Given some of the comments on last Friday’s post, it appears that, to those of us of A Certain Age, Trevor Griffiths’ 1975 play Comedians affected quite a few young men and women who, then in their adolescence, were just taking up the pen to become poets or playwrights. This is, I imagine, to be expected: there was a sea change in the world of stand-up comedy and comedy generally in the mid-1970s. When Griffiths’ play opened on Broadway in 1976, I was 14 years old and already engaged in piling up a mass of dramatic juvenilia; at the same time, I was enjoying the sudden explosion of comedy both in print and on television. (I first read Griffiths’ play when it was published by Grove Press in the mid-1970s.) It may not have been a Golden Age — to say that would be to indulge in rose-tinted nostalgia which was a frequent target of satire back then — but it was a formative influence, clearly, on commenters and playwrights Alison Croggon, David Ian Rabey, and myself.

I can’t speak for the culture of South Africa, Australia, or England, but here in the United States the mid-1970s represented a renaissance of comedy as alternative comedians and those influenced by the “black humor” novelists of the 1960s like Terry Southern and Bruce Jay Friedman made their way to the mainstream. HBO (then Home Box Office), which launched in 1972 and was in the market for cheap original programming, began to run uncensored, full-length comedy concerts by the likes of Robert Klein and George Carlin, whose routines on television had until then been limited to seven or eight minute segments on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show or other variety shows of the period; Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor and others regularly hosted NBC’s Saturday Night Live (then just NBC’s Saturday Night), which launched in 1975 as well; among the writers for the show were Michael O’Donoghue and other stalwarts of the National Lampoon, a satiric magazine specializing in alternative humor then experiencing its heyday.[1] (Andy Kaufman — certainly one of the predecessors of today’s alternative comedians — made his television debut on the first episode, lip-synching to the Mighty Mouse theme song.) It’s also likely that others, like myself, were listening to the double- and triple-album sets of Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce routines, newly released by United Artists. To listen to the three-album set of Lenny Bruce’s classic Carnegie Hall concert on my tiny portable record player was a revelation I don’t believe I will ever experience again — the three-hour concert was as much a one-man play as it was a comedy routine. In 1975, also, Monty Python’s Flying Circus made its American debut, six years after its premiere on the BBC. Those of us who were just starting to write plays in those feverishly comic days were all affected by the caustic satire and social commentary we were suddenly being exposed to, and I think that none of us would have argued against the idea that stand-up comedy, like drama and theatre itself, was a performative art form that participated in the gray area between commerce and social criticism in the form of entertainment.[2]

The dubious value of stand-up comedy as a lever for significant political and social change was also explored by Howard Barker, albeit briefly, in his 1977 Fair Slaughter. Gocher, a World War I veteran whose experiences during the war imbue him with a missionary zeal for communism, pursues a career as a music hall comedian in the years after the war. One night in 1935, backstage at the Hammersmith Empire music hall the tramp comedian muses about the comedy routine he’d like to present, reminiscent perhaps of Price’s routine in Comedians:

(He picks up his banjo, adapts his funny posture and starts strumming and shuffling.)

I was sayin’ to the missus you can pawn the cat,
You can pawn me medals, me braces or me hat,
But I don’t care how much dough we owe,
You’re never gonna pawn me ol’ banjo!

(Suddenly he brings the banjo down onto the floor with a tremendous smash. Pause. He looks into the audience.) I have shit on you. You have paid to come here, and I have shit on you. No, don’t laugh missus, I’m not ill. Stop smiling, it’s not funny. It’s a fucking tragedy. You and your wonderful good humour, your British talent for seeing it through. CHRIST! You would have your daughters in the brothel and still not lift a finger! I tell you it’s not funny! It is not funny that we are here to laugh at our communal bloody misery, it is a sin! Don’t you understand what I have done to you, you ragged arsed workers! Have some pity on yourselves, have some pride and pity for your own sakes.

Gocher’s bete noir Staveley is his manager who, overhearing this “routine,” comments to Gocher’s daughter, arguing from his own free-market stance, “He is a myth-maker. He hates the people who pay to see him. He despises the audience who love him, and I think that’s vile. I think that is a disgusting attitude for an entertainer to adopt. He has a private loyalty to a society which would have eradicated him and his profession long ago, a society where violence and killing have replaced any proper form of government, where free debate has been suppressed and bureaucratic savagery is the order of the day.” And indeed Gocher retires from the music hall stage to become a communist agitator.

The prism through which Griffiths and Barker looked at popular comedic entertainment suggested little possibility that Gethin Price’s and Gocher’s use of comedy would lead to any real social change; and indeed, Barker soon abandoned the satiric forms of his early plays Claw and Stripwell for a darker interrogatory project. A few years later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan would enter the White House, Margaret Thatcher move into Downing Street, and the conservative reaction was complete, regardless of what either the American or the British comedians had to say through the jokes they had to tell.

The history of stand-up comedy in the United States is remarkably long and rich, and Constance Rourke in her 1931 study American Humor: A Study of the National Character discussed the importance of the solo storyteller to American comedy; in the nineteenth century, “Mark Twain,” “Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Artemus Ward” and others undertook what they called “lecture tours” across the continent. While I was idly pursuing some graduate research on this in the 1980s, I read contemporary reports indicating that these mock lectures were not dissimilar to stand-up comedy routines today: a persona took a bare lecture stage for an hour or so and delivered a series of jokes from memory. These artists, too, exhibited significant political consciousness in their routines, in Twain’s and Nasby’s case of a particularly radical slant.

The peculiar comedy of the 1970s, though, seems to have stayed with those who experienced it. (Indeed, one of the structural devices I’m using for my new play The Elf King is that of a vaudeville comedy team, transformed to suit my own nefarious narrative purposes.) Taking comedy seriously, then, is nothing new, and recognizing its aesthetics for exploitation in dramatic work far from the comedy club stage remains pertinent. And many of these comedians, such as Bruce, Carlin, and Pryor, were as “in-yer-face” as the radical British and American dramatists of the period, from Barker himself to Sarah Kane, who have been similarly criticized for the taboo-shattering nature of their work.[3] You can tell quite a bit about a culture by examining what it laughs at — as well as our political evolution, such as it is, in its history as it developed.

1. It was during O’Donoghue’s predictably brief tenure as executive producer of the show in 1981 that William S. Burroughs appeared on the program to read from his work to a nationwide audience of millions. [↩]
2. I was very enthusiastic about stand-up comedy back then, and in 1979 went to see Richard Pryor’s first concert film at a downtown Philadelphia theater; I was, I believe, the only white person in the sold-out audience. A quite memorable experience. [↩]
3. In fact, Tony Hendra’s history of American comedy of the 1960s and 1970s, Going Too Far, bears a title which echoes that of Aleks Sierz’ history of British drama of the 1990s, In-yer-face Theatre. [↩]