COMEDY

110 POLITICSalmost laughed, it seemed so ludicrous. Then I saw it. It was a worldlike any other. It was the logic of our world…extended…. And Idiscovered…there were no jokes left. Every joke was a little pellet, afinal solution’ (Griffiths, 1979:64). In this obscene absurdity, that thoseincarcerated in a concentration camp should have a special placereserved for further punishment, as if such a thing were possible, hesees the cruelty of the joke and the perversity of the camp are cutfrom the same cloth, different in degree, but not in kind (Garner Jr,1999:141).Having established the insidiousness of club comedy, one ispresented with the problem of what a responsible, inclusive, andliberating comedy might look like. Act 2 of Comedians tries to thinkthis through via the performances of the students. Here the theatreaudience takes the place of the audience in the club, a device thatrelocates the theatre patrons and places them in, one imagines, largelyunfamiliar surroundings and dares them to laugh at the acts they areabout to see. The first student, Mick Connor, appears to follow Waters’sadvice. His routine is drawn from his background, with material on theCatholic confession, the prurience of priests, and the inconsistencies ofsex and faith. Connor seems at least to be confronting his fears, evenincluding a rather standard joke about the IRA, which in his mouthcomes across as an anxious gag about stereotypes and the violence thatplagues his country. Sammy Samuels, who has already signalled hisambition to play the ‘tops’, begins his routine in similar fashion withcomment on his Jewish upbringing. Seeing Challoner entirely unmovedbreaks his nerve and sends him into a routine that targets the Irish, WestIndians, feminists, homosexuals, and sexual assault. The UlstermanGeorge McBrain follows the same path, although his is marked by adeep misogyny that appears in the refrain ‘my wife, God, she’s a slut’.Samuels and McBrain, predictably, are the only students signed up byChalloner to play the clubs. The centrepiece of act 2, and the entireplay, is Gethin Price’s routine, a bizarre and aggressive act that owesmore to Grock and Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty than to FrankRandle, the northern comic he purports to idolize. Price is clearly themost artistically gifted and ideologically motivated of the comedians,yet he produces work that is dramatically out of place in the club settingand stretches the definition of comedy until it is entirelyunrecognizable. He enters whiteface in denim jacket and boots, ‘halfclown, half this year’s version of bovver boy’ (Griffiths, 1979:48). Theact begins with a piece of mime, setting fire to a violin bow, andcrushing the violin underfoot. His first words sum up the violence and