Top 5 Funniest TV Series Ever

My picks for funniest ever TV series (excludes variety shows and sketch comedy shows, etc.).

1. Blackadder The funniest man alive, in my opinion, is Rowan Atkinson. His stage performances are brilliant, and his character “Mr Bean” is hilarious. For my money, his best work is as Edmund Blackadder in his various incarnations. I am hard pressed to pick a favorite incarnation, but if I must it would be the first incarnation in the fifteenth century as the Duke of Edinburgh, the hapless second son of King Richard IV. His sidekicks Percy and Baldrick were particularly good in that season. In that incarnation, the best episode was when Edmund was unwillingly made Archbishop of Canterbury by his father in order to stop the practice of soliciting death-bed bequests to the church. The most unforgettable scene is when Percy shows Edmund and Baldrick a precious relic he had acquired, a finger bone of Jesus Christ.

2. Red Dwarf Chris Barrie’s character of the sniveling Arnold Rimmer was the highlight of the series Red Dwarf. The series revolves around a spaceship crewman, the curry eating and lager swilling Lister, who is revived from suspended animation (where he had been placed as punishment for smuggling a cat onto the ship) after a million years. His companions are his annoying roommate Rimmer, who has been brought back to life as hologram, a humanoid being, “Cat”, that has evolved from Lister’s cat, and the ship’s computer, “Holly”. They pick up a domestic servant robot, Kryten, fairly early on in the series. The comic possibilities are endless and are fairly well explored.

3. Jeeves and Wooster Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie have Wodehouse’s worthless playboy Wooster and his indispensable valet Jeeves dead on. The books are side-splittingly funny, and many of the episodes, especially in the first season are laugh out loud funny.

4. South Park Nothing is sacred, and nobody is immune to merciless mockery. Funniest ever moment to me, for no reason I can divine, was Cartman’s singing, “I made you eat your parents.”

5. Bob Newhart/Newhart Either series.