James Acaster
1 min read
James William Acaster (born January 9, 1985, Kettering, Northamptonshire, England) is an English stand-up comedian, actor, and podcaster. After playing drums in local bands he began pursuing stand-up comedy professionally in 2008, quickly drawing attention at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where he earned a record-breaking five nominations for Best Comedy Show. His distinctive style blends long-form storytelling, absurdist scenarios, and elaborate recurring characters.
Acaster's profile grew internationally in 2018 when Netflix released Repertoire, a four-part stand-up collection covering four of his Edinburgh shows with an overarching narrative structure, making him the first UK comedian to release more than one Netflix Original stand-up special. His following tour Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 (2019) won a Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award, and his 2022 tour Hecklers Welcome was released as an HBO Max special in 2024. He also co-hosts the food podcast Off Menu with comedian Ed Gamble and appeared as a contestant on the panel show Taskmaster in 2018.
In Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Acaster plays Lars Pinfield, a researcher connected to the Ghostbusters Engineer Corps. During his second audition for the film he was asked to improvise Ghostbusters technobabble, a task that suited his comfort with absurdist comedy. The character's surname in the film is Pinfield.