Who Is the Father of Alt Comedy? The Real Candidates

Who is the father of alternative comedy? The honest answer is that nobody holds the title, and anyone who tells you otherwise is picking a side. Alternative comedy was never invented by one person. It is the name a group of London comics gave themselves around 1979, applied later to American scenes that grew up independently, and stretched backwards to cover rule-breakers who never used the word. Which “father” you choose depends on which of those things you think alt comedy is.

That said, the candidates are not equal. Below we weigh the serious claims, explain what each person actually contributed and where the claim falls short, and end with our verdict. If you need the basic definition first, start with what alternative comedy is.

Three ways to answer the question

Before the candidates, it helps to be clear about what “father” could mean:

The founder of the movement that used the name. That points to London, 1979–80, and to people who ran rooms and set the rules.
The ancestor whose ideas made it possible. That points to earlier American comics who broke the form before there was a scene to join.
The builder of the scene we mean today. For American readers, “alt comedy” usually means the 1990s Los Angeles and New York rooms, which had their own founders.

Each definition produces a different winner.

The forerunners: Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl

Lenny Bruce (1925–1966)

Lenny Bruce is the name most often given, and the case is strong on content. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he abandoned the gag-teller's patter for long, improvised, jazz-influenced riffs on religion, race, sex and hypocrisy, and he paid for it: repeated arrests for obscenity culminated in a 1964 conviction in New York over his shows at the Cafe Au Go Go. He died in 1966, and in 2003 New York's governor granted him a posthumous pardon.

Where the claim falls short: Bruce changed what a comic could say, but he worked the nightclub circuit and still thought of himself as a comedian in the conventional sense. He is the patron saint of free speech in comedy, a slightly different lineage from the formal experiments alt comedy is known for.

Mort Sahl (1927–2021)

Mort Sahl arguably got there first. Starting at San Francisco's hungry i in 1953, he dropped the tuxedo for a sweater, carried a newspaper on stage and riffed on current events in a conversational, intellectual style. By 1960 he was on the cover of Time. Sahl showed that stand-up could be personal opinion rather than prepared jokes.

Where the claim falls short: His influence runs more clearly into political and topical comedy than into the alt scenes, and he became, in later years, something of a mainstream establishment figure himself.

The godfather: Andy Kaufman

If alt comedy means taking apart the idea of comedy itself, Andy Kaufman (1949–1984) has the best claim of anyone. His appearances on the first season of Saturday Night Live, his Foreign Man character, his abusive alter ego Tony Clifton, his wrestling feud with Jerry Lawler and his habit of reading novels to paying audiences all made the audience's expectations the real material. Almost every strand of anti-comedy, from Tim and Eric to Nathan Fielder, traces back to him.

Where the claim falls short: Kaufman was a mainstream star (he was a regular on the sitcom Taxi), worked in comedy clubs and on network television, and famously resisted being called a comedian at all. He never belonged to an alternative scene. He is better described as alt comedy's godfather: the figure later generations claimed, rather than the one who built anything.

Honourable mentions in the same spirit: Steve Martin, whose 1970s act deliberately removed punchlines, and Lily Tomlin, whose character-driven stage work blurred comedy and theatre.

The founders of the name: London, 1979

This is where the word comes from, and it's the most literal answer to the question. In 1979 the Comedy Store opened in a room above a Soho strip club, the Alternative Cabaret collective began running political comedy nights in London pubs, and in 1980 the Comic Strip opened at Soho's Boulevard Theatre. Together they formed a scene that defined itself, explicitly, as an alternative to the racist and sexist humour of the working men's clubs. Our history of British alt comedy tells the full story.

Alexei Sayle

The compère at the Comedy Store in its early days and a founding member of Alternative Cabaret, Alexei Sayle was the scene's most recognisable stand-up: a shaven-headed, suit-wearing, furious Marxist from Liverpool whose act was part rant, part surreal fantasy. He is the most common British answer, and the case is strong. He was there first, he was on stage every night, and his style set the tone.

Tony Allen

Tony Allen co-founded Alternative Cabaret and is the person the Comedy Store's own history credits with the term “alternative comedy”. He was the scene's theorist as much as a performer, arguing for comedy that challenged rather than reassured. (The promoter and comedian Malcolm Hardee also claimed to have coined the phrase; there's no way to settle it.)

Peter Richardson and the Comic Strip

Peter Richardson founded the Comic Strip club and later steered The Comic Strip Presents... onto Channel 4's opening night in 1982. Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders made it famous. If you measure fatherhood by who took the scene from a club to a national audience, Richardson has a real case.

Where the claims fall short: The British scene was collective by design, so crowning any one member works against its spirit. It also had little direct contact with the American scenes that came later.

The American scene builders

When Americans say “alt comedy”, they usually mean the early-1990s rooms in Los Angeles and New York. These had their own founders, and they included some obvious mothers.

Beth Lapides launched Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles in 1988 and turned it into a Sunday-night institution where comics were asked to drop their club acts and tell the truth. If any one person built the American alt room, it's her.
Janeane Garofalo was the scene's defining performer: conversational, sardonic, reading from notes, and central in both cities. With Marc Maron she created Eating It, the Monday show at New York's Luna Lounge.
Dana Gould is the comic Patton Oswalt has credited with starting the LA alternative scene in the early 1990s.
Bob Odenkirk and David Cross turned the scene's taste into television with Mr. Show with Bob and David (HBO, 1995–98), which more than any single person defined what American alt comedy looked like.

Other names you'll see, and why they don't quite fit

Lists of alt comedy's founders often include a few more names. They are all important; they are just answers to slightly different questions.

Dick Gregory broke through at Chicago's Playboy Club in 1961 with sharp, cool-headed material about race, and later put comedy aside for activism. He is a founder of political stand-up, which overlaps with alt comedy without being the same thing.
Richard Pryor and George Carlin both reinvented themselves around 1970, dropping clean club acts for personal, profane, confrontational material. They transformed mainstream stand-up rather than creating an alternative to it; by the 1980s, they were the mainstream the alt comics measured themselves against.
Monty Python (from 1969) gave British comedy its surreal, stream-of-consciousness sketch grammar and influenced nearly everyone who followed. But the Pythons were Oxbridge graduates working inside the BBC, the establishment that 1980s alternative comedians partly defined themselves against.
David Letterman's 1980s Late Night on NBC, with its stupid pet tricks and camera stunts, gave a mass audience its first regular taste of ironic, form-bending television comedy, and many 1990s alt comics grew up on it.

Each of these figures shows that the impulse behind alt comedy (do the opposite of what's expected) is older and wider than any scene. That's useful context. It's also the best evidence that looking for one father is a mistake.

Why “father” is the wrong word

The question assumes a single male founder, and both halves of that assumption are shaky. Alternative comedy has always been made by groups (collectives, clubs, writers' rooms, troupes) rather than lone geniuses. And some of its most important builders were women: Lapides and Garofalo in the US, French and Saunders in Britain, Lily Tomlin as a forerunner. A history that only looks for fathers misses half the family.

There's also the problem of definition. Alternative comedy is by nature relative: it means “alternative to the mainstream of its time”. Every generation has its own founders, because every generation is reacting against something different. The comics who built the 1990s American scene were partly reacting against the 1980s club boom that some 1970s rule-breakers had helped create.

Our verdict

That's three answers, which is the point. Alt comedy has a family tree, not a father. To see how the branches connect, follow our alt comedy timeline from the 1950s to today, or browse the history hub.

Frequently asked questions

Who is the father of alternative comedy?

There is no agreed answer. Lenny Bruce is the most common choice as a forerunner, Andy Kaufman as the spiritual ancestor of anti-comedy, and Alexei Sayle or Tony Allen as founders of the British scene that actually gave alternative comedy its name.

Who coined the term alternative comedy?

The term emerged in London around 1979 and 1980. The Comedy Store's own history credits Tony Allen of the Alternative Cabaret collective, while the promoter and comic Malcolm Hardee claimed to have used it first. Neither claim can be settled definitively.

Is Andy Kaufman the father of alt comedy?

He is the most influential ancestor of its anti-comedy wing, but he worked in mainstream television and comedy clubs and disliked being called a comedian. He shaped alt comedy without belonging to an alt scene, which makes him a godfather more than a founder.

Who is the godmother of alt comedy?

There is no official one. Strong candidates are Beth Lapides, who founded Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles in 1988, Janeane Garofalo, the central performer of the 1990s American scene, and in Britain Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders of the Comic Strip.