Ruby Wax has packed a lot into her life - writer, actor, stand-up comic, television interviewer, to name a few. But possibly her greatest professional achievement will be her work in mental health, prompted by her own experiences of depression, which has led to a BBC series about the subject and her current studies for an MSc at Oxford. And now she has devised a theatre show with musician Judith Owen that’s funny, warm and inventive and takes as its starting point the fact that one in four of us suffers a mental-health problem at some time in our lives.

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”.

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.”

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis originally came to fame in the late 1980s as one half of the satirical sketch group The Mary Whitehouse Experience, with fellow Cambridge alumni David Baddiel and Rob Newman. Now, though, most people know them (as a double act, at least) as the lead performers in The Now Show on Radio 4.

Will Adamsdale was so sweat-drenched by the end of his character-comedy show Jackson's Way – on the night I saw it at the Soho Theatre – that you might think he had just emerged from a frantic triathlon swim. Actually, he is performing a marathon of sorts: the Jacksathon, 26 gigs in as many days in various venues across London.

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).

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.

There’s a surreal sitcom waiting to be written about the often-told story of when Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s plasterers for a while in the early 1980s. Here’s the pitch: F and L would play caricatures of themselves in the mould of the posh twits they played in Blackadder, and – for extra comic frisson – H and W would play it straight while appearing (as the story goes) naturally funnier than their professional Oxbridge comedy-writing superiors.

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.