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In the preface to his second fictional endeavour, Whatever Love Means, David Baddiel refers to a special 1990 Time Out magazine screening of the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. At the question and answer session afterwards, a woman put her hand up and observed that she felt ‘shocked, soiled even’ by the film’s graphic violence, eliciting the harsh if not entirely unmerited reproof from elsewhere in the audience: ‘For fuck’s sake, it’s not called Henry the Elephant, is it?’

Most people would have appreciated the cruel irony of this exchange and then got on with their lives, but David Baddiel decided to make it the cornerstone of a new moral (or, more accurately, amoral) scheme. ‘It was at that point’, he writes, ‘that the 80s fell away, or at least that seriousness fell away.’

The comedian’s initial reaction to this moment of satori – he claims to have ‘laughed for 15 minutes’ – might seem somewhat hysterical, but presumably something about the spectacle of a man humiliating a woman in public must have been especially gratifying to him. Especially following hard on the heels of ninety minutes spent sitting in the dark watching other women being gruesomely murdered.

As such self-consciously uncaring voices as Baddiel’s have grown ever more dominant, it has become increasingly easy to overestimate the height of the intellectual barricades erected during the 1980s. No decade which provided a lucky few with the opportunity to see Jerry Sadowitz at his majestically offensive best can fairly be judged an era of unalloyed moral priggishness. Indeed, far from being an oasis of non-sexist rectitude, the Comedy Store at this time was often little more than, to borrow Jeremy Hardy’s gruesomely memorable phrase, ‘a roomful of people baying to hear the word “cunt”’.

While sympathetic observers such as William Cook have tended to portray alternative comedy as a reaction – or, most neutrally, a counterpoint – to Thatcherism, in fact the relationship between the two was a good deal more complicated than that. For example, Margaret Thatcher was the mother-in-law of alternative comedy not only in providing it with a necessary object of antipathy, but also (further echoing the historic tension between working-class men and their wives’ mothers) by giving it a house to live in.

While her obsession with the deregulation of broadcasting might have originally been designed to intimidate the BBC and open the way for her (then) ally Rupert Murdoch to colonize people’s homes with The Simpsons and Granada Men and Motors, its other end results were the creation of Channel 4 (a place where ambitious young satirists could get together to make a good living by taking the piss out of her) and a changed TV power structure in which competing production companies would compete to satisfy egotistical comedians’ every artistic whim.

It would obviously be foolish to make too explicit a historical comparison between the Second World War and the three governments of Margaret Thatcher (apart from anything else, in the Second World War the good guys won). But in the same way as the traumas and hardships of 1939-45 would underpin the comedic triumphs of Spike Milligan and Tony Hancock, so – by undermining pre-existing social structures and leaving people with a profound sense of cataclysm – the distinctly unfunny Tory governments of the 1980s had also prepared the ground for a rich comedic harvest.

‘For many people,’ wrote Ian Jack, on travelling through northern England in 1987, ‘their link with history – the functions and behaviour, morality and religion of their recent ancestors – has been snapped.’⁴⁵ It is against this desolate backdrop that many of the most vital cultural manifestations of the late 1980s – from the reembrace of pre-alternative comedic traditions at one end of the entertainment spectrum to the Acid House movement at the other – can most easily be understood.

What better way to disprove the depressing Thatcherite contention that there was ‘no such thing as society’ than by coming together in a gleeful ecstasy (or lager-fuelled fug) to savour some form of communal jollification? Apart from anything else, it’s what J. B. Priestley would have wanted.⁴⁶

‘This used to be a picture house,’ says Lee Evans – with his South London showbiz heritage hat on – to a packed Lewisham Odeon in the early nineties. ‘You don’t give a shit, do you?’ Evans’s personification of his audience as a dangerous beast, ready to turn on him at any moment, is not entirely fanciful. Before the alternative circuit began to find his modesty and innocence beguiling, he died a thousand deaths in holiday camps and working men’s clubs. He used to box when he was younger, too, and now he seems to think if he stays in one place for too long – or messes about and tries anything too fancy – the crowd might flatten him.

One shoulder slightly raised in a perpetual half-flinch, Evans doesn’t so much deliver his lines as let them escape, like compressed air released from an over-pumped bike tyre. Perpetually poised just beyond the brink of hysteria, he must duck and dive or die. His comedy is the product of a harsh Thatcherite world, a world entirely without safety nets, which is perhaps one reason why people find watching him simultaneously plummet into the abyss onstage and soar ever skywards in career terms so strangely reassuring.

Like Norman Wisdom (at this point enjoying cult status in Albania) before him, Evans is a highly skilled celebrant of incapacity. And Evans’s awareness that the bottom can call again at any moment is – if anti-scatological pun laws will permit – fundamental to his act. Hence his unusually pointed (and grateful) observation that the unfortunate butts of his jokes – bystanders, burger-eaters and toilet-sweepers – are ‘always the same guy’. Evans pauses. ‘And that was me once.’

‘If there are tears in my eyes, you put them there.’ So says Des O’Connor to Loughton’s ambassador of laughter Alan Davies, who has not punched him in the kidneys, but told him some jokes. If there is a comedy equivalent – in terms of instantaneous constituency broadening – to a band’s first appearance on Top of the Pops, initiation to the fraternity of Des’s sofa is probably it.⁴⁷ And Davies certainly looks at home there. His nasal vocal delivery has a hint of Kenneth Williams about it, his eyes dart beneath a curly fringe, picking out the audience’s weak points, and the cackles rise off them like steam from a herd of wet cattle.

A few weeks on from his O’Connor début, the bleary-eyed and unassuming Davies is chain-smoking in his manager’s Regent Street office. There is an old-fashioned show-business ambience, as opposed to the thrusting combativeness of the new comedy establishment: Tony Hancock’s former agent still has an office here, and sitting in another room is Blockbusters’ Bob Holness.

Having graduated from Kent University with a degree in drama in 1988, Davies belongs – alongside Steve Coogan – to that section of the comedy fraternity respectfully referred to by the softly spoken agent Addison Cresswell as ‘fucking wannabe actors who couldn’t get it together to get an Equity card any other way’. Alan’s first steps into the stand-up spotlight coincided with the explosion of comedy clubs in London. And his preference for personal rather than news-based material (belying his background as a teenage Labour Party member – ‘marching and all that’)⁴⁸ harmonized usefully with a general depoliticization of the UK comedy scene.

‘With our circuit,’ Davies insists cheerfully, ‘people at the beginning tried to separate themselves from the mainstream history of comedy. But in truth, if you go back, there have always been little clumps of young performers who appeared to be different but actually weren’t.’ Whether or not this will also turn out to be true for the next generation – hatching out, even as he speaks, in a scary Aliens-style spawning room – only a daredevil would hazard a guess.