Mike McShane picks his Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites

American comic Mike McShane is at the Edinburgh Fringe with a James Bond inspired comedy play, and as part of Paul Merton & Suki Webster’s Improv Show, Here he picks his favourite comedy moments.

The Firesign Theater

They are one of the best examples of surreal, rollicking, political American humour, with lengthy Goon-style audio sketches that skewered post-war American propaganda, the collapse of a complex computer intelligence with one mistake and the nightmare journey it takes the protagonist on. 

They were also pioneers in radio comedy, their albums multitracked with weird character comments and side gags. I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus is one of their best albums. 

I am friends with one of the members, Phil Proctor, an elder statesman of the 60s, and when he went to Yale, he was invited to the Skull and Bones, a secret society. It has lots of oligarchical sheen – presidents and the like are members. After getting his invitation. he went to the evening’s meeting and right before it started, he stood up told them all to shove it, and went back to his dormitory satisfied in his soul. He’s what I can only aspire to.

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday

I love silent takes, and even though most folks know me as loud, frantic and sometimes funny, there is an elegance in great comedy moments. This film has one short exchange in front of the restaurant. Two doors, one in one out, (with a beautiful, awful squeak) the proprietor is standing on one side of a chalkboard with the main course written on it. 

A customer comes out of the restaurant, looking queas. He stops at the sign, stares at the name of the dish he just consumed as if to double-check, then looks up at the owner, and glares at him with disgust and contempt, then exits past the frame. 

The owner then looks at the menu, and turns angrily to the kitchen ready to kill the chef. It always just gets me.

[Sadly that scene does not appear to be available online]

My Cousin Vinny

It’s a great screenplay from Dale Launer, who also wrote Ruthless People and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Two New York kids get pinched in a small Southern town for a robbery and murder they didn’t commit but one of them has a cousin that will defend them… Joe Pesci, doing great Joe Pesci with extra Pesci sauce on the side. 

Marisa Tomei is a perfect foil with totally out-of-place outfits and razor sharp comeback timing. The courtroom scenes are so funny they’re painful to watch. Jonathan Lynn cast it beautifully, but it’s Austin Pendleton playing a panicked sweating public defender that pushes it into really funny anxiety worthy of your man, Rik Mayall.

Nina Conti

She possesses me with multiple levels of giggles and awe. My first success as a child was entertaining myself with a cat-shaped potholder called Max, my inside speaking to my outside through him. She does so much with that freeing act of ventriloquism, rippling out to include the audience participating, even scaring us with the danger of losing one’s way with this split of the mind. And, in addition, with all respect, she’s a strikingly beautiful human being…

The Producers

The 1967 original. I came to it in the Seventies, when its central joke was thought to be the shock of a musical about Hitler, promoted by two guys. Two Jewish guys. So shocking it was relegated to creaky repertory cinemas in San Francisco, where it would share the bill with the films of Ed Woods and John Waters.

 But its comic mayhem and power came not from Hitler, but the venerable showbusiness adage that once a piece of theatre crosses the stage, it belongs to the audience, no matter what happens next.

It's also an amazing bromance, and my introduction to Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, It showed me that you can find humour, shocking or otherwise, not in the subject itself, but in our wholly overblown or insufficient reaction to it. 

Which brings me to what I consider the UK's shining example:

Brass Eye: Paedogeddon

I was touring in a show and one of the cast members gave me this to watch. I watched it six times in a row, and thought it was a perfect recreation of the banal morally panicked media and its celebrities being driven by fast reactions to issues, and the insidious way charity replaces political and social change. 

The grainy staggered footage of an architectural feature cruising a park late at night looking for victims, then poor well-meaning Phil Collins getting duped by a ‘charity’ called Nonce Sense. 

Also it made me so happy it was directed by Tristram Shapeero, who was a runner on the old Whose Line Is It Anyway. He also directs Brooklyn Nine Nine, which was a favourite of mine.

• The Spy Who Went to Rehab is on at Pleasance Dome at 12.10pm throughout the Edinburgh Fringe, while  Paul Merton & Suki Webster’s Improv Show is on at Pleasance Courtyard from 3.30pm from August 7.

Published: 23 Jul 2025