The Politics of British Stand-up Comedy by Sophie Quirk

Author:Sophie Quirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030011055
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The argument advanced by those who see neoliberalism as an all-pervasive force is that the ‘management of populations with the aim of cultivating … individualistic, competitive, acquisitive and entrepreneurial behaviour’55 has been so successful as to fragment the societies it infects. Individuals embedded within this ideology focus upon themselves as their primary asset and the enhancement of the self as a pro-social—an inherently ‘good’ and ‘correct’—behaviour. Therefore, it appears noble to pursue self-improvement in the various areas of one’s life, and natural to prioritise one’s own needs. This framing of competitive behaviours as healthy and natural clearly allies neoliberalism with the right as we have defined it. In this world-view, competition is justified by a meritocracy which, even if it theoretically offers equality of opportunity, inevitably creates winners and losers as a result of its competitive social and economic processes.56 It is a system which creates inequality rather than prioritising Luke’s ‘principle of rectification’.57

Neoliberalism pervades every aspect of contemporary life; the arts are no exception. Jen Harvie argues that ‘contemporary neoliberal cultures venerate independence, celebrating individuals who are entrepreneurial self-starters’;58 the individual artist is venerated for precisely these abilities. Stand-up comedy is a solo art form in which the individualised voice of the performer is celebrated, it proffers a level of autonomy and creative freedom of which most workers are deprived and offers its most commercially successful proponents the opportunity to amass significant wealth. It is perhaps particularly open to accusations of complicity with the neoliberal machine. In 1996, Stephen Wagg noted the subtleties of this connection, describing the impact of neoliberalism evident among the first generation of Alternative comedians:

In my view, the clear paradox of these new social arrangements has been that, in the material sense, a large and growing section of the British population has had its freedoms reduced (through reductions in public spending, increased surveillance at work, fear of redundancy and so on) while in the symbolic world greater and greater possibilities for individual expression are held out … It is this latter imperative that the ‘alternative’ comedian supplies: s/he is now, apparently, everywhere – ‘live and lewd’ – as bestselling videotapes invariably promise -, saying the unsayable, speaking the mind of the ordinary punter.59

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