Notice anything about the nominees for this year’s Grammy award for best comedy album? Well, they’re all American – which, even in the context of a showbiz culture that divides “films” from “foreign films”, is quite striking. Among the nominees for the music Grammy awards, for example, are UK acts such as Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith, Bastille and Coldplay. So where are the British comedy albums?
The answer, of course, is: back in the 1970s. For some reason – answers welcome below the line! – the album (we’d have called it an LP back in the day) is no longer a unit of currency of UK comedy. When I was writing about Richard Pryor recently, I was struck by how his rise to comedy stardom was charted album by album. I take the point, made by some commenters, that Pryor was a genius of physical expressivity as well as a truth-teller, etc. But that would have been lost on the hundreds of thousands who grew to love him via audio recordings (for which, incidentally, he won five Grammys).
Standup-lovers of a certain vintage – my age and older, probably – will remember the thrill of hearing (and sharing) comedy LPs. They were, as Time Out once wrote, “the most subversive aural document[s] a teenager could own, [to] be transferred to a C90 and distributed among school playgrounds like samizdat literature”. Derek and Clive, Monty Python, Billy Connolly – these acts were as well-loved for their audio output as anything they did on stage or screen.
So what happened? That same Time Out article suggests that UK comedy albums were more musical (or indeed, music hall) than their American equivalents – an inheritance that came to feel embarrassing to the “comedy is the new rock’n’roll” 90s generation. Certainly, in this era of proliferating outlets for comedy, there’s no longer a need for comics to release albums in order to get their material heard. (Nor, in our comedy-saturated culture, much sense that a standup routine might be “samizdat”.)
Nowadays, if we Brits want recorded versions of comedians’ live sets, we get DVDs. (In the States – some ascribe this to the country’s “driving culture” – comedy CDs sell in roughly equal numbers.) And, for an audio fix of the comics we love, podcasts. Neither gives you quite the concentrated hit, the immersion in a comedian’s world – everything excluded save the voice – that the great comedy albums offer. We’ll all have our favourites: even in recent years, I’ve gorged on early Doug Stanhope albums, Flight of the Conchords, Otis Lee Crenshaw and John Shuttleworth. I’ve probably listened to more Bill Hicks than I’ve ever actually watched.
The British comedy album hasn’t wholly expired. Matt (Toast of London) Berry, honorary Brit Tim Minchin, Bill Bailey, Tim Key have all released recent albums; not coincidentally, they all work in music or verse rather than straight standup. Do you wish there were more? Might the British comedy album (as per the title of Derek and Clive’s opus) Come Again, and Daniel Kitson – unlikely, I know – one day trouble the Grammy judges? If only to ensure that our national pride isn’t left to Ed Sheeran and Coldplay to sustain, such a day is fervently to be hoped for.
