In MacCruiskeen's thread on Gervais and Merchant, someone mentioned Peep Show. I got completely into that, then found a sketch series by Mitchell and Webb, actually there are two: The Mitchell and Webb Situation and the Mitchell and Webb Look. Excellent, classic British sketches in the Fry and Laurie vein but darker, more imaginative and less shouty. I never could stand shouting as humour. They're both great actors and play off each other really well.
My favourite sketch, and a good example of the sort of psychological portrait that I think a really good comedian should be able to paint:
So recently I felt withdrawal symptoms and scoured the depths of the internet, or rather fiddled with the search function on YouTube, to try and find more. I came across an earlier sketch show called Bruiser they'd done with Olivia Colman (Sophie in Peep Show), Martin Freeman (Tim in The Office), and Matt Holness, also an outstanding actor. Bruiser is okay, it has its moments, but then I got the real treat: a show with Holness and Richard Ayoade (who's in The Mighty Boosh and now The IT Crowd) called Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. It's quite hard to describe, but Garth Marenghi (Holness) is a horror writer with delusions of grandeur who presents to the audience a series he'd made years before starring himself as a doctor with knowledge of the occult who saves the world from various demonic threats. The series was never broadcast (Marenghi hints at government intervention), but the whole look is sort of early 90s. Ayoade plays his publisher, Dean Learner, who is also in the series as the head of the hospital.
The opening credits:
There was only one series, but then Ayoade and Holness worked together on a spinoff, Man to Man with Dean Learner, where the Learner character from Darkplace is a sort of Hugh Hefner / Donald Trump and has guests on a talk-show, each guest a different character played by Holness. I found it even better than Darkplace, and Holness's range is phenomenal.
Here's Learner doing a sort of Apprentice vibe:
If you like Peep Show, or Boosh or Red Dwarf, check these other ones out.
