Jen Brister loves her five-year-old twin boys, she is at pains to tell us, even when they have a major meltdown and, like Little Lord Fauntleroys, refuse to eat broken biscuits. Stories like these are sprinkled throughout her new show, Under Privilege, in which she describes trying to instil proper values in children who, she hopes, will probably never know any life struggles, and the broader issue of what privilege is.

David Baddiel is a keen Twitter user, commenting on matters of the day, making witty observations about this and that, or simply chatting to his 650,000 followers. But he does seem to attract trolls, whose idiocy he frequently confronts – and his new show, Trolls: Not the Dolls, was inspired by some of those interactions.

No more glitzy and glam musical shows for Jayde Adams, the comic tells us at the top of the hour. Now, after a few years in the business, she wants to be taken seriously (or seriously enough to host Crazy Delicious on Channel 4), so the sequinned Spandex has gone into storage – “no more camel toes” – and she's popped on jeans and a black turtleneck. 

Matt Forde sets out his stall in Brexit: Pursued by a Bear from the first line: “We meet in diabolical circumstances.” These aren't good times, he says, with two major leaders in the Western world whose relationship with the truth is merely that of passing acquaintance. Add in the UK's continuing divisions over Brexit, and diabolical seems apt.

Musical comedy siblings Nicola and Rosie Dempsey (Flo and Joan were their grandmother and great-aunt's names) get along very well – even being mistaken for lovers by one Paris hotel who gave them a double bed – and certainly their chat between songs, where they politely interrupt each other and finish each other's sentences, is testimony to that.

When Frank Skinner did a London run of new material last year, the show was billed as a taster of a longer touring version. I wrote then that the show whetted my appetite for more, and I'm glad to say that the updated version, Showbiz, which now has a West End residency, has delivered.

A mixed bill rarely pleases all comedy tastes – whether in style or content – and so it proved at the launch of the Leicester Comedy Festival, which starts next month. In a line-up of eight comics that had few star names, the best came last – but more of that later.

It was a year in which we welcomed some big, big names back on stage, including Ben Elton, Clive Anderson and Jack Dee.

Medic-turned-comic Adam Kay had been performing for some years before he wrote his 2016 Edinburgh Fringe show Fingering a Minor at the Piano. It had a personal addendum – about why he left medicine – and was a call to arms to save the NHS. It hit a nerve with audiences and in 2017 he published his waspish memoir, This Is Going to Hurt, which has been on bestseller lists ever since.

Andy Parsons is a comic known to like a good old rant, particularly on a political issue. But in Healing the Nation he takes a calmer, more conversational approach as he tries to do what it says on the tin in a show that he fully expected to be performing after the UK left the EU – but more of Brexit later.