COMEDY

108 POLITICSdifficult crowds for whom the comedian was simply one more act on avariety bill.In response to comedy of this kind came a new sensitivity to thepractice of joking and its implicit politics. ‘Alternative’ comediansrejected the easy racism and fast delivery of the gag comic, replacing itwith revised form and content. One of the first and probably the mostarticulate formulation of these issues is found in Trevor Griffiths’s playComedians (1976). Griffiths, a playwright whose work tacklesquestions of class consciousness and left-wing politics, examines thepower of comedy to support prejudices and instruct people in bigotrythrough a group of men attending a night class for aspiring comediansabout to perform their debut show. Griffiths alludes to the constructionof jokes in his choice of characters, a proportion of whom belong to thegroups stereotyped by the CIU-style comedians: two Irish labourers, aJewish club-owner called Sammy Samuels, Gethin Price, a British Railvan driver, and a walk-on part by a lost Pakistani called Patel. Theirtutor is Eddie Waters, the retired ‘Lancashire Lad’, a principled Shaviansocialist who believes strongly in the transformative power of comedy.After warming his students up with a tongue-twister, ‘the traitordistrusts truth’, Waters matter-of-factly starts to abuse the Irish,‘flapping hands, stinking of soil and Guinness. The niggers of Europe’,before doing the same with Jews, ‘Say Jew, say gold’ (Griffiths, 1979:18–19). While his class laugh embarrassedly and shuffle their feet,Waters carries on:Negroes. Cripples. Defectives. The mad. Women…Workers.Dirty. Unschooled. Shifty. Grabbing all they can get. Putting coalin the bath. Chips with everything. Chips and beer. Trade Unionsdedicated to maximizing wages and minimizing work. Strikes forthe idle. Their greed. And their bottomless stupidity. Likechildren, unfit to look after themselves. Breeding like rabbits, sexmad.And their mean vicious womenfolk, driving them on.Animals, to be fed slops and fastened up at night. (Long pause.) Thetraitor destroys the truth.(Griffiths, 1979:19)This shopping list of prejudice is intended to shock, a deliberate ploy byWaters to warn his students away from the easy targets and lazy jibes ofthe club comedian. In essence it invokes the spirit of club comedywithout the punchlines, exposing it for a lightly sugared bigoted tirade.For Waters, the repetition of prejudice in comedy consolidates