After years of hard gigging, the comedian of the year finalist and pun champion is finally breaking through, thanks to his intoxicating mix of surreal standup and social justice

In comedian Kev Mud’s home in Cornwall, a caravan overlooking Porthcothan Bay, he has a mountain of DVDs stashed in a corner. There’s Hitchcock, skateboarding films, Rugrats and Fraggle Rock. “It might be a bit weird for some guy living in a caravan on top of the cliffs to have a load of kids’ DVDs,” he says. “But there’s nothing alarming going on. It’s just sometimes you don’t want to watch a Swedish noir about suicides from a bridge. Sometimes, you just want a talking bear.”

Mud started collecting them during lockdown, after he moved here from Leicester. “The DVDs were me catastrophising – there’s always catastrophe going on inside my head,” the 37-year-old continues, pausing to take a sip of his favourite concoction – Horlicks, milk powder and chai. “I’ll go through these periods, ‘What happens if I have to live without the internet?’”

These are serious times, and they demand silly entertainment. Please, British TV – send in the clowns

Do we need more stupidity in our lives? With the state of the world as it is, the obvious answer is that we most definitely do not. But what if we need more stupidity in our comedy? The actor and comedian Diane Morgan argued last week that there is a crisis of stupidity in on-screen comedy: “Mandy [her show about an idiotically unemployable woman] is stupid. I don’t think there’s enough stupid stuff. Most [comedies] have always got a bit of drama or a bit of romance … you can spend a lot of money on having something look nice, but it doesn’t make it any funnier. In fact, I think it sort of impinges on it.”

This is true. We need stupid, cheap, unpolished stuff. Also out this week is a new documentary celebrating the career of Steve Martin, one of the greatest standup comedians of the past century before he became known to a younger generation for Only Murders in the Building. Martin’s whole shtick as a comedian was in being as stupid as humanly possible. Arguably, this is the root of pure comedy: lack of self-awareness, the folly of existence, the inevitability of humiliation. We need to see more stupid people being stupid for the sheer joy of it. Not just because they are standing for public office.

Griffiths, who has died aged 88, explored the conflict between reform and revolution in plays and scripts from the film Reds to dramas such as Occupations, The Party and Comedians

Of all the political dramatists who emerged in Britain in the late 1960s, Trevor Griffiths, who has died aged 88, was the most fervent and committed. As a Mancunian Marxist he brought to theatre his love of dialectic. He also believed passionately in “strategic penetration” of the citadels of culture. He succeeded, in that plays such as The Party and Comedians were taken up by the National Theatre; Bill Brand, an 11-part series about the frustrations of parliamentary democracy, was shown on ITV; and his screenplay for Reds, co-authored with Warren Beatty and based on John Reed’s account of the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, became an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie.

If there was one theme that informed Griffiths’s work, it was the conflict between reformist pragmatism and revolutionary idealism. It was there in an early work like Occupations, first seen at the Manchester Stables in 1970 and quickly picked up by the RSC for a production starring Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. Set in Turin in 1920 at a time when every engineering factory in northern Italy had been taken over by the workers, the play involves a head-on confrontation between Kabak, a businesslike Comintern representative, and Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian firebrand advocating shop-floor soviets.

Dupieux’s melancholic comedy sees a disillusioned audience member pull a gun before demanding a word processor to write the actors a better play

Quentin Dupieux is one of the vanishingly small number of film-makers on the non-Anglo-American distribution circuit who really is interested in – and allowed to make – straight-up comedy, albeit flavoured with melancholy or violent absurdity. For me, only Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern are comparable. Aki Kaurismäki, for example, is different; although gently and wonderfully comic, his films don’t try to hit the laugh lines in the same way.

The prolific Dupieux has now created a 67-minute sketch, a one-act cine-play about a mediocre Paris stage company performing a dinner-theatre comedy called The Cuckold to a bored, half-empty house. Just as they are grinding through their tired old routines, a guy called Yannick (Raphaël Quenard) stands up in the auditorium and announces that this so-called comedy is making him sad and he wants his money back. The dumbfounded actors start mocking this jerk but Yannick pulls a gun, clambers on to the stage and demands a word processor and printer so he can write a better play for them. Is he a radical hero for disrupting mediocre bourgeois culture? If this is a hostage situation, he says, well, so is sitting through a bad play.

Forbes Masson stars in Gary McNair’s version of the gothic novella, Tim Key joins Kitson in an Old Vic two-hander and Jason Manford celebrates all musicals great and small

Robert Louis Stevenson’s ever-compelling “strange case” becomes a solo play, adapted by Gary McNair and performed by Forbes Masson at Dundee Rep earlier this year. Directed by Michael Fentiman, it is the latest addition to Original Theatre ’s impressive collection.

Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London
Fun songs and exciting immersive touches delight children and adults alike in a lively picture book adaptation from actor Cush Jumbo and Katy Sechiari

‘Ha ha!” laughs my six-year-old as a knitted mole pops out of the ground and sneakily drinks a carton of Ribena. There’s a lot of amusement and delight in this lively adaptation of the kids’ picture book Bear Snores On , originally created by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman, and given new life here by co-writers and directors Katy Sechiari and Cush Jumbo (the actor, quite the switch of direction since her last role playing Lady Macbeth ).

A group of animals shelter from a storm in the cave of a hibernating bear, and after a short alfresco intro we join them inside, in a specially created space (so actual inclement weather won’t disrupt the show too much). We get there through a tunnel lit up by the LED wristbands we’ve all been given, a nice immersive touch. “That was really exciting. The wristbands were amazing!” says my son Jamie, who’s also very impressed by some UV light effects on the cave walls – designer Rebecca Brower has done a great job, especially on the chunky knitted costumes that give Mouse, Badger and Hare a Central Saint Martins meets Gardeners’ World kind of vibe.

Menier Chocolate Factory, London
Paul Grellong’s gripping dialogue makes a brisk plot and unlikable characters immensely watchable as a Harvard professor invites a white supremacist for a debate

‘I’m one of the good guys,” insists a beleaguered Harvard professor facing student protests after inviting a white supremacist to be part of a university debate on extremism. The defence, for Charles Nichols (Julian Ovenden), is that illogical or offensive arguments need to be heard in order to be dismantled, though hand-wringing principal Amy Katz (Tanya Franks) suggests he is doing this as an attention-grabbing career move.

Paul Grellong’s intelligent if schematic play incorporates themes of cancel culture, Nazi legacies and the intersection between freedom of expression and hate speech.

The Harry Potter and Bridget Jones star is a dazzlingly versatile performer, with a string of Michael Winterbottom films under her belt, as well as Star Wars, TV’s Happy Valley and an Olivier award. She explains how she keeps on top of it all

It is easy to feel protective of Shirley Henderson on this gloomy winter afternoon. Is she warm enough? Does she want to put the heating on? “Aye, I’m OK,” she says from her home in Fife, a few strands of chestnut hair falling over her glasses as she huddles close to the laptop. “It’s a wee bit blowy out. But I’m at the age where you can get too warm, so I’m all right.” Her giggle is helium-high: the sort of sound you want to trap, like in one of those toy moo boxes, so that you can play it when you’re down in the dumps. Hearing Henderson laugh, or say “Sorry darlin’?” when she hasn’t quite heard your question makes you feel as if you’ve been cuddled.

Her allusion to the menopause, though, takes a moment to sink in. Though 58, she looks barely old enough to be online without parental controls. (No suspension of disbelief was required when she played a mother who dresses as her own adolescent daughter to sit an exam in May Contain Nuts .) Henderson came to prominence in the 1990s as one of the UK’s most probing, unpredictable character actors. After being spattered with excrement in Trainspotting, she won pivotal roles in two masterpieces: she was a soprano pining for her son in Mike Leigh’s Gilbert-and-Sullivan extravaganza Topsy-Turvy, and a feisty hairdresser smacking her lips at London life in the rhapsodic Wonderland . That was the first and best of her six collaborations with the director Michael Winterbottom , as well as the one which got her hooked on improvising.

Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath
Bourgeois boredom is pervaded by fantasy and betrayal in these one-act plays with an astute cast including David Morrissey and Mathew Horne

Truth, lies and fantasies in long-term relationships sit at the slippery centre of these one-act plays from the early 1960s, originally written by Harold Pinter for television. The couples – straight, bisexual, jealous and betraying – are not so much engaged in power battles as playing psychological games whose terms can suddenly change. They are enacted under Lindsay Posner’s slick direction, the nervy comedy drawn out by an astute cast, without being hammed up.

The first is the simpler in its setup but more satisfying for its clever twist. A quintessential home counties couple, Sarah (Claudie Blakley) and Richard (David Morrissey), act out “adulterous” sexual fantasies with each other. The husband is the wife’s Lady Chatterley-style lover every afternoon. Then it becomes a delicious satire of bourgeois norms as they return to middle-class respectability by evening, talking about the hollyhocks in their garden.