1. Flight of the Conchords (Soho theatre, London)
I can’t remember a richer year to watch live comedy than 2018: it just kept on giving. It’s hard to separate my two favourite shows – James Acaster’s and the return, after eight years, of New Zealand musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. I saw the latter twice – once at an unpublicised London warm-up, once on their arena tour. I could have watched every night of its run and kept finding new things to love and laugh at.
You wouldn’t begrudge Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement an indulgent greatest-hits tour. They don’t get together often, their back catalogue is bulletproof and they’ve got busy lives. Instead, they delivered a suite of new songs (to the UK, at least) that rivalled those with which they first blazed through the Edinburgh fringe 15 years ago. A crossed-purposes duet between an estranged father and son. A drab – but wannabe raunchy – office romance. A satanic country-and-western ballad. The range was as eclectic as ever, the lyrics as surprising, the music more than a backdrop, but a brilliant part of the joke.
If that were all, it would be more than enough. But McKenzie and Clement are just as funny when they’re not singing. On this year’s tour, we caught up with them in middle age, happier to be themselves, as alert as ever to opportunities to tease and nitpick at each other, at their relationship with the audience, at rock’n’roll cliches. Our backstage lives are so wild, they deadpanned – and then came news of McKenzie’s hapless tumble down the stairs, breaking his hand, nixing the rest of the tour. Perhaps this was taking the bathos a step (or several steps) too far? Our happy memories of the show, at least, are unbreakable.
2. James Acaster (Vaudeville theatre, London)
To the best artists, the words “that’ll do” are alien. Throughout the hot streak that saw him secure multiple Edinburgh comedy award nods and Netflix specials, James Acaster delivered standup sets more perfect, and perfectionist, than almost anyone else. But this year’s offering topped them all. Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 was a show for the ages, which beautifully combined the Kettering man’s twisty, forensic standup with (for the first time) personal material about his love life and mental health. Audacious and hilarious in a whole new range of ways, it’s a must-see.
3. Jessie Cave (The Stand, Edinburgh)
Anxiety and comedy have long been bedfellows – but have they ever spooned as tightly as in Jessie Cave’s shows? Following on from I Loved Her in 2015, Sunrise is like open-heart surgery in standup form: an update on Cave’s life as a mother and singleton since separating from her kids’ dad, fellow comic Alfie Brown. It’s full of insight, honesty and self-mockery. Cave’s life is never so worrisome (and believe me, it’s worrisome) that she can’t offer us a laugh at the bizarre lengths to which those neuroses lead.
4. Sheeps (Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh)
The biggest sketch comeback this year was the League of Gentlemen’s, and a cracking show it was. On a smaller scale, Sheeps returned with a prematurely nostalgic set about their youthful heyday, and the challenge of keeping team comedy on the road. Liam Williams, Al Roberts and Daran Johnson are a winning combination, serving up and sending up a compelling story of their own relationships alongside now-political, now-ridiculous sketches, each played with a devastatingly straight bat.
5. Natalie Palamides (Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh)
Having laid a marker down with weird egg-based clown show Laid in 2017, Los Angeles native Natalie Palamides muscled her way to the nerve centre of creative live comedy with Nate, a cross-dressing solo about machismo and sexual conduct. A bizarre omission from Edinburgh’s comedy award shortlist, its playful, provocative and hands-on inquiries into rape and consent made it one of the knottiest and buzziest shows on this year’s fringe.
6. Bridget Christie (Brighton Dome)
“It was an act! I don’t give a shit! I just wanted to be famous!” If you thought nothing could be funnier than Bridget Christie’s brand of feminism, her disavowal of it proved you wrong. What Now? was a gleeful casting off of shackles by one of our funniest people, relegating big- and small-p politics in favour of clownish self-abasement – at her “metropolitan elite” problems, at her parenting difficulties. The campaigning may be on hold, but the laughs keep coming.
7. The Pin (Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh)
In a year when a handful of already excellent acts raised their game, duo Alex Owen and Ben Ashenden delivered a bulletproof nugget of comic theatre, buttressing their cerebral meta-comedy with the vintage pleasures of a good farce. We’re in Noises Off territory here, as supposed support act The Pin vie – on stage and off – with fictional alter egos Philip and Robin to top the bill. All sorts of capers and clever sketches ensue – and big, big laughs, too.
8. Kate Berlant (Assembly George Square, Edinburgh)
Fans of the US television series Search Party had an inkling what to expect at this show. Just as that programme satirised Gen-Y egotism, so too Kate Berlant (who starred in it) makes a monster of millennial self-love on stage. Berlant can’t even get to the comedy, she’s so busy preening, feigning sensitivity, and living – very self-consciously – in the moment. Mixing character comedy, improv and crap ESP, Berlant’s sui generis set was the fringe’s most eye-catching debut.
9. Lazy Susan (Assembly George Square, Edinburgh)
There was no shortage of #MeToo-infused comedy shows this year, at Edinburgh in particular. One of them marked the coming-of-age of sketch duo Lazy Susan, whose talent was well established, but who had never delivered a show as swaggering as this. Forgive Me, Mother! had a ball with anxiety around male misbehaviour, Freya Parker’s severe bout of which hijacked the show, while Celeste Dring made eyes at a gent in the front row. In short: a hoot.
10. Nish Kumar (Soho theatre, London)
Having positioned himself, via The Mash Report, as the closest we’ve come to a British Jon Stewart, Nish Kumar unleashed his big-hitting political comedy on the live stage after a two-year absence. The upshot was less standup than volcanic eruption: an hour-long vent against Brexit, the incompetence of our leaders and the sexual indiscretions of his heroes, filtered through the perspective of a hapless clown-comic sheepish about his newfound authority.