"Seriously Funny"
al_pastor
STANDUP GUYS
by ADAM GOPNIK
What were the rebel comedians rebelling against?
Issue of 2003-05-12
Posted 2003-05-05
Anyone can make jokes about books on comedy. Even the
grumpy-belletrist-in-a-bow-tie type can tap the dottle out of his pipe
long enough to harrumph out the old one about how Mr. Murkle seems to
have got comedy down and broken its arm, while the postmodernist
professor makes garlicky puns about the subversion inherent in
garlicky puns. Everyone feels smug about books on jokes, because we
all know that there's no explaining jokes—though perhaps we wouldn't
be so smug if we stopped and tried to explain why it so often takes a
joke to explain us.
But comedy, like cooking, is a great subject, and should not be
avoided just because it is also a hard one. This is especially true of
books about the growth of a new comic style in mid-century America, of
which Gerald Nachman's "Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the
1950s and 1960s" (Pantheon; $29.95) is the example at hand. If any
movement has changed the inside of our mind—or, at least, lined its
cage with a different kind of newspaper—it is the movement in comedy
which began in the mid-fifties, crested in the early sixties, and, in
one form or another, is still with us today. In one neat formulation,
popular American comedy changed then from wit to humor—from nicely
packaged aphorisms about life (for that, when the pickle juice is
shaken off, is what a one-liner like "Take my wife, please" is) to
shapeless commentary on events and manners.
A terrific book might be written tracing the birth, dissemination, and
eventual decadence of this manner, from coffeehouse to our house. This
book is not that book. Instead, Nachman has given himself the narrower
task of talking to the surviving comics of the fifties and sixties,
and writing from clips and earlier interviews about the ones who
aren't around or who won't talk to him. Drawing the line overtight at
1970, he tells the story of how the style started, leaving out the
really interesting story of how the style spread. George Carlin and
Robert Klein, for instance, are excluded, on the debatable ground that
neither was much of anything in the sixties, even though they were
surely the key figures in communicating coffeehouse humor to a
television audience. (And Carlin, in his early infantry-standup mode,
had become a regular on Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin by 1966.)
Nachman is, on his own terms, though, extremely thorough: there is a
full recounting of what happened to Shelley Berman's career (he was
seen, in a documentary, losing his temper and yanking a telephone
receiver off the hook, and never recovered) and more than you probably
need to read about the over-in-an-afternoon career of Vaughn Meader,
the John Kennedy impersonator. One ought to protest the minutiae, but
the minutiae are all the fun. It's like watching a summer-replacement
show circa 1966. David Frye turns up to imitate Nixon and William F.
Buckley, Jr.; Jonathan Winters is wild and wacky. Stan Freberg
commercials play in the background. Alan Sherman sings a funny folk
song. Godfrey Cambridge makes a cameo appearance. If at times the
whole thing leaves us wondering at the ease with which our parents
were entertained (Nachman delightedly revives some of Steve Allen's
pet phrases: "You're under arrest!" "How's your fern?" "Kreel!" "Watch
it, Charley!," and "his trademark bird cry ‘Shmock-shmock!'"), the
book also works hard to restore some reputations too long lost. There
is the marvellous satiric songwriter Tom Lehrer, serenely retired to
the academy for forty years, and the strange, crazy-sentimental radio
man Jean Shepherd, a kind of local, Beat Generation Garrison Keillor.
What's amazing is that nearly everyone is still around. Here you've
spent thirty-five years feeling sorry for the Smothers Brothers, only
to find out that the Brothers are running a vineyard and working Vegas
and making a nice living.
In fact, everyone is so around that some of the rebel comics didn't
have time to talk to Nachman at all. The lives of Bill Cosby and Mel
Brooks are produced from clips and interviews with contemporaries, and
that of Joan Rivers from a brief phone conversation. A volume of
"American Comedians" like Whitney Balliett's "American Singers" would
be wonderful, but the form depends on observing and listening, and
when the figures won't sit still to be listened to there's nothing for
it but the library. Even Mort Sahl, the book's cover subject, refused
to speak to Nachman, although in his case he was not too busy but too
bitter. "It pains me to say no," he explained. "I just don't want to
be in there with all those other guys. Who are those other guys? I
don't consider them in the same league." With some exceptions (Bob
Newhart, Phyllis Diller), the tone is of wounded narcissism, embattled
jealousy, and an ill will so extreme that it would make a table of
writers, or English professors, blanch. Sahl again: "All the stuff in
‘Annie Hall' is really me." Jackie Mason: "As soon as I walk into the
Friars Club, you never saw such hostility. Alan King with venom, full
of vicious hate. . . . Henny Youngman was hated." Henny Youngman,
hated? (Apparently so; the observation is made several times.) The
forgotten impressionist Will Jordan wanders in and out, so embittered
that he seems to be trying out for a role in one of Philip Roth's
Zuckerman books, at one moment explaining how Mel Brooks stole the
Hitler musical-comedy idea from him, and at another how Ed Sullivan
stole his Ed Sullivan impression. ("Now, I didn't own Ed Sullivan, I
didn't own Sabu, but I hope I would own the mannerisms and the
phonetics. You get very little sympathy from the public when you say
you invented ‘ooo.' But I did invent the ‘ooo' and the ‘ooo' is what
makes it funny. Without that ‘ooo' you have nothing.")
That the artist is different from his art, the shpritzer from his
shpritz, is not surprising enough to stop one from talking sensibly
about why and how the art took the shape it did. Nachman's gifts of
analysis, however, are limited, and he can be, at times, unfortunately
breezy: "I concluded that the comedy renaissance, like all artistic
flowerings—the French Impressionists, the Bloomsbury circle, the
Italian and French New Wave cinema, Tin Pan Alley . . . was just a
lucky accident." (Well, that's settled, finally, and all the cultural
historians can go find honest work as piano movers.) But, just as
baseball writers suspicious of statistics end up using the wrong ones,
critics suspicious of "theory" end up using someone else's. Nachman's
story, therefore, shares some of the elements of myth, or of cliché.
In a country whose satiric tradition was paralyzed by the twin
spectres of the blacklist and the Borscht Belt—Joe McCarthy and Milton
Berle—a tiny band of comics rose up in rebellion. Mort Sahl, an
awkward, untrained commentator, put on a sweater, held a newspaper,
mumbled brightly, and changed the shape of comedy, making it both
political and collegiate: "Joe McCarthy doesn't question what you say
so much as your right to say it." Lenny Bruce—whom Nachman calls "the
Elvis of standup," but who seems more like its Jesus, dying for
Henny's sins—found Sahl significant but very square, and made war on
the taboos of sex and racism which even Sahl respected, showing what
might happen if one could be released from all inhibitions. A
generation of comedians broke through behind them, some keeping the
faith, most making necessary compromises with commerce, a few trying
and failing to be true. (The earlier television eccentrics Steve
Allen, Sid Caesar, and Ernie Kovacs, like the Prophets on the Sistine
ceiling, wonderingly anticipate the main action.) They left behind a
legacy of "subversive," or anti-establishment, humor, which is very
fitfully kept alive by their successors. The courage and commitment
lapsed, and now comedy is an easier business of attitude and
apolitical indifference.
Searching the welter of voices and vendettas for a slightly finer
pattern than this, you can catch the outlines of two related but
distinct movements. One, the hard edge, which connects Mel Brooks and
Joan Rivers and Lenny Bruce and even, in her own way, Phyllis Diller,
is the release of Jewish verbal overkill, outrageous shpritzing, into
popular entertainment. (Albert Goldman—that strange mixture of Theodor
Adorno and Kitty Kelley—offered a precise account in his Lenny Bruce
biography of how this style moved from Brooklyn to the night club,
which remains one of the best things ever written about American
comedy.) The funniest and most memorable, because least dated, of
these explosions is surely Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks's
"Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man," but it is the will to explode that
connects Brooks to Bruce and Sid Caesar, who are also manic and mostly
concerned with sex. The other was the softer satire boom, among whose
exponents were secular Jews and, just as much, Gentile comedians.
Jonathan Winters is much drier about his country-club airheads than
Brooks ever is on his Jewish oldsters. With the coming together of
hard and soft, a coalition against entrenched power got made.
And right around here the trouble arrives. For what is really striking
about all the "rebel" comedians of the time, hard and soft, is that
their main target was almost never the excesses of the right wing in
power. From Tom Lehrer's "Love, love love me, I'm a liberal" and
Shelley Berman's nervous flier to Woody Allen's mockery of cuny ethics
and Nichols and May's sublime catalogue of the sounds of tolerance
("Well, Al Schweitzer is just a great guy. Al is a lot of laughs. I
personally have never dated him"), their subject was liberalism and
its pieties. As Nachman sees quite clearly, though he seems not always
to see the centrality of his own observation, the bulk of Mort Sahl's
material, beyond a couple of anti-McCarthy jokes long after McCarthy
was out of power, wasn't political—and, to the degree that it was, it
mostly mocked liberal saints like the Kennedys. Rather, it was social
and sexual: "There are no women in the Beat Generation, just girls who
have broken with their parents for the evening." Lenny Bruce may have
been victimized by the police and the judiciary, but he seldom made
fun of them—partly because he had a twisted, junkie's respect for
anyone who had contempt for him, but mostly because there wasn't
enough life in what they did to be very funny. "What can a man
Eisenhower's age say to me?" he shrugged memorably and then joked
about liberal hypocrisies and liberal conventions ("I used to go to
civil-rights marches, but Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles keep bumping
into people"). Nichols and May are funny because they have perfect
pitch for the holy words of progressive culture ("I can never believe
that Bartók died on Central Park West"). Well past the high-water mark
of McCarthyism, the comedians were mocking liberalism, implicitly
recognizing that this was the ideology in cultural ascent.
Though it is an article of faith in pop histories that satire is for
the oppressed against the oppressor, if there is a single continuous
thread running through the history of satire it is this natural
affinity for familiar order. Comedy is a criticism not of ideas, or
even of life, but of the space between an idea and life. Neither right
wing nor left wing in a narrowly partisan sense, it is conservative
inasmuch as it compares an ideal of conduct with the limits of human
behavior. It exists to remind us of the difference between the
rhetorical and the real. "Not the way things oughta be or the way
they're supposta be but the way they are" was Bruce's own motto in his
last years. Aristophanes, in "The Clouds," thought Socrates was
ridiculous because his head was in them. Shakespeare is funny about
pompous idealists like Malvolio and Jaques not because they are the
ones with the power but because they are the ones with the thoughts.
(Comedy does not make fun of power; it makes fun of the pieties of
power. Lear's fool does not mock him for being King. He mocks him for
apologizing for being King with a phony and elaborate, "enlightened"
ritual of retirement.) Even Dickens, a true political radical, makes
fun of Mrs. Jellyby, not of Lord Dedlock: the mindless reformer with
the unkempt family can be made funny in a way that the heartless
aristocrat, armored in his traditions, cannot.
The real genius of the "new" comedians lay in spotting, intuitively,
and before anyone else did, the sudden rise of the wide-eyed optimism
of liberalism—the rhetoric of rights, personal growth, acceptance, and
ostentatious tolerance. What their comedy traced, in this sense, was
the true phenomenon of the time: not "rebellion" but the spread of
college education and in-group conformity, and the growth of the
university as a central symbolic switching station of American life.
Then a funny thing happened. The comedians of the fifties and early
sixties unconsciously assumed that both political power and popular
piety would come to rest in the hands of liberals, in a kind of
complacent family compact. But after the Kennedy assassination the
great divide began, in which America turned to the right politically
while becoming increasingly liberated in its personal manners. By the
time Ronald Reagan was President, you could say "cocksucker" in any
comedy club in Philadelphia; or, rather, by the time you could say
"cocksucker" in any comedy club in Philadelphia, Ronald Reagan was
President. This left the comedians making fun of the pieties while
looking past, or not caring very much about, the politics. The
personal or apolitical tone of so much post-sixties comedy is, in this
sense, not a betrayal but a simple tracking of the scent to the place
where liberal pretension has gone, mainly the bedroom and the living
room. The object of comedy remains the absurdities of the new liberal
order—but since its power has been largely relegated to private life,
that, too, has become the subject of the comedy. (Nachman details how
Mort Sahl's career was destroyed by the Kennedy assassination: perhaps
because it removed his subject, liberal foolishness, from his arena,
which was what you could find in the morning paper. Sahl, whose comedy
depended on a seamless blending of what's in the news and what's in
the neighborhood, and whose life would make a better movie than Lenny
Bruce's did, both hated the Kennedys and needed them.) The liberal
cultural pieties were so strong, and affected people's lives so
directly—the way we eat, sleep, date, make love, and so on—that, as
one or two conservative pundits may have pointed out somewhere or
other, they have managed to persist in power even after they were
rejected politically.
What really happened to the new comedy was not that it was defanged
but that, as its audience broadened, it necessarily became less
intellectual. The Two Dumb Guys who are the dominant figures of comedy
today—in everything from "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "Wayne's World" to
"Saving Silverman"—are distant, unwashed descendants of Lenny Bruce.
Those with decent hearts, a faith in their own hipness, and a few
shreds of pop culture enlist the affection of the viewer because, in a
culture obsessed with sensitivity, they are too stupid to be sensitive
to the effect they have on other people. In a culture obsessed with
apology, this seems wonderfully free. (Falstaff didn't apologize,
either, for being a drunk, a powerful freedom in a guilt-and-whiskey
culture.)
Yet, though we laugh at the bien-pensant, it does not mean that the
bien-pensants are not bien. A joke is not an empowered heresy; a joke
is merely an emboldened doubt. By doubting liberalism, the new
comedians reinforced its essential message, which is that extreme
self-consciousness is a social good. The great comedians of the first
half of the century—the Marxes, Chaplin, Fields—had all been, in one
way or another, lords of misrule, outside the normal bounds of
society, tramps and scamps and carnival barkers. They represented
Everyman but, expressing themselves in dance and acrobatics and
vaudeville stylization, were not like any man. Their intuitive
alliance was with the avant-garde, who discovered and rediscovered
them again and again.
The "new" comedians of the fifties and sixties were, instead, part of
our moral modernity. They were their audience, asking questions that
had increasingly tricky answers: how to be a good person, and how to
be seen as a good person. Stammering in sweaters, they were led to the
skeptical self-reflection that is the common ground of comedians
otherwise as unlike as Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce, and to the
obsessiveness about the minutiae of social presentation that connect
Nichols and May to Seinfeld. For the older generation of comedians,
the question wasn't how to be a good person but how to break free of
an order in which goodness was something forced on you. (Even Lenny
Bruce, for all his reputation as an agitator, presents himself not as
an outsider but as a hipster, a knowing and essentially well-wishing
insider speaking to others.)
The curious thing is that, forty years on, what was meant as a mockery
of conventional wisdom has become itself another kind of wisdom. We
cannot laugh quite as easily at Nichols and May or even Lenny Bruce as
we do at Chaplin or Keaton, because their subjects are too narrowly
circumscribed, but their comic reflections on our urge to be comically
self-reflective still resonate. Even Mel Brooks's
Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man's mock folk wisdom has become, at some
level, real wisdom. The accumulated certainty of his two thousand
years—"Never run for a bus. There'll always be another"—is, after all,
about as much wisdom as any comedian, or critic, chasing the cultural
moment can hope to find.
Dave Little
lovedavelittle
"al_pastor" <al_p...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:97bd4555.03050...@posting.google.com...
> http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?critics/030512crbo_books
>
> STANDUP GUYS
> by ADAM GOPNIK
> What were the rebel comedians rebelling against?
>
> Issue of 2003-05-12
> Posted 2003-05-05
>
> Anyone can make jokes about books on comedy. Even the
> grumpy-belletrist-in-a-bow-tie type can tap the dottle out of his pipe
> long enough to harrumph out the old one about how Mr. Murkle seems to
> have got comedy down and broken its arm, while the postmodernist
> professor makes garlicky puns about the subversion inherent in
> garlicky puns. Everyone feels smug about books on jokes, because we
> all know that there's no explaining jokes-though perhaps we wouldn't
> be so smug if we stopped and tried to explain why it so often takes a
> joke to explain us.
>
> But comedy, like cooking, is a great subject, and should not be
> avoided just because it is also a hard one. This is especially true of
> books about the growth of a new comic style in mid-century America, of
> which Gerald Nachman's "Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the
> 1950s and 1960s" (Pantheon; $29.95) is the example at hand. If any
> movement has changed the inside of our mind-or, at least, lined its
> cage with a different kind of newspaper-it is the movement in comedy
> which began in the mid-fifties, crested in the early sixties, and, in
> one form or another, is still with us today. In one neat formulation,
> popular American comedy changed then from wit to humor-from nicely
> flowerings-the French Impressionists, the Bloomsbury circle, the
> Italian and French New Wave cinema, Tin Pan Alley . . . was just a
> lucky accident." (Well, that's settled, finally, and all the cultural
> historians can go find honest work as piano movers.) But, just as
> baseball writers suspicious of statistics end up using the wrong ones,
> critics suspicious of "theory" end up using someone else's. Nachman's
> story, therefore, shares some of the elements of myth, or of cliché.
> In a country whose satiric tradition was paralyzed by the twin
> spectres of the blacklist and the Borscht Belt-Joe McCarthy and Milton
> Berle-a tiny band of comics rose up in rebellion. Mort Sahl, an
> awkward, untrained commentator, put on a sweater, held a newspaper,
> mumbled brightly, and changed the shape of comedy, making it both
> political and collegiate: "Joe McCarthy doesn't question what you say
> so much as your right to say it." Lenny Bruce-whom Nachman calls "the
> Elvis of standup," but who seems more like its Jesus, dying for
> Henny's sins-found Sahl significant but very square, and made war on
> the taboos of sex and racism which even Sahl respected, showing what
> might happen if one could be released from all inhibitions. A
> generation of comedians broke through behind them, some keeping the
> faith, most making necessary compromises with commerce, a few trying
> and failing to be true. (The earlier television eccentrics Steve
> Allen, Sid Caesar, and Ernie Kovacs, like the Prophets on the Sistine
> ceiling, wonderingly anticipate the main action.) They left behind a
> legacy of "subversive," or anti-establishment, humor, which is very
> fitfully kept alive by their successors. The courage and commitment
> lapsed, and now comedy is an easier business of attitude and
> apolitical indifference.
>
> Searching the welter of voices and vendettas for a slightly finer
> pattern than this, you can catch the outlines of two related but
> distinct movements. One, the hard edge, which connects Mel Brooks and
> Joan Rivers and Lenny Bruce and even, in her own way, Phyllis Diller,
> is the release of Jewish verbal overkill, outrageous shpritzing, into
> popular entertainment. (Albert Goldman-that strange mixture of Theodor
> Adorno and Kitty Kelley-offered a precise account in his Lenny Bruce
> biography of how this style moved from Brooklyn to the night club,
> which remains one of the best things ever written about American
> comedy.) The funniest and most memorable, because least dated, of
> these explosions is surely Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks's
> "Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man," but it is the will to explode that
> connects Brooks to Bruce and Sid Caesar, who are also manic and mostly
> concerned with sex. The other was the softer satire boom, among whose
> exponents were secular Jews and, just as much, Gentile comedians.
> Jonathan Winters is much drier about his country-club airheads than
> Brooks ever is on his Jewish oldsters. With the coming together of
> hard and soft, a coalition against entrenched power got made.
>
>
>
> And right around here the trouble arrives. For what is really striking
> about all the "rebel" comedians of the time, hard and soft, is that
> their main target was almost never the excesses of the right wing in
> power. From Tom Lehrer's "Love, love love me, I'm a liberal" and
> Shelley Berman's nervous flier to Woody Allen's mockery of cuny ethics
> and Nichols and May's sublime catalogue of the sounds of tolerance
> ("Well, Al Schweitzer is just a great guy. Al is a lot of laughs. I
> personally have never dated him"), their subject was liberalism and
> its pieties. As Nachman sees quite clearly, though he seems not always
> to see the centrality of his own observation, the bulk of Mort Sahl's
> material, beyond a couple of anti-McCarthy jokes long after McCarthy
> was out of power, wasn't political-and, to the degree that it was, it
> mostly mocked liberal saints like the Kennedys. Rather, it was social
> and sexual: "There are no women in the Beat Generation, just girls who
> have broken with their parents for the evening." Lenny Bruce may have
> been victimized by the police and the judiciary, but he seldom made
> fun of them-partly because he had a twisted, junkie's respect for
> of liberalism-the rhetoric of rights, personal growth, acceptance, and
> ostentatious tolerance. What their comedy traced, in this sense, was
> the true phenomenon of the time: not "rebellion" but the spread of
> college education and in-group conformity, and the growth of the
> university as a central symbolic switching station of American life.
>
>
>
> Then a funny thing happened. The comedians of the fifties and early
> sixties unconsciously assumed that both political power and popular
> piety would come to rest in the hands of liberals, in a kind of
> complacent family compact. But after the Kennedy assassination the
> great divide began, in which America turned to the right politically
> while becoming increasingly liberated in its personal manners. By the
> time Ronald Reagan was President, you could say "cocksucker" in any
> comedy club in Philadelphia; or, rather, by the time you could say
> "cocksucker" in any comedy club in Philadelphia, Ronald Reagan was
> President. This left the comedians making fun of the pieties while
> looking past, or not caring very much about, the politics. The
> personal or apolitical tone of so much post-sixties comedy is, in this
> sense, not a betrayal but a simple tracking of the scent to the place
> where liberal pretension has gone, mainly the bedroom and the living
> room. The object of comedy remains the absurdities of the new liberal
> order-but since its power has been largely relegated to private life,
> that, too, has become the subject of the comedy. (Nachman details how
> Mort Sahl's career was destroyed by the Kennedy assassination: perhaps
> because it removed his subject, liberal foolishness, from his arena,
> which was what you could find in the morning paper. Sahl, whose comedy
> depended on a seamless blending of what's in the news and what's in
> the neighborhood, and whose life would make a better movie than Lenny
> Bruce's did, both hated the Kennedys and needed them.) The liberal
> cultural pieties were so strong, and affected people's lives so
> directly-the way we eat, sleep, date, make love, and so on-that, as
> one or two conservative pundits may have pointed out somewhere or
> other, they have managed to persist in power even after they were
> rejected politically.
>
> What really happened to the new comedy was not that it was defanged
> but that, as its audience broadened, it necessarily became less
> intellectual. The Two Dumb Guys who are the dominant figures of comedy
> today-in everything from "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "Wayne's World" to
> "Saving Silverman"-are distant, unwashed descendants of Lenny Bruce.
> Those with decent hearts, a faith in their own hipness, and a few
> shreds of pop culture enlist the affection of the viewer because, in a
> culture obsessed with sensitivity, they are too stupid to be sensitive
> to the effect they have on other people. In a culture obsessed with
> apology, this seems wonderfully free. (Falstaff didn't apologize,
> either, for being a drunk, a powerful freedom in a guilt-and-whiskey
> culture.)
>
> Yet, though we laugh at the bien-pensant, it does not mean that the
> bien-pensants are not bien. A joke is not an empowered heresy; a joke
> is merely an emboldened doubt. By doubting liberalism, the new
> comedians reinforced its essential message, which is that extreme
> self-consciousness is a social good. The great comedians of the first
> half of the century-the Marxes, Chaplin, Fields-had all been, in one
> years-"Never run for a bus. There'll always be another"-is, after all,
Tommy Joseph
> From: "Dave Little" <dav...@earthlink.net>
> Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net
> Reply-To: "Dave Little" <dav...@earthlink.net>
> Newsgroups: alt.comedy.standup
> Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 20:20:20 GMT
> Subject: Re: "Seriously Funny"
>
> I'm reading it now. It's terrific.
>
>
>
> lovedavelittle
An inordinate amount of Jews mentioned in this 'history' of comedy, I'd
say.
Tommy Joe (Harrrumph!)
steve
>An inordinate amount of Jews mentioned in this 'history' of comedy, I'd
>say.
>
>Tommy Joe (Harrrumph!)
It's due to an inordinate amount of Jews in comedy.
Some suggest that it's due to the inordinate amount of persecution they've
suffered over the centuries.
I think it's like my old buddy, Hymie Mendelhsohnnn says: "Jews is funny
people."
steve gelder (Feh!)
Tommy Joseph
> From: lap...@aol.comity (steve)
> Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
> Newsgroups: alt.comedy.standup
> Date: 07 May 2003 01:46:10 GMT
> Subject: Re: "Seriously Funny"
>
I think it's more a matter of nepotism, have thought this for some time,
and will probably continue to think it until shown otherwise. 'Jews is not
more funny people' than anyone else. My remarks, which require no
justification, concern not only the subjects of the book, but the guy who
slung it together. I don't buy that 'persecution over the centuries' crap,
not one bit. The centuries have proved harsh to all of us. By the way, I
have nothing against Jews. I just brought them up to see if I could maybe
get people off the 'White Prom' thread........... Jews don't like it when
other downtrodden people get more attention than them.
Tommy Joe
steve
>
>> From: lap...@aol.comity (steve)
>>
>> Tommy Joseph jo...@bellsouth.net writes:
>>
>>> An inordinate amount of Jews mentioned in this 'history' of comedy, I'd
>>> say.
>>>
>>> Tommy Joe (Harrrumph!)
>>
>>
>> It's due to an inordinate amount of Jews in comedy.
>>
>> Some suggest that it's due to the inordinate amount of persecution they've
>> suffered over the centuries.
>>
>> I think it's like my old buddy, Hymie Mendelhsohnnn says: "Jews is funny
>> people."
>>
>>
>> steve gelder (Feh!)
>
>
> I think it's more a matter of nepotism, have thought this for some time,
>and will probably continue to think it until shown otherwise. 'Jews is
>not
>more funny people' than anyone else. My remarks, which require no
>justification, concern not only the subjects of the book, but the guy who
>slung it together. I don't buy that 'persecution over the centuries' crap,
>not one bit. The centuries have proved harsh to all of us. By the way,
>I
>have nothing against Jews. I just brought them up to see if I could maybe
>get people off the 'White Prom' thread........... Jews don't like it when
>other downtrodden people get more attention than them.
Oh, okay.
Then, stop reading my first response after the line "It's due to an
inordinate amount of Jews in comedy." That will explain nicely why there are
so many in the book about comedy.
The rest was idle speculation and hearsay.
steve gelder
http://www.stevegelder.com
The FAQ for alt.comedy.standup is currently located at:
http://members.aol.com/comedyfaq/faq.html
Jimwoster
>harsh to all of us.
"The centuries have proved harsh to all of us."?
>Jews don't like it when
>other downtrodden people
>get more attention than them.
Oh, dear ...
Wait.
" ... other downtrodden people ...":
You're referring to yourself there.
Oh, dear ...
>By the way, I
>have nothing against Jews.
Oh, okay. Never mind, then.
Tim Shell
>It's due to an inordinate amount of Jews in comedy.
>
>Some suggest that it's due to the inordinate amount
>of persecution they've suffered over the centuries.
Something like that. Before Hollywood made show business into the glamorous,
prestigious, sought-after profession it is today, it was generally regarded as
something no "decent, respectable" person would be involved in. But it was the
only place a lot of new immigrants -- Jews, Irish, Negroes, Italians, Gypsies,
etc. -- could make a relatively honest dollar.
Why the stereotype of the tap dancing Irish cop? Entertainment and law
enforcement were the only scummy jobs they could get. Jews did theater and the
rag trade for the same reason. Blacks borrowed tap dancing and the blues song
form from the Irish when they migrated from the South to northern urban areas.
Gypsies did roving carnivals and still do, helped by Irish hillbillies. Jews
and Irish filled vaudeville, and later, burlesque.
And it's still around. Why is it all those contestants on American Idol sound
"black" when they sing? Because that's the current norm in music, a result of
underclass blacks working their way up into the mainstream entertainment biz.
It's become the standard. And yes, there is a bit of nepotism, "helping one's
own," but you can say that about any profession.
It's like that line in the movie "To Be or Not to Be": "If it wasn't for Jews
and fags, there wouldn't be a theater."
PJ DiSanti
PJ
And which is best, Jewish or Gay.
--
"Every country has the government it deserves." Joseph de Maistre
"steve" <lap...@aol.comity> wrote in message
news:20030506231853...@mb-m11.aol.com...
kinetic
"steve" <lap...@aol.comity> wrote in message
> It's due to an inordinate amount of Jews in comedy.
>
> Some suggest that it's due to the inordinate amount of persecution
they've
> suffered over the centuries.
I've often thought of comedians as people looking in from the outside.
An item that regularly makes the rounds through Canadian media is that
Canadians tend to be "funny". To illustrate the point, they'll list several
accomplished Canadian "funny people" and their success in American showbiz.
Jim Carrey, Martin Short and Lorne Michaels are particular favourites - due
to their fame - but there are also many "lesser known" entertainers
including writers and performers. The general consensuses that Canadians are
funny because we are on the outside looking in - we're exposed to as much of
the "American lifestyle" as any American, but we aren't American. Mike Myers
once said that the difference between Canadians and Americans is that
Americans watch tv while Canadians watch American tv. In a sense, we are the
same but different - and that difference allows for a detached perspective.
Assuming that theory is true, I suspect that the "same but different" theory
would also be true for most American minorities - perhaps even more so. Keep
in mind that, psychologically speaking, comedy is essentially a sword and
shield with which we can attack or defend without seeming aggressive or
defensive (it's only a joke, remember?). Therefore, it only makes sense that
any minority group (Jewish or otherwise) would use this tool to voice their
opinion without it threatening the mainstream.
Just a thought.
~ Jamie West
Comedywood
"PJ DiSanti" <p...@pjdisantinospam.com> wrote in message
news:Lybua.9504$%_3.56...@newssrv26.news.prodigy.com...
> All I want to know is, do I have to convert?
>
> PJ
>
> And which is best, Jewish or Gay.
>
vey.....
b
Tim Shell
>
>"PJ DiSanti" <p...@pjdisantinospam.com> wrote:
>> All I want to know is, do I have to convert?
>> And which is best, Jewish or Gay.
>>
>Go for the ultimate.....<snap>....<snap>...<snap>
>oy vey.....
If you do both, then you can marry Liza Minelli.
Comedywood
news:b9c8h...@drn.newsguy.com...
b
Tommy Joseph
> From: lap...@aol.comity (steve)
> Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
> Newsgroups: alt.comedy.standup
> Date: 07 May 2003 03:18:53 GMT
> Subject: Re: "Seriously Funny"
>
There is no argument. Your response was accurate. Certainly there are
in inordinate amount of Jews in comedy, which prompts me to move beyond the
obvious and to question why. I see nothing wrong with that. Your
speculation may even be accurate. I simply doubt it. If centuries of
persecution explain why there are so many Jews in comedy, then I am forced
to wonder if persecution might also play a role in determining who becomes a
doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a book publisher, or a movie producer in
today's American society.
Tommy Joe
Tommy Joseph
> From: Tim Shell <Tim_m...@newsguy.com>
> Organization: Newsguy News Service [http://newsguy.com]
> Newsgroups: alt.comedy.standup
> Date: 7 May 2003 09:02:15 -0700
> Subject: Re: "Seriously Funny"
Let's assume a good deal of your post makes sense - because it does.
That doesn't dismiss the fact that you choose to wrap it up with a quote
from a movie written and produced and performed mainly by Jews, maybe even
Jewish fags. Point is, whether your statements are valid or not, and surely
they are, there is no need to support them with a quote from a movie. Movie
makers can be a pretty egotistical lot, and surely theatre would exist today
without Jews or fags or anyone else belonging to any particular group. As
for those singers who try to sound black, I too have noticed this and it's
been going on a long long time. I like honesty in a singer or any
performer. If a person sounds a certain way, that's the way they should
sing. A lot of those 'singers' are aware they are being judged (by non
singers some or most of the time), and it's a shame they feel the need to
present themselves as something other than what they really are. Too bad
for them. Most 'artists' come from the lower classes and always have.
Nothing new there. They can come from any class, though, as long as they
are allowed to get a taste of real life and the character that sometimes
comes with it. Anyway, I'm boring even myself at this time. Point is, I
have heard this thing about Jews in comedy and elsewhere in the
entertainment field for many years and I simply do not agree with it. It's
neoptism more than anything else - that's what it's come to be - and surely
they are not the only ones who practice nepotism, but when it comes to the
entertainment 'industry' they are involved with that creativity-destroying
practice in a rather large way.
Tommy Joe
PJ DiSanti
PJ
PS, although catholic I already got the snip snip.
--
"Every country has the government it deserves." Joseph de Maistre
"Tim Shell" <Tim_m...@newsguy.com> wrote in message
news:b9c8h...@drn.newsguy.com...
Cos McCowboy
news:V3bua.4786$ER4.5...@news20.bellglobal.com:
> because we are on the outside looking in - we're exposed to as much
> of the "American lifestyle" as any American, but we aren't American.
Sounds good as far as it goes (and much of the same logic would apply to
Australians as well), but it doesn't explain the English. They've been on
top of the food chain for most of recent history (past few hundred years),
culturally and politically, yet their comedy heritage is arguably un-matched.
No, I think it's something else, something more to do with how socially and
emotionally repressive a culture is, that wrings comedy (and perhaps
football-hooliganism) out of people. But that conversation has been thrashed
out here before, more than once.
--
Perfectly Normal Industries: serving Fortune 500's comedy needs since 1998!
"I'm not home now. At the sound of the explosion, please leave a stain."
BozoDeClown
> I'm reading it now. It's terrific.
>
> lovedavelittle
>
> "al_pastor" <al_p...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> news:97bd4555.03050...@posting.google.com...
> > http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?critics/030512crbo_books
> >
> > STANDUP GUYS
> > by ADAM GOPNIK
> > What were the rebel comedians rebelling against?
> >
> > Issue of 2003-05-12
> > Posted 2003-05-05
> >
> > Anyone can make jokes about books on comedy. Even the
> > grumpy-belletrist-in-a-bow-tie type can tap the dottle out of his pipe
> > long enough to harrumph out the old one about how Mr. Murkle seems to
> > have got comedy down and broken its arm, while the postmodernist
> > professor makes garlicky puns about the subversion inherent in
> > garlicky puns. Everyone feels smug about books on jokes, because we
> > all know that there's no explaining jokes-though perhaps we wouldn't
> > be so smug if we stopped and tried to explain why it so often takes a
> ....But comedy, like cooking, is a great subject, and should not be
> avoided just because it is also a hard one. This is especially true of
> books about the growth of a new comic style in mid-century America, of
> which Gerald Nachman's "Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the
> 1950s and 1960s" (Pantheon; $29.95) is the example at hand. If any
> movement has changed the inside of our mind-or, at least, lined its
> cage with a different kind of newspaper-it is the movement in comedy
> which began in the mid-fifties, crested in the early sixties, and, in
> one form or another, is still with us today. In one neat formulation,
> popular American comedy changed then from wit to humor-from nicely
> packaged aphorisms about life (for that, when the pickle juice is
> shaken off, is what a one-liner like "Take my wife, please" is) to
> shapeless commentary on events and manners...
>
> ...A terrific book might be written tracing the birth, dissemination,
> eventual decadence of this manner, from coffeehouse to our house. This
> book is not that book. Instead, Nachman has given himself the narrower
> task of talking to the surviving comics of the fifties and sixties....
Read the rest of this message... (259 more lines)...yes I did, all 259
Read the rest of this message... (259 more lines)...yes I did, all 259
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...I don't get it.
-BdC-
BozoDeClown
> > From: lap...@aol.comity (steve)
> > Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
> > Newsgroups: alt.comedy.standup
> > Date: 07 May 2003 03:18:53 GMT
> > Subject: Re: "Seriously Funny"
> >
> persecution explain why there are so many Jews in comedy, then I am forced
> to wonder if persecution might also play a role in determining who becomes a
> doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a book publisher, or a movie producer in
> today's American society.
>
> Tommy Joe
Oh that's easy Tommy! No need to wonder your silly little head about
THAT! The answer to the question you're begging linking Jews to
successful careers in comedy to those in medicine, dentistry, law,
publishing and film is because those careers are also "seriously
funny". Glad I could help.
Still your good Shabbos friend, -Bozo d' Clown-
Tim Shell
>
>Tommy Joseph wrote:
>> If centuries of
>> persecution explain why there are so many Jews in comedy, then I am forced
>> to wonder if persecution might also play a role in determining who becomes a
>> doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a book publisher, or a movie producer in
>> today's American society.
>
>Oh that's easy Tommy!
Tommy, you ignorant slut. If you knew anything about the ethnic history of the
US, then you would know that until a little over a hundred years ago, being a
doctor or a dentist was a real shit job. Little or no pay, covered in blood,
people screaming in your face because you're working without anesthesia, etc.
Lawyers didn't have it a whole lot better, mostly dealing with dipshits who
couldn't read or write. So you can imagine, then, that book publishing was a
little cottage industry, not nearly as lucrative as horse shoeing. And the
first movie producers were essentially theives who stole Edison's invention,
high-tailed it to the West Coast, as far away from Edison in New Jersey as they
could get, and cranked out the equivalent of porno (including some early porno).
All these jobs are the only crap jobs they could hustle. Only accidents of
history made them as prestigious and lucrative as they are today. That's irony
at its finest!
One of these days I'll tell you the story of the Italian immigrants.
Tommy Joseph
> From: Tim Shell <Tim_m...@newsguy.com>
> Organization: Newsguy News Service [http://newsguy.com]
> Newsgroups: alt.comedy.standup
> Date: 9 May 2003 13:14:48 -0700
> Subject: Re: "Seriously Funny"
>
> BozoD...@37.com says...
>>
>> Tommy Joseph wrote:
>
>>> If centuries of
>>> persecution explain why there are so many Jews in comedy, then I am forced
>>> to wonder if persecution might also play a role in determining who becomes a
>>> doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a book publisher, or a movie producer in
>>> today's American society.
>>
>> Oh that's easy Tommy!
>
> Tommy, you ignorant slut. If you knew anything about the ethnic history of
> the
> US, then you would know that until a little over a hundred years ago, being a
> doctor or a dentist was a real shit job. Little or no pay, covered in blood,
> people screaming in your face because you're working without anesthesia, etc.
\
That's nice to know, Mr. Historian, but we're talking about today, not
yesterday. At least I am. And I think you know I am. So, cut the phony
bullshit because it doesn't work with me. Also, if you really knew history
you would know as far back as thousands of years ago many physicians
attended to the wealthy and ignored the sick in their attempts to rake in
the dough, not that others in other professions don't do the same. You can
call me all the names you want in your efforts to make yourself look
openminded while making me look quite the bigot, but the truth is the truth,
and the truth is - doctors today are taking the people's cash. End of
fucking story. I don't even care. I aint crying about it. I'll die before
I pay one of these fuckers. But stop avoiding the real issue and stop
pretending we're talking about the past, your view of it anyway, because
we're talking about right here, right now - today. You fucking phony!
Tommy Joe.0
Ollie North
All jobs are crap.
Ollie
Semper "Immigrant song" Fi
HENEGHEN
> "kinetic" <j.w...@sympatico.ca> yammered in
> news:V3bua.4786$ER4.5...@news20.bellglobal.com:
> > Canadians are funny
> > because we are on the outside looking in - we're exposed to as much
> > of the "American lifestyle" as any American, but we aren't American.
>
> Sounds good as far as it goes (and much of the same logic would apply to
> Australians as well), but it doesn't explain the English. They've been on
> top of the food chain for most of recent history (past few hundred years),
> culturally and politically, yet their comedy heritage is arguably un-matched.
Benny Hill, Peter Sellers....uh that short dead guy and monty python.
You are kidding right?
Cos McCowboy
@posting.google.com:
> Benny Hill, Peter Sellers....uh that short dead guy and monty python.
> You are kidding right?
No, but I'm not interested in launching into a long debate with (certain
other frequent posters to ACS...) on the subject. Suffice to say, there's
been an incredible level of stuff originating in the UK, comedically, even if
the average American (even American comics) hasn't heard of it.
It's a commonly-held fallacy to believe that anything good must be something
you've heard of, or it's not really any good after all... and here, my
commentary on the subject will cease, although I'm looking forward to meeting
you someday (I've heard your CD - Stanhope loaned me a copy) and if you like
we can discuss it face to face.
- Ben
HENEGHEN
> JHen...@aol.com (HENEGHEN) yammered in news:cf6d1a79.0305091958.261c4b68
> @posting.google.com:
> > Benny Hill, Peter Sellers....uh that short dead guy and monty python.
> > You are kidding right?
>
> No, but I'm not interested in launching into a long debate with (certain
> other frequent posters to ACS...) on the subject. Suffice to say, there's
> been an incredible level of stuff originating in the UK, comedically, even if
> the average American (even American comics) hasn't heard of it.
Yeah, that was my point. even here in america stanhope is known of by
all comics yet is not a household name. not yet anyway. neither is
hicks so yes i know what you are talking about. i was just fuckin
around. i dont know many comics in this country but am looking
forward to going to england and that dutch place with the hash soon.
>
> It's a commonly-held fallacy to believe that anything good must be something
> you've heard of, or it's not really any good after all...
exactly.
and here, my
> commentary on the subject will cease, although I'm looking forward to meeting
> you someday (I've heard your CD - Stanhope loaned me a copy) and if you like
> we can discuss it face to face.
>
> - Ben
what part of the country are you in? i am on the road this year and
hope to run into you. heneghen
C. Leroy Ellenberger
1960 and, despite my wide reading on his life and career, I was
surprised to read in the chapter on Nichols and May that Lenny once
opened for them for six months, according to Nichols. Since Lenny's
career took off in 1957 at Ann's 440 in San Francisco and Nichols and
May were then Chicago and New York performers, I'd guess it was in New
York between '57 and '59, but Lenny's itinerary in the books I've read
is too sketchy to pin it down. Please, if any reader out there knows
where and when Lenny opened for Nichols and May for six months, post
the answer.
Leroy Ellenberger,
St. Louis, MO