How Sean Hughes (1965-2017) transformed comedy

Not many people can say they’ve transformed an entire art form, but Sean Hughes, who died yesterday, aged 51, did just that. His one man show, A One Night Stand With Sean Hughes, changed our preconceptions of what stand-up comedy should be – not by being strident or political, but by rejecting trite one-liners and letting his imagination run riot. I was lucky enough to see this ground-breaking show on its first run at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, before or since.

In the summer of 1990, so-called alternative comedy was all the rage – but though the style of stand-up had shifted, the format had hardly altered. Traditional stand-up consisted of working class men in tuxedoes cracking lame jokes about the mother-in-law. Alternative stand-up consisted of middle class men in jeans and T-shirts cracking lame jokes about Margaret Thatcher. Then Hughes came along, and made a new generation of comics realise that stand-up could be so much more than that.