Harry Hill and the History of Stand-Up Comedy

It was once widely believed that stand-up comedy began in Britain in the late 20th Century when TV star Harry Hill first told jokes to a live paying audience in a tent in Chelmsford. Before this time it had been known for comedians to write jokes for radio programs, magazine articles and television shows but it seemed they had never before attempted to tell these jokes face-to-face with the paying public.

Since Hill’s early explorations into the world of direct joke-telling, other comedians have followed in his footsteps, each developing their own approach but more or less sticking to the rules put down by the pioneer Hill. Almost all of them would borrow much from Hill’s revolutionary stand-up toolkit, tricks such as appearing in the same room as the audience, reciting pre-prepared material, improvising material based on the response of the audience and waiting for applause and laughter to die down before introducing new material. Even patented Hill techniques such as using body movements and facial expressions are readily ransacked by today’s humour- mongers.

Comedians can often still be seen on the stand-up circuit using a quintessential Harry Hill device of saying something that has happened, either in the news or which most people will be aware of, and then making a humorous comment about it.

Today Hill admits that, while he played a sigificant role, he was only part of a wider community of comedians who were all interacting with their audience. Firstly, Hill admitted that some of the jokes told at those first gigs weren’t even created for that purpose but had in fact been used in Hill’s earlier television shows; Hill had the idea after he heard rumours that Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer had once performed excerpts from Shooting Stars (Dove from Above, Ulrika-ka-ka etc) in a pub and this had gone down so well with the locals that they’d passed around a pint glass and everyone had put a pound (£1) in.

Even Hill’s distinctive besuited appearance, the legacy of which can be seen in the acts of hundreds of stand up comedians from Jack Dee to Mo Mowlan, was not an entirely original idea. ‘I remember when I was younger, hhmmmm?’ Hill recalls. ‘I’d seen Ted Heath on the telly calling Enoch Powell a ‘great, sweaty ball-bag of a man’. This got a huge laugh from the assembled mob and I couldn’t quite work out why, as using colloquialisms for the male genitalia when referring to unpleasant people is not in itself innately funny. Then I realised the Conservative leader was wearing a suit and suddenly it all fell in to place.’

Although the revelations may come as a surprise to some, many in the comedy community say they had always known that Hill’s claims to being the originator of each and every element of stand up comedy were greatly exaggerated. Novelist David Baddiel remembers being the very first person to ever use irony, back in the early 1990s ‘Hill seems to get all the credit for that because he’s done it in front of large audiences and people know about him, everyone’s always saying ‘I’m so glad Harry Hill invented irony, I don’t know what we’d do without it’ but I did it first, I just never got the recognition’.