What Is Alternative Comedy? The Meaning, the History and the Styles
It began as a protest against racist club comics in 1979 London and became the name for any comedy that refuses the usual rules. Here is what “alt” actually means, where it came from and how to recognise it.
Alternative comedy (usually shortened to alt comedy) is comedy that deliberately does something other than what the mainstream of its time expects. The name comes from London in 1979, where a new wave of comics defined themselves against the racist and sexist jokes of the working men's club circuit. Since then it has come to mean any comedy that bends or breaks the standard rules: the setup and punchline, the polished persona, the club-room format, even the idea that every line should get a laugh.
That makes alt comedy a moving target. What counted as alternative in 1981 (political stand-up with no mother-in-law jokes) is ordinary now, and much of what was weird in 1995 (sketches that loop into each other, a comedian reading from a notebook) has become the house style of prestige television. This guide explains what the term has meant in each era, the styles it covers, real performers and specials that show each one, and how to tell alt from mainstream when you see it. For the full story decade by decade, see our history hub and the alt comedy timeline.
Alt comedy meaning, in one paragraph
“Alt” means alternative to something. In Britain, that something was the club comic telling stock jokes about wives and immigrants. In the US in the 1990s, it was the brick-wall comedy club, the two-drink minimum and the observational bit about airline food. In each case the alternative scene changed three things at once: the content (what you could joke about, and who the target was), the form (how a joke was built, or whether it was a joke at all) and the venue (bars, theatres, bookshops and back rooms instead of comedy clubs). An alt comic does not have to change all three, but almost always changes at least one.
One clarification that searchers often need: alt comedy has nothing to do with the “alt-right”. The comedy term is roughly thirty-five years older than the political one, and the original British scene was explicitly anti-racist.
Where it started: London, 1979
On 19 May 1979, Peter Rosengard and Don Ward opened the Comedy Store in a room above a Soho strip club on Dean Street. It ran like a gong show: anyone could get up, and the audience could get them off. Among the regulars were Alexei Sayle, who became its compère, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.
The same year, Tony Allen, Alexei Sayle and others set up Alternative Cabaret, a collective that ran political, anti-sexist, anti-racist comedy nights in London pubs. Tony Allen is often credited with popularising the word “alternative” for this kind of act. In October 1980 Peter Richardson took a group of Comedy Store regulars to the Boulevard Theatre in Soho and started the Comic Strip, which became the movement's first proper home.
What made it “alternative” was partly politics (Thatcher had just been elected, and many of these comics were openly on the left) and partly energy. Sayle's act was furious, surreal and very loud. Mayall and Edmondson were violent slapstick clowns. French and Saunders took apart female stereotypes. Nobody told a joke about their mother-in-law.
Television came fast. On 2 November 1982, Channel 4's opening night included The Comic Strip Presents... film Five Go Mad in Dorset; a week later the BBC began The Young Ones, the anarchic student-house sitcom written by Mayall, Ben Elton and Lise Mayer. Ben Elton went on to host Channel 4's Saturday Live, which put alt stand-ups in front of a national audience. Our full guide to British alternative comedy from 1979 to today follows the story through Vic Reeves, Chris Morris, Stewart Lee and the modern Edinburgh Fringe, and there are profiles of the Comic Strip and Alexei Sayle.
The American version: Un-Cabaret, Luna Lounge, Largo and UCB
American comedy had its own rule-breakers long before anyone used the word: Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl in the 1950s, Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin in the 1970s, David Letterman's absurdist late-night show in the 1980s. But “alternative comedy” as an American scene belongs to the early 1990s, when the stand-up boom of the 1980s collapsed under its own sameness and a group of comics went looking for rooms where they could try something else.
Los Angeles
Beth Lapides launched Un-Cabaret in 1988 and, from 1993, ran it on Sunday nights at the LunaPark club in West Hollywood. Her rule was simple: no club act. Comics were asked to talk honestly about their lives, often from notes, without the safety net of tried-and-tested material. Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Margaret Cho and Kathy Griffin all worked there. Patton Oswalt has credited Dana Gould with getting the LA scene going, and the rooms multiplied: coffee shops, bookstores and above all Largo, the Fairfax Avenue club Mark Flanagan took over in 1992, which became the home of Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, Tenacious D and many more before moving to the Coronet on La Cienega in 2008.
New York
In 1995 the Luna Lounge opened on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, and its Monday-night show Eating It, created by Marc Maron and Janeane Garofalo, became the New York alt room until the bar closed in 2005. Sarah Silverman, Louis C.K., Todd Barry and Ted Alexandro were among the comics who worked it. Then, in 1999, the Upright Citizens Brigade (Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh, who had come from Chicago's improv scene) opened the UCB Theatre in Chelsea. UCB turned alt sensibility into an institution, with classes, house teams and a pipeline into Saturday Night Live and network sitcoms. Our UCB history covers its rise, its 2020 closures and its return.
Television
The scene's TV landmarks were The Ben Stiller Show (1992–93), Canada's The Kids in the Hall, Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist (from 1995) and, above all, HBO's Mr. Show with Bob and David (1995–98), the sketch show that turned the Un-Cabaret crowd's taste into a format.
Characteristics of alternative comedy
No single trait makes something alt, but these are the features that show up again and again across forty-plus years. The more of them a performer has, the more “alt” they read.
- Form is up for grabs. The setup-punchline unit is optional. Bits can be long, circular, deliberately anticlimactic, built from repetition or abandoned halfway.
- Persona over material. Who you are on stage, and how you are, matters more than any individual joke. Many alt comics are funnier described than quoted.
- The audience relationship is part of the act. Comics comment on the room, the gig, the act of performing, and on how the audience is reacting.
- Commitment to a bad idea. A premise pushed far beyond the point where a mainstream comic would have moved on, until the persistence itself is the joke.
- Specificity over relatability. Instead of “you know when...”, alt comedy tends toward “here is exactly how strange my mind is”.
- Punching up or punching nowhere. The British founders defined the scene against jokes aimed at women, minorities and gay people. Later alt comedy is not always political, but cruelty toward easy targets reads as hack.
- Genre-blending. Music, video, PowerPoint, props, drawings, theatre and performance art are all fair game.
- DIY rooms and DIY distribution. From pub back rooms to bar shows to self-released specials, alt comedy has always built its own stages.
The main styles, with real examples
People searching for “examples of alternative comedy jokes” usually find that the best alt material does not survive being written down as a joke. That is part of the point. So rather than reprinting bits, here are the main styles, what each one does and where to see it done well.
Anti-comedy
Comedy that withholds or mocks the payoff. Norm Macdonald's long story about a moth visiting a podiatrist, told on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien in 2009, crawls through minutes of detail toward a punchline that is deliberately weak, and the audience ends up laughing at the length and the nerve. Gregg Turkington's Neil Hamburger is a sour lounge comic whose jokes are technically jokes and emotionally hostile. Stewart Lee repeats a line until it becomes unbearable, then analyses why it isn't working. Our full guide to anti-comedy covers the tradition from Andy Kaufman onward.
Absurdist and surreal
Dream logic played straight. Vic Reeves's Big Night Out, The Mighty Boosh, Reggie Watts's improvised loops of music and invented language, Julio Torres explaining his collection of oddly shaped objects in My Favorite Shapes (HBO, 2019). See our guide to absurdist comedy.
Character comedy
The comic disappears into someone else, often for an entire show. Kaufman's Foreign Man and Tony Clifton, the Kids in the Hall's recurring weirdos, Maria Bamford's rapid switches into the voices of her mother and assorted strangers, Megan Stalter's chaotic, relentlessly self-promoting characters in her Instagram videos.
Meta and conceptual comedy
Comedy about comedy, or built on a structural idea. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC Two) is stand-up that keeps stepping out of itself to critique its own construction. James Acaster's four-part Netflix series Repertoire (2018) is linked by recurring stories that pay off across the hours. Bo Burnham's what. and Make Happy deconstruct the pop-star spectacle of the stand-up special.
Musical and multimedia
Flight of the Conchords' folk-parody songs, Demetri Martin's drawings on a giant sketch pad, Bo Burnham's Inside (Netflix, 2021), shot alone in one room during lockdown, and the scrambled video effects of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
Confessional and theatrical
Material from the comic's own life, told with little armour. Un-Cabaret built a scene on it. Tig Notaro's 2012 Largo set about her cancer diagnosis, Hannah Gadsby's Nanette (2018), Jerrod Carmichael's Rothaniel (HBO, 2022) and Jacqueline Novak's Get On Your Knees push stand-up toward solo theatre.
Cringe and real-world comedy
Comedy that happens to real people, or feels like it does. Nathan Fielder's Nathan for You and The Rehearsal build ridiculous premises inside actual businesses and lives. Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave escalates a single social humiliation, like a man refusing to admit he's wrong about a hot dog costume, far past any reasonable stopping point.
Alt vs. mainstream: how to tell the difference
The line is blurry and it moves, but these contrasts hold up well as a rule of thumb.
| Mainstream club stand-up | Alternative comedy | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of comedy | The joke: setup, punchline, tag | The bit, the premise, the persona or the whole show |
| Laughs | High and steady laughs per minute | Willing to trade frequency for bigger, stranger or slower laughs |
| Topics | Relatable: dating, family, travel | Specific, personal, abstract or about comedy itself |
| Failure | Something to hide | Sometimes the material |
| Venue | Comedy clubs, arenas | Bars, theatres, back rooms, festivals, the internet |
| Audience | Entertained | Implicated, confused, then won over (ideally) |
A useful test: try to retell the funniest moment to a friend. If you can retell it as a joke and it still works, it is probably conventional comedy (which is no insult; it's hard to do). If you find yourself explaining the situation, the tone and the length of a pause, you were probably watching something alt.
Plenty of comics live in both worlds. John Mulaney came up in New York alt rooms and writes tightly constructed jokes; Maria Bamford is wildly unconventional and also reliably, loudly funny. “Alt” describes a direction of travel more than a fixed category.
Is alt comedy still alternative?
The honest answer is: partly. The people who built the 1990s scene now run television. Bob Odenkirk became a dramatic lead in Better Call Saul, alt-adjacent sitcoms filled network schedules in the 2000s, and in the 2010s streaming services bought specials that would once have been too odd for anyone. Fourth-wall breaks, anti-jokes and cringe premises are common currency.
But each generation finds something new to push against. In the 2010s that was the slick, uniform Netflix hour; in the 2020s it is the algorithm-friendly clip. The current alt scene lives in small rooms in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, at the Edinburgh Fringe and in self-released specials and odd short-form video. Our pages on the 2010s, the 2020s and the rise of micro-venues pick up that thread. And if you want to know who invented all this, our essay on the “father” of alt comedy weighs the candidates. For the vocabulary, keep the alt comedy glossary open in another tab.
Frequently asked questions
What does “alt” mean in comedy?
“Alt” is short for alternative. An alt comic works outside, or against, the conventions of mainstream club stand-up: the tight setup-punchline rhythm, the familiar topics and the comedy-club rooms themselves. The word describes an approach and a scene, not a single style.
Does alt comedy have anything to do with the alt-right?
No. Alternative comedy is a term from late-1970s London, decades older than the political label “alt-right”. The two share only the abbreviation. Historically, alt comedy grew out of left-leaning scenes that rejected racist and sexist club material.
What is an example of alternative comedy?
Classic examples include The Young Ones and The Comic Strip Presents in Britain, Mr. Show with Bob and David and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! in the US, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Maria Bamford's The Special Special Special, Bo Burnham's Inside and Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave.
Who started alternative comedy?
No single person. The term took hold in London around 1979 and 1980 through the Comedy Store, the Alternative Cabaret collective and the Comic Strip, with Alexei Sayle, Tony Allen, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson among the central figures. Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman are often named as forerunners.
Is alternative comedy mainstream now?
Much of it is. Alt veterans run sitcoms, win Emmys and headline theatres, and techniques like anti-jokes and fourth-wall breaks are common on streaming. “Alt” today mostly describes a sensibility and a network of small independent rooms rather than a fringe that nobody watches.