Stand-up comedy is a comedy performance where a comedian performs in front of a live audience, often addressing them directly from the stage.

The performer is known as a comic, comedian, or simply stand-up.

Stand-up comedy consists of one-liners, stories, observations or shtick that may incorporate props, music, magic tricks, or ventriloquism.

Stand-up comedy can be performed almost anywhere, including but not limited to clubs, festivals, bars, nightclubs, colleges or theatres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_comedy

How boring a definition….

————————————

Watching — painfully, by the side of my eye, in conjunction with the reality show of cosmonauts coming back to earth on my computer a few days ago — the Melbourne Festival Comedy Gala-something, one can say either Gus and his old brains are dumb, deaf and/or frustrated amateur comedics themselves. The punchlines were pissy and would not have awaken a family of rats, with laughter. The live automated written translations of the spiel regarding the cosmonauts was far-far funnier. I might do a transcript sometimes as I made a recording of the whole thing…. It was hilarious…….

Modern stand up comedy is often self-indulgent and used rude adjectives every second words. Not all stand-up comedian indulge in the art of fart jokes, nor sexual innuendoes with play of hand imitating someone  — or a monkey — trying to have a free ejaculation, but the gist is always there around the corner. Even Ricky Gervais does it — only in front of American audiences, I must add…. The Americans are shocked by smut, while we find it a yawn.

And this has nothing to do with puritanism. We’re not prudes, in Elizabethan times, we would have been canned for not being rude enough. After a few kings and queens succeeded one another in the land of the Anglo-Saxons, Victoria, the queen who was addicted to sex, was not going to have any rudeness in her kingdom… This is known as the Victorian Times when even homosexuals were hounded like a bunch of Oscar Wildes...

What has changed since the Elizabethan times isn’t the rudeness coming back in the vocab, but the hesitancy in lampooning real people. So modern stand-up comics have turned to self-immolating. If they are not sued by their own parents it is because these are either dead or in a home for people who can’t remember.

Mind you, I am not just writing about stand-up comics, but about the theatre in the days of the Queen E1, in which plays to entertain the masses, increased the rudeness in order to maintain bums on seats and pay the actors. Appearing on stage was not a profession for women, akin to being a whore, the female roles were played by men, some barely shaven.

We are told: Women were first permitted to perform on the English stage in the early 1660s, after the Restoration of King Charles II.

Respectable women would not usually consider a career in the theatre. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century women players were much in demand, both on the stage and as subjects of painted portraits and prints. These helped to enhance the fame of early actresses such as Nell Gwyn and Moll Davis.

But there was dissatisfaction brewing about the blasphemous, grossly immoral pays acted by “degenerates”, possibly homosexual beasts, that in 1698, a priest, Jeremy Collier, published “A View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage” which was more like a dictionary of rude words, so it became very popular…...

Collier also dislike “Shakespear” because he used rude words (most of which have been expunged from modern adaptations) but despite "the Smut, at least 'Shakespear' made Sense".

Some erudite writers of the time, say a certain John Dryden, blamed the source of such rude language on the King Charles II…

But Rudeness on stage could not bring enough patrons to pay the actors, thus theatre troupes went broke. In the “free-wheeling" theatre of the Elizabethan times, everything was allowed except ATHEISM. One could promote the damnation of god and the salvation of the devil — as long as the divine concepts were maintained.

By the early eighteenth century, theatre was thriving in Britain. However, in 1737 a licensing act was passed making it illegal for companies to perform without a royal charter. This led to the censorship of plays. The effect was to outlaw many groups of ‘strolling players’ but also to enhance the dominance of the official theatres in which women could seek careers as actresses.

Recently, there was the Annual Senior Comedy Festival (some comedians are getting old and tired) or the Comedy Festival for Senior, as usual organised by the New South Wales Government with all the best wishes from the ministers of the day to make sure they get re-elected with the help of the forgetful. In the past, most stand up comedians made jokes about old age, but in fact, seniors TRY HARD to forget that they’re old, and the main thing I was told by some old patrons who went, the only thing they remembered about the show was the pizza they had for lunch before entering the venue.

The smut for the oldies would have been double-“entendred", though the word F...K seems to have entered the ordinary lingo of the old folks, who having seen world wars, would not get too upset at rude words — as long as god or the devil still get your one old foot in the grave.... Gus is an atheist......

As mentioned before, women were not allowed on stage till king Richard III, as there was not much difference between theatre and brothels. It seems that we’ve turned full circle. Women (apart from very few of them) should NOT do stand up comedy. It’s embarrassing to watch as it seems that all the good punchlines have already been used by Joan Rivers. 

No, I am not sexist. Please women improve your material and don’t be afraid of sticking sticks in the right-wing politicians. Go easy on the poor geezers on the left… They are trying not to make waves, while the ScoMoricane is blustering like a new dangerous flood or a nasty bushfire, coming your way. 

As the price of tickets to the Opera — imported from Italy — became only affordable to the gentry, the rich people in search of refined boredom — someone called John Gay wrote “The Beggar’s Opera” which was a satirical work about the snooty elites… A ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 with music (some stolen from famous composers) arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch,  it is the only example left of the once thriving satirical ballad operas to remain popular today. 

According to The New York Times: "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it.”

The story satirised politics, poverty and injustice, focusing on the theme of corruption at all levels of society. Don’t we need our own “Beggar’s Opera” as our bloody Aussie Federal election looms… Yes we had “Keating the Musical”, but the guy has verve and wit, while the ScoMo only has faith and venom... No fun in him....

Similarly, when a starlet has an affair with a Brad something, Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum character and an overnight success with the “Beggar’s Opera", ran away with her married lover, Charles Powlett, 3rd Duke of Bolton. She must have been beautiful, unless he was ugly...

Bertolt Brecht (working from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann) adapted the work into Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) in 1928, sticking closely to the original plot and characters, but with a new libretto, and mostly new music by Kurt Weill…

Meanwhile, our satirists have vanished from the surface, mostly to become self-navel-gazing pretend-stand-up comics… The only too few satirists left, are playing with their own survival… or have become mad as hell….

I hope I did not f....ing offend anyone

Gus Leonisky

Effing poor man satirist