COMEDY

POLITICS 107appalling obliviousness to the variance between the ‘modest’ proposaland the consequences of selling one hundred thousand children a yearfor meat is typical of the cognitive distance Swift exploits in order toexpose his targets to maximum contempt. Like Juvenal, and indeed likeBrass Eye, Swift offers no counter-argument that can either beconcretely identified with the authorial position or be consideredsocially constructive. This has made his satire appeal to widelydisparate groups: both English and Irish nationalists have claimed him astheirs; the Protestant and Catholic churches see him as a defender oftheir faiths; Marxists read in his satire a withering critique of bourgeoiscapitalism; and ‘despite his association with misogyny’, Swift has beencelebrated as one of the ‘Fathers of Feminism’ during Women’s HistoryMonth in 1996 (Kelly, 2002:133). ‘Satire’, he wrote in the preface toThe Battle of the Books (1704), ‘is a sort of glass, wherein beholders dogenerally discover everybody’s face but their own’ (Swift, 1984:104).‘ALTERNATIVE’ COMEDY: COMEDIANS ANDCOMEDIANSIn 1971, Granada Television first broadcast The Comedians, a simpleand enormously popular show that ran for more than fifty episodes andcountless repeats. The show is notable because its stars, many of whomhad never appeared on television before, came to epitomize a style ofstandup comedy that was vilified in an unprecedented politicization andre-evaluation of comedy that took place in Britain throughout the 1970sand 1980s, known as ‘alternative comedy’. The Comedians featured ahigh turnover of routines, edited into a fast-paced package that broadcasteach comedian telling only one or two jokes. Most of its performerswere seasoned professionals drawn from the privately owned nightclubsand working men’s clubs run by the Club and Institute Union (CIU). Thecomedians of the CIU circuit had an enormous repertoire of formulaicjokes, material that was often sold in bulk rather than written to order,and over which individual comedians had no proprietary rights. Muchof this material had an aggressive subtext, expressing in particularracist, sexist, and homophobic sentiments, such as Bernard Manning’s:‘There was a plane crashed in Madrid about six month ago, two hundredJapanese on that plane, broke my fucking heart. Six empty seats therewas’ (Manning, 1993). To a certain degree, the material reflected thecontext of the performance, as the style suited a rapid non-narrativedelivery—practical means when coping with large and sometimes