The Alternative Comedy Movement: When Punk Met Stand-Up
How the alternative comedy movement of the early 1980s overthrew the conventions of British stand-up and created a new satirical mainstream
By Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson, Ph.D. — satire.info
The alternative comedy movement that emerged in British stand-up comedy in the early 1980s was, in retrospect, one of the most consequential satirical revolutions in twentieth-century British culture. Centered on the Comedy Store, which opened in London in 1979, and the Comic Strip club, which opened in 1980, the movement rejected the racist and sexist material that dominated mainstream British club comedy in favor of a new kind of politically engaged, self-consciously anti-establishment humor that drew simultaneously on the punk attitude of the late 1970s and the satirical tradition of the 1960s satire boom. The alternative comedy movement produced a generation of performers who would go on to dominate British television comedy throughout the 1980s and 1990s and to shape the political comedy that followed.
The Political Imperative: Satire Against Thatcherism
The alternative comedy movement was not politically neutral: it emerged in direct opposition to the Thatcher government that came to power in 1979 and drew its satirical energy from the same sources of anger and disillusionment that fueled the broader left-wing cultural resistance to Thatcherism. Ben Elton’s stand-up was explicitly politically engaged, combining savage attacks on Thatcher government policies with the self-aware reflexivity about comedy’s own political position that characterized the best work of the movement. The movement’s political engagement distinguished it from the apolitical or implicitly conservative humor of the mainstream club circuit and gave it the satirical edge that its defenders have consistently emphasized.
The performers who emerged from the alternative comedy scene — including Ben Elton, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Rowland Rivron, and later Steve Coogan, Mark Steel, and many others — went on to create the television satire of the 1980s and 1990s that included The Young Ones, French and Saunders, The Comic Strip Presents, and eventually I’m Alan Partridge and The Office. British stand-up comedy’s history traces the alternative comedy movement within the longer history of British comic performance, and alternative comedy’s academic study situates it within the broader cultural history of the Thatcher era.
Source: satire.info | Edinburgh Fringe Satire