Getting Inside "Inside Humor'

...I Love Lucy"), all of which were funnier in their depiction of the mirthlessness of daily existence than for their expected comic embroidery...

...humor turning up in a variety of forbidden shades...

...Sahl is only a slight improvement on Will Rogers' safe political iconoclasm...

...As self-admitted as a guy who thumbs his nose at the tide, the make-them-think monologist is actually the most ferocious belonger and sect-worshipper in a business engulfed by mystic brotherhood stuff...

...Despite a few stunning moments on TV spectaculars, the Mike Nichols-Elaine May team is often undone by a cheerless, frightened presence and a shallow dialect that backfires, suggesting Nichols-May are themselves as untough and pretentious as their victims in look-Ma-no-rehearsals conversation ("maybe you could be a boss and his secretary in a cocktail lounge...

...when you looked at me as if I were me . . .") and a suspenseful comic format I faucet-drip dialogue of cliches in which the comedy never shows its face...

...you son of a gun . . .") or the Trevor Howard dentist in an English movie abscess ("When you looked in my mouth and said it's rotten...

...Perhaps the most authentic examples reside on TV's outskirts—Howie Morris (in last summer's "Pantomime Quiz...

...TV hit roads which few in pop-comedy thought to travel: impressions of empty treadmill existence done with unbeguiling humor, created by an immobile, charm-robbing medium, and hack writers such as Nat Hiken ("Bilko"), who can anchor a story in the center of commonplace life without making philosophic promises...

...and a driveling Mr...

...Herb Caen, Miles Davis" (and manages at the same time to apple-polish the pop-art critics...

...On TELEVISION Getting Inside ‘Inside Humor' By Manny Farber THOUGH "Sergeant Bilko...

...and Mrs...

...Though Berman is a persuasive, interesting, elegant raconteur in Jewish-toned anguish humor, he stays too far within average sensibility to escape sentimentality, backslapping...

...all the Southern senators who want to hang the world...

...I'm God...

...For the first time, the large audience saw a murderously dry infantry life (‘"Bilko...

...slow double-take...

...Despite a talent for swinging doggerel and brashness that probably developed in college bull-sessions...

...their humor soon sags in midstream of consciousness and Nichols-May become the two sad bunnies tracking through the darkest interior of David Reisman's lonely crowd...

...Their real talent, however, is in the delicate craftmanship of fantastically light voices that seem spooked by inhibitions, a trick of building each dialogue to a pin-point of passion ("Oh Riba...

...When Mort Sahl's raspy voice is in normal jet repulsion, the audience is inundated by generalized hates, loves, gambits that add up to stale anti-American swing...

...Lenny Bruce, whose Beat Generation specialities are wrathful anti-bourgeois humor and self-devotion ("I find most of my satires on 42nd Street"), devotes part of his routines simply to listing passwords in upper Bop: "Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason...

...preciosity...

...In its most likable form (the Canadian low-think team of John Wayne and Frank Schuster doing a faintly Jewish, contemporary blabbering of Great Works like "The Scarlet Pumpernickel"), egghead comedy is a revolt which starts by insulting audience intelligence with a contrived gag, and then, through semi-skilled pantomime (Skelton, Lou Costello) builds a hectic atmosphere that could be called laughably energetic, if not funny...

...opinion ("The Man Upstairs, Henry Luce") or topic ("We have Utopia with Byrd...

...Where an Inside comedian (Jack Paar) spends a lot of time simply in boasting, savoire faire, explaining his comedy, and cementing himself with the esoteric flock, his opposite is a modern version of Buster Keaton playing into social outcast comedy, bucking the current with a negative streak that balances his artistic sophistication...

...While poking about populating their spontaneously created scenes with plagueable types such as the jazz-accompanied Beat poet ("You did it...

...Oh Riba...

...At its worst, the cerebral, cruel or free-thinking talker, in trying for trenchant comment on the current scene, uses words, tastes, dialects and subjects that have long been the ego-supports of Bohemian intellectuals and are now the property of bank-safe middlebrows...

...and small annoyance (the pornographic look of an emptied glass of buttermilk...

...Recently there has been another turn in the direction of desolate, anti-chic humor...

...The most celebrated of Serious-Blooming wits, Sahl has an interesting delivery, a rapid outpouring in which words are used for abundance, beat and ripple...

...Joey Bishop (calculated) and Jack Douglas (madly wooden) are two fair examples...

...While the professional funnyman still reaps the highest prices and best TV time, the news in humor is being made by the satirical monologist, whose home is the chi-chi nightclub and whose goal is a place somewhere in the suburbs of High Art...

...Berman combines a number of unlikely comic talents: a writer's knack for small-word humor ("I'm fine thenk you and how are you . . . fine, fine, thenk you very much"), an acting flair that indicates training in The Method and keeps the spectator glued to outrageously dramatic tricks of timing and correct tone, and a conceited-needling voice that creates a suspenseful mood that almost strangles the audience...

...Sahl's flooding speech does occasionally turn up an insight, usually about night people—his picture of a restless figure who wanders out at 4 A.M...

...Eastland...

...An Elegant Ego has taken over: In a medium that discourages physical comedy and robs experienced clowns (Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton) of fantasy and finesse, turning them into realistic rogues-gallery personalities, the newest stars consider tasteless any movement more earthy than Shelley Berman's dainty crossing of legs while reaching for a make-believe telephone, Mort Sahl's waving of a rolled-up newspaper, or Jack Benny's princely...

...a morbid, bickering slum series ("Honeymooners...

...In its early period...

...The most engaging egghead comedian is Shelley Berman, an essayist usually found with imaginary telephone in hand, working with intimidation (an airplane passenger), badgering (delicatessen owner deflating his son's acting ambitions...

...The greatest assist to the new Ego is an ugly invention...

...morose, not too energetic) that predicted a comedy of desolation, TV's most recent comedians have done an about-face...

...Faubus...

...just "to see if Kantor's Delicatessen is open," and then the real confusion of Western Man: "Do I want a hamburger or fried eggs...

...Morey Amsterdam (a long-time horror who somehow lights up the "Keep Talking" panel), or Kaye Ballard (on a recent "One Night Stand")—uncontrollable clowns who work within several levels of sophistication without the slightest pretense of belonging to the mysterious group of cohorts that succeed in alienating at least this reviewer...

...Berman's essays, which play like Mozart with infinite control of rests, elongations, and tiny pointed notes, have brought TV audiences some enormously beguiling relationships, particularly a frustration-on-the-telephone skit involving a man badgering a Dennis-the-Menace child to call his mom to the phone ("If you put the telephone down, lightning will strike you...

...The Honeymooners" and the first Ernie Kovacs vaudeville showed traits (lonely, abrasive, lower-than-lowbrow...

...Inside Humor, which allows the comedian to buddy-buddy his humor without actually committing himself in action or idea: i.e., chuckling at hidden jokes, playing snob-ball with names like "Needle-man," aiming words ("cool it, cool it") and ideas at a mysterious group of superior characters who claque on cue...

...Jules Feiffer...

...While the chain of Insiders has been growing rapidly from Tom Posten to "Guido Panzini" to genial smiler Dave King, it is surprising to find lonesome (unpopular...

...The most curious gimmick (plagiarized by Lenny Bruce) is Sahl's fake laugh, which sounds like genial surprise but is used as a fraternity button, to show that Sahl is inside the Group with a cynical word ("Right, it's wild...