Catherine Tate

She sits at the center of British comedy. Though she spends most of her time acting in television, her live tours run on the raw, confrontational energy of a solo stand-up. She commands large theaters by refusing to break, treating massive crowds like hecklers she needs to shut down.

Other comics write premises. She builds unmovable people and lets them loose in a room.

The characters are uniformly combative. They are willfully ignorant, deeply defensive, and armed with specific vocal tics. She excels at playing people who are entirely wrong but utterly convinced they are right. The limitation of this approach is its reliance on scale. Because her live bits depend on broad strokes and familiar phrases, they occasionally coast on audience affection rather than fresh observation. When she commits to a physical meltdown on stage, however, the lack of restraint is what makes the bit work.

Her early years were spent in late-nineties stand-up and the Edinburgh Fringe sketch scene. That combative, earn-the-room training survived her transition to television, anchoring her live performances with the hostile edge of a late-night club set.