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CMU Beef Of The Week #345: Comedy v Rock n Roll

By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 3 March 2017

“Comedy is the new rock n roll”, they said. Do you remember that? Maybe you’re a bit too young. No, you look like you’d probably remember when they said that. It was a 90s thing, like plaid shirts and hope for the future.

Back then, before ‘Live At The Apollo’ and Michael McIntyre, if you can imagine such a time, comedy was in something of a renaissance period. Cool new kids were coming up, brushing aside the alternative comedy heroes of the 80s, and telling jokes for The Kids. Or at least The Students.

Venues where punk bands had previously cut their teeth were starting to put on comedy gigs featuring this new wave of talent. And on TV, shows like ‘The Mary Whitehouse Experience’, ‘Viva Cabaret’ and ‘Fist Of Fun’ provided a steady stream of quotable jokes for the adolescents of the day, mainly from cool looking guys (always guys), some of whom you might want posters of on your bedroom wall. We only ever quoted Punt & Dennis jokes, mind. And we’re very sorry.

Anyway, the peak of all that “comedy is the new rock n roll” hoo-haa was David Baddiel and Robert Newman selling out Wembley Arena, which was considered quite a rock n roll thing to do in the time before the London venue was rebranded as an energy shed. These days comedians are always selling out arenas of course, even though they remain by far the worst sort of building to watch comedy in. But in the days of Newman and Baddiel, such an achievement by mere joke peddlers was considered newsworthy.

The conclusion of all those news stories was that this was indeed proof that comedy was the new rock n roll. And, presumably, rock n roll was the new comedy. The weaker elements of Britpop were on the rise at the time, after all. Perhaps rock n roll was now in terminal decline, some people even speculated, and in the future The Kids would only frequent arenas to hear some gags. Those people were wrong of course. As people so often are.

But Newman and Baddiel nevertheless played along with the rock star analogy by acrimoniously splitting up after their last big show. With hindsight, it might have been better for everyone if that’s where comedians playing big venues had ended too. But alas, no. The whole phenomenon rumbled on until, before we knew it, McIntyre was in all our lives.

Meanwhile, comedians started to infiltrate all of the music community’s regular haunts. So much so that this week Russell Howard began a run of shows set to break records previously set by Frank Sinatra and Barry Manilow for the most consecutive nights performing at the Royal Albert Hall in London, by playing ten in a row. Which means that, yes, we made it, comedy is now the new easy listening.