This might be the funniest TV show you'll ever see – and it's not Fawlty Towers
Last One Laughing, a series recently released on Amazon Prime, might be the funniest thing I've ever seen. The schtick, if you haven't seen it or its endless clips on Instagram, is simply this: ten comedians are stuck in a room for six hours, trying not to laugh. That's it.
I mean, it can't be the funniest thing I've ever seen. I've seen Fawlty Towers. I've seen Some Like It Hot, Airplane! and Groundhog Day. I've seen Eddie Izzard doing live stand-up comedy in the 1990s, I've seen Dame Edna host a chat show. An anonymous media source of my acquaintance, often quoted in this column, is the funniest person I've ever met and he's not in this series – so how could it be?
It's not painstakingly crafted; it's a studio show which covers a single day and is broken into six half-hour bits. And it's broadly improvised! How could any of that result in the funniest thing I've ever seen? And yet its bang-for-buck, laugh-per-minute rate seems unbetterable; I have laughed without cessation through every episode. And that's speaking as someone ageing, tired and sleep-deprived, juggling children and pets and National Insurance (which I really wasn't when I saw Eddie Izzard doing live stand-up comedy in the 1990s) with a global backdrop that is bleak and riddled with horror, and I'm still laughing without cessation through every episode. So it certainly feels like the funniest thing I've ever seen.
I should make it clear: the comics assembled for the series aren't trying not to laugh as a collective. That would be too easy. They are in competition. If anyone chuckles, they're knocked out. So the job of the contestants is simultaneously to make each other laugh while remaining totally impassive themselves.
It's a very, very funny idea for a programme. Even if the comedy bits weren't funny in themselves, the importance of their onlookers not laughing would immediately render them so. It brings a wave of the ghastly hilarity we feel when someone whispers a joke during a funeral, or passes you a secret cartoon of the maths teacher. It takes me back to my days at the Edinburgh Fringe (often in the company of some of the people who make this programme), when tickets for everything were about £3 so you could see ten shows a day, finding ourselves reasonably diverted by the comedy acts but only made helpless with painful, unconquerable merriment by amateur opera, or fiery political tub-thumping, or inexpert contemporary dance.
The only thing in the world that's funnier than trying not to laugh, or watching someone else trying not to laugh, is someone who's genuinely unamused for reasons of disapproval. 'This is no laughing matter' is one of the funniest sentences in the English language. And that's why the cultural era we're living through, while no doubt the most puritanical and purse-lipped it's been for over a century, is also, in many ways, the funniest.
With that in mind, the show is tremendously well cast. It's hosted by Jimmy Carr, the court jester of our age, who has survived attempted cancellation so often that his whole self is a counter-argument to 'This is no laughing matter'. He just stands and stands and stands for the principle that everything is.
The contestants are perfect for the game in hand, including some (Daisy May Cooper, Richard Ayoade) whom you'd particularly credit with the ability to keep a straight face, and some (Bob Mortimer, Joe Wilkinson, Judi Love) who are so deeply, naturally hilarious that it's hard not to start giggling before they even speak. This makes for a magnificent tension as the competition gets underway.
We see Bob Mortimer putting on a magic show, alive with patter and veils. Lou Sanders performs a piece of expressive mime with someone who may or may not be her mother. Rob Beckett explains the role of a proctologist ('Have you ever had a check up the bum?', he asks; 'A Czechoslovakian?' replies Bob Mortimer, puzzled). Each comedian in turn is obliged to sing Lovin' You by Minnie Riperton, with its high rippling falsetto – and all of it through the prism of fellow contestants twitching and fidgeting as they desperately try not to smile. And then, somehow, the funniest thing of all is Joe Wilkinson delivering an impromptu factual lecture on the 200th anniversary of the RNLI.
We all know what it's like to try and quell a laugh that comes when it shouldn't. In a customs queue, just as you've been asked whether you packed your bag yourself. During a work meeting, as you're being told that everyone's being made redundant. In a school assembly, while a guest speaker describes the challenges of their disability. I don't think that comes from the bad part of us; quite the reverse, I think it's a physical reaction to an overdose of empathy. It requires full understanding of the gravity of the scenario; a sociopath wouldn't be tickled at all. It is the very confrontation with humanity that is, sometimes, our undoing.
But this wonderful series has found a way to bottle that hilarious resource, the laugh-that-must-be-stifled, without having to lean on cruelty or bigotry or anything off-colour at all. It's not about 'saying the unsayable' or 'jokes you can't make any more'; in fact it demonstrates how the most powerful weapon in the comic armoury is simple silliness. Without spoilers, that is what must and does triumph in the end.
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