He only made two appearances in the first series and four in series two.
He missed an episode in series eleven due to illness.
Earlier this series he missed two episodes.

Is this still funny?

No.

I'm starting to realise that I might hate Mock the Week and Dara Ó Briain.

Also, has Holly Walsh had some work done? I wouldn't have recognised her if it wasn't for her voice. She looks like a different woman.

Most posters on this thread are in agreement that Sara Pascoe and Zoe Lyons are simply "token women" and are very unfunny. I was simply asking who people believe is the MOST unfunny.

Do you find either woman funny then?

By the way, any fan of the programme would care whether they found somebody funny or not, as otherwise what's the point of watching a COMEDY show if it is infested with unfunny stand-ups trying too hard?

I thought Holly Walsh did OK; about equal to the men, anyway.

A bit fed up with the "Lets get 2 of the guests to do a bit of their current stand-up" segment.

I actually thought it was a good show. The best of the second half of the run imo.


As for the women, Holly Walsh is one of the better ones along with Katherine Ryan and I also like Sara Pascoe.
Possibly now being a semi-regular is putting more pressure on some of the women to be consistently funny rather than just having a one off appearance.


I also rather like Ava Vidal. Quite dry with a kind of wicked sense of humour.

So you speak for most posters? Why the need to comment on female comics as opposed to just comics on the show?

Because the male comics are more established and, whilst I appreciate that humour is subjective and a matter of opinion, many posters on this thread including myself have commented that the "token woman" policy has made Mock The Week worse because terribly unfunny comediennes like Sara Pascoe and Zoe Lyons have become semi-regulars.

The way to solve this "token woman" farce is to make Katherine Ryan- a comedienne who actually suits this show- a team captain.

Sara Pascoe and Zoe Lyons are also well established comics and not just token women they put on MTW. I've seen Zoe twice at comedy gigs doing stand up and she's very good.

Are there team captains? I hadn't noticed. Just two panels of three. Also your plan would fail since some on this thread regard Katherine Ryan as totally unfunny. Your use of the word comedienne is revealing. Do any female stand ups use that term?

And to answer a question earlier, yes it's still very funny. However if you are determined not to find it so then no doubt that's what you'll get.

Yes, it seems out of place, especially as they've reduced the number of people doing the stand up bit

A bit weird to have MTW on at the same time as Have I got news for you, but I thought MTW was better this week.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the female comics on the show, they've generally fitted in well with the laddish banter

Hugh Dennis is officially described by the show as a "team captain". The other team doesn't have a captain but I suppose you could say that Andy Parsons is their de facto captain because he is a regular and the other two members of the team are guests.

In what way is my use of the word "comedienne" revealing? It's a perfectly valid term for a female stand-up. Fact is, comedy is still a male-dominated world and I think the BBC is doing more harm than good by having unfunny token women on every week. What they should do is have genuinely funny comediennes on every couple of shows so that the funniest panel is always picked.

News programs which usually always have one male and one female presenter have on occasions had 2 female or 2 male presenters.

If it was a last minute cancellation e.g. the female guest phones in sick then they will incur a lot of cost cancelling the show as the studio will be booked, an agency have provided an audience, the people who have turned up for work will still have to be paid even if there's no show.

I first saw her on Show Me The Funny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_Me_the_Funny Both of the female comedians who appeared on it have been on Mock The Week but the winner Patrick Monahan doesn't seem to have been getting TV appearances on comedy related shows since.

There will be a stand-by, and the idea that even at 10 minutes notice they couldn't find a female comedienne or comedian is errr risible. Even so, thank Danny Cohen for his mandate that all BBC panel games must include female talent. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, altho R4's The Unbelievable Truth chaired by David Mitchell had one of its best episodes recently with an all-female panel of Katherine Ryan, Sarah Millican, Holly Walsh & Mrs Mitchell herself. The first was very good, the second of the two that went out wasn't quite so.

Holly Walsh has improved enormously lately for some reason, but the underlying issue is that panellists need to be on form. Sometimes they aren't and it doesn't matter what gender they might be, if they don't hit their stride they come across as poor guests, male or female.

Hypothetically let's pretend Andy Parsons was supposed to appear last week but was sick and Ed Gamble was a standby person who stepped in. How many other standby people would they have had?

Pregnancy weight gain affecting her face, maybe?

Mock The Week. 259th Series and still not funny.

Do you force yourself to watch it so you can rate it? Saying it's "still not funny" implies it never has been, so why on earth do you bother watching?

Team captains in quizzes usually have to take the odd decision, decide what the answer is, etc. In terms of the functioning of Mock the Week the two teams only compete on the basis of Dara's totally opaque and very random scoring and no one is needed to lead a team. So calling Hugh Dennis a team captain is an honorary title at best. For Andy Parsons to be a de facto team captain would require him to do something which was effectively the act of a team captain.

"Comedienne" is a rather archaic term dating from the days when female comedians were very much rarer than they are now, and usually very different in style. Never coarse, always decorous, only funny in a gentile way. Someone like Dora Bryan would have been called a comedienne back in the day. I can't imagine anyone calling Jo Brand a comedienne and surviving unscathed.

I very much doubt that female stand-ups would describe themselves as a comedienne. It's a term applied to female comedians by some who like to use gender specific words for people doing the same thing, in this case telling jokes. It's a pointless distinction.

That you use it is revealing of your mindset. We don't use gender specific terms for most professions (doctor, nurse, lawyer, teacher, pilot, builder, electrician and so on) yet some people insist on clinging to it in certain perfoming arts, but not all. Would anyone call JK Rowling an authoress these days? Maybe you would?

The latest episode was a good one I felt. I'm being thrown by the repeat being on the same time and channel as the main showing however!

I sometimes use "waitress" or "actress". I'd have no trouble calling Jo Brand a "comedienne", because that's what she is. The notion that comediennes cannot be coarse is something I'd never heard before. I just checked some online definitions and none of them mention it. Are you sure you didn't invent it, perhaps because of some old-fashioned idea about the kinds of humour suitable for women? Using the male form when a female form is available is misleading, as it implies the person is male. Do you address letters to women with "Mr"?

You might not have any problem using it but I don't think she'd appreciate it.


BIB, what a ridiculous thing to say.

It was an observation, not a definition. The few female comedians that there were back then were very different to their male couinterparts. That isn't the case any more and there's no need to differentiate with a different noun.

If anyone has an old fashioned idea about this it's people who insist on using the word comedienne.


Not the same thing at all. "Mr" is gender specific. "Comedian" is not.

Joan Rivers springs to mind.

Agreed and that's not just due to female comedians of today being different to ones of days gone by. On the John Bishop show James Acaster did a sketch about oven gloves, after it John Bishop said in his Dad's day no man would have come on the stage and done a routine around oven gloves.


OT the title that annoys me is mayoress. Some people use it to refer to a female mayor and others use it to refer to someone married to a mayor. It just makes no sense!