"Alternative" comedy isn't funny

[graffic]

Would anyone disagree with the above statement? I don't think "real" alternative comedy can be funny. This doesn't mean its a bad thing, because if it was funny it would stop being radical/political.

This article by Stewart Lee http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/where-are-all-right-wing-stand-ups is a load of self-important nonsense in my opinion. Comedians are not like writers or musicians. Writers can make you think as well as being a good writer but if comedians are making you think and being "radical" they are not being good "funny" comedians.

Alternative comedy such as Stewart Lee and other comedians are not part of the avant garde or doing anything radical or if they are then they are not comedians  because a group of people laughing is a submissive act that does not challenge anything. Alternative comedy has aided the right wing and reactionaries because a group of liberals physically laughing shows they are just as bad as their supposed enemies because to laugh is to show you are part of a gang and to exclude those who aren't laughing. It is a very difficult thing to explain and I am not explaining it very well however I think its a mistake for comedians such as Stewart Lee to see themselves the same as radical activists,  writers or musicians who aren't trying to make an audience laugh because to make an audience laugh is not radical or political. One of the reasons I dislike stand up is that its a cheap way for a performer to exert control and superiority over the audience. The idea of a clown and "funny guy" is depressing because people who are always cracking jokes are usually attention seekers. Alternative "comedy" isn't radical or political because "comedy" cannot be radical or political. The attempt to make it so has aided the right wing. I think that surrealist comedy  can be funny and radical but the stand up of Stewart Lee or Marcus Brigstocke is even worse than right wing stand ups because it is reactionary as well as being smug.

[up_the_hampipe]

I like my comedy not too alternative and not too mainstream.

[Petey Pate]

Are boring troll posts "alternative" comedy, or are they an alternative to comedy?

[amnesiac]

graffic, on the other messageboard I go on we call people like you Impact Posters, 'another impact post' we'll say. Where do you stand on things being funny if they make you laugh, or, conversely, things being not funny if they don't make you laugh.

[graffic]

graffic, on the other messageboard I go on we call people like you Impact Posters, 'another impact post' we'll say.

Yes, thats really cool.

Where do you stand on things being funny if they make you laugh, or, conversely, things being not funny if they don't make you laugh.

Yes, that makes sense. And yeah thats fine.

[amnesiac]

cool beans dude, karma me up please.

[bigfatheart]

I like my comedy not too alternative and not too mainstream.

So Goldilocks tried the third comedy, which was just right.

[graffic]

You know you're on C&B when you get the usual refusal to post reasoned replies, unfunny comments and hateful abuse.

[graffic]

"Kill yourself". Oh how funny. I'm keeling over with laughter...suicide is so hilarious isn't it lol.

"cunt act likes cunt." Look they've said "cunt" twice. How hilarious.

[pancreas]

I think it is possible to make sense of what you're saying but not possible to agree with any of it. What can you mean by `alternative'? I'd like to call it anything which breaks with established comedic traditions. In which case, there'll be a massive overlap with what's popular, since generally, people don't always like watching the same stuff over and over; pace Little Britain fans. So I'd say e.g. Brass Eye, while now part of the canon, was pretty alternative at the time. And it did make people laugh, I am led to believe. Even if you want to restrict yourself to stand-up... Almost everyone who isn't Bernard Manning came from an alternative comedy background. Simply because he's the first that comes to mind, Eddy Izzard in his glory days would have surely been considered alternative---and people found him pretty funny too. The whole Comic Strip Presents gang. I needn't go on. Moreover, I don't see what's logically inconsistent about laughing/submitting to something alternative. In fact, the only way to make your claim work is if you define `alternative' as what you personally don't laugh at. But we already have better words to describe that like `your opinion'.

That said, I can't bear Stuart Lee's output most of the time. And he would certainly self-define as  alternative. But that doesn't prove very much and Lee-hate has been somewhat done to death by now.

[andy33]

I thought the Make Mary Merry segment of Radio Shuttleworth resolved this once and for all.

[graffic]

I think it is possible to make sense of what you're saying but not possible to agree with any of it. What can you mean by `alternative'? I'd like to call it anything which breaks with established comedic traditions. In which case, there'll be a massive overlap with what's popular, since generally, people don't always like watching the same stuff over and over; pace Little Britain fans. So I'd say e.g. Brass Eye, while now part of the canon, was pretty alternative at the time. And it did make people laugh, I am led to believe. Even if you want to restrict yourself to stand-up... Almost everyone who isn't Bernard Manning came from an alternative comedy background. Simply because he's the first that comes to mind, Eddy Izzard in his glory days would have surely been considered alternative---and people found him pretty funny too. The whole Comic Strip Presents gang. I needn't go on. Moreover, I don't see what's logically inconsistent about laughing/submitting to something alternative. In fact, the only way to make your claim work is if you define `alternative' as what you personally don't laugh at. But we already have better words to describe that like `your opinion'.

That said, I can't bear Stuart Lee's output most of the time. And he would certainly self-define as  alternative. But that doesn't prove very much and Lee-hate has been somewhat done to death by now.

I don't think there is right wing or left wing/alternative comedy, except for surrealism. All comedy is right wing and conservative. Left wing "comedians" are the same as right wing conservative comedians.

Stand up is very masculine. Its one person getting up dominating an audience, having all the attention and the audience submits to the superiority of the stand up by laughing. Those that don't laugh feel bad, like they are left out of a tribe. Comedy has a certain kink and I disagree with the idea that left wing comedians are radical and alternative and doing anything different to Jim Davidson or Roy Chubby Brown. They are just entertainers making people laugh. If comedy is radical and politically correct then it is no longer comedy. 

Yet Stewart Lee has this smugness in the way he sees himself as morally superior to the top gear boys because he tells left wing jokes but he's playing the same game as Jim Davidson and is not ethically superior to them.  He is not just working within the capitalist system, he's working within a psychological format that is hierarchal.  He's not a writer or political activist, he's an entertainer, doing a form of entertainment that is intrinsically masculine, hierarchal and appeals to primal instincts unless it turns into surrealism.

Pretending that stand up comedy is radical and revolutionary is like trying to be a hyper masculine alpha male whilst being democratic and fair at the same time. Its trying to have it both ways because the medium of comedy is intrinsically masculine, dominant and exclusive because you either get the joke or not.

[elnombre]

I don't think there is right wing or left wing/alternative comedy, except for surrealism. All comedy is right wing and conservative. Left wing "comedians" are the same as right wing conservative comedians.

So there is no right wing/left wing in comedy, but all comedy is right wing. Apart from Stewart Lee, who you refer to as a Left Wing Comedian, and refer to him doing Left Wing jokes. But like Lenny Bruce, Hicks, Carlin, and Pryor before him, he is mistaken, and is actually Right Wing by simple virtue of being a comedian, because comedy is inherently masculine and conservative.

It scares me to think that this makes sense to someone.

[graffic]

So there is no right wing/left wing in comedy, but all comedy is right wing. Apart from Stewart Lee, who you refer to as a Left Wing Comedian, and refer to him doing Left Wing jokes. But like Lenny Bruce, Hicks, Carlin, and Pryor before him, he is mistaken, and is actually Right Wing by simple virtue of being a comedian, because comedy is inherently masculine and conservative.

It scares me to think that this makes sense to someone.

But Hicks wasn't a standard comedy performer. He shouted without giving a fuck about what the audience thought. I wouldn't describe Hicks as laugh out loud funny. He was more amusing because of his manner as well as making you think. Hicks wasn't like Stewart Lee, making smug jokes and dominating an audience. He was more just some guy having a chat about how fucked up the world was whilst being unintentionally amusing to an extent at the same time. There was no kink in Bill Hicks stand up. Thats why I would describe Bill Hicks as not necessarily being "comedy". He wasn't trying to have it both ways. Whereas "alternative comedians" like Stewart Lee try to have it both ways by both being laugh out loud funny "comedians", whilst claiming to be morally superior and left wing.

[Operty1]

Does Stewart Lee claim to be morally superior? I would like to see that on one of his posters though, or perhaps name a tour or special DVD after it.

I'm not sure of your point? In fact none of your previous post makes much logical sense after your original thread post. I think your trying to graft a political slant on things that really doesn't exist, and the criteria that backs up your argument only exists and makes sense to you in your head.

[Default to the negative]

Would anyone disagree with the above statement? I don't think "real" alternative comedy can be funny. This doesn't mean its a bad thing, because if it was funny it would stop being radical/political. This article by Stewart Lee http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/where-are-all-right-wing-stand-ups is a load of self-important nonsense in my opinion. Comedians are not like writers or musicians. Writers can make you think as well as being a good writer but if comedians are making you think and being "radical" they are not being good "funny" comedians. Alternative comedy such as Stewart Lee and other comedians are not part of the avant garde or doing anything radical or if they are then they are not comedians  because a group of people laughing is a submissive act that does not challenge anything. Alternative comedy has aided the right wing and reactionaries because a group of liberals physically laughing shows they are just as bad as their supposed enemies because to laugh is to show you are part of a gang and to exclude those who aren't laughing. It is a very difficult thing to explain and I am not explaining it very well however I think its a mistake for comedians such as Stewart Lee to see themselves the same as radical activists,  writers or musicians who aren't trying to make an audience laugh because to make an audience laugh is not radical or political. One of the reasons I dislike stand up is that its a cheap way for a performer to exert control and superiority over the audience. The idea of a clown and "funny guy" is depressing because people who are always cracking jokes are usually attention seekers. Alternative "comedy" isn't radical or political because "comedy" cannot be radical or political. The attempt to make it so has aided the right wing. I think that surrealist comedy  can be funny and radical but the stand up of Stewart Lee or Marcus Brigstocke is even worse than right wing stand ups because it is reactionary as well as being smug.

[Alberon]

On the one hand, Stewart Lee's comic persona is of someone who takes himself at least a little too self-importantly. The superiority he displays in his performances is often deliberately punctured during the show, like during his impotent rants.

On the other, there is the question whether there really is alternative comedy any more or is it just one end of the mainstream. Alternative comedy was an important movement against tired, sexist and racist mainstream comedians (which did not make up all the mainstream it has to be said), but like many other movements it became absorbed by the mainstream even while it was changing it.

On the final hand though, Graffic is a cunt.

[graffic]

If you go on youtube you can see Stewart Lee in interviews and he is exactly the same as he is on stage.

I agree that "alternative comedy" can be just one end of the mainstream. I was reading a book about sitauationism a while ago and I remember the idea that even dissent and rebellion has become commodified and been made mainstream. You could say the same about comedy that even rebellion and dissent has been taken into the mainstream.

I think that comedy is a very limited and actually impoverished medium to take on the mainstream with because laughing is inherently reactionary because it is submissive and instead of alternative/left wing comedians enlightening audiences, all they are doing from the outside is getting an audience to submit to their ideas in the most cheap way by making them laugh and excluding those who don't laugh.

Stewart Lee has this impoverished idea that because he makes people laugh he is somehow right and his ideas are superior. Sometimes it can be the least funny person and the one who is the one not laughing who is correct. There is this greasy idea that Stewart Lee sees himself as some sort if left wing stand up taking on capitalism just because he makes a bunch of people laugh when in fact laughter can be an ugly thing because those who are not laughing feel bad and excluded.

[Nmkl Pkjl Ftmsch]

The majority of 'alternative' comedians do have more than the merest touch of 'spoilt bastard' about them, don't they? Irrespective of their political views (most of which come straight from the Guardian or the student union bar anyway, so no surprises there), the vast majority of them have never grown out of the mindset of an annoying, hyperactive ten year old, constantly shouting for adult attention despite having nothing remotely important or funny to say - they just expect the world to stop dead in its tracks and gawp at whatever mindless shit they happen to be doing.

Yes, Mayall and Edmondson, no doubt it was a dream come true when you discovered you could actually make a tidy living out of your piss-poor rehashing of Three Stooges routines with added knob and bum jokes in front of a roomful of braying trendies and social workers above a strip club, but that soon went sour, didn't it? They sold their supposedly 'anarchic' (in truth, conventional, middle class and small-c conservative to the core) souls to Auntie Beeb for a shot at the big time and, after the Young Ones had shot its bolt, spent the next thirty years rehashing the same tired schtick with predictably diminishing returns. Still, there was a certain poetic justice in seeing them flogging the rotting corpse of Bottom to death in front of theatres packed with the kind of heavily-tattooed, mouth-breathing peasants they'd no doubt run a fucking mile from in the real world.

Then there's the so-called 'second wave' of alternatives from the nineties... the ones who had the opportunity to kick the world of comedy right up its arse and create genuinely fresh and exciting television. So what did we actually get? A bunch of fundamentally unlikeable performers with very short shelf lives pandering to niche audiences who simply HAD to have "their OWN comedy", regardless of how shit and unfunny it was.

Exhibit A... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUA_O4m2PlA

Living proof that impressionable teenage girls will laugh at literally ANYTHING as long as they fancy the ponce who's saying it. Misogynist? No - REALIST. We have this pair of arseholes to thank for the "new lad" cultural shitfest of the nineties, and (to a lesser extent) the comedy-as-a-hobby chancers like Russell Kane who've been infesting our screens ever since. "I don't HAVE to be funny, I'm a fucking PRETTY BOY!" Yeah, right. Go and try your piss-awful act out at some dog rough social club up North, I'd LOVE to see your face bisected by a flying bottle, you concieted piece of shit.

Exhibit B... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUFEUyDMziU

This is just fucking unbelievable. If Stu Francis and company had done this on Crackerjack, or Andrew Secombe and his pals had done this on Fast Forward, I dare say even the juvenile target audience would find it all too silly for words, and their parents would ask them "why are you watching this rubbish?", as parents do. But because it was the work of performers recognised as 'cool' by the dicksuck media and regarded as comic geniuses by a handful of twats in influential positions with more power than they actually deserve, it's "genius". The Emperor's New Clothes spring to mind whilst watching this. "A packet of seeds, the Who Live At Leeds and a top hat full of gloy"? For Christ's sake.

Exhibit C... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVDQYby4ftA

This is what it all led to, and this is roughly where we stand now. Performers with not a single funny bone in their bodies or an original thought in their heads wandering around club stages, holding their microphones like ice cream cones, burbling approximately fifty feet of noise to every inch of actual recognizable material, damning their critics as "sexist cunts" or "trolls" and trying to work out how this "comerdee" business actually, you know, works, at the expense of poor sods who've actually paid for the evening's supposed 'entertainment'.

On the other side of the coin, there's shit like this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCgA5Ql5-o8

'Comedy' that attempts to lambast the world of light entertainment and celebrity worship whilst simultaneously crawling so far up its well-hammered arsehole it can taste what it had for breakfast. Brooker also falls into this category - yeah, easy to slag off some primary-coloured early-evening pap that your core audience of Guardian readers and uni-students are highly unlikely to watch, isn't it, Charleston?

That's my two pennorth anyway. I'm off to watch the Two Ronnies.

[heretical error]

Personally, I refuse to watch any comedian whose income is greater than mine.  Or is older than me.  Or has more hair than me.  Or whose TV content exceeds his radio, or who hasn't done more than two hundred gigs in one tax year. 

[elnombre]

Yes, Mayall and Edmondson, no doubt it was a dream come true when you discovered you could actually make a tidy living out of your piss-poor rehashing of Three Stooges routines with added knob and bum jokes in front of a roomful of braying trendies and social workers above a strip club, but that soon went sour, didn't it? They sold their supposedly 'anarchic' (in truth, conventional, middle class and small-c conservative to the core) souls to Auntie Beeb for a shot at the big time and, after the Young Ones had shot its bolt, spent the next thirty years rehashing the same tired schtick with predictably diminishing returns. Still, there was a certain poetic justice in seeing them flogging the rotting corpse of Bottom to death in front of theatres packed with the kind of heavily-tattooed, mouth-breathing peasants they'd no doubt run a fucking mile from in the real world.

As one of those braying cretins (though sadly devoid of any tattoos and with what I'd consider a fairly conventional and functional respiratory system) I actually met Mayall after one of these live shows for amoeba-brained morons and found him to be an extremely likeable person, standing in the blistering cold to pose for photos, sign autographs and answer questions for a good 40 minutes or so.

I now realise thanks to your wisdom, that all laughs, enjoyment and memories myself and my partner of the time had over the course of that evening were ultimately hollow, and we were in fact being patronised by a scumbag - one who had the sheer gall to have comedic influences, no less - who wouldn't piss on us if we were on fire.

Though I've never felt the need to deride the fanbase of something I have little taste for, such as Family Guy or The Mighty Boosh, I now realise that I am in fact both a 'trendy' and a 'peasant' thanks to your generosity and sheer infallible wisdom in comedy - a form which, in my dunderheaded, council-estate child existence, I had previously thought to be subjective.

Thank you for showing me the error of my ways. I'm off to watch The Goodies.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

"cunt act likes cunt." Look they've said "cunt" twice. How hilarious.

"Repitition is funny" - Stewart Lee.

[j_u_d_a_s]

"cunt act likes cunt." Look they've said "cunt" twice. How hilarious.

Heh, you said it three times...

[Depressed Beyond Tables]

"Repitition is funny" - Stewart Lee.

[daf]

Has 'Alternative Tragedy' happened yet? [nb] All that 50's grim up North Kitchen sink stuff, possibly?[/nb]

[Replies From View]

Has 'Alternative Tragedy' happened yet? [nb] All that 50's grim up North Kitchen sink stuff, possibly?[/nb]

Yes.  It isn't funny either.

[DuncanC]

But it is, of course, inherently left-wing, as it incites the crowd to the rebellious revolutionary act of squirting water at the stage from their eyes.

[graffic]

The majority of 'alternative' comedians do have more than the merest touch of 'spoilt bastard' about them, don't they? Irrespective of their political views (most of which come straight from the Guardian or the student union bar anyway, so no surprises there), the vast majority of them have never grown out of the mindset of an annoying, hyperactive ten year old, constantly shouting for adult attention despite having nothing remotely important or funny to say - they just expect the world to stop dead in its tracks and gawp at whatever mindless shit they happen to be doing.

Stewart Lee's stand up is shit and I've read some of his columns and he can't write. I don't like the way he sees himself as superior to the top gear boys. I hate Jeremy Clarkson and James May, not for the reason liberals hate them, but because they are arrogant bores. I don't need to see someone making themselves look good by attacking them from a liberal perspective.

Similarly Stewart Lee seems genuinely nasty in his dislike of those who disagree with him politically. I don't like his demeanor and he seems genuinely bitter and lacks any generosity of spirit. He is intelligent but he isn't funny.

[syntaxerror]

MORE LIKE AN ALTERNATIVE TO COMEDY EH? EH? EH! WHAT U AV ALREADY DONE THAT JOKE.

[heretical error]

I suppose you need to have gone to university to appreciate the subtle brilliance of Mr. Stewart Lee's act, which lesser educated types might not appreciate.  He is, after all, a much cleverer person than you or I.  Having achieved an upper second at Oxbridge, I can understand his act in all its glory.