What on earth was funny about 2010? Quite a lot, actually, says Steve Wright.

2010 was a fine year for sketch comedy. After a good start from Pappy’s, who brought their ‘World Record Attempt’ (200 sketches in an hour – a heroic failure) to the Tobacco Factory and Rondo theatres, we also heard from The Noise Next Door at Bath Fringe (“A colossal number of laughs, all made up on the spot,” said our reviewer, adding presciently in pre-Coalition April, “Bit like Conservative policy, really – only much funnier”). Elsewhere, Idiots of Ants, Newsrevue, Bristol troupes Instant Wit and Bristol Revunions and Bathonians New Old Friends and The Unrelated Family all flew the sketch comedy flag this year.

At Jesters in Feb, Stuart Black was one to watch, drawing us into his paranoid and semi-hallucinogenic worldview. Around the same time, the hyperactive and sizzlingly smart Russell Kane gave us ‘Fakespeare’, a blackly comic tale of modern Essex morals in Bardic blank verse, at the Rondo. And Tim Vine was at the Tobacco Factory, unleashing a torrent of puns and one-liners, many already pre-loved by his audience (Vine: “Black Beauty…”; Audience: “He’s a dark horse!”). The Factory had a cracking comedic year, in fact: a few days before Vine the venerable Stewart Lee sold the place out, and later in the year a string of the most distinctive comics in the business looked in, including Rich Hall, Stewart Francis, Chris Addison, Sarah Millican, John Shuttleworth and the incomparable Daniel Kitson. Ms Millican had a fine year, also storming Edinburgh Festival and selling out across the land – she was 2010’s most prolific comedienne, although Bristol and Bath also got their laughs from Zoe Lyons, Isy Suttie, Shazia Mirza, Bridget Christie and the wonderful Josie Long, while Rhona Cameron at Jesters was the big draw of August’s Pride Bristol.

It was also a good year for thoughtful, literate and socially engaged comedy. Alongside the thought-provoking messrs Lee and Kitson and la Long, Richard Herring’s ‘Hitler Moustache’ (TF, Feb) probed audience taboos about race while his mucker Robin Ince bowled Rondo audiences over with his ‘Bad Book Club’, critiques of some of the most amazingly awful works ever published. Other comics, meanwhile, were clearly setting out to change the world as much as to make it laugh. Take Tom Wrigglesworth, whose ‘Open Return Letter to Richard Branson’ (Rondo, March), narrated his spat with Virgin Trains over a £115 fine for a pensioner who’d boarded the wrong train and was thus divested of her Xmas shopping money. Wrigglesworth, sitting opposite, organised a whip round: he was later arrested, but Virgin did change their price structure. Mark Thomas’s Bath Manifesto Show, meanwhile, made democracy a laughing matter by asking the good burghers of Bath what policies they’d like to see implemented at the forthcoming election.

That was one of the highlights of a second Bath Comedy Festival that also welcomed fast-becoming-national-treasure Arthur Smith and comic and lexicophile Alex Horne. Elsewhere on the festival front, Edinburgh warm-up fest Bristol BrouHaHa was back for a second brilliant year: high-octane Aussie Kent Valentine wowed us all over again, as did carrot-topped filth-merchant Andrew Lawrence (“from the Viz school of comedy… a fine comic mind at work beneath the bluster”), Alun Cochrane, Rob Deering and Carey Marx.

Bath Fringe highlights included pastiche anti-capitalist world-music combo Mundo Jazz, cod children’s entertainer Jeremy Lion (“wickedly funny demonstrations of how not to be a children’s entertainer, with abysmal puppets, appalling costume ideas and deeply inappropriate songs”) and gleeful Glaswegian Craig Hill. And Bristol Old Vic’s spontaneityfest The Bristol Jam welcomed the freewheeling Phil Kay and the unclassifiable Reggie Watts (“Imagine Bill Bailey and Milton Jones fronting De La Soul and you’re halfway there”).

Comedy venues came and went: we welcomed fortnightly comedy at The Oxford, Totterdown and (for a while) The Kings Arms on Whiteladies Road. Au revoir, for now, to comedy at Bristol’s The Lanes and Bath’s Victoria Works pub: farewell too, until further notice, to the sessions at The Square Club in Clifton and Cabot Circus’s Cinema de Lux. Welcome back, though, to Jongleurs, back at its Baldwin Street home (now the Eton Bar). And an ongoing hurrah to Mark Olver’s open-mic Sunday evenings Oppo at Channings Hotel, Clifton.

Plenty of big names headed west: Dylan Moran sold out the Comedy Box, while Bill Bailey filled Ashton Gate. The ubiquitous Michael McIntyre gave TF audiences a work-in-progress show in August, as did former son of this parish Mark Watson at the Comedy Box in June (he later filled the Hippodrome). Jimmy Carr filled the Colston Hall (thrice), as did Jason ‘The One Show’ Manford; Dara O’ Briain and the incomparable Rhod Gilbert packed out the Hippodrome. Another big gun, Lee Mack, though, failed to charm us: his succinct self-deprecation was actually rather accurate. We also didn’t get on with Ricky Gervais’s ‘Science’ (Colston Hall, March: “Calling Susan Boyle a mong is not taboo-breaking”), and Hardeep Singh Kohli also fell flat. Yes, he cooked a chicken curry live on stage, but the evening was essentially “a comfortably self-satisfied monologue about his favourite subject: himself.”

Comics on the rise this year included Dubliner Andrew Maxwell, at the Comedy Box in April for a set of fizzing energy and spontaneity; Scots storyteller Jimmy McGhie; and Bristol comic Ben Norris, whose Bristol-filmed comic song ‘35’ should be checked out at http://www.bennorris.co.uk We also loved Welsh comic Elis James, kohl-drenched pop pasticheurs Frisky and Mannish and straggled-haired Brightonian Seann Walsh (check out his triumphant Hippodrome slot at http://tinyurl.com/379429p). And Mark Olver, with his nights at Oppo and Jesters, continued to help bring on the comics of tomorrow: his Circuit Breakers night at the BrouHaHa was an enjoyable peek into the future, the highlight James Acaster and his brilliantly quizzical eyebrows.

Copyright Steve Wright 2010

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