'A cocktail of the cartoonish, dumb, and vaguely autistic that takes me to nirvana'

Sam Williams shares his Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites

Edinburgh Fringe comedian Sam Williams shares his favourite comedy moments...

Sebastian Maniscalco: What’s Wrong With People?

The Sistine Chapel of stand-up: a high camp Italian masterpiece that ferociously judges people. I first watched it in the pandemic, when I was coming back to stand-up as a Chortle Student finalist who hadn’t done comedy in 18 months, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to start up again.

Maniscalco’s furious joy - the physicality, the universal subject matter, the homoerotic flare of every gesture and vocal intonation - gave me new excitement about comedy when I needed it most.

This is the first full-length special Maniscalco recorded, 15 years into his career. It is wall-to-wall greatest hits about the broadest subject matter ever: family life, sports, Starbucks, clubbing then vs clubbing now. It helped me to learn early doors that it’s not what you’re speaking about but how you’re speaking about it, that makes an act distinctive.

The real magic of this show is its universal appeal. I’ve shown it to such a range of people and they’ve all fallen about laughing at it. My parents, my flatmate and fellow comic Pravanya Pillay, even asylum seekers learning how to do standup before their first gig - all of them have seen themselves in Maniscalco’s Italian-American slant on daily life and share his neuroses.

Brian Regan: I Walked On The Moon

I put this special on while making dinner in winter 2023 and ended up on the floor three times crying with laughter. It was a proper revelatory experience - there’s something about the way Brian Regan breaks language and abruptly changes perspective that has forever changed how I interact with language as a material in and of itself.

It probably helps that Brian Regan and I have a similar flavour of undiagnosed (raw) autism, struggling in social situations without really knowing why, and taking umbrage with the kind of people who dominate and thrive in those situations. This ‘me monster’ routine is such a beautiful and withering characterisation of that salmon-coloured shirt wearing bellend who everyone like me hates but can’t quite name.

My favourite part of the routine is where Regan tries to tell his own story of having two wisdom teeth taken out. The line ‘what’s gonna happen is the four wisdom tooth people are gonna parachute in, and cut you off at the pass’ is first among equals as my favourite line in all of the stand-up I have seen. To express being interrupted in conversation in such an embodied and overly dramatic way - it’s a cocktail of cartoonish, dumb, and vaguely autistic that takes me to nirvana.

Rodney Dangerfield: Top 100 Compilation

In 2023, I did a 45-minute show at the Fringe called Himbo. If any of you come to my show this year you will see that that is absolutely not a word that accurately describes my act.

About three people came every day. Sometimes seven people came, sometimes two people came. Once there were two people to begin with, a boy and a girl, and halfway through the boy left for a coach to Aberdeen where he was going on a stag do. He assured me that he wasn’t walking out because of the quality of the show and that as the only comedian he’d seen, I could take pride in having been 100 per cent of his Fringe experience.

Early in the run I knew I’d bitten off more than I could chew with doing 45 minutes daily, and couldn’t flyer very well, knowing that I was inviting people to be one of few people watching an act who hadn’t really found out who they were yet.

In an effort to make my show better, I started listening to long compilations of legendary comedians as I was falling asleep. I hoped this would make me learn how to do stand-up the way that one woman in a coma learned how to speak Chinese.

The first and only comedian I ended up listening to was Rodney Dangerfield. I fell asleep listening to his one-liners every night. First I expected to disapprove with vast swathes of his act, as an old time ‘my wife’ specialist. But his act is so much more than that - weirdly vulnerable, intensely self-deprecating, and from the right angle quite affirming of his wife’s sexual escapades, happy that at least one of them is getting some action.

It’s through compilations like this that I learned to focus on the basics of jokes again, having looked over that process in pursuit of a ‘show idea’ at the 2023 Fringe. Rodney Dangerfield helped me go back to the drawing board and figure out who I should be on stage through the simple and unbearable task of writing one joke after another.

Forced Entertainment: Speak Bitterness

Forced Entertainment have a massive influence on my stand-up and where I want to try and take it. The show I have ended up making is very earnest, more earnest than I think stand-up should be, and I think that’s their fault, not because they make ‘earnest’ work but because they make work that doesn’t fit in the genre that best describes any of it. They have made me enjoy breaking things and failing.

I love how genuinely offensive their shows can be. In one, Showtime, a performer takes off the dog’s head she’s wearing and then meticulously details how she would commit suicide. It deeply upset some of the people on my drama degree (I’m a state-educated bisexual, okay, please let me live), others found it hilarious. It actually provoked the kind of visceral response that deeply hack ‘offensive’ comedians claim, but fail to, evoke.

Speak Bitterness is probably the show of Forced Entertainment’s that most resembles a stand-up show, although there are loads of them on stage and loads of bits of paper littered with confessions, and a table separating them and the audience. They randomly pick out pieces of the text and declare them as things ‘we’ have done. Sometimes it is very grave and sombre, but often it gets really funny, and the durational/very long nature of the Speak Bitterness shows creates a kind of giddy and delirious atmosphere that involves a lot of laughter. ‘We ate all the biscuits’, followed by admitting to an unimaginable crime, sticks in my mind.

It’s this kind of work that probably drove me to do more confessional stand-up. In another time, in different economic conditions, perhaps I would’ve ended up in a performance collective like Forced Ents. As it is, I can only afford to make work alone. I feel lucky to have discovered stand-up - it is possible and perhaps even necessary to smuggle more experimental contraband into Fringe hours, because the audience is up for it, as long as they’ve been sold it as entertainment. If they’re laughing, it’s still stand-up.

Inside The NBA: When A Guy Is Banging You

I got really into the NBA when I was sixteen. Inside The NBA is one of the shows that hosts and commentates on games, like Sky Sports or Match Of The Day or whatever. On that show, Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley have become one of the funniest double acts in the world. Something about their chemistry takes me Back To School classrooms, being told off for laughing at someone farting or a world-class 'your mum' joke.

This clip captures that perfectly - Charles Barkley earnestly analysing some play as one guy ‘banging’ another as if it’s the most normal thing to say, and absolutely ISN’T Top Gun-level homoerotic. The follow-up of ‘when you can feel his body’ and Shaq’s face as he’s trying to keep his laughter to a minimum gives me the kind of giggles I could only otherwise get by time travelling back to Year 8 and hearing everyone call everything gay.

Farting in Oppenheimer

What is there to say? Live standup is amazing - to be in the room when someone is really in their element is one of life’s great pleasures. However it is blown out of the water by the experience of bearing witness to a perfectly timed fart.

I don’t have anything to say about this video other than that I watch it probably four times a week. Enjoy x

@weeklycut Scene ruined lol #oppenheimer #movie #films #fart #filmtok #christophernolan #cinema #movietok #hollywood #fyp #cillianmurphy #universal ♬ original sound - The Weekly Cut