For some reason, British comedy shows have become a cult genre of their own in the world outside of our horrible, rainy little island. I mean, I think they’re funny, but I’m surprised the rest of you like them so much when you didn’t grow up surrounded by all … this.
With their signature reliance on dry wit, sarcasm, and slightly mean-spirited Schadenfreude, British comedies are great if you want to watch awful people set themselves up to get exactly what they deserve, and for cathart-ing your way through a Friday night so you’re ready to fully embrace the weekend. But it’s not all dark humor, there’s also a degree of genuinely heartwarming emotion in many of them, sometimes delivered in the exact same moment as the overblown pompous lead gets his just, humiliating deserts. There are some Shrek-like onion layers to the British sense of humor, is what I’m saying. Here are 14 of the best, with a Northern Irish special at the end.
19. Smack the Pony
One of the classic British sketch shows Smack the Pony is a female-led and focused show with skits about the absurdities of dating life, workplace drama, and deeply surreal weirdness. There’s also a musical parody at the end of every episode and I admit that I’m a sucker for those. It’s coming in in last position though because, while it was definitely a highlight of my week when it was on broadcast television, it’s probably quite dated now. There is a little bit of that 90’s/oughts typical sexism that people didn’t tend to recognize as sexism at the time (like the embarrassing clingy ex-girlfriend sketches) and an unfortunate ableist character in season 3 whose scenes I advise forwarding through instead of watching. However, sketches like the oblivious woman (explaining further would destroy the bit) and women doing absurd things in high heels or wedding dresses remain funny and worth a watch.
17. Coupling
Sort of like Friends but British, and in my personal opinion much less annoying, Coupling is a comedy-drama about a group of twenty-something friends and their messy personal drama. There’s the long-standing couple who break up and get back together, the deeply broken up couple who are still both part of the core group, the sensible one tm, and the deeply weird one who, looking back as an adult, is honestly just creepy a lot of the time. It’s near the end of the list because while it’s funny that’s probably less true unless you’re a British person of a certain age. There’s also all the typical casual sexism and probably homophobia (I don’t remember anything specific but I haven’t watched it since it was on the air and I have no delusions about the early oughts) you’ll find in a show of that vintage.
16. The Brittas Empire
Sort of a precursor to The Office (which has not made it onto this list, even though the British version is the original, because it also features Ricky Gervais, the most annoying man in comedy. Just watch the American version, it’s better), The Brittas Empire is a workplace comedy featuring an odd, petty dictator of a boss, Mr. Brittas (Chris Barrie), and the weird, unfortunate things that happen as a result of his ambitions.
Taking place in a leisure center (a sports complex, for the unfamiliar), Brittas’ ineptitude, grandiose dreams, and constant ability to offend everyone he comes across result in classic improbable hijinks like an emu loose in the center, every single staff member getting hypnotized, and an actual piano being dropped on someone like in an Acme cartoon. There are technically seven seasons but it was supposed to end after five, and while I haven’t actually watched the final two, I’ve heard that generally you shouldn’t. As funny as The Brittas Empire can be, I’m sticking it in 14th place because there is unfortunately some fairly ’90s-typical ableism in it that detracts from the overall humor of the show. Still, it has its moments of being a fun, “oh god”-inducing piece of comedy.
15. Inside No. 9
From the absurd to the grotesque, each episode of Inside No. 9 is a stand-alone character study set inside a different property, only connected to each other by the shared street address number 9. It comes fairly low on the list because while some episodes are absolutely brilliant others fall flat (at least in my deeply subjective opinion), which is one of the risks when putting out or settling down to watch a disconnected anthology series like this. At its best Inside No. 9 is darkly funny and utterly disturbing, with some real horror mixed in with the silliness and dark humor. It’s one of those shows that holds up a mirror to the things we don’t like to think about but really need to, in between childish absurdity and the kind of humor that’s actually really depressing when the laughter’s worn off.
14. Miranda
The incredible Miranda Hart plays herself, sort of, in the semi-autobiographical sitcom Miranda, in which she runs a joke shop while trying to manage her pushy, marriage-obsessed mother, horrible posh friends from boarding school, and massive crush on the himbo chef next door. Filled with relatable, excruciating situations and a fair amount of physical comedy, you’ll find yourself genuinely invested in Miranda and her friends as they navigate their ridiculous lives. It’s also particularly relatable if you’re an unusually tall, broad-shouldered, and clumsy woman or femme because Hart manages to take the unpleasant experiences that come from that and turn them into something genuinely funny, as all good comedians do with whatever bullshit they have to deal with in every day life – you don’t end up in comedy because it’s all sunshine and roses.
13. Keeping Up Appearances
A show about white middle-class pretensions, Keeping Up Appearances follows Hyacinth Bucket (“pronounced Bouquet”) and her long-suffering husband Richard (Clive Swift) as she tries desperately to social climb for the both of them to endlessly embarrassing results. With her thoroughly terrorized neighbor/best friend Violet (Josephine Tewson) reluctantly in tow, Hyacinth rampages through the cul de sac, oblivious to her actual effect on the people she’s trying to suck up to. She continues on, unaware of her beloved, doted-on son’s increasingly out status, or the fact that his best friend and roommate is actually his lover (don’t watch looking for representation, however; Sheridan never actually appears on screen).
Taking shots at all the standard, soulless middle-class niceties that will be familiar to anyone who grew up in England (at least those millennial-aged and up) it’s usually very satisfying to see Hyacinth’s schemes come to nothing—I say usually because once in a while you find yourself rooting for her despite herself. Add in the working class family she loves dearly, yet not enough that she won’t try and conceal their existence from her social circle, Elizabeth’s acerbic, extremely divorced brother, and a vicar who’s desperately trying to avoid her at all costs and you have everything you need for a delightful comedy of errors.
13. The Goes Wrong Show
Following on from the TV specials Peter Pan Goes Wrong and A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, The Goes Wrong Show keeps up with the adventures of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society as they’re inexplicably given the chance to perform a series of plays live on the BBC. Each episode features a new play, and a new series of excruciating disasters that the cast bravely tries to soldier through as the performance falls apart around their ears. A mixture of slapstick, faulty sets, bad acting, and wild cast drama that makes its way onto stage every episode is very funny on its own. However, the series as a whole only makes it into the number 13 slot on this list because the premise does begin to get repetitive after a while. Still, it’s easy watching and highly entertaining, especially if you’re looking for something to watch drunk with your friends.
12. My Family
A classic family sitcom, My Family follows the day-to-day lives of grumpy dentist Ben Harper (Robert Lindsay), his brilliant, sharp-tongued wife Susan (Zoë Wanamaker), and their three children—all of whom are a nightmare in their own special, unique ways. Though there’s a fair number of bland, or just not very good, episodes, it’s one of the longest-running BBC sitcoms for a reason, and with 10 seasons of it, you won’t run out for a while. Consistently funny and with an iconic cast but overall few standout moments, My Family comes in at number 12 on this list for being a reliable binge-worthy background noise/comfort show that will last you a long time and requires basically nothing from you in order to enjoy and follow along.
11. Outnumbered
Family dramedy Outnumbered chronicles the lives of middle-class Londoners Pete and Sue Brockman and their three children, who, you know, outnumber the parents. Reliant on dry, dark humor Outnumbered is funny precisely because it’s realistic – at least for the time it was made, the idea now that a teacher could afford to buy a house in London is the true comedy – the family fight over petty things, get frustrated with each other, and the children are far from the idealized adorable moppets you often get in family shows. A lot of the scenes involving the kids are ad-libbed too, which is part of what makes it so funny—kids are deeply absurd, hilarious human beings.
10. Dad’s Army
A big one for nostalgia, Dad’s Army is an old comedy that’s constantly being replayed on one channel or another. Set during the Second World War, it follows the adventures of the Home Guard, a military force made up of men whose age, medical status, or profession meant they couldn’t be sent overseas, and were trained to be the last line of defense against a German invasion instead.
Led by the officious Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe), local bank manager by day, the fictional Walmington on Sea’s branch of the home guard is made up of oddballs including the elderly pacifist Private Godfrey (Arnold Ridley), wheeling, dealing Private Walker (James Beck), who can always supply you with a pair of nylons and somehow persuaded the army his profession was too important to sign him up, and the adorably oblivious teenage Private Pike (Ian Lavender). Poking fun at British classism and small-town politics, the Home Guard regularly face off against their nemeses—not the Germans but the local Air Raid Warder, and the Verger of the church in whose hall they have their meetings. With a mix of slapstick comedy, dark humor, and pathos, Dad’s Army is one of those shows that makes you want to call your granddad and feel vaguely comforted at the same time.
9. Waiting for God
If you like seeing older people defying expectations and getting up to hijinks, then you’ll enjoy Waiting for God. Placed in a retirement home by their respectively concerned and uncaring families, retired accountant Tom (Graham Crowden) and deeply cynical photojournalist Diana (Stephanie Cole) decide to join forces to fight the power and generally seed chaos in the home. Run by a greedy incompetent who constantly places profit above the residents, Tom and Diana regularly thwart his plans and raise the overall living standard for the residents through a combination of blackmail and raw cunning. A show that subverts the normal expectations for elderly people, as well as the usual generational family dynamics, Waiting for God is somehow both cynical and charming at the same time.
8. The Young Ones
A series satirizing university students in the ’80s, The Young Ones is one of those shows with such extreme caricatures you’re laughing both at the actual satire and the people who believe this is really what students are like. Following four ridiculous white boys in a squalid student flat in London, The Young Ones features Rick (Rik Mayall), an anarchist obsessed with Cliff Richard; Vyviane (Adrian Edmondson), a chaotic violent punk alarmingly studying medicine; Neil (Nigel Planer), a deeply depressed hippy who does all the work around the place; and Mike (Christopher Ryan), a successful, unscrupulous ladies man—all enrolled at Scumbag College.
It’s absurd, chaotic, surreal as hell, and weirdly still relatable decades later (or at least it was back in the late aughts when I was in college). Who didn’t know some guy already into unethical-seeming business before you’ve even graduated, a self-proclaimed anarchist who never did anything useful, or a wildly corrupt landlord? Not to mention that guy who really, really shouldn’t be studying medicine. The animal puppets providing commentary in the walls are a great touch, and the final episode goes out with a band (I’m not apologizing for that pun).
7. Ghosts
A comedy-drama that’s as sad as it is funny, Ghosts is what you get if you decide to take a house-share sitcom but make it paranormal. Obviously, if ghosts were real, you’d have multiple different ghosts from multiple periods of history all haunting the same place. Ghosts looks at this and asks the real questions: What would that be like? How would they treat each other? Would they like each other, and what kind of petty feuds would develop if they didn’t? Add in a new, living family, with plans for the home that the dead residents don’t like, and you’ve already got a brilliant setup.
Add the fact that a member of that family develops the ability to see ghosts after being briefly clinically dead, however, as happens to new owner Alison, and you’ve got an entirely different, even better premise. What starts out as a conflict between the living and the dead soon develops into a relatively happy housemate situation, mixing the usual beats and plotlines of a housemate comedy with paranormal drama.
6. Green Wing
A comedy that really leans into the absurd as it gets going, Green Wing is set in an NHS hospital, chronicling the adventures of four doctors, the administrative staff, and all the many and varied affairs that go on around them (you’d need an L Word-style map). With heavy hitters like Olivia Coleman and Tamsin Greig, it’s a pretty impressive cast for a quirky little weeknight show, but it fully delivers.
What starts as a classic comedy-drama set in a hospital slowly morphs into a deeply weird and occasionally surreal thing to watch, which I’m told is rather like the experience of actually working in a hospital so that tracks. Green Wing manages to skirt that fine line between funny-embarrassing and ‘oh god I can’t actually watch this anymore’ embarrassing, always staying on the right side of it, It also blends together Schadenfreude with pathos in a way that leaves you deliberately confused about what you’re feeling.
5. The Inbetweeners
It’s rare that a show really gets teenagers in all their horrible glory like The Inbetweeners. After his father runs away with a mistress, taking most of the money with him, the insufferable but well-meaning Will McKenzie (Simon Bird) has to attend a state school for the first time. Spoiler, this goes poorly for him.
Not exactly popular at his old school he immediately discovers that being a “posh twat” isn’t going to help him here either, but help is at hand when Simon (Joe Thomas) takes pity on him and soon enough he’s part of a new, utterly dreadful friend group. The four lads then meander through the rest of their adolescence, trying to buy alcohol, get laid, and generally do all the other normal, obnoxious things teenage boys do. Even though they’re all wretched in their own special ways you do end up fond of them, even the reprehensible Jay (James Buckley), and it’s honestly fun to remember what it was like being a teenager—and realize how glad you are that you aren’t one anymore.
4. Goodness Gracious Me
Once a staple of the Friday night comedy lineup, Goodness Gracious Me is a British-Asian sketch show from the ’90s that’s timelessly funny. Written by and starring comedy legends Meera Syal, Nina Wadia, Kulvinder Ghir, and Sanjeev Bhaskar, the show mixes together comedy and commentary about British Asian culture with brilliant satire of the English and the racist attitudes displayed towards the Asian community here.
With everything from fabulous musical parodies to familiar family characters (embarrassing aunties and that uncle who claims he can fix anything) to Skipinder the Punjabi Kangaroo (who, unlike the original, can talk, is always drunk, and has a bad attitude), it’s got a great range of comedy styles, and unfortunately, a lot of the points being made are still relevant now. My favorite sketch will always be “Going for an English,” because it’s a perfect satire of how a lot of British people behave when they’ve been down the pub, though the parody song “I wanna live like Hindi people” almost beats it out of top spot (we’ve all met the white girl who says namaste and has a poorly executed henna tattoo).
3. Red Dwarf
I’m a sucker for sci-fi, and if you’re at The Mary Sue, chances are so are you, so a sci-fi comedy hits exactly right. Red Dwarf asks the simple question: what would it be like if, due to refusing to betray your illegal pet cat to the top brass, you were cryogenically frozen during a nuclear disaster and left there until the radiation dropped back down to a human-safe level, which just so happens to be after the entire rest of humanity has died out? Oh, and while you were frozen, your cat had kittens who had kittens of their own and an entire new civilization of sentient cats evolved in the hold. And your asshole roommate is also there, in hologram form. See? Simple questions! Red Dwarf is a sitcom in space where delightfully weird things happen every week and classic sci-fi tropes are played with for laughs. The Cat is a really stand-out character too, like a full-on fever dream of what some writer’s cat would be like if he gained anthropomorphic form with a spectacular wardrobe, and Danny John-Jules plays him to perfection.
2. Blackadder
Ah, Blackadder. Exactly the show you want to watch if you’ll enjoy seeing a mean-spirited schemer hilariously fail to achieve his dreams over and over again in different time periods (well, technically a long line of very similar mean-spirited schemers, all played by Rowan Atkinson). While the first Blackadder was a prince, second in line to the throne and desperate to beat his older brother to it, the Blackadder family rapidly shoots down the social ladder—likely as a direct result of their attempts to climb it via very cunning plans, and the deeply incompetent friends and henchmen they surround themselves with.
Another show filled with dry, dark humor that pokes fun at the British establishment and the aristocracy (especially the royal family) as well as the narratives we’ve been spun about it, Blackadder is a great watch if you like history and don’t mind it being mangled in the name of a few laughs. In my opinion the third season, the aptly named Blackadder the Third, is the best of them as it sees Blackadder as butler and babysitter to the Prince Regent (Hugh Laurie). The dynamic there is just delightful, as is getting to watch that man have to manage a tremendous, albeit well-meaning, man-child in addition to his own plots to strike it rich and never have to mind the prince ever again. The fourth season meanwhile, set during the First World War, is consequently less funny with a very sad ending, so if you do plan to watch all the way through that be warned—you won’t end it laughing.
1. Friday Night Dinner
Set during a family of Londoners’ weekly Shabbos dinners, where the grown sons come back home for the evening (usually without a girl in tow), Friday Night Dinner starts with a fairly ordinary premise and takes it somewhere very funny. It’s a deeply relatable show, from the way the boys immediately revert to childhood and start pranking each other the second they get through the door (who doesn’t, at least a little bit, when they go home for a visit?), the perfect middle-aged Dad weirdness of their father (always shirtless because his “nipples are roasting”), and the degree to which their mother is both eternally hopeful and just Done With Everything all the time. Add in increasingly weird neighbor Jim and the dichotomy of Horrible Grandma and Nice Grandma (with her absolutely terrible “gentleman companion”) and you’ve got the perfect slice-of-life comedy. Like a lot of things on this list, there’s a good mix of Schadenfreude, dark humor, and things that generally make you go “oh, no” and wince a bit while you’re watching, as well as some genuinely sad parts, but it’s also a warm, feel-good show (and not in the cringe, sanitized, conservative way people often mean by that). The Goodmans really do feel like an actual family, with all the complicated, messy, loving dynamics involved, and that’s honestly what makes it funny, because it feels true, like it could be happening next door right now.
Bonus Northern Ireland Round: Derry Girls
Derry Girls gets its own separate side entry to this list because while it is technically a British show, and frankly the best one, it also feels incorrect to include it on any list of specifically British anything. Join Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Orla (Louisa Harland), Clare (Nicola Coughlan), Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), and her cousin, the offensively yet somehow still “not proper English” James (Dylan Llewellyn), as they navigate adolescence during The Troubles in Derry.
It’s very funny, a great look at adolescence both in general and specifically during the ’90s, and manages to bring tender humor to everyday life during a fraught period of history. The final episode did actually make me cry, which I wasn’t expecting, but it forcefully yanked me back in time to when I was about 11, watching the news about the Good Friday agreement on television in my Irish grandparents’ house and realizing this was going to change everything. Anyway, watch it if you haven’t already.
(featured image: BBC)
