Comedy cracks: What happened to the alternatives?

There was a time, at the start of the 1980s, when comedy was widely dubbed the new rock’n'roll as a wave of young comedians, essentially in the wake of punk’s original and angry spasm, took to the stage and made the craft of laughter-making a credible pursuit once again.

The kind of DIY ethic that had prompted the Clash and the Buzzcocks to make music appeared to infuse, if a little belatedly, a generation of stand-ups who rejected the moribund mainstream and shared material that was frequently spiky, often political, and avoided the tired tropes of TV variety, end-of-the-pier and the fast-disappearing, last remnants of music hall.

Interestingly though, while many of the punks were genuinely working class characters – John Rotten and Mark E. Smith, Sid Vicious and Jimmy Pursey, for example – the surge of new comedy was largely driven by a brigade of middle class, university-educated graduates. If Alexei Sayle fiercely paraded his blue collar credentials within this emerging community, he was, unquestionably, a rarity in the room.

The room in question, certainly at the start, was the Comedy Store in London’s Soho, a venue that attempted to capture some of the pioneering spirit of the comedy clubs that had found their feet in New York and San Francisco in the later 1950s and early 1960s.

These intimate and sophisticated night-spots – the Duplex in the Village, the Bay Area’s hungry i – were a platform for a fresh generation of post-war satirists – from Mort Sahl to Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen – to project their wry, and often acerbic, reflections of an America that was both commercially watertight and psychologically insecure, a capitalist dream haunted by nightmares of the nuclear annihilation and communist insurrection.

These aspiring British comedians were younger and less sophisticated than their US predecessors but they brought their brand of invective to bear with Margaret Thatcher, elected as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister in 1979, the principal target of their rancour, ridicule and abuse.

As the Tory right-wing held government and nation firmly in its grasp, there was plenty to get stroppy about – industrial decline, soaring unemployment, military spending, issues of racism and sexism – and the capital’s comic crew employed the weapon of laughter to defuse any notions that the fresh air of authoritarianism was going to revive a wilting patient any time soon.

Yet for all Sayle’s sardony, Ben Elton’s ribaldry, Jo Brand’s radical feminism and the subversive antics of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Thatcher’s reign of terror was barely rattled: she saw off the Argentines, repelled the striking miners and won the next two general elections to hold sway until her very own party dispensed with her services in 1990.

But, in this heated and controversial moment, the new comedy flourished. If you couldn’t bear the policies of the Conservative regime there was at least an outlet for your frustration; you could find a mirror for your misery in a string of sharp-witted jokesters whose routines – an interplay of observation and determined political correctness – were, by the end of that decade, regulars on the small screen, too.

By now, that older group of comics – an ageing school who had regarded mother-in-law gags and casual racism as integral to the role – had been largely displaced by the new breed and so, even if the over-riding power remained in Westminster, on BBC2 and Channel 4 there was now a platform for a bunch of bright sparks to wittily air social grievances beyond the smoky confines of a basement cellar.

After that, what had been once dubbed alternative comedy became something closer to big business. By the time Rob Newman and David Baddiel were selling out Wembley Arena in the early 1990s, the Edinburgh Fringe – the annual jamboree that represented a vigorous retort to the city’s official arts festival – was speedily re-tooled as a production line for the next generation of small screen national treasures: Steve Coogan, Frank Skinner, Harry Hill and Al Murray.

I followed these developments closely – still do, I guess, though rather less avidly – with my first visit to a New York comedy club in 1979, trips to the Comedy Store in the 1980s, then many years of going to Edinburgh, pretty well exclusively for the new comedians. In the end though, it just began to run out of steam for me. Or maybe I did for it.

I missed the amazing League of Gentlemen – until their hit TV series – and Mitchell and Webb – whose Peep Show is arguably the outstanding British sit-com of the last decade – in their early years honing their skills in the bar backrooms of that annual Scottish laughter fest. But, by then, the post-punk vitriol that had fired the original alternatives to grab the microphone had long since evaporated.

Observational commentary, like that which the Peep Show delivers in rich measure, and outlandish surrealism, which the League had in spades, remain mainstays of the contemporary comic landscape and audience-driven improvisation – often hilarious yet essentially manifesto free – has also carved out a significant following.

But just as rock music appeared to lose its political prerogative, so has comedy. As I head to my latest encounter with the current live scene, a trip to Jongleurs in Leeds tonight, I just wonder how much the BNP or economic recession, terrorist threats or the immigration debate, will feature in the entertainment on offer.

Tags: Alternative comedy, Comedy Store, Lenny Buce