Fighting Thatcher with Comedy: What to Do When There Is No Alternative

This article offers a history of British alternative comedy as a case study of political challenge and opposition in the 1980s and considers the role of humor in political campaigning more broadly. It explores left-wing thinking on culture as a potential political weapon, and questions how this informed the development and impact of alternative comedy as a genre. The article observes that pioneering alternative comedians went some way to change British comedy values and inform political discussions. However, it also argues that the complex operation of jokes and the tendency of comedians to become “incorporated” within the political and cultural mainstream ensured that the impacts of radical alternative material were limited and ambiguous. It contends that the practice of alternative comedy was undermined by business and political values that were often influenced by Thatcherism, and that alternative comedians mostly failed to capture the imaginations of working-class Britons. These communities retained instead an affection for more traditional, differently rebellious, comedic voices. Ultimately, this article frames alternative comedy within a longer history of radical humor, drawing out broader lessons concerning the revolutionary potential of jokes and the relationship between comedians, their audiences, and politics. O 19 May 1979, only sixteen days after Margaret Thatcher’s first general election victory, a new comedy club opened in London, hosted in a Soho topless bar named the Gargoyle, accessed through the Nell Gwynne strip club in Dean Street.1 The Comedy Store was the brainchild of insurance salesman Peter Rosengard, who teamed up with local businessman Don Ward, having been inspired by the Los Angeles Comedy Store while on holiday. Still open after thirty-five years and numerous changes of location, London’s Comedy Store has become an iconic venue, seen as the birthplace of British alternative comedy. Here, so the story goes, a new generation of nonsexist, nonracist, leftist performers reinvented stand-up comedy as innovative and socially conscious and “kick-started a mutiny in the populist performing arts,” challenging both the new Conservative government and a generation of older comedians who Gavin Schaffer is professor of modern history at the University of Birmingham. He would like to thank Pauline Melville, Jon Plowman, Martin Soan, and Trevor Griffiths for their generosity in taking the time to speak to him and for their comments on the draft. He would also like to thank friends and colleagues who gave him feedback and advice: Lucy Delap, Chris Moores, MatthewHilton, Helen McCarthy, Peter Bailey, Daisy Payling, Matthew Worley, Matt Houlbrook, and Spencer Harris. 1 See Roger Wilmut and Peter Rosengard, Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law? The Story of Alternative Comedy in Britain from the Comedy Store to Saturday Live (London, 1989), 2, and William Cook, The Comedy Store: The Club that Changed British Comedy (London, 2001), 7–19. Journal of British Studies 55 (April 2016): 374–397. doi:10.1017/jbr.2015.229 © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2016