Abstract
This thesis draws on an originally scripted TV drama series, ‘Open Mike’, which was written to explore the emergence of alternative comedy in the 1970s. Three of the hour-long episodes of this five-part drama are being submitted for this thesis. ‘Open Mike’ starts with Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in April 1979, which coincided with the opening of a new comedy venue, and ends with the Brixton riots in 1981. Aside from ‘Open Mike’ itself, a research artefact in its own right, there is a commentary that reflects on the nature of the process, combining personal memories and insights with historical and contemporary documents related to the period (newspapers and news programmes, Hansard, social histories, memoirs and autobiographies) and, finally, explorations of the nature of comedy, especially the particular variety known as ‘alternative’. By engaging in the process of practice-led research, involving repeated cycles of reflection, iteration and objective examination of the complexity of humour, the thesis examines the nature of alternative comedy. The work explores the impact of this form of comedy on feminism, class, race and sexuality and, more broadly, on humour itself. Undoubtedly, alternative comedy helped to shape perceptions of women, race and sexuality, besides helping to redefine an acceptable language with which to discuss these issues. Moreover, as demonstrated in the drama series, the pioneering alternative comics inspired minority groups to use humour as a form of social protest, leading individual performers to build sustainable careers for themselves.
However, despite this influence, alternative comedy had little, if any, impact on the issue of social class, largely because class itself was ignored as a subject for debate.
In this period drama series, ‘Open Mike’, which invites comparisons with contemporary society, the limited impact of this principled form of humour is laid bare and, in the process, the thesis provides novel insights into the paradoxical nature of humour to explain why alternative comedy’s impact was circumscribed.