B ritish comedy is a broad church united by a simple adage: less is more. The most acclaimed and beloved shows – Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, Brass Eye, The Office – tend to be exceptionally short-running. Compared to the Americans, our series are brief anyway, but we also seem anxious to bow out well before a premise is squeezed dry. We don’t milk it, we don’t money-grub. In a weird way, comedy is viewed as a precious finite resource liable to become exhausted at any moment.
Which is why I feel slightly sceptical about this Halloween special of Prime Video’s Last One Laughing, the reality gameshow that involves a group of comedians competing to see who can remain straight-faced for the longest. The enormous success of the first two series – incredible ratings, healthy media coverage, a pair of Baftas – was well deserved: the show produced some of the most hysterical TV comedy in recent memory. You can understand why the streamer would be keen to capitalise on the interest of the circa 6 million-strong fanbase with this four-part miniseries, which whittles down the usual 10 contestants to seven. But might this snacky stopgap dilute the precious joy of the yearly series proper?
At first, the whole thing does come off a bit half arsed. Why Halloween, except that it falls six months after the last edition? While some contestants do seem specially chosen – series one returnee Daisy May Cooper has authored a book about the supernatural, while Reece Shearsmith (The League of Gentlemen, Inside No 9) is known for his love of horror – others are shoehorned into the theme: we’re told Lou Sanders (who also appeared in the first series) “genuinely believes in crystals” and that Phil Wang once presented a podcast about his hatred of horror movies. Tom Allen, Jack Dee and rising standup Harriet Dyer, meanwhile, are merely introduced with a spooky joke.
The twist this time is that the comedians are not only banned from laughing, but screaming too. I thought this might solve one of the format’s only flaws: that the challenge is too easy for a certain kind of personality. In the last series, both David Mitchell and Sam Campbell got to the end of the allocated time without cracking, forcing producers to bend the rules with a tie-breaker. Yet in the first three episodes of this series – the finale wasn’t made available to reviewers – this new caveat barely features.
Well, none of it matters … Last One Laughing: Halloween is just as hilarious as the show’s previous iterations. There’s little chance of this particular comic well running dry – even second-time contestants Sanders and the defensively screwfaced Cooper prove they have plenty more to give. Wang provides the quick wit, Allen brings the camp asides (and a ridiculously funny breakdancing interlude), Dyer a touch of surrealism and Shearsmith a seemingly never-ending box of gruesome tricks. Ironically, the typically gloomy Dee is a delight – the man has never looked so happy to be on TV. And there’s another irony: what was previously the show’s most groan-worthy quality – the lameness of host Jimmy Carr’s script – has been almost completely rectified (credit, perhaps, to the new blood in the writers room).
Aside from everything Shearsmith says and does, the Halloween of it all is most evident in the “jokers”, pre-planned performances the comedians are periodically called up to do in an effort to make their peers laugh. These seem more gratifyingly weird than ever before, while the special guest appearances are starrier still. Yet the best value comes from the random conversational turns and strange little bits of prepared material the contestants spring on each other. You might go in thinking certain standups are more to your taste than others (not everyone will find Sanders’ dance about frogs as funny as I do), but by the end you’ll be impressed by all of them. Obviously comedians are funny as a rule – here, however, they’re working especially hard to prove it. In a sense, Last One Laughing is the polar opposite of the podcast: the bloated medium in which two comics chat about banalities over a thousand hours while laughing liberally at almost anything the other says.
Despite the impulse to equate comedy with scarcity, Last One Laughing turns out to be pure treat, no cynical trick. Bring on series three – and any other spin-offs the producers come up with in the meantime.
