Stand-Up Comedy and Everyday Life: Post-war British Comedy and the Subversive Strain. Christopher Ritchie. Goldsmiths College, London, Ph. D Drama, 1998. - ME Ia- AM GOLDSMITHS 87 0079879 6 Abstract. This thesis "examinee,,, its to life , . stand-up comedy and relation everyday and presents a model of everyday life in the commodity society. It seeks to define stand up comedy and how it works as a performance mode and will offer a definition of the stand-up comedian. It will examine how jokes reflect opinions and attitudes within everyday life and how they can communicate negative cultural myths, stereotypes and ideologies but also reach beyond the merely absurd and comical to present authentic moments that enable us to locate the truth about ourselves. The thesis seeks to locate a stand-up comedy that enables us to understand ourselves in relation to life in the commodity society. The thesis traces a subversive lineage through post-Second World War comedy from The Goon Show through the satirists of the 1960s and Monty Pylhon's Flying Circus to Alternative Comedy and stand-up comedians in the present day. The 'Alternative Comedy moment' between 1979 and 1981 is central to the thesis as is the relation to American stand-up comedy, Punk and the rise of reactionary humour in Britain. Alternative Comedy is identified and placed in a social, political and counter-cultural context. The achievements and failures of this comedy will be discussed with particular focus on the redefinition of the role of women and sexual politics in stand-up comedy and the creation of a thriving London cabaret and comedy scene. An argument against televised stand-up comedy and for live comedy will be put forward, as will an argument for a National Comedy Archive that will reflect the richness and continual changes within stand-up comedy in the last fifty years. 2 Acknowledgments. Thanks to: Nesta Jones, supervisor, for all her enthusiasm and encouragement Simon Trussler for his initial help Dr. Barry Smith, Nottingham Trent University, for initial encouragement Alexei Sayle and Tony Allen for giving up their time The British Academy for funding and Rossi. 3 Contents. Introduction 5 Everyday Life 17 Towards A Definition 38 Stand-Up Comedian/ Stand-Up Comic 66 Jokes 93 Post-War Stand-Up Comedy: A Subversive History 120 Punk, Politics And The National Front 154 The US Influence 176 Alternative Comedy 197 Alternative Comedy: "Action/Reaction/Action" 234 The 1980s And Beyond 249 Towards A Conclusion 275 Bibliography 296 4 Introduction. Stand-up comedy is theatre in its purest sense. It is a stripped down theatre, devoid of prop and set, the barest of light and sound and only the distorted ego of the comedians to convince us to spend time with them. It is an arrogant theatre, a human theatre, a poor theatre. It has its own codes, rules and tricks, cons and clap traps. Eve,ryQne knows what it is but one of the many difficulties is that no one has yet to 'There definejit. is very little we have to bring to stand-up comedy, in the way of cultural baggage, in order to relate to it. It is a very direct mode of communication, sometimes, painfully direct; other t1mes7 w.il fully-' obscure, dated, dross and pointlessly reiterated. Most of us have our favourite comedians who speak the way that we speak, about the things we experience, about the often bizarre everyday life in which we live. Often, the closer the comedian gets to the way we feel, the way we live, the way we relate to each other, the funnier it gets. In some ways, comedy is closer to reportage than theatre. Reportage aims to represent the human experience. Theatre's job is to represent the human experience imaginatively. Reportage relates the facts. Theatre relates the truth of experience in relation to those facts. Reportage tells us how it is. Theatre tells us how we may feel about it. Sometimes, what the comedian is saying is not a joke, but the truth. Sometimes, laughter is the only option. It is comedy's relation to everyday life, the way it can take a spin on an everyday event and make the mundane marvellous, the quotidian bizarre, which is also fascinating. But, of course, not all comedians deal with commentaries on our daily lives: some comedians we employ to look at the dark side, perhaps to say the things we dare not say or uncover the things we or others would prefer to remain hidden. The taboo busters, verbal hooligans, sharp edged satirists and slightly twisted nihilists all have their place in the subterranea of comedy land. We select our favoured performers and employ the stand-up comedian to variously scare us, cheer 5 us, entertain us or inform us of where we may err. Multifunctional for something so simplistic, the comedian with a microphone. And stand-up comedy often works best when it is at its most simplistic, when it does not push to discover hidden agendas, disparate behaviour and alienated relations. Reeves and Mortimer, Harry Hill and Lee Evans, brilliant comedians all and less serious they could not be. Like Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd before them, they are there to make us laugh not think. But sometimes, stand-up moves beyond just entertainment and it tells us something we know but may refuse to recognise and it can investigate the gap between how we see ourselves and how we actually are,'This restless probing renders everyday life into a theatre of the absurd. But it neednot just reduce us to being the butt of our own joke. It can begin to dismantle the mystification of everyday life, the alienation we feel in a complex, commodity driven world, tele-mediated, consumer hungry and strange. Stand-up comedy can show us as people, with deep feelings and with more in common than we may sometimes think. Comedy works on shared reference and relation to experience. By uncovering the confusion of that experience, we can begin to know ourselves and develop strategies to combat the confusion. Comedy can show us as human beings alive in a social world not as just faceless consumer/producer models, like black holes endlessly filled with tedious work and leisure pursuits, constantly changing comestibles and labour saving devices. Stand- up comedy is an act of pure communication, people relating to other people in a world often dispensed through a screen or from a psychic distance. Stand-up comedy can present moments of genuine, authentic communication within our everyday lives. This thesis begins by offering a model of everyday life in the commodity world. This is a world driven by market forces, a strange place, desperately uneven and bizarre. It is an everyday life where we find ourselves alienated. The cornerstone of this was laid by Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist, beginning in the late 1940s and 6 developing the ideas throughout his life. The society that Lefebvre applied his model to has changed radically, accelerating its participants into constantly changing roles of producer and consumer. What Lefebvre would have called bureaucratically controlled consumption is now preTwentyi-irst"century consumer capitalism moving at breakneck speed to recolonise and deregulate the global market place to propagate the prime ideological construct - the commodity. Fashion, leisure, art, entertainment and stand-up comedy, amongst so many other things, have been reduced to commodities, separated from everyday life activity and sold back to us as relief from working. But despite this acceleration, there remains a desire for authentic experience and it is achievable: the commodity is not a totality, yet. This authenticity can often be realised many times throughout the day in moments where we realise ourselves in relation to ourselves and others. It is this function that stand-up comedy can perform, to show us as we really are. The thesis then falls into two parts, the first of which attempts to define stand-up comedy, locate who the comedian is and find out how it works and what it does. An excursion through the history of philosophy in relation to comedy is necessary.Much has been written on the causes of laughter, the structure of jokes and comedy and the behind it psychology all. The successive theories of comedy are examined - Superiority, Incongruity and Relief from Restraint - and filleted for usefulness in locating the essence of stand-up comedy. A 'magpie' approach is employed to sift what is relevant to stand-up in particular: Plato and the sadistic and subversive capabilities of comedy and laughter; Aristotle, the perpetual categorist, and his ideas of ridicule; and Kant and the nature of surprise. Bergson and his exploration of the comic character gives us something to define the stand-up comedian against. Schopenhauer and the incongruous, Freud's relief and Orwell and satire are visited. The disparate nature of theoriesý deal with differing aspects of humour, and much is /, found irrelevant to our definition. 7 After dealing with the general, we move to the specific and attempt to define this chimerical comedian. A difference between stand-up comic and stand-up comedian is established, narrowing the field somewhat, through an exploration of character and persona. The mechanics of performance are examined and the process of stand-up comedy is dismantled. How does the comedian work? It is the establishment of a relation between performer and audience and this is a complex, shifting relationship absolutely dependent on confidence: the confidence of the audience in the confidence of the performer. The performer/audience relation is not so singular however, and the idea of 'liking' is developed.