Stand-Up

...Seriously Funny is loaded with remarks of similar lugubriousness...

...Television, which was once the great entrée for stand-up comics, is so no longer...

...Shelley Berman, of a generation of obsessively self-confessional humor...

...Stand-up comedy has become more manic, an exercise, as he puts it, in "attitude," the word that "defined 1980s and 1990s comedians like Dennis Miller, Garry Shandling, Roseanne Barr, and David Letterman"—I'd throw in Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy—and, he adds, "cynicism replaced humor...

...and though its subject may seem light, the stuff of trivial pursuits, its importance is genuine...

...Because of his insistence on using language judged obscene, Lenny Bruce lost his New York cabaret license and was embroiled—"broiling" seems the right metaphor here—in endless legal tangles in New York and Chicago...

...A man who until then had been a great military hero was nicely reduced in stature when Mort Sahl mocked Eisenhower's limited verbal agility by saying—as I once heard him say at a now defunct Chicago nightclub called Mister Kelly's—that a meeting between Ike and Adlai Stevenson had to be cancelled because the interpreter failed to show up...

...Imogene Coca, Sid Caesar's co-star, said that on their television show "it never occurred to anyone to talk down to the audience...

...The one time I saw Lenny Bruce, the weekend after the John F. Kennedy assassination, he claimed that the reaction of Vaughan Meader, a John F. Kennedy impersonator, to the news of the president's assassination was: "What...

...Nachman announces that his aim in his accounts of the satirical comedians—I myself think "radical" comedians more precise, for the best were radical in their time—is to "show not just their genius but to catch glimpses of their demons, damaged souls, and desperate drive...

...A stern bourgeoisie still existed to épat...

...The most consistent complaint, though, is about the growing obtuseness of the audience...

...I don't hear any laughs out there...

...Catering to them can only kill the joyfulness of comedians shpritzing away at full sail, not particularly caring if everyone in the audience can keep up with them...

...Then, poof and shazam, everything changed...

...Stand-Up BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN In seventeenth-century England, writes Adam Nicolson in God's Secretaries, his book about the making of the King James Bible, "'renaissance' was not a word that was known or used...

...Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die...

...Before the comedy renaissance, most comedians in America were known through radio, and a few through the movies...

...50,000 T-shirts down the crapper...

...and Ernie Ko-vacs, of surreal visual effects and the unbound vistas of video...

...and there is a great deal of talk among them of having their material stolen by comrades...

...He reminds us of George Jessel and Joe E. Lewis, the unfunny comedians the country had agreed to laugh at...

...Pause: allow two beats...

...Now you can say them, but you can't say girl...

...An optimistic comedian is oxymoronic, if not nonse-quitorial...

...Professional comics, humorists, by their very presence, begin by establishing an anticipation—you will laugh at what I am about to say or do—and then set out not to defy but to fulfill it...

...But, apparently, nobody is ready to do it...

...Every good joke, it has been said, requires three people: the person who tells it, the person who gets it, and the person who doesn't...

...The argument of Seriously Funny is that the 1950s laid the groundwork for the loosening up of American culture that took place in the notorious 1960s, with comedians often serving as, in Gerald Nachman's phrase, "cultural harbingers": [Mort] Sahl of a new political cynicism...

...The man known as the founding father, in reaction to jokes about his son the president, told Sahl's agent, "I don't care how you do it, but get that Jew to shut his f—ing mouth," and suddenly it became tougher for Sahl to get club dates...

...Seated upon the guest's couch, Sahl proceeded to report that he had just had a disarming letter from the NAACP informing him that, liberal and man of the left though he was, he, Sahl, had no Negro (as the word then was) in his act...

...Shelley Berman hints that Bob Newhart may have lifted his use of the one-sided telephone conversation...

...Nachman makes the crucial distinction between the flat-out joke and the comic insight: The latter is set in a context and brings plausibility to the unpredictable...

...Dostoyevsky, himself operating under the censorship of the tsar, once said that anyone who couldn't find a way to get around the censors didn't really deserve to...

...Their lives, true enough, tended not to be immensely happy ones...

...A comedian of another generation, Jerry Seinfeld, compares it to working in your underwear, so exposed is one alone on the stage with only one's wit for protection...

...Most were trying to make a living...

...Shelley Berman adds that "what's happening now is that there is no life [in comedy shows and routines] after teenage...

...That is why, as a writer, you never want to be known as a humorist...

...Someone recently told me that when he performs today, early in his act Mort Sahl tells three jokes at three different levels of sophistication, and pitches the rest of his act on the basis of the audience's reaction to those three jokes: smart, passable, hopeless...

...today, of course, it is just the reverse...

...Nachman makes the point that comedy doesn't, somehow, seem to have the weight now that it did then...

...Owing to Tom Lehrer's mocking song "The Vatican Rag," most radio stations round the country refused to play his other songs...

...Much interesting information crops up along the way: Stan Freberg, for example, we learn is not Jewish, though Tom Lehrer (who wrote the song "I'm Spending Hanuk-kah in Santa Monica") is...

...he might have added Eddie Cantor and Danny Thomas to the list...

...Why are producers of mass entertainment less willing to be richly allusive today when a greater number of Americans have participated in higher education now than then...

...Some go on to collect more honorary degrees than laughs (Bill Cosby...

...Steve Martin claims that eventually it wears one down...

...The secret he and Elaine May share, Mike Nichols reports, "is that neither of us like people very much—they have no reality for us...

...Late one night—I wish I could recall the year—I was watching the Tonight Show, then run by a lachrymose man named Jack Paar, who introduced the comedian Mort Sahl...

...It would be nice to just let 'em have it—feminists and antifeminists and affirmative action and bleeding hearts and kneejerk liberals, and not be embarrassed about it...

...Most of the material came from Kaye's television show of the early 1960s...

...Mort Sahl, though an equal-opportunity abuser of politicians, has gotten in some of his best shots against those on the left...

...Just as we would know a great deal less about fifth-century b.c...

...C'mon folks, these are the jokes...

...Most of the comedians in Seriously Funny feel that something has happened to the country to make it less appreciative of comedy of any subtlety...

...We just automatically assumed that people understood what we were doing...

...The Internet and cable television are sometimes said to constitute a knowledge explosion...

...Yet in the bad good old days, censorship could give cachet to a comic...

...Along with being a swell dancer and an amusing singer—Kenneth Tynan said he had perhaps the best diction of anyone in show business—Kaye was a skit comedian...

...Athens without Aristophanes' comedies, so the stand-up comics who began to appear in the 1950s provide much insight into what followed them in the culturally revolutionary years in America of the late 1960s and beyond...

...Who would get a Schopenhauer reference...

...Mel Brooks, of the Yiddishization of American comedy...

...The announcing of it beforehand is where the nerve comes in...

...Seriously Funny is riddled with one comedian putting down another...

...I don't think being funny is anyone's first choice," Woody Allen has said...

...For example, the ignominious Joe Kennedy, father of JFK, tried to stop Sahl from making jokes about his son...

...I doubt that many, Lenny Bruce distinctly apart, thought of themselves that way...

...Something like the reverse of a catharsis was at work: not pity and terror but exultation and delight were the reigning emotions...

...He also claims—the line is by now rather well known—that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize...

...Nachman's is a book that entailed much in the way of reading and interviewing...

...He is not the only comedian to complain about the toll that political correctness has taken on freewheeling comedy: "When I was in college there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl...

...Some have been as brief as four years (that was the duration of Nichols & May, the sublimely funny team who split up in 1961...

...Some keep flailing away, operating where and when they can, their old magic dissipated into grossness, no longer even faintly amusing (Joan Rivers...

...Jackie Gleason, through great acting skill, could be poignant as a permanent underdog with pretensions to mastery over his world, as in his Ralph Kram-den character on the television program The Honeymooners...

...TV," Woody Allen notes, "is idiot stuff, designed by idiots for idiots...

...The calmest of all, though, is Tom Lehrer, who seems to have got the most out of a small talent for writing musical burlesques based on other people's songs...

...Sid Caesar, who was perhaps the only comic genius to appear regularly on television, went into psychotherapy in later years, conquered his drinking problem, lost a lot of weight—and promptly ceased to be even mildly amusing...

...And that, as the man said, is entertainment...

...Is Sahl, a man of the left, playing off the old stereotype about blacks' being tardy, also known as CPT (Colored People's Time...

...The other comedians really feasted on liberalism, no matter how liberal their own culture...

...So, too, was Lenny Bruce, insofar as he abused his audience, which he often did, for liberals took a certain pride in feeling themselves hip when listening to him rattle on in filthy language about the joys of drugs...

...Nor is there much available in what the low-grade psychologists call "support systems...

...and in the instances of Allan Sherman and the Smothers Brothers, of its overly revered folk songs and folklore...

...and of Jesse Jackson he declared, "Jesse's a man of the cloth—cashmere...

...Tragedy is if I cut my finger," said Mel Brooks...

...Tom Lehrer, of the inane, hypocritical (and in Jean Shepherd's case, melancholy) nature of hallowed Americana and Nostalgia...

...Sahl may have the best working definition yet of a liberal: "Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so that they can feel good for ten minutes...

...The Smothers Brothers Show was on television for only three years...

...For better and worse, they helped pave the way...

...It would be a great pity if everyone today is much too worried about those laggards, those dullish third persons...

...Shelley Berman, who for a brief period in the late 1950s was a household name, says that "the future is a breaker of promises...

...Jonathan Winters, of the possibilities of freeform improvisational comedy and of a sardonically updated view of Midwestern archetypes...

...The comedians who are the subject of Seriously Funny had a distinct advantage over those operating today: censorship...

...Above all, one didn't want the comedian to leave the stage, ever...

...Mike Nichols & Elaine May and Woody Allen, of self-analyt-g ical angst and a rearrange-£ ment of male-female rela-£ tions...

...Nachman thinks of the comedians he has written about as heroic...

...The great god Show Biz set strict boundaries, with lines that could only be crossed on pain of ending one's career...

...Depression, aggression, and monomania, with an occasional touch of alcoholism for added piquancy, are more like the order of the day for successful stand-up comics...

...An academic mathematician, he worked fewer than seven years, giving only 109 performances and retiring from show business at twenty-nine, but made, one assumes, a good deal of money on recordings (The Remains of Tom Lehrer, three CDs and a book of his lyrics, has recently been released by Warner Archives), and then returned to a light teaching load at the University of California at Santa Cruz...

...the only thing worse, in my opinion, is to be known as a national treasure...

...Wit, says Paul Valéry, entails defying anticipation...

...Then Sahl, looking down at his wristwatch, announced, with a gritting of teeth, a slight shake of the head, "He should have been here by now...

...Steve Allen, of the late-night talk show as a force in Comedy and of the reliance on wit over verbal pratfalls...

...Nichols & May, with their brilliant skits on psychoanalysis and highbrow culture heavily worn, were really mocking liberals...

...You could turn on the Ed Sullivan Show, or Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater, or the Jackie Gleason Show, and a number of others and not worry about having your politics, religion, little snobberies in the least ruffled...

...I just stopped getting funny ideas," he told Nachman...

...Swept up in wave upon wave of laughter, one was utterly captured and yet didn't want to be released...

...For myself, I'm pleased to learn that I have lived through at least one renaissance before pegging out...

...The individual careers of the stand-up comedians of the 1950s and early 1960s have not been long lived...

...They stand there alone (though some have had companions: Costello had Abbott, Allen had Burns, May had Nichols) and propose to make an audience of strangers forget their personal troubles, not to mention the world's endless supply of suffering, and laugh...

...Tom Lehrer told Nachman that "you can't say anything now that won't offend an audience...

...Many seem to have had five or six solid years of fame and high pay, and then, for one reason or another, crashed and burned, with the exception of those lucky enough to score with a television sitcom (Bob Newhart is the notable example here), or veer off into movies and theater (Mel Brooks, Woody Allen...

...A grossness seems to have set in, perhaps owing to the fact that obscene language and the subject of sex are now standard fare...

...As he chronicles the efflorescence of comedy during this period, one begins to believe he does not use it imprecisely: A genuine rebirth was underway...

...I'm going to piss on you," Bruce told an audience in Sydney, Australia...

...Childhood seems good in retrospect," said Jean Shepherd, who used to do comic vignettes over the radio about his growing up in Hammond, Indiana, "because we were not yet aware of the basic truth: that we're all losers, that we're all destined to die...

...In an earlier time, comedians blithely fired away...

...But he has written so solid and informative a book that these venial sins can be forgiven...

...Not everyone can laugh at going to the toilet or diddling with oneself or whatever seems to amuse today—catching your penis in a zipper, which of course is so brand-new...

...In the early 1950s, at the Compass Players, the precursor of Second City, I recall seeing Mike Nichols improvising a very swish businessman in a skit called "Executive Sweet...

...Fellow comedians are likely to be your toughest critics (as journalists, novelists, poets, playwrights are of their own fellow workers...

...Renaissance" is not a word I would have thought of, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to describe the comedians I saw on television and, occasionally, in nightclubs, but it is the word Gerald Nachman uses throughout Seriously Funny...

...Of an impressionist named Will Jordan, whose distinction resides in his having done the first successful impression of Ed Sullivan, Nachman writes, "Larceny, both grand and petty, is the central theme of Jordan's life...

...With an expression of chagrin Sahl allowed that this was so, but then, bucked up now, he added that he had hired a brilliant young Negro comedian and incorporated him smoothly into his act...

...Or is he skewering those who believe in the stereotype...

...My memory of watching some of the superior comedians whose careers are chronicled in Gerald Nachman's book is that of being utterly charmed by witty invention...

...Political correctness has foreshortened possible subject matter...

...He said Gary Hart was JFK "without the batteries...

...He does all this, but I think that, without setting out to do it, his book does something more: It suggests that what certain comedians are able to joke about today can presage what will become reality a few years, possibly decades, later...

...The skits on this tape assumed that his viewers knew something about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, classical composers, ballet, and French history—and Danny Kaye was never thought an especially cerebral comedian...

...Tom Lehrer complains that "people don't know enough today...

...This line is reminiscent of the one about how in the old days one went into a drugstore to buy a package of cigarettes and whispered to the pharmacist that one would also like a package of condoms...

...Stand-up comedy has never been easy...

...Why comedy, like learning, must be pitched to the lowest, not the highest, level, is far from clear, except for the belief that the cruder the presentation the larger the audience the safer the investment...

...They did rather standard things: developed a set comic persona (Jack Benny's cheapness, Bob Hope's wiseguy patter), or, if in duos, ignorant figure (Lou Costello, Gracie Allen) played off commonsensical straight-man (Bud Abbott, George Burns...

...Sid Caesar, of a new awareness of the satirical possibilities of TV...

...A few weeks ago someone lent me a videotape entitled The Best of Danny Kaye...

...But about all this comedy there was a safeness...

...Not all of Gerald Nachman's roster of stand-ups were, to use the French phrase, messugah...

...All the stuff in Annie Hall is really me," according to Mort Sahl...

...Rather different, this kind of humor, than watching Milton Berle get hit in the face with a huge powder puff...

...Connecting the bright-colored dots they strewed upon the air, one felt one was seeing things in a fresh and riveting and, somehow, useful way...

...An occasional wildly talented comedian— Danny Kaye comes to mind—could do both physical and verbal humor and toss in a few songs at no extra charge...

...These comics, out there trying to make a living, were, probably unbeknownst to themselves, an advance guard...

...Stan Freberg and Bob Newhart, of the encroaching, pervasive manipulation by the advertising and public relations culture...

...After the initial shock, hearing Bruce one realized that of course he was on target—no political event, no matter how shattering, finally gets in the way of business as usual—and the result is a gain, however small, in perspective...

...The television audience in New York didn't know what to do with this complicated but superior joke...

...He claims to be a lazy man with a short attention span, whose inspiration for further songs dried up...

...Sad to have to describe this experience in the past tense, but there are, alas, too many reasons to believe that we may never know it again...

...I have, for as long as I can recall, been amazed by stand-up comics— chiefly by their courage, though effrontery may be closer to the exact Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Now, when anything goes, one could have open-heart sex on the Comedy channel during prime time and no one would much care...

...Johnny Carson is thought to have glommed Jonathan Winters's character Maude Frickert for his character Aunt Blabby...

...His prose is sometimes rather more juiced up than one would like: He refers to "comic-kazis" and "all-out girl-illa warfare," calls too many comedians "larger than life," and others "icons," and still others, yes, "national treasures...

...Dick Gregory, of racial unrest...

...Nachman provides chronicles of the careers of all these comedians, along with those of Phyllis Diller, Bill Cosby, Godfrey Cambridge, Vaughn Meader, Will Jordan, Bob & Ray, David Frye, and Joan Rivers...

...Think upon it: Mort Sahl's political iconoclasm, Lenny Bruce's sexual and pharmacological liberationism, Mel Brooks's deliberate tastelessness—all are, in Trollope's phrase, "the way we live now...

...Bob Newhart, Steve Allen, Bob & Ray, Bill Cosby— all Gentiles—appear to have been less mad, much calmer...

...Lenny Bruce, of the sexual, pharmaceutical, and linguistic revolution (and of the anything-goes nature of comedy itself...

...Along with the Smothers Brothers, who took many shots at the way the Vietnam War was run, Tom Lehrer was one of the few comedians of the era who went after what were then thought conventional right-wing targets: the Catholic Church, the segregated South, and nuclear weapons (and, especially, German nuclear scientists...