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PA L G R AV E
STUDIES IN
COMEDY
THE PUNK
TURN IN
COMEDY
MASKS OF ANARCHY
KRISTA BONELLO RUTTER GIAPPONE

Palgrave Studies in Comedy
Series Editors
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, UK
Sharon Lockyer
Brunel University
London, UK
“Punk scholarship and comedy studies offer a wide range of routes into academic
enquiry. The relationship between punk, humour and comedy is a largely unex-
plored area, with rich and exciting potential for research and critical analysis. This
fascinating study of the shared influences that informed the evolution of both
punk and alternative comedy in the late 1970s and early 1980s is a timely and
important contribution to an evolving and expanding field.”
—Dr. Russ Bestley, London College of Communication, UK
Comedy is part of the cultural landscape as never before, as older mani-
festations such as performance (stand-up, plays, etc.), film and TV have
been joined by an online industry, pioneered by YouTube and social
media. This innovative new book series will help define the emerging
comedy studies field, offering fresh perspectives on the comedy studies
phenomenon, and opening up new avenues for discussion. The focus is
‘pop cultural’, and will emphasize vaudeville, stand-up, variety, comedy
film, TV sit-coms, and digital comedy. It will welcome studies of poli-
tics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception, as well
as work that explores international perspectives and the digital realm.
Above all it will be pioneering – there is no competition in the publish-
ing world at this point in time.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14644
Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone
The Punk Turn

in Comedy
Masks of Anarchy
Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK
and
University of Malta
Msida, Malta
Palgrave Studies in Comedy

ISBN 978-3-319-72840-7 ISBN 978-3-319-72841-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72841-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938335
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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now known or hereafter developed.
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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Cover credit: no_limit_pictures/Getty Images
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International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To My Parents:
Anna, Mum, In Loving Memory,
and
Mario, Dad, for his Unflagging Support
Acknowledgements
First thanks go to Oliver Double for being a generous, supportive, and all-
round excellent Ph.D. supervisor; to Ivan Callus for being an indispensable
mentor every step of the way on the academic journey; and to the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding this project, and mak-
ing it possible. Thanks too to Duška Radosavljević, Michael Mangan, and
Peter Boenisch, and to the peer reviewers whose suggestions helped make
this book stronger. Thanks also go out to Sharon Lockyer and Roger Sabin,
editors of this series. I would like to thank John Marchant (John Marchant
Gallery), Mark Perry, and Russ Bestley for their help with obtaining images.
I would also like to extend thanks to Guillaume Collett, Wissia Fiorucci,
Kurt Borg, Sean Fenech, Emma Nugent, and Lara Schembri for their
much-appreciated encouragement and advice; and to all those performers
who agreed to talk to me, and who inspired this project through their work.
Thanks too to the Palgrave Macmillan and Springer team for their careful
attention throughout the publication process. A heartfelt thank you to my
parents for their support, which got me through.
I would also like to thank Taylor and Francis for their kind permission
to reprint some of the argument published in ‘Laughing Otherwise:
Comic-critical approaches in alternative comedy’, The Journal for
Cultural Research 21.4 (2017), 394–413.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Peter Cook: Missing Links 13
3 The ‘Alternative’ 33
4 Attitudes Towards the Past 67
5 Styling the Amateur 99
6 The Role of the Audience 111
7 Modes of Dis-/Engagement 123
8 Power Play 153
9 ‘Style Without Affectation’: Honesty and Performance 175
10 Boundaries of the (Un)Said 195
11 Conclusion 241
Index 251
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 ‘God Save the Queen’ (1977), collage on paper. Image
Jamie Reid, courtesy John Marchant Gallery. Copyright
Sex Pistols Residuals 47
Fig. 4.1 Jamie Reid’s design for ‘Pretty Vacant’ (1977), collage
on paper. Image Jamie Reid, courtesy John Marchant Gallery.
Copyright Sex Pistols Residuals 80
Fig. 5.1 Sniffin’ Glue cover, Issue 3 1/2, 28th September, 1976.
Copyright Mark Perry 105
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Comedy is prey to an elusiveness that seems to defy framing. Critchley

(2002, p. 2) notes that ‘humour is a nicely impossible object for a philos-
opher’; Bergson (1980, p. 61) describes it as ‘this little problem, which
has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to
bob up again’. Nancy (1993, p. 368) writes, ‘Laughter always bursts—
and loses itself in its peals. As soon as it bursts out, it is lost to all appro-
priation, to all presentation.’ Lewis (1989, p. 156) outlines humour
by refusing to define it: ‘humour is not one but many things’, among
which ‘humour marks the boundaries of the real’; ‘serving as a weapon,
an embrace, an evasion, a lesson, a puzzle and a game’. That most infa-
mous of ‘lost’ texts, Aristotle’s Poetics of Comedy, continues to fascinate
and elude, both structuring and escaping the literary labyrinth designed
for its concealment in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1998). The
implications are that we can detect it at its play and interplay; but the
following reservation qualifies our quest: there is something that escapes
our attempts to theorise humour. That, perhaps, is its very essence: this
is not simply to imply that it is its essence which escapes; but—rather, or
additionally—that this very elusion, this missing link, is its essence, not
merely of its essence (or a property thereof).1
Punk is similarly riddled with internal contradictions;2 it seems to spin
its own origin myth(s), and subsequently refuses to be pinned down to
it. In rejecting an origin in the past, punk is, paradoxically, both creator
of its own myths and reference points on the one hand, and iconoclastic
© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. Bonello Rutter Giappone, The Punk Turn
in Comedy, Palgrave Studies in Comedy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72841-4_1
2 K. BONELLO RUTTER GIAPPONE
on the other. Punk, although characterised by a certain naïveté,3 was not

wholly lacking in awareness of the media’s power—swiftly acquired as
that awareness was. Punk seemed to situate itself not simply in opposition
to photographic stillness, but in the very space that opened up between
photograph/record and performance—partly captured yet eluding, punk
critically commented on both sides, refusing to come aground on either
shore. Punk has been described as destined to fail, its very raison d’être
its own death.4 This fold however possesses a force of its own. Punk’s
power could be said to arise from this ‘Romantic’ blaze, extinguished as
soon as ignited—its extinction so fundamentally implied and inscribed in
its own stance as a precondition that it could only be sustained as a vir-
tual shadow of something that has laughingly absconded—its very force
arising from its always already being deferred.
The disorientation of a constantly displaced ‘beginning’, and its
attempted erasure, would seem to discourage the spinning of a struc-
tured narrative—or to be capable of spinning any such narrative around
and turning it on its head. The attempt to trace (and, to a degree, recon-
struct) alternative comedy (altcom) and punk’s respective lineages and
identify points of intersection along the way is therefore fraught with
paradox. The opposition of such ‘unbound’ moments to the fixity and
stasis of an ‘establishment’ is not a simple one, and it might be suggested
they (at least partly) succumbed to dominant ideology in their own turn.
The surrounding ‘establishment’ scene in place at the time was not the
only ‘tradition’ targeted. A radical break also seemed to entail a strongly
declared rejection of the past and of these movements’ own influences,
or the search for ‘alternative’, unexpected spheres of influence.
The outspoken attitudes towards the past evinced by both altcom
and punk will be dealt with in greater detail in Chapters 3–5. Chapter 2
posits a common influence in Peter Cook, someone ostensibly detached
from either scene—his association with them, on the surface, a casu-
ally flirtatious one. This will give us occasion to broach themes that will
resurface in the course of the book. Though the quality of ‘liveness’ was
valued for its promise of authenticity against ‘spectacle’, the scope of this
discussion also takes in mass media coverage—this had a part to play,
relatively early on, in the construction of ideas and perceptions of both
punk and altcom, locating them at a point in postmodernism where the
line between liveness/mediatisation is problematised.
For the most part, I accept the conventional view that ‘punk’ was
at its height in 1975–1978,5 taking the UK scene as my primary
focus. Although my discussion will highlight certain moments, I am
1 INTRODUCTION 3
hesitant to pinpoint a single origin—this would be against the ‘spirit’

of punk: taking a strict view of the timescale of punk would limit rec-
ognition of its continued influence, as well as of its very fleetingness
and the elusiveness of the ‘now’ it posits, coupled with the problem-
atisation of anteriority and influences so crucial in punk. Its very his-
torical specificity is characterised by a certain reservation in relation
to context. The identification of shared traits between punk and alt-
com, and of differences between them, suggests a route towards con-
structing a sort of poetics of genre; however, my aim is not to fully
encode the movements, nor is it to give the impression of related but
essentially enclosed phenomena.6 Moreover, questions of influence
move the discussion beyond the narrow time-bracket of what is con-
ventionally regarded as ‘punk’. The American punk scene is, likewise,
not neglected—certain enlightening similarities, contrasts, and mutual
influences are noted throughout. Rather than positing an ‘essence’
of punk therefore, the book examines its tendency to spawn various
permutations and parodic transformations. Thus too, post-punk,7 as
another possible route in parallel with altcom, is taken into account
when it highlights elements or develops some potential within punk, or
departs from punk and altcom in revealing ways.
The origins of ‘altcom’ are, likewise, difficult to pinpoint, though
associated with the rise of Thatcherism (see Connor 1990, p. 81; Cook
2001, p. 9). The debts owed to, on the one hand, popular comedy, and
on the other, countercultural political theatre must be recognised, yet
‘definitions’ of punk and altcom are best derived by considering them
in relation to what they define themselves against, a tactic that will be
employed in Chapter 3: ‘The “Alternative.”’ ‘Alternative Cabaret’
(see Allen 2002, pp. 107, 116) and the opening of various spaces for
the performance of the ‘new’ comedy (before its incursion into the
mass media), seemingly coincided with the ‘end’ of punk—yet, as with
the transition from punk to post-punk, the break is not a discrete one.
Some punk performers, including punk performance poets such as
Jenny Eclair, bridge the areas of performance—importing elements of
one style into another. Some punk poets, such as John Cooper Clarke,
Seething Wells, and Attila the Stockbroker, continued to straddle (or
combine) the two modes. Keith Allen and Tony Allen both had direct
connections with punk bands—Keith Allen fronting The Atoms, and
Tony Allen occasionally performing alongside the Poison Girls. Norman
Lovett (2002) supported punk bands, including The Clash and 999,
before taking his chances at the Comedy Store. Moreover, some early
alternative comedians were drawn from the ranks of countercultural the-

atre: for example Andy de la Tour, who had been in the Belt and Braces
Roadshow. The transition period saw punk bands, comedians, and
punk performance poets sometimes sharing the same bill. This endured
beyond what could be deemed a ‘transition period’, with performance
poetry such as that of Henry Normal continuing to occupy a position
in between music and comedy in the 1980s (see Double 1997, p. 238).
Furthermore, there is of course the sense that altcom arose with a gener-
ation reared on, and attuned to, punk and post-punk.8 Punk’s ‘threaten-
ing’ pervasiveness went beyond being considered a self-contained scene,
and it could be remarked that it provided the soundtrack to altcom’s
early years.9 Later ‘waves’ of alternative (or even ‘post-alternative’) com-
edy will be considered; for the most part, they will feature in our dis-
cussion insofar as they appear to develop (sometimes significantly) the
trends set by punk and/or early altcom.
My comparative study proceeds by examining punk and altcom along-
side each other with reference to particular points of convergence or
divergence. Chapters 3 and 4 ‘situate’ the movements within a cultural
context and in relation to competing discourses, with additional regard to
their attempted reconfiguration of the very terms of a temporal relation.
This exploration of attitudes towards the past picks out notable ‘precur-
sors’ in its tracing of an alternative counter-history, taking note of the
mythologising impulse in punk and exploring this in relation to the dis-
course of the ‘impossibility’ of nostalgia and the demand for the ‘new’, as
well as looking at the implications for the acknowledgement or rejection
of influence. While Chapter 3 offers some contextualisation of punk and
altcom in relation to influences and rejected traditions, Chapter 4 focuses
more specifically on the attitudes and approaches to the past, the impli-
cations of these for the sense of the ‘future’, and the opening up of a
particular critical-parodic stance. It focuses particularly on the interplay
of parody and nostalgia, as different approaches to the past which may
open up an avenue of criticism (towards present, as well as past). Theories
of nostalgia and parody will come into play here, with an eye on the way
they have tended to interact or diverge in theories of postmodernism/
late capitalism. Parody is considered as a humorous means of enabling
deconstruction, and of engagement with and disengagement from both
past and contemporary contexts, as well as offering a possible [dis]con-
nection with a ‘future’, extending/issuing an invitation and a challenge.
Chapter 5 focuses on the value placed on the ‘amateur’ and on lack of
1 INTRODUCTION 5
skill—rather, an inversion of traditional values, where being able to play

gives way to ‘playfulness’, and hence to room for experimentation. This
is discussed as a deliberate strategy for bypassing established procedure
and enabling the emergence of raw and unshackled ‘noise’ and the voices
of a youthful generation. The paradox encountered here is that this
‘raw’ quality was itself to some degree constructed, as the target style.
‘Newness’ here goes hand in hand with the implied atavism of stripping
rock back to its basic building blocks—harking back to the ‘youth’, even
mythicised ‘origins’, of rock itself.
While the focus in the preceding chapters is on contextually, tempo-
rally, and intertextually situating the movement(s), Chapters 6–8 explore
the spatialised dynamic: the changed terms of the relationship between
audience and performer, including the struggle for or renegotiation of
distance. The struggle over space and distance is discussed, alongside the
attempt to ‘close the gap’, suggesting a third way—that of deconstruct-
ing the ‘purely’ oppositional approach through instability (not always
deliberate). Altcom’s attempts to work within and against the expecta-
tions generated by punk will be considered, in the course of an analy-
sis of how this struggle affected performance style. Chapter 6 tackles the
responses available to the audience. The punk audience was a ‘new’ kind
of audience—seemingly authorised to participate and even be unruly.
In a reaction against epic-scale arena rock, there seemed to be a tilting
of the balance, with the audience seemingly invited onto equal footing
with the performers—sometimes to the point of audiences invading the
stage. This translated into an increase in heckling with altcom, and the
use of the Comedy Store gong—a novel means of interaction available
to the audience, with the capacity to empower them to sway the course
of a performance. Rather than equality pertaining, however, the dynamic
more often tended towards a play for dominance, with the performer
sometimes struggling to maintain control. Chapter 7 considers the
strategies used by performers to reassert some degree of distance, even
in intimate performance spaces which seemed conducive to a sense of
immediacy. Hostility, alienation, and aggression, as well as the courting
of disgust, were features of both punk and altcom. Thematised detach-
ment also suggested the recognition and attempted working through of
the postmodern condition, exploring the elusiveness of feeling (in both
senses). The meta-comic played a part in generating critical distance.
Chapter 8 considers some alternative mechanisms of control and the
implications for [re-]positioning in terms of power in situations where
trust in traditional assumptions structuring the performer–audience rela-

tionship has been deliberately compromised.
Chapters 9 and 10 build upon recurring themes, drawing out impli-
cations for the overarching agendas of punk and altcom, and identify-
ing a possible point of divergence. Chapter 9 deals with the declared
punk aim of ‘honesty’, also upheld in altcom, and its relation to per-
formance—the paradox of ‘style without affectation’, in Lydon’s words
(1994, p. 84). Any consideration of ‘honesty’ in punk must take into
account its fiction-spinning and mythologising, intertwining with
performance and performative truth. Contexts, likewise, tend to be
highlighted as changeable constructs (having real effect), with recontex-
tualisation being a favoured parodic technique. Chapter 10 focuses on
emphatic shifts away from ‘covert’ means of implying underlying shared
meaning, to the troubling of those assumptions of trust and immediate
understanding. Increased obscenity is discussed as a feature of a more
‘direct’ approach. ‘New’ areas rendered available for comic treatment
by punk are discerned. This new outspokenness is seen to be reflected
in the changes taking place in gay comedy. Although, like punk, alt-
com had its own blind spots, paradoxes, and zones of inarticulacy, alt-
com evinced greater wariness of irony and ambiguity, and the shift into
over- rather than understatement became more pronounced. I suggest
that the reason for this is an urgently increasing sense of the importance
of political responsibility—departing from the Malcolm McLaren ‘be
irresponsible’ punk model (not apolitical, but lacking clarity in terms of
political engagement).
Having regard to relevant contextual specificity, contemporary cultural
critiques, and punk’s position at the brink of the transition into intensi-
fying neoliberalism under Thatcher, I will draw upon theories of post-
modernism. Punk could be seen as (critically) invoking the modernist
‘avant-garde’ to critique the postmodern condition—with the addition of
a ‘postmodern’ awareness of its displacement and distance from modern-
ism, and moreover an inbuilt anticipation of failure. My approach and
methodology are also indebted to those of Derrida, whose work seems
to be peculiarly suited to the topic: first, in the ‘theatricality’ of his writ-
ing, which is infused with terminology drawn from performance—veils,
curtains, masks, medium, space, time (see, for example, Derrida 1981).
The ‘scene of writing’ (Derrida 1978, pp. 246–291) is more than a
mere trope for Derrida, the theatre more than simply a store of conven-
ient analogies. As indicated in the ‘unusual’ spatial organisation of some
1 INTRODUCTION 7
of his texts and in the ‘graphic illustrations’ they provide of the ‘multi-
ple-reading process at work’ (Norris 1987, p. 201), the ‘theatrical’ use of
space extends into the writing, woven as it is out of digressions, returns,
deferrals. With its spatial complexities—such as the ‘figure of […] invo-
lution, which extends space and creates the echo of theatricality’ (Terada
1999, p. 204)—and its unique sense of timing, Derrida’s work seems
intensely theatrical. His writing is replete with devices of concealment,
of withholding, of revelation, with an array of spectres and figures wait-
ing in the wings; it is acutely concerned, moreover, with the dimensions
of performance and performativity.10 Furthermore, with his wordplay, his
surprises held in abeyance then sprung (something always withheld), his
interminable play of appearances, reappearances, and disguises, Derrida
seems to bear a particular kinship with comedy.11 The medium spec-
ificity implied by his frequent emphasis on the ‘literary’ is blurred by
Derrida’s statement that ‘the institution of literature […] is an institution
which tends to overflow the institution’ (Derrida 1989, 1992, p. 36).
As Attridge notes elsewhere (1988, p. 189), the ‘literary’ is specific in
that it occupies a position which allows it to reveal something about lan-
guage and structure more generally—a specificity that resides therefore
in its very overflowing. Punk (beyond the referencing in post-punk band
Scritti Politti’s [1982] song, ‘I Love Jacques Derrida’) also has an affinity
with Derrida’s deconstructive approach in its insistence on a counter-cur-
rent, and on the gaps and seams of [dis]jointure—as evidence of hetero-
geneity within an apparently coherent system, which has implications for
the possibilities and the politics of resistance.
For a counter-current, punk has attracted considerable attention.
Punk is the object of ongoing documentation and flurries of anniversary
events, and has long straddled the areas of pop culture, rock journalism,
and academia; it is steadily finding entry and acceptance into more rig-
orously academic territory, with an established Punk Scholars Network
and a journal, Punk & Post-punk (Bestley 2011–). In staking (highly
important) claims for punk’s [counter]cultural contribution, deserving
of academic attention, many accounts and studies, with a few notable
exceptions (for example, Bestley 2013; Double 2007), have tended to
emphasise its ‘seriousness’. Stewart Home (1995) recognises the com-
edy in punk, yet draws a distinction between the more humorous ‘nov-
elty’ approach and the ‘serious’ bands. Documentaries on punk, such as
Don Letts’ excellent Punk: Attitude (2005), often set out to interview
artists from diverse fields (film-makers, photographers, graphic artists),
who claim a debt to punk—yet comedy remains under-represented in

many such accounts, or occupies a mostly tangential or incidental posi-
tion in the narrative. This book explores punk’s use of the comic, as well
as its part in influencing the direction comedy would take in altcom.
Rather less has been written about altcom than punk; in some ways, as
we shall see, it took itself even more ‘seriously’ than punk did. This book
attempts to explore the interrelationship between both these countercul-
tural ‘movements’, within the ‘punk spirit’ of rendering connections visi-
ble while also exploring moments of [dis]juncture.
Notes
1. Alenka Zupančič (2008, p. 58) comments on comedy’s ability to make
the ‘constitutively missing link’ between the ‘Real’ and ‘its other side’
‘appear’. Nancy (1993, pp. 371, 376) observes that the loss of Aristotle’s
Poetics of Comedy ‘is full of instruction: in that we learn nothing from it’,
and that ‘the burst of laughter reveals that the structure of its truth is to
be hidden’.
2. ‘Any attempt at extracting a final set of meanings from the seemingly
endless, often apparently random, play of signifiers in evidence [in the
difficult and contradictory text of punk style] seems doomed to failure’
(Hebdige 1979, p. 117).
3. Critchley (2004, pp. 116–117) sees punk as being characterised by the
‘self-consciousness of naïvité’.
4. ‘When you’re young—you see what a lie the world is, and in punk there is
this recognition of the difficulty of being honest. Punk recognised that it
was impossible—unlike previous movements. That’s how it built in that it
doesn’t succeed’ (Richard Hell, in Heylin 2007, p. 278).
5. Coinciding, more or less, with the lifespan of the band the Sex Pistols,
as fronted by Johnny Rotten. Savage’s account of punk in England’s
Dreaming (1991) is Pistols-centred; Garnett (1999, p. 21) also identi-
fies punk primarily with the Pistols, while Sabin (1999, pp. 3–4) notes
that punk is often viewed as having been already in its death throes when
Thatcher rose to power in 1979, although his interest lies in its continu-
ing legacy.
6. This study does not form part of the explosion of oral histories and mem-
oirs noted by Matthew Worley (2017, p. 20)—indeed, it fits rather bet-
ter in the ‘theoretical’ stream he identifies (and as such, it does grapple
with some of the same questions and difficulties). And yet, there is an ele-
ment of strong personal engagement within my attempt to sustain ‘criti-
cal distance’. Alongside recognition of the need to ‘re-historicise’ punk,
1 INTRODUCTION 9
as compellingly argued by Worley, an undeniably personal motivation

lies behind my attempt to additionally understand how the opening onto
recontextualisation could mean that a young teenager’s encounter with
1970s–1980s UK punk, then joyfully recognising its spirit in TV reruns
of The Young Ones, in a different place and time (the fairly insular, con-
servative, and postcolonial Malta of the 1990s), could feel so important,
liberating, exciting, even identity-forming. Perhaps it was a more indi-
vidualised and isolated experience (I later met others who identified as
punks, but the local scene was small)—I’m certainly not claiming it was
the same as living through it as it occurred—but the experience was no
less impactful for being displaced.
7. Simon Reynolds (2005) limits his study of post-punk to the years between
1978 and 1984.
8. Harry Enfield (1997, p. 106) writes: ‘When I was fifteen, I and my friends
were all punks. We loved the Clash, the Sex Pistols and ATV’.
9. Ben Elton, on making his way to his Comedy Store debut: ‘I felt ill all
day. I remember leaving the tube station, sort of eleven o’clock or so,
with The Jam, “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight”, ringing in my
ears’ (in Cook 2001, p. 68).
10. ‘The grammatological space of a general writing, that in virtue of which
experience is possible, is the space of what Derrida calls “le texte en gen-
eral” […] a limitless network of differentially ordered signs which is not
preceded by any meaning, structure, or eidos, but itself constitutes each
of these. It is here, upon the surface of the general text, that there “is”
deconstruction (“Il y a de la déconstruction”), that deconstruction takes
place (a lieu). It is this general textuality that Derrida seeks to deploy per-
formatively in many of his readings’ (Critchley 1999, p. 38).
11. Jerry Aline Flieger (1991, p. 140), indeed, likens Derrida’s work to a
‘bedroom farce’.
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the Postmodern Text. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Garnett, Robert. 1999. Too Low to Be Low. In Punk Rock: So What? The
Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin, 17–30. London and New York:
Routledge.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.
Heylin, Clinton. 2007. Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge. London:
Viking.
Home, Stewart. 1995. Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock.
Hove: Codex.
Letts, Don. 2005. Punk: Attitude. London: Fremantle Home Entertainment.
DVD.
Lewis, Paul. 1989. Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in
Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Lovett, Norman. 2002. Interviewed by Andrew Ellard. Penguin’s Lovett. Red
Dwarf: The Official Site. http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/features/interviews/
norman-lovett/. Accessed 4 November 2017.
Lydon, John. 1994. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs: The Authorised
Autobiography, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. London: Plexus Publishing.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Norris, Christopher. 1987. Derrida. London: Fontana.
Reynolds, Simon. 2005. Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984.
London: Faber and Faber.
Sabin, Roger (ed.). 1999. Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk.
London and New York: Routledge.
Savage, Jon. 1991. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London:
Faber and Faber.
Scritti Politti. 1982. Songs to Remember. Rough Trade. ROUGH20. LP.
Terada, Rei. 1999. Imaginary Seductions: Derrida and Emotion Theory.
Comparative Literature 51 (3): 193–216.
Worley, Matthew. 2017. No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
CHAPTER 2
Peter Cook: Missing Links
Peter Cook hailed from the Cambridge Footlights tradition of comedy,

yet his career cannot be entirely explained or circumscribed by the
dominion of the ‘Oxbridge Mafia’, as Roger Wilmut (1980, p. 253) calls
it. Indeed, this resistance to conventional categorisation was part of his
allure for Lydon (1991): ‘If I’m related to anything, it would be to peo-
ple who have always been awkward and difficult, people like Peter Cook.’
This surprising convergence provides an apt starting point for a discus-
sion of the relationship between comedy and punk.
The Establishment Club

In the 1960s, Peter Cook was at the forefront of a wave of politically
engaged satire. Lisa Appignanesi (2004, p. 235) credits Beyond the
Fringe (constituted by Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley
Moore) with reintroducing the form of satirical cabaret in England, in
1961.1 The Establishment, the cabaret which followed hot on its heels
(co-founded by Peter Cook and Nicholas Luard), was both fashion-
able and cutting edge. However, it took place in a ‘club environment’,
distinct from ‘public’ performance spaces. As Appignanesi (2004, p.
237) points out, with its size The Establishment offered intimacy,
while its club status freed it from the shackles binding ‘public’ stages,
where ‘censorship forbade the presentation or mention of royalty

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72841-4_2
or government figures in any disrespectful light’. This put it in a posi-

tion to lay the necessary groundwork that would enable more aggressive
forms of satire, though it would fall to others to completely break the
circle of exclusivity (affectionately but pointedly referred to by Frankie
Howerd in addressing his Establishment audience).2 William Cook
(2001, pp. 9, 46) observes parallels with the later Comedy Store, and
suggests that while The Establishment was a passing phase, an extraor-
dinary one-off event mostly subject to the whims of fashion, the Store
was in the right place at the right time, and could pursue to a fuller
stage of development ideas that The Establishment had only toyed with.
The Establishment was, however, instrumental in carving out an ‘alter-
native’ niche alongside pre-established and ‘public’ venues; such spaces
became highly valuable to the ‘alternative’ comedians, who would turn
that self-contained niche into the beginnings of a (still rather centralised)
circuit.
Between The Establishment and altcom, radical theatre and punk,
with their focus on accessibility, took the form in new directions.
Oliver Double (2007) has noted punk’s debt to music hall and cab-
aret, as well as to avant-garde performance. Punk drew upon both
the subversive potential of cabaret and the ‘popular’ aspect of music
hall to facilitate an intrusion into a more public arena. Itzin (1980,
pp. 277, 303) documents the parallel rise of cabaret in ‘alterna-
tive theatre’ in 1977: in particular Monstrous Regiment’s Floorshow,
and North West Spanner’s efforts, which were also active attempts
to reach out to new—often challenging—audiences, to tour, and to
explore new performance spaces. The Combination, a radical and
experimental theatre group and ‘commune with a café’ (Osment
and Woddis 2009), later actively involved with Rock Against Racism
(a campaign which came to be associated with punk elements), felt
the need to carve a space for its combination of ‘music, music hall,
cabaret and political comment’ (Itzin 1980, pp. 326–327). Between
1971 (the year it acquired the Albany Empire) and 1978, The
Combination consolidated that space—a circuit of community cen-
tres, accessible to people on a local level. This was the scene that punk
and altcom would interact with, and in some ways, diverge from.
Therefore, though the Establishment had paved the way, politically
satirical cabaret would only become more accessible across ‘club’,
local, and more generally ‘public’ spaces some years later.
2 PETER COOK: MISSING LINKS 15
Punk Disconnections
Although he was present at the Sex Pistols’ first television appearance,
on Tony Wilson’s So It Goes (4 September 1976), Peter Cook’s many
flirtations with punk seemed destined never to materialise into a direct
association. He was actively courted by Rotten and McLaren to write the
script for the Pistols film project.3 He had furthermore been informed by
Johnny Rotten ‘that one of their songs had been based on his Drimble
Wedge and the Vegetations number from Bedazzled’, yet: ‘“I don’t know
which one”, Peter told the New Musical Express (NME)’ (in Thompson
1997, p. 358)—‘I was too pissed to remember’ (‘No Feelings’ seems a
likely candidate). Peter Cook would repay the favour on the track ‘Street
Music’ (Cook and Moore 1978), Derek and Clive’s own typically irrev-
erent tribute to Johnny Rotten, in which Cook sings ‘I don’t care’
repeatedly, in Rotten-esque fashion, irreverence being an attribute com-
mon to both. Continuing the line of just-missed encounters, Lydon’s
post-Pistols ‘band’ (or ‘company’), Public Image Ltd (PiL), failed to
show up for their scheduled appearance on Revolver, a music showcase
series hosted by Cook (further discussed below).4
These missing/lost direct links are, however, the tip of the proverbial
iceberg. John Cooper Clarke (in Hamilton et al. 2006, p. 346) main-
tains that ‘generational humour began with Peter’, and—one could
add—nowhere so evidently as with the venture Cook launched with
Dudley Moore in the first flickerings of punk’s dawn. When Peter Cook
appeared on So It Goes, he was there to promote Derek and Clive, a dive
into obscenity which coincided with the Pistols’ infamous appearance on
The Bill Grundy Show (1 December 1976).
Derek and Clive
The quest for an ‘alternative space’ took a dramatic turn with Derek
and Clive, with the attempt to speak from a space that was not—‘I’ve
got cancer of never being heard in my life’ (‘Having a Wank’, Cook and
Moore 1977). The ‘new’ space seemed to appear out of a crack, uncov-
ering an apparently ‘negative’ space from which to speak, or un-speak, in
a paradoxical stream of obscenities repeated ad nauseam.
The affinities between punk and Pete and Dud’s Derek and Clive out-
ing have been remarked by several chroniclers. Alexander Games (1999,
p. 57) writes:
Derek & Clive caught the temperature of the times in much the same
way as Beyond The Fringe had in the previous decade. In 1976, there was
only one type of music to listen to, and that was punk rock. Derek & Clive
(Live), their first album, was comedy, punk-style […] grossly indecent, a
danger to society and an insult to all right-thinking people.
Wilmut (1980, pp. 117–118) terms the creations ‘more punk versions of
their original characters’—a tantalising comment, sadly pursued no fur-
ther; Barbra Paskin (1998, p. 146) writes: ‘Derek and Clive were punk
versions of Dud and Pete who loved to talk dirty.’ The first recording
was initially distributed as a bootleg, and Barry Fantoni (in Hamilton
et al. 2006, p. 45) rightly describes this act as ‘intentionally amateur’.
I will argue that a shift into overstatement became characteristic of
alternative comedy (altcom) and punk, as opposed to the understate-
ment sometimes associated with ‘Englishness’.5 This trend was already
evident in Derek and Clive, whose comedy did away with innuendo
altogether by mercilessly taking smut to an extreme.6 Derek and Clive
dragged the dirt to the surface, setting the blueprint for alternative
comedy and even not-so-alternative comedy like Not the Nine O’ Clock
News, which latter would later directly target the Two Ronnies by over-
exposing the sexual underpinnings of their puns in the sketch ‘The Two
Ninnies’.
The question of parody—a mode which inhabits its target texts/
genre (see Genette 1997, p. 2)—will be further discussed in Chapter
4, as being one manifestation of an attitude towards ‘past’ forms or
content that fall under scrutiny, or cease to be acceptable. Parody
inhabits the text, but always modifies it, both imitating and trans-
forming (see Genette 1997, pp. 5, 28). One could go further, and say
that it even, in a move that evokes the Möbius strip, makes a percep-
tible turn and reinscribes within itself the parodied text.7 The trans-
formative power of parody ensures it is never neutral. I would like
to draw attention to Bakhtin’s claim (1984a, pp. 225–227) that even
repetition itself is not a neutral activity—repetition opens onto the
dialogic, with even seemingly identical echoes introducing difference
through displacement. In Derridean terms one might say it always
introduces a third term, différance, enabling transformation through
its seeming superfluity, even its very nature as ‘frivolous’.8 Parody can
therefore be proposed as potentially a prelude to or an agent of some
sort of change.
Derek and Clive’s ‘Alfie Noakes’ (Cook and Moore 1977) launches a
withering attack on the tired format employed by Northern club com-
ics, who would become targets for altcom’s debunking of tradition and
critique of racism as the new comedians attempted to redefine com-
edy and the limits of the acceptable. ‘Northern’ club comics, with their
brand of mother-in-law and stereotype jokes, adhered to a hitherto fail-
safe formula and an ‘easy-target approach’ (Double 1997, p. 172). ‘Alfie
Noakes’ highlights the interchangeability of such comedians, with Derek
and Clive alternately and sometimes simultaneously voicing the indistinc-
tive ‘Alfie Noakes’, purveyor ordinaire of hand-me-down humour. Alfie
Noakes is announced for a turn, then re-announced, and re-announced
again, drawing out the dull monotony of his joke format, once deemed
infinitely reusable, now showing signs of wear. Derek and Clive take a
typical joke, and pursue the set form ad absurdum, complete with exces-
sive laughter-signposting:
CLIVE: I want to tell you a story, I want to tell you a story. There’s this
bloke—he was Irish, and he’s Jewish, and he’s Pakistani; he’s stupid,
he’s lost his teeth.
[…]
CLIVE:—and all his hair fell out.
DEREK: O-ho.
CLIVE: and his legs fell off.
DEREK: O-ho.
[…]
CLIVE: his cock got sliced off by a lawnmower.
DEREK: O-ho.
CLIVE: And he said—o-ho.
DEREK: O-ho.
CLIVE: He said ‘I’m not feeling too well.’
DEREK: O-ho.
CLIVE: His landlord came around and said to him.
DEREK: O-ho.
CLIVE: ‘if you’re not feeling well,
DEREK: O-
CLIVE: you should see how I’m feeling’
DEREK and CLIVE [raucously erupt]: ooooooh!!
The more overtly politically motivated alternative comedian Tony

Allen would similarly lay bare the structure of this kind of Northern club
comedy: ‘This drunk homosexual Pakistani squatter trade unionist takes
my mother-in-law to an Irish restaurant. Says to the West Indian waiter,
“Waiter, waiter, there’s a racial stereotype in my soup”’ (in Wilmut and
Rosengard 1989, p. 34). This play with formula subverts all-too-estab-
lished conventions.
Derek and Clive seem to grasp a recognisable form, and wilfully run
with it. Some sketches start off from a recognised joke format, such as:
‘This bloke came up to me …’ (Cook and Moore 1976). Its refusal to
‘end’ turns it from a ‘joke’ into a ‘comic sequence’, where satisfaction
does not come as the end, but rather triggers an extending game, in the
terms of Zupančič’s (2008, pp. 136–137) distinction between the two.9
Exaggeration is a feature of superfluity, and a parodic device, as well as
a more general comic technique. The expected effect of intensification
is offset by a petering out into a disturbing sort of nothing, as Derek
and Clive insistently exaggerate to a point where it could go no further,
where it seems to be exhausted or deflated—the point at which the genre
of smut and its derivatives are killed, along with each and every sketch,
so utterly dependent on the terms they seem to explode. It foreshad-
owed punk’s terminal blaze, in seeming to deconstruct its targets only
through its own self-deconstruction. The insistent filth, overexposed
and overstated, seemed calculated to render innuendo unnecessary, and
thereafter impossible without a critical stance.
The spiralling of the cancer dialogues—in particular, ‘Having a Wank’:
‘I’ve got cancer of not ever being born’ (Cook and Moore 1977)—
seem to end up in this ‘nowhere’ (place): a place that, however, seems
to be paradoxically glimpsed, made manifest in the same manner that a
black bar marked the Pistols’ chart position when ‘God Save the Queen’
soared near the top of the charts in June 1977, ‘despite [the song’s]
suppression on British radio, the ban on sales at many shops which
reported to the charts, and the many outlets who refused to advertise it’
(Gimarc 2005, p. 72).10 Chris Morris (in Hamilton et al. 2006, p. 450)
describes the Derek and Clive experience in terms of place—an indefina-
ble ‘there’—and suggests that they break through (the masks?) to some
other (more ‘real’?) side:
It’s like a massive mixture of mainly negative forces that takes you there,
but ‘stands up’? For God’s sake, I dunno. […] Or the things where they’re
just beginning to crack up because they can’t believe where they’ve got to.
And then just going ‘Fuckingcuntfuckingfuckingcuntcuntfuckingcuntyouf
ucking-cunt’, the fact that it stops being a sketch and becomes two guys in
a studio doing this becomes funny for that reason.
Derek and Clive are relentless in their progressive exaggeration, accel-

erating into this no-place. Greil Marcus (2001, pp. 16–17) describes
a similar impression while listening to the Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays in the
Sun’: ‘Johnny Rotten was climbing, throwing pieces of the wall over his
shoulder, crying out his inability to understand more of the story than
you do’, and—after working himself up into a kind of heightening fren-
zy—‘Rotten went through the wall; “please don’t be waiting for me”, he
said.’
Even some of those who respected the duo seemed to harbour
reservations, and appreciate Derek and Clive only in spite of their
excesses. Ade Edmondson, a fan and later alternative comedian, com-
mented on his debt to Pete and Dud. With regard to the Dagenham
Dialogues (Not Only But Also) for example, he admitted (in Pete &
Dud: The Lost Sketches 2010), ‘I remember we were copying these
voices. And you know, quite obviously Rik and I have sort of, er,
assumed a lot of the characteristics of … you know, we’ve stolen, basi-
cally’. Yet he confessed to finding the Derek and Clive film Derek and
Clive Get the Horn (Mulcahy 1979) offensive (in Thompson 1997, pp.
363–364). There was perhaps some relief that someone had gone so
far, so they would not have to. Mark Thomas (in Hamilton et al. 2006,
p. 361) is emphatic—‘John Cleese said, “Peter was the gatekeeper to
the fields in which we now all play.” I think Peter Cook kicked the
doors down!’
There were few who did not greet the cunt-kicking episode in the
film with some distaste or discomfort, and there were those who felt, in
addition, that there were points at which the sketches ceased to be funny
(see, for example, Thompson 1997, p. 355). The cunt-kicking sequence
follows (and occurs as an unnecessary extension of) the Guinness Book of
Records–bogey routine, with Clive (Cook) expressing the defeated desire
to hold the world record for the longest bogey, and follows the rules
of extension dictated by that content. Peter Cook, unable to extend his
line of bogey and the thread of the joke any further, reaches out to yet
another extreme, beyond the bounds of the bogey routine—aspiring to
the record for ‘number one cunt-kicker-in in the world’.
The delaying of or detour around climactic moments such as one

might expect from a punchline is characteristic of ‘Derek and Clive’
material, in which repetition frequently escalates only to plateau or peter
out (and this despite the seemingly ‘direct’—sometimes vocally violent—
approach of leaving very little unsaid). Derek and Clive typify Zupančič’s
notion (2008, pp. 65–66) of:
the way in which comedy manages to stretch the momentariness of the

short circuit, how it manages to faire la comédie, to ‘make a (whole) scene’
out of this structural moment, by not simply letting it go, by insisting on it
‘beyond reason’, and exploring it from different angles. In other words—
by refusing to ‘cut the comedy’.
There is one sense in which one may be tempted to posit a climax, as

Games (1999, p. 24) does:
One of Peter’s main pleasures in life, in the Sixties,11 was to make Dudley
corpse in the studio. Watching the efforts with which Dudley tries to hold
himself back and the ease with which Peter ties him up in yet more knots,
the tension between them is almost sexual, like an elaborate game of comic
foreplay. Dudley, being passive, is trying to put off the moment of submis-
sion as long as he can. Peter, the active half of the couple, wants him to
submit, and he won’t stop until he achieves his climax and makes Dudley
crack up.
However, the keyword is ‘foreplay’—and Peter’s foreplay is incessant.

It is ‘almost sexual’, but still firmly within the realm of foreplay. Adam
Phillips’ analysis (1993, pp. 10–11) of tickling as ‘dependent’ on the
ability of the one doing the tickling ‘to hold […] the experience’ is rele-
vant here:
And this means to stop at the blurred point, so acutely felt in tickling, at
which pleasure becomes pain, and the [one being tickled] experiences an
intensely anguished confusion; because the tickling narrative, unlike the
sexual narrative, has no climax.
In response to Phillips, John Limon (2000, p. 62) emphasises the word

‘blurred’ and concludes that ‘the pleasure may not always be pain but
it is always becoming pain. Even the victim of the tickling may not be
sure when enough is enough.’ ‘Derek and Clive’, however, proceeds

as though there were such a point. It is not a point of anti-climax, it
is in a sense a climax indeterminately deferred—but more than that, it
is the interminably extended gap of deferral, the missing point where
the climax absconds, is not to be found. While scatological, the com-
edy of Derek and Clive is not quite carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian
sense (Bakhtin 1984b). Where Bakhtin’s carnivalesque suggests constant
movement, Derek and Clive seem to reach a point from which they can
go no further, despite having reached no end.
Filth
Gary Morecambe and Martin Sterling (1994, p. 209) raise a concern
about the explicit nature of altcom, and dissociate it from Morecambe
and Wise—another double act claimed as one of its influences:
Rightly or wrongly, alternative comedy is thought of by a majority to be

associated with comics who deliver a stream of bodily-function related
jokes—the type of which most mature people have grown out of prior
to secondary school. It is material which would have been totally alien to
Morecambe and Wise.
The dissociation is not, however, so self-evident. What Morecambe and

Wise share with Pete and Dud’s Derek and Clive, as two precursors to
altcom, is that in both cases vulgar obscenity is unnecessary. Morecambe
and Wise rarely resort to it, while Derek and Clive delight in the very
fact that it is unnecessary—with them, it is always already excessive, and
revealed as such—they inhabit an area of superfluity. Such superfluity
is indulged precisely as if requiring no further justification: ‘Derek and
Clive’ often seem to aim at nothing more than filth—filth for filth’s sake,
nothing but filth, nothing beyond the filth—except for the knowingness.
In ‘The Critics’ (Cook and Moore 1978), Derek and Clive, or two
‘critics’, discuss the virtues—or vices—of ‘Cook and Moore’, and express
the sheer delight of saying things ‘unnecessarily’ in the strongest possible
terms:
CLIVE: ow, Pinter uses these words, these—I, I suppose to the gen-
N
eral public shocking words—
DEREK: Yes, yes of course.
CLIVE: But he uses them to effect.

DEREK: Yes, to punctuate his, his …
CLIVE: He punctuates his dialogue.
DEREK: His drama. Yes.
CLIVE: And when he uses the word ‘arsehole’.
DEREK: Quite.
CLIVE: It means something,
DEREK: Exactly!
[…]
CLIVE: hereas a ‘prick’ or a ‘cunt’ in the hands of Cook and Moore,
W
it’s just gratuitous. ‘Prick’ or ‘cunt’.
DEREK: One feels it’s being abused …
CLIVE: It is being abused.
DEREK: Oh, yeah.
CLIVE: And I myself, I, I, I cannot see why in the civilised world it
is necessary for people with a certain amount of—erm—under-
standing, university, to use the word ‘prick’, or ‘fuck’ or …
DEREK: … ‘cunt’.
CLIVE: … ‘cunt’. I mean I, I never have the slightest urge to use the
word ‘fuck’, do you?
DEREK: I mean, why would I … No.
[…]
CLIVE: o. I mean, why the fuck should I say ‘fuck’? I’ve got no rea-
N
son for saying ‘fuck’.
[…]
CLIVE: I mean, I’m not going to go ‘fuckinghellshittitbumarsehole’
because I don’t need to.
DEREK: [laughing] Of course you’re not going to!
CLIVE: What is the point?
[…]
DEREK: What is the point?
Whereupon they erupt into a volley of expletives, hurled at no particu-

lar target, while asserting: ‘There is absolutely […] no point whatsoever’
(Clive). They do not stop, however, at establishing the pointlessness of
this ‘transgressive’ group of words. Towards the end of this dialogue,
critic Clive moves to implicate language more generally: ‘I mean, when
I want to say, “Fuck!”, I don’t want to say, “Radiator”!’ This collapses

the distinction between ‘gratuitous’, and ‘ordinary’, or communicative,
teleologically inclined language. It suggests the necessity of the unneces-
sary—the suggestion even that perhaps this is the most necessary of all,
the blurring of the threshold between the frivolous, and the essential:
preparing the way towards a more ‘honest’ approach to language, later
argued for by Ben Elton, amongst others.
The ‘filth for its own sake’ approach seemed to test the extremes of
smut in groping for its purest, ultimate form. Dudley Moore’s own ver-
dict was: ‘We went just about as far as we could go with pure filth’ (in
Paskin 1998, p. 161). Paskin (1998, p. 163) affirms ‘nothing and no
one was sacred.’ The place they sought, however, had its own air of pro-
fane sacredness, and the attempt at rupture has been seen in quasi-reli-
gious terms: the cancer sketches led Will Self (in Hamilton et al. 2006,
p. 188) to think they seemed to proclaim that ‘Nothing Was Taboo’—
he perceives Derek and Clive as a ‘one-off, as an epiphanic realisation of
what the potential of satire was in that way.’ An ‘epiphanic realisation’
would indeed involve taking the mode to a point from which it could go
no farther, in its quest for the sordid-purity of the form—the reaching
towards an inverse apotheosis: ‘“Cunt” and “fuck” combined is poetry,
pure attack’ (Jerry Sadowitz, in Hamilton et al. 2006, p. 198). Yet, this
‘poetry’ resides in repetition to a point that defuses the word’s ‘taboo’
power, its mystique, and relocates the veiled obscene in the unmarked/
unremarkable ordinary—as Germaine Greer recognises, ‘“fuck” becomes
like “the” and “and”’ (Offensive 2002).
The Double Act

Like many double acts, Moore and Cook prompted and some-
times shoved each other along, though Moore’s role was tempered
by some reluctance: ‘There’s no doubt he shocked me, and it seemed
that was his main source of pleasure—shocking me. He was push-
ing me to go further too […]. I didn’t enjoy it as much as doing Pete
and Dud’ (in Thompson 1997, p. 356).12 The technique that drove
Pete and Dud to this point of no return (and of being able to go no
further) involved the play of insults, the attempt to drown each other
out, and outdo each other—trapping them in a spiral of deferral. The
intensification of the give and take—or, perhaps more accurately, of
the give–give–give–give—of the game is reminiscent of the excesses of

the ‘potlatch’, which could drive to overabundance or oblivion (see
Marcus 2001, pp. 393–397). There is no turnaround, no punchline—
just ever-extending play, and a tension relentlessly increased by proximity
to the point of overlapping, speaking over each other, competing with
each other, and often uttering the same or similar words, as on the track
‘In the Cubicles’ (Cook and Moore 1977).13
The other things it resembles are practices such as the ‘dozens’ and
‘dissing’—‘verbal contests such as signifying (verbally putting down or
berating another person with witty remarks, also called ranking, sound-
ing, or dissin’) or the dozens (mocking someone by ridiculing their
relatives)’ (Watkins 1994, p. 64). Peter Cook memorably (and rather
unsettlingly) engages in the latter in the filmed studio session, Derek and
Clive Get the Horn.14 This mounting exchange of abuse would also be
an inalienable feature in punk. John Lydon (1994, p. 250) reads the Sex
Pistols’ ‘game’ in this same light:
It’s a ‘dissing thing’, isn’t it? You notice it a lot in black culture in America
these days, this thing of putting each other down all the time, and whoever
comes out with the best one-liner—that’s it—and you burst out laughing.
‘You can’t top that!’ That’s the game that used to go on with the Pistols.
In Derek and Clive, the acceleration into overstatement seems to ful-

fil another function: that of overcompensating for the suppression of
an affective or emotive layer, as I will argue is also the case in punk’s
studied indifference15 and outspokenness. This is an issue that will be
addressed at various points, from different angles, throughout this book.
There is no lack of force, or of occasional aggression—what seems to be
suppressed, rather, is anything pertaining to sentimentality, sometimes
indiscriminately extended to expressions of emotion. Hence, punk would
claim to be susceptible to ‘No Feelings’ (on the album Never Mind
the Bollocks: Sex Pistols 1977), or ‘No Compassion’ (from 77: Talking
Heads 1977), a legacy carrying through into post-punk. This calls to
mind ‘the absence of feeling’ that Henri Bergson (1980, p. 63) sees as
both symptom of and condition for laughter. Nigel Planer (in Hamilton
et al. 2006, p. 296) notes this peculiar inarticulacy in Cook:
Like Michael Palin, Dudley Moore has the ability to act A Moment Of The
Heart, whereas comedians like John Cleese and Peter Cook could not act
A Moment Of The Heart. […] What made [Peter] funny was that certain
cruelty, that cynicism.
‘Behind’ the scenes, mirroring and perhaps influencing the ongoing

performance-bound friction between the two (which veered between
aggressive and playful), was a fraying, or at the least strained, relation-
ship (see Games 1999, p. 106; Thompson 1997, p. 359). There have
been attempts to read Derek and Clive in terms of this not-quite-equal
relationship; for example Thompson (1997, p. 35), on Derek and Clive
Come Again (1977):
The content of the album was a vicious, bleak outpouring of genuinely

inarticulate, pent-up rage and frustration. […] The bulk of the rage was
Peter’s, and much of it was directed at Dudley.
Cook (in Thompson 1997, p. 362) himself described Get the Horn as
‘a document about two people who are at the end of their rope with
each other’. Though they were incredibly outspoken on topics or words
generally deemed ‘taboo’, there was reluctance on both sides to broach
emotional topics—or, when approaching delicate topics, they carefully
emptied them of affective content and emotive undercurrents. These
were suppressed, which is not to say they were never glimpsed (Peter
Cook makes several barely veiled allusions to Derek/Dudley’s relation-
ship with his mother in Get the Horn, and the cancer sketches were close
enough to Moore’s losing his father to be uncomfortable). However,
they were buried beneath compulsive laughter that failed to provide
any kind of catharsis or to defuse the tension, and in the Get the Horn
sequence, Dudley can no longer react, laughter itself becoming silenced.
This discussion ushers in an observation on the dynamics of the
performer–audience relationship, in its implications of a withdrawal/
retreat from an audience—a situation replicated in the glass between
the recording-studio performance space and the ‘audience’ in the
control room in Derek and Clive Get the Horn, and in Peter Cook’s
on-screen presence in Revolver. One could suggest that Cook and
Moore’s interrelationship involved alternating the roles of audience–
performer between themselves, making them a self-sufficient duo.
However, this might be weighted in Cook’s favour as performer, and
risk levering Dudley Moore into the position of audience on the (not
necessarily tenable) basis of comparative passivity. This would be to fall

into the trap of overemphasising one pole in a double act over anoth-
er—a common mistaken impression, as Ernie Wise found to his vexa-
tion (see Morecambe and Sterling 1994, p. 89). There was a third term
in Pete and Dud’s ‘Derek and Clive’ performing relationship, but it
was perhaps the distance introduced by the tripolarity that was most
crucial. It was a mostly silent and invisible audience. Apart from the
occasional (and sometimes significantly disruptive) intrusion in Derek
and Clive Get the Horn, their audience in the contained studio space
was set apart in the control room, safely removed, but reassuringly
present: ‘In the film Pete and Dud, when performing, always face the
control room. We would be their focal point; they needed to feel like
they were playing to an audience’ (Hugh Padgham, in Hamilton et al.
2006, p. 237).
Revolver (1978)
The compilers of How Very Interesting (Hamilton et al. 2006, pp. 216–
217) point out that Cook adopts the Clive voice for his role hosting
Revolver, a series showcasing punk and ‘new wave’, which fell between
Come Again and Ad Nauseam. In this role, he was unlike some other
hosts sympathetic to punk, such as Tony Wilson, who spoke out in his
own voice in punk’s defence. As compère, Cook doubled the punk atti-
tude of general contempt, going one better: ‘Insulting both bands and
audience was pretty novel at the time’ (Elvis Costello, in Hamilton et al.
2006, p. 223, emphasis added).
Although Revolver marked Cook’s most visible and apparently direct
involvement with punk, one of the striking things about Cook’s perfor-
mance is its disengagement, and his removal from the studio audience,
already TV-framed. Cook appeared at two removes from the home
viewers—on a little screen, above the stage. Interestingly, in every
respect other than Peter Cook’s role, the series aimed for ‘authentic-
ity’ and ‘liveness’—Revolver’s studio audience ‘hadn’t written in for
tickets, Mickie Most’s people had actually gone out and found them.
They acted like an authentic audience in the studio’ (Chris Hill, in
Hamilton et al. 2006, p. 227). The ‘authentic’ audiences and ‘live’
bands were being insulted by someone on a screen. Complicating the
issue of liveness, while all bands played live, and Cook performed from
a more restricted space, sitting behind a desk, within the smaller frame
of a screen, Elvis Costello (in Hamilton et al. 2006, p. 223) believes
that Peter Cook ‘got more genuine reaction from the audience than
any of the bands’. The screen separating Peter Cook from the audi-
ence in Revolver, and the apparent absence of a direct relationship with
their audience in most Derek and Clive recordings, accentuates and
underlines a play of closing and opening distances that, I will claim, is
very much a feature of ‘live’ performances in punk and altcom. Philip
Auslander (2008) questions the usefulness of ‘liveness’ as a distinctive
feature in any performance in a ‘mediatised culture’; I would likewise
question the immediacy ‘liveness’ would seem to promise. While ‘live-
ness’ remains a means of assuring an impression of immediacy and a
back-to-basics ‘honest’ approach, and is therefore valued by punk and
altcom, in practice, distance remained a structuring principle of most
performances.
Towards Altcom
Nigel Planer (in Hamilton et al. 2006, p. 300) is unable to see any true
single heir of Cook’s amongst his own contemporaries, though he does
single out Keith Allen for particular mention. Yet he does not credit
Allen with having gone quite far enough alone. Instead he asserts, ‘If
anything, it was a collective effort’—he sees the spirit as inherited by a
generation rather than any one individual in his time.
Notes
1. Humphrey Carpenter (2000) provides some background and contextual-
isation specific to the 1960s ‘satire boom’.
2. ‘As you know—well if you do know at all—I’m a humble music hall
comedian, a sort of variety artist you know, I’m not usually associated
with these sophisticated venues …’—the last word in a faux-French accent
(Howerd 1963).
3. The quest for a writer and the bumpy progress of the script is discussed in
Savage (1991, pp. 379–390).
4. Ben Myers (2004, p. 43) notes that such failures to appear became typical
of PiL’s dealings with the media—which were characterised by ‘disrespect
and disdain’.
5. Kate Fox (2004, p. 68) alleges that ‘The understatement “comes natu-
rally” because it is deeply ingrained in our culture, part of the English
psyche’. J. B. Priestley (1931, pp. 1–21) gives one explanation that could
be read as an attempt to account for the perceived prevalence of ‘under-
statement’. He describes English humour as ‘thinking in fun while feeling
in earnest’, implying a ‘deep’ undercurrent of feeling below a thin veneer
of ‘thought’—a veritable spring of feeling suggested, tapped into, subtly
evoked, and moreover foundational, but not overtly surfacing.
6. Ad Nauseam alone contained over 100 uses of the word ‘fuck’ (Paskin
1998, p. 181).
7. Margaret Rose (1993, p. 79) suggests this when she claims that ‘unlike
satire, the parody makes the “victim”, or object, of its attack a part of its
own structure’.
8. Frivolity as the destiny of the ‘sign’ (see Derrida 1980, pp. 124–128).
9. Jerry Aline Flieger (1991, pp. 81–84, 96), who expands on Freud and
takes a largely poststructuralist stance (in the vein of Derrida, Lacan,
and Blanchot) also explores the digressiveness of the comic, whereby the
game may be ‘subject to endless reactivation’.
10. Dave Laing (1985, p. 8) counts these non-appearances, ‘the series of con-
cert cancellations and acts of censorship that occurred in the early months
of 1977’, amongst punk’s key ‘events’.
11. A pleasure that would carry on into the 1970s (and Derek and Clive).
12. See, however, Paskin (1998, p. 147): ‘He found it fun, and was always
baffled when this more outrageous side of his humour was greeted with
puritanical shock.’
13. (Almost) together: You stupid fucking cunt.
Cook: You can’t keep talking longer than I can.
Moore: Oh, really, oh let’s see about that. […] The way I’m getting above
your voice is that I’m pitching it a bit higher … […]
Together:You stupid fucking cunt ….
14. Departing from the give–give format, this parry-riposte exchange turns
into a one-sided series of insults from Cook to Moore:
Moore: What has this got to do with fucking Wales/whales?
Cook: Nothing at all.
Moore: Right …
Cook: Your mother goes swimming around underwater you know, and
she spouts a lot.
Moore: That is very cruel. […]
Moore stands up and goes ‘for a walk’.
15. John Cooper Clarke considers Cook the first comedian to tap the vein of
boredom (in Hamilton et al. 2006, p. 347). Simon Critchley (2004, p.
116) writes: ‘punk is a working through of the creative possibilities of
boredom that resist any easy translation into pleasure’.
References
Appignanesi, Lisa. 2004. The Cabaret. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press.
Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatised Culture. London:
Routledge.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984a. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984b. Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Bergson, Henri. 1980. Laughter. In Comedy: ‘An Essay on Comedy’ by George
Meredith, ‘Laughter’ by Henri Bergson, ed. Wylie Sypher, 61–190. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press.
Carpenter, Humphrey. 2000. That Was Satire That Was: The Satire Boom of the
1960s: Beyond the Fringe, the Establishment Club, Private Eye and That Was the
Week That Was. London: Phoenix.
Cook, Peter. 1978. Revolver. ITV. TV
Cook, Peter, and Dudley Moore. 1976. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Present
Derek & Clive (Live). Island Records, ILPS9434. LP.
Cook, Peter, and Dudley Moore. 1977. Come Again. Virgin. V2094. LP.
Cook, Peter, and Dudley Moore. 1978. Ad Nauseam. Virgin. V2112. LP.
Cook, William. 2001. The Comedy Store: The Club That Changed British Comedy.
London: Little, Brown.
Critchley, Simon. 2004. Very Little … Almost Nothing. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1980. Archaeology of the Frivolous, trans. John P. Leavey and Jr.
Lincoln. London: University of Nebraska.
Double, Oliver. 1997. Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian. London: Methuen
Drama.
Double, Oliver. 2007. Punk Rock as Popular Theatre. New Theatre Quarterly
1 (23): 35–48.
Flieger, Jerry Aline. 1991. The Purloined Punch Line: Freud’s Comic Theory and
the Postmodern Text. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Fox, Kate. 2004. Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour.
London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Games, Alexander. 1999. Pete & Dud: An Illustrated Biography. London:
Chameleon.
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans.

Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Gimarc, George. 2005. Punk Diary: The Ultimate Trainspotter’s Guide to
Underground Rock 1970–1982. San Francisco: Backbeat Books.
Hamilton, Paul, Peter Gordon, and Dan Kieran (eds.). 2006. How Very
Interesting: Peter Cook’s Universe and All That Surrounds It. London:
Snowbooks.
Howerd, Frankie. 1963. At the Establishment & at the BBC. Decca. LK4556. LP.
Itzin, Catherine. 1980. Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since
1968. London: Methuen.
Laing, Dave. 1985. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock.
Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Limon, John. 2000. Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Lydon, John. 1991. Interviewed by Steven Daly. Interview, January.
Lydon, John. 1994. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs: The Authorised
Autobiography, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. London: Plexus Publishing.
Marcus, Greil. 2001. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.
London: Faber and Faber.
Morecambe, Gary, and Martin Sterling. 1994. Morecambe and Wise: Behind the
Sunshine. London: Robson Books.
Mulcahy, Russell. 1979. Derek and Clive Get the Horn. Universal DVD 2010.
Myers, Ben. 2004. John Lydon: The Sex Pistols, PiL and Anti-celebrity. London:
Independent Music Press.
Offensive: The Real Derek and Clive. 2002. Channel 4. TV.
Osment, Philip, and Carole Woddis. 2009. Noël Greig Obituary. Guardian,
September 24.
Paskin, Barbra. 1998. Dudley Moore: The Authorised Biography. London: Pan
Books.
Pete & Dud: The Lost Sketches. 2010. BBC 2. TV.
Phillips, Adam. 1993. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic
Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Priestley, John Boynton. 1931. English Humour. London: Longmans, Green
and Co.
Rose, Margaret. 1993. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Savage, Jon. 1991. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London:
Faber and Faber.
Sex Pistols. 1977. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Virgin.
V2086. LP.
Talking Heads. 1977. 77. Sire. SR6036. LP.
Thompson, Harry. 1997. Peter Cook: A Biography. London: Hodder and

Stoughton.
Watkins, Mel. 1994. On the Real Side. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wilmut, Roger. 1980. From Fringe to Flying Circus: Celebrating a Unique
Generation of Comedy 1960–1980. London: Eyre Methuen.
Wilmut, Roger, and Peter Rosengard. 1989. Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law?
The Story of Alternative Comedy in Britain from the Comedy Store to Saturday
Live. London: Methuen.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One in: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
CHAPTER 3
The ‘Alternative’
A Quest
The emergence of a new wave of comedy was to some extent enabled,
and the form it was to assume partly determined, by the topics that had
become available: ‘It became apparent that there was another universe
of things to make jokes about’ (Arthur Smith in Cook 2001, p. 28).
These recently uncovered zones seemed to demand a different approach,
and the creation of a new format, or the reformulation of existing ones.
This extended to the very medium itself—there was the sense of hav-
ing to reinvent the medium of television: ‘The early acts of alternative
comedy have dominated the TV medium, first because they are talented
but also because they opened the market for themselves’ (Connor 1990,
p. 129). Less spectacularly, the attempt that was Boom Boom … Out Go
the Lights (1980) was one unsteady stepping stone. The ill-fitting cou-
pling of medium and material had already been felt in the tentative but
exciting awkwardness of the Pistols’ first appearance on television, on
Tony Wilson’s programme So It Goes—which, in Savage’s words (1991,
p. 203), ‘was not without moments of mutual incomprehension’.
This incongruity also gave rise to one of the most explosive events in
punk: the ‘Grundy Incident’ on 1 December 1976 (Sex Pistols 1976),
when undeleted expletives breached accepted TV decorum.
Performers like Alexei Sayle did not immediately find a home for their
work. Sayle flouted categories by conflating expectations for genres and

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72841-4_3
media—performance poetry, music, comedy, and television. Introducing

himself as ‘Britain’s first mod Two-Tone poet’ on Boom, he recited a
poem with hat pulled low over his eyes. The poem in question, ‘’Ullo
John! Gotta New Motor?’, was later released as a single (Sayle 1982).
In the wake of Boom’s failure to make a splash, alternative stand-up
seemed more resistant to televisation, while sketch and character comedy
were seen as the most instantly assimilable genres—hence, for example,
Rik Mayall’s ‘Kevin Turvey’ monologues (A Kick Up the Eighties
1981–1984). Yet, television’s potential to transmit stand-up to a wider
audience was also being explored in The Comedians (first broadcast in
1971–1979, resuming in 1984), which showcased acts from Northern
working men’s clubs. One of altcom’s oft-declared raisons d’être was to
set itself up in opposition to such ‘trad’ comedy; consequently, it may be
supposed that the problems to be solved in each case were different in
kind. One problem however, was shared: The Comedians was also ‘cen-
sored for foul language’ (Hannan 2009, p. 279)—the very hurdle punk
had exposed.
There seemed to be no readily available openings for altcom: ‘If you
were from neither an Oxbridge nor a variety background I can quite see
how Fortress Broadcasting must have appeared unassailable’ (Fry 2010,
p. 208). The setting up of Channel 4 in 1982 seemed to offer a provi-
sional answer, at least, to the problem. In the mid-to-late 1980s, it was
to broadcast the most extensive televised showcase of ‘altcom’ (including
stand-up) to date: Saturday Live (1985–1987), and its follow-up Friday
Night Live (1988).
The ‘alternative’ could be viewed as attempting to forge/tread a path
through oppositions, as discussed below. Keith Levene was unable to
answer Snyder’s question about things he liked in the Tomorrow show’s
Public Image Ltd interview (PiL 1980)—finally responding, ‘I only
know what I don’t like’. This reinforces Laing’s observation (1985, p. x)
that ‘the connotations’ of punk often ‘appeared through a negative pro-
cess’. With this in mind, my attempt to ‘define’ punk and altcom, or to
draw a (non-exhaustive) ‘poetics’-in-negative of the two, will take the nec-
essarily winding approach of considering them in relation to the genres/
forms of performance they differentiated themselves from, and to which
they endeavoured to offer an alternative.
3 THE ‘ALTERNATIVE’ 35
Space (and Time)

The emphasis on the ‘here’ and ‘now’ seems, in both punk and altcom,
to be intricately linked to a rejection of the situation abiding in the ‘here’
and ‘now’, in an effort, perhaps, to puncture through the establishment
veil into the ‘real’ ‘here and now’, with ‘now’ being the ultimate elusion:
‘No Time to Be 21’, attested the Adverts (1978).
‘Alternative’, in both punk and altcom, came to mean not merely set-
ting up an ‘alternative’ to something, but also opening up a space within
the system from which to launch a critique of the establishment. Indeed,
Grossberg’s schema (1984, p. 243) situates most of punk upon the ‘crit-
ical’ axis, and the Sex Pistols more specifically within the ‘Alternative-
Critical’ category. The space of resistance is a paradoxical one: ‘we’re
occupying places/Just as they get removed’ (Ultravox 1978). Garnett
(1999, p. 17) proposes that punk—the Pistols in particular—succeeded
in finding ‘somewhere else, someplace that hadn’t existed before and
that only existed for a brief moment in time’. This was an alterna-
tive space that changed the configuration of the space between art and
pop, and importantly, provided a place from which to mount a critique.
Derrida (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, pp. 15–16) suggests that appar-
ent cohesion in a context is always haunted by heterogeneity; a possible
counter-current, ‘secondary, virtual, inhibited—it waits, pregnant with a
possible receivability’.
The attempt to create a counter-system, deriving force from a surfac-
ing counter-current, extended to the means of production and network
of distribution, where independent distribution could to some extent
sidestep market values—redefining expectations for music and thence
the positions available to the listener (see Laing 1985, p. 21). While
‘counter-’ implies a relation to the dominant, the punk, post-punk, and
punk-influenced attempt sometimes seems to veer towards creating a
totally independent network, which Hesmondhalgh (1997) concludes
proved ultimately untenable in that form.1 The enduring legacy that
Hesmondhalgh (1997, p. 272) allows for—‘a continuing suspicion of
corporate cultural practice’—should not however be underestimated, in
its opening of a critical space/margin. Even when working from ‘within’
the system, Lydon (1983) implies that an uncompromising stance was
always necessary—he claims to have attained success always ‘on [his] own
terms’.
The need to carve out a space, within already-demarcated borders, in

an attempt to subvert them (‘Now they’re on the inside they’re gonna
eat away at all the crap until there’s none of the old stuff left’ [Perry
1977]), may lead to the attempt—as with Derek and Clive—to seek out
a non-place, forcibly carved out by an ‘act’ of refusal. This negative zone
holds a strange attraction in its very repulsion (and self-expulsion or
self-imposed exile):
The fascinating and powerful class of negative performatives—disavowal,

renunciation, repudiation, ‘count me out’—is marked, in almost every
instance, by the asymmetrical property of being much less prone to
becoming conventional than the positive performatives. Negative per-
formatives tend to have a high threshold. […] It requires little presence of
mind to find the comfortable [interpellating2] formula ‘I dare you’, but a
good deal more for the dragooned witness to disinterpellate with, ‘Don’t
do it on my account.’ (Parker and Sedgwick 1995, p. 9)3
Sedgwick and Parker, while accepting the possibility of such refusal,

admit that it works within an established framework, ‘made possible by
the [interpellating] utterance itself’. We may thence infer that the utter-
ance enables and contains the seed of its own deconstruction, its own
counter-utterance—simultaneously destabilising, and bound.
Spatial [re]construction, or the plotting of an alternative map, is rem-
iniscent, in its tactics, of the Situationist dérive. ‘Primarily urban’, the
dérive involves letting oneself ‘be drawn by the attractions of the terrain
and the encounters [one finds] there’, while remaining aware of the ‘cur-
rents’ of the city and minimising chance—thus gaining increased sensi-
tivity to affective urban architectures and insight into the cityscape’s
effects on emotion and behaviour (Debord 1956). Debord (1955) out-
lines the importance of creative intervention in manipulating so-called
chance through—for example—the construction of psychogeographi-
cal maps (‘a renovated cartography’): ‘express[ing] not subordination
to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences’.
Similarly, McLaren’s design of devising an alternative to the industry has
been described as an attempt to ‘get his band into situations’ (Ingham
in Savage 1991, p. 173).4 Comedian Keith Allen (2007, p. 230) also
declares a debt to Situationism. Although his definition of ‘situationism’
does not appear to be rigorously specific, he does contrast it with ‘spec-
tacle’: ‘There was something a little too obvious about “spectacle”, so
3 THE ‘ALTERNATIVE’ 37
I set about looking for a suitable “situation” where I could perform.’

Situationism’s notion of détournement puts its own spin on carving out
one’s space; it involves wresting, tweaking, derailing or in some man-
ner altering a pre-existing context—just as Keith Allen (1990) describes
his own intrusion into a Max Bygraves show in 1976, walking on naked
while working as a stagehand, actively diverting attention from the cen-
tral performer.
The larger cities have their spaces—whether waiting to be uncovered,
blank spots bursting with potentiality, or apparently oversaturated—
where overwriting (or counter-writing) may yet turn up blind spots. ‘In
Manchester and London, there was a sense that you had to make your
own entertainment’, says Richard Boon (in Savage 1991, p. 207), for-
mer Buzzcocks manager. Savage (1991, p. 112) maps a ruined London
landscape:
In 1975, the areas around Chippenham Road and Elgin Avenue, Freston
Road and Lancaster Road were a scrapyard vista. Where there wasn’t rub-
ble, there were remnants of Victorian housing stock. Just like parts of
Camden Town, most of Docklands, and pre-media Soho, these empty
spaces seemed then to embody an emotional truth: this is what England is
really like.
Savage’s emphasis is on realism and ‘truth’; however, the spaces he marks

out comprise a vista of ruins, ripe for reinvention and reconstruction.
Despite their obvious attractions however, the major cities were not the
exclusive homes of punk—regional bands and fanzines took root, to
some extent decentralising the ‘scene’. As TV Smith (The Adverts 1977)
said, ‘Devon’s great for learning to get bored’.
However, after the Grundy show, punk’s rise in publicity was coun-
terbalanced by the difficulty of finding places to play—the media hype
overtook the live appearances of the Pistols, the surfeit of images over-
whelming the actual broadcasting of the band’s work. On their abortive
tour of the UK in December 1976, thirteen of nineteen dates were can-
celled, while ‘most commercial radio stations were refusing to play the
Sex Pistols, and only John Peel stuck it out at the BBC’ (Savage 1991,
p. 270). The image of radio DJ John Peel is that of a lonely, if vision-
ary, exception—working against the current. Yet, even in the midst of
being blanked out or displaced by its media image, punk refused to sim-
ply disappear.
One of the more practical aspects of creating ‘new’ comedy was, like-
wise, to seek—or create one’s own—performance platforms. Northern
comedy had its club circuit, Oxbridge had a longstanding love affair
with television. The emerging comedians ran the gamut from those who
had performed in community theatre, and radical touring companies, to
those who had never performed in their life; the quest for public spaces
included, in Tony Allen’s case, a platform at Speakers’ Corner—making
do with ‘an old milk crate’ for his debut performance there (Allen 2002,
pp. 78–80).
Taking the Comedy Store as his focus, Cook (2001, p. 81) points
out the specificity of the budding ‘scene’, contextualised in time and
place, suggesting that some of the Soho Store comics ‘never really found
another time and place they could inhabit so completely’. Soho’s sig-
nificance as a place had been consolidated by punk’s mythologising.
Foreshadowing the Comedy Store and Comedy Strip, one early Pistols
gig took place in a Soho strip joint—El Paradise—on Sunday 4 April
1976. The band’s playing was sandwiched between the stripping acts
(see Lydon 1994, p. 103), an arrangement as redolent of Carry On farce
as of altcom. The Sex Pistols cheerfully embodied such contradictions,
with Johnny Rotten’s defiantly antagonistic stance sitting alongside Steve
Jones’s mock-laddish cheekiness. The Comedy Store was set up in 1979
above a strip club, after hours at the Gargoyle Club in Soho, and was the
first place devoted predominantly to stand-up comedy (within delineated
hours—as one of the few places open late at night, it also separated itself
temporally from other entertainment venues). The Store’s position as the
most publicised and emblematic venue for altcom is not undisputed. It
may be the best known—but its ‘alternative’ credentials have not gone
unchallenged. Jo Brand (who, however, never played the Soho Store),
for example, says ‘The Store was never really part of the Alternative
Circuit; it was always slightly American and slightly glitzy’ (in Cook
2001, p. 157). Cook’s study (2001, p. 9) of the Comedy Store seems to
set it at the centre of an era, seeing it as the club which ‘sparked a revolt
that swept through the Light Ent netherworld like an idiotic inferno’.
It seems fair to accord it a place somewhere in the vanguard of a move-
ment that still needed the stability of an identifiable place and crowd/
scene to acquire definition (however hazy). However, it is also worth
remembering that the Store was not the only ‘alternative’ venue, and
that the very fact of a rudimentary circuit arising is easily as important.
To some extent, altcom was more localised than punk. Hannan (2009,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
My good Lord Sinnatus,
I once was at the hunting of a lion.
Roused by the clamour of the chase he woke,
Came to the front of the wood—his monarch mane
Bristled about his quick ears—he stood there
Staring upon the hunter. A score of dogs
Gnaw’d at his ankles: at the last he felt
The trouble of his feet, put forth one paw,
Slew four, and knew it not, and so remain’d
Staring upon the hunter: and this Rome
Will crush you if you wrestle with her; then
Save for some slight report in her own Senate
Scarce know what she has done.
(Aside.) Would I could move him,
Provoke him any way! (Aloud.) The Lady Camma,
Wise I am sure as she is beautiful,
Will close with me that to submit at once
Is better than a wholly-hopeless war,
Our gallant citizens murder’d all in vain,
Son, husband, brother gash’d to death in vain,
And the small state more cruelly trampled on
Than had she never moved.
Camma.
Sir, I had once

A boy who died a babe; but were he living
And grown to man and Sinnatus will’d it, I
Would set him in the front rank of the fight
With scarce a pang. (Rises.) Sir, if a state submit
At once, she may be blotted out at once
And swallow’d in the conqueror’s chronicle.
Whereas in wars of freedom and defence
The glory and grief of battle won or lost
Solders a race together—yea—tho’ they fail,
The names of those who fought and fell are like
A bank’d-up fire that flashes out again
From century to century, and at last
May lead them on to victory—I hope so—
Like phantoms of the Gods.
Sinnatus.
Well spoken, wife.
Synorix (bowing).
Madam, so well I yield.
Sinnatus.
I should not wonder

If Synorix, who has dwelt three years in Rome
And wrought his worst against his native land,
Returns with this Antonius.
Synorix.
What is Synorix?
Sinnatus.
Galatian, and not know? This Synorix

Was Tetrarch here, and tyrant also—did
Dishonour to our wives.
Synorix.
Perhaps you judge him

With feeble charity: being as you tell me
Tetrarch, there might be willing wives enough
To feel dishonour, honour.
Camma.
Do not say so.

I know of no such wives in all Galatia.
There may be courtesans for aught I know
Whose life is one dishonour.
Enter Attendant.
Attendant (aside).
My lord, the men!
Sinnatus (aside).
Our anti-Roman faction?
Attendant (aside).
Ay, my lord.
Synorix (overhearing).
(Aside.) I have enough—their anti-Roman faction.
Sinnatus (aloud).
Some friends of mine would speak with me without.

You, Strato, make good cheer till I return.
[Exit.
Synorix.
I have much to say, no time to say it in.

First, lady, know myself am that Galatian
Who sent the cup.
Camma.
I thank you from my heart.

Synorix.
Then that I serve with Rome to serve Galatia.

That is my secret: keep it, or you sell me
To torment and to death.
[Coming closer.
For your ear only—

I love you—for your love to the great Goddess.
The Romans sent me here a spy upon you,
To draw you and your husband to your doom.
I’d sooner die than do it.
[Takes out paper given him by

Antonius.
This paper sign’d

Antonius—will you take it, read it? there!
Camma.
(Reads) “You are to seize on Sinnatus,—if——”
Synorix.
(Snatches paper.) No more.

What follows is for no wife’s eyes. O Camma,
Rome has a glimpse of this conspiracy;
Rome never yet hath spar’d conspirator.
Horrible! flaying, scourging, crucifying——
Camma.
I am tender enough. Why do you practise on me?
Synorix.
Why should I practise on you? How you wrong me!

I am sure of being every way malign’d.
And if you should betray me to your husband——
Camma.
Will you betray him by this order?
Synorix.
See,
I tear it all to pieces, never dream’d
Of acting on it.
[Tears the paper.
Camma.
I owe you thanks for ever.
Synorix.
Hath Sinnatus never told you of this plot?
Camma.
What plot?
Synorix.
A child’s sand-castle on the beach

For the next wave—all seen,—all calculated,
All known by Rome. No chance for Sinnatus.
Camma.
Why, said you not as much to my brave Sinnatus?
Synorix.
Brave—ay—too brave, too over-confident,
Too like to ruin himself, and you, and me!
Who else, with this black thunderbolt of Rome
Above him, would have chased the stag to-day
In the full face of all the Roman camp?
A miracle that they let him home again,
Not caught, maim’d, blinded him.
[Camma shudders.
(Aside.) I have made her tremble.

(Aloud.) I know they mean to torture him to death.
I dare not tell him how I came to know it;
I durst not trust him with—my serving Rome
To serve Galatia: you heard him on the letter.
Not say as much? I all but said as much.
I am sure I told him that his plot was folly.
I say it to you—you are wiser—Rome knows all,
But you know not the savagery of Rome.
Camma.
O—have you power with Rome? use it for him!
Synorix.
Alas! I have no such power with Rome. All that

Lies with Antonius.
[As if struck by a sudden thought.

Comes over to her.
He will pass to-morrow

In the gray dawn before the Temple doors.
You have beauty,—O great beauty,—and Antonius,
So gracious toward women, never yet
Flung back a woman’s prayer. Plead to him,
I am sure you will prevail.
Camma.
Still—I should tell

My husband.
Synorix.
Will he let you plead for him

To a Roman?
Camma.
I fear not.
Synorix.
Then do not tell him.

Or tell him, if you will, when you return,
When you have charm’d our general into mercy,
And all is safe again. O dearest lady,
[Murmurs of “Synorix! Synorix!” heard

outside.
Think,—torture,—death,—and come.
Camma.
I will, I will.
And I will not betray you.
Synorix (aside).
(As Sinnatus enters.) Stand apart.
Enter Sinnatus and Attendant.
Sinnatus.
Thou art that Synorix! One whom thou hast wrong’d
Without there, knew thee with Antonius.
They howl for thee, to rend thee head from limb.
Synorix.
I am much malign’d. I thought to serve Galatia.
Sinnatus.
Serve thyself first, villain! They shall not harm

My guest within my house. There! (points to door) there! this
door
Opens upon the forest! Out, begone!
Henceforth I am thy mortal enemy.
Synorix.
However I thank thee (draws his sword); thou hast saved my

life.
[Exit.
Sinnatus.
(To Attendant.) Return and tell them Synorix is not here.
[Exit Attendant.
What did that villain Synorix say to you?
Camma.
Is he—that—Synorix?
Sinnatus.
Wherefore should you doubt it?

One of the men there knew him.
Camma.
Only one,
And he perhaps mistaken in the face.
Sinnatus.
Come, come, could he deny it? What did he say?
Camma.
What should he say?
Sinnatus.
What should he say, my wife!

He should say this, that being Tetrarch once
His own true people cast him from their doors
Like a base coin.
Camma.
Not kindly to them?
Sinnatus.
Kindly?
O the most kindly Prince in all the world!
Would clap his honest citizens on the back,
Bandy their own rude jests with them, be curious
About the welfare of their babes, their wives,
O ay—their wives—their wives. What should he say?
He should say nothing to my wife if I
Were by to throttle him! He steep’d himself
In all the lust of Rome. How should you guess
What manner of beast it is?
Camma.
Yet he seem’d kindly,
And said he loathed the cruelties that Rome
Wrought on her vassals.
Sinnatus.
Did he, honest man?
Camma.
And you, that seldom brook the stranger here,

Have let him hunt the stag with you to-day.
Sinnatus.
I warrant you now, he said he struck the stag.
Camma.
Why no, he never touch’d upon the stag.
Sinnatus.
Why so I said, my arrow. Well, to sleep.
[Goes to close door.
Camma.
Nay, close not yet the door upon a night

That looks half day.
Sinnatus.
True; and my friends may spy him

And slay him as he runs.
Camma.
He is gone already.
Oh look,—yon grove upon the mountain,—white
In the sweet moon as with a lovelier snow!
But what a blotch of blackness underneath!
Sinnatus, you remember—yea, you must,
That there three years ago—the vast vine-bowers
Ran to the summit of the trees, and dropt
Their streamers earthward, which a breeze of May
Took ever and anon, and open’d out
The purple zone of hill and heaven; there
You told your love; and like the swaying vines—
Yea,—with our eyes,—our hearts, our prophet hopes
Let in the happy distance, and that all
But cloudless heaven which we have found together
In our three married years! You kiss’d me there
For the first time. Sinnatus, kiss me now.
Sinnatus.
First kiss. (Kisses her.) There then. You talk almost as if it

Might be the last.
Camma.
Will you not eat a little?
Sinnatus.
No, no, we found a goat-herd’s hut and shared

His fruits and milk. Liar! You will believe
Now that he never struck the stag—a brave one
Which you shall see to-morrow.
Camma.
I rise to-morrow
In the gray dawn, and take this holy cup
To lodge it in the shrine of Artemis.
Sinnatus.
Good!
Camma.
If I be not back in half an hour,

Come after me.
Sinnatus.
What! is there danger?
Camma.
Nay,
None that I know: ’tis but a step from here
To the Temple.
Sinnatus.
All my brain is full of sleep.

Wake me before you go, I’ll after you—
After me now!
[Closes door and exit.
Camma (drawing curtains).
Your shadow. Synorix—

His face was not malignant, and he said
That men malign’d him. Shall I go? Shall I go?
Death, torture—
“He never yet flung back a woman’s prayer”—
I go, but I will have my dagger with me.
[Exit.
Scene III.—Same as Scene I. Dawn.

Music and Singing in the Temple.
Enter Synorix watchfully, after him Publius and Soldiers.
Synorix.
Publius!
Publius.
Here!
Synorix.
Do you remember what

I told you?
Publius.
When you cry “Rome, Rome,” to seize

On whomsoever may be talking with you,
Or man, or woman, as traitors unto Rome.
Synorix.
Right. Back again. How many of you are there?
Publius.
Some half a score.
[Exeunt Soldiers and Publius.
Synorix.
I have my guard about me.

I need not fear the crowd that hunted me
Across the woods, last night. I hardly gain’d
The camp at midnight. Will she come to me
Now that she knows me Synorix? Not if Sinnatus
Has told her all the truth about me. Well,
I cannot help the mould that I was cast in.
I fling all that upon my fate, my star.
I know that I am genial, I would be
Happy, and make all others happy so
They did not thwart me. Nay, she will not come.
Yet if she be a true and loving wife
She may, perchance, to save this husband. Ay!
See, see, my white bird stepping toward the snare.
Why now I count it all but miracle,
That this brave heart of mine should shake me so,
As helplessly as some unbearded boy’s
When first he meets his maiden in a bower.
Enter Camma (with cup).
Synorix.
The lark first takes the sunlight on his wing,

But you, twin sister of the morning star,
Forelead the sun.
Camma.
Where is Antonius?
Synorix.
Not here as yet. You are too early for him.
[She crosses towards Temple.
Synorix.
Nay, whither go you now?
Camma.
To lodge this cup
Within the holy shrine of Artemis,
And so return.
Synorix.
To find Antonius here.
[She goes into the Temple, he looks

after her.
The loveliest life that ever drew the light

From heaven to brood upon her, and enrich
Earth with her shadow! I trust she will return.
These Romans dare not violate the Temple.
No, I must lure my game into the camp.
A woman I could live and die for. What!
Die for a woman, what new faith is this?
I am not mad, not sick, not old enough
To doat on one alone. Yes, mad for her,
Camma the stately, Camma the great-hearted,
So mad, I fear some strange and evil chance
Coming upon me, for by the Gods I seem
Strange to myself.
Re-enter Camma.
Camma.
Where is Antonius?
Synorix.
Where? As I said before, you are still too early.
Camma.
Too early to be here alone with thee;

For whether men malign thy name, or no,
It bears an evil savour among women.
Where is Antonius? (Loud.)
Synorix.
Madam, as you know

The camp is half a league without the city;
If you will walk with me we needs must meet
Antonius coming, or at least shall find him
There in the camp.
Camma.
No, not one step with thee.

Where is Antonius? (Louder.)
Synorix (advancing towards her).
Then for your own sake,

Lady, I say it with all gentleness,
And for the sake of Sinnatus your husband,
I must compel you.
Camma (drawing her dagger).
Stay!—too near is death.
Synorix (disarming her).
Is it not easy to disarm a woman?
Enter Sinnatus (seizes him from behind by the throat).
Synorix (throttled and scarce audible).
Rome! Rome!
Sinnatus.
Adulterous dog!
Synorix (stabbing him with Camma’s dagger).
What! will you have it?
[Camma utters a cry and runs to

Sinnatus.
Sinnatus (falls backward).
I have it in my heart—to the Temple—fly—

For my sake—or they seize on thee. Remember!
Away—farewell!
[Dies.
Camma (runs up the steps into the Temple, looking back).
Farewell!
Synorix (seeing her escape).
The women of the Temple drag her in.

Publius! Publius! No,
Antonius would not suffer me to break
Into the sanctuary. She hath escaped.
[Looking down at Sinnatus.
“Adulterous dog!” that red-faced rage at me!

Then with one quick short stab—eternal peace.
So end all passions. Then what use in passions?
To warm the cold bounds of our dying life
And, lest we freeze in mortal apathy,
Employ us, heat us, quicken us, help us, keep us
From seeing all too near that urn, those ashes
Which all must be. Well used, they serve us well.
I heard a saying in Egypt, that ambition
Is like the sea wave, which the more you drink,
The more you thirst—yea—drink too much, as men
Have done on rafts of wreck—it drives you mad.
I will be no such wreck, am no such gamester
As, having won the stake, would dare the chance
Of double, or losing all. The Roman Senate,
For I have always play’d into their hands,
Means me the crown. And Camma for my bride—
The people love her—if I win her love,
They too will cleave to me, as one with her.
There then I rest, Rome’s tributary king.
[Looking down on Sinnatus.
Why did I strike him?—having proof enough

Against the man, I surely should have left
That stroke to Rome. He saved my life too. Did he?
It seem’d so. I have play’d the sudden fool.
And that sets her against me—for the moment.
Camma—well, well, I never found the woman
I could not force or wheedle to my will.
She will be glad at last to wear my crown.
And I will make Galatia prosperous too,
And we will chirp among our vines, and smile
At bygone things till that (pointing to Sinnatus) eternal peace.
Rome! Rome!
Enter Publius and Soldiers.
Twice I cried Rome. Why came ye not before?
Publius.
Why come we now? Whom shall we seize upon?
Synorix (pointing to the body of Sinnatus).
The body of that dead traitor Sinnatus.

Bear him away.
Music and Singing in Temple.
END OF ACT I.
ACT II.
Scene.—Interior of the Temple of Artemis.
Small gold gates on platform in front of the veil before the colossal
statue of the Goddess, and in the centre of the Temple a tripod
altar, on which is a lighted lamp. Lamps (lighted) suspended
between each pillar. Tripods, vases, garlands of flowers, etc.,
about stage. Altar at back close to Goddess, with two cups.
Solemn music. Priestesses decorating the Temple.
Enter a Priestess.
Priestess.
Phœbe, that man from Synorix, who has been

So oft to see the Priestess, waits once more
Before the Temple.
Phœbe.
We will let her know.
[Signs to one of the Priestesses, who

goes out.
Since Camma fled from Synorix to our Temple,

And for her beauty, stateliness, and power,
Was chosen Priestess here, have you not mark’d
Her eyes were ever on the marble floor?
To-day they are fixt and bright—they look straight out.
Hath she made up her mind to marry him?
Priestess.
To marry him who stabb’d her Sinnatus.

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The Punk Turn in Comedy 1st ed.

Edition Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone

KRISTA BONELLO RUTTER GIAPPONE

More information about this series at

The Punk Turn

Palgrave Studies in Comedy

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938335

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: no_limit_pictures/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

2 Peter Cook: Missing Links 13

4 Attitudes Towards the Past 67

5 Styling the Amateur 99

6 The Role of the Audience 111

7 Modes of Dis-/Engagement 123

8 Power Play 153

9 ‘Style Without Affectation’: Honesty and Performance 175

10 Boundaries of the (Un)Said 195

Comedy is prey to an elusiveness that seems to defy framing. Critchley

© The Author(s) 2018 1

on the other. Punk, although characterised by a certain naïveté,3 was not

hesitant to pinpoint a single origin—this would be against the ‘spirit’

alternative comedians were drawn from the ranks of countercultural the-

skill—rather, an inversion of traditional values, where being able to play

trust in traditional assumptions structuring the performer–audience rela-

who claim a debt to punk—yet comedy remains under-represented in

as compellingly argued by Worley, an undeniably personal motivation

Connor, John. 1990. Comics: A Decade of Comedy at the Assembly Rooms.

Peter Cook: Missing Links

Peter Cook hailed from the Cambridge Footlights tradition of comedy,

The Establishment Club

© The Author(s) 2018 13

or government figures in any disrespectful light’. This put it in a posi-

The more overtly politically motivated alternative comedian Tony

Derek and Clive are relentless in their progressive exaggeration, accel-

The delaying of or detour around climactic moments such as one

the way in which comedy manages to stretch the momentariness of the

There is one sense in which one may be tempted to posit a climax, as

However, the keyword is ‘foreplay’—and Peter’s foreplay is incessant.

In response to Phillips, John Limon (2000, p. 62) emphasises the word

sure when enough is enough.’ ‘Derek and Clive’, however, proceeds

Rightly or wrongly, alternative comedy is thought of by a majority to be

The dissociation is not, however, so self-evident. What Morecambe and

CLIVE: But he uses them to effect.

DEREK: What is the point?

Whereupon they erupt into a volley of expletives, hurled at no particu-

I want to say, “Fuck!”, I don’t want to say, “Radiator”!’ This collapses

The Double Act

the give–give–give–give—of the game is reminiscent of the excesses of

In Derek and Clive, the acceleration into overstatement seems to ful-

‘Behind’ the scenes, mirroring and perhaps influencing the ongoing

The content of the album was a vicious, bleak outpouring of genuinely

necessarily tenable) basis of comparative passivity. This would be to fall

Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans.

Thompson, Harry. 1997. Peter Cook: A Biography. London: Hodder and

© The Author(s) 2018 33

media—performance poetry, music, comedy, and television. Introducing

CLIVE: But he uses them to effect.

DEREK: What is the point?