The Best of British Comedy

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The three young comedians known collectively as the League of Gentlemen develop their unique comic-grotesque creations still further in this second series. Helped by elaborate makeup, Mark Gattis, Steve Pemberton, and Reece Shearsmith throw themselves into their many disguises with unbounded enthusiasm. What is even more impressive is that, together with co-writer Jeremy Dyson, the Gentlemen manage to locate these alarming characters within coherent story arcs that interlock over the course of a series as well as inside the individual six episodes. Here we have the apparently inexplicable plague of fatal nosebleeds that affects the remote Northern town of Royston Vasey, the attempts of the incestuous shopkeepers Edward and Tubbs to find a bride for their monstrous offspring, the misadventures of some lost plastics salesmen, and the hostage crisis at the local Restart center. Achingly funny and entirely disturbing, this is comedy less dependent on brilliant one-liners than on recognizable yet distorted situations. One-off creations like Papa Lazarou's sinister circus or the patronizing theatre group Legz Akimbo are as fine as the sustained characterization of the anal toad-obsessed Denton family. --Roz Kaveney