Alternative Comedy

Alternative comedy is a term coined in the 1980s for a style of comedy that makes a conscious break with the mainstream comedic style of an era but can also be found in cartoons. The phrase has had different connotations in different contexts: in the UK, it was used to describe content which was an "alternative" to the mainstream of live comedy, which often involved racist and sexist material. In other contexts, it is the nature of the form that is "alternative", avoiding reliance on a standardised structure of a sequence of jokes with punch lines. Patton Oswalt has defined it as "comedy where the audience has no pre-set expectations about the crowd, and vice versa. In comedy clubs, there tends to be a certain vibe—alternative comedy explores different types of material."

In an interview with The A.V. Club after his performance in the 2011 comedy-drama film Young Adult, Oswalt stated:

I had come up out of that whole alternative scene, which was all about, "Don’t try it, man. Just go up and wing it." I think a lot of that comes from insecurity. It's that fashion of improv and amateurism that comes from the insecurity of saying to the audience, "Well, it doesn't matter if it doesn't go well, because I didn’t even try that hard to begin with." It's like, "Oh, that's why you're not [trying]. If you actually tried hard and it sucked, then you've got to blame yourself." So that's what makes it hard for some people to sit down and actually just do the fucking work, because doing the work means you're making a commitment.

The official history of London's Comedy Store credits comedian and author Tony Allen with coining the term. However, in his autobiography, the late Malcolm Hardee claims to have coined the term in 1978.

Alternative comedy came to describe an approach to stand-up comedy that was neither racist nor sexist but free-form and devised by the performers themselves. This style won out in a "civil war" against more traditional comedians who had, initially, also performed at London's Comedy Store, Dean Street, Soho, from its opening in May 1979. Traditional club comedians of the time often relied on jokes targeting women and minorities. The alternative comedy that developed from these clashes was more like comedy's answer to punk.

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