Last One Laughing: Halloween, the Prime Video spin-off of the gameshow in which comedians try not to laugh at one another, arrived with one new rule. Laugh and you get a card. Scream and you get one too. The producers built a haunted house around the idea, with fake headstones, scary dolls and actors dressed as zombies, according to The Telegraph’s description of the set.

British critics agree on almost everything about the special except the rule that was meant to define it. That split is the most revealing thing in the reviews. Our reading: the scream ban is the weakest idea in Last One Laughing: Halloween, and the special works because it slides back into the game the show already had, seven comedians deciding, minute by minute, not to laugh at each other.

If you are wondering whether the special is worth four half-hours of your week, the reviews answer yes, almost unanimously. The more interesting question is for anyone who loves the show. Amazon has a third series on the way and keeps finding new shapes for the format, and the scream rule is the first real test of how far a very simple idea can be dressed up before the costume starts doing the work the comedians used to do.

The scream rule in Last One Laughing: Halloween divides the critics

Ellie Harrison, reviewing for The Independent, likes the twist. The contestants are banned from laughing and smiling, and now they also cannot “scream, screech, shriek or squeal” as their rivals and the producers try to frighten them. “The no-shrieking twist brings an extra dimension to the game that’s very fun,” she writes. In her account the comedians alternate their usual anxious pacing with bouts of sitting very still, and some refuse to open the fridge in case the decaying head of David Mitchell, last series’ winner, pops out of a pile of iceberg lettuce. It does.

Ed Power, in The Telegraph, goes further. “But it’s the scary stuff that invariably drives them over the edge,” he writes, reminding readers that under the Halloween rules “screams and laughs are equally verboten.” He reports that a zombie hand appearing in an unusual setting makes one contestant lose it completely, and he mentions a gag involving a prosthetic limb and a cleaver.

Rachel Aroesti, in The Guardian, saw something else. She had hoped the twist would fix “one of the format’s only flaws: that the challenge is too easy for a certain kind of personality.” Instead, she writes, in the three episodes sent to critics “this new caveat barely features.” Steve Bennett at Chortle, the British comedy site, is blunter: “in practice, this twist is soon abandoned,” though not before one comedian collects a yellow card after falling for a jump scare.

Why a scream is the wrong thing to ban

Bennett also makes the sharpest argument in the whole review cycle. The scream rule, he writes, “seems like cheating given how easy it is to elicit a reflex reaction that’s harder to control than a laugh.” We agree, and the reason goes to what the show is. Every round of Last One Laughing rests on a judgement call. A comedian hears something funny and has a fraction of a second to decide whether to let it land on their face. That is a contest of comic taste and self-control. A jump scare skips the decision. Punishing a scream measures nerves, and nerves are not what anyone tunes in to see.

Bennett’s next line points to where the Halloween dressing does help: “More intriguing is trying to hold back a laugh of relief once a perceived threat has passed.” Fear is useful here as a set-up, and the payoff is still a laugh. Read again, the reviewers’ favourite scare stories make the same point. The fridge and the zombie hand are described as moments that break people, in the format’s own currency, which has always been the giggle a comedian failed to swallow.

The rule also leaves the show’s real structural problem where it was. Aroesti recalls that in the last series both David Mitchell and Sam Campbell reached the end of the allotted time without cracking, “forcing producers to bend the rules with a tie-breaker.” Chortle reported at the time that some viewers found that ending anticlimactic. A scream ban could, in theory, have separated the stoics. On the evidence of the first three episodes, nobody can yet say it does.

The case for the haunted house

The strongest defence of the twist runs like this. A format this bare needs new pressure, or it goes stale. Harrison puts the bareness plainly: “You could hardly think of a simpler, cheaper format than filming a group of comedians trying not to laugh in a studio for a few hours.” Bruce Dessau, the critic behind the comedy site Beyond the Joke, writes that the second series “slightly fizzled out” after the success of the first, and that the opening Halloween episode “finds the format very much back on form.” On that reading the gimmick earned its keep: a new set, a new fear and a new reason to come back between series, at the moment the main show had started to look tired.

Look, though, at what the critics actually credit. Dessau’s favourite is Jack Dee, and his highlight is Daisy May Cooper’s routine set to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, read aloud by Charlie Cooper, whom The Independent identifies as her brother. Harrison singles out Tom Allen’s semi-naked wrestling routine, a game of mangled regional accents run by Steve Pemberton, and the sight of Jack Dee dancing. Aroesti laughs at Allen’s breakdancing and Lou Sanders’ dance about frogs, and concludes that “the best value comes from the random conversational turns and strange little bits of prepared material the contestants spring on each other.” None of those moments is a scream. All of them are comedians trying to make other comedians laugh.

The Halloween idea that does work is the casting. Reece Shearsmith, co-creator of The League of Gentlemen and Inside No. 9, is in Bennett’s words “the perfect choice, given the Venn diagram overlap of horror and comedy is where he has spent his entire career.” Bennett calls the third episode “the absolute five-star classic” of the run, partly for a surprise guest apparently brought in for the sole purpose of breaking Shearsmith. Dee, “the grumpiest, most poker-faced, man in comedy” for Bennett, turns out to be the special’s other engine: Aroesti writes that “the man has never looked so happy to be on TV.” The theme picked the people, and the people carried the show.

Last One Laughing and the British fear of too much

Aroesti frames the larger worry better than anyone. “British comedy is a broad church united by a simple adage: less is more,” she writes, pointing to Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, Brass Eye and The Office, all short-lived. Comedy, she argues, is treated in Britain “as a precious finite resource liable to become exhausted at any moment.” She went in sceptical. “Why Halloween, except that it falls six months after the last edition?” she asks, and she notes that some contestants feel “shoehorned into the theme.” Her real question is whether “this snacky stopgap” might “dilute the precious joy of the yearly series proper.”

The commercial logic points the other way. Chortle, reporting on the show’s win at the Broadcast Awards, wrote that the first series drew six million viewers in its first month in the UK, making it, in Chortle’s words, the second most popular series launch ever for Prime Video, beaten only by Clarkson’s Farm. The first series then won the Bafta for entertainment, and Bob Mortimer took the Bafta for entertainment performance. The format comes from the Japanese series Documental, and Chortle counts versions in 25 countries. A streamer holding that much demand will keep making more of it.

Power names the risk without meaning to. Last One Laughing, he writes, “is just a few rungs above some YouTube rubbish you might waste 20 minutes on. Yet that disposability is also part of the charm.” He adds that four half-hours devoted to trick-or-treating “do over-egg the pumpkin pie slightly.” Aroesti lands in a warmer place: the show “turns out to be pure treat, no cynical trick.” Both verdicts hold for now. Gimmick fatigue is the smaller threat. The bigger one is that a show built on the strain of seven people holding it together slides into background viewing, the thing you put on between better things.

Last One Laughing: Halloween, on the record and still open

On the record: Last One Laughing: Halloween is a four-part special on Prime Video, with the first three episodes released on 23 October 2026 and the finale on 30 October. The seven contestants are Jack Dee, Daisy May Cooper, Phil Wang, Lou Sanders, Reece Shearsmith, Harriet Dyer and Tom Allen; Cooper and Sanders return from the first series. Jimmy Carr hosts from an adjoining room with co-presenter Roisin Conaty, and, as The Telegraph explains, a laugh or a scream earns a yellow card, with two meaning elimination. The Independent lists Charlie Cooper, Catherine Tate and Steve Pemberton among the guests.

Also on the record: Amazon announced the special alongside a third series in March 2026, and the third series is due in 2027 with a cast that includes Lee Mack, Katherine Ryan, Harry Hill and the returning Richard Ayoade. The critical response is positive across The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, Chortle and Beyond the Joke. The Independent gave the special four stars and says the missing fifth star is for the garish set.

In dispute: whether the scream rule adds anything. Harrison and Power say it does; Aroesti and Bennett say it fades almost at once. Still unknown: the finale, which was not made available to reviewers, so nobody outside the production can say whether the scream ban ends up deciding the winner. MCM has not watched the special; everything above about what happens on screen comes from the named reviews. The verdict is our reading of them: the rule fades because the format never needed it.

The best summary of the special comes from inside it. Harrison quotes Tom Allen from inside the game: “It’s all been a lot of fun so far. I wish I could have let my face know.” Nobody had to scream to make that line work.

Tags: Prime Video, comedy game shows, Jack Dee, Jimmy Carr, Last One Laughing, Reece Shearsmith