According to Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, ‘Englishness has had to be made and re-made in and through history, within available practices and relationships, and existing symbols and ideas’ (1986: Preface). The main aim of this book is to explore how and where comedy fits into those processes, since I see comedy as absolutely central to their operation. Comedy, after all, is a cultural and social practice that is both shaped by and contributes to historical conjunctures; it pivots on contested and ambivalent relationships of power; it constitutes a repository of symbols that can be drawn on to indicate how, where and why people place themselves; it is a prime testing ground for ideas about belonging and exclusion. What I hope to show in later chapters is that amongst the multitudinous versions of Englishness that were in circulation during the twentieth century, many have been played out, overtly or covertly, on comic sites. Before investigating a series of case studies of such sites, however, this chapter seeks to sketch some of the ways in which the idea of Englishness has been conceptualised.