Why Miss Piggy is the godmother to so many comedians

Dom McGovern picks his Perfect Playlist

The comedy favourites of Edinburgh Fringe comedian Dom McGovern...

I Think You Should Leave sketch with Vanessa Bayer

Vanessa Bayer is already the face of some of my favourite ever SNL bits (Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy, ‘We Aren’t Pornstars Any More!’) and this sketch is just one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. The grotesqueness of her language I find to be transcendently poetic.

Sometimes you show friends a video and they don’t find it as funny as you, but I’ve never shown this to someone, and they’ve not been howling by the end. I think it’s the thing that I have laughed at the most in my life. Not the hardest laughter, the actual most number of separate individual laughs drawn out by one thing.

Maya Ishii Peters in Pen15

Deeply underrated sitcom. I love when women are freaks. Maya Erskine plays herself as so desperate and wanting, but with real pathos. Her little pageboy haircut, her braces, the piteous want in her eyes. She wears her desire for acceptance so openly that it’s impossible not to love her.

Julia Louis Dreyfuss as Selina Meyer

Comic performance of the millennium, no one is doing it like her. She’s desperate and desperately funny because of it. I think what’s really coming to light as I write this playlist is my affinity for characters and performers who are brash, but not doing enough to mask their own deep patheticness.

It’s also just one of the best written characters of all time, some of the lines are utterly perfect: ‘I’m gonna have the IRS crawl so far up your husband’s colon, he's gonna wish the only thing they find is more cancer.’ Too horrid for them to have put in the compilation below. I love it.

Joan Rivers talks about vaginal dryness

It’s just really funny. She’s so horrid and I love that. She’s quite cruel at the beginning of this clip but her jibes are often actually done through the lens of recognising her own shortcomings.

I think this is also the reason I love Hacks’ Deborah Vance so much, because there’s an acceptance of the bleak realities of life in the material, but without ever scrimping on being truly outrageous. Watching Graham Norton, Catherine Tate, and Johnny Knoxville react to this is just so brilliant.

Robin Williams An Evening at the Met

It all comes back to Robin Williams really. The singularly most charismatic man to grace the planet. Live At The Met is a masterclass in performance, everything about him is primed to entertain an audience, I would have given anything to see him live. Sadly, I was born in 2018 so missed my chance x

Miss Piggy (all)

I am definitely inspired by the great female American stand-ups who have emerged over the last decade and a half; the Kate Berlants, Cat Cohens, Jacqueline Novaks, who mix ferocious charisma with the extremely diaristic and the grotesquely personal.

I do, however, think there is a godmother to those comics under whose wide-reaching influence we all sit. Her name is Miss Piggy. I think she is truly perfect. A wounded, tragic soul, plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight by virtue of her sheer star power.

You empathise with her, you’re beguiled by her, you admire her commitment to her self-aggrandisement. Everything on this list, and all the stuff I had to cut (Bridesmaids, 30 Rock’s Jenna Maroney, Bill Hader as Stefon, Lea Michele as Rachel Berry, Titus Burgess) owes something, whether they know it or not, to Piggy’s mix of vulnerability and fearlessness. Also, she’s a real bitch. Also, she’s a pig. It’s funny.