Remember that classic moment from the 1984 sitcom starring the chaps from Madness when their mate suddenly appears and makes them jump? No, of course you don’t, it was never shown, and what a blessing that was judging by a glimpse of it from BBC Two's documentary celebrating 50 years of its own comedy output.

Political farces always start with a distinct disadvantage — the reality is so much sillier than the fictional version. Never mind, if anyone can make a stage comedy funny it is Ray Cooney, who is not only one of the most entertaining playwrights of our age, but also a national treasure in his own right. This play, originally written in 1984, predates the recent dip in the popularity of MPs, and also features a neat cameo appearance by its author.

Here laughter is a poor substitute for orgasm

Zany Dublin family comprising eccentric parents, neurotic daughter and dozy slacker son prepare to meet daughter's new boyfriend... Sound promising? No not especially, but The Walshes is written by Graham Linehan (with help from the "Diet of Worms" comedy troupe), and where there's Linehan there's always hope.

An insider once told me that you get a grant for including puppets in a production. Which may account for the amount of crap puppetry haphazardly applied in the theatre. That certainly can't be said about the work of husband-and-husband team Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of Handspring as they collaborate again with War Horse director Tom Morris, this time on Shakespearean texturing of organic discipline. The problem is that such focused visual imagination needs to be matched by verbal beauty, word magic, of the highest order, and it isn’t.

As the Brockman family returns for a fifth and final series of Outnumbered, some viewers will find their hackles standing to attention at the family's extraordinary distillation of middle-class characterstics. There’s the enviable middle-class London home they live in, absurdly beyond the means of a family that seems to subsist on a single teacher’s income. There’s the tameness of their problems, this week's revolving around angst-ridden secondary school choice and the horror provoked by the eldest child Jake's (Tyger Drew-Honey) tattoo.

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's fans recall with huge affection their previous collaborations – among them Big Night Out and The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, two wonderfully anarchic shows. Now comes their first traditional, one-room (well two actually) sitcom House of Fools, which, true to form, is a mix of physical comedy, bawdy humour, surreal sight gags and utter nonsense.

Lest anyone think that the measured performances in Borgen, The Bridge and The Killing or the personal cinema of, say, Susanne Bier, Pernille Fischer Christensen, Lars von Trier or Thomas Vinterberg define Danish drama, along comes the British release of Klown, a film which – despite a few local touches – plays to the familiar: the uncomfortable comedy of The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the gross-out, road-trip fare of The Hangover.

Three cheers for good old Albert, natural laugh-out-loud heir of Verdi’s Falstaff and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and the best possible way to mark creator Britten’s being one hundred years and one day old. Youth has its day in both those earlier masterpieces, but the lovers are subordinate to the middle-aged comic protagonists. Here they're the equals of a hero who is no scamster but a shy grocer’s boy who busts out drinking and worse to loosen the apron strings of a prim community.

Mancunian Jason Manford is the kind of chap it would be difficult to dislike. Laidback, casually dressed, smiley and interacting with his audience in a totally unthreatening manner - it's no wonder that that demeanour, coupled with his everyman observational comedy, has made him a star.

He comes on stage to tell us there's no support act. “I'm not paying someone 60 quid to be slightly shitter than me,” he says. And then he deadpans: “I can do that.” He's joking, of course, as he's not shit at all, but rather an accomplished entertainer.

The last time we saw soldiers going over the top at the Somme with comic baggage attached was the tragic finale of Blackadder. It’s the inevitable comparison that The Wipers Times writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman were going to face, and though they aim for something different in what is, after all, a true story, there’s no escaping the same absurdity of clipped understatement that they have given their British officer heroes, or the essential one-dimensional nature of characterisation.