Says Bob Slayer (with some help from Karl Schultz)

I was chatting with friend and fellow comedian Karl Shultz last night, and I think we solved a conundrum

Karl Schultz: What you up to?

Bob Slayer I was having a long, largely pointless but nonetheless very interesting discussion with a young Danish comic on ‘what is alternative comedy?’

KS: And how did that go?

BS: Well after an hour or so my conclusion was that alternative comedy was at one time simply defined as not the mainstream but...

KS: Yes but everything's as accessible as everything now so after a point doesn't everything become alternative to everything else. 

BS: Good point, whatever association to alternative with a big ‘A’ or a small one becomes a deeply subjective and personal experience which no two people share - therefore the term has become at best meaningless but more often than not divisive... 

KS: Yes, the problem herein is the word 'alternative'. because we confuse nouns and adjectives. there'll always be the adjective because there'll always be counterpoints to everything. there're too many choices to talk about alternative. As to the noun 'alternative comedy' I personally don't associate with it.

BS: Nor me, really. Ironically it is easier to define who is not alternative than who is, in that anyone who believes they know all about alternative is probably not very alternative. Ergo, if anyone sounds completely confused on the subject then they might just know what they are talking about. But not always.

KS: I think that's very well put in a beautifully confused way. Alternative is a bit like saying what number makes a heap

BS: Oh that is wonderful! I will send the Danish comic that. I think she is like a butterfly collector and demands to pin something to her board. But sadly the butterfly is extinct and cannot be captured any more. Her definition of alternative comedy is. ‘To me, alternative comedy is anything that is not mainstream which is just being yourself on stage with a microphone...’

KS: That's moronic

BS: Yes but it is her viewpoint, it is probably no more moronic than my own which is very unlikely to match up to yours.

KS: OK. Alternative comedy is relative to its time. What is the mainstream of the day? There was a time when going on stage and just being yourself was alternative to the most popular/general style of the day. Lenny Bruce was alternative. Billy Connolly, who defines being yourself on stage, was alternative. Are all mainstream comics just being themselves? Is the history of mainstream comedy a history of people being as honest as they can be with themselves and their audience? Of course not also, 'just being yourself' is far from mainstream. Much like 'not being yourself' is hardly alternative.

BS: I pointed out that Tim Vine sometimes has props and she told me that she would class him as alternative

KS: It is not a definition that I understand, mind I am sure any definition can be shown to be a nonsense.

BS: I think we are in agreement on this. She said that it didn't matter that we all have different definitions for alternative comedy and I said that it did… what if one person's definition basically means 'no' and the others means 'yes' - how can they have any hope of a useful discussion? I was told that I had missed the point and I agreed with her. I told her it was not possible to get a point if the point was ungettable. She told me we were talking about completely different things, and again I agreed with her and told her that she had just proved my point. She said, 'But it was the wrong point' and I said yes, and that proves my point again - and somewhat strangely also her point. Do you get the point Mr Karl?

KS:I kind of think it misses the point altogether.

BS: I agree

KS: However I also think that alternative comedy had a right to call itself that once and that it is a redundant word now 

BS: Ah yes, I totally agree with that. I tried to make the analogy with punk - it is exactly the same

KS: Do you know why I feel disenfranchised from most of that alternative comedy talk? Because I feel dislocated from everything, and when people start talking about alternative comedy as if it was a group, I feel uneasy.

BS: Yes I sort of thought the original name for my venue in Edinburgh, I thought the Alternative Fringe would be good because it highlighted that we were about doing something differently. But after a year and a half I saw that it would become horribly limiting because everyone has a different idea of what alternative is, so it’s now called Heroes Of Fringe. I think any brand association has its marketing advantages and creative drawbacks. Underbelly used to be the interesting young upstart but now have become the institution. As soon as you have any pedigree then you start to develop values which ultimately become rules and are restricting. I think that maybe the only answer is to change the name of it every year.

KS: I think that is a very good idea, can I pick the name next year please?

BS: Yes why not. Alternative Fringe had kind of been handed to me when I booked the room as part of Laughing Horse, the year that Knut and The Gang had all the fun putting cock stickers everywhere. We became known the Alternative Fringe and so I stuck with it. But in the last year I have spoken to acts who love what we are doing. But when I said, come and join us then, they said, ‘Oh I am not alternative enough’. These were out there interesting acts who I really love. They saw themselves as normal, probably because we are all our own normality. I could see that the old name was on the way to becoming a tight set of rules that would totally restrict what we did. It felt like a glass ceiling.  

KS: It's all tedious, in fairness.

BS: And so to wrap up there is no such thing as ‘alternative comedy’ any more. It happened in a moment in time as soon as someone said , “Oh look, there it is!” then it was gone like a Higgs boson that the hadron collider is pointlessly looking for. 

KS: Sounds good, call Heroes that next year. I'm doing the Ham-on-Rye Folk Festival in 2014 anyway.

BS: I think I will do exactly that. Thank you Mr Karl. I am going to send this all to Chortle and tell them that the Alternative Fringe is dead, long live Heroes of Fringe (possibly to become The Pointless Higgs Boson Comedy Experiment in the future).

• Click here for more info on Bob Slayer’s Heroes of Fringe. Karl Schulz: Start The Karl will be appearing 4pm daily in The Hive as part of the Weirdos trilogy, preceded by Adam Larter and Barnaby J Thompson. 

Published: 5 Mar 2013