Rik Mayall

He doesn’t deal in standard setups and punchlines. A typical Rik Mayall bit is an exercise in physical escalation. He storms the microphone at maximum volume, sweating through his shirt and thrusting his pelvis at the front row. The comedy sits in the gap between his sneering bravado and the pathetic idiot he plays. He uses his face like a prop, pushing his eyes wide in a manic leer that collapses into a whining pout when the audience doesn’t clap loud enough. If the room gets quiet, he doesn’t pause to recalibrate; he screams insults at the balcony until they submit.

He is the benchmark for British alternative comedy. He proved live comedy could carry the volume and danger of a punk gig. Comedians still watch his tapes to see what total physical commitment looks like. The massive theatrical tours he mounted in the nineties remain the blueprint for taking a chaotic act into a two-thousand-seat venue without softening the edges.

What he did best was play the deluded loser entirely convinced of his own genius. He wrung laughs out of pure exertion, stretching a single groan into a frantic routine. He cared less about clever observations than seeing how hard he could hit a table or mispronounce a word to sound important. He rarely did quiet or subtle. His live shows were blunt instruments, and the sheer force of his performance steamrolled any need for standard joke writing.

He started at the original Comedy Store and The Comic Strip in London, helping invent the 1980s alternative comedy boom before taking that sweaty aggression to television.