The aim of Last One Laughing is to be exactly that. In Prime’s runaway hit, a group of comedians are trapped in a room and forbidden from cracking a smile or a laugh, and the one who keeps a straight face the longest is crowned the victor. Last year, it became one of the streamer’s biggest ever launches, drawing in six million viewers at its peak. It also confirmed eventual winner Bob Mortimer to be one of the funniest men alive.
Mortimer had been bobbing around on the periphery of national treasure status for a few years, with his viral Train Guy sketches and his slow TV gem Gone Fishing enjoying a surge of popularity in lockdown. In 2022, he also started a new side-hustle as a bestselling novelist with The Satsuma Complex (he’s published two more since). But it was the 2025 launch of Last One Laughing, a strange and ridiculous import from Japan, that pushed him over the edge. No one stood a chance against him. He was like some kind of surreal, Middlesbrough-bred King Kong of comedy, crushing his competitors with peculiar songs about lemon curd, and random observations such as “meats and cheeses, always pleases” (for some god unknown reason, it turns out this is the funniest sentence in the English language when spoken with a Teesside accent).
