Dr Oliver Double

Oliver Double has been at the University of Kent since 1999, teaching and researching comic and popular performance. 

Before becoming an academic, he worked as a stand-up comedian on the national comedy circuit ('Delightful' -The Guardian), and set up the Last Laugh, Sheffield's longest running comedy club. He continues to perform occasionally, for example in his one-man shows Saint Pancreas (2006, DVD available  here) and Break a Leg (2015, on YouTube here), and the monthly comedy club Funny Rabbit. 

He has written a number of books, chapters and articles on stand-up, alternative comedy, variety theatre and popular performance, and helped to establish the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive (BSUCA), based at Kent’s Templeman Library. His podcast about items in BSUCA,  A History of Comedy in Several Objects, is available  here. 

His teaching is based on his research, giving students access to cutting edge knowledge and an extraordinary range of unpublished historical documents. He is proud of the number of his graduates who are now working professionally as comedians and comic performers. 

In addition to books on stand-up, alternative comedy and variety theatre, Oliver has written articles and chapters on the early twentieth century German comedian Karl Valentin, Brecht's relationship with cabaret, punk rock as popular theatre, and the enormously fat xylophonist Teddy Brown. He is the Interviews Editor of Comedy Studies, has written a number of entries for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and often appears as an expert in television and radio documentaries about comedy.   

He is interested in stand-up comedy and popular performance more generally. What particularly interests him is anything in which the performer works straight out to the audience, performing in the first person and the present tense in which the audience can make their opinions known by laughing, applauding, heckling or booing.   

DRAM5940 Popular Performance Project 

DRAM6760 Stand-Up Comedy

Oliver is interested in supervising students researching stand-up comedy, alternative comedy, comic performance, variety theatre, punk performance, or any related area of popular performance.