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    Books on Comedy

    This academic collection from the late-90s is very interesting and accessible; very good on sitcoms, gender, race and class:

    https://www.amazon.com/Because-Tell-.../dp/0415129214

    Biographies: John Fisher's biography of Tony Hancock is the best I have read of a comedy actor.

    #2
    The Comedians by Kliph Nesteroff is a fantastic book - out in 2017 or late 2016 - that charts the history of comedy from the early 20th Century til today. Very broad and very deep.

    Stand and Deliver by Andrew Clark, by contrast, is a narrow slice of Canadian comedy from the late '70s to the early '90s, focussing mainly on names you'd know from Canadian comedy (Jim Carrey, etc) and how they came up through the Toronto-centric comedy boom and the Yuk Yuks franchise machine.

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      #3
      Current reading:

      Stewart Lee - How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian. Sensationally good, built around an annotated transcript of a 2005 routine in Glasgow. Seeing the material in print gives you a deep appreciation of the craft, and indeed the art.

      Frankie Boyle - Work! Consume! Die!: I Am Actually Almost Completely Insane Now. A very intelligent guy but the politics are crude sub-Mark Steel, whose delivery style he unconsciously imitates in the war chapter. The comedy philosophy is also just a smokescreen for rape jokes* and so on. OTOH the first three chapters contained two jokes each that made me laugh out loud (although TBF they were just very cleverly done ethnic stereotypes when stripped down). Boyle is a misanthrope who is less original than he claims to be because you can detect plenty of thinly disguised Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks in there, and the serious bits about Libya 2011 could have been Mark Steel or Jeremy Hardy banging on about the first Gulf War in 1991 (example: the Libyans were using the weapons we sold them; Cameron bombs Libya one week and then tours Saudi Arabia selling weapons the next; you could build a hospital for the cost of a couple of planes, etc). You would need to be 16 years old not to spot the recycling of other comics' riffs, but maybe that's the target audience for this book.**

      *There is a strong implication that being a celebrity makes a woman a legitimate subject of a "comic" rape fantasy.

      **I should note that it only cost be two dollars on Kindle so I did not splurge serious cash on it.
      Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 07-02-2018, 12:44.

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        #4
        Stewart Lee's book seconded, though I would say that as he's my favourite stand-up.

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          #5
          Much of his writing available here

          http://www.stewartlee.co.uk/stews-writing/

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            #6
            I read David Mitchell's memoirs and his Guardian articles collection yesterday. Each only took about three hours because there were several chapters that held no interest so I skipped to the next, but the good chapters and articles were worth the few quid I spent on the pair. As I have lived in the US since 2006, I was only dimly aware who Mitchell was (fairly typical career path of public school to Footlights to panel show wit) but I think he defends himself well against the silver spoon charge without becoming defensive in doing so. He is open, frank and self-effacing so I like him, despite the fact that, unlike Stewart Lee, I find little in his life or politics that I can connect to.

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              #7
              Avoid Richard Herring. Writes like an over-excited 5th former.

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