In over four decades since it first emerged as a rebellious, anarchic subculture in Britain and the United States, punk has been framed as a destabilizing nexus between reactionary politics, avant-garde art, theater, and pop music. Scholars working in fields as diverse as musicology, visual studies, cultural studies, art history, and political science have mined punk's political, generational, and class divisions, probing fields of power and sociopolitical resistance expressed in an often absurdist, Bakhtinian carnival style. Dick Hebdige's seminal 1979 exploration, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, offered one of the first examinations of the punk movement in 1970s Britain. In the early 2000s, film studies scholars such as Stacy Thompson and Nicholas Rombes traced the legacy and influence of punk in cinema by examining movements as diverse as Dogma 95 and cyberpunk films such as The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999). Raymond A. Patton's 2018 cultural historiography Punk Crisis: The Global Punk Rock Revolution explores how punk aesthetics emerged as a transnational resistance framework reacting to geopolitical Cold War and post–Cold War crises.Yet despite this extensive interdisciplinary archive, there is little scholarship on the critical role of humor in the punk movement. This absence is even more striking given the centrality of satire, parody, and tricksterism in punk. Joey Ramone's peppy pop beat ironically undergirding the nihilistic lyrics in “I Wanna Be Sedated” (1978), for example, or a drunk Sid Vicious's mockingly crooning an off-key version of Frank Sinatra's “My Way” on his posthumous solo release “Sid Sings” (1979) deploy humor as sociopolitical critique. Even band names such as the Stooges (referencing the Three Stooges) or the self-mocking X-rated comic sensibility of names such as the Sex Pistols and Circle Jerks highlighted a rebellious prankster outlook in which sarcasm and irony were used to upend and mock established norms of traditional pop music form and style.Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone's The Punk Turn in Comedy: Masks of Anarchy addresses this gap in the scholarship. In arguing for the centrality of humor within the punk mode of address, Giappone explores the development of the then concurrent British alt-comedy movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, a style of comedy that Giappone defines as “altcom.” Across nine chapters, primarily organized by theoretical concepts rather than chronology or subject matter, Giappone argues that anarchic British alt-comedy performers of the 1960s, with their emphasis on “ambivalence,” were a precursor to and influence on 1970s punk as it grew out of the class-based counterculture reaction to the conservativism of the Thatcher years (128). Linking boundary-pushing comedy to the nascent punk movement, Giappone demonstrates how comic performers informed not only the rebellious spirit of punk music and style but also how punk audiences understood themselves as active participants in “demystifying authority” rather than passive spectators supporting the status quo (243).Giappone makes this intervention by exploring how both altcom and punk are paradoxically situated between high modernism and postmodernism, reveling in disruptive contranarratives resistant to cohesive chronology and established hierarchies (1, 54). Altcom established a transgressive performance mode that subsequently opened the door for the punk sensibility to emerge. The Sex Pistols' subversive mode of address, manifested in its self-consciously constructed image as a parody of costumed disco novelty acts like the Bay City Rollers, had been established in the fringe, experimental British comedy performances of the previous decade (54).In the introduction, Giappone defines punk as a rebellious, often schizophrenic art, music, performance, and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in both the United States and the United Kingdom between 1975 and 1978. Giappone primarily focuses on the UK (2-3). Chapters 2 and 3 outline the anarchic, boundary-pushing sensibility of influential British comedian Peter Cook (1937-95). Combining historical research with textual analysis, Giappone shows how Cook, Dudley Moore, and other members of the cast of the popular cabaret-style Beyond the Fringe stage and radio shows of the 1960s introduced a new form of subversive, disruptive comic theater. These altcom performers violated theatrical boundaries through mimicry, drawing on established cabaret forms but relocating these rhythms in the more taciturn and adult spaces of the classic British concert hall (14). Moore and Cook, in character as “Derek” and “Clive,” often began shows by introducing a familiar, traditional comedic sketch premise (17). They then pushed the dialogue into sociopolitical violations with bad taste, raunchy subject matter, and absurdism. This gradual violation of decorum resisted cohesive comic storytelling structures and upended the boundaries of the theatrical revue (18).Cook was, arguably, the most influential instigator in disrupting and challenging conventions and norms, but subsequent altcom troupes emerging in the late 1960s and 1970s also deployed absurdism, fragmented narratives, and slapstick as a political class critique through boundary transgression to respond to the rise of the conservative Thatcher administration (24, 39). This trend was seen most notably in the antics of the Monty Python comedy troupe on Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-74); however, Giappone also examines altcom protopunk performers such as Griff Rhys Jones, Rik Mayall, Ade Edmunson, Ben Elton, and Alexei Sayle.Chapters 4, 5, and 6 trace how the anarchic altcom sensibility influenced early punk by challenging and upending linear chronology and blending kitsch nostalgia with satirical futurism (4, 35). Both altcom and punk's assaultive, disruptive critique of performative expertise turned amateurism on the stage into a visceral parody of postwar neoliberalism's entrenched hierarchies (83). This comic work was done by blurring distinctions between performer and audience and stage and spectatorship, which had the effect of deconstructing the notion of the “professional.” Giappone examines punk fan 'zines such as “Sniffin' Glue” and improvisational, often antagonistic interactions between bands and audiences and shows how they collectively cultivated hostility, abjection, and alienation to express and visualize hierarchical re/descrambling (105, 116-17). Giappone convincingly argues that amateurism, disgust, and alienation operated as satirical taboos that were amplified through hostile interactions between performers and audiences in which both were consciously participating in an improvisational, theatrical variation of comedic theater (125-42).The book's theory draws primarily from Jamesonian postmodern theory and Derridean deconstruction, arguing that both altcom and punk resist any coherency or resolution within their modes of address (6, 54, 81). For example, in tracing how the Sex Pistols built on the ironic distancing of the Kinks rather than the more earnest Beatles, Giappone shows how the Sex Pistols rejected any notion of nostalgia and permanence in defining their music (68-72). Yet this disruption was not a negation of form. The Sex Pistols still produced cohesive rock albums and their songs were coherent, titled, used pop music chords, and adhered to the genre's structure. In altcom, the groundbreaking British “antisitcom” The Young Ones followed a similar pattern. Although it at first appeared to be rejecting the traditional tropes of the sitcom, it ultimately followed many of its conventions (87-88).Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10 offer detailed formal and theoretical comparisons between punk and altcom spatial critiques of theaters and concert halls, power dynamics between band and audience, and disruptive aesthetic styles and approaches. Giappone argues that scholars must resist easy binaries that represent punk and altcom as authentic working-class expressions of resistance (6-7, 161). Punk and altcom claimed to champion authenticity, but satirical undercurrents coded this authenticity as a self-defeating, fraudulent variation on comic theater. Yet Giappone concludes by distinguishing punk's comedic mode of address from irony, building on Robert Pattison's concept of “honest vulgarity” and suggesting that both punk and altcom oscillate between the normative and deviant without resolving to either form (200-201). This ambiguity is apparent in their transgression and destabilization of the power relationship between performer/spectator and of spatial divides between stage and audience (167-69). Altcom humor and punk's failures to resolve these tension points are critical in understanding the role of satire that undergirded their performative critiques.Giappone's well researched, solidly theorized exploration of the influence of altcom on emergent British punk makes an important contribution to both humor and cultural studies. The book's thesis is clear, well argued, and entirely convincing. The research is of significant value to humor studies scholars working on innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the study of media and culture. However, the lack of a more expansive historical context engaging rock music more generally or avant-garde art and performance more broadly limits the scope of the book's intervention. While American punk may have been outside the purview of Giappone's investigation, satire and performative masquerade in bands such as the New York Dolls, the Ramones, and Blondie merits further examination. Predating punk, Elvis with his gyrating hips, Chuck Berry with his duck walk, and Buddy Holly with his horn-rimmed glasses each synthesized sound and ironic image as a winking communiqué that satirized the fears and anxieties of the parents of their target audience. In Britain, the Beatles satirized the American beatnik rebellion (and Buddy Holly's Crickets) through wordplay and pun, combining conservative matching suits with overgrown, feminized “mop top” haircuts as a visual joke (when Ringo Starr was asked in A Hard Day's Night whether he was a “mod” or a “rocker”—the two dominant British youth culture identities of the early 1960s—he famously responded that he was a “mocker”). More recently, in the postpunk era, grunge acts such as Nirvana rejected the glam rock shallowness of the 1980s while the Beastie Boys and Eminem used humor to parody white privilege in hip-hop. Even the term “rock and roll,” reportedly coined by DJ Alan Freed in 1951, was ironic, suggesting youth culture impulsively “rocking” and “rolling” in a quasi-religious body frenzy. Giappone does not place the comedic elements of punk into this larger musicological and chronological context, something that would have given the book a stronger frame in terms of the specifics of the altcom-punk entanglement.The near total lack of women performers in this era also demands at least a brief examination of the role of gender in both altcom (particularly cross-dressing) and punk identity and performance. While Giappone explores sexuality, particularly the emphasis on masturbation in both altcom and punk, she does not focus on their gendered nature (222-24). Punk-pop crossover band Blondie, for example, presented a hyperexaggerated riff on Playboy Magazine's postwar femme fantasy in the embodiment of lead singer Debbie Harry that might offer insight into this absence elsewhere. However, these observations are less a critique of Giappone's work than a recognition of numerous fruitful areas for research that this book suggests. The role of humor in popular music, synthesizing as it does art, theater, aural, and screen culture in our post-televisual mass media landscape, remains underexplored as a critical nexus for cultural renegotiation. Interdisciplinary work in humor and cultural studies continues to produce scholarship that explores the contemporary pop culture landscape in all of its (comedic) forms. The Punk Turn in Comedy: Masks of Anarchy offers an important contribution to this developing interdisciplinary approach.