53 English humorists

Gilbert Abbott à Beckett was an English humorist.

Douglas Noel Adams was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist. Adams was author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams's contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.

Michael "Atters" Attree is a British humourist and performer.

Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting, are in many public collections.

William Ernest Bowman was an engineer and writer, best remembered for his 1956 book The Ascent of Rum Doodle, a satire on the world of mountaineering literature inspired by Bill Tilman and his 1937 account of the Nanda Devi expedition. Bowman's work was a send-up of the rather pompous British expedition book style fashionable in the 1930s through to the 1950s.

Henry Brewis (1932–2000) was a Northumberland born farmer, who developed his artistic talents into a successful side-line as a writer of tales, poems, artist, cartoonist and illustrator.

Timothy Julian Brooke-Taylor OBE was an English actor and comedian. He became active in performing in comedy sketches while at the University of Cambridge, and became president of the Footlights, touring internationally with its revue in 1964. Becoming more widely known to the public for his work on BBC Radio with I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, he moved into television with At Last the 1948 Show, working together with old Cambridge friends John Cleese and Graham Chapman. He was best known as a member of The Goodies, starring in the television series throughout the 1970s and picking up international recognition in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. He also appeared as an actor in various sitcoms, and was a panellist on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue for almost 50 years.

Anthony Malcolm Buckeridge was an English author, best known for his Jennings and Rex Milligan series of children's books. He also wrote the 1953 children's book A Funny Thing Happened which was serialised more than once on Children's Hour.

Sir Francis Cowley Burnand, usually known as F. C. Burnand, was an English comic writer and prolific playwright, best known today as the librettist of Arthur Sullivan's opera Cox and Box.

Arthur Cecil Blunt, better known as Arthur Cecil, was an English actor, comedian, playwright and theatre manager. He is probably best remembered for playing the role of Box in the long-running production of Cox and Box, by Arthur Sullivan and F. C. Burnand, at the Royal Gallery of Illustration.

Barry Charles Cryer, OBE, is an English writer, comedian and actor. Cryer has written for many noted performers, including Dave Allen, Stanley Baxter, Jack Benny, Rory Bremner, George Burns, Jasper Carrott, Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson, Dick Emery, Kenny Everett, Sir Bruce Forsyth, Sir David Frost, Bob Hope, Frankie Howerd, Richard Pryor, Spike Milligan, Mike Yarwood, The Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise.

Leslie Dawson Jr. was an English comedian, actor, writer, and presenter, who is best remembered for his deadpan style, curmudgeonly persona and jokes about his mother-in-law and wife.

Benjamin Charles Elton is a British comedian, author, playwright, musical librettist, actor and director. He was a part of London's alternative comedy movement of the 1980s and became a writer on the sitcoms The Young Ones and Blackadder, as well as continuing as a stand-up comedian on stage and television. His style in the 1980s was left-wing political satire. Since then he has published 16 novels and written the musicals The Beautiful Game (2000), We Will Rock You (2002), Tonight's the Night (2003) and Love Never Dies (2010), the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. His novels cover the dystopian, comedy, and crime genres.

Henry Evans was a conjurer, ventriloquist and humorist, born in Kennington, South London, who used the stage name Evanion. Performances in front of members of the British Royal Family, including Queen Victoria at Sandringham, and the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra at Marlborough House, enabled him to use the name "The Royal Conjuror" in his publicity.

Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirty something singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love. Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) were published in 40 countries and sold more than 15 million copies. The two films of the same name achieved international success. In a survey conducted by The Guardian newspaper, Bridget Jones’s Diary was named as one of the ten novels that best defined the 20th century.

Ricky Dene Gervais is an English comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director. He is best known for co-creating, writing, and acting in the British television series The Office (2001–2003). He has won seven BAFTA Awards, five British Comedy Awards, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Rose d'Or twice, as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. In 2007, he was placed at No. 11 on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups and at No. 3 on the updated 2010 list. In 2010, he was named to the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people.

Richard Corney Grain, known by his stage name Corney Grain, was an entertainer and songwriter of the late Victorian era.

George Grossmith was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, some 600 songs and piano pieces, three books and both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines.

Thomas Anstey Guthrie was an English author, most noted for his comic novel Vice Versa about a boarding-school boy and his father exchanging identities. His reputation was confirmed by The Tinted Venus and many humorous parodies in Punch magazine.

Daniel John Hardcastle, known online as Nerd³, NerdCubed, and sometimes as Forsinain42, is an English author, YouTuber, Company Director and CEO of Nerd Cubed Limited. He is the author of The Sunday Times bestseller Fuck Yeah, Video Games: The Life and Extra Lives of a Professional Nerd. As of 2020, his YouTube channel has accumulated more than 1.2 billion views and over 2.5 million subscribers.

Antony Gordon Hawksworth, MBE, known professionally as Tony Hawks, is a British comedian and author.

William Thomson Hay was an English comedian who wrote and acted in a schoolmaster sketch that was popular all over the world, and later transferred to the screen, where he also played other authority figures with comic failings. His film Oh, Mr. Porter! (1937), made by Gainsborough Pictures, is often cited as the supreme British-produced film-comedy, and in 1938 he was the third highest-grossing star in the UK. Many famous comedians have acknowledged him as a major influence. Hay was also a keen amateur astronomer.

Sir Alan Patrick Herbert CH, usually known as A. P. Herbert or simply A. P. H., was an English humorist, novelist, playwright and law reform activist, and an Independent Member of Parliament for Oxford University from 1935 until 1950, when university constituencies were abolished. Born in Ashtead, Surrey, Herbert attended Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating as a first in Jurisprudence in 1914. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as an ordinary seaman in World War I, later serving as an officer with the Royal Naval Division. He fought in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, becoming battalion adjutant in 1917, before injury excluded him from the front line. After the war, he published The Secret Battle and joined the staff of Punch in 1924. He also wrote librettos for musicals. Elected as Independent MP for Oxford University in the 1935 general election, Herbert campaigned for private member's rights, piloted the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 through Parliament, opposed the Entertainments Duty, and campaigned against the Oxford Group. He joined the River Emergency Service in 1938 and served in World War II as a petty officer in the Royal Naval Auxiliary Patrol. He captained his river boat, the Water Gipsy, on the River Thames. In 1943, he joined a parliamentary commission to investigate the future of the Dominion of Newfoundland.

Gerard Hoffnung was an artist and musician, best known for his humorous works.

Keble Howard was the pen name of John Keble Bell. He was an English writer and journalist, who wrote a large number of novels, short stories, sketches and plays, mainly light comic pieces, often depicting suburban life. One contemporary literary commentator described Howard as "a highly successful novelist and a moderately successful playwright".

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889).

Frederick George Hobson, known as Fred Leslie, was an English actor, singer, comedian and dramatist.

Martin Neil Lewis is a US-based English humorist, writer, radio/TV host, producer, and marketing strategist. He is known for his participation in a variety of projects in the arts and entertainment worlds including his work as the co-creator and co-producer of the Secret Policeman's Balls benefit shows for Amnesty International and as a comedic performer and writer on American TV. He hosts his own daily radio show, heard in America on Sirius Satellite Radio and worldwide on Sirius Internet Radio. He is an occasional contributor to The Huffington Post website.

Sir Henry William Lucy JP, was one of the most famous English political journalists of the Victorian era. He was acknowledged as the first great lobby correspondent. Lucy wrote articles for Punch, Strand Magazine, The Observer, The New York Times and many others. He also wrote books detailing the workings of the Houses of Parliament and two autobiographies. He was Knighted in 1909.

Christopher Charles Forrest Matthew is a British writer and broadcaster. He is the author of Now We Are Sixty, inspired by the poems of A. A. Milne in the book Now We Are Six, and the chronicler of the life and times of the hapless hero, Simon Crisp, in Diary of a Somebody.

Horace Mayhew was an English journalist, a writer of humorous sketches and a sub-editor of the magazine Punch.

Jonathan Turner Meades is an English writer and film-maker, primarily on the subjects of place, culture, architecture and food. His work spans journalism, fiction, essays, memoir and over fifty highly idiosyncratic television films, and has been described as "brainy, scabrous, mischievous," "iconoclastic" and possessed of "a polymathic breadth of knowledge and truly caustic wit".

Tim Moore is a British travel writer and humourist. He was educated at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith. In addition to his nine published travelogues to date, his writings have appeared in various publications including Esquire, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Observer and the Evening Standard. He was also briefly a journalist for the Teletext computer games magazine Digitiser, under the pseudonym Mr Hairs, alongside Mr Biffo

Mitch Murray is an English songwriter, record producer and author. He has won two Ivor Novello Awards, including the Jimmy Kennedy Award. Murray has written, or co-written, songs that have produced five UK and three US chart-topping records. He has also been awarded the Gold Badge of Merit by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.

Barry Eric Odell Pain was an English journalist, poet and writer.

John Orlando Parry was an English actor, pianist, artist, comedian and singer.

Adrian Plass is a British author and speaker who writes primarily Christian humour, but also short stories, Bible commentaries and novels with a more serious tone. His most popular books are a series concerning The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass which is a humorous, fictional satire of Christian life and which has sold over a million copies worldwide.

Stephen Meredith Potter was a British author best known for his parodies of self-help books, and their film and television derivatives.

John Boynton Priestley, OM was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster and social commentator.

David Quantick is a novelist and critic, who has worked as a journalist and screenwriter. A former staff writer for the music magazine NME, his writing credits have included On the Hour, Blue Jam, TV Burp and Veep - the latter for which he won an Emmy in 2015.

Arthur Roberts was an English comedian, music hall entertainer and actor. He was famous for portraying the pantomime dames and later for his comic characters and "gagging" in farces, burlesques and musical comedies. He is credited with coining the word "spoof".

Bertram Fletcher Robinson was an English sportsman, journalist, author and Liberal Unionist Party campaigner. Between 1893 and 1907, he wrote nearly three hundred items, including a series of short stories that feature a detective called "Addington Peace". However, Robinson is perhaps best remembered for his literary collaborations with his friends Arthur Conan Doyle and P. G. Wodehouse.

Tahir Shah is a British author, journalist and documentary maker of Afghan-Indian descent. He lives in Casablanca, Morocco.

Thomas Ridley Sharpe was an English satirical novelist, best known for his Wilt series, as well as Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape, which were both adapted for television.

Vivian Stanshall was an English singer-songwriter, musician, author, poet and wit, best known for his work with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, for his exploration of the British upper classes in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, and for acting as Master of Ceremonies on Mike Oldfield's album Tubular Bells.

Mark Clifford Thomas is an English comedian, presenter, political satirist and journalist from south London. He first became known as a guest comic on the BBC Radio 1 comedy show The Mary Whitehouse Experience in the late 1980s. He is best known for political stunts on his show, The Mark Thomas Comedy Product on Channel 4. Thomas describes himself as a "libertarian anarchist".

Susan Lillian Townsend, FRSL, was an English writer and humorist whose work encompasses novels, plays and works of journalism. She was best known for creating the character Adrian Mole.

Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov was an English actor, writer, and filmmaker. He was a fixture on television talk shows and lecture circuits for much of his career. An intellectual and diplomat, he held various academic posts and served as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF and president of the World Federalist Movement.

Kenneth Macfarlane Walker was a British author, philosopher and urological surgeon.

Stuart Wilde was a British writer. Best known for his works on New Age, self-empowerment, and spirituality, he was also a lecturer, teacher, humorist, essayist, scriptwriter, lyricist, and music producer. He was the author of twenty books including the popular series The Taos Quintet: Miracles, The Force, Affirmations, The Quickening, and The Trick to Money is Having Some.

Nigel Williams is an English novelist, screenwriter and playwright.

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving school he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction, creating several regular characters who became familiar to the public over the years. They include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.

George Murgatroyd Woodward (1765–1809) was an English caricaturist and humor writer. He was a friend and drinking companion of Thomas Rowlandson.