A personal rundown of the year's best live comedy

Here are the best live comedy shows I saw in 2024, an otherwise best-forgotten era of indignity.  No one sees everything, and no one exercises flawless judgement,  but if you ever have a chance to catch any of these shows, or to follow these acts as they take their next steps, I can promise your time will be well spent.…

20. Bella ​Hull: Piggie

A pointed, precise wit with a poppy sheen, Bella Hull distilled a Gen Z malaise and questions about their place in the world into a delightful set that probed the relationship between consumption and spirituality.

 19. Ed ​Aczel: Running on Empty

No one rejects comedic cliches quite like Ed Aczel, who has excised traditional notions of setups, punchlines and even entertainment from his material. His rambling stories and gripes about his network provider celebrate the meaningless and the banal in a way that’s profoundly funny, and a perfect antidote to stand-ups more mechanistic tendencies.

 18. Demi Adejuyigbe: Demi Adejuyigbe is Going to Do One (1) Backflip

The American dynamo and font of creativity had one of the year’s most universally beloved shows here, all about building up to the titular stunt, but peppered liberally with other tricks, feints and musical interludes. An inevitable smash.

17. Aaron ​Chen:  Funny Garden

I loved Chen’s analogy of his stand-up as being like tending to the plants in his funny garden, an image which perfectly captures his tender, unfussy patience as a comic, spinning traditional observational material into gold with his dry, charming style and sense of the absurd. Deservedly on his way to becoming a huge star

16. Lou ​Wall: The Bisexual’s Lament

Lou Wall’s account of the worst year of their life is blasted into your face at 300bpm in a frenetic mix of music, lightning-fast visual stings, jokes and poses, making it even more impressive that they find moments of pathos amidst the candy crush chaos. Digital natives are starting to make more of an impression on standup, but no one does it like Lou Wall. Standup for the Chappell Roan generation.

15. Ian Lockwood: The Farewell Tour

One hesitates to use the phrase ‘a star is born’, but Ian Lockwood made a huge first impression with his outstanding character comedy hour about the last hurrah of a megalomaniacal popstar, exploding on stage with the charisma of a drag queen and some of the catchiest pop bangers ever seen in musical comedy. Seeing him perform ‘Orbo’ at the LMAOnaise show was probably my single favourite moment of Edinburgh ’24.

 14. Celya ​AB: Of All People

The French comic has been a significant rising star on the UK circuit for a few years now, but 2024 represented an evolution of her style. Of All People is a more honest, affecting show than ever before, tackling some serious big feelings and major life events with the skill of her generation’s pre-eminent joke writer.

13. Mike ​Rice: Nasty Character

Raucous, old school and close to the bone, Mike Rice’s show about growing up as a farmer’s son in Ireland is best suited to an audience of reprobates above a pub. It might not be sophisticated to scream at your audience and call them all paedophiles, but this had the highest pure fun quotient of any show I saw this year.

12. Trygve ​Wakenshaw: Silly Little Things

A real opus here from the contemporary master of mime – Wakenshaw has created a silent play about un unlucky stage magician that insistently expands in scope until all of life’s arc is described in a few perfectly chosen movements. A genuinely beautiful and meaningful comedic feat.

11. Flo & Joan: One Man Musical

Musical duo Flo & Joan cede the spotlight in their unauthorised biographical musical of Andrew Lloyd Webber, giving George Fouracres the opportunity to burn up the stage with the year’s best comedic performance. His ALW is a glorious supernova of talent, ego and cocaine, and he’s matched with some of Flo & Joan’s best ever songwriting. See it now before the real ALW catches wind.

10. John ​Tothill: Thank God This Lasts Forever

An hour of pure delight from this living nexus of pleasure, one of our greatest and most promising new comics, who managed to rebound after bursting his appendix halfway through the Fringe. 

Tothill’s high church, high camp warmth leaves his audience completely helpless to absorb his lecture on the nature of desire and some choice stories from a challenging year in which he almost died twice.

 9. Anna Akana: It Gets Darker

In a brutally funny Edinburgh debut, the LA-based comic teased comedy out of genuine despair, and misfortunes that included a terrifying experience with a stalker and the loss of her sister to suicide. 

Akana expertly provided a demonstration of the power of comedy to help us come to terms with great sorrow, in a show that managed the magic trick of containing extremely heavy topics without ever feeling leaden.

8. Sam ​Campbell: Wobservations

It’s been so lovely to see the ongoing success of Campbell, who I will persist in calling the greatest comic mind of his generation. 

He finally brought his skills to the masses this year, capitalising on his Taskmaster success with a blockbuster nationwide tour that fizzed with constant, off-the-wall invention and mad stunts. He remains the only comedian who reliably makes me laugh so much that I fear for my own health. 

7. Ed ​Night: The Plunge

Not discounting his significant success, the fact that Ed Night isn’t a star on the level of Frankie Boyle remains confusing to me. An incredibly sharp writer with an unmatched sense of modernity, Night continues to be the comedic standard bearer for Gen Z, expressing both the despair and the Fuck It We Ball nature of coming of age in the age of doom. This is the best show he’s ever done, and that’s really saying something.

6. Katie ​Norris: Farm Fatale

After her formative years in the witchy sketch duo Norris & Parker, Katie Norris graduated with a sensational hour of vampy stand-up and songs, firmly positioning her as the British Catherine Cohen. Norris paints herself as bawdy farm wench, lonely cat wife and romancer of awful French techno DJs, but radiates confidence and power on stage – assurance that’s totally earned by her magnificent singing voice and super dense laugh rate.

5. Jin ​Hao Li: Swimming in a Submarine

Proof that there are still totally unique comic voices waiting to form in the ether, Jin Hao Li marries a spiky, unpredictable persona to the surreal haze of his storytelling, softly recounting a selection of strange dreams to an audience who sit in the palm of his hand, entranced by his command of the room. Fascinating, startlingly original, and my favourite British debut from 2024.

4. Rob Copland: Gimme (One With Everything)

Copland achieved a genuine word of mouth smash this Fringe, which he began with a free gig at the Banshee Labyrinth and ended with huge queues, a Victoria Wood Award win, and a lengthy run at the Soho Theatre secured. 

A virtuoso of silliness and a performer of fantastic energy, Copland channelled his talents into a revelatory show that sketched the outlines of something transcendent, and ended with an unforgettable sequence that says more than words ever could. 

3. Dan Rath: Pariah Carey

A somewhat enigmatic outcast, always reliably superb, Australian comedian Dan Rath comes to the Fringe most years, never getting the recognition he sorely deserves, most likely because he performs his bleak, jet black comedy with a genuine stiltedness that holds the audience at a deliberate remove. 

Under the unusual presentation and chewiness of the subject matter, you’ll find one of the greatest living comic writers, a comedian’s comedian if ever there was one, working with an extraordinary economy of language to craft perfect, sickening comedic koans like uranium pellets. On the strength of this and a string of previous shows, I think he became my favourite working comedian this year.

2. Rachel Kaly: Hospital Hour

Kaly’s legitimately mindblowing debut was performed to gasps and slack jaws for only a couple of weeks before she had to abandon the Fringe and return to New York, but they say that those who saw it will never recover. 

Focusing on her childhood and relationship with her father, Kaly drops enough twists and turns in one hour to keep any other comedian in business for a lifetime, and completely rejects the typical Fringe show structure in favour of a wall-to-wall pummelling of incredibly dark facts about her life masquerading as jokes. A tour de force of deadpan madness, and the greatest stand-up show I saw all year.

1. Pony Cam:  Burnout Paradise

Perhaps not even strictly a comedy show and yet still the funniest, most profound experience I had as an audience member this year, the Australian performance collective’s audacious offering at Summerhall felt like it took the magic of Julia Masli’s last show to its obvious, delirious conclusion. 

Four very tired-looking performers spend the entire show running on treadmills while simultaneously attempting to complete a battery of life tasks e.g. ‘cook and serve a three course dinner’, ‘perform a dance routine’, or ‘write and submit a genuine funding application to the Scottish Arts Council’. Dozens of these tasks, large and small, must all be completed while running, and the performers have to beat their own running record or the audience gets their money back.

As a way to visualise burnout and the challenges of living life to the fullest under capitalism, it’s simple but tremendously effective, especially when you see the lean, wiry performers gasping for breath in their short breaks, it’s impossible not to appreciate the physical strain they’re putting themselves through. But it’s the truly ingenious staging that makes it so special: at any given moment, upwards of five separate hilarious things are happening, all unscripted but simply the result of a brilliant arrangement of dominos being steadily set up and knocked down throughout the show. 

As an audience member it’s like a smorgasbord for the eyes – not since Jacque Tati’s Playtime have I seen a production that allows you to flit at will between dozens of moments of slapstick genius, all happening simultaneously. And like that film, it constitutes vital commentary on its own era, each hilarious moment occurring seemingly spontaneously and yet reflecting your own life back at you in miniature. 

It was the moment in 2024 that I felt most clearly that I was standing on the precipice of a new type of comedy. I don’t know if it’s a show that can ever be repeated, but I’m fascinated to see what they do next.

Published: 2 Jan 2025