With his distinctive accent and brilliant gags Micky Flanagan has steadily made a name for himself as one of the top comedians in the UK. You may have seen him on shows such as Comedy Rocks, Mock The Week, Channel4 Comedy Gala or Live at the Apollo. He has also toured Britain with his stand-up shows.

Here are some funny quotes by him. Further down are some clips to watch also.

• My wife’s middle-class, she’s been skiing and everything.
• I’ve worked out what ambiance is. It’s a night out without poor people basically isn’t it.
• [in friends voice] “I spent a year surrounded by people with no hope and no future”. [own voice] I said “well we could’ve come straight into the Wetherspoons really couldn’t we”.
• My wife decided, she said “we are having sex on a Tuesday” she said. Well I thought that’s great because now I know I can leave myself alone, you know what I mean. Because you can get caught out, she comes in a bit frisky, and you have to look at her and go (shakes head) “that ship has sailed darling”.

Here are some videos of him in action. The first is a stand-up routine, the second is on the BBC show Mock The Week. Unfortunately the first one is only in 360p so the quality isn’t the best.

Want to know more about Micky? Well he is from London, and lived in America for a year as a young man. He has been performing since 1997. His fame has continued to rise and he has appeared on Mock The Week, Comedy Rocks, Live at the Apollo, Channel4 Comedy Gala, Royal Variety Performance. He is such a top comedian no doubt we will continue to see more and more of him.

You can also see him live on stage. Check current tickets available at the TicketMaster website. Well worth going to see if you get the chance.

Image used of Micky as a category thumbnail.

He may be in his eighties but comedy veteran Ken Dodd still plays 150 gigs a year, around half the number he performed at the height of his 55-year career. With his wild hair, buck teeth and famous feather dusters, or ‘tickle sticks’, Dodd is the self-styled King of the Diddy Men. With his signature tune, Happiness, his traditional music-hall style act may seemed dated to some modern audiences, but he still has legions of admirers.

Quotes

• Did you hear about the shrimp that went to a prawn’s cocktail party? He pulled a mussel.
• Try shoving an ice-cube down your wife’s front – ‘There’s that chest freezer you wanted.’
• How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows – it’s never been done.
• Honolulu, it’s got everything. Sand for the children, sun for the wife, sharks for the wife’s mother.
• What do you do sir? (to a man in the audience.) I’m a consultant in steel and iron. Ah so you steal and your wife irons!
• I’ve done some brave things in my time. I played Nottingham Labour Club. I was the one who shouted ‘Three cheers for Mrs Thatcher’. And it was during the bingo.
• Do great comedians come in cycles? Yes, some do, but others prefer to walk to work.
• I wouldn’t part with my teeth. I’m the only patient who can sit in the dentist’s waiting room and have his teeth checked at the surgery.
• I told the Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny because I lived near the seaside.

Watch the legend in action here:

More About The Man
Ken Dodd’s marathon sets are known for their extraordinary length, quick-fire one-liners and constant innuendo and jibes aimed at a hate figures ranging from tax collectors to local councillors and traffic wardens. (He was cleared of tax evasion in 1989.) Dodd has also had a number of hit records over the years, and one of the longest ever residencies at the London Palladium.

His book ‘Look At It My Way’ was published in October 2009. His DVD ‘An Audience with Ken Dodd’ was released in May 2010 and is available to buy in all DVD shops and some rubbish ones. Here is a slideshow of lots of releases featuring him.

Stand-up, performance poet, podcaster and musician Phill Jupitus has been a team captain on BBC 2’s music quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks since the beginning in 1996 and also appears regularly as a guest on other panel shows, from QI (on which he has a history of impersonating host Stephen Fry) to Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

He has also recently released a paperback called Good Morning Nantwich: Adventures in Breakfast Radio which has received lots of positive reviews.

Here are some funny quotes by the man.

• (On QI.) What kind of hellish quiz is this? Which one’s the odd one out? None of them! Bahahaaa! Bahahaaa!
• (On QI.) Stephen Fry: I’ll give you an extra two points if you can tell me the longest fence in the world. Phill Jupitus: The Great Fence of China!
• Stephen Fry: Why shouldn’t I strip Alan naked and cover him in gold paint? Phill Jupitus: You win your Oscar properly like everybody else!
• (On fortune cookies) I wish they’d be a bit more honest—I mean “With the amount of MSG you’ve just had, a massive coronary is on the way”!
• (On what happened to the crew of the RMS Titanic) I would imagine that in a sinking situation, you’d hope to be getting time and a half.
• (On the Bayeux Tapestry) Is it like medieval text speak?
• Brusque is a word that I would gleefully use about myself. I am not everybody’s cup of tea.
• When you are a smartarse off a pop quiz, that is going to rub some people up the wrong way.
• I can’t get arrested on the radio by the BBC these days.

Clip of him in action:

More About The Man
His career began in the mid-1980s, when he quit working in a Job Centre to become a left-wing punk poet. The former Housemartins press officer also has several dramatic roles under his belt, was the breakfast DJ on BBC 6 Music between 2002 until the end of March 2007, and worked on London’s GLR Radio. He has also supported Billy Bragg on tour, been a member of the West End cast of Hairspray, and is a regular on the summer festival circuit.

Good Morning Nantwich: Adventures in Breakfast Radio is published by HarperCollins, info further up the page. Never Mind the Buzzcocks is on TV screens in Autumn 2010 for its 24th series!

Comedian, writer and actor Paul Merton’s style is defined by the way he takes a surreally improbable scenario and runs with it, keeping a poker-straight face. In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the UK’s 50 funniest acts, while a 2007 poll saw him voted one of the 10 greatest wits ever.

Let’s celebrate his work by looking at some funny quotes from the man.

• On my first day in New York a guy asked if I knew where Central Park was. When I told him I didn’t he said, ‘Do you mind if I mug you here?’
• My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I’ve endured over the past 25 years.
• I’m always amazed to hear of air crash victims who have to be identified by their dental records. If they don’t know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?
• Never a frown with Gordon Brown.
• I wouldn’t mind half an hour on a giraffe. Very sexy animals, giraffes.
• My hair’s got a life of its own. Last week I found it in the kitchen, making an omelette.
• There are various ways to give up smoking — nicotine patches, nicotine gum… my auntie used to pour a gallon of petrol over herself every morning.
• If you stay in a house and there is no toilet paper, you can always slide down the bannisters. Don’t tell me you haven’t tried it.

Watch Merton on classic ‘Have I Got News for You’ form.

More About The Man

Merton is best known for being a panellist on BBC TV’s long-running Have I Got News for You and Radio 4′s Just a Minute, along with Channel 4′s Whose Line Is It Anyway? He has also hosted Room 101 for the BBC, the ITV improvisation show, Thank God You’re Here, and presented various television travelogues and documentaries on early cinema.

If you missed Merton at the Edinburgh Festival in the 2010 summer with his Impro Chums set, catch him on Sundays at London’s Comedy Store. Spin-off DVDs and books of Have I Got News for You are also available.

Artist, comedian and actor Noel Fielding stars as Vince Noir in award-winning cult comedy series The Mighty Boosh, co-written with Julian Barratt. An experienced stand-up, his routine incorporates surreal stories, physical comedy, characters, and songs.

Fielding has also had roles in some of Channel 4’s more off-beat comedy programmes, from Nathan Barley to The IT Crowd. Last year, he was made a team captain on BBC panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. He has co-hosted Comic Relief Does Top of The Pops, appeared in various music videos and starred in five episodes of BBC Radio 2’s Vic Reeves’ House Arrest. He won a Sexiest Man award in 2008, and his flamboyant sartorial style has also garnered him a Best Dressed Male gong.

Here are some funny lines from his stand-up gigs and interviews.

Quotes

• Catch the vision, smell the dream. Make toast and put it in your anorak.
• We didn’t want to be known as Barratt & Fielding, we’d just sound like a company of solicitors. The Mighty Boosh is more flexible and it’s amusing watching people saying boooosh.
• My nan had a cat with one eye. It walked into walls and tables. I used to think it was hilarious. It was a slapstick cat.
• When I was a little kid I wanted to be Face (The A-Team). I thought, cos I had blond hair too, that when I grew up I’d look like him.
• You know the black bits in bananas? Are they tarantulas’ eggs?
• It’s impossible to be unhappy in a poncho!
• I’d like to punch out a really old lady. There’d be no repercussions.
• I used to suck Smarties until they were white, let them dry, and then put them back in the packet and show my mum the colourless Smarties.
• I never did that badly with women when I wasn’t on telly, but it’s a bit out of control now. Strange, because I think I look like a troll wearing a woman’s wig backwards.

Here are duo Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt in character with The Mighty Boosh.

You are welcome to throw your thoughts, more quotes and love for Noel in the comments section below.

Iranian-born Shappi Khorsandi’s family fled to London after her father criticised the Islamic regime, and this background often features in her work. She has established herself on the stand-up circuit, having been a finalist in the BBC New Comedy Awards 2000.

Khorsandi has appeared on a string of radio programmes, including her own four-part BBC Radio 4 series Shappi Talk. She is also a TV regular, having appeared on shows from Have I Got News for You to Live at the Apollo and Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Her memoir A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English is available now.

Quotes

• What Iran needs now is a more modern leader – a mullah lite.
• For exiled Iranian writers, the closest thing we have to a literary award is a fatwah.
• The worst audience is when some pub landlord sticks a microphone in the corner and calls it a comedy club. Everyone is thinking we only came here for a pint!
• Nowadays, if someone asked me to play some Milton Keynes pizzeria for a fiver, I would say stick it. But when you’re starting out, you do it all.
• At a midsummer festival in Dorset, some Morris Men grabbed me, danced around me, lifted my arms and said, ‘If this woman isn’t pregnant in a year, we will come back and do it properly.’ I was like, what, gang rape me?
• I’ve had loads of calls from the media asking me if I’m Muslim. If the journalist says they’ll put my picture in paper if I say I am, I’ll reply ‘Allah be praised!’
• This guy said he wanted to understand my culture. I said: ‘Well, I’m from Ealing, what are you going to do? Memorise the Central Line?’
• I’m not going to tell anti-man jokes. I like men. My father was a man. And his father before him.

Catch Khorshandi live at the Apollo with this great clip:

If you missed Shappi Khorhandi’s Edinburgh show, she tours the UK this autumn until the end of the year with The Moon on a Stick, including a date at Greenwich comedy festival. For some dates, she appears in a comedy double bill with fellow comic Jon Richardson.

Stand-up comedian, novelist, music journalist and director Lee was one half of the 1990s comedy duo Lee and Herring, and co-wrote and directed Jerry Springer – The Opera.

The Oxford graduate has written for newspapers, magazines, TV and radio and performed stand-up all over the world. The Times has called him ‘the comedian’s comedian’, and Lee has also been described as “Unflinching in his satire, unapologetic in his liberal, middle-class, highbrow appeal, and fiercely intelligent, his comedy does not pander to the masses”.

For sale for £15.27

His very highly rated DVD (pictured) ‘If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One’ is available now.

Quotes

• It’s back in the news now, the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. People going, “It’s what she would have wanted.” It isn’t! What Princess Diana would have wanted would have been to have not been killed.
• I love Catholicism, it’s my favourite form of clandestine global evil.
• I remember when the last Harry Potter title came out, I think it was Harry Potter and the Crock of Shit. Or Harry Potter and the Mitten of Wool? Remember that?
• Political correctness seems to me to be about an institutionalised politeness at its worst.
• I’ve started to believe in creationism because of Professor Richard Dawkins. Because when I look at something as complex and beautiful as him, I don’t think that could’ve evolved by chance.
• (On Top Gear’s Richard Hammond.) I wish he had died in that crash and that he had been decapitated and that a jagged piece of metal debris from the car had blinded him.
• I may have been named 41st best stand-up, but my Mum still prefers Tom O’Connor.
• Wittiest thing I’ve heard? Jim Tavares, when he was doing stand-up at the Comedy Store in 1988, and opened with “I’m a schizophrenic.” Some wag shouted out “why don’t you both fuck off?”

Get a feel for stand-up Stewart style with this clip:

More Info
How I Escaped My Certain Fate: the Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian, Stewart’s second book, is published by Faber and Faber. If you missed Vegetable Stew, his Edinburgh show, he tours the UK this autumn before taking his show to London’s Leicester Square Theatre until the end of the year. His new live DVD, If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, is out in October.

Noble’s stand-up routine is best known for its improvised and surreal performance, and its stream of consciousness delivery. He often mimes actions to help the audience visualise his ideas, and much of his act is often based around heckles or chats with audience members. From firing Elton John out of a cannon to urging the audience never to put a blanket over an owl, to portraying an epileptic flamenco dancer, his comedy tends to be very physical, and his stage sets extravagantly decorated.

His latest DVD is called ‘Things’ and is available now.

Quotes

• It is a dark night in the forest! Out of the moonlight swoops a tiny bird and it begins pecking at my ear, pecking and pecking! Deeper and deeper! Help me! Help! I’ve got sparrows in my mind!
• That’s the thing, in a deaf class; no-one can hear you scream…
• How come Miss Universe is only won by people from Earth?
• Tonight’s show is sponsored by Ted Danson’s Pizza shack!
• It’s Christopher Reeve the Musical!
• (On reading a fortune cookie) And I was feeling a bit cheeky, so I went ‘Ooh, it says ‘You have AIDS.’
• (On his hometown in Northumberland.) The ultimate in dullness.
• (On the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations in London.) They could have just had a massive pile of burning tyres and more people would have turned up. Especially if they put S Club 7 on the top of it.
• I had to take the batteries out of the carbon monoxide detector; it was beeping all night.

Watch him on classic form with this clip:

More Info
Noble has made many TV appearances, particularly on interviews and on celebrity quiz shows such as Have I Got News for You. In a 2009 poll for Channel 4, Noble was voted the 10th on a list of the 100 Greatest Stand Up comedians. London’s Time Out has called him: “The supreme master of spontaneous stand-up and the most exciting comic in the country.”

Noble travels the UK and Ireland this autumn with his Nonsensory Overload tour. DVDs including Sonic Waffle, Randomist, Fizzy Logic and Unrealtime are out now.

Funny actor, writer and comedian Dave Spikey has won two British Comedy Awards and one from the Royal Television Society, and has been a BAFTA nominee.

Spikey co-wrote Channel 4′s hilarious Phoenix Nights, in which he co-starred as gloriously naff northern nightclub compere Jerry St Clair. He also co-wrote and co-starred in Dead Man Weds and Magnolia; presented Bullseye and was team captain on four series of 8 out of 10 Cats, as well as being a host on More 4’s book show. He is also a veteran of the live comedy circuit, with his Best Medicine Tour available on DVD.

Here are some funny quotes from his stand-up as well as classic quotes from Phoenix Nights.

• they had a top10 list most painful things in life that women had to endure….number 1, and I’m guessing that not many women have had this done – having their nipples clamped. I thought ‘noooo’, having them towed away’s got to be worse.
• get to the escalators, saw their was a sign on the escalators, dog must be carried on this escalator, could I find a dog, could I fuck.
• Jerry St.Clair: Deaf Tony died last week.
  Brian Potter: No.
  Jerry St.Clair: Fifty six!
  Brian Potter: That’s no age. What’d he die of?
  Jerry St.Clair: Bin lorry. Nipped out to check they’d emptied his bin . . . reversed over him.
  Brian Potter: How’s Irene taken it?
  Jerry St.Clair: Badly . . . and they never emptied her bin.
• Max: God Jerry what aftershave have you got on there? It stinks.
  Jerry St.Clair: Something you lot couldn’t afford.
  Paddy: What’s that, Fabreeze?
• Student: Do you take N.U.S.?
  Max: I don’t take none of that shit love, and neither should you. I treat my body like a temple, none of your ha-ha hashish.
• Paddy: Prostitutes in Amsterdam are dead filthy, this one I went to, she made me wash my old man in the sink.
  Max: What, you took your dad?

Get a taste of stand-up, Spikey-style, with this clip from his Best Medicine tour:

A Bit More About Dave
His career began as a biomedical scientist in a haematology lab at hospital in Bolton, Lancashire, and human blood was his chosen subject on Celebrity Mastermind a few years ago – which he won.

Dave Spikey’s first book, He Took My Kidney Then Broke My Heart, was published in October last year by Michael O’Mara books. The DVD of his latest show, The Best Medicine, is also out now, and both have been well-received. He is also due to play various stand-up dates across the UK in autumn 2010 and spring 2011.

The veteran funny man, “the cream of cornish comedy”, is back with yet another DVD for 2010 (released November 22nd), just in time for Christmas! It is from his new live tour and is called ‘I Told it My Way’. So to celebrate this comic I thought we would get together some funny jethro jokes.

Alcohol:
Alcohol killed my first wife. I got home drunk one night and shot her.

Shaving your pubes:
We had this Polish woman staying with us and my wife run her a bath and when she turned round the woman was completely hairless down there….looked like a money box!

Plastic surgery:
I’m not in very good mood. My wife, the cow, I lend her a thousand pounds to have plastic surgery, now I can’t get the money back and I don’t know who to look for.

Tattoos:

My wife knew that I was a big fan of Bridgette Bardot so she thought it’d be a sexy surprise if she had a ‘B’ tattooed on each of her arse cheeks. When I came into the bedroom she was on all fours as she asked ‘Who does that make you think of?’ and all I could think of was ‘Bob’!

Safe sex:
I was giving this girl a portion up against a chip shop and it was pretty wild. I explained to her that I’d not had it in 2 years because I’d been in the VD clinic. She replied ‘How’s the food? I’m going in tomorrow!’.

Fish:
A guy walks into a chip shop with a cod under his arm. “Here, do you sell Fish Cakes?”, chip shop guy says “sorry No”. “Shame that, it was his birthday today”.

Keeping the wife sweet:
I’d been out drinking til 4.15 in the morning and there’s the bastard wife waiting on the doorstep with a broom. She didn’t seem to like it when I asked her ‘Are you late finishing cleaning or are you going for a flight?’

Christmas:
I bought her a car for christmas. She said ‘that’s no good to me, I want something that will go from 0-160 in 3 seconds’. So I bought her bathroom scales.

Want to see more of this funny old boy? Check out some of his DVDs below.

See Jethro Live

Want to see him do his thing on stage? If you do you can check out current available dates via the Ticketmaster website.