Lil Wenker shares her comedy favourites

Lil Wenker has brought Bangtail – her cowboy-themed clown show back to the Fringe. Here she picks her Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites...

Connor O’Malley Stand Up Solutions

Over the past month, I’ve realised some people in the UK haven’t been taught the gospel of Connor O’Malley. This is criminal –  he’s my top pick of this Perfect Playlist. 

O’Malley is a bit unclassifiable – at once a stand-up, character comedian, even bouffon. I was first introduced to him via his completely bonkers YouTube videos, but Stand Up Solutions was his piece of work that completely stopped me in my tracks. 

Masked as a stand-up special, he delivers a masterclass in character comedy that just so happens to get to the heart of my artistic fascinations– gender (specifically manhood) and purpose in an increasingly lonely society. Maybe I’m overanalysing O’Malley and he’s just playing a dufus who loves 5G. Either way, it’s damn funny. Thank God the special’s online so I can pause it to laugh without missing the next side-splitting joke. 

I first watched it in the early stages of making my show Bangtail and I felt like: ‘Ah! He did exactly what I hope to do someday. Perfectly!’ He lives in my mind as an idol, and I’ll forever be trying to create something so exactly excellent. 

Veep

The day I finished the series Veep, I started rewatching the entire thing from the very beginning. Now, I love this show for many reasons: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the rest of the star-studded cast, the incredible insults, the vulgarity, the razor-sharp political satire.

But most of all, it is truly fantastic to see a woman be an absolute bitch on screen without one shred of self-consciousness, doubt, or harrowing backstory which somehow justifies her cruelty and greed. 

Rarely is a woman able to be powerful and sexy and tired and crabby and hungry and desirous without more justification than ‘That’s just how she is!" It’s refreshing, and Julia LD plays the role perfectly. 

The other thing that struck me so specifically about the series is how much it relies on physical comedy. The show often feels quite farcical, almost slap-stick. Staff members tripping over each other to please Selena (Julia LD), Gary (Tony Hale, her assistant) practically man-handling Selena as he stuffs her into outfits, an entire presidential team performing a near circus act to avoid staining the rug in the Oval Office.  

It’s quite un-American in this way – I’ve found from living in both countries that the US relies so heavily on written jokes while the UK likes wackier, more physical humour. 

And the political satire translates to any backlogged, red-tape, bureaucratic democracy, so give it a watch (or two or three) if you haven’t seen it!  

PEN15

I’m uncertain if PEN15 made it to the UK at all [it is - it's on Sky, Ed] so I thought this would be an especially great one to include! It’s a series that came out in 2019 created by Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle who play themselves as high school students in the early 2000s. Much akin to Summer Heights High, the rest of the cast is played by a cast of real middle-school students (12-14 years old). 

The show manages to capture the awkwardness of puberty and middle school perfectly, specifically the undeniable ‘girlhood’ of it all. First crushes, first periods, first friend fights, first sexual awakenings. They capture all of this and more in a way that is truly embodied: it makes your stomach churn watching some of the most painfully awkward interactions, and that exact squeamishness is what makes it so brilliant. You can’t look away because it is just so relatable! 

And though at first it seems like an odd choice to have adult and child actors mix, I think it’s the true brilliance of the show. The slightly absurd juxtaposition reveals the beautifully tragic truth that, no matter how old we get, this awkward little person we once were lingers just behind the surface. 

US Office: Dinner Party 

Oh I’m American and a woman of my generation, so I of course love The Office (US). It’s extremely cliche and also the best piece of television that’s ever been made. (Well, the bits with Steve Carell, that is). 

Dinner Party (Season 4, Episode 13) is famously rumoured to be the episode that took the longest to shoot. Steve Carell, who apparently never breaks, overran, shooting until 2am because he couldn’t stop laughing. I think that’s a pretty strong endorsement for an episode! 

Dinner Party is so extremely funny in how extremely awful it is. It’s relatable, awkward, and just plain tragic. Somehow being outside of the office (at Michael and Jan’s house), the show is even sadder than when it’s inside the dingy paper company. 

We see the characters’ hopes and dreams and how easily they are crushed by plain old reality – Michael’s ‘plasma’ TV (a tiny square mounted to the wall), Dwight’s willingness to do anything for an invitation (he invites his old babysitter as his date, as it’s a ‘couples only’ night), Andy’s countless failed attempts to make his girlfriend attracted to him. 

If you are one of the few humans who haven’t seen The Office (US), please watch. If you love it, watch it again. 

Hellzapoppin’

OK this is a really rogue choice that shows not only my true nerd status but my complete lack of relatability sometimes, but stay with me! It’s a real hidden gem!

Hellzapoppin’ is a 1941 comedy action film adaptation of an earlier Broadway musical of the same name. It follows two men wanting to create a comedy film whose ideas are constantly undercut and adapted by industry producers. This basic plot is interrupted by various classic-Broadway-musical subplots, including a farcical series of love triangles. 

I was first drawn to this film because I felt, perhaps unintentionally, that the creators had found a way to stage clown for the screen. The film runs at breakneck speed, every moment peppered with slapstick, wordplay, outrageous physical gags. It twists and turns to follow the fun instead of a coherent plot.

It even breaks the ‘form’ of film quite regularly to literally address what the audience is seeing, and sometimes replays a scene in a different way to try a joke again. The characters get stuck between frames and have to talk to each other from ‘across’ the screen, others get trapped in the wrong backdrops. And like clowning, the audience and the enjoyment of the performers are at the heart of this comedy. And like clowning, the performers are given the liberty to break the form of it all at any moment – to say: ‘Hello! I’m performing comedy for you now!’

Pure, stupid fun! 

Man at a vending machine in New Haven 

Once while waiting for a train in New Haven, Connecticut, I watched a man attempt to buy a jumbo cinnamon roll from the station’s vending machine. He had a bag full of nickels (five cents), and the cinnamon roll is one of the most expensive things in the machine.

It took ages for him to load enough money into the damn thing. Often, he would have to stop, take a break, and sip from his styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup. I assume he wanted the cinnamon roll to go with the coffee. 

Eventually he loaded enough money in and entered his desired item’s number. The cinnamon roll slowly moved towards him, before getting stuck in the machine’s metal hooks—just out of his reach. 

He pounded several times on the glass and shook the entire thing. No luck. 

He took his far-emptier bag of nickels, he took his coffee, and he walked away. 

This scene has stuck with me, almost like an essential oil of my comedic tastes. I call it The Small Tragedies of the Everyday. It’s what inspires me on the day-to-day and what I make shows about. 

• Lil Wenker: BANGTAIL is on at the Pleasance Courtyard at 9.40pm until August 10, then 11pm from August 14 to 16 and 21 to 23.

Published: 4 Aug 2025