#roy-wood

#roy-wood

I started in stand-up because it felt like the most direct way to connect with people. There's no filter. You go on stage, and you find out very quickly if something works. That shaped everything for me. It forced me to be honest. If you're not honest, the audience knows. That idea still drives how I work today.

I'm late for the school run. I'm stuck in traffic. I'm meant to be at my laptop, but I'm having to do it on my phone, in my car.

Nige isn't even trying to pretend that Reform is anything more than his own personality cult these days. The heavily grease-painted entertainer in need of ever more attention. The possibilities are endless. Be more like Nige and jump at the chance to buy shares in Kwasi Kwarteng's crypto scheme.

Our new and original show allows Manchester United fans to see the players in a totally different, more relaxed environment at our Carrington training ground. Filmed in the dedicated barber facilities, which formed part of the huge revamp of our base last summer, the focus is on the Reds enjoying their downtime after training.

For the past four weeks, 11 performers and 20 writers have been spending every weekday together in this very building, hashing out premises for skits, workshopping each other's material and finding the alchemy, as cast member and standup Ayoade Bamgboye puts it. For another, actor and TikToker Jack Shep, it's been like comedy boarding school.

It was the only ticket available at such short notice," he told Business Insider. He joked that, if his sibling were going to pass, he could at least have waited until he wasn't packed like a sardine. It would have been more thoughtful of him, Fredericks said, if he hadn't learned of the tragedy while sandwiched "in 37B" between two strangers.

I wanted to mention Kenneth Williams because he was so profound, Allen tells me. And yet, because he was also funny, that profundity hasn't been acknowledged. As a child, I connected with his outsiderness. Rather than trying to fit in, he went in the opposite direction. Not only did he not apologise for being different, but he was queer in every sense, truly at odds with the world in which he found himself.

Steve Martin Writes the Written Word is an aptly-named collection and excellent introduction to the comedian's best writings, including some new material. In another piece, he makes the list of 100 greatest books he read laugh out loud funny with fake titles such as "Omelet: Olga - Mnemonic Devices for Remembering Waitress' Names" and "Marijuana! Totally Harmless (can't remember author)."

According to my mum, my first word was look. My brother arrived 17 months after I was born, so most days Mum would have been pushing us around in a buggy, and I would be pointing at everything going, Look, look, look. What I was really saying was, Everyone, I'm here!

Anyone who spends untold hours surfing the Web for humorous content will eventually find the work of one Vladimir Shmondenko, a prankster who goes by the name Anatoly. He's developed a faithful following, and, as far as I can tell, makes a comfortable living entirely from his TikTok and YouTube videos.

A romcom fanatic, Foxx didn't quite get the quaint four-bedroom apartment in Bloomsbury he assumed he'd land when he moved to London, but he did, at least, get the guy: a tall, fit rugby lad, just his type, he tells us. Yet after several years of sort of bliss, sort of reluctant mothering on Foxx's part, the Julia Roberts meet-cute fantasy crumbled.

I was a smiley, happy child. I've had cerebral palsy since birth, so I've never known any other reality. At three years old I went to a disabled nursery connected to a disabled school, and I remember thinking, Why am I here? At the end of the day, the teacher brought my parents in and said, Rosie should be in a mainstream school.

He had already picked on me several times for laughing too loud, too readily (that wasn't even a joke, he chastised me at one point). I was trying hard to suppress my laughter to hold it in, to hold it back, to not fully express the joy I was feeling. I was being somewhat successful. And then I wasn't. Everyone in the audience was laughing but I was laughing too much.