Listomania Part 3: Top 5 (Living) Comedians That I Think Are Good

I'm having a real struggle concentrating and getting my work done in a way that I'm pleased with, so I thought I'd take a break and think about something else for a minute. And what better way than to fire up the old list making part of the brain.

I love stand up comedy. There is something incredibly impressive about being sharp, quick-witted, intelligent and perceptive enough to be really good at making a room full of people laugh. It seems there has been a real resurgence in the genre over the last few years. It might be related to societal attitudes. Maybe it's the falling price of DVD players. Maybe it's because of populist no-brow nonsense like Michael McIntyre (I'm not the biggest fan). But anyway, here is a list of some of my favourites, in no particular order. It reads like a list of influences I like to think have inspired me as a character (although obviously not as good as any of them). I limited it to living ones since otherwise you end up with the same Bill Hicks, Richard Prior circle jerk that any old numpty can come up with. Not to say this list is particularly ground-breaking. Just shut up and read it, jesus.

1) Stewart Lee

I am just about old enough to remember Stewart Lee and Richard Herring's "This Morning With Richard Not Judy". It was a Sunday morning comedy show, and given that airing time, incredibly rude and surreal. I fell in love with it almost instantly. The combination of Herring's child-like, whimsical, but ultimately filthy persona with Lee's sour, more muted and pessimistic demeanor was a delight to behold.

But as much as I loved the double act, and indeed Richard Herring, Lee on his own is frankly a class apart. He's the antithesis of most popular comics. His delivery is laboured, repetitive, deliberate and slow, but the punchline arrives it invariably floors you. He's cerebral, culturally and politically sensitive, but still capable of moments of the jarringly surreal. I urge you all to look him up.

His BBC2 series "Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle" has recently has a second series commissioned, so you should all look forward to that.

2) Ed Byrne

Ed Byrne is magnificently under-rated. Having been on the circuit for years now, he's only just starting to get major award nominations and the like, and there are probably plenty of people who know him best as the voice of 'Mowbli' from the Carphone Warehouse adverts. If I remember rightly I first happened across him in an absolutely terrible ITV sitcom "Sam's Game" (a vehicle for Davina McCall riding a remarkable wave of popularity at the time). Even in such a stinking TV turd as that, Byrne's razor sharp wit and penchant for barbed pedantism was on show for all to see.

Byrne spins a wonderful yarn, an observational comic who never cops out with the cliched "what's all that about?" line, instead drawing parallels between the obvious and the fantastical and highlighting the absurdity he encounters in his life. There's something about Ed Byrne that makes me think he'd be fantastically annoying to actually hang around, because he is just too good at what he does.

He's also my hero for taking on and utterly destroying Piers Morgan live on BBC Radio 5 Live

3) Dylan Moran

Dylan Moran is simply not of this age. To me he seems like he'd be more at home in Victorian society, drunkenly offering witticisms from a comfortable chair in the corner of a ballroom, chain smoking and angrily calling for a serving wench to bring more wine. Like Byrne, he's an observational comic who refuses to bow down to cliche or formula. He has simply created this absurd, chain-smoking, drunken, misanthropic caricature of himself and wallows in the absurdity of a world in which he feels he doesn't belong. His humour comes from a very dark place, and it's all the more invigorating for it.

4) Ross Noble

From three cerebral comics who extrapolate the absurd from the real, we move on to one who seems to permanently live in a fantastical realm of the surreal and the whimsical. Watching Ross Noble work is actually amazing to me. Even though he tours relentlessly in Europe and Australasia, every one of his shows is unique. In 2 hours, there will be maybe 3 stories he tells every time, and everything else comes about purely from tangent after tangent after tangent inspired by anything from an audience member to a chance happening earlier in the day. It's almost like spinning plates, he keeps five or six anecdotes alive concurrently, extracting as much humour as possible from each, and can keep track of them all well enough to bring everything back round to a conclusion. He's simply wonderful.

5) Doug Stanhope

For this last one I thought I'd try and go a bit further left field and maybe uncover something only very few of you even knew existed. American Doug Stanhope is, perhaps unsurprisingly given some of the other's I've picked, an angry misanthrope. He spits bile about just about anything you could think of, from a rocking chair on his porch, swigging hard liquor from a brown paper bag. He's a regular contributor to Charlie Brooker's excellent Screenwipe and Newswipe programmes for BBC4, which I'd recommend you to check out as well.

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So there you have it. Some notable absentees perhaps. Eddie Izzard is an obvious one with a case. Bill Bailey. Frankie Boyle perhaps? Or indeed any of the legion of American funny men and women that dominate popular culture and movies. If you've got nothing better to do, then by all means make a case for your absent favourite. But for now, go away.