In the final episode of his TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, Lee tells his audience at the Mildmay Club in Stoke Newington that he is disappointed with their reaction to a particular joke: ‘D’you know what? I’ve been running this in live for about six months and there is normally applause there. [laughter]’ This small complaint grows comically vast, as he starts to snipe about how the audience fails to understand how hard it is to be a comedian: ‘We lose, it’s very stressful, we lose a lot of people to the – [a few laughs] We you know, like Hancock and er – Lenny Bruce, all these guys, ’cos it’s, it’s, y-you, you-’ This builds to an outrageous accusation: ‘I mean, audiences like you, you know, you – [a few laughs] you as good as murdered Robin Williams. [outraged laughter, seven seconds]’ As his complaints get ever more outrageous, Lee takes the audience to task for their incompetence:

After telling them he walks onstage every night ‘through a forest of ghosts’ of dead comedians – and pretending he can see these ghosts right now – he shouts more accusations out into the crowd. He tells them the blood of these comedians is ‘on you’, and included among the dead are ‘the old music hall guys!’¹

In this routine, Lee turns a common assumption about stand-up on its head, implying that the audience – and not the comedian – are to blame for the failure of a gag. A review of a live show performed a few months before this routine was filmed notes his skill in ‘deconstructing the art form he’s performing while performing it’,² and this ability to deconstruct and reinvent stand-up is often seen as central to Lee’s work.

Yet the routine is also absolutely rooted in the defining features of stand-up comedy. Tony Allen’s definition of the form, as quoted in the Introduction, conspicuously applies here. Lee is performing ‘in the first person’. The routine is about him, about his complaints and frustrations as a comedian, and it is his persona – the hangdog arrogance of the disappointed idealist, undercut by barely hidden playfulness – that makes it funny. He ‘speaks directly to the audience’, berating them as a group and singling out individuals for particular scorn. Finally, there is a strong sense that ‘the performance is spontaneous’.³ Even though at the time of filming, Lee had been performing this routine for months, and its basic structure was set, he was still able to respond to things happening right in front of him on this particular night.

What is particularly interesting about this routine is that it shows such a strong awareness of the history of stand-up in the UK. It references the roots of the form in nineteenth-century music hall. One of the comedians mentioned, Tony Hancock, started his career in the variety theatres of the mid twentieth century. The Americans mentioned, Lenny Bruce and Robin Williams, influenced the beginnings of the UK alternative comedy movement of the 1980s. Even the venue in which it was filmed is significant. The Mildmay Club is a working men’s club, part of the club circuit which became the main location for stand-up in the 1960s and 1970s.

The routine also relates to history in another way. By focusing on the job of the comedian and the working conditions that comedians experience – for example, suffering audiences that ‘can’t follow the development of an idea through’ – Lee offers a clue about one of the main drivers shaping the way stand-up has evolved in the UK.

Music Hall

Music hall developed in the north of England during the 1840s and later spread to London and throughout the UK.⁴ For two generations the audiences were working-class and lower-middle-class patrons of all ages. At first each music hall was a one-off, but northern entrepreneurial performers developed small chains of such venues, benefiting from economies of scale in employing performers and spreading the risks of any specific venue making losses. Large-scale, nationally oriented chains of music halls did not emerge until the 1890s. During that time the large investment needed required broadening the audience to include the middle classes. Differentiated ticket prices ensured both a degree of respectability for the middle classes and practices of class segregation in the hall.

In the heyday of music hall there were no stand-up comedians. Comic performances consisted of songs sung in character. Dagmar Kift suggests that the characters portrayed in music hall songs came in three types. First, there were characters representing the ‘man-in-the-street and his everyday attitudes and habits at home, at work and at leisure’. Second, there were regional, national, and racial stereotypes, including Irishmen, Scots, Northerners, Cockneys, and Black people – the last of these portrayed by white performers in blackface. Finally, there were characters based on gender reversal, with male performers cross-dressing as women and vice versa.⁵

The way in which the songs were performed was crucial to music hall’s identity, and it was this performance style which paved the way for stand-up in the UK. A disapproving press report on a music hall show, published in 1856, described the nature of the performances: ‘They are sung, or rather roared, with a vehemence that is stunning, and accompanied with spoken passages of the most outrageous character.’⁶ The spoken passages are particularly significant, and not just because of their ‘outrageous character’ – an indication that sexual innuendo was a popular theme. According to Peter Bailey, in the ‘patter’ – the spoken sections – the singers ‘insistently broke through the fictions of their impersonations with an ad lib gagging commentary’.⁷ In other words, they were performing spontaneously, in the first person, and speaking directly to the audience.

By the turn of the twentieth century, patter was becoming increasingly important, largely due to the success of one of music hall’s biggest stars, Dan Leno. In a biography published shortly after Leno’s death, J. Hickory Wood notes that: ‘One calls his performances on the halls “songs” for want of a pithy word that is better; but they were not really songs at all. They were diverting monologues in a style of which he was as undoubtedly the originator as he was its finest exponent.’ He goes on to praise Leno’s ‘amusing wealth of monologue or “patter”’ and describes the actual song verses that surrounded his talk as ‘a somewhat unnecessary interlude’.⁸ Similarly, in 1904, Max Beerbohm suggested that Leno differed from the ‘classic tradition’ of music hall because he ‘shifted the centre of gravity from song to “patter”’.⁹

The recordings Leno made fail to capture the excitement of his act, because he died in 1904, long before it was possible to make live theatre recordings and thus capture the comedian playing to an audience. However, they give a reasonable idea of his style. For example, the recording of his song ‘The Grass Widower’ starts with four sung lines, followed by over a minute of patter, before finishing with a few more lines of singing.¹⁰ The song is about a man seeing his wife off at the station for a few days away by herself. Here is a section of the patter, which we have broken down into a series of gags reminiscent of the type comedians would use in variety in the decades to follow:

The first two gags play on the comic stereotype of the monstrous wife, which was common in both music hall and variety. This explains Leno’s glee at the prospect of being without her for a week in the first joke, and the punchline hinges on describing him as a ‘massive brute’, given he was actually a short, thin man. The stereotype is also behind him wishing death on her in the second gag. The third joke comically reinvents how time works – and anticipates one of the jokes in Monty Python’s classic ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch.

Leno’s dominant use of patter has led John Fisher to identify him as ‘the archetype of the modern stand-up comedian’.¹¹ Other accounts identify different origins for stand-up, such as the spoken comic elements of the blackface minstrel show, whose development was contemporary with that of music hall and which has been recognised as contributing to the rise and performance of stand-up in the USA.¹² However, what makes Leno so convincing as a key figure in the development of UK stand-up is that he was part of a continuous tradition of comic performers, stretching back to the mid nineteenth century and forward to the comedians who would populate the stages of variety theatres in the mid twentieth century. Although there were blackface acts in Victorian music hall, few survived through the variety era, and those that did were not solo comedians. G. H. Elliott, for example, sang straight rather than comic songs, and Nosmo King mainly worked as a double act with his son.

Variety Theatre

With the rise of national music hall chains, the way the entertainment was organised was radically altered. By the late nineteenth century, music halls had come to resemble conventional theatres, and changes to licensing laws meant removing alcohol from the auditorium. Around the same time, the policy of running one long show lasting the whole evening was replaced by the ‘twice nightly’ system, with a shorter, tighter show playing twice a night. What had been known as music hall now came to be more normally referred to as variety theatre.

The front cloth comic – one who performs in front of the painted backdrop that hangs nearest to the front of the stage – was central to variety. The ‘stand-up’ (though that phrase was not commonly used then) performed by such comedians was crucial to the smooth running of variety shows. It allowed for elaborate acts with large stage set-ups (magicians, dance troupes, animal acts, big bands, speciality acts, and so on) to be organised out of sight of the audience during the front cloth comic’s act; therefore, for the show to ‘run without gaps’.¹³ It was this controlled and controllable organisation of variety that allowed for two complete shows per evening, making variety economically more sustainable than the music hall. This also made front cloth comedy central to variety as both a cultural and a commercial proposition.

The change from music hall to variety also led to changes in audience behaviour. Music hall’s drinking audiences tended to be rowdier, with chatter from the bars and the people wandering through the gallery at the back threatening to drown out the unamplified acts on the stage.¹⁴ In variety, the audience members were not drinking during the show and were seated in the orderly rows of a conventional theatre auditorium. As a result, they were quieter and more attentive. Whereas music hall singers had to ‘roar’ out their songs – as described in the 1856 account – variety performers could adopt a quieter approach, particularly when theatres began to introduce microphones and public address systems in the 1930s.

It is likely that these new working conditions encouraged comedians to use more patter, allowing them to adopt a quieter, more conversational style. An advertisement for Standard Sound Reproducing Equipment in a 1937 issue of The Era shows a comedian speaking into a microphone, suggesting that his ability to convey his jokes to the audience was mainly attributable to the use of the company’s products.¹⁵ The skill with which comedians wielded the spoken word to stimulate laughter from audiences ensured their importance to popular culture of the time. Famous variety comedians often also enjoyed success in radio (BBC and European stations broadcasting into the UK from Europe), gramophone recordings, and the British film industry.¹⁶

The subject matter joked about by the front cloth comics of variety echoed that of their music hall predecessors, with jokes about marital strife and a delight in innuendo. For example, a routine by Suzette Tarri recorded at the Argyle Theatre in Birkenhead in 1939 includes the following: ‘Only this morning, I said to my ’usband, “Where were you last night?” He said, “It’s a lie!” [laughter] Oo! Oo, what a washout! He goes to bed every night in his tin ’elmet. [brief laughter] Says he needs to be ready for any emergency. [laughter, nine seconds]’¹⁷ This short section includes two types of innuendo, comically suggesting both sex – the implication of her husband’s infidelity – and toilets, with the suggestion that her husband might use his helmet instead of a chamber pot if an emergency required it.

Max Miller – arguably variety’s most celebrated front cloth comic – put innuendo at the very heart of his act. In a review published in 1940, George Orwell praised the ‘startling obscenities’ in Miller’s act, noting that they were ‘only possible because they are expressed in doubles entendres which imply a common background in the audience’.¹⁸ Miller dressed in garish suits, was an enormously skilled and charismatic performer, and played a sexually confidant bar-room philosopher, giving the audience the choice of books from which he should choose his jokes – the jokes from the ‘blue’ book often dripping with innuendo – though completed as vulgar (sexually explicit) gags only in the minds of the engaged audiences.¹⁹

This was just one example of how he turned the delivery of innuendo into a game played with the audience. Miller’s act was recorded live at various points of his career, and this kind of game features in many of these recordings. At the Finsbury Park Empire in 1942, he takes the audience to task for picking up the obscene possibilities the word ‘do’, which he uses while introducing a song: ‘I’ll do “Josephine”. Do “Josephine”. [laughter] What’s wrong with that, go on, make something of that, go on, make- [laughter] Nice lot of people, eh, Finsbury Park! [laughter]’²⁰ Fifteen years later, at the Met, Edgware Road in 1957, he is still using the same trick of blaming the audience for understanding what he was clearly implying: ‘Oh you – you wicked lot. [laughter] You’re the kind of people who get me a bad name. [laughter]’²¹

Miller’s use of innuendo plays on core qualities of stand-up, relying on his garish persona, and his direct interaction with the audience, commenting on their reactions with apparent spontaneity. The way Miller blames the audience clearly anticipates how Stewart Lee would berate the people watching him in 2016. Like Lee, Miller would also directly comment on his working conditions. For example, at the Holborn Empire in 1938, he tells the audience that its manager, Bertie Adams, hears all his songs and gags ‘because he tells me what to cut out, you see? [laughter] He does, he tells me, I don’t take any notice, but he tells me. [laughter]’²² He then says Adams is on the side of the stage right now, keeping a close eye on him. While it is unlikely that Adams was really watching him from the wings, Miller’s suggestion was not entirely fanciful. Variety theatres were subject to de facto censorship from local Watch Committees, and the standard contract issued by the Moss Empires chain forbade performers from ‘giving expression to any vulgarity or words having a double meaning’.²³

Working Men’s Clubs

During the 1950s, the circuit of variety theatres that once dominated the British entertainment industry went into sharp decline, its demise significantly hastened by the arrival of independent television in 1955. By the beginning of the 1960s, there were only a few of the theatres left, and the form of stand-up needed somewhere else to grow and develop. Britain’s club circuit filled that gap.

Since the mid nineteenth century, working men’s clubs had sprung up in working-class communities all over the UK. A central organisation – the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union (CIU) – was founded in 1862 to represent the interests of working men’s clubs. There was a rapid rise in the number of CIU-affiliated clubs in the mid twentieth century, reaching a peak of 4,033 in 1974.²⁴ Entertainment had played an important part in such clubs since the late nineteenth century, and its importance increased significantly after the decline of variety. Alongside the working men’s clubs, there were also privately owned nightclubs and theatre clubs. Manchester had a number of these, most notably the Embassy Club, established by the comedian Bernard Manning in 1959. Perhaps the most famous of the privately owned venues in the club circuit was Batley Variety Club. Between its opening in 1967 and closing in 1978, this legendary club attracted a series of famous stars – including Shirley Bassey, Eartha Kitt, and Louis Armstrong – to appear in the small West Yorkshire town in which it was located.²⁵

The style of stand-up that proliferated on the club circuit was conservative in style and content. Material took the form of standard jokes, as shared in workplaces, neighbourhoods, schools, and society as a whole. A 1975 performance by George Roper gives a good idea of the style: ‘One Irish fella went into a shop, he said, “I want some nails. I do. Yis. I do.” The lady said, “How long do you want them?” He said, “I wanna keep them.” [laughter] Fella went to a transport caff, he said, “I want seven cups of tea in a flask. Two without sugar.” [laughter]’²⁶

These gags were based on standard patterns, structures, and stereotypes and often began with the same opening lines. A 1971 documentary about comedians in working men’s clubs took its title from one of the commonest opening lines: There Was This Fella …²⁷ As this suggests, jokes tended to be about a generalised third person – ‘this fella’ – rather than being personalised to the comedian. Moreover, gags were seen as common property. When Bobby Knutt started developing his stand-up act in the early 1970s, he began by taking material from another performer and then added some gags his uncle had told him until ‘I’d probably replaced about half of the material with other stuff’.²⁸ Ken Goodwin recalled appearing on club comedy showcase The Comedians around the same time: ‘I had my list of jokes. So every time I heard one of mine told [by another comedian], I had to cross it off. I was adding and subtracting all the time.’²⁹

The northern Irish comedian Frank Carson’s catchphrase, ‘It’s the way I tell ’em!’, articulates the role of jokes nicely. The interchangeability of gags meant that it was the manner in which they were performed that differentiated one comedian from the next. This was noted by the London-born comic Mike Reid, who asserted that ‘I’d nick anyone’s material. But to be fair to myself, I have to say that once I’ve given it the Mike Reid treatment, they wouldn’t recognise it themselves.’³⁰ This claim notes both the overwhelming focus on jokes and also the profound importance of performance skills and styles in a setting where jokes and formulae for jokes are well worn. This is particularly true given that 1970s club comedians tended to adopt similar stage wear – velvet jacket, frilly shirt, bow tie – described by Bobby Knutt as ‘the standard uniform of the day for all the comics’.³¹

Club comedy was as conservative politically as stylistically, reinforcing old-fashioned attitudes by drawing on common stereotypes. Jokes were populated with nagging wives, mean Scots, thick Irishmen, and so on. Racism was rife, with South Asian immigrants a particular target. As Bernard Manning acknowledged: ‘Everybody’s giving the Pakistanis an hammering.’³² The violence of this image captures the implicit violence in such material. This gag, told by Marti Caine in 1975, was in circulation throughout the 1970s and 1980s: ‘Ey, you don’t see many Pakistanis these days, do you? Chinese have discovered that they taste like chicken and – [laughter and applause, six seconds]’.³³ This manages to cram in two racist insults in the space of two lines, both reinforcing stereotypes of Chinese people serving types of meat Westerners would see as inappropriate and imagining Pakistanis being literally butchered.

Again, this style of stand-up developed in response to working conditions. Bernard Manning recognised that ‘audiences in clubs are very, very, very critical’,³⁴ and Bobby Knutt argued that they could be actively antagonistic: ‘They didn’t give a shit about the “Turns”, as we were all called. We’d worked with many a good comic … and seen lots of ’em die on their arses for no other reason than that the punters just weren’t listening.’³⁵ In a book published in 1971, David Nathan summed up the problem: ‘In many of the clubs the performer is treated with little respect and sometimes with contempt. The club is there for other purposes and could exist without him … Bingo, bar sales, hot pies, lottery tickets and gaming tables take precedence in many places.’³⁶

Standard jokes based on common stereotypes made sense in a context where audiences could be indifferent, talkative, or even hostile. Such material is well suited for short attention spans, because if one gag is missed, another will be along shortly. This was comedy for audiences that, as Stewart Lee might put it, couldn’t ‘follow the development of an idea through’. As for the politics of the material, this reflected attitudes that were built into the structures of working men’s clubs. Women were not allowed to become full members, and in 1977 Sheila Capstick began a campaign for equal membership for women – it was not until 2007 that the CIU would agree to this change.³⁷ Some working men’s clubs even operated a formal colour bar, refusing to allow entry to people who were not white. In the 1970s, the CIU went to court to defend the rights of the East Ham South Conservative Club and the Preston Dockers’ Club to continue to operate a colour bar.³⁸ If such policies reflected the attitudes of the audience, it is easy to see why jokes about wives or Pakistanis proliferated, particularly as they may have helped comedians to deflect hostility away from themselves.

Alternative Comedy

Meanwhile, a different stand-up scene was developing across the UK, in the folk clubs that were growing up from the 1960s. Notable comedians emerged from this scene, each with a strong regional identity: Billy Connolly (Scotland); Mike Harding (north of England); Max Boyce (Wales); and Jasper Carrott (Birmingham). In each case their stand-up careers recapitulated the rise of stand-up comedy out of music hall – starting with the singing of often comic songs, to specialising in comic songs, to becoming primarily a spoken word performer. Each of them continued to perform comic songs as part of their act well into the 1980s, though typically songs became a minor feature of their acts, there to provide variety within their mainly spoken performances. Folk comedy was dominated by white, male performers, but the best of them avoided the sexism and racism of working men’s club comedy and preferred personal anecdotes and observations to standard jokes. The style of delivery was gentler and more conversational, so that the personality of the individual performer became the centre of the act.

It was not until the end of the 1970s that the conservatism of working men’s club comedy was fundamentally challenged. On 19 May 1979, the Comedy Store opened in Soho. It was intended as little more than a showcase for new acts, modelled on a venue of the same name in Los Angeles, but it acted as a magnet for a group of performers who had been struck by the artistic and political potential of stand-up. A working-class Marxist art school graduate, Alexei Sayle, was the first compère, and he was soon joined by anarchist squatter and Speakers’ Corner veteran Tony Allen, followed by Andy de la Tour, Jim Barclay, Maggie Steed, and Keith Allen, as well as double acts the Outer Limits (Peter Richardson and Nigel Planer) and 20th Century Coyote (Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson).

A few weeks after the Comedy Store opened, some of these performers formed themselves into a loose collective called Alternative Cabaret, staging shows around London and beyond and taking up a ten-month residency at the Elgin pub in Ladbroke Grove. This sowed the seeds of a live comedy circuit made up of small clubs, often based in pubs, which continues to this day. In October 1980, another set of performers who had met at the Comedy Store opened a club called the Comic Strip, which garnered national press attention, leading to a tour, a live LP, and a long-running series of television films.

These initiatives spawned an entire scene which became known as ‘alternative cabaret’, the name of the loose collective losing its uppercase initials to become a generic term. Although it was also known – and tends to be remembered – as alternative comedy, the word cabaret was more commonly used. This reflected the fact that the emerging circuit played host not just to stand-ups but also performance poets, singers, street performers, and speciality acts. It is not surprising that this rich mixture of styles and genres would encourage the new alternative comedians to take an inventive, innovative approach to stand-up, refusing to conform to the dominant, established norms.

Punk was a major influence on alternative comedy, and a number of the performers took on its aggressive approach. Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson’s Dangerous Brothers routine, for example, was a loud, violent slapstick deconstruction of a standard joke.³⁹ Alexei Sayle verbally assaulted the audience while compering at the Comic Strip, calling them ‘fuckfaces’ and telling them: ‘This is a People’s Collective, you do what I fuckin’ tell you, all right?? [laughter]’ He would even jab at them for approving of him, following a political gag by mockingly imagining their reaction to it: ‘Yeah, political satire, yeah! This is what we’ve come from Islington for, eh?? [laughter]’⁴⁰ A journalist described Keith Allen’s approach to the audience at the Comedy Store as ‘on the brink of violence, brooking no criticism from the audience, outstaring them with a look from his roll-around popout eyes’, and noted that he assaulted a heckler ‘with his own beer’.⁴¹

This kind of aggression was as much a response to the audience at the Comedy Store as it was an expression of punk attitude. The shows started late and attracted audiences which could be apathetic, hostile, and often drunk. For the first few months, the venue adopted a gong show structure that empowered rowdy audiences by encouraging them to shout ‘gong’ to get rid of acts they were not enjoying. Sometimes they would simply talk among themselves rather than listening to the act on the stage. Yet instead of falling back on formulaic jokes as comedians had done in working men’s clubs, some performers responded to audience hostility with aggression of their own.

The comedians also took action to change their working conditions. Alexei Sayle believed that ‘sexism and racism were rife in the entertainment business and needed to be challenged’, and thus used his position as Comedy Store compère to ‘impose my own view and gong off a comic I thought was stepping over the line’.⁴² Tony Allen took similar action, inviting left-wing actor friends to come along to the Comedy Store so they could outnumber the more traditional acts, and rigorously promoting a non-sexist, non-racist approach. Gradually, this changed the nature of the Comedy Store as a venue. Moreover, both Alternative Cabaret and the Comic Strip were set up to create performance spaces that were less hostile than the Comedy Store.

The Elgin, for example, attracted an alternative crowd made up of activists, anarchists, and squatters, who were sympathetic to experiments with form. Sayle has recalled performing a routine there based on an audience quiz in which he would threaten people who got the answers wrong with an air pistol. This went ‘really well’ at the Elgin, but when he tried it later that week at the Comedy Store it just confused the audience and provoked them to shout, ‘Gong!’ He realised that the reason it worked at the Elgin was that the regulars there ‘tolerated my experimenting with material’.⁴³

As the circuit grew, the audiences that were attracted to the alternative cabaret clubs springing up around London tended to be more like that at the Elgin than the Comedy Store – young, open-minded, and left wing. Generally, comedians and audiences had similar political sympathies. Yet rather than simply confirm the audience’s beliefs, comedians would mock them – albeit from an insider’s perspective. Pauline Melville, for example, usually performed as Edie, a character who constantly made faux pas while trying to show off her left-wing credentials:

As well as shifting stand-up to the left, alternative comedy was a vital step in the stylistic evolution of stand-up in the UK. The autobiographical, conversational style that dominates today had begun to develop in America from the 1950s when comics such as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce reinvented the form, and many of the early alternative comedians were aware of – and influenced by – not just Bruce but also more recent stand-ups such as Richard Pryor, Steve Martin and Robin Williams. Indeed, Williams would sometimes turn up at the Comedy Store to perform a set.

Alternative comedy allowed the UK to catch up and create its own tradition of stand-up, with self-authored original material based on personal perspective. Tony Allen’s material, for example, reflected his worldview as an anarchist squatting rights activist, with a strong interest in sexual politics. One routine saw him imagine a postcoital conversation between a man and a woman:

The characters Allen conjures up here allow him to send up the subtle ways that men assert their dominance. The man is overbearing and insistent on his sexual potency, symbolised by his ability to give his partner an orgasm (‘It matters to me’). The woman tries to avoid upsetting her partner (‘Doesn’t matter’) and only puts him down – thus providing the punchline – when really pushed to it. Allen paints a vivid comic picture of male touchiness around sexual performance and refuses to let himself off the hook. Following the imaginary conversation, he confesses to seeing some graffiti written in mascara on the mirror of his flat: ‘Postpone. Post-coital. Postmortems.’ The sexual frankness and explicit language in this routine goes far beyond the innuendo of the variety comedian, and the way its comedy is rooted in close observation of lived experience is fundamentally different from the standard jokes told in working men’s clubs.

Black British Stand-Up

Although there were a few Black comedians in the working men’s clubs of the 1970s (such as Charlie Williams, Jos White, and Sammy Thomas) and the alternative comedy circuit of the 1980s (such as Felix Dexter, Sheila Hyde, Buddy Hell, and Kevin Seisay) – as well as the individual success of Lenny Henry around the same time – it was not until the 1990s that an autonomous Black circuit began to emerge. The Black Comedy Club started at the Albany Empire in 1989 with the aim of fostering new talent and attracting new audiences.⁴⁶ A few years later, in 1993, John Simmit started his Upfront Comedy Club at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, and has run shows under this name at theatres and arts centres around the UK continuing right up to the present. Simmit explains, ‘We, unbeknownst to us, were creating a circuit which was friendly to Black audiences. So we came on talking to our peers, so we didn’t have to make the compromises some of our pioneering predecessors had to.’⁴⁷

The Black circuit has produced its own stars – including Angie Le Mar, Curtis Walker, Gina Yashere, Slim, and Richard Blackwood – who can pull big audiences while often remaining largely unknown in the mainstream. This is because, despite occasional exceptions such as The Real McCoy and The Richard Blackwood Show, television commissioners have either failed to notice the popularity of the Black circuit or failed to recognise the talent it has nurtured. Some Black comedians – notably Gina Yashere – only achieved major recognition once they moved to the USA.

Recently, Black British comedy has begun to attract more recognition, particularly through the stellar success and conscious intervention of Mo Gilligan (Figure 1.1). Gilligan was working in retail when he first began to perform at the Sunday Show at the Slug and Lettuce in Soho, going on to become its regular host, and later running his own Cracking Up Comedy nights. However, he felt that though he got some of his stand-up education from the US Def Comedy Jam, there was no route in the UK for him to play such venues as the Comedy Store, let alone ‘[b]reaking through to the mainstream’.⁴⁸ His breakthrough came when his social media videos started going viral, particularly his Cockney ‘geezer’ character with his ‘coupla cans’ catchphrase. In 2017–2018, his online success allowed him to play big venues on The Coupla Cans Tour, which encompassed a West End run and dates in Australia, eventually selling 50,000 tickets. He has gone on to star in a number of popular television shows.

Figure 1.1 Mo Gilligan performing on the Alternative Stage at the Leeds Festival at Bramhall Park on 24 August 2018 in Leeds, England

Photo: Carla Speight / Contributor / Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images.

Gilligan has used his success to draw long-overdue attention to the Black British comedy scene. He has headlined two live shows at the O2 Arena, entitled Mo Gilligan + Friends: The Black British Takeover, featuring comedians such as Slim, Babatúndé Aléshé, Thanyia Moore, Richard Blackwood, Eddie Kadi, Angie Le Mar, and Kyrah Gray. He also presented a Channel 4 documentary, Mo Gilligan: Black British and Funny, focusing on the history of the scene, talking to its stars, and examining the problems Black British stand-ups have experienced trying to break into the mainstream. In the programme John Simmit – one of the key pioneers of the Black British comedy circuit – argues that it ‘came on the heels of the alternative comedy circuit’ because ‘it’s people talking about their real experiences, not stereotypes’.⁴⁹

This highlights the importance of the Black British comedy circuit in opening up the autobiographical, conversational style of stand-up to new voices, articulating different types of lived experience. A moment from Mo Gilligan’s second Netflix special, There’s Mo to Life, provides an excellent example. In a routine about his experiences working in retail, he talks about having to ‘code switch’ and illustrates the point by asking a Black person called Anton in the front row what he does for a living. Hearing that Anton is a carpenter, Gilligan replies: ‘Carpenter! Wow! Great job, man! You must be code switching all the time! [laughter]’ To illustrate, he imagines Anton talking to his friends in a strong multicultural London English accent: ‘You’re chillin’ with the guys – “Yeah fam, that’s I was saying, cuz. Man might go out this Sa’urday, you know?”’ Then he mimes picking up the phone and shows Anton adopting a completely different voice, posh and full of forced brightness: ‘Hallo? [laughter] Hi! Ha! Yes! Yes, yes! OK. Can I make a rocking horse? OK. [laughter] Yes! Yes, OK! OK, you need it for Friday, this Friday? Yeah! OK. All right, I’ll see you Friday. OK. Bye bye! Bye bye! Yeah.’ He mimes putting the phone down, and shows Anton snapping back to multicultural London English: ‘“Man ain’t makin’ no fuckin’ rocking horse, cuz!” [laughter and applause]’ This moment encapsulates what John Simmit says about the Black British comedy scene as a whole. By building it out of a conversation with an audience member, Gilligan is ‘talking to [his] peers’ and emphasising that he is ‘talking about their real experiences’.

UK Stand-Up Today

In the 1980s, alternative comedy grew from an anarchic, loosely organised scene into a professionalised commercial circuit, with the most successful comedians being able to tour big venues. Perhaps the most powerful symbol of this change was the UK’s first arena comedy show, Newman and Baddiel Live and In Pieces, staged at Wembley Arena on 10 December 1993, with Robert Newman and David Baddiel performing solo stand-up sets and a series of sketches as a double act.

Since then, the live comedy scene has continued to grow, with a night out at a comedy club or a tour show by a well-known comedian becoming an established part of British popular culture. By 2010, it had become normal for the most commercially successful comedians – including Lee Evans, Peter Kay, Eddie Izzard, Russell Howard, and Michael McIntyre – to appear in multi-date arena tours. For example, in 2012, McIntyre’s Showtime tour saw the comic gross £21 million for performing seventy-three arena shows to a total audience of over 600,000 people.⁵⁰

The working conditions that comedians experience when playing arenas have encouraged them to develop a distinctive style of stand-up. Large projection screens are used as a backdrop, showing a live feed of the comedian in close-up, to make the performance accessible to the people seated furthest away. Arena comics take a very physical approach to stand-up, running up and down around the enormous stages, and using their entire bodies to act out exaggerated, cartoonish impersonations. This physical style demands headset or clip microphones rather than handheld ones that would restrict the comedian’s movements. The sheer number of people in the audience encourages material with the broadest possible appeal, avoiding difficult or controversial subjects in favour of universalised observations.⁵¹

While some comedians tour arenas, other have reacted against the commercialisation of stand-up by establishing smaller, quirkier venues appealing to more niche audiences. In 2007, The Guardian published an article recognising the emergence of a new scene, describing it as a ‘refreshing antidote to slick, male-dominated mainstream comedy’ and labelling it ‘DIY comedy’.⁵² More recently, the comedians associated with the scene have revived the term ‘alternative comedy’.

Josie Long is one of the pioneers of this new wave of alternative comedy, her early stand-up style being based around large presentation pads filled with her own delightfully amateurish art. In her 2006 show Kindness & Exuberance, she lists ‘the smallest things that make me happy’, starting with ‘when bus drivers stop in the street to have conversations with each other’. As she delivers the line, she smiles proudly and reveals a colourful cartoon of two red double-decker buses, with the passengers represented by faces cut out from magazines – getting a big, warm laugh from the audience. After acting out her imagined conversation between the drivers, she confides: ‘Artistically, this is the genuine best I can do. [laughter] And I’ve also thought about who’s on the bus. Like, who’s on this bus?’ She points to one of the magazine faces and declares, excitedly, ‘It’s The X Files’ Gillian Anderson! [laughter] Don’t leave me on my own, I will make a collage. [laughter]’⁵³

She explains that when she started to establish herself, she struggled to make her playful approach come across to audiences in London’s comedy clubs: ‘I was temping every day, I was gigging every night, and just dying on my arse every night. I was, like … “Well, I don’t want to do anything else, so I guess this is my life forever” … And then when I started doing my own shows, it got a lot easier.’⁵⁴ Running her own clubs and touring her own solo shows meant that she attracted new audiences with similar interests to her own. Like the 1980s alternative comedians before her she was helping to create a new scene, running her own shows in order to attract new and different audiences. By changing her working conditions in this way, she opened up the space for her to experiment with the form of stand-up and develop her own distinctive comic voice.

Best Living Comedian

Stewart Lee’s flair for analysing and commenting on the art of stand-up even while performing it has won him widespread critical acclaim – in 2018, The Times put him number one in a list of the ‘30 best living comedians’.⁵⁵ The routine quoted in the introduction to this chapter is a typical example, with the relationship between Lee and his audience becoming its very subject. As much as it is a routine that shows awareness of the history of British stand-up, it also reflects the influences of that history. Lee began his career at the end of the 1980s, becoming part of what was still known as alternative comedy. The influences of the pioneers of that scene are very visible in this routine, from berating the audience as Alexei Sayle did, to deconstructing the process of joking in the manner of the Dangerous Brothers.

In turn, Lee became an influence on the new wave of alternative comedy that has grown up in the early years of this century. Josie Long says she was ‘utterly obsessed’ by Fist of Fun, the TV show written by and starring Lee and Richard Herring in 1993 and 1995,⁵⁶ and later, in 2005, Lee chose Long as his tour support. In 2013–2014, he also supported the new scene by curating a TV show for Comedy Central – The Alternative Comedy Experience – which showcased alternative comedians such as Long, Simon Munnery, Bridget Christie, and Tony Law.

Yet although Lee’s style reflects the ethos of alternative comedy, it also shares features that go right back to the roots of UK stand-up. As well as sharing stand-up’s defining features of being performed in the first person, directly to the audience, with the feel of spontaneity, music hall performers were known to draw attention to and comment on their own performance techniques. For example, Little Tich – an unusually short comedian who became one of music hall’s most celebrated stars, particularly for his ‘Big Boot Dance’ – was praised for the ‘sophisticated presentment’ of his material, as he ‘took the audience slyly into his confidence, tipping them the wink, or remarking as he kicked his cap around, “Comic business with hat!”’⁵⁷ There is clearly quite a distance from this kind of knowing comment to hurling mock-furious accusations at the audience while claiming to surrounded by a forest of ghost comedians. Thus, Lee’s routine shows both a connection with stand-up’s music hall origins and how far the form has evolved since then.