Fact check: Ranking puts Victoria Wood as funniest British woman of all time

Several claims have circulated online that Rosie Jones has come top of a list of funniest British female comedians, followed by Eddie Izzard and Victoria Wood.

Evaluation

It is unclear what the source of this claim is. One poster claimed that it came from a survey carried out by “Rankerz”.

This is likely a reference to the website Ranker, but Ranker’s list of the funniest British female comedians features Rosie  Jones in position 78 and does not feature Eddie Izzard at all.

The facts

Many of the posts feature a screenshot, with photographs of the three comedians, which reads: “Rosie Jones tops the list of funniest British Female Comedians of all time with Victoria Wood and Eddie Izzard rounding off the top 3.”

A Google search for the names of all three comedians together does not appear to return any results, apart from a few posts on Facebook, which now appear to have been deleted.

One of these, which appears to have been deleted and was found using the cached version on Google, added: “The poll carried out by Rankerz surveyed over 17,000 people from right across the country.”

It is not totally clear what Rankerz refers to, but there is a website called Ranker, which lets people vote for their favourites on many different lists.

On Ranker’s website, Eddie Izzard does not feature on the list of the “Funniest British Female Comedians Of All Time”. Rosie Jones does feature, but at the time of writing was in position 68.

Victoria Wood was top of the list at the time of writing.

Links

Post on Facebook

Second post on Facebook

Post on X (archived)

Second post on X (archived)

Google search

Ranker – Eddie Izzard (archived)

Ranker – Rosie Jones (archived)

Ranker – Funniest British Female Comedians Of All Time (archived)