American television is currently brimming with sharp, cute female comics, and this year sees more of them heading to UK screens. Closest in spirit to Susie Essman is Sarah Silverman, whose sitcom The Sarah Silverman Program starts on Paramount Comedy in autumn. Silverman recently hosted the MTV Movie Awards, days before Paris Hilton was jailed, and spent half her set mocking the heiress. The cameras stayed on Hilton – who was in the crowd – throughout, and clips of the encounter are huge on YouTube.

Kaitlin Olso, meanwhile, has softer material. She has grown up in sketch and impro comedy. She stars in Danny DeVito’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a foul-mouthed improvised sitcom set in a Philly bar and shown on Bravo. Wanda Sykes, the female Chris Rock, with a similar line in race and social issues, has a supporting role in Julia Dreyfus’s The New Adventures of Old Christine, on UKTV Gold.

To be fair, two of the sharpest are actually Canadian. Sarah Chalke, who plays Dr Elliot Reid in the NBC medical comedy Scrubs, hails from Vancouver and – unusually for a comedy performer – is half German. The former sketch performer Samantha Bee acts as an investigative reporter on Comedy Central’s satirical spoof news programme The Daily Show, diligently uncovering hot topics such as the reasons for the dearth of Asian men in US pornography.

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