The famous sketch/bit by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. While outside our focus of classic stand-up, this shows a nice mix of the Abbott and Costello vaudeville approach and the Borscht Belt joke structure.
Week 3: Political Awareness and Personal Narrative
While a complete and better researched history of vaudeville can be found elsewhere, its importance in the history of stand-up comedy is paramount. The idea of a variety show had been around in America since before the Civil War. Traveling circuses, minstrel shows, wild west shows, etc. all provided a cheap form of entertainment to America at a time before recorded or broadcast mediums; and just as the Industrial Revolution was creating a middle class with expendable money and time.
The variety show uses the theater format, but detaches it from plot or story. Instead, the focus is on a collection of short acts that all seek simply to entertain: music, comedy, magic, dancing, animal tricks, whatever could fit on a stage and hit it's mark with the audience would be included.
Vaudeville followed the variety format, but stabilized it by offering a consistent bill of shows in more upscale urban theaters and promising cleaner entertainment, something suitable for ladies and middle-class sensibilities.
The vaudeville venues provided a platform for many of the most important comedy performers and writers to develop. With the rise of television and radio, vaudeville lost much of its appeal and financial strength. Many of its performers, however, went on to recreate some of their best acts for the radio and television audiences. One of the greatest comedy acts from this style is Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine, called by them, simply: "Baseball".
While this bit is not technically stand-up, it provides at least two elements important to stand-up: detachment from plot and word-play. While there is the odd conceit that Abbot is starting a baseball team that Costello wants to join, there is actually very little else besides the two guys talking. What's important here is the rhythm of language and the timing of the performers, something most stand-up throughout it's history depends on.
While nobody performed stand-up as we would recognize it today, the consistent bill of fare at these shows provided a role for an MC - someone who would introduce the acts and move the shows along.
While some vaudeville performers went on to become popular comedians on Television, one person in particular took the form he developed on the vaudeville stage and popularized it into what we today call stand-up. Bob Hope worked as an MC on the vaudeville stage, meaning he came up in between acts to introduce them and give time for the transitions. Rather than a character, Bob Hope performed as himself, relating directly to the audience and entertaining them with jokes.
I had a hard time finding good Bob Hope stand-up bits, but here's a collection from his admirable and long-standing work for the USO, performing shows for American Troops abroad. The important thing to notice here is the importance of the joke. Unlike the Abbot and Costello routine we watched last week, Bob Hope's material is classic joke territory: set-up and punchline. Often these can seem dated, but building off what we discussed last week -- timing, rhythm and a focus on words -- the classic joke format told without sets or characters is at the core of all stand up.
Borscht Belt is a colloquial term for the mostly defunct summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in parts of Sullivan, Orange, and Ulster Counties in upstate New York that were a popular vacation spot for New York City Jews from the 1920s through the 1960s.
The Borscht Belt resorts often had live entertainment; and many of the early most famous stand comedians got their start there: old-style entertainers like Don Rickles, George Burns, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, Phyllis Diller and even Mel Brooks; but also the seeds of the new generation, people like Woody Allen, Robert Klein, and Lenny Bruce (and maybe Mel Brooks should be in that group?).
For our purposes, the Borscht Belt is where the classic joke developed into the rapid fire routines iconic with American Stand-Up. Henny Youngman, one of the Borscht Belt greats, said a good joke is like a "really a simple cartoon -- you can see it". For example:
'A man says to another man, 'Can you tell me how to get to Central Park?' The guy says no. 'All right,' says the first, 'I'll mug you here.' Two guys are in a gym, and one is putting on a girdle. 'Since when have you been wearing a girdle?' says his friend. 'Since my wife found it in the glove compartment of our car.' If a joke is too hard to visualize, I tell the young comics, then what the hell good is it? Personally, I forgot about the sophisticates years ago.'' (from a _New York Times_ obituary of Youngman)
While it was hard to find recordings of the Borscht Belt comedians from that period, here's a classic example of that style of stand-up provided by a Borscht Belt graduate, Rodney Dangerfield.
Again, the importance here is two-fold:
Dangerfield is performing not in character, but as himself (though you could argue that he's just as much a character as any of the vaudeville comedy acts, at least the character he's playing is 'Rodney Dangerfield')
His material here is not situational, but more observational; or at least relating back to stuff in real life - relationships, money
The Borscht Belt comedians were not all that removed from the funny person at the party; the guy or gal who entertained you with little more than drink in their hand. Who could set you up and knock you down all by themselves - no story line needed.
One item we discussed in class today that I found interesting was the question of whether or not you were supposed to believe Rodney Dangerfield's jokes. He definitely tells them like they are true, but the consensus in the class was that the jokes aren't really supposed to be true; we don't believe that they are true. Instead, we believe he's telling jokes.
Rather than discussing his actual real wife, for instance, Dangerfield is discussing wives in general; and it's both the conceptions we have about wives (or at least conceptions the audience had in the 50s) and the structure that make the joke funny. Dangerfield probably didn't write all his material. He didn't need to. The jokes weren't about him; they were about being good jokes. The class were all of the opinion that any comedian worth their salt should write their own stuff.
This question of believability and of writing is important when we compare the Borscht Belt comedians to the next phase of stand-up; a phase introduced by Mort Sahl and completely blown open by Lenny Bruce.
It's difficult to discuss the comedy of Mort Sahl without discussing the shifting political climate in 1950s America. Following World War II, America began a period of mass political disillusionment perhaps best represented by the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee (and ultimately coming to a head in the late 60s/early 70s with Nixon, Watergate, and the Vietnam War). This was a time when the American Government turned on its own people, persecuting individuals with critical views of the government as communist supporters (see the sidebar links to the McCarthy hearings). While there had been vocal critics and satirists of the American Government in the past, the 50s saw rise to an popular movement called the counter-culture; vocal critics of American policy at home and abroad.
Mort Sahl was one of the first to bring a counter-culture attitude to comedy. Whereas the Borscht Belt comedians relied mostly on a classic joke structure (set-up/punchline) and material that stuck to generalizations (whether it was about wives, or themselves), Mort Sahl looked to the newspaper for his material. "He revolutionized the world of stand-up comedy," the PBS American Masters series writes, " with a fresh combination of political awareness fearless criticism of the government, and a willingness to draw on personal experience."
In this piece from 1967, Sahl takes on the political reality of America in the early stages of the Vietnam War:
Note how unfunny this seems now. He builds his comedy on references we mostly do not recognize nowadays, and those we do recognize don't mean much to us. Remember the Who's On First routine by Abbot and Costello. We laugh at that because the confusion of names is something we can relate to. In Sahl's case, his comedy relied on people experiencing some of the same political realities he was experiencing. This shows us a new development in comedy; the ability to speak directly and plaininly about current reality, and to show how absurd that reality is.
While we may think Mort Sahl's humor a bit boring, I want to highlight how some of our best comedians of today do very similar material; and that we laugh in this case because we get the references. Here's Patton Oswalt talking about the War in Iraq:
Lenny Bruce
Lenny Bruce was both a contemporary and successor to Mort Sahl. He adopted the political awareness of Sahl while adding to it a personal openness. When Lenny Bruce got up on stage he was not only performing in one, he was literally talking as himself. This might seem somewhat normal to us, but in the early 60s, Bruce shocked, thrilled, and offended people by getting up on stage and simply sharing his actual thoughts.
Here he is on the Steve Allen show relatively early in his career:
Note that he doesn't tell one classic joke. Like Mort Sahl, Bruce's material touched on dangerous political and social issues: religion, racism, and sex being some of the more frequent topics. His willingness to discuss these issues eventually got him in legal trouble. As written in his Wikipedia entry:
On October 4, 1961 Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the word "cocksucker" and riffed that "'to' is a preposition, 'come' is a verb", that the sexual context of "come" is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, he "probably can't come." Although the jury acquitted him, other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity.
Like many accused of communism by the McCarty hearings, Bruce became a scapegoat for all the counter-cultural resistance emerging in the country. While the humor of his comedy doesn't translate as easily to our ears as some of the Borscht Belt material, it's vitality comes through. What Bruce and Sahl introduced to comedy was the idea that a microphone was more than a tool for easy laughs and entertainment; it could be a tool to point out the absurdity of the world; and a strong weapon in the fight against injustice.
Here's Bruce in a performance soon before he died of an accidental drug overdose in 1966:
As we discussed last week, Lenny Bruce brought a rebellious truth-telling to the stand-up stage. He discussed taboo subjects and his own personal life in a way that was both believable and (at least to his contemporaries) shocking. This was during the late 50s and early 60s amidst a rising disenchantment with the American Government and corporate authority. This disenchantment came to a head during the Civil Rights Movement & Vietnam War in the late 60s and early 70s.
This week we are looking at the two stand-ups who took Bruce's legacy -- truth telling and personal narrative -- to the next level: Carlin and Pryor.
George Carlin
Carlin's career in stand-up began in the early 60s. He began with a clean-cut act showing only a tinge of counter-cultural sensibilities. By the early 70s, however, and much under the influence of Bruce, Carlin had completely re-worked his image, growing out his beard and hair and ditching the suit.
Clean-Cut Carlin Carlin after being arrested in 1972
Carlin epitomized the truth-telling comedian - the guy who not only used the words you weren't supposed to, but literally made an entire act out of them. He dissected popular culture's beliefs and hypocrisies until the absurdity shone through.
Seven Dirty Words
At a time when using these words could get you arrested, Carlin highlights them as language. Rather than relying on pure shock value, Carlin's act is funny because it takes us past the shock of the words until the words feel comfortable and we can actually laugh at the shock. Why were we shocked?
Richard Pryor
Early Pryor
As described on his Wikipedia Page, Pryor had a pretty rough childhood:
Born in Peoria, Illinois, Pryor grew up in Peoria in his grandmother's brothel, where his mother, Gertrude Leona (née Thomas), practiced prostitution. His father, LeRoy "Buck Carter" Pryor was a former bartender, boxer, and World War II veteran who worked as his wife's pimp. After his mother abandoned him when he was ten, he was raised primarily by his grandmother Marie Carter, a violent woman who would beat him for any of his eccentricities.
Add to that, of course, being black in 1950s America and you would expect Pryor's comedy to be rough, edgy, personal, political - all the things it eventually became. When he began, however, Pryor played the Comedian character as defined by the Borscht Belt - classic joke structure touching on general themes that don't feel all that personal.
While Lenny Bruce had been on the scene for a little bit, comedy hadn't taken the big personal and political turn it would take. Especially for a black comedian at the time, if you wanted to be on television, you didn't talk about your actual life and actual thoughts.
Epiphany
While he was gaining some notoriety as a comic (Bill Cosby already proved you could be a successful black comedian), Pryor grew to hate his act.
In September 1967, Pryor had what he called in his autobiography Pryor Convictions an "epiphany" when he walked onto the stage at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas (with Dean Martin in the audience), looked at the sold-out crowd, exclaimed over the microphone "What the fuck am I doing here!?", and walked off the stage.
He reworked his act around his own personal life, his own language and community, and along with Carlin redefined what stand-up comedy looked like.
While the following clip is not as funny as Pryor would become, it is absolutely beautiful in it's boldness; and shows the difficultly Pryor had when he broke ranks with mainstream comedy. Listen for a line early on where Pryor says: "I am very excited and stuff. I'm glad ya'll didn't move...But I imagine a lot of ya'll will be leaving during my shit. But that's cool too."
Pryor hits his stride
Pryor eventually found his comedic voice - extremely honest with great timing and inflection. He doesn't tell jokes as much as he tells stories; and since his stories are brutally true, the humor comes from his observation and commitment to the truth. He was also one the first black comedians to talk about being black to a black audience. Pryor's influence on what stand-up comedy looked and sounded like cannot be over-emphasized.
Last week, we looked at how George Carlin and Richard Pryor represented a shift in the late 60s/early 70s towards truth-telling, social relevancy, and personal narrative within stand-up. While this development continued through the 70s (and is definitely still present in stand-up today), by the mid-to-late 70s another style began to emerge, one that found humor in irrelevancy, irony, and in making fun of stand-up itself.
America had emerged from Vietnam and from the Cultural Revolution of the late 60s a bit jaded; more distrustful of the government and of popular culture. While socially relevant, personal narrative comedy continued, the sense of the microphone as a weapon lessened. Instead, comics like Andy Kaufman, Steve Martin, and Albert Brooks used it as a way to spoof entertainment itself.
Andy Kaufman
Kaufman began performing comedy at many of the small clubs that started catering to comedy in the early 70s. However, his comedy broke from all the patterns established by previous stand-ups. "While often referred to as a comedian, Kaufman did not consider himself one," his Wikipedia article states. "He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood, referring to himself instead as a "song and dance man."
In a way, Kaufman brings us back to before the Borscht Belt, to a more Vaudevillian approach. Often times, he doesn't use language to set up his bits. Instead, he almost seems to build humor out of what the audience expects humor to be. In perhaps his most famous bit, Kaufman pretends to be a terrible comedian from Eastern Europe who does bad impressions. At just the point where the audience is ready to boo him off stage, he says, "I would now like to impersonate the Elvis Presley." He turns around, slicks back his hair and then does one of the greatest Elvis impersonations the audience has ever seen. The response was ecstatic - he set them up to think they were watching a bad performer; and then flipped it for them so that the "bad performance" was actually just a smaller part of a great performance. (Sadly I couldn't find a full clip of Kaufman doing this bit, but here's a pretty good recreation from the Kaufman biopic Man in the Moon)
Rather than using shared cultural experience, language, or personal stories, Kaufman crafts comedy that is difficult to discuss. For instance, his popular Mighty Mouse routine, here performed on Saturday Night Live:
Andy Kaufman performs Mighty Mouse on SNL
The bit is awkward, confusing, and at least for me, really funny; but it's hard to say why. We have talked before about how we believe certain comics (Carlin & Pryor); and don't believe other ones (Dangerfield, Hope) - but in Kaufman's case, we're not sure if we're supposed to believe him or not. Instead, Kaufman played on what we expect from a performer on stage - and crafted humor from defying those expectations.
Steve Martin
Like Kaufman, Martin began performing in clubs in the late 60s and early 70s, and for a while grew his hair out to look more like George Carlin. But Martin's show biz roots were almost comically traditional and vaudevillian - he grew up working in a magic shop at Disneyland, and performed straight magic, juggling, and music throughout his early career. When he started performing comedy, he incorporated a lot of that classic showbiz patter and style. Eventually donning a suit and tie (as opposed to the rebel look adopted by his peers), Martin created an act that seemed to almost make fun of comedy. Like Kaufman, he didn't perform as himself, but as a showbiz caricature.
The rhythms of showbiz and performance were so routine and known by then, that Martin could make people laugh by spoofing it all.
Steve Martin on the Smothers Brothers
As Richard Zoglin says in his book Comedy At the Edge, Martin (I'm paraphrasing here cause I don't have the book in front of me) introduced the age of irony. Everything he said on stage was tongue in cheek. You were not to believe what he said; and you weren't even to be galvanized by it - you were simply to be entertained. Unlike Kaufman, however, with Martin you were in on the joke, and he became the most financially successful stand-up of his time. From small clubs, Martin's antics and catch-phrases made him the pinnacle of the main-stream; eventually leading to a comedy tour where he sold out sports stadiums.
Here's the closing bit from his stadium show that toured in 1979 before Martin quit stand-up altogether to focus on films and writing.
Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff, because all you have to do is twist everything hard — you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up, that it's easy . . . and it's thrilling.
Starting in the early 70s, two trends emerged that brought stand-up into the mainstream of American entertainment. The first was the opening up of clubs devoted entirely to stand-up comedy (before, most comics either played large halls like Carlin and Pryor; or worked music clubs and bars); and the second was the exposure of the Johnny Carson show.
Catch a Rising Star, the Improv, and the eventual Comedy Boom
The Improvisation actually opened it's doors in the early 60s; but along with Catch a Rising Star, a similar club that opened in 1972, it defined the New York (and ultimately the national) stand-up scene. "It was a new kind of club," Richard Zoglin writes in Comedy at the Edge, "a 'showcase' for new talent: no headliners, no billing—and for many years, no pay." It allowed a whole new crop of comics raised on Carlin and Pryor to hone their material and build their acts in a (relatively) supportive environment. It also gave them a place to hang out and talk comedy. These clubs helped define many of the styles we see in stand-up today.
The Inspiration - Robert Klein
As Zoglin writes:
He [Klein] made stand-up comedy hip and relevant and accessible for that vas group of younger comics who weren't ready to storm the barricades like Carlin and who didn't have the autobiographical raw material of Pryor. (p. 86)
The Neurotic - Richard Lewis
The Women - Elayne Boosler
The Everyday Observer - Jay Leno
The Improvisor - Robin Williams
The Loudmouth - Sam Kinison
The Importance of Carson
For many comics in the 1970s comedy scene, there was only one real goal - get on Carson. "A successful Tonight Show debut could ignite a career," Zoglin writes.
The morning after his Carson spot, [Tom] Dreesen got a call from CBS offering him a one-year development deal—which meant a struggling young comic "didn't have to worry about rent, groceries, shoes for the kids," Dreesan says. "I could work on my craft. And I never stopped working since" (p. 144).
Carson also helped bring stand-up into mainstream entertainment. While Catch a Rising Star and the Improv allowed comics essentially a full-time office, the exposure Carson gave stand-up meant that comedy clubs began appearing in every major city. Suddenly, a lot more people could go on the road and feasibly make a living as a stand-up. "By the time the boom hit its peak in the late 1980s," Zoglin writes, "there were at least three hundred full-time comedy clubs in the United States...A glut was inevitable" (p. 205-06). It also meant that shocking artistry of Bruce and then Carlin and Pryor was eclipsed by the more observational and universally appealing style.
As we discussed last week, stand up experienced a boom throughout the 80s. Comedy clubs popped up in most major cities across America creating a larger demand for comics than ever before. Like all bubbles, however, increased demand fueled a supply of mediocre material. The edginess of Carlin or Pryor didn't get you on Television, and a definite sameness swept through stand up style. The observational stuff about relationships and parent's and gender and race became what stand-up meant, and eventually it's appeal worn off. As Zoglin writes in Comedy at the Edge, "after the '80s boom suddenly imploded in the '90s, when at least a third of all clubs nationwide shut down" (223).
At that time, however, the dominant style received it's most perfect incarnation in Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld took the sameness of stand-up and perfected it.
Seinfeld
As Zoglin writes:
Though Seinfeld was no innovator or social provocateur, he was a worthy ambassador for another part of the '70s stand-up revolution: the comedian as truth-telling everyman, exposing our secret thoughts and airing our dirty laundry--even when it's just laundry. Seinfeld's stand-up may have seemed trivial, but it was never phony or forced.
Seinfeld's first appearance on Carson
Seinfeld's I'm Telling You For the Last Time
Bill Hicks
On the flip side of Seinfeld, keeping the memory of Lenny Bruce alive, was Bill Hicks, a stand-up from Texas who died of pancreatic cancer at age 32. While Hicks worked in a time when it was harder to shock the culture, he still focused on the big stuff -- war, humanity, religion, etc. -- when most stand-ups were turning their gaze to the minutiae of daily life.
While trying to research Eddie Izzard's career -- with admittedly not much doggedness -- I kept getting the impression that he just appeared, full formed and funny, on stage in London's West End. This is of course not the case, but unlike most of the American stand-ups we've looked at, the story of Izzard's early career is not much of his myth. There are no Jay Leno like war stories of driving from Boston to New York every weekend; or Chris Rock struggling to get seen on SNL. At least not that I could find.
Instead, Izzard creates shows. His stand-up seems to come from the theatre, not from a comedy club. He combines a lot of what we have looked at, but probably owes a lot to the un-cabaret idea. His rhythm is that of a story-teller, and often his bits are epic in scope. He is a commentator, but not on the trivial subjects of daily life. Instead, Izzard goes for historical reenactment and large concepts.
The below are from his special that brought him his first world-wide fame.
Dress to Kill
The Army and Cross-Dressing
Religion
Empire
Doing Comedy in French
This is a master-class in stand-up - he uses mime, tone, rhythm, and just enough of his previous act so we can follow the routine in French.
Matthew
Matthew
