COMEDY

112 POLITICSsatisfied by Price’s iconoclastic performance. Politics, commitment, andthe articulation of experience have all been drawn upon to produce agenuine and truthful event. No conventional description would call itcomedy, however. There is not one single laugh in the fictional club,and one doubts there are many in the theatre either. Is it possible, then,to have entertaining comedy on these terms?In 1979, amateur promoter Peter Rosengard set up the Comedy Storein a strip club in London’s Soho district. This club proved to beimportant in the development of modern British comedy as it served asa laboratory for the experiment presciently outlined in Griffiths’s play.In Oliver Double’s terms, it brought ‘a handful of comic revolutionariestogether, [and] gave them a stage on which they could learn to befunny’ (Double, 1997:165–166). Alternative comedy was overtlypolitical from the start, informed by a punk ethos that dominated Britishcounter-culture in the mid to late 1970s, it defined itself against theexpectations of mainstream performance, and encouraged people towrite their own material, set up their own gigs, and perform without theneed for agents or the approval of the concert secretaries of the CIU.Looking back across fifteen years of alternative comedy, Guardiancomedy critic William Cook described its ideals in terms reminiscent ofthe ethics of Eddie Waters, as a form that celebrated ‘similarity, ratherthan condemning difference. The best of it hits hard and it hurts, but it’sphilanthropic not misanthropic, a bridge and not a wall. Above allAlternative Comedy reveals, via laughter, something of the real life ofthe comedian’ (Cook, 1994:16). One of the first casualties of the newcomedy was the joke-form itself, which had become guilty byassociation. Alternative comedy deliberately parodied and derided theidea of ‘jokes’ as reactionary and dull, as in Peter Richardson and NigelPlaner’s anti-joke ‘what’s yellow and goes into the toilet? Piss’ (Sayle,1988). While many routines now seem hopelessly naive, the movementhad the momentum and the talent to bring an entire generation ofperformers to the attention of the public. Most important was the workit did raising awareness of the prejudice that lurked in much mainstreamcomedy, and in making audiences increasingly intolerant of it.However, alternative comedy is no longer the iconoclastic force it oncewas, and has managed to retain only the vaguest of liberal consciencessince it became big business and was incorporated into radio andtelevision. The market dominance of the watered down alternativecomedy has also had the peculiar effect of allowing comics like BernardManning to portray himself as the victim of censorship and martyr topolitical correctness. Manning’s publicity now presents him as the man