Sometimes comedy styles or comedians can fall so far that they become the subject of jokes themselves.
Stand-up Comedy[]
- Rob Newman and David Baddiel's stand-up. In the early nineties, they were the "New Rock 'n' Roll", hosting The Mary Whitehouse Experience and playing sell out gigs at Wembley Arena. Then they fell out, split their partnership, and a few years later most of their stuff fell by the wayside. Intellectual and philosophical comedy, and their grunge-meets-preppy style, was replaced by "laddish" comedy (including Baddiel's own Fantasy Football League TV show) and the Britpop wars of Oasis vs. Blur. Occasionally you might hear someone in Britain say "That's you that is!", but so far there has been no revival of interest. Both of them are now well known as authors, but their stand-up careers have been largely forgotten.
- Rob Newman, anyway. David Baddiel's career recovered a few years later when he found a new partner in Frank Skinner. Skinner and Baddiel hosted the quirky sport programme Fantasy Football League and, with alt rock group The Lightning Seeds, scored a #1 UK hit with "Three Lions"...Then, Fantasy Football League was canceled and the bottom fell out of their career. Even though they can likely both retire from the royalties for "Three Lions", they've stuck around doing podcasts.
- Andrew Dice Clay was a pretty big hit in the late 80s/early 90s for his controversial, sexist insult humor (essentially the Don Rickles of his day). However, his act was seen as annoying and offensive to some (most notably Roger Ebert), mainly due to his tendencies to play his stage persona in reality, as well as the fact that being un-PC just for the sake of it was getting played out. The tipping point was the flop of his star vehicle film The Adventures of Ford Fairlane which, to add insult to injury, was removed from theaters due to pressure from Moral Guardians. Clay's popularity plummeted shortly afterwards; he subsequently tried to change his image as a result, even doing a failed CBS sitcom where he played a family man, but to little avail.
- On a more general note, such comedians as Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, well known for their racist, sexist and mother-in-law jokes, were once huge, but are pretty much jokes themselves now.
- Gallagher was huge in the The Eighties, selling out giant arenas and delivering expensive stage shows with a wide array of elaborate props. He fell quite far — until illness forced him to retire in 2012, he toiled in relative obscurity in local shows and squabbled with his copycat brother, while his act took an unpleasantly hateful, racist and homophobic turn (as described here). His original act is mostly remembered as being representative of all that was wrong with stand-up comedy in The Eighties.
- The Blue Collar Comedy trend was established at the Turn of the Millennium. Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, Larry the Cable Guy, and Ron White's routines played with Deep South / white trash stereotypes while applying a Flyover Country perspective to general stand-up topics. Often touring together, they even had a Sketch Comedy show on The WB that reran on Comedy Central. But Foxworthy's signature "You might be a redneck" routine was parodied by every group ever even before the trend exploded, Larry was overexposed (partially via the Cars films), Engvall is now best-known for hosting the revival of Lingo, and White still does stand-up but has distanced himself from the rest of the group.