Lots of stand-ups plunder their personal lives for material – whether it's about friends, parents, children or partners – and many a good show has been fashioned by the telling of tales about them, or comic exaggerations at least. But sometimes real life interrupts art in the rudest possible way.

In 2019, Russell Howard was all set to celebrate his 20th year in comedy by going on a world tour. Covid put paid to that, so it was with some genuine celebration that he was able to return to the stage with Lubricant, his second Netflix special, recorded at the Eventim Apollo in late 2021.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say. I'm not sure One-Woman Show, written and performed by comic, writer and actor Liz Kingsman, is an imitation of a solo show that catapulted another female actor-writer to worldwide fame, but it's imitation-adjacent in a spot-on spoof kind of way.

Everybody in the comedy industry started out with so much hope that, finally, things could get back to normal in 2021 – and for a while they did, and there were some gems as live comedy returned to clubs and theatres.

The lengthy ovation Chris and Rosie Ramsey received when they walked on stage at the O2 showed there was a lot of love in the room, and why wouldn't there be? The married couple's podcast Shagged. Married. Annoyed. has clocked up 144 episodes and built a large and loyal following, and now here they were doing the show live.

"Off-grid" wasn't a thing in the mid-'70s. Sure, people planted a few potatoes in the garden and pottered about a bit in an allotment, but nobody went the whole hog. The rat race was certainly a thing though, a fertile seam for comedies like The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

Well, this is a first: a comedy show with footnotes. Alfie Brown tells us at the top of the hour that he'll be stepping out of his routines from time to time to explain why the gag he's about to tell, or has just told, isn't offensive. It's a clever touch, one of several in Sensitive Man.

During lockdown most of us were caught in a Groundhog Day existence of sleep, eat, exercise with Joe Wicks, take part in a Zoom quiz, bake banana bread, repeat – or variations on that theme. So a comic doing a show talking about his lockdown experience is taking a risk that it might not be the most scintillating hour – and so it proves with Ahir Shah's Dress.

Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.

Iliza Shlesinger is an American writer, performer and presenter whose film work includes roles in Pieces of a Woman and Good on Paper, the latter which she also wrote and produced. She's also an established stand-up comic, with five Netflix specials to her name. For her latest stand-up show, Back in Action, she was on a fleeting visit to London as part of an international 70-date tour, delayed by COVID, before she performs some dates in the US.