Guest Editorial

Adventures in comedy research: the British museum and the Mike Craig archive or: confessions of incompetent researchers

“…We found that every week from around 1902 to the First World War, the Red Letter reviewed a Music Hall act in a much more detailed way than you can find in periodicals such as The Performer, The Encore or other professional magazines. We published some of our research in both the Comedy Studies Journal (Huxley and James, 2012) and guest-edited an issue of Early Popular Visual Culture (Huxley and James, 2013), and we have really only scratched the surface of the material we unearthed. We have talked about a whole range of acts such as Pansy Montague, who was billed as 'La Milo' and whose act consisted of coming on stage painted white and posing semi-naked as famous statues from history.…”