Page 114 - The Language of Humour

STAND-UP COMEDY 101
audience: are there props, the use of a persona etc? How many female
comedians are there?

Alternative comedy

Comedy is risky, not only for the performers but for their targets.
Laughter creates a bond between teller and tellee, and excludes the butt.
The term ‘alternative comedy’ has been used since the 1980s to indicate
a particular stance of humour. What is it an ‘alternative’ to? An old joke
is that it was an alternative to comedy. It was, however, a rejection of
the sexist and racist jokes that mainstream comedy had relied on. Tony
Allen, the ‘godfather’ of alternative comedy, has this to say in his act.

OK, stand-up comedy, I know what you want… There was this
drunk homosexual Pakistani squatter trade unionist takes my
mother-in-law to an Irish restaurant, says to the West Indian
waiter, ‘Waiter, waiter, there’s a racial stereotype in my soup.’
No, no, no… That’s not to say I haven’t got prejudices, ‘cos I
have. There’s one minority group I loathe…the Metropolitan
Police Force.

The criticism is made by some that there is an element of po-faced
preaching, which is not funny, but more importantly, that any ‘political
correctness’ is a form of censorship. The comedians whom alternative
comedy was reacting to, like Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning, insist
that ‘It’s just a joke’. Yet in 1997 two Afro-Caribbean women won an
appeal, claiming that their employers had failed to protect them from
racial abuse and harassment. They were employed as waitresses at a
function at which Bernard Manning made racially offensive remarks to
them, encouraging members of his audience to join in the abuse. Alexei
Sayle explains why some targets are out of bounds for him: The
important thing about racism is oppression—I won’t do stuff about the
Irish or women or blacks or Pakistanis because they are oppressed, and
I don’t want to make that oppression any greater.’ This means that he
might use jokes against a group he sees as powerful and oppressive,
thus he would not object to jokes against the Royal Family. Most people
set limits on the subjects of jokes: a fight broke out at the Comedy Store
(a London club set up to provide a venue for an alternative type of
comedy) after this example from Keith Allen, which pushed taboo
subjects to the edge.