| Bemerkung |
Apparently the British have a strange sense of humour. This is apparently noticeable in both the mainstream and the alternative comedy scene, and it is one of the stereotypes most often associated with the culture of the British Isles. This course will focus specifically on the styles and forms of humour of alternative comedy, a movement with its origins in left-wing stand up circles in the late 1970s.
The mainstream of British comedy is the established sitcom: from Love thy Neighbour to Fawlty Towers to The Office, there is a structure and plot, an engagement with a particular kind of established form of comedy. It is recognisable, formulaic, and no less intelligent and funny for it. Its frames of reference are public life, the British class system, stereotype, the vision of the nation, and the political system. From Yes Minister to The style of alternative comedy is much more difficult to pin down - it is related to subcultures and counter-cultures, a rejection of the values and forms of the establishment that mainstream comedy either parrots or parodies; its style is often seen as anarchic, fragmented, difficult to interpret, and sometimes difficult to find funny.
In a recent volume, Alternative Comedy, Then and Now (1922), Oliver Double and Sharon Lockyer trace the development of the concept of alternative comedy across the history of the alternative stand up scene. Our focus, however, will be less on this and more on television: from the seminal The Young Ones - seen to have established the alternative genre in the public conciousness - to programmes like Red Dwarf, through to Reeves and Mortimer and Green Wing, we will explore a series of strange and chaotic works in order to work out the formal elements of "alternative" comedy.
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