Building on recent work on the political and everyday nature of comedy, this paper seeks to situate the genre of stand-up comedy as a form of capitalist social relations. The paper focuses on the emergence of Alternative Comedy in the 1980s in contrast to the comedy of Working Men’s Clubs. This cultural development is placed in the context of Marx’s understanding of capitalist society and a critique of Adorno’s notion of the culture industry. The paper argues that this radical change in British comedy was only made possible by the policies of the British state in the 1980s. In particular, the paper considers the changing ideas comedians had of property, propriety and performance. While Alternative Comedy was highly critical of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, it owed its existence to these modes of state management. The paper contends, then, that comedy can be seen as a form of class struggle and should not be judged by its capacity to be a mere instrument of resistance, or condemned by some spurious inability to achieve this. The paper concludes by considering the development of comedy production since the 1980s.
Sutton, Alex
Department of Social Sciences
Year of publication: 2021Date of RADAR deposit: 2020-07-15