This TV series will appeal to anyone who likes to laugh

Sydney Morning Herald

06-06-2025

If there is one thing to know about me, it is that I love comedy. I love to chuckle, laugh, guffaw - pretty much all the classics. This passion has also led me to work in comedy. While there are huge downsides to this career path (money, stability, sanity), it means I can make a valid claim that consuming comedy and engaging with funny TV, movies, podcasts, etc, is part of my job.
And I am very good at my job. I watch everything from silly sitcoms to dark comedy narrative to experimental humour to internet-based improv shows (better than it sounds!), and I love using my skills and general perfect taste to recommend the great things I find. Often these recommendations are specifically targeted, knowing that comedy is especially subjective, and what I find funny (correct), other people might not (incorrect). Sometimes, however, I come across a show that I know will appeal to basically anyone who likes to laugh. If you don't love to laugh, I don't think I can help – maybe try watching about 40 minutes into Bambi. The reason I think this show can be widely enjoyed is that it is so simple, so funny, and so doesn't take your brain to engage. It's called LOL: Last One Laughing UK.
The concept of the show is so simple that it could make someone scream because they didn't invent it and are instead just writing about it in the paper. Like Taskmaster (which I also love), Last One Laughing takes a bunch of funny comedians and puts them to the test, filmed for our pleasure. Except in this show the test is that 10 comedians are all locked into one big room together for six hours, and in that time are not allowed to laugh. If they laugh, they get a yellow card, and if they laugh again, they get a red, meaning they are out and have to go sit in the other room with Jimmy Carr (punishment). You might guess that the 'last one who is laughing' wins.
Last One Laughing is a franchise show with seasons in places like Australia, Ireland, and South Africa, but whether through luck or planning or both, this first season of the new UK series has rocketed to the top of my rankings. Largely that's to do with the perfect cast, which included several hilarious ex-Taskmaster alums, including Judi Love, Joe Lycett and Lou Sanders, as well as the legend Bob Mortimer (JOKE), the brilliant trained comedic actress Daisy May Cooper, and the always-deadpan Richard Ayoade.
It turns out it is very entertaining to see a group of people whose life revolves around making people laugh go through the extremely unnatural process of figuring out how to not.
They start out fixing their faces into place, trying to walk away if they are going to laugh, avoiding the ones they know will break them, but the show forces them to interact. Some of them also go on the attack, jabbing out with jokes or bits, often endangering themselves. At regular intervals, they must sit on a couch and watch the other comics give pre-planned performances, and a couple of times, an outsider is brought in to try and get them to crack. The strength of the show lies in the diverse comedic approaches of the cast, a mix of characters and funny professionals that are sizing each other up for weak spots. They are professional comedians, which is hard enough, but as we all know, being told you can't laugh is sometimes funnier than anything you might be laughing at.
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One comic breaks at a very funny performance, another breaks after hours of stone-face at an unintentional, not-that-funny-sound that occurs randomly.
Watching Last One Laughing often feels like you're at the sidelines of a comedy sporting event, an endurance test where the best athletes in the country are competing in one room. They go through ebbs and flows, in danger a lot early on, moving into 'dead inside' later in the episodes. It's engaging, and unlike other sports (besides curling), it's very funny. The show ends with a genuinely very tense and incredible face-off between two masterful comics. It's akin to a thrilling State of Origin game three – in this case, scoring is making someone else laugh – and the people I was watching with all cheered and clapped as if Queensland had just won (I was in Queensland). In this time of heaviness and bleakness and not that much laughter, I heartily recommend this show. They are trying to be the last ones laughing, but I guarantee – you'll laugh first.