Oliver Double and Sharon Lockyer: Palgrave Studies in Comedy

May 19th, 1979 was the first night of the Comedy Store, sixteen days after the election of Margaret Thatcher. Alternative Comedy thus ostensibly entered its fifth decade in May of 2019, which occasioned a commemorative festival, exhibition, and conference organized by the University of Kent and Brunel University. It was also the 32nd anniversary—an admittedly less numerically satisfying one—of the first academic article written on the subject, Tony Lidington’s ‘New Terms for Old Turns: The Rise of Alternative Cabaret’ in New Theatre Quarterly. It would appear that it is only with Alternative Comedy conspicuously ‘doing something’ that stand-up of any form became on object of serious inquiry in the United Kingdom: this collection, arising from that conference and edited by Oliver Double and Sharon Lockyer, is an excellent addition to that lineage.

In many ways this is a spiritual sequel to Double’s Alternative Comedy: 1979 and the Reinvention of British Stand-Up (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), and virtually every chapter cites it in some capacity: one of Double’s own contributions to this volume is an “Alternative Comedy Timeline” drawn from this history that locates pivotal moments of the scene within the political climate of the 1980s, providing a useful anchor for many of the works that follow. His other sole-penned chapter (skipping over the incisive introduction co-authored with Lockyer) leads off the “Alternative Comedy Venues” section. “The Meccano Club: The Business of Alternative Comedy” reminds the reader that, as much as this was a movement, it existed within capitalism and, as much as it might be steeped in an ethos of (anarcho-) socialism, it needed to be equitable for the artists and viable for the promoters. Double’s close reading of the club’s materials, deposited at the British Stand-up Comedy Archives, demonstrates the efforts required to cultivate an audience for a conscientiously programmed show, suggesting the notion of how the Meccano Club became ‘a brand’ without losing a sense of integrity and purpose.

Moving from London, Richard Cuming’s “‘A Local Show for Local People’: Alternative Cabaret at the Tower Arts Centre, Winchester, UK, 1981–1984” and Ray Campbell’s “The Story of Cabaret A Go Go” both benefit from authors who are providing a personal history of being a key figure in a local scene while grounding that reminiscence in scholarship. Cuming attempts a Foucauldian genealogy of the Winchester scene bringing a critical depth to what could otherwise be a more facile ‘compare and contrast’ with London’s: the absence of stand-up comedy, that acts performed in non- ‘alternative’ spaces also, and that other events took place within the Tower Arts Centre venue qualify his ultimate conclusion to locate Winchester as an example of Double’s understanding of alternative cabaret. Cabaret A Go Go ran in Newcastle-upon-Tyne at the end of the 1980s, and Campbell notes the post-punk influences on the approach he and his fellow organizers took to cabaret. Fascinatingly, he uses the unique posters designed for each show as a sort of series of mandalas to interpret the emergent understanding of what Cabaret A Go Go was meant to represent: it forces reflection on all aspects of alternative comedy, and not simply the words on a stage, but is an insightful methodological approach, denoting an artifactual record of sorts.

The next section turns to performers—not performers-turned-academics—and their memories. Brian Mulligan’s “Trends with Benefits” is a reflection on the tension between the desire and the expectation of alternative comedians to perform at benefit shows, which aligned with their overall politics while simultaneously straining their ability to sustain their participation in the artform. It is not the easiest of reads—it is probably better performed than read, and there are deep-cut English 1980s references lost on me—but the collection is richer for it. The transcript of an onstage conversation between the core members of Alternative Cabaret—Andy de la Tour, Jim Barclay, Pauline Melville, and Tony Allen, as compéred by Oliver Double—follows, and how both the theories and practices of alternative theatre informed the troupe that essentially foisted the term ‘Alternative’ onto the scene.

Echoing through all the papers is an inevitable contrast with a particular bogeyman: the phenomenon of non-alternative comedy. In the context of the Comedy Store/Alternative Cabaret comedians of 1979, there was a specific rejection of the comedians of the working men’s clubs, not only in terms of style and their reliance on street jokes and a common repertoire, but also in terms of ethos with their incessant racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic material. One could argue—without defending them through some form of ethical relativism—that the working men’s clubs themselves also offered a perceivably more relevant entertainment for its audience than what the larger culture provided, begging the question of what comprised ‘mainstream’ stand-up comedy, or whether such a thing even existed in sufficient amounts to interpolate a consistent mode which one can present oneself as an alternative. In the present moment, when stand-up comedy is expressly part of regular network television through such shows as Live at the Apollo, and panel shows provide further opportunities for stand-up comedians to cultivate and burnish their reputations for wit, and large-scale theatre and stadium tours are economically viable for a conspicuous number of comedians, stand-up comedy is a significant player in the entertainment industry. But in style or ethos is it in stark contrast to what might be called the alternative comedy scene today? A greater diversity of voices—a stated goal rarely achieved in the original Alternative Comedy movement—and some experimentation with the form might distinguish the latter from the former, but—at least from the perspective of a reasonably informed outsider to the scene(s) such as myself—it appears to be difference in scale rather than in kind.

Neil Washbourne—in his “Pressing for No Change? Political Correctness, the Defence of the ‘mainstream’ and Class in UK Newspaper Responses to the Emergence of ‘Alternative Comedy’,” the first chapter of “Interpreting Alternative Comedy”—addresses this issue head-on, at least in terms of how alternative was being framed by the press at the time. He notes how much of the vernacular theorizing of alternative comedy took place within a media landscape composed of those who were invested in a status quo and thus predisposed to reject it. A close reading indicates that it wasn’t until figures such as Ben Elton, Rik Mayall, and Alexei Sayle became part of their television landscape, which brings both possibilities and demands different from live performance, that any attention—and outrage—was directed towards it. As the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic ethos of alternative comedy became saddled with the cumbersome ‘politically correct’ label—much as the contemporary orientation is saddled with ‘wokeness’—the press created a straw man, understanding the new comedians as primarily forwarding a political agenda, as opposed to primarily attempting to be funny without recourse to racism and the like. And any deviation from an ideal, particularly among those who began to receive mainstream success, comprised proof positive of alternative comedy’s fundamental flaw, that in its politically correct form it was ‘not funny.’ Jonjo Brady, in ‘The Dramatic Script of Alternative Comedy,’ traces the internal ambivalence directed towards any commercial success and mainstream validation within a community understanding itself as engaging a politics of antagonism, using such delightfully rhetorical flourishes as “All of our jaded militants are so repelled by the notion of recuperation […] and is this any surprise when it is they themselves who position the movement in some fallacious realm existing only outside the complex interplays that make up structural realities?” (196-97, emphasis in original). He suggests this binary needs to be supplanted through a politics of affirmation, “away from ‘authenticity’ and towards creativity. We position comedy within an ongoing process of pluralist connection and disruption motivated by a desire to create and affirm difference (204, emphasis in original). This is the chapter I will likeliest come back to several times, as Brady provides an intriguing entryway into discussing some of stand-up comedy’s inherent contradictions.

The last section, “Alternative Comedy Today,” is in some ways about legacy. The always excellent Marianna Keisalo, in “Alternative Comedy in Finland: Juhani Nevalainen, Musician Not Comedian,” profiles an outlier within the contemporary Finnish stand-up comedy scene, one which post-dates and has been influenced by English and American stand-up. If an audience walks into a venue framed as stand-up comedy encounters someone doing something different from expectations—music, props, and very few moments approaching ‘jokes’—when does ‘different from’ transform into ‘alternative.’ Keisalo uses this Nevalainen to consider the creative dialogic tension between convention and invention that defines all changes in art and especially stand-up, given how playing with convention is part of the elaboration of the incongruous and the ‘making the strange familiar and the familiar strange’ at its heart. Ellie Tomsett’s “‘Less Dick Jokes’: Women-Only Comedy Line-Ups, Audience Expectations and Negotiating Stereotypes” provides insight into the ongoing reality of a lack of representation for women in comedy rooms despite a purported commitment to diversity. What are the benefits of women-only nights, what are audience expectations, and do they serve to open up new possibilities or can they somehow marginalize women’s voices further by essentializing them? For those quantifiable data-inclined, Tomsett grounds her work in online surveys and follow-up interviews conducted whilst Researcher in Residence at the UK Women in Comedy Festival from 2013 to 2019. Finally, Sophie Quirk and Ed Wilson, in “New Alternative Comedy: Productive Crises c.2005–Present” brings the tensions discussed by Brady to the present day: one of the ‘crises’ was the mainstreaming of stand-up comedy and the concomitant homogeneity it invariably produced, yet in response comedians such as Stewart Lee and Josie Long introduced a form of metacomedy that exposed this homogeneity, much as the early alternatives would parody the working men’s club comedians. The second crisis was the issue of representation, addressed by Tomsett with respect to the paucity of women in both mainstream and alternative spaces but also the absence of people of color and the LGBTQ+ community, which was met with the creation of new spaces and options for previously disenfranchised groups, continuing even after gatekeepers of panel and performance programs began to make resolutions towards greater inclusivity.

Double and Lockyer have put together an important collection that speaks to the ongoing relevance and repercussions of perhaps the most significant movement in English comedy, for all its ambiguous successes. Personally, rather than providing a capstone reflection on an era, it opens up a new series of questions and approaches, applicable not only for this history but for the study of stand-up comedy in broader contexts. The emergent scholarship on Indian stand-up in a time of Modi would benefit from a consideration of comedy under Thatcher. A history of the American comedy boom of the 1980s would benefit from a consideration of the politics of antagonism/politics of affirmation. This is an excellent addition to the Palgrave series.