Overview

Originally part of the UK alternative comedy scene, Andy de la Tour spent many years on the circuit, performing with the likes of Rik Mayall, Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle and French and Saunders. After a 20-year break from stand-up he returned to New York City, the genre’s spiritual home, to start all over again in the back-rooms and dive bars of the Big Apple. This is one man’s journey through New York’s underground comedy scene. From ‘Rubber Bullets’ in lower Manhattan to the ‘Hot Tub’ in Brooklyn, Andy takes the stand. Can he make them laugh? Will New Yorkers stomach his outsider’s take on Obama, the Tea Party and 9/11? Andy’s a long way from home and dying is not an option.

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9781849433945

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Reviews

'I was born in 1968. For my generation of London-circuit stand-up comedians there was a Year Zero attitude to 1979. Holy texts found in a skip out of the back of the offices of the London listings magazine Time Out tell us how, with a few incendiary post-punk punchlines, Alexei Sayle, Arnold Brown, Dawn French and Andy de la Tour destroyed British comedy hegemony of Upper-Class Oxbridge Satirical Songs and Working-Class Bow Tie-Sporting Racism. Then, with the fragments of these smashed idols and their own bare hands, they built pioneering stand-up clubs The Comedy Store and The Comedy Strip. In doing so they founded the egalitarian Polytechnic of Laughs that is today's comedy establishment.' Stewart Lee 'Andy de la Tour deserves a noble place in the history of stand-up. He was one of the fringe theatre performers who were there at the foundation of Alternative Cabaret as the Seventies turned into the Eighties, alongside the likes of Alexei Sayle and Tony Allen... De La Tour nails the [Comedy circuit's] problems exactly, and with some authority - while the book maintains a brisk, entertaining read... anyone with interest in the workings of the live comedy circuit would be a fool not to get it.' Chortle.com

Author Information

Andy de la Tour: Andy is a writer, director, actor and stand-up comedian. He has appeared in scores of stage plays, TV dramas and films, including Notting Hill and 44 Inch Chest. His plays have been produced throughout the UK and also further afield, from the US, to Serbia and Panama.

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