It takes a certain something to make a roomful of white people get their funk on. I feel I have dispensation to make that ridiculous generalisation because Lenny Henry, famously born in Dudley to immigrant Jamaican parents, addresses the whiteness of the room the minute he comes on stage at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre, and by the end of this biographical show - part comedy, part music - the entire audience is on their feet, strutting their stuff to “Sex Machine” and “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”.

Misery and comedy have always been happy bedfellows. The sad clown, the stand-up who falls down offstage – we know who we’re talking about. But for all their problems, comedians don’t generally make a habit of turning medical pathology into material. Until now. Ruby Wax has crafted an entire show out of her depression. Anyone who has seen her glorious documentary interviews with Pamela Anderson and Imelda Marcos, to name a couple, might have guessed she is manic. But a depressive?

Jimmy Carr, a comedian who has more than once got into hot water over jokes that some find offensive, does a very strange thing for the encore of his latest show, Laughter Therapy - he gives a lecture cum homily on the limits of offensiveness, and how anything is permissible if the audience allows it. “I know my jokes are cruel and brutal and unacceptable,” he says. “But they have only one purpose - to make you laugh.”

The multiplatform franchise might sound like a modern concept - the film that leads parallel lives as video game, TV spin-off, T-shirt and toy. But no, ‘twas ever thus. Entertainment moguls have always known how to squeeze every last dime out of a popular hit, none more than The Green Hornet. Created in Detroit as a radio drama in 1936, it has buzzed across the decades and the genres, from film to comics to television to fiction and back to comics again. It’s now returned to the big screen with a bang. And a nod and a wink.

It was a year when comics at opposite ends of the scale - offensive or annoyingly bland - were taking up room on our television screens and selling out ever-larger arena tours. And the depressing rule of thumb (with a few honourable exceptions) that the blander the comic, the bigger the venue, held true in 2010, so thank goodness there were some terrific shows by talented performers in medium-size theatres. As it happens, the most memorable show I saw all year was in a small venue at the Edinburgh Fringe (the American Bo Burnham).

Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights is an interesting beast. A mix of stand-up, sketches and cartoons, it’s neither fish nor fowl, but many will certainly find it foul - with the comic’s penchant for sexually explicit material, unPC humour and determinedly bad-taste jokes, it’s bound to upset some viewers. But that’s why Channel 4 poached him from the BBC in the first place and have put his name in the title.

In the course of his decade-long career Jason Manford has benefited from the British public’s appetite (eagerly fed by television producers) for inoffensive and family-friendly comics. Similar stand-ups, for instance Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay, have even become millionaires by providing this kind of comedy, and until recently there was no reason to believe that Manford was going to do anything other than follow in their footsteps, particularly after he was made co-host of BBC One’s The One Show, which regularly pulls in more than four million viewers. Television exposure like that, as any comic will tell you, means you start playing stadium gigs sooner rather than later.

Jon Richardson’s first full-length show in 2007, Spatula Pad, was about the seemingly unpromising subject of having obsessive compulsive disorder, and being a misanthrope to boot. But it deservedly gained him an If.Comedy Award Best Newcomer nomination, which was followed by another in the main category of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for last year’s show, This Guy at Night, about how his perfectionism has ruined his relationships.

By chance, two comics with a penchant for rock‘n’roll have been strutting their stuff at opposite ends of the capital in the same week. First, Bolton funnyman Peter Kay was giving it his all on stage at the O2 on the Greenwich peninsula, and now Bill Bailey begins a two-month-long residency at the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End. Music buffs both - but in Bailey’s case there are no air guitars as he’s an accomplished musician, and the stage is filled with stringed instruments and keyboards.