Growing up in the Nineties with plenty of “alternative” humour on television, including Chris Morris, Lee and Herring and The Friday Night Armistice, I was told that predictability is the enemy of laughter. The narrative behind their growing popularity ran that the Bad Old Comedy (stand-ups like Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, and sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbour) used cheap stereotypes to pick on easy targets, especially ethnic minorities, women and gay men, before rightly being sidelined by a new wave, more adventurous in form and content.
As it transpired – and as Stewart Lee has expertly depicted via a range of television and stand-up shows, and Suzanne Moore recently documented – the Nineties represented the mid-point between the old guard’s overthrow and the rise of comics who similarly exploited populist prejudices to become the new orthodoxy. Unlike their predecessors, they may justify their acts by claiming irony or opposition to their straw man conception of political correctness but in practice, their apparent stretching of liberal boundaries is sometimes barely distinguishable from the retrograde bullying of the Seventies, even if the butts of their jokes are slightly different.
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