Best of So You Think You're Funny?

Article by Becca Pottinger | 10 Aug 2009

‘Best Of’ shows make for PR child’s play. They also make for unnaturally high expectations and, in some cases, potentially disappointing and slightly awkward outcomes. Fear not though, bewildered victim of marketing malice, as the UK’s longest running newcomer comedy award has a pretty stellar back catalogue of talent to pull from.

Compère Stuart Goldsmith’s chit chatty audience-probing belies his day job as the warm up for ITV’s Loose Women, and ties everything together in a cosy ribbon of daytime TV-appropriate chiding. The wholesome PG stuff is a perfect appetizer to Matt Green’s effervescent prepubescent charm. Green’s deftly scripted observational material has a brilliantly earnest quality, while 2003’s winner, Tom Wrigglesworth, stretches the 'it’s a true story, honestly' line into the farcical and beyond. Sean Walsh rounds off the night in a vaguely posh, lazy thesp meets drunk Aslan the Lion kind of a way, warping material gleamed from a few too many nights out into some distinctly better than average physical comedy.

With a different line-up of past finalists paraded each night, there is an element of gamble involved, but with the calibre of acts associated with SYTYF, it's a pretty tiny one.