From Beyond the Fringe to Nanette: five shows that changed the face of comedy

Beyond the Fringe

These days, as BBC comedy controller Shane Allen recently confirmed, “Oxbridge white blokes” are out of comedy fashion. Time was they were the cutting edge, as when Messrs Cook, Miller, Moore and Bennett were cherrypicked to create Beyond the Fringe. A modest success at the Edinburgh festival in August 1960, it then made a huge splash in the West End. Here, as never before, the sacred cows of postwar Britain (the political class; the royal family; the military) were led to the satirical slaughter. Kenneth Tynan’s Observer review set the agenda: this was “the moment,” he wrote, “when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the 20th century.” By design or otherwise, Beyond the Fringe punched a hole through English deference and launched the 60s satire boom. Without it, would we ever have had the Establishment Club and TW3, Monty Python and Private Eye?

Richard Pryor: Live in Concert

How much game-changing do you want from one performance? Before Pryor’s Long Beach, California show in December 1978, no standup gig had ever been given a cinema release. Before Pryor became comedy’s most fearless truth-teller, mainstream US comedy remained largely the preserve of your Bill Cosbys and Bob Hopes – aspirational types loathe to affront middle-class morality. That had started to change a decade earlier, when Pryor walked offstage mid-show in Vegas, muttering to himself: “What the fuck am I doing here?” But the deal was sealed by Live in Concert, a excoriating set in which race, his bleak childhood, his arrest for shooting up his wife’s friends’ car and his recent heart attack were all fair game. This was the set that popularised standup on-screen and shifted the goalposts for how uncompromising comedy could be. In the words of Pryor’s most direct inheritor, Chris Rock: “Every comedian will tell you that it is, by far, the greatest piece of standup ever done.”

Opening night of the Comedy Store

May 1979, and a new comedy venue opens above a Soho strip club. An advert is placed in Private Eye for wannabe comics. Among the applicants is former art student and part-time drama teacher Alexei Sayle, who – after performing his “thug who got into violent philosophical disputes in a cake shop” routine at audition – is recruited by founders Don Ward and Peter Rosengard to be the opening night MC. It was an evening that changed Sayle’s life for ever. “Truthfully nothing during that week was real,” Sayle wrote in his memoir, “until with a rushing sound I am standing on the tiny stage and there are 150 baying, drunken punters in front of me and I am yelling and swearing and sweating and then I’m bringing on the first act and everyone hates them … ” So, UK audiences were introduced to New Model Comedy: aggressive, freeform, wildly creative and hostile to the casual chauvinism that characterised much prior British humour. So too was space created onstage for Rik Mayall, French and Saunders and “alternative comedy”, as standup’s punk generation emerged yelling and screaming and sweating into life.

Tig Notaro at the Largo, Los Angeles

Summer 2012 was a tough one for comedian Tig Notaro. She caught pneumonia. Her beloved mother died. Her relationship ended. And then, four days before she was due to perform at the Largo in Los Angeles, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. What happened next is the stuff of comedy legend. Aware this might be her last ever gig, Notaro shelved her planned set and greeted her audience with a surprise announcement. “Thank you, thank you, I have cancer, thank you, I have cancer, really, thank you.” There followed an extraordinary half-hour – one of “a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets” Louis CK had ever seen, tweeted the comic – in which Notaro extemporised cathartic, funny-sad and red-raw comedy for her astonished audience. While she wasn’t the first to address her cancer in comedy, it had never been done four days after diagnosis. Notaro raised the bar for how intimate standup could be, how entwined with life as it’s being lived. To this gig can be traced the many emotionally naked comedy shows we’ve seen since.

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette

It won the Barry award in Australia. It won the Edinburgh comedy award, and was the talking point of the 2017 festival. It sold out multiple London runs – and now it’s the buzziest Netflix comedy special for years. With her blistering anti-comedy show Nanette, Hannah Gadsby calls out comedy. The art form is lying to us, she says: simplifying the truth for easy laughs; making things seem funny that aren’t. And encouraging the abused to participate in their own subjugation. The response has been overwhelming. Gadsby’s show has been hailed not only as comedy for the #MeToo generation, but as an end-of-the-road for the whole idea of “humour as truth-telling”. We elevated comedians once because they told us what we needed to hear. But at a time when a resurgent “alt-right” cloaks itself in irony, and when stellar comedians (Louis CK, Bill Cosby) stand revealed as liars and abusers, Gadsby demands we reconsider comedy’s supposed authority. It has been hailed as a game-changer, so now let’s see how the game will change …