British comedy has always had a diverse and illustrious history, from poetry, plays and radio to TV, film and stage. Throughout the years, the British comedy industry has created some indisputable classics, as well as the occasional damp squib along the way.
British comedy can be traced back to the Middle Ages in Chaucer’s bawdy ‘Canterbury Tales’. Many of the plays by William Shakespeare contained elements of comedy, and the Victorian and Edwardian music halls saw many comedy shows and related variety acts emerge. The course of comedy was changed forever in 1969 when Monty Python burst on to the scene with their long running BBC comedy show ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’.
The British sitcom became increasingly popular in the Seventies and Eighties with ‘Rising Damp’, ‘Dad’s Army’, ‘Porridge’, ‘Steptoe and Son’, ‘Only Fools and Horses’, ‘Fawlty Towers’ and ‘Blackadder’ being some of the best comedy shows around. These sitcoms were essential viewing and have remained classics, due to the winning recipe of great writing, acting and directing.
Pushing and challenging the audience as far as it dared, bad taste humour was developed in the Nineties, with shows like ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ and ‘Drop the Dead Donkey’. More recent innovative masterpieces followed on from these, such as ‘The Office’, ‘Peep Show’ and ‘The Inbetweeners’.
Many other British comedy classics were created on the radio. During the post-war decades, shows such as ‘The Goons’, ‘Round the Horne’ and ‘Beyond Our Ken’ all enjoyed huge success. ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, ‘Red Dwarf’ and ‘The League of Gentlemen’ are just some of the acclaimed television programmes that began their life as a radio show.
The silent movies of the early 20th century followed a long tradition of slapstick humour and the British offerings are among the finest and most well-known of the genre. The Ealing comedies in the Forties and Fifties exemplified the classic British wit, before the bawdy humour of the ‘Carry On’ films in the Sixties and Seventies.
The popularity of live stand-up comedy had increased in recent times, thanks to comedians such as Peter Kay, Jimmy Carr and Russell Howard, who regularly take part in TV comedy shows, as well as selling out huge stadium tours.