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Lexx has produced four full-length Edinburgh Fringe shows to date: I Lovely i (2015); I Tyrannosaurus Lexx i (2016); I Trying i (2018); and I Knee Jerk i (2019). On 12 August 2020, Oliver Double interviewed Laura Lexx via Zoom about the process of turning traumatic personal experience into a full-length stand-up comedy show. I Since probably the late 2000s there's been a rise in these shows, sometimes people call them "dead dad shows", you know, the hour-long show that deals with something traumatic and it's not always a parent who's died, it can be lots of different things. I worked with Jessica Fostekew, she directed this show... She's so good at structure and characters and keeping the gag rate high....I didn't want I Trying i to be misery porn. [Extracted from the article]

British variety theatre has been largely ignored by theatre historians, in spite of its huge popularity in the early twentieth century. Here, Oliver Double examines variety through its exemplification in the work of one performer, Teddy Brown, a virtuoso xylophone player whose career coincided with the heyday of the variety stage between and just after the two world wars. The key historical and stylistic aspects of the form typified by Brown's success included the development of a stage persona, novelty, skill, participation, a distinctive musical style, and the ability to exploit the complex relationship between variety and the other types of popular entertainment of the time, notably cinema, revue, and radio. Former comedian Oliver Double is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005). His stand-up comedy DVD Saint Pancreas is available from the University of Kent website. doi: 10.1017/S0266464X09000669

Punk rock performance consciously draws on popular theatre forms such as music hall and stand-up comedy--as was exemplified on the occasion when Max Wall appeared with lan Dury at the Hammersmith Odeon. Oliver Double traces the historical and stylistic connections between punk, music hall and stand-up, and argues that punk shows can be considered a form of popular theatre in their own right. He examines a wide range of punk bands and performers--including The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Devo, Spizz, The Ramones, The Clash, and Dead Kennedys--to consider how they use costume, staging, personae, characterization, and audience-performer relationships, arguing that these are as important and carefully considered as the music they play. Art movements such as Dada and Futurism were important influences on the early punk scene, and Double shows how, as with early twentieth-century cabaret, punk performance manages to include avant-garde elements within popular theatre forms. Oliver Double started his career performing a comedy act alongside anarchist punk bands in Exeter, going on to spend ten years on the alternative comedy circuit. Currently, he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent, and he is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005).

Admired by Brecht, yet also counting Hitler among his fans, the German cabaret performer Karl Valentin remains an enigmatic figure for most English-speaking theatre people; and his accommodation as a licensed jester during the Nazi years has reinforced the received wisdom that his comedy was ultimately offering reassurances of their own supremacy to bourgeois audiences. Here, Oliver Double and Michael Wilson outline Valentin's life and career, and offer an analysis of his performance style closely linked to two of his best-known routines, which are here also translated for the first time into English. They conclude that Valentin's idiosyncratic style of surreal logic had an effect akin to that of Brecht's Verfremdung, of making the familiar strange, and so, while often extremely funny in its unexpected dislocations, never offering a simple view either of comedy or of life. Oliver Double worked as a comedian for ten years on the alternative comedy circuit, was formerly proprietor and compare of Sheffield's Last Laugh Comedy Club, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997). Currently he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Mike Wilson, whose background is in community theatre, is now Professor of Drama and Field Leader for Performing Arts and Film at the University of Glamorgan. He has published widely on varying aspects of storytelling practice and, in particular, on teenage storytelling culture, notably in Performance and Practice: Oral Naratives Among Teenagers in Britain and Ireland (Ashgate, 1997). His latest book, Theatre, Acting, and Storytelling will be published by Palgrave in 2004.

Stand-up comedy is often distinguished from straight acting by its apparent lack of characterization - the comedian appearing onstage apparently as him or herself. But within gags and routines, comics often briefly take on the voice and posture of the characters they describe. Here Oliver Double contrasts the approach of two comedians of different generations- Ted Ray and Billy Connolly - to this technique of 'momentary characterization'. He notes the links between Connolly's conversational approach and Brecht's notions of acting, and goes on to examine the broader questions of comic personae, representation of the self, and the changing performance conventions within British stand-up comedy. Oliver Double is an ex-comedian who now lectures at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Metropolitan snobbery and the logistics of scale both militate against the success of comedians working in the regions. Yet, as Oliver Double here argues, the scene has been a lively one, often daring in its style and range alike - at least until the absorption of its big names into the London circuits by the agencies which increasingly control most of the bookings and much of the talent. Oliver Double, himself a working comic, describes the distinctive characteristics of regional alternative comedy, and the now very real dangers of stagnation, illustrating his argument from interviews with leading comics on the regional circuits - Nick Toczek, Stu Who?, Roger Monkhouse, Malcolm Bailey, Anvil Springsteen, Adam Caveleri, Kevin Seisay, Henry Normal, and John Simmit. Offering some hopes for the future, he points out the relatively low audience figures required to ensure a vigorous growth - if only emerging talent can be nurtured rather than condemned to still birth.