'I don’t need to explain Sam Campbell's idiosyncratic brilliance'

Lulu Popplewell picks her comedy favourites

Lulu Popplewell is heading back to the Edinburgh Fringe with an 'hour of jokes about love, obsession and raccoons'. Here she shares her Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites...

Julia Davies

I was around 14 when I first saw Julia Davies in Human Remains with Rob Brydon. Giddy with my first taste of dark and alternative scripted television, I ran around telling everyone I could about it.

A friend suggested to me that I might then like Nighty Night. I DID like Nighty Night. I liked it a lot. Seeing these two things one after the other made me fall completely in love with Julia Davies.

I know it’s a very tired trope for female comedians to talk about the power of seeing another woman in comedy when they were younger, but I think we’ve forgotten just how relatively few of them there were in 2004.

It’s not that I hadn’t seen other women in comedic roles on TV, it’s just that I hadn’t found them nearly as funny.

It seemed to have to necessarily involve being big (in performance, but often also in size) and limited to not having any of the best lines. Julia Davies revealed to me a world of more subtle and studied characters, weird without being whacky, hilarious yet mildly sinister.

My love for her in these roles opened up a world of alternative TV comedy discovery, a far cry from the (still enjoyable but much more fizzy) likes of Blackadder and Ab Fab I was brought up on. Davies paved the way for me to discover shows like The League of Gentlemen, Brass Eye, Garth Marenghi, Spaced etc. She remains completely brilliant in all she does.

110% John Kearns and Pat Cahill

I don’t know how long these lads have been doing this night. Seemingly eternally. It now has what you might call cult status.

I happened upon it a small handful of times over the years and really loved it, but I didn’t quite manage to keep up with it. But over the last year or so I have been chasing it like a whippet. It’s perfect.

They’re obviously sensational comedians in their own right, but when paired together for an evening of entirely unscripted chat and songs, something magical seems to happen. They also feature a brilliant, alternative guest comic. It’s hard to describe it - it’s wonderful, it’s nonsense, it’s everything created out of nothing. You have to be there. Grab a ticket and learn the stops on the Northern line before you do.

[There's no footage online of this]

Limmy: Kill Jester

I reckon Limmy features pretty frequently on Perfect Playlist, so I won’t wang on for ages about how great he is - I’m sure other comedians have already done that very well.

While I recommend his entire oeuvre, I will try to differentiate this Limmy entry by recommending one particular sketch. Maybe watch a couple of other Falconhoof ones for context if you’re new to Limmy, but I reckon this masterpiece holds its own without previous watching to be honest.

Will Ferrell’s Blooper/Outtake Reels

Would I say Will Ferrell - in and of himself as a comedic entity - is high up there on my list? Probably not. The man is a great comedy actor, for sure, but when I feel down I don’t turn to his back catalogue of films - I turn to his bloopers (or ‘outtakes’ as we say in the UK, but I don’t want to sound like a Brexiteer by insisting on this too much).

His and others’ laughter is infectious when you realise how much he’s playing around with the script and how innately funny he is as a performer. I love watching the whole set trying not to break. It’s silly and simple.

My favourite one is from Eastbound & Down, which is a show I haven’t even seen. Highly recommend watching a compilation video for glum days. Plum days. Plums.

Sam Campbell: The Trough

Look, obviously Sam Campbell is a comedy sensation and everyone already knows about him. I don’t need to explain his idiosyncratic brilliance and his popularity is incredibly well established.

However, I will always feel a strong connection to his 2018 show The Trough. I was asked ahead of that Fringe if I wanted to be an audience plant in a Midnight Show at the Monkey Barrel. I’d never heard of the comedian before but had been assured he was very good and successful in Australia.

I worried I would go insane sitting through the same, very late show every night for almost the whole month, but I reasoned it would be good to take the small fee to help with the mad cost of the fringe.

I assumed it was stand-up. A day before the run started, I met a comedian who handed me a knife (not safety blunted :/) and taught me two lines of dialogue and a ritualistic dance set over the backdrop of increasingly distorted images of chimps. I thought, ‘wow, this could really go one of two ways.’

But I could not have made a better choice saying yes to the gig. I was not, as I had worried, bored at all - every time I watched this show I found something new to love in it. Being even a tiny part in it was a genuine joy.

I did the majority of the fringe and a couple of Soho Theatre dates before being replaced by Mark Silcox, which is entirely fair and makes more sense, let’s be honest. I could still watch that show again and again.

My one regret is that I didn’t talk to or socialise with Sam as much as I’d have liked to, because Stu Laws had started a rumour for fun (he does this) which made its way to me very early on in the Fringe: he'd spread it about that Sam was very religiously Christian and was therefore sometimes uncomfortable talking to girls. I didn’t find out this was nonsense until I brought it up with Stu in September. Thanks Stu.

She Does Not Leave the Lizard Alone

I don’t know if you’d call this a meme or a post or a tweet… whatever it is - no notes. Every time I see it circle back round on my feed I am entertained. The chaotic grammar and syntax, the sense of it being truly earnest, the misidentification of Kermit’s species: everything is on point. There is no full stop at the end of it, which to me reflects the unending endurance of this post’s power.

I hate the Muppets tweet