Having apparently gotten a taste for Los Angeles-based comedians with last year’s inclusion of Jason Mantzoukas on its roster, British panel show Taskmaster has now reportedly cast comic/actor/reformed Kingo Kumail Nanjiani for its upcoming 21st season. Nanjiani (who’s fresh off a two-episode stint on Prime Video’s Fallout TV show) will appear on the season with a pretty stacked cast of talent, too: His fellow contestants, per Radio Times, will be comedian Amy Gledhill, TV presenter Joel Dommett, Gavin & Stacey star Joanna Page, and, perhaps oddest of all, Armando Iannucci, the legendary Scottish comedy writer and director best known, Stateside, for creating Veep. (But who will always, in our mean little hearts, be the guy who brought us Malcolm Tucker and The Thick Of It.)
Among other things, that means this is the first Taskmaster season to feature not just one, but two Oscar nominees, with Iannucci and Nanjiani having both scored nods for their writing work on In The Loop and The Big Sick, respectively. None of which will presumably help them in preserving their dignity as they run through the tasks set for them by series creator/lackey Alex Horne, all to be judged by the Taskmaster himself, comedian Greg Davies. Part prank show, part panel show, and part high-impact lateral thinking challenge, Taskmaster has become a British (and Australian, and New Zealand) institution by steering hard into the belief that if you put funny people in extreme circumstances, and then dangle a bunch of ultimately meaningless points over their head, something pretty funny is bound to happen.
News of the latest casting comes just as the series is gearing up for its latest, possibly Quixotic attempt to convince Americans that one of the planet’s most consistently funny TV shows is exactly that, with Horne and Davies embarking on a United States tour that kicks off in Chicago on January 15. Meanwhile, if you just want to get caught up on the seriesâincluding Mantzoukas’ episodes, where he gleefully embraced his role as the show’s latest engine of chaosâyou can check them out on YouTube, where the series’ whole run remains readily available in the U.S.
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