Amid the cascade of solemn, grimly sensible resolutions we inevitably set ourselves at this time of year, there is a task of universal importance that all too often slips through the net: laugh more. It’s something that more or less all of us agree is a good idea – few people would confidently say “no thanks, I laugh too much actually, and if anything I need to cut down” (perhaps a particularly giggly funeral director). But how does one achieve such an aim? When the cost of living continues to squeeze us into oblivion? When we live in the age of enshittification? And, above all else, in grim, desolate January?
Enter the Cultural Diet, the annual Observer feature that offers up 31 pieces of work, one for each day of the month, to help enrich and uplift the start of your year. This year, the theme is comedy – there can surely be no better inoculation against the unspecified horrors of a new year – and the weighty task of issuing the recommendations has fallen to me.
As well as a writer, I happen to be a professional comedian – among other things, part of globetrotting comedy double act Max & Ivan, the recipient of an Edinburgh comedy award, and a member of the vast writing team of the Bafta-garlanded Horrible Histories (would the show have been so successful without my homeopathic contributions? Who knows! But also: yes). So, when it became apparent that the Observer was in need of an expert to deftly curate a month’s worth of comedy, it was clear there could only be one person for the job. However, James Acaster was unavailable, so here we are.
This January, then, strap in for 31 days of spirit-lifting, life-enhancing humour. My edit runs the gamut from old TV sketches to new TikTok comedians, from Weird Twitter to wonderful musicals, and from books to sitcoms to movies. (NB: the radio show I hoped to include, Round the Horne, was vetoed by my editors on the basis that the places it can be most easily listened to are “illegal” – so please, I implore you, do not type that into YouTube under any circumstances.)
Lots of my choices you’ll love. Statistically, some you won’t – and honestly, that’s OK*. Comedy is incredibly personal, so if one of these recommendations infuriates you into watching something you do love, and you end up laughing at that instead, I’d say that’s a win.
Enjoy.
* Unless of course you don’t enjoy Singin’ in the Rain, in which case I’m afraid you are dead inside.
1 January
Arrested Development
TV series: Series 1, episode 1 (Netflix)
Kick off your month with the start of one of the finest sitcoms of all time. Standout among standouts in possibly the funniest ensemble cast ever assembled is Jessica Walter as imperious matriarch Lucille Bluth, seen in episode 1 complaining about a gay boat protest that has upstaged her husband’s retirement party: “Everything they do is so dramatic and flamboyant. It just makes me want to set myself on fire.”
2 January
Dear Joan and Jericha
Podcast: Spotify (S2, Ep7)
Extemporised smut from two of the best. Julia Davis and Vicki Pepperdine play the titular agony aunts who respond to unhinged “questions” with even more unhinged “advice”. It’s a simple idea, executed sensationally well, leading to some of the most hysterical – and obscene – exchanges ever committed to audio. This episode includes references to nipple replacement surgery, the benefits of uncle/niece marriages, and “mice with distended ani”.
3 January
Alistair Green
YouTube: Ep1
A cringe-inducing modern Alan Bennett, and grandmaster of the front-facing social media video. Each lo-fi sketch, shot in Green’s white room, is a portrait of a horrifically recognisable domestic monster: think smug housewives, “trendy” craft beer founders, and, excruciatingly, “man pretending he’s pleased relationship is over”. Often performed in one unbroken take, Green’s sketches are laced with poison and, occasionally, unexpected poignancy. Peerless.
4 January
The Armando Iannucci Shows
Sketch: Hello Hugh! (S1, Ep1, Channel 4)
Iannucci’s 2001 surrealist sketch series – often overlooked, given his vast body of work – is a thing of beauty, and perhaps the highlight is an elderly man named Hugh and his incomprehensible reminiscences. “The internet was in black and white, and it was only on for three hours a day.” There’s something about Hugh’s throwaway delivery – egged on by Iannucci – that brings near-unlimited joy. “Cheeseburgers were a penny then.”
5 January
TikTok: Bookstore sketch
American actor and social media sensation Delaney Rowe creates note-perfect parodies of the manic pixie dream girl trope. Her social media is reason alone to further corrode your brain by downloading TikTok – see, for example, “absolutely insufferable female lead of an indie movie goes to a bookstore”, in which she kookily inhales the scent of an old book: “Is that weird? That’s weird. Weirdo on aisle three” [self-deprecating lip bite].
6 January
Nathan for You
TV series: Rebate Gas (S1, Ep1; widely available to stream)
Canadian comedian/world’s worst “management consultant” Nathan Fielder meets real small businesses, for whom he devises ridiculous rebranding strategies, such as the real estate company he markets as offering entirely “ghost-free homes” (drawing on the skills of a local exorcist). In this episode, he advises hiding a gas station’s fuel rebate dropbox on top of a mountain, meaning the public have to travel for days to reclaim the money (astonishingly, they do).
7 January
TV Go Home, by Charlie Brooker
Book: Buy here
Spoof TV listings guides as high art. Some of Brooker’s entries are bilious – see “Cull Your Felt Co-Workers: Psychotic gameshow. Two frustrated employees design and build lifesize effigies of their colleagues using offal for insides and coloured felt for skin.” Others are bizarre – such as “Fresian PoW: The forgotten story of the many thousands of cows who were injured, killed, or taken hostage during World War II.” All are inspired.
8 January
@Dril
On X: ISIL tweet
“There’s always a Dril tweet” has rightly become an internet maxim. The pseudonymous overlord of Weird Twitter posts gibberish that is frequently reflective of our online behaviour – “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob” – and frequently just showstoppingly strange (“BOSS TELLS ME I CAN KISS MY FERRETS AT WORK, BUT NO OPEN MOUTH”). Scroll back through the social media feed and bathe in the chaos.
9 January
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
TV series: I Want It That Way (cold open) (S5, Ep17, Netflix)
At their best, American sitcoms – created as they are by huge writers’ rooms, as opposed to the English tradition of “one lone auteur locked in a cupboard” – are drum-tight gag factories. Police precinct sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine is one of the best. In this gorgeous cold open, Detective Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) catches his man in time-honoured fashion: by instructing a lineup of perps to sing the Backstreet Boys classic I Want It That Way.
10 January
Such Brave Girls
TV series: Hair bleaching scene (iPlayer)
Kat Sadler’s dark Bafta-winning sitcom follows two sisters (Sadler and her real-life sister Lizzie Davidson) and their single mum (Louise Brealey), who are, in Sadler’s words, “narcissistic losers who are pathetically obsessed with what people think about us”. Debt, grief and mental health issues are all rendered laugh-out-loud funny (honestly). In the first episode, a disastrous attempt at hair bleaching has an incredible payoff, prompting mum Deb’s immortal shriek: “Stop being pig women!”
11 January
Bo Burnham: Inside
One-off special: White Woman’s Instagram (Netflix)
Bo Burnham swiftly graduated from “early YouTube musical-comedy sensation” to “jaw-dropping world-class standup” via “critically acclaimed film director”. His work is often a disarming combination of the puerile and the profound, as on his audacious and self-excoriating Inside, a comedy special released during the pandemic, which he filmed himself, at home, sans audience. His inspired song White Woman’s Instagram – with a middle eight that manages to nimbly skewer its own conceit – is somehow scathing and compassionate all at once.
12 January
Shooting Stars
Panel show: George Dawes’s Baked Potato Song (S6, Ep6, some series on iPlayer)
Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are inventors of their own colourful, cartoonish comic universe, and this “gameshow” is a glorious expression of it. Meaningless catchphrases and bizarre recurring rounds (“The Dove From Above”) generate a sort of cumulative hysteria. Best of all is Matt Lucas’s drum-playing infant scorekeeper George Dawes, who delights with an inexplicable repertoire of accents and songs – including Thank You Baked Potato, a duet which contains some of the most useful life advice a potato has ever given.
13 January
Fleabag
TV show: Shower scene (S1, Ep2, iPlayer)
Watching Fleabag live at the Soho theatre, it felt like Phoebe Waller-Bridge had created something simultaneously funnier and more serious than anything else around. Then – seemingly effortlessly – she repeated the trick on TV in two pretty flawless series. The shower scene, in which a balaclava-clad, knife-brandishing Waller-Bridge bursts in on a screaming, nude Hugh Skinner, is a distillation of what makes the show so captivating.
14 January
Munya Chawawa
Sketch: Unknown P
The devil works hard, but Munya Chawawa works harder. The social media satirist and one-man comedy machine is adept at calling out racism in the British media (often via his spoof newsreader persona, Barty Crease), and dropping fully formed music videos loaded with references to that morning’s headlines (see his Shaggy-inspired number about Matt Hancock’s Covid-era affair). For sheer silliness, enjoy his work as “the UK’s first posh drill rapper”, Unknown P – a class act, in every possible sense.
15 January
Jackie Chan in Drunken Master (1978)
Film, widely available to stream
While often bracketed with Bruce Lee, Chan’s perpetual underdog status and willingness to risk his body in pursuit of the perfect gag actually makes him the heir to Buster Keaton’s crown. Drunken Master, an early breakout success, sees him combine combat and comedy to fantastic effect – in order to take down the horde of villains via the ancient art of drunken boxing, he simply must get pissed at the same time as fighting.
16 January
YouTube: Happy Valley Series 3
The only thing wrong with character comedian Kieran Hodgson’s Bad Impressions videos is the title – his virtuoso one-man take-offs of popular TV shows, which rightfully went viral during lockdown, are performed with dazzling dexterity and immense affection. Hodgson’s Happy Valley video, as well as a brilliantly written sketch in its own right, serves as a useful recap of the series (“A woman’s been murdered. The husband’s an abuser and, potentially, a PE teacher.”).
17 January
Archie Henderson
X thread: Bestselling Singles
Hyper-creative comedian Archie Henderson has a prolific output, much of it under his musical alter ego Jazz Emu. His social media is a joy to explore, and this thread is one of his best – a project with comic Adrian Gray in which they post snippets of “the bestselling single of every decade all the way back to 14,000BC”. Each beautifully produced fictional song sample is a small, perfectly formed joke (look out for the 1940s hit by definitely-not-a-Nazi-propagandist “Jöhn Smith”).
18 January
Kate Berlant & John Early
YouTube: Paris
US comics Berlant and Early are both towering forces in their own right, and together they are irresistible. This classic early video of theirs – two millennials, each more self-involved than the other, discussing their lurrrrve of Paris – is loaded with quotes: “You know that for every minute you spend in America, in Paris it passes three minutes longer, to the second? Yeah.” By the end you’ll love both performers (and, quite possibly, hate Paris).
19 January
The Timewaster Letters by Robin Cooper (aka Robert Popper)
Book: Claridge’s/robot calf
When Robert Popper isn’t making superb TV comedy (science show parody Look Around You, C4’s Friday Night Dinner) he has an alter ego: professional letter writer/irritant Robin Cooper. His Timewaster Letters are a printed compendium of his (real) correspondence; in one exchange, he inquires as to whether staff at Claridge’s would be prepared to address him as “The Lizard” between the hours of 9-11am. The responses are heroic in their politeness.
20 January
Broad City
TV series: Subway encounters (S2, Ep1, available on streaming services)
Today is Blue Monday, which, according to a well-known made-up stat from a 2005 travel agent’s press release, is the saddest day of the year. Regardless, commuting can be horrendous at any time, so escape into Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s freewheeling, almost dreamlike sitcom about two stoned best friends trying to make sense of life as twentysomethings in New York City – and rejoice that your commute probably isn’t as grim as this series of hellish subway encounters.
21 January
Goodness Gracious Me
Sketch show: S1, Ep3 (iPlayer)
One of the great sketch shows of the late 90s/early 00s, Goodness Gracious Me explored contemporary British Asian culture, introducing a generation of delighted schoolkids to the phrase “kiss my chuddies” along the way. Highlights include the Coopers (not the Kapoors), an Indian couple hell-bent on assimilating into the upper echelons of British society despite the numerous faux pas of husband Denis (not Dinesh). Their constant misguided striving shone a spotlight on English bigotry (as well as being immensely funny).
22 January
I Think You Should Leave
Sketch show: Darmine Doggy Door (Netflix)
Saturday Night Live alumnus Tim Robinson’s high-velocity sketches are berserk and unpredictable, and obey few of the traditionally established “rules” of comedy. This sketch – ostensibly an advert for a pet door – makes several completely preposterous digressions, via a pig wearing a Richard Nixon mask and a marriage threatened by a swing dancer at a wedding, and ends somewhere in the realm of … shellshocked philosophy?
23 January
Ken M
Internet troll: X account
In the pantheon of off-key internet posters, Ken M (once described as “the Rembrandt of Yahoo Comment Trolling”) is in a league of his own. He has stated that his aim is to detoxify the comments section, and his years of inane comments – publicly posted on Yahoo, HuffPost, Facebook, Yelp and more – are so singularly, spectacularly stupid that they verge on surrealist art. (Example: beneath a story about basketball star LeBron James wearing one black and one white shoe saying “Equality”: “For the sake of unity he should have just worn one big shoe”.)
24 January
The Two Ronnies
Sketch show: S8, Ep1
Filmed in 1980 and still a remarkable achievement today, David Renwick’s sketch for The Two Ronnies takes an ingenious conceit – a Mastermind contestant whose specialist subject is answering the question before last each time – and executes it flawlessly. The result is a perfect comic equation, with a nonstop torrent of punchlines packed into two minutes and 44 seconds. Masterful.
25 January
Key & Peele
Sketch: East/West Collegiate Bowl
Speaking as a member of a comedy double act, I worship at the feet of US sketch duo Key & Peele. Enjoy browsing their vast back catalogue – the inner-city substitute teacher and “Obama’s anger translator” are both classics – but to kick off why not treat yourself to this infinitely quotable parade of college American football players (all played by Key and Peele) with increasingly ridiculous names. The effect is cumulative – I tend to start losing it at “Tyroil Smoochie-Wallace”.
26 January
Laura Ramoso
TikTok: German mother at the beach
Canadian comic Laura Ramoso’s videos are a total joy – full of rapid-fire gag-filled impressions of her highly critical German mother (“Ach Laura you are hungry? How can you be hungry? We had food just seven hours ago!”) and her irascible Italian father. Also see her instantly recognisable permutations of “that one girl who …”, and clips from her infectiously fun live standup.
27 January
Podcast: Slamdown w/Ania Magliano and Michael Odewale (S14 Ep36)
Recorded in front of a live audience, this chaotic podcast-slash-gameshow from sketch trio Pappy’s – comedians Matthew Crosby, Tom Parry and Ben Clark – is perhaps the closest thing today to the anarchic spirit of Shooting Stars. There are lots of lovely running jokes, but Tom Parry’s “John Grisham-style deep south lawyer” character, Fanshawe Standon, is a particular delight.
28 January
Schitt’s Creek
TV series: A Little Bit Alexis (S5, Ep8, available on streaming services)
With the simple premise of a lovingly dysfunctional family in a fish-out-of-water setting, this Canadian sitcom gets better and better as it goes. Spoiled daughter Alexis Rose becomes increasingly endearing, and the scene in which she auditions for a community theatre production of Cabaret by performing the theme from her “critically reviewed” limited reality series A Little Bit Alexis is a showstopping – and, indeed, audition-stopping – performance.
29 January
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Film, widely available to stream
Timeless musical classic about silent movie actors entering the world of the talkies, and a prime showcase for Gene Kelly, who managed to project an “affable everyman” image while also being the world’s greatest dancer. The whole thing’s a treat – but look out for Kelly’s vaudeville song-and-dance routine with pal Donald O’Connor, a flashback to their days playing the small rooms, which is laughably presented as “bad” when it’s clearly one of the tightest routines ever recorded.
30 January
30 Rock
TV series: Best of Dr Spaceman (available on streaming services)
Tina Fey’s sitcom about life behind the scenes at an SNL-esque show is laden with relentlessly creative jokes and top-tier cutaways to the fictional TV show’s sketches (“Werewolf barmitzvah – spooky, scary! Boys becoming men, and men becoming wolves!”). There are numerous standouts, but the funniest character in sitcom history, line-for-line, may be Chris Parnell’s incompetent Dr Leo Spaceman (pronounced Spa-che-man), who should really have his medical certificates revoked. “I don’t know how to say this. Dee … ay … batees?”
31 January
Funny animal videos
Instagram: Raccoon chases boy
One can construct the most perfectly calibrated bon mot that wryly deconstructs the leading issue of the day with flair and panache. But will it ever be as funny as a short Instagram video of a raccoon scooting around on its stomach, chasing a little kid around a living room, with cartoon “broom broom” noises dubbed over the top? The answer is, almost certainly, no. So switch off your brains, let your algorithm take over, and enjoy the dopamine. You’ve made it to the end of the month. Congrats.
