Palgrave Studies in Comedy

This Palgrave Pivot questions how a new generation of alternative stand-up comedians and the political world continue to shape and influence each other. The Alternative Comedy Movement of the late 1970s and 1980s can be described as a time of unruly experimentation and left-wing radicalism. This book examines how alternative comedians continue to celebrate these characteristics in the twenty-first century, while also moving into a distinct phase of artistic development as the political context of the 1970s and 1980s loses its immediacy. Sophie Quirk draws on original interviews with comedians including Tom Allen, Josie Long, John-Luke Roberts and Tony Law to chart how alternative comedians are shaped by, and in turn respond to, contemporary political challenges from neoliberalism to Brexit, class controversy to commercialism. She argues that many of our assumptions about comedy’s politics must be challenged and updated. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the working methods and values of today’s alternative comedians.

Contextualizing the duo’s work within British comedy, Shakespeare criticism, the history of sexuality, and their own historical moment, this book offers the first sustained analysis of the 20th Century’s most successful double-act.  Over the course of a forty-four-year career (1940-1984), Eric Morecambe & Ernie Wise appropriated snippets of verse, scenes, and other elements from seventeen of Shakespeare’s plays more than one-hundred-and-fifty times.  Fashioning a kinder, more inclusive world, they deployed a vast array of elements connected to Shakespeare, his life, and institutions. Rejecting claims that they offer only nostalgic escapism, Hamrick analyses their work within contemporary contexts, including their engagement with many forms and genres, including Variety, the heritage industry, journalism, and more.  ‘The Boys’ deploy Shakespeare to work through issues of class, sexuality, and violence.  Lesbianism, drag, gay marriage, and a queer aesthetics emerge, helping to normalize homosexuality and complicate masculinity in the ‘permissive’ 1960s. 

Alternative Comedy Now and Then: Critical Perspectives is the first academic collection focusing on the history and legacy of the alternative comedy movement in Britain that began in 1979 and continues to influence contemporary stand-up comedy. The collection examines the contexts, performances and reception of alternative comedy in order to provide a holistic approach to examining the socio-political impact and significance of alternative comedy from its historical roots through to present day performances. As alternative comedy celebrated its 40^th anniversary in 2019, critically reflecting on its impact and significance is a timely endeavour. The book adopts a distinctive interdisciplinary approach, synthesizing theory, concepts and methodologies from comedy studies, theatre and performance, communication and media studies, sociology, political sciences and anthropology. This approach is taken in order to fully understand and examine the dynamics and nuances of the alternative comedy movement which would not be possible with a single-discipline approach. 

Comedy in Crises provides a novel contribution to an emerging comedy studies field, offering a fresh approach and understanding toward both the motivation and reception of humour in diverse contemporary art contexts. Drawing together research by artists, theorists, curators, and historians from around the world (from Palestine, to Greece, Brazil, and Indigenous Australia), it provides new insight into how humour is weaponised in contemporary art – focusing on its role in negotiating complex cultural identities, the expectations of art markets, the impact of historical legacies, as well as its role in bolstering cultural resilience. In so doing, this book explores a vital, yet under-explored, aspect of contemporary art. Over the last decade, we have witnessed an overwhelming emphasis on experiences of precarity and emergency in contemporary art discourse, reflecting a popular view that the decade following the outbreak of the global financial crisis has been marked by an intersection of constant crises (refugee crisis, sovereign debt crisis, environmental disaster, COVID). Comedy in Crises offers innovative analysis of the relationship between this context and the growing use of humour by artists from around the world, making clear the vital role of laughter in mediating the collective trauma that takes shape today in a period of protracted crisis.

This book looks at television comedy, drawn from across the UK and Ireland, and ranging chronologically from the 1980s to the 2020s. It explores depictions of distinctive geographical, historical and cultural communities presented from the insiders’ perspective, simultaneously interrogating the particularity of the lived experience of time, and place, embedded within the wide variety of depictions of contrasting lives, experiences and sensibilities, which the collected individual chapters offer. Comedies considered include Victoria Wood’s work on ‘the north’, Ireland’s Father Ted and Derry Girls, Michaela Coel’s east London set Chewing Gum, and Wales’ Gavin and Stacey. There are chapters on Scottish sketch and animation comedy, and on series set in the Midlands, the North East, the South West and London’s home counties. The book offers thoughtful reflection on funny and engaging representations of the diverse, fragmentedcomplexity of UK and Irish identity explored through the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender.

The book is about comedy, the nation, and resistance in Zimbabwe, following the fall of Robert Mugabe in 2017. It explores how satiric comedies and comic texts in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe contest hegemonic narratives of the nation and authorise alternative narratives from the margins. Drawing on postcolonial theories of the nation, it analyses subversive comedies and social media texts that contest official political narratives in Zimbabwe, including the comedies of four Zimbabwean comedians—Kapfupi and Marabha, Doc Vikela, and Sabhuku Vharazipi—as well as social media texts on President Mnangagwa’s Facebook Page and cartoons published by the Zimbabwean newspaper ZimDaily. Primarily found via social media platforms (Facebook and Youtube), these texts centre alternative views and narratives of ordinary citizens, contesting established truths and providing a counter-narration to official hegemonic discourses of the nation.

Where existing scholarship on post-Mugabe politics in Zimbabwe focuses on issues such as the coup, militarisation, and discourses of "newness", little attention has been paid to the forms of resistance used in everyday discourse by Zimbabweans, and particularly via satire and comedy. These comic texts, shared by comedians and normal citizens on social media, can provide a useful alternative perspective to make sense of the politics and political performances that characterize the new political dispensation after Mugabe.