ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to make sense politically of the phenomenon of ‘alternative comedy’ in Britain. It describes a variety of developments in British society in the 1970s and 80s—in the social worlds of work, politics and the media and popular culture. The chapter sets out in a study of British satirical comedy between the 1960s and the 1980s. It draws on books about ‘alternative’ comedy, especially Roger Wilmut and Peter Rosengard’s exhaustive chronicle didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law?, and on a number of conversations had with comedians. The production of ‘alternative’ comedy was impossible to confine to one social class, the consumption of this comedy, in its early phase, took place across the social structure. The core audience for ‘alternative’ comedy was established quite early in its history: it was young and variously middle class. The first batch of ‘alternative’ comedians drew culturally on the punk movement and on older established traditions of libertarian comedy in the United States.
