‘Comedy is the new rock’n’roll!” This line, variously attributed to a defunct listings mag, a member of the Comedy Store Players and Janet Street-Porter, became common currency in the 1990s, when comedy gatecrashed arenas with Newman and Baddiel’s maiden Wembley gig in 1993. Had the art of making people laugh eclipsed – in size, public enthusiasm, cultural cachet – the art of making people groove?
It feels like a quaint conversation in light of the arrival of Oasis’s mega-tour in Edinburgh this month, which triggered panic among standups at the gazumping of their fringe audience. But has comedy returned to playing second fiddle to its sexier, better-loved big brother? Or are such distinctions meaningless in a cultural landscape unrecognisable from the 1990s?
There’s certainly no shortage of comedy/rock’n’roll crossovers on the fringe, including Friday Night Dinner star Tom Rosenthal’s show Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am. As the title implies, the show compares and contrasts Rosenthal with the Arctic Monkeys – specifically, how both have felt trapped by public perception and expectations of their work. Comedian Marc Burrows, meanwhile, is performing The Britpop Hour, celebrating the cultural moment that Oasis (and indeed Newman and Baddiel) bestrode.
Burrows, a music critic and musician as well as a comic, doubts that the “new rock’n’roll” claim holds water any more. “I don’t think there’s a Mighty Boosh around at the moment,” says Burrows. “They were the last comedians with a music-style fandom. Apart from in niche ways, you don’t find people wearing comedians’ merch these days. Except for Taskmaster, nothing’s developed that cult fandom the Boosh had.”
Not that comedy’s cool era was confined to the 90s. “If it was the new rock’n’roll in 1994,” says Burrows, “what was it in 1984 with The Young Ones? Or in 1970 with Monty Python? The Young Ones had bands on their show. There had always been obsessive fanbases in comedy.” Burrows has a point: what made the Newman and Baddiel era different had less to do with dissident, dissolute values than with big money, swagger, and mass appeal, since the 80s alternative comics were more punk than their 90s successors. If by that logic you wanted to prove comedy was rock’n’roll today, you could point to enormo-dome acts such as Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock or even our own Ricky Gervais – the Rolling Stones of their art form, making money by the stadium-load off the back of what was once their shock-of-the-new appeal.
I turn to Ollie Catchpole at Live Nation, “the world’s leading live entertainment company”, which now – to a degree unimaginable in the 1990s – pays as much heed to comedy as music. Catchpole used to programme theatres, and found that “comedy is for most regional venues the backbone of revenue. The economics just became a lot more reliable [than music]. So more promoters like us moved into the comedy space.” Nowadays, he says, “it’s overwhelming how much demand there can be. The Ricky Gervaises, the Micky Flanagans – it’s big, big business. And it’s growing into Europe now.” Between the UK, America and Australia, and now Europe, arena touring for comedians can effectively be endless. “Someone like Jimmy Carr, he could just keep going.”
So you’ve got a live performance industry rallying to comedy, as a low-cost way to make big bucks. But this doesn’t translate into the Boosh-style fandom of yesteryear. (Which at least – let us be thankful – means Jimmy Carr T-shirts are few and far between …) What’s going on? To Catchpole, it’s about how audiences consume their culture nowadays. “Audiences cross over. Tastes vary these days. There’s no financial risk to anybody to learn something new any more. You don’t have to buy a CD or spend £15 on a gig. The young consumer has such a wide range of profiles at the touch of their fingers, so their interests develop. They no longer pigeonhole themselves into one avenue.”
That’s a phenomenon promoters exploit, proactively encouraging fans of Band A to explore the work of Comedian B. “We use the word fluid a lot,” says Catchpole. “If we feel that fans like a particular band, a Fontaines DC, say, we know they might also like [comedian] Vittorio Angelone. It’s a lot healthier now in terms of growing comedy and getting names out there.”
The comedians I speak to agree: it’s easy now to cultivate your own fanbase – but harder to find a mass audience. Says Burrows: “Punk came out of fanzine culture, that very DIY point of contact, which comedy didn’t do in the past. But it does now – because of TikTok, Instagram reels, social media.” Catchpole says: “You get a more personal interaction with a comedian now. And we’re getting digital influencers and Instagrammers who can go straight on stage.” But the culture of comedy versus music online is imbalanced, says Burrows. “On YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music, the algorithm gives you the same bands, and fandoms can build across those platforms. Whereas for visual stuff, streaming platforms are ghettoised. A sketch show isn’t finding an audience on Netflix and Amazon and YouTube. For comedians, there aren’t these huge mass communication points you need to kickstart a rock’n’roll-level appeal.”
Culture and the media have fragmented, and the ubiquity of “milky, milky” and the Mighty Boosh – and indeed Oasis – is harder to attain. (The success of the current Oasis revival, argues Burrows, is partly down to a yearning to be united by a monoculture.) But that phenomenon has changed music just as much as comedy. When I pose the “new rock’n’roll” question to comedians now, one common response is: is rock’n’roll even “rock’n’roll” any more? Do we still live in a world where social tribes identify themselves by the music they like, and where bad-ass bands can straddle the world, and seem, even, to propose alternative values to the status quo?
In 2019, I wrote an article for this newspaper on the anniversary of the death of ur-rock’n’roll comedian Bill Hicks, asking younger comics what they thought of his work. Their distaste for his swaggering, shoot-from-the-hip comedy was striking. So it’s a surprise to hear from the musical comedy act Jazz Emu, AKA Archie Henderson, that the say-the-unsayable brand of standup Hicks once represented is alive and well. “It still has a big pull, that naughty-boy standup energy, where they’re pushing things they shouldn’t really be saying, especially on podcasts. Maybe now it’s hidden behind more layers of irony. There are lots of ‘cancel me if you want’ games being played. But there’s an appetite for it.” While distancing himself from the phenomenon, Burrows cites the anti-woke acts trading under the Comedy Unleashed banner as an example of what some might consider rock’n’roll comedy. (Worth noting that, at the other end of the political spectrum, the most trenchant recent opposition to President Trump has been expressed in comedy, by South Park and Stephen Colbert.)
Like all my interviewees, Henderson thinks the comedy and music worlds are so changed as to make the “new rock’n’roll” claim now meaningless. If you want rock’n’roll-alike comedy, you can find it, he says, citing as an example the “deliberately disruptive” late-night collective Stamptown, led by American import Zach Zucker. “The underground energy of being crammed in a room with people late at night is the same whether you’re seeing a band in a sweaty music venue or a comedy show at 1am when someone’s throwing stuff all around the room.” On the other hand, “going to see a rock legend who is completely committed to the theatre of being cool, and the audience buys into it – I don’t think comedy can do that”. A sense of humour necessarily bursts the bubble. “Comedy is always being undermined by itself.”
But that’s fine – because far from comedy aspiring to be rock’n’roll, these days it’s often the other way around. “Musicians who previously might have been cool and aloof,” says Henderson, “now have to debase themselves a bit and do sketches online. It’s a very effective way of getting their music out there: comedy is a good way of gaming the algorithm. So the bands that survive in this anti-band economy are the ones willing to be a bit internetty and a bit cringe, and do sketches about their songs.”
Finally, says Catchpole, “all of these things exist quite happily together in today’s marketplace. Comedy is stronger and healthier than ever. The fact that at the Edinburgh fringe it is” (widely expressed panic notwithstanding) “still selling tickets next to Oasis shows comedy can not only compete with rock’n’roll but can match it. But I don’t see it as a competition, I see them as complementary.”
So, too, does Burrows, staging his show about Britpop while its most bullish proponents perform to 70,000 fans in a stadium just down the road. There’s only one thing niggling Burrows about comedy’s current relationship with rock’n’roll, and that’s that “Liam Gallagher is funnier than almost any comic”, he says. “There’s a bit in my set where I read out his tweets. And one of the existential crises I have about what I’m doing is that it gets bigger laughs than anything else in my show.”
The Britpop Hour With Marc Burrows is at Underbelly, Bristo Square until 25 August; Jazz Emu: The Pleasure Is All Yours is at Pleasance Dome until 24 August; Tom Rosenthal: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am is at Assembly Roxy until 24 August
