Man Alive

Harry Hill steps onto the stage of London’s Lyric Theatre in 1997 wearing his oversized collar to deliver an hour of surreal nonsense. He operates by abandoning jokes halfway through, repeating non-sequiturs like “Go away from the flats” until they wear the audience down, and demonstrating rhyming memory systems to dictate what dogs should eat. The performance relies entirely on his commitment to the bit, trading traditional setups and punchlines for eccentric repetition and a heavy reliance on a rubber hand puppet named Stouffer.

Released on VHS the same year his self-titled Channel 4 show debuted, Man Alive captures the comic just as his peculiar brand of absurdism was reaching the British mainstream. He incorporates multimedia with a black-and-white opening film about a boy with a big face, then spends the live show pulling audience members on stage for awkward interactions with his fake cat. The hour also includes his widely referenced “two scoops of mash” anecdote before ending exactly the way a live performance of this era should: with a badger parade.