Valorising liveness, in the face of a threat from the endlessly remediated art of the day, performance studies has tended to reject the historical; on the other hand, documentation of the live event has become not only a funding imperative but a personal obsession with many practitioners. It is not enough to do what we do; we must record it, and put it on YouTube. In the spirit of this take – or assault – upon historiography, this essay begins with a live moment that has led to a revision of the plan of this book, and continues with some perhaps uncomfortable historiographical questions.

On 18 June 2010 the editors called together a conference of the contributors to this volume, and an audience of interested scholars and postgraduate students, to discuss and co-ordinate approaches to its content. I (Jacky Bratton) spoke late in the day, with a brief to address the history of ‘the comic’ – solo performers of humorous material – and to suggest how the dominant aesthetic has variously appropriated, discarded, hidden or demonised the ‘popular’ art of the entertainer, and then suggest what the historian might do about this. I decided to demonstrate the complexities by showing a picture (Fig. 36) found on a calendar and asking delegates to name the performer. Of course they could not; as I had hoped, they did not even guess right as to the gender of the figure posing perfunctorily as a monster chicken, clamp-jawed, toothless and befeathered, in skull cap and big three-toed comedy boots.