The way comedy has developed in the last 20-30 years is something I'm always really interested in talking about. When I was a kid, I would always stay up late to watch Have I Got News For You, a panel show that in the 90s and 00s felt fresh, culturally relevant, and politically scathing. I also grew up discovering many shows that played with comedy TV as a medium in groundbreaking, exciting, and unique ways. Shows such as Goodness Gracious Me, The Young Ones, Red Dwarf, The Day Today/Brass Eye, Black Books, and The Thick of It.
Fast forward to the present day and in the UK, we're inundated with panel shows. New panel show formats come and go, flung at us like spaghetti at a wall, and occasionally sticking to the somewhat stale parade of Have I Got News For You (still here but feeling deflated after almost 30 years of the format), 8 Out of 10 Cats (which is now a teenager at 13 years of airing), and Mock The Week (introduced in 2005, the same year as 8 Out of 10 Cats).
Now, don't get me wrong, I still enjoy these shows to varying degrees, but it's strange to remember the incredible inventiveness that was going in comedy in the 00s. We had so much coming at us. Plenty of different approaches to comedy, from the now standard E4 tongue-in-cheek style of Misfits (which has its problems, but offered something that at the time was so fresh and different), to the bizarre and almost surreal social sitcom Peep Show. I should probably note these series did end relatively recently, in 2013 and 2015 respectively, and I'm not trying to argue that there is nothing good, creative, or politically relevant being created in contemporary British comedy, but TV does seem to be often trying very hard to replicate and capitalise on existing safe formats, rather than putting forward new ideas.
Aside from panel shows, we see a lot of straightforward stand up shows, like Night at the Apollo or Russell Howard's Good News. Now, I have nothing against making TV shows out of stand up, however it feels to me at this point as if many comedian's voices in these shows all blend into one. We're all so used to kind of narrative structures we see all the time on TV now. So much reacting to the news, but very little of it has any bite. Comedy is fundamentally about subverting expectations, so being exposed to such a lack of diversity in mainstream comedy style, format, personality, and topic makes me less interested in British TV comedy.
I've turned to US productions (Brooklyn 99, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) much more recently, as well as YouTube videos (hbomberguy, Jenna Marbles), and Korean dramas (Oh My Ghost!) because there is a lot more heart and variety to be found there. There are plenty of criticisms to be made about those different areas too, but there are certain things in these examples that I know I'm unlikely to get on TV in the UK any more. I love the wholesome yet clever jokes of Brooklyn 99 combined with fantastic characterisation, I love the utter chaos of hbomberguy videos, and I love the otherworldly wackiness of Oh My Ghost!
Now I'm finally going to actually talk about James Acaster's Repertoire, which is good.
It's an example of a stand up show, but Acaster is a comedian who slams down slightly surreal imagery expertly. He is not a man idly riffing on personal moments of awkwardness. His delivery is sharp and pecks at his intertwined narratives cleverly, but there is a natural softness to it. Just the right level of the absurd makes them feel real and engaging, but not too boring, not too straightforward. With so many stand up offerings, you can see where you're going. The crux of comedy for me is that I don't want to know where I'm going. By necessity, the medium needs to be evolving constantly to subvert expectations, to subvert what comedy became a second ago. It's a hard thing to get right, but Acaster does this really well, and it's a total joy to watch him get angry about bananas.
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