In the UK the 1960s saw the growth of satire boom, including the creation of The Establishment Club, which, amongst other things, gave British audiences their first taste of extreme American stand-up comedy from Lenny Bruce. In the 1970's the growth of stand-up comedy in the UK was fuelled by local working men's clubs, where the style of humour was of the smutty crude mother in law style, often with quite racist in content, and much of which would be considered unacceptable today. A breakthrough British TV show called The Comedians saw many of the club circuit comics, such as Stan Boardman, George Roper, Roy Walker, Tom O'Connor, Frank Carson, Jim Bowen, Charlie Williams, Mike Reid, Duggie Brown, Lenny Windsor, Colin Crompton, Ken Goodwin and Bernard Manning, becoming major stars based on stand-up comedy performances on this TV show.
In the early 1980's, with Britain going through an economic recession and the strong often unpopular leadership of it's first woman Prime Minister Margret Thatcher, came the emergence of 'alternative' comedy. Turning it's back on the style of the 70's comedians, it was a comedy perhaps characterized by more character-based, surreal, or absurd humour as opposed to observations of everyday life - non-gag-orientated but completely irreverent and often very anti establishment. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson were the best known alternative stand-ups of the time.
In 1989, however, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer more or less killed alternative comedy by proving that you didn't need to swear and be political and rude as an alternative to mother-in-law jokes and during the 90's, for all their foul-mouthed socialist fury, the alternative comedians of the early 1980s became part of the establishment.
So to the present, and it seems as though the British stand-up comedy scene has settled into a happy combination of alternative and more traditional styles of comedy. Encompassing the irreverent and mixing in gag based humour, observational comedy and political satire. All of which now find their niche within the mainstream. The United Kingdom continues its long and rich heritage of stand-up comedians, and continues to be considered the stand-up centre of the world, due to the ease with which a comic can make a living. Read more on Dawn French Comedy.
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