Michael Fucking McIntyre

It's fair to say that my Granddad and I have a different take on the state of modern comedy. Recently driving past a billboard featuring the looming visage of Russell Brand, he remarked without irony, "That man exudes evil". He visibly purples at the very mention of Jonathan Ross. And recently, as I tried my hardest not to laugh, he recounted, in a state of solemn exasperation, a TV stand-up's routine which apparently consisted of the comic saying the word "masturbating" over and over again. I feebly suggested that there may be have been some context that he had missed, he was steadfast in his disappointment with not only the state of comedy today, but clearly, the world we now live in. "Masturbating", he repeated softly, ashen-faced, head shaking slowly, eyes fixed to the floor.

But it turns out we do have something in comedy common after all. When I heard him bemoaning the act of "a Chinese fella who kept laughing at his own jokes before he'd finished, or often, started them", I knew he could only be referring to one man...


That's right - its Britain's new comedy hero, Michael Fucking McIntyre, who is in fact

• Not Chinese
• very, very irritating
• displacing Peter Kay as the doughy-faced poster boy for unfunny British comedy
  

Ubiquitous to the point of making me physically angry, McIntyre began spreading himself remarkably thin across every panel show going a couple of years ago, and has since graduated to the lofty heights of hosting his own BBC Comedy Roadshow. According to The Daily Telegraph, McIntyre is "quite simply top-to-toe hilarious". Above and beyond the obvious crapness of that review line (are anyone's toes, even Eddie Murphy or Dave Chapelle's, hilarious?), it is woefully inaccurate.

In fact, McIntyre's act seems to consist of giggling a lot, talkingreallyquicklyasthoughwewon'tnoticethatwhathe'ssayingisn'tactuallyfunnyatall and making 100% certain that every sentence he utters goes up in a questiony way at the end like a Californian schoolgirl?

Of McIntyre, one fan had this to say - an inane snippet of drivel which perfectly encapsulates what I despise about the man's comedy.

"He was on “Have I Got News for You”; he was funnier than Paul Merton. In fact, Paul didn’t get a word in. Not often that someone can get the better of him.’"

If your idea of being funnier than someone is talking so much that they actually get a word in edgeways, then your idea of comedy is very different from mine. I don't hate this guy as much as I hate the inexplicably overpraised Catherine Tate, but I do wish he'd give it a bloody rest. AC