Book review by Steve Bennett

The Cambridge Companion To Stand-Up Comedy is a collection of essays on the history and state of the art from lecturers and professors around the world.

Some of the writers hide their academic roots better than others, but the aim, at least, is for an accessible guide that takes a sociological look at an artform that surely reflects the world around it better than any other, thanks to its immediacy and simplicity – no production or committees needed.  Those same factors have also seen it spread around the world in the past couple of decades, fuelled by the huge volume of stand-up available to watch online.

The fact that’s probably most telling about the state of live comedy is that half of the chapters here examine the art through the lens of identity, reflecting both how much the scene has diversified from the straight white men, and how much comedians now put so much of themselves into their work, which was rare even 20 years ago.

Such chapters cover gender, sexuality, black stand-up, Jewish-American comedy, disability and politics – though this last one has little to do with topical satire and instead focusses on gender politics, specifically the role of The Guilty Feminist in taking the sexism out of the circuit (an essay which overlooks wider mood changes in the air anyway, but which the podcast has certainly been an important conduit for). 

There’s also a full chapter on Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, written by Bristol university’s Mary Luckhurst, which, of course, also touches on gender while unpicking how the groundbreaking special subverts the comedian’s contract with an audience to release tensions with a punchline. It treats the show with the same intellectual rigour that Gadsby, pictured, put into writing it and shows how mature and complex stand-up – and its analysis –  can be.

The collection has been compiled by Oliver Double, the former comedian now based at the University of Kent, where he teaches the craft and where he established the British stand-up comedy archive. He’s written a number of previous books – including the definitive history of alternative comedy – and is certainly the most readable author in this collection.

He co-writes the opening chapter, offering a fascinating if potted timeline of the scene in the UK, followed by American Beck Krefting doing the same for the US, from the minstrel circuit and the Jewish proving grounds of the Borscht Belt  right up to contemporary alternative comedy.

The book gives American comedy equal standing to British – which is only fair given they invented the art form – though it’s perhaps an omission not to have an essay about the recent explosion of the genre in other countries without such a tradition, a phenomenon Double draws glancing attention to in the introduction.

For those outside comedy, the biggest question of recent years involves offence, cancel culture and the feeling ‘you can’t joke about anything any more’  – even if that’s a distorted simplification of the evolving, broad scene. 

The chapter here from Brunel University’s Simon Weaver is a dense one, dripping with obscure academic references while tying the reader up in aloof phrases and sentences such as ‘fictive internal contrast’; ‘the encoding and decoding process that form  a metalinguistic defence of the joke’; or ‘stand-up comedy has the potential to provide an aestheticised entertainment of politics of cultural difference that situates offensiveness at the boundaries of cultural groups’. I wouldn’t put that on the poster.

Other essays cover the dynamics of performance, with Double analysing the role of persona and Ian Brodie, of Cape Breton University in Canada, on how the audience is so integral to stand-up; while yet more chapters cover the evolution of comedy venues and how performances are captured on TV and radio.

To break up the heavyweight analysis, some chapters are broken up with quotes from comedians about their own work, which is a nice diversion. Another recent book, JT Habersaat’s Doing Time, tried to paint a picture of the entire stand-up scene this way, but proved an infuriatingly bitty way to do it. 

The format works better as a palate-cleanser here, helping The Cambridge Companion To Stand-Up Comedy be a mostly interesting read for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of the art, and how it emerges from and reflects the society in which it sits.

• The Cambridge Companion To Stand-Up Comedy is published by Cambridge University Press, priced £24. It is available from Amazon priced £22.99 – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.  

Published: 24 Nov 2025