Alternative Comedy

Alternative comedy is a term that originated in the 1980s for a style of comedy that makes a conscious break with the mainstream comedic style of an era. The phrase has had different connotations in different contexts: in the UK, it was used to describe content which was an 'alternative' to the mainstream of live comedy, which often involved racist and sexist material. In other contexts, it is the nature of the form that is 'alternative', avoiding reliance on a standardised structure of a sequence of jokes with punch lines. Patton Oswalt has defined it as "comedy where the audience has no pre-set expectations about the crowd, and vice versa. In comedy clubs, there tends to be a certain vibe—alternative comedy explores different types of material." After his critically acclaimed performance in Young Adult, Oswalt clarified the method and attitude of the alt comics he came up with as, "Don't try it, man. Just go up and wing it". He goes on to say how it affected his acting, "I didn’t really have the confidence to ...I think a lot of that comes from insecurity. It’s that fashion of improv and amateurism that comes from the insecurity of saying to the audience, 'Well, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t go well, because I didn’t even try that hard to begin with.' It’s like, 'Oh, that’s why you’re not . If you actually tried hard and it sucked, then you’ve got to blame yourself.' So that’s what makes it hard for some people to sit down and actually just do the fucking work, because doing the work means you’re making a commitment."