The year 1979 marked the beginning of a revolution in British comedy: so goes the legend. This was the moment that the Comedy Store opened in London’s Soho, creating a concentration point for a new form of stand-up which was to set expectations for the next generation of comedians and their audiences. The story is repeated among comedy performers, scholars, and buffs, organising our history and making sense of our present.

The events are still in living memory. Naturally, there are nuances and differences in the way that individuals who experienced the revolution first-hand tell the tale, as well as in the second-hand accounts that have continued to give shape to the folklore. As William Cook highlights at the very start of his ‘biography’¹ of the Comedy Store: ‘There are always several sides to any good story, and I reckon the closest you’ll come to the truth about this place is via a murky cocktail of them all.’² Don Ward, co-founder of the Store, reflects on Cook’s history in a similar vein:

Discovering the reminiscences of those who were in the delivery room at 69 Dean Street, Soho [the address that first housed the Comedy Store] is a gratifying if sometimes salutary experience. I do not always agree that events transpired as some may recollect. However, pragmatic in the knowledge that everyone sees things differently, I shall not quibble!³

In his account published in 2002, Tony Allen, one of the first generation of Alternative comedians and a key figure in its development, makes clear that he is offering his own ‘interpretation of recent history’. He acknowledges that different participants bring different perspectives: ‘Although it was little more than 20 years ago, I’ve yet to read an account that bears anything more than a passing resemblance to what I experienced.’⁴ His own narrative begins a little earlier, recalling a performance at Kennington’s Oval House on Monday, April 2, 1979:

Although I’m only vaguely aware of it, there’s other fringe performers out there also toying with the idea of radical stand-up comedy. I have no idea that I am ‘one of a group of innovative new comedians who are about to change the face of light entertainment’. My sights are set higher – I want to be local shaman in a performance-led, grass roots, flowering tops, anarchist revolution.⁵

My interest here is not in navigating the differences between accounts or seeking to determine what ‘really’ happened. This book is not a history of Alternative Comedy. What is more significant for my purposes is how stories about this time contribute to the production of a shared history and how (and how adequately) the story of Alternative Comedy shapes, reflects, and sometimes limits our understanding of alternative comedy today. Storytelling is important. Communities share narratives in order to achieve cohesion and shape expectation. As David Carr elaborates:

A community in this sense exists by virtue of a story which is articulated and accepted, which typically concerns the group’s origins and its destiny, and which interprets what is happening now in the light of these temporal poles … [Narrative] is literally constitutive of the group … not a description or account of something that already exists independently of it and which it merely helps along. Rather, narration, as the unity of story, story-teller, audience, and protagonist, is what constitutes the community, its activities, and its coherence in the first place.⁶

Our story may be told like this:

For my generation of London-circuit stand-up comedians there was a Year Zero attitude to 1979. Holy texts found in a skip out the back of the office of the London listings magazine Time Out tell us how, with a few incendiary post-punk punch-lines, Alexei Sayle, Arnold Brown, Dawn French and Andy de la Tour destroyed the British Comedy hegemony of Upper-Class Oxbridge Satirical Songs and Working-Class Bow Tie-Sporting Racism. Then, with the fragments of these smashed idols and their own bare hands, they built the pioneering stand-up clubs The Comedy Store and The Comic Strip. In so doing, they founded the egalitarian Polytechnic of Laughs that is today’s comedy establishment.⁷

Or like this:

From 1979 to 1988 a dramatic re-evaluation of comedy began to take place in Britain. Frustrated by what they saw as the casual bigotry of the trad comic and the hackneyed light entertainment of TV sitcoms, a new generation of stand-up comedians emerged around London’s newly opened Comedy Store. Though highly varied in individual style, these comedians were united by an experimental approach to comedy that self-consciously attempted to push beyond the ‘low-brow’ styles that had previously dominated the field.⁸

Neither of the aforementioned accounts comes from an author who was present at the birth of Alternative Comedy. The first is by comedian Stewart Lee. Still a child in 1979, he started his comedy career in the late 1980s, joining a later wave of Alternative comedians. Today, he is a highly respected comedian, continuing to perform to a large audience of fans, both live and on TV. He is one of the UK’s most prominent commentators on the comedy world through his books and other writings, perhaps most notably his regular column for major British newspaper The Observer . Here, as in other examples cited in this book, he writes for comedic entertainment value as well as accuracy. He outlines the origin story of Alternative Comedy but also acknowledges the story-building itself through wry critique of the way in which this ‘Genesis myth’⁹ has simplified and romanticised reality. The second account comes from the sociologist Sam Friedman, who arrived a generation later and...