Gerard Clough investigates the difference between comedy courses today, and Trevor Griffiths' fictional version

It’s the 50th anniversary of Comedians, Trevor Griffiths’ groundbreaking play about an evening class for wannabe comedians. Does it have anything to say to the live comedy experience in 2025? Gerard Clough goes to stand-up school to find out.

I didn’t see the original 1975 production of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians at Nottingham Playhouse but did catch it on TV a little later in a Play For Today, directed by the young Richard Eyre. Situated in the gritty world of northern working men’s clubs, the play was the first serious attempt to ask searching questions about stand-up: why comics get on stage, what gets a laugh and what the comedy tells us about ourselves. But does a comedy world conjured up in a drama from so long ago resonate in any way with the scene today?

Comedians is set on showcase night for an imagined evening class for fledgling stand-ups. I say ‘imagined’ because such courses didn’t exist back then; it wasn’t until around 15 years later that the first stand-up course was launched. The comics - all white, working-class men desperate to escape the grind of their dead-end jobs in Manchester - are gathered for a last meeting with their charismatic teacher, Eddie Waters, a veteran of music hall and variety and a believer in the truth-telling power of humour.

The best comedy does not ‘feed prejudice and fear’ but rather makes them ‘clearer to see’ he tells his students. But this view is challenged by talent scout Challenor, a smarmy agent up from London who takes a very different line. Comics are ‘servants to the audience’, not ‘missionaries’ but ‘suppliers of laughter’.  And in those two opposing views, we have the central tension of the play.

We see it played out when the showcase comics take to the stage. Some stay true to their colours like the Irish construction worker whose set is a brutally honest exploration of life as a besieged outsider in a Britain panicked by IRA bombings.  But others mostly sell out for a cheap laugh, including the Jewish comic who, unable to engage the club audience with a sideways look at his own upbringing, abandons the set to reel off a string of ready-made gags targeting Irish and Afro-Caribbean immigrants as well as gay entertainer, Liberace.

Finally, top of the bill, we get strangeness and rupture.  Enter Jonathan Pryce’s class warrior, Gethin, a shaved-headed hooligan in startling white clown make-up who proceeds to berate two onstage toffs who fail to acknowledge his presence. It’s a highly theatrical moment because the mute toffs are a couple of grotesque mannequins.

Gethin then turns to stare us down - like a glowering Johnny Rotten on the Bill Grundy show - before finishing with a screeching Red Flag played on an out of tune violin. It’s a stroppy, convention-busting set that anticipates the confrontational performances of comics like Jerry Sadowitz.

Here then was a drama (not a comedy) that interrogated both the form and content of lazy 1970s stand-up:  the numbing predictability of frilly-shirted men reciting formula gags that betrayed those in need of solidarity - women, immigrants, gays and, ultimately, members of their own class.

At times, that critique is laid on rather too thickly and, as with all of Griffiths’ plays, his Marxist politics is never too far away. But, as stand-up historians have argued, the play served as a call to arms, one taken up by alternative comedians in the early 1980s whose punkish boldness and inventiveness was a disavowal of what went before.

Roll on 50 years and I’m at the back of a pub in southwest London following in the footsteps of Griffiths’ learner comics. I’ve signed up for a course of five weekly evening classes that will prepare me for a stand-up showcase. Why? Because I want to know if I can get a laugh in front of a crowd - even though there’s a fair chance I may die in the attempt. And I’m also curious to know whether that half-remembered play from such a different time and place will have anything to say to the experience ahead.

What is striking straight away is the diversity of our cohort. It’s not the male working-class monoculture of Comedians. I’m relieved to find I’m the oldest in a group of men and women ranging from their 20s to early 50s. We come from a slew of professions - sales, hospitality, medicine, theatre, therapy and that staple breeding ground for frustrated comics, teaching. Three classmates are first-generation immigrants and around half the group come from working-class backgrounds. Most are drawn to the satisfactions of creative self-expression or just want distraction, uplift in otherwise stressful lives. And like the aspirant comics in Comedians, a few can also see a future in professional stand-up.

Under the practical guidance of our avuncular, wonderfully witty teacher, Erich McElroy, we build confidence in stand-up basics from handling a mic to developing a starter persona, writing funny lines, structuring a five-minute set and finding that first gig. Learning is very efficient, driven by the power of feedback from supportive classmates and the personalised write-ups we get from Erich each week.

We do have a foray into the ethics of laughter-making, but it is brief. Humour is powerful - it can diffuse tensions, get us through hard times, create connection, provoke thought but also be weaponised. Yes, we need to think very carefully about whom we punch and why. For the comics in Comedians that was a lesson to be learned but for our group it seems like a given.

Showcase night comes and as we do our sets, it is clear that our varied life experiences provide rich source material. We hear about growing up with strong Eastern European and African mothers; the escapades of a neurodiverse ‘oik’ working in the City; life with a feminist, Lollipop Lady dad; the crazy identity politics facing a working-class writer from the Old Kent Road; the misadventures of a shoplifter with a coke habit; and stories aplenty about the vicissitudes of married life. Our performances are greeted with loud, whooping applause. It’s a rush – a very addictive rush.

In the following two months, about half the group take their training to the next stage, developing their comedy chops at open mics across small venues in London.  I do the occasional gig but mostly take on the role of ‘bringer’, the plus one required by many open mics. In this role, I see how classmates finesse their sets, begin to clarify their comic personas, and land their jokes more expertly.

They also start to break through the fourth wall - reading the room, interacting with the crowd, and making impromptu adaptations to material. It’s about emerging talent and skill but also impressive courage and perseverance when things don’t go according to plan. It’s a tough process, learning from bombing, and I am filled with admiration.

And is live club comedy pushing the boundaries of form in interesting ways and delivering fresh, thought-provoking content? Or are we back in the stand-up doldrums of the 1970s? It’s a little difficult to tell but from my very unscientific survey of the rather insular world of open mics, there is much to celebrate. Newbie comics often have a raw energy that you don’t get with polished professional acts at places like the Comedy Store.

Some of the best ones are from outside the UK – Asian students, Aussie backpackers, Russian exiles, European migrants - who find a rich vein of absurdity in our politics and unexamined social mores while also sending themselves up. And at many gigs, there’s an Irish comic who is razor sharp, turning the tables on the kind of English condescension that was rife 50 years ago. Far from being the butts of jokes, outsiders are now the joke-makers.

Some things never change though. Fart jokes and sex gags abound, but then they have across the millennia and for a very good reason:  if done well, they can produce the biggest belly laughs. For my taste, the gags are often a little too graphic but then you get someone who understands how to do risqué like the older comedian who recounts her day meeting needy men around the capital. Laughter builds as we click that she is a sex worker. It’s done with the kind of delicacy that brings to mind the playfulness of long-gone talent like Irene Handl and Joyce Grenfell.

On some nights, I am struck by a conservatism underlying the performances: the same diet of topics (dating apps figure again and again), not much in the way of political punch, and a rather narrow view of the stand-up form that mostly excludes sketch comedy, clowning, music and comic verse. If you are after more eclecticism at open mics, it is available but only in a select few venues or on dedicated ‘alternative’ nights. We don’t get the rich mix of genres that early 1980s live comedy/cabaret (with its roots in arts school and fringe theatre) provided as standard.

There is also an undercurrent of atavism. A small minority of male comics do a line in the intentionally offensive and so we get smutty gags knocking women, and on one memorably awful occasion, a vile pornographic joke about Anne Frank. Perhaps these men think they are, in some deeply misguided way, ‘dark’ and ‘edgy’ putting the boot into wokedom. The irony here is that their brand of edginess would make a good fit for the kind of witless, locker-room humour that was mainstream in northern clubs back in the dim, distant seventies. Exactly the kind of nastiness dismantled in Griffiths’ play.

That said, stand-up now is mostly a very different proposition. Gags are woven into personal storylines, and, on good nights, there are acts that can wake you up with a jolt. At professional level, the shining example is ‘racist grandad’ Jeff Innocent. His clever set is a masterclass on how to wrong foot audience expectations, upend class stereotypes and really sting. Think class warrior Gethin from Comedians - now a pensioner uprooted to the East End, still with an air of danger but without the Marxist mantras and, this time, very, very funny.

And if you are after comedy that pushes the boundaries of form, Elf Lyons is the ticket. Her curated Cabaret Of The Weird at - of all places - The British Library, was a genuinely joyous evening that stepped well beyond the confines of gob and mic to embrace clowning, mime, acrobatics and just sublime craziness. For her own act, she moved seamlessly from crowd work to an extraordinary mime piece in which she took us into the mind of an abused nag out for murderous retribution on poorly behaved children. Dark but funny dark, like a tale by Hilaire Belloc.

A good stand-up course can help you develop the skills and confidence to build towards that kind of powerful performance. An important step on the way is finding a comedy signature – an original perspective, a well-defined character, a particular delivery style - to make your stand-up stand out. I can see this emerging in my classmates’ sets.

For Andy, it’s a bewhiskered Salvador Dali appearance and wordplay stories that are hilariously offbeat. Part of Teddy’s funniness lies in the tussle between two versions of herself – a genteel English self and a gruff, deeper-voiced alter ego that channels her Bulgarian mother. Kerry, a trained actor, commands the stage immediately with her high energy, cheery presence but underneath is a distinctively acerbic voice ripping into class and gender tropes.

‘It’s not the jokes. It’s not the jokes. It’s what lies behind ’em,’ says Eddie Waters, the music hall veteran in that faraway play from 1975. That seems right. Not to belittle the hard craft of joke writing, but great comedy is not all about the mechanics of a well-made gag. It’s that in part but everything else too: the interplay of personality, attitude, delivery, in fact the whole caboodle of what a comic brings to the stage. And all the better if it packs a surprise - just enough to budge our thinking in unexpected ways. For me, this is the key lesson, then as now.

• Gerard Clough has spent many years working in higher education. He goes back to comedy school this autumn with a new set.

• Comedians originally ran at Nottingham Playhouse from February 19 to March 15, 1975, transferring to  The Old Vic, London from September 24 that year. It aired as a Play For Today in 1975.

Published: 8 Sep 2025