Comedy gold: The Best of Dave Allen

Taking aim at priests and politicians, sharp-suited iconoclast Dave Allen pushed the boundaries of standup comedy while sitting down
Allen was banned from an assortment of venues and by broadcasters around the world. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features

Title: The Best of Dave Allen

Year: Various

The set-up: Dave Allen was a comedian for his time, which was the 1960s-80s. Those decades are remembered for their hippies, punks and cityboys today, but the British mainstream that flowed around them was still terribly conventional, and repressed as hell. And the Irish one maybe even more so. "The reason we come to your country is because over here you're a permissive society," Allen says. "In Ireland we're not. Here you have sex before marriage. In Ireland we do not. We've come to get our share."

Having completed the assimilation by dropping his born surname, O'Mahony, Allen came up through the comedy ranks. Strip joints, holiday camps and working men's clubs readied him for his big break on the talent show New Faces in 1959, after which he remained a hugely popular television performer for almost 40 years.

He was known as an iconoclast, and indeed he was quite racy by the tamer standards that prevailed then. Really his guiding view of the world was very simple: that people are selfish, vain, stupid, emotional and lustful (especially), and that they don't admit it. What made this iconoclastic was that he did not allow exceptions – politicians, military leaders and churchmen (especially), he insisted, were just as bad. Wherever Allen found someone telling other people what to do, he smelled a hypocrite and said so. The Catholic Church, whose functionaries beat him viciously throughout his childhood in the name of love, was a favourite hunting ground.

Funny how? Allen was one of those rare standup comedians who do not stand up. Usually he preferred a bar stool, from which he delivered monologues between bundles of rather wacky sketches. In truth, there was nothing very technically innovative at work. He had a narrow range of regional and drunk voices, and some funny noises, plus a few party-trick-type mimes (the invisible thread through the lip, the imaginary glass eyes and so on), but his jokes were mostly classic story gags disguised as observations. For instance: "You get drunk guy at a party who says to the hostess, 'Do lemons have feathers?' She says, 'No, I don't think so.' 'In that case I've just squeezed your canary into my drink.'"

In other ways, however, he achieved miracles. Despite being banned from an assortment of venues and by broadcasters around the world (owing to some comment about the pope here or some swearword there), he was quite the opposite, stylistically, of a fire-breathing progressive preacher like George Carlin, who stood for something similar in America.

What Allen somehow managed to pull off, instead, was a cosy style of iconoclasm. Sitting down the way he did, always in a beautiful suit, always with a cigarette and an alleged whisky (those were the days), it made him seem safe and suave, although it never lasted. One moment he'd be giving a disquisition on his atheism, dispensing piquant little jewels like, "The Catholic Church offers to women two things only: perpetual virginity or perpetual pregnancy", the next he'd be in a bath getting sucked down the plughole. It's as though he wanted to demonstrate what a composed mask he could put on, just so he could fling it to the ground afterwards. The news since Allen's death in 2005, about the Catholic Church and Jimmy Savile, has shown that we weren't listening.

Comic cousins: Peter Cook, Bill Cosby, Ronnie Corbett, George Carlin, Dylan Moran

Steal this: "I think priests should be allowed to get married. I think if a priest meets another priest, and they love each other, there's nothing wrong with it."