10
Leslie Jones: Time Machine
Netflix
Best known in the UK for Ghostbusters, and in comedy for Saturday Night Live, Leslie Jones showed off her standup chops with this big-hitting special directed by Game of Thrones creators DB Weiss and David Benioff. Don’t expect dragons – but there is fantasy a-plenty, as Jones time-travels to meet her younger and older selves. There’s even a prince – for whom Jones performs a sexy dance in the show’s standout moment.
9
Steve Martin and Martin Short
SSE Hydro, Glasgow
Coronavirus was already in the air when these Two Amigos arrived from North America with their old-school comedy cabaret in March. The UK lockdown cut off the tour in its prime, but not before Martin and Martin delighted Glasgow with camaraderie, banjo and ruthless mutual mockery. Memories of their carefree silliness glow all the brighter given the gloom that followed. Read the full review.
8
Nabil Abdulrashid
21Soho, London
The Anglo-Nigerian standup Nabil Abdulrashid received death threats after his close-to-the-bone race material on Britain’s Got Talent. He got nothing but plaudits from me when I saw him at the Sunday Antics club night in London last October. His 40-minute set – edgy, thoughtful, beholden to no one – raised the roof in Soho and brought high expectations for his maiden tour in 2021. Read the full review.
7
Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine
Netflix
It wasn’t a done deal that viral star Sarah Cooper would make the leap from her Donald Trump lip-sync videos to a full-length Netflix special. But Everything’s Fine proved that Cooper is a keeper. A spoof daytime news show that warps into a fever dream of 2020 America, this sketch show-turned-psychic-collapse distilled this weird year like nothing else. Read the full review.
6
Kim Noble: Futile Attempts (At Surviving Tomorrow)
Podcast/Spotify
For many of us, 2020 was a year of isolation and existential dread. For Kim Noble, that’s every year, as his career in black-as-pitch comedy and “failed performance art” has strikingly demonstrated. This summer brought his podcast Futile Attempts, each episode detailing a new approach to finding meaning in a meaningless world. Part prank, part breakdown, these mind-bending and meta slices of audio were a must-listen. Read the full review.
5
The Pin’s Zoom sketches
Online
We were spoiled for digital comedy in 2020, as the live performance industry sought new ways to make work – and make a living. Much of the online comedy left one pining for real-world standup. But not this series of short videos by sketch twosome the Pin, brilliant little comedies of Zoom-era manners making hay with our still uncertain working-from-home, (dis)connecting-in-cyberspace world. Read more.
4
Maria Bamford: Weakness Is the Brand
Netflix
You might call Weakness Is the Brand “back to normal” after Maria Bamford’s previous standup special, delivered to an audience of her parents and no one else. But normal isn’t Bamford’s metier. Her new Netflix special found the 50-year-old in remission from the mental health battles foregrounded in her sitcom Lady Dynamite, but still delivering complex, characterful – and unrepentantly abnormal – standup. Read the full review.
3
Epstein theatre, Liverpool
This was the last live gig I saw before lockdown 1.0 – and I can’t imagine a better lasting impression for comedy to leave. Here’s how exciting standup can be, as practised by one of its originators – at least, in its British, post-1981 mode. This hometown outing found the 68-year-old Scouser on rip-snorting form: erudite, self-mocking and bracingly intemperate about the Tories, Laura Kuenssberg, David Miliband and lots else besides. Read the full review.
2
Aisling Bea
Greenwich comedy festival, London
After six months without seeing live comedy, the handful of gigs I saw in September felt like a gift from the standup gods. Bridget Christie at Brighton’s Standup Under the Stars was a highlight, but the standout was Aisling Bea’s set at the Greenwich comedy festival, combining high-quality routines about Covid, Ireland and Jesus in an irresistible goofball package. Read the full review.
1
Russell Kane: Live at the Rose
Rose theatre, Kingston
In 2020 most new comedy shows spent the year in a holding pattern, waiting for a festival or touring circuit on which to launch themselves, when tours and festivals are once again allowed. I felt – the whole comedy community felt – the loss of the Edinburgh fringe keenly, and grieved for all the amazing new shows and new talents that we didn’t get to see.
But if well-honed new sets were thin on the ground, we did get to study comedy in extremis, reacting to its own biggest crisis, the biggest most of us had ever lived through. We watched comedians joke about the advent of Covid-19, we saw them respond (online, mostly) as their industry shut down, and – as audiences began creeping back into clubs and theatres – we turned to them to help us process this strange, disturbing year.
So the best performance of 2020, for me, has to be the one that nailed – and made urgently funny – what it’s like to be alive, here and now, in pandemic Britain. The weird new behaviours and the ever-changing rules. The precious things we’ve lost. The malign incompetence of the government. That performance was Russell Kane’s.
For 40 minutes at the top of a Saturday night bill in south-west London, this most hyperactive of comics hurled himself at the black comedy of Covid, as if channelling our collective anxiety to power this fierce, funny and heartfelt rejection of the world the pandemic has threatened to create. It was a thrilling reminder of what comedy can do, even if that didn’t, alas, extend to stopping Covid: the theatre closed for lockdown 2.0 the next day. Read the full review.
