Trialling new jokes in front of a sell-out, international crowd is an act of supreme confidence

I don't feel like a veteran even though I did my first gig at Whitstable Labour Club in 1988. The people I revered when I was young were people such as Dave Allen, who I saw in 1991 when he was around 60. I saw Bill Cosby at the Royal Albert Hall in the early 1990s. He did two-and-a-half hours, just ambled out and started talking and got a genuine standing ovation at the end.

The comedian – aka Rob Simpson, to the mums at his son's school – has shaved off his trademark moustache for his (very funny) West End debut. Susie Mesure meets Rufus Hound

'I dare say my house is haunted'

The 'good, the tanned and the ugly' up for this year's comic alternative to the Baftas

Alice Jones' Arts Diary

No subject seems taboo for increasingly edgy television comedies – except perhaps the Holocaust

Comedian attacks production companies behind popular shows for simply employing their own clients

With 500 shows over 16 days and the support of the comedy TV channel Dave, Leicester's annual hoodang is becoming a bona fide highlight of the comedy year.

Alice Jones' Arts Diary

Comedian-turned-author, turned-comedian again, Alexei Sayle was rather hoarse for his first proper standup show in seventeen years.

He’s 45, balding and hailed as a comic genius in America. Now UK audiences can discover what’s so special about Louis C.K. By Sarah Hughes

Fashion: Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!

Gerard Gilbert meets the perfectly-judged sidekick of Bridget Jones and Miranda

If the jokes don't get you, the slightly lunatic stare that accompanies them will; and if that doesn't do it either, then there's always the hair – whipped up towards the ceiling as if all the one-liners struggling to escape from Milton Jones's strange mind have produced a kind of comic, static uplift.