Comedy
"Benny" Hill (1924–1992) was an English actor, comedian, singer and writer. He was best known for "The Benny Hill Show", an amalgam of slapstick, burlesque and double-entendre that ran on Thames TV for 21 years. The format included live comedy and filmed segments, usually with Benny in hot pursu...
Sir Billy Connolly CBE (born 24 November 1942) is a Scottish actor, retired comedian, artist, writer, musician, and presenter. He is sometimes known, especially in his homeland, by the Scots nickname the Big Yin ("the Big One"). Known for his idiosyncratic and improvised observational comedy, pep...
Stan Laurel (born Arthur Stanley Jefferson; 16 June 1890 – 23 February 1965) was an English comic actor, writer, and film director who was part of the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. He appeared with his comedy partner Oliver Hardy in 107 short films, feature films, and cameo roles.
Peter Sellers CBE (1925–1980) was an English actor, comedian and singer. His breakthrough came in the 1950s BBC Radio comedy The Goon Show. He went on to play leading roles, often comedic, in Dr. Strangelove (1964), What's New, Pussycat? (1965), Being There (1979) and five Pink Panther films (19...
Dawn French (born 11 October 1957) is a British actress, comedian, presenter and writer. She is known for writing and starring on the comedy show French and Saunders with her best friend, Jennifer Saunders, and playing the lead role in the sitcom The Vicar of Dibley. She has been nominated for se...
Ronnie Corbett CBE (1930–2016) was a much loved Scottish actor, broadcaster, comedian and writer.He achieved prominence (with a young Ronnie Barker and John Cleese) in David Frost's 1960s satirical programme The Frost Report. He continued his comedy career on stage and increasingly TV and became ...
Ronald William George Barker OBE (25 September 1929 – 3 October 2005) was an English actor, comedian and writer. He had the talent to be "a great straight actor", but while studying theatre realised his life ambition was "to make people laugh". Thank God for that. He was known for his hilarious r...
Monty Python (also collectively known as the Pythons) were a British surreal comedy troupe who created the sketch comedy television show Monty Python's Flying Circus, which first aired on the BBC in 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. The Python phenomenon developed from the tel...
Eric Morecambe (1926–1984) and Ernie Wise (1925–1999), known as Morecambe and Wise, were an English comic double act, working in variety, radio, film and most successfully in television. Their partnership lasted from 1941 until Morecambe's death in 1984. They have been described as "the most illu...
John Cleese (born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. Emerging from the Cambridge University Footlights, he achieved success in the 1960s Frost Report, then in the late 1960s, co-founded and starred in Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the subsequent films ...
The Two Ronnies is a British television comedy sketch show created by Bill Cotton for the BBC, which aired on BBC1 from April 1971 to December 1987. It featured Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, the two Ronnies of the title. The usual format included sketches, solo sections, serial stories and mu...
Stephen Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer. He first came to prominence in the 1980s as one half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, alongside Hugh Laurie, with the two starring in A Bit of Fry & Laurie (1989–1995) and Jeeves and Wooster ...
Peter Edward Cook (1937–1995) was an English satirist and comedic actor. Graduating from Cambridge where he was president of the Footlights Club, he was part of the anti-establishment comedic movement in the 1950s that led to him being a leading figure of the British satire boom of the Swinging 1...
Lenny Henry (born 29 August 1958) is a British actor, comedian, singer, television presenter and writer. Initially known best as a comedian, he transcended, inevitably and stylishly, on to the broader stage. He starred in the 1990s Hollywood film True Identity, in which his character pretended t...
Little Britain is a British sketch comedy series that began as a radio show in 2000 and ran as a television series between 2003 and 2007. It was written and performed by David Walliams and Matt Lucas. Financed by the BBC, the radio series was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, with the initial two t...
French and Saunders is a British sketch comedy television series written by and starring comedy duo Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. It is also the name by which the performers are known on the occasions when they appear elsewhere as a double act. The show was originally broadcast on BBC Two fr...
Fry and Laurie are an English comedy double act, mostly active in the 1980s and 1990s. The duo consisted of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who met in 1980 through mutual friend Emma Thompson whilst all three attended the University of Cambridge. They initially gained prominence in a television sket...
Graham Chapman (1941–1989) was an English actor, comedian and writer. He was one of the six members of the surreal comedy group Monty Python. He portrayed the nutty Colonel and then lead role in two Python films, Holy Grail and Life of Brian. In 1972, on a TV show hosted by jazz musician George M...
Kenneth Williams (1926–1988) was an idiosyncratic English actor. He was best known for his comedy roles, and in later life as a nicely-spiky raconteur and diarist. He was one of the main ensemble in 26 of the 31 Carry On films, and appeared in many British television and radio comedies, including...
Jimmy Carr (born 15 September 1972) is a British-Irish comedian, television presenter, writer and actor. He is known for his controversial deadpan one-liners, for which he has often been criticised. He has been listed as "the undisputed king of deadpan one-liners", "one of the 50 funniest acts i...
Spitting Image is a British satirical television puppet show, created by Peter Fluck, Roger Law and Martin Lambie-Nairn. First broadcast in 1984, the series was produced by 'Spitting Image Productions' for Central Independent Television over 18 series which aired on the ITV network. The series wa...
Not the Nine O'Clock News was a British television sketch comedy show which was broadcast on BBC2 from 1979 to 1982. Originally shown as a comedy alternative to the Nine O'Clock News on BBC1, it features satirical sketches on then-current news stories and popular culture, as well as parody songs,...
Alas Smith and Jones is a British comedy sketch television series starring comedy duo and namesake Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones that originally ran for four series and two Christmas specials on BBC2 from 1984 to 1988, and later as Smith and Jones for six series on BBC1 until 1998. A spin-off fr...
