The most natural thing in the world is laughter. That’s doubly true if you’re in a room with half a dozen of the best stand-up comedians in the world. Such is the premise of Last One Laughing UK – a new comedy series with a very simple conceit at its heart. Put a cast of talented comedians in a little studio flat and tell them they have to avoid laughing or smiling for as long as possible. Break once, you get a yellow card. Break twice, you’re out of the game.
It’s surprising that it has taken this long for the show to come about. Flick through Amazon Prime Video and you can find dozens of other versions from various countries, ever since the format debuted in Japan in 2016. The UK take on it doesn’t deviate too far from the standard panel show rotation – it won’t surprise you to hear that Jimmy Carr is the host, nor that Sara Pascoe, Joe Wilkinson, Judi Love, and Rob Beckett are among the contestants.
The casting, though, is the true genius of Last One Laughing UK. These people know each other very well and relax as if they’re chatting in a backstage green room, putting them at risk of cracking each other up. Some are more aware of the game than others, with Lou Sanders adopting an all-out attack strategy of trying to knock out her opponents and Harriet Kelmsley – perhaps the least known of the cast, but primed to be the breakout star – wandering around wearing a look of pure, wide-eyed horror throughout.
Like any great sporting competition, this is a game of favourites and underdogs. The clear favourites to win are Richard Ayoade – a deadpan maestro who seems as if he can go months without cracking a smile – and Bob Mortimer, whose status as a comedy legend ensures that everyone in the room has been laughing at his work for most of their life. Most of the cast seems to spend a lot of time avoiding talking to Mortimer, in particular – aware that any one-on-one chat with him is a recipe for disaster. He manages to push one fellow contestant over the edge just by sitting on a chair and delivers a musical onslaught to another that could reduce even the hardest of grimaces to hysterical laughter.
Smartly, Last One Laughing UK mostly allows the simplicity of the format to do the work, with interjections from Carr and the eliminated contestants – who join him in a side room – used sparingly. There are some tropes of the format, though, which the show could do without. It’s rare that the use of reality TV confessional interviews actually adds anything to the material and Roisin Conaty, deployed as a perfunctory sidekick to Carr, doesn’t really get the chance to be as funny as we know she can be.
But when the show is in that room with the comics, it’s funnier than just about anything on TV. There’s a perverse joy in watching professionally funny people deliver solid jokes to a room in which no one reacts – a little bit of light leaving their eyes each time. Similarly, any time a contestant can tell they have another on the ropes, the way they go for the comedic jugular is truly beautiful.
There’s a remarkable diversity of humour on show as well. Some opt for gross-out and others embrace lewd sexuality, while there’s a great representation for absurdism and old-fashioned slapstick as well. Joe Lycett performs some tremendous pratfalls, Joe Wilkinson delivers a powerful speech with a perfect pay-off, and Bob Mortimer treats us to the silliest magic show you’ve ever seen. There’s nothing unrepresented here in the search for that elusive laugh.
First and foremost, this is a triumph of format and cast. Like another of the comedy world’s most bulletproof formats, Would I Lie to You?, this is a simple parlour game given undeniable comedic energy by the presence of some of the funniest people on the stand-up circuit today. It has the potential to run and run, just as the tonally similar Taskmaster has done.
At a time when the news is as dark as it has been in years and even the best TV is deeply bleak – we’re still recovering from Adolescence – something like Last One Laughing UK is a gloriously silly port in the storm. Someday soon, we might be able to see someone finally break Richard Ayoade – and that’s an achievement worth treasuring forever for whoever makes it happen.
Last One Laughing UK is streaming now on Prime Video, with new episodes airing weekly.
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