There are, it turns out, a few ways to avoid laughing — or at least try to avoid it — while locked in a room full of professional comedians. One can freeze one’s face in feigned disinterest. (But the eyes inevitably start to twitch.) Or one might attempt to avoid the problem, fleeing as far as possible from the source of humour. (But the comedians can follow right along.) Or, best of all, one might try to make the other comedians laugh first. (But then they get some fresh material in the process.)
On Last One Laughing — back Thursday on Prime for its sophomore season — all strategies are deployed, and one by one they collapse in delicious, excruciating failure.
The series places 10 comedians — stars of the U.K. panel show circuit, predominantly — on a closed set where, over the course of a single long day, they are successively eliminated any time they laugh or even smile. Think of it as a one-day Big Brother with jokes. The format demands a sort of comedic battle royale as comics attempt to knock one another out, and the result is akin to a supercut of performers breaking on Saturday Night Live. As fatigue sets in — and co-hosts Jimmy Carr and Roisin Conaty offer up production-dictated curveballs, like head-to-head speed-dating-style contests — things quickly get bizarre.
The inaugural season featured the unflappable Richard Ayoade of The I.T. Crowd terrifying everyone around him while the BAFTA-winning English comedian Daisy May Cooper spent multiple hours in what looked like physical agony as she fused her mouth shut. Other highlights included a surprise appearance by Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed — in character as his batty, psychic alter ego, Mr. Swallow, a creation so divergent from any Bill Lawrence gloss that there’s a laugh line even before Mohammed starts making predictions — and exploding props. If it’s a strange conceit, it’s also a hugely successful one: Last One Laughing UK is just the latest adaptation of the decade-old Japanese series Documental, which has yielded spinoffs everywhere from Germany to Brazil to Indonesia — though not, alas, the United States, perhaps explaining its direct delivery to an American streamer. It was reportedly the most-watched Prime show in the U.K. following its launch.
British television is having a moment stateside, and Last One Laughing’s return is a gift particularly for the Taskmaster-pilled among us. Late last year, that long-running British series, which pits five comedians and actors against one another for a season of odd, odder, and oddest physical challenges, announced that its U.S. tour sold out in 13 minutes flat, with Jason Mantzoukas’ madcap turn on the show helping to draw more than a few Americans into the fold. Taskmaster alumni abound on Last One Laughing: Six of this season’s contestants have appeared on the series, with a seventh, Amy Gledhill, set to compete in Taskmaster’s upcoming Season 21 opposite Kumail Nanjiani and Armando Iannucci (Conaty was in the inaugural Taskmaster season as well).
Still, some of Last One Laughing’s duelling comedians are better known on this side of the Atlantic than others. This season will feature Peep Show’s David Mitchell as well as Mel Giedroyc, a former presenter on The Great British Bake Off, the cottagecore cooking contest that increasingly feels like a House of Windsor soft-power psyop.
Others are familiar to anyone who’s explored the weird and wonky world of British panel shows: Carr, for example, is best known for anchoring 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Even Mitchell, in this context, is probably known less as an actor than as a team leader on Would I Lie To You? (as well as for being the husband of Victoria Coren Mitchell, the host of the cult-favourite quiz show Only Connect). Virtually all the remaining cast members, including returning champ Bob Mortimer, make regular appearances on those same panel shows. The result is that many contestants are frequent collaborators and have long histories with one another, adding extra juice to their attempts to screw each other over.
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Not that much can be predicted about what will happen in the thunderdome. Sam Campbell, a comic of Australian extraction who is among this season’s competitors, might be best known for his oddball stint on Season 16 of Taskmaster; his general demeanour is that of an alien freshly beamed down from the mothership who also happens to be on a performance improvement plan. Real heads might recall his performance with a broken egg on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, which at one point provoked Carr to turn to the camera and demand, “What the fuck?” Is this a safe person to be locked in a room with? Absolutely not, which is to say that Last One Laughing, and all of the ways it’s bound to go sideways, is appointment viewing.
From Rolling Stone US
