Coming to Comedy Part Two: Stand-Up and Delivery

You Say You Want a Revolution

George Orwell has this to offer about comedy in his 1945 essay “Funny, but not Vulgar”: “A thing is funny when — in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening — it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution. If you had to define humour in a single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger they fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.”  Recall the opening sequence from Singin’ in the Rain included in Part One, in which Gene Kelly/Don Lockwood proclaims to the starstruck crowd gathered to celebrate the premiere of the new Lockwood and Lamont film his motto “always dignity”; the movie audience learns via flashback about the derision and scorn Lockwood faced from audiences and prospective employers alike along with glimpses of Don and Cosmo Brown’s long, desperate scramble to succeed, revealing the humiliation-strewn truth of his career path.  In place of the religious context Orwell draws on, with his bishop getting the custard pie in the face, we get the secular pomp of pop culture on the surface; we see behind the movie star veneer painted on by the studio, the striving clown behind the stylish white topcoat, the rakish fedora, the dazzling smile—quite a joke to begin a comedy about the “dream factory” of Hollywood.

Here's another example of “dignity sitting on a tin-tack” from the 1939 romantic comedy Ninotchka, directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  Advertising for the movie extended the promise “Garbo Laughs!” as the hook; the somber, reclusive Garbo had not previously appeared in film comedies but rather melodramas such as Camille and Anna Christie or adaptations from literary novels or historical biographies such as Anna Karenina and Queen Christina.  Here the Swedish legend who first made her name in silent films plays Soviet Russia’s special envoy Nina Ivanovna "Ninotchka" Yakushova, sent to Paris to oversee the sale of jewels confiscated during the revolution, as the Soviet economy needs an infusion of cash—the  script features several digs at the struggles and humorlessness of the Soviet state without mentioning Stalin, though the special envoy keeps a picture of Lenin at her bedside.  While striding through Paris to evaluate such engineering wonders as the Eiffel Tower and sewer system, she encounters Count Léon d'Algout, played by Melvyn Douglas, a debonair on-the-make gigolo representing the interests of Russian Grand Duchess Swana, played by Ina Claire, who wants to reclaim the jewels she believes rightfully belong to her.  Of course, the genre demands that Léon and Ninotchka fall in love, forcing them to reconsider their respective commitments to easy (decadent, debauched) Parisian living for him and unrelenting work to improve the stark realities of the Soviet state for her.  In this scene Léon has followed Ninotchka to a “workers’ restaurant,” lying that he frequents the establishment.  He tries to get her to laugh by telling her a series of jokes.

Let’s consider how he first tries to elicit her laughter in a traditional way, through jokes.  After starting and disregarding several possibilities as inappropriate and finally getting through an unsuccessful joke about two people looking at the moon, Léon settles on one last joke he considers a sure bet.  That joke’s punchline, “We have no cream, can it be without milk,” draws appreciative laughter from the eavesdropping workers eating their lunches.  Ninotchka judges the joke as not funny, stolidly eating her soup without changing expression.  Exasperated by her passive reaction, Léon rocks on his chair and topples over, breaking the table behind him and winding up sprawled on the restaurant floor, his manic indignation at her stoicism deflating whatever dignity he has left—finally, Ninotchka does laugh, along with the workers, who appreciate both jokes and pratfalls.  As we saw in the first installment, shared laughter in romantic/screwball comedies often brings couples together, serving as the kind of “tiny revolution” that builds a bridge between the central duo—after this scene, Ninotchka and Léon both qualify as smitten, and even the joke Ninotchka initially dismissed lingers in her mind, making her laugh when she returns to work on her state-sanctioned mission; for both of them, what Orwell calls the “established order” has been jolted into the uncertainty of romantic entanglement, with both experiencing an internal revolution (and dopamine rush).  Leon questions his self-centered carefree lifestyle while she questions her joyless subservience to the state.

Orwell gives us a quotable takeaway aphorism in the short declarative “Every joke is a tiny revolution,” a line many writers have repeated without additional context from Orwell’s essay. The line’s certainly memorable, though Orwell goes on to develop the implicit critical observation that only a “good” joke qualifies as revolutionary.  He describes less revolutionary humor as timid, mealy-mouthed: “Nearly all English humorists today are too genteel, too kind-hearted and too consciously lowbrow.” Such writers lack courage: “They and all their kind are dominated by an anxiety not to stir up mud, either moral, religious, political or intellectual.” He adds, highlighting that humor has an important social and political dimension, “But the point is that the modern emphasis on what is called ‘clean fun’ is really the symptom of a general unwillingness to touch upon any serious or controversial subject.” Orwell writes primarily of English comedy, with a brief salute to the spirit of irreverent comic invention he finds in humor writing in the United States; he also concerns himself mostly with literary humor, from novels to comic essays rather than performances on a stage.  We can nonetheless borrow the aphorism defining jokes as tiny revolutions to play a role as an analytical lens in our discussion of stand-up comedy in this installment.

I add immediately a gloss to Orwell’s observation that humorists can suffer from “an anxiety not to stir up mud, either moral, religious, political, or philosophical.”  The list of kinds of muds suggests sub-genres of joke-fueled revolutions spanning all spheres of daily life.  In the cases of overly-cautious humor Orwell derides, the “tiny revolution” of the “good” joke becomes the “tiny affirmation” conveyed by the average or adequate joke, one that reinforces the status quo, a kind of oblivious skating on the surface of “the mud” of daily life and all its enthymematic baggage waiting to be exposed and unpacked.  I won’t go full Aristotle here and lay out an elaborate taxonomy, though I do ask you to keep in mind as we move through the development of stand-up comedy in the United States this basic division between jokes as revolutions raising awareness that might lead to analysis, critique, and ultimately revision of private and public behavior (each sub-genre creates its own arena of revolution) and jokes as affirmations of the things the audience already believes, with their comfortable laughter serving as the soundtrack for keeping things pretty much as they are.  Thus we can consider jokes as always political in some sense, either calls to action (whether internal shifts in belief or public acts projected outward) or reassurances that we have permission to carry on as usual.

We can think about this framing in relation to the genre of “observational comedy.” Wikipedia’s short entry on the term describes it as “a form of humor based on the commonplace aspects of everyday life,” with comics drawing on “something which is common enough to be familiar to their audience, but not commonly discussed”; well, we can immediately quibble with that, as comics in the mass media age tend to return again and again to the same oft-discussed somethings, e.g. dating and marital relationships, relatives, in-laws, politics, driving, air travel, and any number of mundane topics of the day.  The entry continues, “Such observations are typically presented with the phrase ‘Have you ever noticed...?’ or ‘Did you ever notice...?’"  Proceeding from there, comics can choose to reside calmly in the realm of what the comic and audience share across their experience, relying on reference to a known world that contains oddities or irritations we can laugh about together; alternately, they can use the observational foundation to shine a bright light of challenge on what the comic sees, and insist the audience see clearly, using jokes to persuade the audience to see the world for what it is and imagine a revised world—the effective comic revolutionary aims to leverage observation to create change.

Pedagogy Break: For the invention stage of an essay assignment, whether a rhetorical analysis or a research-based argument, consider the usefulness of a “Have you ever noticed?” exercise.  For the RA, a “have you ever noticed” list might include observations about the moves the writer/speaker/creator of the text makes: “have you ever noticed how writers use a narrative as a hook in the introduction?”; “have you ever noticed how writers announce their main point?”;  “have you ever noticed how writers assume you know things that you don’t know?”  For the research assignments in PWR 1 and PWR 2, the “have you ever noticed” list would survey the existing conversation and operative enthymemes underlying the range of positions connected to the topic or question.  This kind of exploratory work can lead to formulating the “revolutionary plan” for the project.

Phenom-Monologists

In his spry, sprinting 2021 book The History of Stand-Up: From Mark Twain to Dave Chappelle, comic and comedy historian Wayne Federman locates the origins of the form in the mid-nineteenth century United States, providing brief accounts of “monologists” Artemus Ward and Mark Twain.  The two met once as young men out west in Nevada and got on well, as both had experience writing for newspapers and likely shared a comic sensibility; I’ve read accounts in several sources about the hijinks they pursued during their short time together—drunken carousing deep into the night played a central role.  One of these monologists lived a short meteoric life, the other a long one including persistent personal tragedy and great fame, ultimately becoming a national figure remembered today with the annual Mark Twain Prize awarded for career achievement in comedy. 

Born in Maine, Charles Farrar Browne (1834-1867) had moved to Cleveland by his early twenties, working for the Plain Dealer both as a reporter and as a writer of comic pieces.  His colleague George Hoyt describes his work station and work habits this way: “his desk was a rickety table which had been whittled and gashed until it looked as if it had been the victim of lightning. His chair was a fit companion thereto, a wobbling, unsteady affair, sometimes with four and sometimes with three legs. But Browne saw neither the table, nor the chair, nor any person who might be near, nothing, in fact, but the funny pictures which were tumbling out of his brain. When writing, his gaunt form looked ridiculous enough. One leg hung over the arm of his chair like a great hook, while he would write away, sometimes laughing to himself, and then slapping the table in the excess of his mirth." Remember the reference to the “gaunt form,” suggesting physical frailty—Browne died young.  Also note the trance-like state in which this odd young journalist pursued comic invention, conjuring and amusing himself with “funny pictures… tumbling out of his brain.”  We might use this as an illustration of the humorist’s “flow state” and also as a character type we’ll encounter throughout this installment—the humorist or comic sees the world differently, experiencing an internal revolution; at the same time the comic vision can isolate the comic, creating a distance between comic and audience and even perhaps the rest of humanity.  This description hints at the peculiar rhetorical position of the comic, both drawing material from the world and withdrawing into the inventing self to craft the shtick of comic revolution.

Edward Hingston served as Browne/Ward’s manager (Artemus Ward served as the moniker of Browne’s homespun persona in the newspaper pieces and then as a stage name on the monologist circuit), writing a long “prefatory note” for the posthumous 1869 edition of Artemus Ward’s Lecture, a transcript of one of his touring performances.  Early on Hingston describes how Ward came to perform his own newspaper stories, giving us a glimpse of street comedy in the mid-19th century: “The substance of which Ward then told me, was that while writing for the Cleveland Plaindealer he was accustomed to, in the discharge of his duties as a reporter, to attend the performances of the various minstrel troupes and circuses that visited the neighborhood.  At one of these he would hear some story of his own, written a month or two previously, given by the ‘middle-man’ of the minstrels and received with hilarity by the audience.  At another place he would be entertained by listening to jokes of his own invention, coarsely retailed by the clown of the ring and shouted at by the public as capital waggery on the part of the performer.” Ward’s eureka moment: “Then the thought would steal over him—why should that man gain a living with my witticisms, and I not use them in the same way myself?  Why not be the utterer of my own coinage, the quoter of my own jests, the mouthpiece of my own merry conceits?”  No harm in making money from one’s comic conjurings if an approving audience exists out there waiting to be found.

The question: what mode should this aspiring comic artist choose as his performing vehicle beyond the confines of his newspaper office?  Describing Ward’s movement toward becoming “a public man,” Hingston writes that the role “of a humorous lecturer seemed to him to be the best.”  This meant creating a new genre, according to Hingston: “It was unoccupied ground.  America had produced entertainers who by means of facial changes or eccentricities of costume had contrived to amuse their audiences, but there was no one who ventured to joke for an hour before a house full of people with no aid from scenery or dress.  The experiment was one which Artemus resolved to try.”  No mean task to create a new mode of comic performance.  Listen to Hingston describe how Ward put together his hour on the stage, keeping in mind all the stand-up performances you’ve seen and what you’ve read or heard about how comics build their sets: “Accordingly, he set himself to work to collect all his best quips and cranks, to invent what new drolleries he could, and to remember all the good things he had heard or met with.  These he noted down and strung together almost without relevancy or connection.”  Ward shared with Hingston that those who heard his plans to deliver comic lectures considered him a “fool.”  This fool had a vision, though, and ultimately an occupation that opened a world beyond Cleveland.

Hingston reports that Ward had no political or moral purpose: “The idea of instructing or informing his audience never once entered into his plans.  His intention was merely to amuse; if possible keep the house in continuous laughter for an hour and a half, or rather an hour and twenty minutes, for that was the precise time, in his belief, that people could sit to listen and to laugh without becoming bored; and, if possible, send his audience home well pleased with the lecturer and with themselves, without their having any clear idea of that which they had been listening to, and not one jot the wiser than when they came.”  To this point in Hingston’s preface Ward comes off as a comic who delivers tiny affirmations without challenging the audience’s beliefs.  But then we get a whiff of revolution in the air: “If in so making them laugh he could also cause them to see through a sham, be ashamed of some silly national prejudice or suspicious of the value of some current piece of political bunkum, so much the better.”  Orwell would likely approve and recommend that this aim should drive the act rather than a general desire to amuse and pass the time.  Ward’s insight that one hour and twenty minutes marked the limit of an audience’s ability to engage/laugh remains with us even now, as most stand-up sets on HBO or Netflix run between sixty and eighty minutes—one exception we’ll encounter later: Lenny Bruce going close to two hours at Carnegie Hall.

And what of Ward’s performing persona?  Again I rely on Hingston, as we have no video clips of Ward: “His style of lecturing was peculiar; so thoroughly sui generis, that I know of no one to whom to compare him, nor can any description very well convey an idea of that which it was like.  However much he caused his audience to laugh, no smile appeared upon his own face.  It was grave even to solemnity, while he was giving utterance to the most delicious absurdities.  His assumption of indifference to that which he was saying, his happy manner of letting his best jokes fall from his lips as if unconscious of their being jokes at all, his thorough self-possession on the platform, and keen appreciation of that which suited his audience, and that which did not, rendered him well qualified for the task which he had undertaken—that of amusing the public with a humorous lecture.”  In modern parlance, we might refer to this style as deadpan (think Steven Wright).  In her 1931 book American Humor: A Study of the National Character, Constance Pierce, a founder of what we now know as “American Studies,” briefly discusses Ward after a longer section on Mark Twain (more on that later).  She writes that “The slow still arrows of Artemus Ward struck deep into social and political absurdities.”  Echoing Hingston,  she notes that Ward’s “long countenance was always dull and impassive as he spoke.”  Further, “Everything he said seemed unstudied; his best lines were uttered with hesitation as if they were afterthoughts of which he was hardly sure.”  Again, we can discern his legacy in contemporary comedy, with some (not all by any means) comics keeping a straight face whatever they say, as if simply delivering their own unvarnished view of the world—nothing funny to see here.    

Ward died in England at the age of 32.  Hingston, in describing his friend’s physical appearance, notes an ethereal quality, a slim, delicate fragility that he cites as evidence that Charles Browne and thus Artemus Ward would not live a long life.  Printed editions of his lectures remain, with Hingston serving as loyal and loving chronicler of the departed monologist. 

Ward’s career benefitted from the rise of the lyceum movement in the United States during his brief lifetime, offering him a venue for performing in something of a “refined” setting away from the loud Cleveland streets where he first heard other comic performers shouting his lines.  The lyceum movement offered an early form of adult education (the 19th century also saw the development of the public school system that ultimately led to K-12 education), an alternative to the “lower pleasures” of minstrel shows and circuses.  Ward met the moment with his solemn delivery of the “absurdities” described by Hingston as central to the lecture, relieving the audience of having to learn anything (at least consciously) and likely delighting them by violating the expectations set for them by the serious expository lectures they may have grown accustomed to through the lyceum.  The excerpts below provide some sense of the act Ward developed; as I mentioned earlier, we have no recordings or video clips showing him at work (and to my knowledge no performer has resurrected Ward through impersonation, as Hal Holbrook so successfully did for Mark Twain in Mark Twain Tonight—more on that later).  In the printed text, Hingston decreases the size of the print to give an idea of when Ward offered a joke as an aside not central to the lecture; he also uses dashes liberally to suggest the absent-minded, digressive delivery style Ward employed to great effect.  

^{“How often do large fortunes ruin young men!  I should like to be ruined, but I can get on very well as I am.”}

^{“Time passed on.  It always does by the way.  You may have possibly noticed that time passes on.  It is a kind of way time has.”}

^{“I haven’t distinguished myself at all as an artist—but I have always been more or less mixed up with art.  I have an uncle who takes photographs—and I have a servant who—takes anything he can get his hands on.”}

^{“It was in my schoolboy days that I failed as an actor—the play was the “Ruins of Pompeii”—I played the Ruins.  It was not a very successful performance—but it was better than the ‘Burning Mountain.’  He was not good.  He was a bad Vesuvius.”}

^{After telling a story about managing sideshow acts: “This story hasn’t anything to do with my Entertainment, I know—but one of the principal features of my Entertainment is that it contains so many things that don’t have anything to do with it.”}

These excerpts come from Ward’s own prefatory remarks followed by a “lecture” focused on Ward’s visit to Salt Lake City, where he performed at the “Opera House” and met Brigham Young and other members of the Mormon community of the time.  The main narrative includes many descriptive details about Mormon society in the city observed during the visit, including references to how to get a drink and how residents who came to the lecture paid in goods rather than money.  Hingston provides a running commentary providing additional context about his travels with Ward and how well the community tended Ward when he fell ill.  Finally, the lecture text includes many visual illustrations reproducing the “panorama” that Ward used to accompany his words, making this an early example of a “multi-modal” oral presentation.  The panorama included drawings and paintings and maps to supplement the audience’s experience of the narrative provided by Ward’s words.  Often, Hingston notes, Ward asked for intentionally mediocre drawings (sometimes out of necessity, when he could not procure more artistic visuals) that he then incorporated into his comedic observations in his absentminded manner.  If you want the full Artemus Ward experience glossed by Hingston, you can find a pdf of the entire preface and lecture including the illustrations available free here.

Pedagogy Break: We can consider the PWR 2 oral presentation of research a kind of monologue.  In nearly every final presentation I’ve seen/heard as a Lunsford Award judge, the presenter steers clear of humor, emphasizing the expository and persuasive components of academic argument, with the visual elements providing pictures, roadmaps, and text-based slides highlighting key sources, data, and elements of the argument.  How might we borrow something from Ward’s twist on the lyceum lecture?  Perhaps an invention activity midway through the research process through which the writer/researcher/presenter develops a parallel presentation of asides, reflections, digressive illustrations, self-talk, counterpoint—all in all the kind of things that generally don’t get included in an oral presentation.  What might such an invention activity reveal about how to stretch the genre of the oral presentation in ways that engage the audience through sharing the unexpected and the generally silent subtext that might illuminate the subject and the speaker’s research process and thinking in useful ways?

Twain on Humankind: “…the only animal that blushes.  Or needs to.”

Samuel Clemens came and went with Halley’s comet, born in 1835 when the comet flashed by earth and passing in 1910, when the comet came and went again.    Late in life, after achieving international fame as a writer and traveling lecturer, Twain wrote the short essay “How to Tell a Story,” which we can read now as making a claim for the garrulous strand of “stand-up comedy” (a term unknown at the time) as a distinctly American art form.  I quote at length to share how he defines the humorous story as separate from the comic or witty story:

“There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

“The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

“The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.”

I’ll interrupt with a note here taking us back to the earlier clip from Ninotchka.  We can think of Léon as the “anybody” who can tell a comic story (joke), however much he struggles to make Ninotchka laugh.  He tries too hard—perhaps the worst thing someone telling a joke can do is announce that something funny is coming (and guaranteed to provoke laughter).  More from Twain that we can apply to the mistakes Léon makes and that Artemus Ward doesn’t (and what Ward does instead as an ace humorist):

“The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the ‘nub’ of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.

“Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know it is a nub.

“Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wondering what they had found to laugh at.”

I don’t necessarily share Twain’s level of disdain for the comic and witty story as he describes them, as I find those variants necessary for everyday social interaction (e.g. “let me tell you this funny thing that just happened,” though we should be wary of raising expectations too high and laughing ourselves in advance of delivering the goods—let Léon serve as a cautionary example); I do accept, though, his claims about the artistry necessary to telling the humorous story as he defines the genre.  Crucially, as he notes, “The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling,” not the content; I also appreciate his account of how to downplay the “nub,” or punchline in modern terms: “in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know it is a nub.” 

Constance Pierce has much to offer about Mark Twain in American Humor, much of which aligns with Twain’s account of how he aimed to tell the humorous story: “He was never the conscious artist, always the improvisor.  He had the garrulity and the inconsequence of the earlier storytellers of the stage and tavern; and his comic sense was theirs almost without alteration.”  She notes the importance of the wide open west to providing space for the development of his style: “…even his lecturing began in the west, the lecturing which was not lecturing at all but the old, spacious form of the theatrical monologue.”  She comments on how the United States and its comics had little use for European traditions, though both Ward and Twain lectured in England to enthusiastic receptions, getting laughs from the premise that citizens of the former colonies lacked culture: “Mark Twain followed the cult of newness like a thousand comic prophets and serious exhorters who had gone before him.  He preferred copies of masterpieces to the originals because they were brighter.” 

In place of Ward’s physical frailty and ethereal appearance, Pierce describes Twain as something of an earthbound narcissist: “Thin-skinned, so sensitive that he could hardly endure a joke turned against himself, he showed the quick revulsions, the neurotic explosiveness, which for long had broken forth into a long-winded comic vein.  His fun was often half perplexity, like a revolt from crowding circumstance with no secure base anywhere… The savage note sounded, with the crackling weakness of the sardonic, like the inevitable outcome of the romantic mood gone wrong.”  I want to highlight here Pierce’s use of “neurotic,” which likely had different connotations when she wrote her book nearly a century ago; however, I plan to trace the thread of neurosis woven into stand-up, and I appreciate Pierce using the adjective in her description of Twain.  Hingston doesn’t use the term in describing Ward—“neurasthenic” seems more apt in aligning with the description Hingston provides—but I’ll venture that Ward and Twain represent two strands of neurosis, both of which we’ll encounter later, the “savage” and “sardonic” variety Pierce ascribes to Twain and the absentminded, not-of-this-world version lightly embodied by Ward.

We have many pictures of Twain, but many of us likely call to mind Hal Holbrook performing as Twain when summoning an image of the man (and Star Trek: The Next Generation fans might remember the actor Jerry Hardin playing Twain in the two-part episode “Time’s Arrow”).  Holbrook (1925-2019) first played Twain in 1954, as a young man impersonating an older man.  He appeared as Twain on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 (on my first birthday, oddly enough), off-Broadway in 1959, won a Tony Award for the 1966 Broadway version, and an Emmy nomination for a 1967 television performance of Mark Twain Tonight.  He certainly played other roles (including Abraham Lincoln on the historical figure side), but he continued to play Twain off and on for sixty years.  In a 1969 interview with William Goldman, Holbrook said this about how he constructed the show out of Twain’s published work:

"Who wants to see an evening about a literary figure? I knew that in the first act I had to overcome that natural reluctance, so my biggest desire was to make them laugh their asses off at the start, so they'd go out at intermission and say, 'Hey, this guy's funny.' The second act became the social-comment act. I'd start with some funny material to get them again (but not too much of it, or they'd never stop laughing and take the show right away from you). In the last act I gave them the Twain they'd been expecting all along: warm, whimsical, memories of childhood.” 

Let’s consider a clip that provides social commentary.

In a 1967 performance, Hal Holbrook contemplates human nature and the “humiliating” results of contemplating the “reasoning animal.”  Orwell would likely appreciate the straightforward engagement with religion and the conflicts arising from theological differences as well as the critique of patriotism and war.

An audio clip of actor William Gillette speaking at Harvard in 1934 including his rendering of Twain’s voice, based on having lived near him as a child.  We’re more accustomed to Holbrook’s version of Twain’s voice.

The only existing film footage of Twain, filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909 during a visit to Twain’s home.  Colorized, but Twain wears the familiar white suit.       

Bert Williams: "the funniest man I ever saw—and the saddest man I ever knew." (a comment attributed to W.C. Fields, who worked with Williams in vaudeville)

In his history of stand-up, Wayne Federman identifies two additional foundational figures born a generation after Ward and Twain, Bert Williams and Will Rogers.  In considering these two, we’ll observe how technological advances including radio, audio recording, and film (first silent, then sound) made comic performances available on a scale beyond what Ward and Twain could access, notwithstanding Twain’s appearance in the silent film made by Edison.  While Williams and Rogers both toured extensively, they reached mass audiences who never saw them in person, through records, films, and radio broadcasts, parallel to what we saw in Part One with vaudeville acts including Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, and the hoofers-gone-to-Hollywood of Singin’ in the Rain.

Egbert Austin Williams, born in Nassau, Bahamas, in 1874, had a career that spanned vaudeville, audio recordings, silent films, and a historic stint in the Ziegfeld Follies.  His parents moved with him from the Bahamas to New York when he was a toddler.  Before he turned twenty, he moved west to join minstrel shows on the west coast, including in San Francisco, where he met future vaudeville partner George Walker.  The New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts overview on Bert Williams includes this unsubstantiated claim about the young Williams: “After completing his secondary education, he is said to have attended Stanford University for two semesters with the intention of studying engineering but quit due to a lack of finances.”  Hmm.  That would have happened right as the university opened in 1891.  Perhaps I’ll ask the university archivist to confirm or deny.  In any case, Williams and Walker worked steadily in San Francisco and then made their way east, appearing in medicine shows and ultimately becoming vaudeville headliners in New York, starring as well in several musical comedies.

Again from the New York Public Library site: “’In Dahomey,’ a satire on the American Colonization Society's ‘Back to Africa’ movement, made black theatrical history by opening at the New York Theatre in Times Square. With the book by Jesse A. Shipp, the lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar and the music by Will Marion Cook, this landmark piece was written, produced and performed entirely by blacks. The show ran from 1902 until 1905, including cross-country tours and a seven-month tour of England, where it served to introduce the old slave dance, the Cakewalk, to European audiences.”  After Walker fell ill and could no longer perform, the overview addresses the next stage of Williams’s career: “In 1910 Florenz Ziegfeld, the most important theatrical producer of the time, signed him to star in the 1910 production of the famous ‘Ziegfeld Follies.’ For almost a decade, Williams, the only black performer in the cast, appeared in several editions of the ‘Follies.’ He received featured billing in the early years of the show and appeared opposite such stars as Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor.”

We don’t have video or audio records of Williams performing monologues, but we have access to recordings of several of his songs and videos of several of his pantomime sketches and silent movies.  One last excerpt from the NYPL archives overview describing what they offer to scholars:

“The first volume contains the lyrics to twenty songs, two of which ‘Nevermo’ and ‘The Lee Family’ were recorded by Williams on Columbia Records in 1915 and 1916, respectively.

“The second volume entitled ‘Anecdotes, Jokes, Axioms, Proverbs, and Puns...’ contains over two hundred jokes or ‘lies’ told by Williams and written down by Rogers. These dialect stories, all of which contain a flavor of fable and black folklore, are primarily about rural or unsophisticated characters. They were first used by Williams in the summer of 1909 when he experimented in vaudeville as a solo performer. Later, while he was with the ‘Ziegfeld Follies’ he used these stories as a sort of monologue between songs.” 

1913 recording of “Nobody,” re-recorded after the original 1906 recording sold out its available copies.  The lyrics describe a woebegone character describing his isolation: “When life seems full of clouds and rain/And I am full of nothin' and pain/Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain?/Nobody.”  The chorus: “I ain't never done nothin' to nobody/I ain't never done nothin' to nobody, no time/So until I get somethin' from somebody sometime/I'll never do nothin' for nobody, no time.”

We also have this short documentary from David Warfield with comments from a range of scholars illuminating the context and complex social dynamics of the time.  Well worth watching for the analysis provided by the scholars, including whether the Williams character “Jonah Man” inspired Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character. 

Historian David Suisman, in his short essay on Williams and Walker for the Library of Congress, writes this about how W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington perceived the duo’s comedy and its effect on society: “Both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois praised them as avatars of uplift. Washington saw their work as embodying a ‘more modern’ and ‘more worthy kind of Negro comedy.’ Du Bois applauded their move away from deleterious minstrel stereotypes and toward what he saw as ‘a new light comedy’ of a new era. Years later, upon Williams’s death, Du Bois remembered him thus (in words that might well encompass Walker as well): When in the calm after day of thought and struggle to racial peace we look back to pay tribute to those who helped the most, we shall single out for highest praise those who made the world laugh; Bob Cole, Ernest Hogan, George Walker, and above all, Bert Williams. For this was not mere laughing; it was the smile that hovered above blood and tragedy; the light mask of happiness that hid breaking hearts and bitter souls. This is the top of bravery; the finest thing in service. May the world long honor the undying fame of Bert Williams as a great comedian, a great negro, a great man.”  The New York Public Library archive article cites Booker T. Washington asserting this about Williams: “He has done more for our race than I have. He has smiled his way into people's hearts; I have been obliged to fight my way." These testimonies about the impact of a comic performer like Williams suggest a revolution of perspective generated by a sense of shared humanity illuminated by comic performance, a kind of observational humor growing out of sharing in the human condition.

I don’t have access to the New York Public Library archive of dialect stories Williams told on stage while in character.  I did find a range of quotations from Williams about how he viewed his vocation as a comic performer: “Comedy is not just about making people laugh; it is about challenging them to see the world from a different perspective.” That and this next statement serve as adjacent to Orwell’s view of the revolutionary potential of jokes: “Comedy has the power to shine a light on the darkest corners of society, exposing the absurdity and hypocrisy that often go unnoticed.” In terms of the personal benefit, the internal revolution, Williams states “Laughter is the ultimate act of rebellion, a refusal to let the challenges of life steal our joy.” In relation to the aesthetics of the comic, Williams offers “There is a certain artistry in comedy, a delicate balance between wit and timing. It is like a dance, where every step must be perfectly executed.”

Finally, I’ve seen this reflection included in several sources: “People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white. I answer ... most emphatically, ‘No.’ How do I know what I might be if I were a white man? I might be a sandhog, burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day. I might be a streetcar conductor at $12 or $15 a week. There is many a white man less fortunate and less well-equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient ... in America.”

Poet Lariat

Will Rogers, born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in 1879, didn’t want to take over managing the family ranch from his father Clem, giving up on the job after a couple of years and instead setting out to see the world, from Argentina to South Africa.  Broke in South Africa, he latched on to a wild west show, as he could do the specific rope trick the boss needed someone to do.  From that modest beginning, Rogers ended up appearing in 70 films (silents and talkies), writing over 4,000 newspaper columns for national syndication, and becoming perhaps the most popular radio personality of the twenties and thirties before his death in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935 at the height of his fame.  Sharing the bill with Bert Williams, he was a star attraction in the Ziegfeld Follies in the teens before getting too big for even high-end vaudeville. 

In his 2021 book We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy, historian of comedy Kliph Nesteroff devotes several chapters to Will Rogers.  He recounts an exchange between Rogers, known as the Oklahoma Kid even at the height of popularity on the New York stage and on the airwaves, and literary curmudgeon H. L. Mencken.  Nesteroff tells of the spat this way: “At a time when the population of the United States was 120 million, Rogers was averaging 40 million readers every day.  There had never been a Native American personality so influential among the white population.  He held serious sway, and his influence was disturbing to his literary colleague H. L. Mencken: ‘He alters foreign policies.  He makes and unmakes candidates… Millions of Americans read his words daily, and those who are unable to read listen to him on the radio… I consider him the most dangerous writer alive today.'”  This reminds me of network television gatekeepers like Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen thirty years later initially refusing to book Elvis Presley, a southerner playing rock and roll, despite the millions clamoring to see him gyrate while singing a kind of (young) people’s truth.

Nesteroff continues the tale: “Rogers responded to Mencken directly: ‘Come on, now, Henry, you know that nobody with any sense ever took any of my gags seriously.’  Mencken shook his head: ‘They are taken seriously by nobody except half-wits… in other words… 85 percent of the voting population.’”  Whether it’s a revolution in music or comedy turbocharged by expanding media, some self-appointed guardians of the “public good” will object.  Rogers cultivated a populist persona, saying “All I know is what I read in the papers,” making no claim to expertise, and “I never met a man I didn’t like,” suggesting that human beings had more in common than causes for division.

Excerpts from the 1922 silent film The Ropin’ Fool, utilizing slow motion to better highlight the skills Rogers developed through years of practice.  The soundtrack offers “Will-a-mania,” a song from the 1991 musical The Will Rogers Follies, written by Peter Stone, with music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; Keith Carradine played Rogers in the original production. We can think of Rogers’s use of the rope in his early comedy work as similar to how Jack Benny and Henny Youngman used a violin, Victor Borge used a piano, and in later decades how the Smothers Brothers and Steve Martin used musical instruments.

Will Rogers delivers his “Bacon, Beans, and Limousines” radio talk in 1931.  Rogers names the “only problem” facing the country as unemployment and cites the need for more equal distribution of wealth.  He contrasts “people starving” with the country’s wealth of resources.  He shares a cynical set of views about politicians and how they only serve the people during election years.  He speaks of how all the people contribute to the economy and thus all people should have food and shelter.  He separates his remarks from the “usual after-dinner hooey,” making an ethical claim about his plain-spokenness.  He has some kind words for President Hoover, who spoke after Rogers, at the end, calling him “a very human man,” which likely doesn’t undo the earlier criticism of politicians and “the big boys” responsible for the Great Depression.  Note the comments on Republicans and Democrats in relation to elections and the assignment of responsibility for economic conditions that create poverty and hunger.

A Back in Time documentary about Will Rogers, from his early life through his journey to fame and tragic fate.  As noted earlier, Rogers began in wild west shows doing rope tricks he learned as a youth.  When he made mistakes, he began to make comments about himself or the rope, which the audience responded to with laughter.  He was hooked by the response, and gradually the rope became a prop with the monologue the center of the act.  His wife Betty encouraged him to talk about current events, so he became a template for later comics like Mort Sahl and all the “fake news” comedy shows.  As noted earlier, he also became a prominent syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commentator.  The documentary’s tone tends to the hagiographic, but the encomium includes fascinating archival photographs and film footage.

In his chapters on Rogers, Nesteroff provides several excerpts representative of how Rogers approached social and political commentary in his radio talks and newspaper columns.  For example, Rogers said “I don’t make jokes.  I just watch the government and report the facts,” defining himself as a truth-teller in contrast to politicians.  Commenting on the two-party system, he wrote “If we didn’t have two parties, we would all settle on the best men in the country and things would run fine—but as it is, we settle on the worst ones and then fight over ‘em.”  Extending Mark Twain’s outrage regarding war, Rogers offered “I have a scheme of stopping war.  It’s this—no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.”  Addressing the Bankers Association at their 1923 dinner, he told them “Loan sharks and interest hounds.  I have addressed every form of organized graft in the United States, excepting Congress.  So it’s naturally a pleasure for me to appear before the biggest.”  In the midst of Prohibition, he continues “You are without a doubt the most disgustingly rich audience I ever talked to, with the possible exception of the Bootleggers Union.”  When the Depression hit in 1929, he excoriated those same bankers: “You will say, what will all the bankers do?  I don’t care what they do.  Let ‘em go to work, if there is a job any of them could earn a living at.” 

He didn’t spare the government: “When a party can’t think of anything else they always fall back on lower taxes.  Presidents have been promising lower taxes since Washington crossed the Delaware… but our taxes have gotten bigger and their boats have gotten larger until now the President crosses the Delaware in his private yacht.”  Finally, Rogers found fault with the unhealthy effects of mass media on politicians, an early warning about the dangers of blurring the line between entertainment and publicity and the discussion of public policy and governance: “I think the camera has done more harm for politics than any other faction.  Everybody would rather get their picture than their ideas in the paper.”  Even then he saw the danger of the mass media wielded to drive division: “It just shows that if you can start arguing over something, and get enough publicity to keep the argument going, you can divide our nation overnight as to whether spinach or broccoli are the most nutritious.”

Due to the lack of additional video clips of Rogers delivering comic observations, I offer some additional Will Rogers quotations, starting with one of his most famous: “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat!” A take on professional expertise: “An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.” Another comment on war: “You can’t say civilization isn’t advancing: in every war, they kill you in a new way.” A declaration that the country will survive politicians: “Every time we have an election, we get in worse men and the country keeps right on going. Times have proven only one thing and that is you can’t ruin this country even with politics.” A comment on social welfare programs: “We are sure living in a peculiar time. You get more for not working than you will for working, and more for not raising a hog than for raising it.” A criticism of wanting things one can’t afford: “Another way to solve the traffic problems of this country is to pass a law that only paid-for cars be allowed to use the highways.” A note on who belongs in the country: “In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.” A view of the rancor of political negotiation: “I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.” Finally, an observation on money and politics: “Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.”

Stand-Up Gets a Name

Let’s jump forward to the late 1940’s, with radio and movies entrenched in popular culture and television about to colonize households across the US.  Wayne Federman acknowledges that the origin of the term “stand-up” “remains in dispute among comedy historians.”  He locates the first printed instance of the term in the show business publication Variety in June 1948 in a review of vaudevillian Lou Holtz appearing at Slapsy Maxie’s nightclub in Los Angeles.  Patrick Goldstein, in a 2011 blog post in the Los Angeles Times, addresses the question of whether the club was owned by Mickey Cohn, a notorious LA gangster.  He writes, “According to most historical accounts, Maxie Rosenbloom, a former prizefighter, was simply the front man for Cohn, who actually owned the joint.” Goldstein continues to reveal a more complicated story featuring clothing store owner Sy Devore, who had come west from New York, where he had provided clothes for many well-known entertainers including Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald: “Being so good at hanging out, it was inevitable that Sy would try his hand at running a nightclub. He knew Slapsy Maxie well--according to Marti, the ex-boxer turned bit actor showed up nearly every day at a barber shop that was located inside Sy’s Vine Street store. So Sy and Al bought themselves a nightclub. For a while, things were flush--Martin and Lewis made a big splash when they played the club, which also hosted performances by the likes of Jackie Gleason and Danny Thomas.” 

Television swept away the nightclub as the primary venue for this newly-named genre of comedy, but the narrative above connects to another etymology Federman shares, quoting comic Dick Curtis as quoted by Kliph Nesteroff in another of his books, The Comedians: “The Outfit used to manage fighters.  A stand-up fighter is a guy that is a puncher.  A stand-up guy was a guy who was tough and you could depend on.  The Outfit managed fighters and they managed clubs that booked comics, so the term found its way into the lexicon of nightclubs.  A guy who just stood there and punched jokes—joke, joke, joke—he was a stand-up comic.”  What to believe?  Perhaps the Curtis version provides some context for the often violent language associated with stand-up.  I have two relevant books on the comedy shelves in my office, one titled I Killed: True Stories of the Road from America’s Top Comics and the other I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and Hard Times in Stand-Up Comedy’s Golden Era, both about the lives of stand-up comics in the decades after that first use of the term in Variety.  Federman quotes Bob Hope reminiscing about his vaudeville days; the phrase “in one” predates “stand-up” as a descriptor of the mode, but the aura of violence remains: “In vaudeville I used to come out in one.  Do about twelve minutes.  And just murder the audience.”  Keep this fraught relationship between comic and audience in mind as we move through the history of this sometimes gladiatorial genre.  

For now, let’s contemplate for a paragraph or two how the television medium affects stand-up, both from the performer and the audience perspective.  Federman quotes Bert Williams about how he approached working on a theater stage: “I study carefully the acoustics of each theatre I appear in.  There is always one particular spot on the stage from which the voice carries better, more clearly and easily than from any other.  I make it my business to find that spot before the first performance, and once I find it, I stick to it like a postage stamp.”  If Williams had lived to appear on television, he might instead have studied microphones and speaker systems, camera quality and camera angles; the spot to stand on would likely be marked with tape by the stagehands. Federman goes on to quote Jackie Gleason about the experience of doing comedy in nightclubs: “I can’t think of anything more unsatisfying than trying to be intelligent in a nightclub.  What’s the point of talking politics or sociology to a bunch of drunks?”  When he moved to television as one of the medium’s pioneers, most famously on The Honeymooners, Gleason couldn’t know for sure how many in the studio audience or those watching at home were drunk, but he knew that the studio audience attended to pay attention and laugh (and would be removed if disruptive), and he couldn’t see the home audience (just the ratings as proof that an audience out there watched his antics on their sets).

For the audience in what Steve Allen in Part One called a “humor-washed” age, the comic performer no longer speaks from a (sometimes distant) stage to a theater full of people or a nightclub full of intoxicated revelers with intentions that might have nothing to do with engaging with comedy; rather, the magic box presents the comic as the focus of attention, with close-ups and various camera views that make the performer more than an erratic and elusive voice (depending on the acoustics of the venue and the behavior of the crowd) and a figure at some remove (depending on the quality of the seat).  The comic becomes a fully embodied human being in close (though electronically mediated) proximity, projecting a comic persona; this ultimately opens up possibilities for comic invention connected to both the nuances of the comic performance (gestures and facial expressions the camera will pick up, looking directly into the camera as if addressing each viewer individually, varying voice volume and tone) and the use of personal experience as part of the act.  I want to keep these performer and audience perspectives in mind as we survey how the stand-up genre evolved along with television as its primary medium.   

Spritzville City Limits

While Berry Gordy, his sisters, and collaborators such as Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye built Hitsville in that house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, while production and marketing mavens like Don Kirshner shepherded the young songwriting geniuses of the Brill Building toward their reshaping of popular music in the US, another legendary realm evolved in New York.  Welcome to Spritzville.  I begin the history of this place I have presumptuously named with its patron saint, a member of a submerged population group on the west side of Manhattan.  

St. Ancis of New York City

Thanks to Wayne Federman’s list of the four figures he considers the precursors of modern stand-up, I learned a lot about Charles Farrar Browne/Artemus Ward while putting together the opening section.  Without clips or his own Hal Holbrook, I still imagine him as a kind of nineteenth century wraith-like apparition; nonetheless, Browne/Ward now lodges in the part of my brain designated for All Things Comedic with some substance, based on my reading of Hingston’s introduction to Ward’s lecture and the script and notes from the lecture itself.  As we move forward to what I had planned as my original starting point for this series, the 1950’s, we encounter another wraith, another ghostly presence: Joe Ancis.  I found some snippets of biography in a 2013 blog post by Baltimore-based writer Dave Kiefaber, who begins with the line “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well,” which he had long attributed to Lenny Bruce; he goes on to correct the record by identifying Joe Ancis as the source.  He describes Ancis as “Bruce’s roommate, friend, and primary comedic influence.”  Further, he writes that “it turns out that Joe said a lot of things that Lenny would become famous for saying. I’m not saying that Lenny stole Joe’s act, but I am saying that Joe Ancis was the definition of an unappreciated genius.” 

He sketches the mean-streets milieu in which Ancis lived, stating that he “hung out with third-rate comedians, hustlers, aging showgirls, and everyone else who passed for a low-life in 1950s Manhattan. Specifically, he spent a lot of time around Hanson’s Drugstore, where all the unknown comics hung out during the day, and was widely considered one of the funniest people in New York.”  I’ve seen that claim elsewhere, in other accounts of those days in New York, asserting that Ancis was ranked by comics as the “funniest.”  Why, then, does he languish in obscurity?  Kiefaber offers this about what might have prevented Ancis from pursuing fame in the burgeoning comedy scene: “Joe Ancis was kind of an angry, neurotic mess. He was also too shy, and too fearful of the stage, to ever be a legit stand-up comedian, but he definitely left his mark on every comic in his social circle. Lenny Bruce learned about Jewish culture, jazz, and art appreciation from Ancis, and borrowed heavily from Ancis’ edgy, stream-of-consciousness vocal delivery.”  Remember that last phrase, “edgy, stream-of-consciousness vocal delivery,” also known colloquially as “the spritz,” for when we get to Bruce.  Also note Kiefaber’s labeling of Ancis as an “angry, neurotic mess” (an echo of Pierce’s description of Twain); finally, register this phrasing from the end of Kiefaber’s blog post, where he credits Ancis for “stand-up comedy’s transformation from hacky vaudeville routines and impressions to the weird form of public philosophy it is today.”  We saw glimmers of comedy as an accepted and consequential form of “public philosophy” in Twain and Rogers (recall Mencken’s objections to how Rogers influenced the public with his homespun folk wisdom); that genre remains an essential strand of modern stand-up.  But what to make of Ancis the “angry, neurotic mess” plagued by shyness and fear of public performance?  Ward translated his neurasthenic frailties into an absentminded deadpan persona; Twain turned what Pierce labels his sclerotic neurosis toward the development of his stage presence as a folksy yet acerbic truth-teller.  Young comics in the television age would branch off to create new paths, though I think of nearly all of them as members in good standing of Neurotics Unanimous.

Lenny, Son of Spritz

“I don't have an act. I just talk. I'm just Lenny Bruce.”  Lenny Bruce

Leonard Alfred Schneider was born in Mineola, New York in 1925 to parents Myron (Mickey) Schneider, who sold shoes, and Sadie Schneider (born Sadie Kitchenberg), who performed as a comic and dancer using the name Sally Marr; the parents divorced before Lenny turned ten, leading to infrequent contact with his father and long stretches of living with family members while his mother toured as an entertainer (reminiscent of Steve Allen’s childhood in Chicago).  Young Lenny grew up in Bellmore, on Long Island, leaving high school at sixteen to join the Navy; he served in North Africa and Italy during WWII.  Still in his twenties after the war, he tried to get into show business in New York, hanging out with the comics at Hanson’s drugstore and diner.  As noted above, he met Joe Ancis there, a meeting that many chroniclers including biographer Albert Goldman consider crucial to Bruce’s later success and notoriety.  Ancis, according to Goldman, provided Bruce with “meticulous schooling” regarding both content and method.  While in New York, though, Bruce performed in the vein of most other aspiring comics, appearing on shows such as Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts to do impressions inspired by rising comics like Sid Caesar.  Only out west, as an emcee at strip clubs in the San Fernando Valley (Bruce’s wife Honey Harlow worked as a stripper) did Bruce go full Ancis, full spritz.  According to Goldman, only then did the comic free himself from “all the restraints and inhibitions and disabilities that formerly had kept him just mediocre and began to blow with a spontaneous freedom and resourcefulness that resembled the style and inspiration of his new friends and admirers, the jazz musicians of the modernist school."  Note the jazz reference as a contrast to the folk genre of Twain and Rogers.  (When we get to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in a future installment, we’ll encounter a kind of homage to this part of Bruce’s career, when Midge Maisel fills the same emcee role at a New York strip club.) 

We learn more about the Ancis legacy from Jack Richardson’s 1974 review of Albert Goldman’s biography Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!!  Here’s Richardson’s fuller description of “the spritz,” a term I warn you I’ll return to throughout the rest of this installment.  Richardson writes, “In fact, it seems that Bruce pilfered much of his style from one Joe Ancis, a man who could walk into the comedians’ hangout, Hanson’s, and transform all the professional comics there into an audience. Ancis was a true improviser, a master of the spritz, a form of humor that is all a rush of words and free associations that push further and further into outlandishness until fresh, precise comic truths are reached. However, Ancis was temperamentally unsuited to be a professional performer, and when he was told that Lenny Bruce was doing him in his nightclub act, Ancis never protested, even when Bruce himself confessed that he felt a little like a thief.”  Note the rhetorical purpose of the spritz as a comic method, the arrival through unfettered invention at “fresh, precise comic truths.”  Freespeaking, kin to freewriting.

Along with the respected biography, Albert Goldman wrote a 1971 New York Times article called “What Lenny Bruce,” providing additional context about the influence of Ancis: “Lenny's greatest influence, however, was not a professional comedian but a highly original amateur as famous for his exploits as a salesman of shingles as for his hysterical, nonstop spritz. This was Joe Ancis, and his trademark was the ‘What if?,’ a zany travesty taking off from some absurd premise, a pattern Lenny's later routines were to reflect in such bizarre concepts as the Lone Ranger, a homosexual, and Sophie Tucker, a nymphomaniac. Even in those years, Lenny showed a tendency, later to become a mania, for taking out into public places whatever his friends did in private. As anybody who knew Lenny can testify, his invariable response to anything funny or bizarre was ‘I'm going to do that on the floor tonight.’”  Comic as cultural magpie.  Rogers claimed that he simply read the newspapers and shared his thoughts about what he read.  Bruce, in the urban hothouses of New York City and Los Angeles in the 1950’s, in the milieu of the Brill Building and the Greenwich Village folk scene in one and the sun-splashed yet frenetic sprawl of LA in the other, soaked up everything as a kind of rocket fuel for his spritz.

Richardson also places the comic in historical context in reviewing the Goldman biography: “Although Goldman does not belabor the point, he presents Bruce as a symbol of all the ferment that was going on in America beneath the surface of those peaceful Eisenhower years, a burlesque MC introducing bits of reality as seen by those whose ‘cool’ demanded their being neither intimidated nor outraged by the world. Such an attitude was capable of finding humor in everything, from natural disasters to liberal hypocrisy, and in his club performances and on his records Bruce gave us the comic articulation of this view of society. And of course if one forces oneself and other people to laugh at a plane crash, to accept that mortal predicaments are amusing in spite of the official solemnity that surrounds them, then there certainly can be no restrictions on the language used to light up these darker moments of the human comedy.”  Richardson doesn’t mention the “too soon” response that can aim to shut down a comic joking about a topical tragedy, though his account shows us the tension that still makes its way to the surface in audience reactions and critics’ reviews.

Lenny Bruce performs in one of his few television appearances, on The Steve Allen Show in April 1959.  He’s promised to work “clean” and stick to a pre-approved script, with the first throwaway line about Elizabeth Taylor and a bar mitzvah (she’d just married Eddie Fisher) the only deviation.  He addresses “bad taste” up front, telling the story of how he “became offensive.”  He includes some jokes about school misbehavior.  He asserts that the words he finds offensive have to do with acquiescent social commentary, the kind of hypocrisy Richardson alludes to above.  He goes into a bit on sniffing airplane glue, with George McCready in the role of the kid, incorporating an impression and pop culture reference.  His range of reference includes Louis Pasteur—one key feature of spritz is a free-wheeling range of reference (no spritz tradition, no Robin Williams).  He calls on the audience’s familiarity with film and television with “Cut to the toy store,” relying on mass media conventions regarding narrative method.  He offers casual transitions such as “What else offends me?”  He critiques Hollywood, leading to a set piece about Miguel losing his bull (incorporating a reference to popular comic Bill Dana doing his character Jose Jimenez).  Another extended narrative excoriates the Hollywood “brotherhood” message.  We then hear host Steve Allen riffing on the piano, with Bruce moving across the stage to write a nini-musical with Allen, setting up a scene about the break-up of a marriage and the aftermath; we move into a realm adjacent to sketch.  Note the exploding enthymemes: “For the kids’ sake, to break up.”  Scene.  “She left me.”  “Better off alone.”  The description of the new pad (“get a coffee table and make a door out of it”) has the offhand quality of a hipster Artemus Ward sneaking in a line.  Bruce turns chanteuse to sing “All Alone,” the continuing narrative interspersed with the chorus.  This clip gives us Bruce working within the constraints of network expectations. 

Part Two. Part Three. Part Four.

From 1959, three segments of Lenny Bruce talking with Hugh Hefner on the late-night Playboy’s Penthouse cocktail-party-themed talk show.  We may feel some queasiness about the setting, but Bruce offers us a long, slow, thoughtful spritz, with digressions, asides, free associations, riffs, impressions, shtick, and more (note his use of the term “monologist,” showing that the old label hasn’t entirely left the lexicon).  Hefner occasionally asks a question, for example the opening question about contemporary comedy, but mostly lets Bruce talk, along the way sharing his philosophy of comedy.  Specifically, Bruce provides an analysis of his own style of comedy, why the term “sick humor,” much in vogue at the time, has no meaning aside from a way to sell magazines (Time did a cover story on sick comics), and a categorizing of other comics including Steve Allen, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, and Lou Costello (he tells a “sick” Costello joke to make a point about where he personally draws the line).  He talks about the trade-offs of appearing on primetime network television, specifically The Steve Allen Show, leading to a long story about how a joke about his tattoo caused all sorts of problems (the opening season of Curb Your Enthusiasm engages with the same issue about burial Bruce describes in relation to the Larry David character’s mother).

I first saw this animated video from the late sixties in 1970 or so, in high school when working in a movie theater.  The audio comes from an extended bit in Bruce’s stand-up act, Thank You Mask Man, with Bruce voicing all the characters.  This represents the kind of surreal world-building that Bruce can indulge in when doing a long performance such as the Carnegie Hall show that follows below.  Warning: the audio of this animated short includes homophobic language toward the end.

Lenny Bruce appeared at Carnegie Hall in February 1961, several weeks after JFK’s inauguration.  While Carnegie most often featured musicians on its stage from its opening in 1891, the Hall did invite comics to perform, including Will Rogers in 1926.  As the Carnegie Hall website notes, “Comedy has been a significant part of Carnegie Hall’s history for more than a century. The Hall has played host to hilarious performances by vaudevillians, storytellers, stand-up comedians, authors, and outstanding comedic entertainers of all types including Will Rogers (1926), Bob Newhart (1961), Lenny Bruce (1961), Phyllis Diller (1962), Bill Cosby (1971), Groucho Marx (1972), Steve Martin (1978), Bob Hope (1984), Jerry Seinfeld (1992), Eric Idle (2000), and Robin Williams (2002).”  At the start of his long performance (nearly two hours), after his introduction as a truth-teller, Bruce shares with the audience his dream of playing Carnegie Hall, offering two comic fantasies about what he could imagine happening.  First, he imagines coming out and playing the violin (like a virtuoso) for an hour, leaving the audience befuddled because they expected a comic.  Second, he imagines an after-hours performance of his less-than-genteel comedy made possible by a janitor who allows him and the audience illicit entry to the hallowed site. 

If you have two hours to spare, listen to the audio of the set (apparently no video record exists).  Note the commentary Bruce provides about what kind of comedy he does.  He states explicitly that he doesn’t do jokes.  He makes several references to “bits.”  He also makes several references to “spritz” as a comic technique without defining the term—with this word and several others, he expects the audience to know the meaning, to be literate in the genre of comedy as a byproduct of living in a “humor-washed” age.  He frames some bits in relation to his purpose, setting up a context of exposing hypocrisy in the church, for example, with the bit about Moses and Jesus attending services at a New York cathedral, leading to the cardinal calling the pope for advice about what to do with the two guys standing in the back.  In this bit as well as others, Bruce invokes a shared culture he counts on the New York audience recognizing while also making a number of offhand allusions to people and culture that some audience members might not recognize.  Toward the end of the set Bruce offers his view of the talents of Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, and Shelley Berman, three other hot comics of the day—he praises Sahl for his intelligence and Newhart for his ingenuity, while describing Berman as a comic he doesn’t connect with before telling a story about Berman performing in Chicago and making a bad decision about complaining that some local mobsters are ignoring his act and having their own loud conversation (recall Gleason’s complaint about nightclub audiences).  Throughout the set Bruce returns to a theme about comedy and society more generally—things change, what’s acceptable changes, what’s funny changes.  The comic rides the wave of change.

Some closing lines from Lenny: “I'm not a comedian. And I'm not sick. The world is sick, and I'm the doctor. I'm a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.”  “If God made the body, and the body is dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer.”  “All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the bread line - right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.”  “The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.”  “Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”

Pedagogy Break: How can the spritz serve us in the academic context?  Well, imagine freewriting activities once student researchers have engaged enough with their sources to have a strong enough sense of the world of the topic; this can serve as an activity for the TIC and again for the RBA—the prompt might recommend the strategy of piling up references to sources, in colloquial associative language with parentheticals and editorial comments encouraged as well.  This kind of activity can also be conducted as a freespeaking exercise, a spritz version of the elevator pitch, quickly going through names of sources, adding asides and summaries and key phrases.

V-Neck Spritz

“He was the best thing I ever saw. There was a need for revolution, everybody was ready for revolution, but some guy had to come along who could perform the revolution and be great. Mort was the one. He was the tip of the iceberg. Underneath were all the other people who came along: Lenny Bruce, Nichols & May, all the Second City. Mort was the vanguard of the group.”  –Woody Allen

Morton Lyle Sahl was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1927, to parents Harry Sahl, an aspiring Broadway playwright, and Dorothy Schwartz Sahl.  Harry and Dorothy left New York to run a tobacco shop in Montreal before moving the family to Los Angeles where, again, Harry did not manage to become a working writer, in this case of screenplays; instead he became a court stenographer.  Young Mort, a member of his high school ROTC, dropped out briefly to try to join the army, lying about his age; his mother brought him back to LA to finish high school, after which he did join the Army Air Forces, serving in Alaska.  He began to have trouble conforming to authority in the military, writing articles critical of the Army for which he was punished with KP duty, but he served until 1947.  Then he attended Compton College and USC, completing a degree in traffic engineering and city management in 1950.  After struggling to make it as a writer and performer in LA for several years, reminiscent of his father’s thwarted dreams, he followed Sue Babior, the woman who would become his first wife, to the Bay Area.  While she attended Berkeley, he found a welcoming “home” for his talents in San Francisco, finding steady work as a stand-up at Enrico Banducci’s club the hungry i (both anti-capital letters and capitalism in general).  Legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen boosted his career with this pithy endorsement: “I don’t know where Mr. Sahl came from, but I’m glad he’s here.”  His success in San Francisco led to bookings across the country, including in New York, so he triumphed where his father did not.   Sahl notes that in some venues he was the first “stand-up comic” to appear, as the term and the genre remained relatively new, as described earlier.  

YouTube doesn’t offer any clips of Mort Sahl in the 1950’s.  The earliest audio clip I can find there is this one from 1960, in which Sahl talks about the 1960 presidential election from the stage of Banducci’s the hungry i.  He questions the value of television debates and speaks of Nixon and Kennedy as squabbling children.  He tells a joke about Kennedy’s ambition to be president when receiving his WWII medal from Truman.  He also analyzes the candidate’s television mannerisms and posturing.  He invokes Will Rogers, noting that he works in the same tradition, though pretending to be an intellectual rather than pretending to be a yokel as Rogers did.  Both Rogers and Sahl generally keep their focus on the political sphere, though both use politics to muse on larger cultural issues.  We see in both Sahl and Bruce a hyper-awareness of popular culture and mass media, with Sahl more the arch professorial monologist and Bruce the hipster adventurer skipping from reference to reference and spinning fevered cinematic scenarios featuring public figures. 

Here’s an odd 1960 clip of a show called Jackpot Bowling with Milton Berle and Mort Sahl.  Berle explicitly discusses “old comedy” versus “new comedy,” naming Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart as new comics along with Sahl.  Sahl talks about finding politics “fascinating.”  They also recycle the old exchange with one comic saying “I wish I’d said that” and the other responding “Don’t worry, you will.”  Berle had a reputation as a stealer of jokes; he certainly wasn’t alone in that.   

Mort Sahl talks politics on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963, with his signature prop, the newspaper.  He makes jokes about the Kennedys and US foreign policy in Laos.  He riffs on Nixon before his political comeback.  Sahl shares some details from his life offstage, referring to writing articles about comedy, the CIA, and women as well as his TA days at the University of California, setting up jokes about the Math, Philosophy, and Psychology departments (apparently his intellectual persona had some substance based on experience, just as Rogers had some yokel bona fides).  Drawing from the news of the day, he jokes about Nelson Rockefeller and NY politics and about the space program, maintaining a conversational, associative style (enacting the “cool professor” persona).  He jokes about details members of his audience likely know something about, for instance Kennedy being Catholic and appointing Jews to his cabinet.  He brings politics and Hollywood together in the Academy Award joke about Kennedy climbing on his own face in a Hitchcock movie.  I encountered an apocryphal anecdote that JFK’s father Joseph Kennedy sent an envoy (think Robert Duvall going to visit the Hollywood mogul Woltz early in The Godfather) to warn Sahl to stop making critical jokes about his son when he became president.  In an ironic twist of sorts, Sahl became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination for a period of time, talking about it incessantly in his act, parallel to how Bruce toward the end of his career (and life) focused on his legal cases, reading from court transcripts in his act.

Gene Barry introduces Mort Sahl on Hollywood Palace in 1967 to explain US politics.  He offers an initial joke about actors in politics (probably a Reagan reference, as the actor had by then become governor of California).  Then, as the centerpiece of the set, he uses a blackboard to deliver a lecture on the left, right, and middle in US politics, demonstrating a particular brand of mass media teaching.  In the “lecture,” he weaves in many topical references, also providing an overarching sociological  commentary on how people shift from group to group based on self-interest and socio-economic affiliation.  He settles on a case study focused on the war in Vietnam to highlight attitudes, designating “Right-wing social democrats” as the majority. 

Some lines from Mort Sahl, reminiscent of Will Rogers.  About comics: “There are talented people along the way, although very few come to mind. They're not very daring. Part of the problem is that comedians don't want to overthrow anything. They want to join it.”  Orwell would like this assertion.  “Comedians have to challenge the power. Comedians should be dangerous and devastating - and funny. That's the hardest part.”  Orwell would like that one too, and this one:. “Too much comedy today is vulgar, not clever. I say that as a comedian and as a consumer.” About getting into trouble with the powerful: “I was always biting the hand that fed me. It was compulsive. Kennedy was very good to me, and I attacked him as soon as he was elected. I attacked him before he was elected.”  This critical stance toward the political regime led to Saul’s career dive in the sixties.  About his comic method: “I was afraid no one would laugh, and I wanted to pretend I wasn't noticing the audience. I didn't want the audience to get the idea I was telling a joke and waiting for a laugh.” This seems similar to Artemus Ward not playing explicitly for laughs.  “Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.”  “A conservative is someone who believes in reform. But not now.”  These two aphoristic lines seem reminiscent of Twain and Rogers.  He draws a distinction between himself and Rogers: “Will Rogers… used to come out with a newspaper and pretend he was a yokel criticizing the intellectuals who ran the government.  I come out with a newspaper and pretend I’m an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government.”  Finally, a take on Nixon: “Nixon’s the kind of guy that if you were drowning fifty feet off shore, he’d throw you a thirty foot rope.  Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way.”

Pedagogy Break: using Sahl’s blackboard bit as a model, have students describe the range of views about their topic or issue locating sources along a continuum as Sahl does.  Likely many of you already do visual mapping activities as part of the research assignment.  This can also serve as an invention activity for the oral presentation in PWR 2.

Gender Spritz

Celine Zeigman, born in Paris in 1911, lived nearly as long as Nathan Birnbaum; while George Burns made it to 100, Jean Carroll died in White Plains, New York at 98 in 2010, six days short of 99.  While Birnbaum/Burns had a career resurgence described in Part One, Zeigman/Carroll left show business in 1968, though later in life she participated in events such as a Friar’s Club salute to women in comedy in 2006 featuring Joy Behar and Lily Tomlin.  Grace Overbeke considers her career in the 2024 NYU Press book The First Lady of Laughs: the Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America's First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian. (Several years ago I happened on now-professor Overbeke’s undergraduate honors thesis “America’s Madwomen” written in 2008 at Wesleyan—her first book expands on the chapter about Carroll in the thesis, which also includes chapters on Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Pearl Williams and Belle Barth, Totie Fields, Rita Rudner, Roseanne Barr, and Sarah Silverman)  Carroll began her career as part of the song and dance duo Carroll and Howe with her husband Buddy Howe, who later became her manager.  She appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show more than twenty times in the fifties and sixties, with material focused mostly on women’s lives during those decades. 

Jean Carroll in 1955 starts with a version of a Gershwin song about how wonderful it is to be in love but quickly stops to “talk about love” without the sugar dusting of popular music celebrating that emotional state.  In Part Four of last year’s series on popular music, I devoted a lot of space to discussing enthymemes about the heaven and hell of love providing the alternate poles of love songs.  We can locate gender comedy as gravitating toward the perpetual hell of long-term relationships, generally marriage, when the initial days in heaven have passed.  Few comics joke about the positive side of the love continuum—almost all joke about what waits for young lovers on the other side of ecstasy.  In The Big Bang Theory, at Leonard and Penny’s wedding, Sheldon Cooper asks his mother Mary, “Why do people cry at weddings?”  Mary answers, “They’re getting ready for what comes next.”  These comics also come next.

Carroll pivots quickly from how wonderful love can be to talk about her first boyfriend “Moot” (note how the wordplay joke falls flat, leading her to say “come on” to the audience).  The first joke that lands lays out a love triangle, with both the comic and Moot in love with Moot.  She moves on to Jack, “six foot two and a solid eighty pounds.”  In the description of meeting Jack, Carroll uses courtship spritz, with lots of wordplay and several forays into tangents reminiscent of Gracie Allen’s logic.  The honeymoon (Jack doesn’t come along) continues in this vein of chipper surrealism (ventilation provided by a hole in the ceiling and a hole in the floor).  She finishes by returning to the love song, an indication that in 1955 the audience expected a woman on stage to sing and/or dance, not just tell jokes upending enthymemes about love.

On The Ed Sullivan Show in 1959, Jean Carroll talks about her vacation in Florida.  Note that she no longer has to sing.  She makes a show of finding her mark, looking for the designated spot on the floor.  She begins by referencing her own weight, projecting that the audience thinks she’s “gotten fat.”  Difficult to imagine a male comic starting with that.  More wordplay and more logic that brings Gracie Allen to mind (“Are you taking something for your cold?”  “Well, make me an offer”).  After recounting medical adventures in Florida, she shifts the focus to her daughter, first invoking enthymemes about the joys of motherhood and immediately sending the daughter off to camp at the age of one and a half.  We also get a move to the suburbs and the craziness there, including her husband joining the kennel club as a dog in order to get fed.

Another appearance on Sullivan, from 1964, beginning with some banter with the host.  Sullivan talks about her losing weight (something that wouldn’t come up with Jackie Mason or Shelley Berman, for instance) and her new hairstyle.  There’s a meta moment when he says everything is new, and Carroll responds “Wait till you hear the jokes.”  Sullivan, aware of her usual topics, asks if she’ll make fun of her husband again; she responds, “Should I make fun of Alan King’s wife,” illuminating that comics of that era generally did material about the trials and tribulations of marriage.  In the bit, the husband says he’ll eat “anything” while the “rotten kid” says she’ll “eat a little something.”  Carroll refuses to fix two separate meals.  The family goes to a restaurant for more spritz.

Carroll briefly starred in a sitcom, The Jean Carroll Show, for ABC, in the early fifties, but the critics responded less than rapturously; anyhow, Carroll preferred to do stand-up until her retirement from show business.

Solo Sketch Spritz

Carol Creighton Burnett was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1933 to Ina Louise Creighton, a publicity writer for movie studios, and Joseph Thomas Burnett, a movie theater manager.  After her parents divorced in the late thirties, both moved independently to Hollywood, as did young Carol, who lived with her maternal grandmother in a one-room apartment in a boarding house.  She taught herself the “Tarzan Yell” at nine, realizing later that the yell served as a good vocal warm-up.  Grandmother Mabel played the piano, and she, Carol, and Carol’s half-sister sang popular songs together.  They also frequented the movies, which influenced Carol’s later parody sketches in her musical variety show.  Her first job (like mine) was as an usher in a movie theater in Hollywood (not Oak Park).  After graduating from Hollywood High, Burnett attended UCLA, switching her major from Journalism to Theater and English, with ambitions to write plays.  She had to take an acting class to apply for the playwriting program.  She reports: "Don't ask me why, but when we were in front of the audience, I suddenly decided I was going to stretch out all my words and my first line came out 'I'm baaaaaaaack!'"  She continues, “They laughed and it felt great. All of a sudden, after so much coldness and emptiness in my life, I knew the sensation of all that warmth wrapping around me. I had always been a quiet, shy, sad sort of girl and then everything changed for me. You spend the rest of your life hoping you'll hear a laugh that great again.”  Mission accomplished many times over as she nears seventy years in the business of making people laugh.

Carol Burnett in 1958, early in her career, doing a combination of songs and impressions.  We can see the sketch DNA in the performance that would serve her well in The Carol Burnett Show that began on CBS in 1967.  We can marvel at her gifts for physical comedy and also see an occasional tug at her left ear, her way of saying hello to her grandmother back home.  We’ll return to Burnett and her musical variety/comedy sketch show in a later installment, which I’ll describe as a direct descendant of Your Show of Shows; I just wanted to share this brief look at Burnett working solo (albeit with a piano and pianist).

Last Girl in Larchmont

"I was the last girl in Larchmont to get married. My mother had a sign up saying, 'Last girl before Thruway.'" Joan Rivers

Joan Alexandra Molinsky was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian immigrant parents Beatrice Grushman and Meyer Molinsky, a doctor.  Academically inclined, she attended the progressive Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture school and then the college prep-oriented Adelphi Academy, where she held the position of co-chair of the school and participated in theater.  The family relocated to Larchmont, north of NYC, in her adolescence, though she continued to commute to school in Brooklyn—one source claims the family lived in an unincorporated area outside Larchmont, but Larchmont works better in jokes, wherever they lived.  After two years at Connecticut College, Joan Molinsky transferred to Barnard, completing an undergrad degree in English and Anthropology in 1954.  After graduating she worked several jobs in New York (Rockefeller Center tour guide, ad agency proofreader, fashion consultant) while trying to find a foothold in the show business, appearing off-Broadway in a play called Driftwood (Barbra Streisand was in the cast as well, though they didn’t share any scenes) and doing stand-up in Greenwich Village clubs, where she met aspiring comics Woody Allen and George Carlin as well as up-and-coming musicians such as Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, and Simon and Garfunkel (quite a heady time in the Village).  Looking for the big break, she did improv at Second City briefly and was part of the comedy trio Jim, Jake & Joan (they didn’t last).  After three years featuring seven auditions, the break finally came courtesy of a long sit-down stand-up routine facilitated by Johnny Carson, soon to be the new host of The Tonight Show, at the time still broadcast from New York. 

Joan Rivers sitting on stools with Johnny Carson in 1966—we can consider this as a possible model for the scene in the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel during which Midge Maisel, employed as a writer on The Gordon Ford Show, first sits with Ford to answer questions about her writing job but then cagily maneuvers herself into doing stand-up, leading to thunderous applause from the audience and a visit with Ford at his desk, where he congratulates her during a commercial break and then also fires her from her writing job.  Carson feeds Rivers questions that lead to her take on married life, rife with skewered enthymemes that turn marital bliss into constant marital diss, generally dished out by husband Edgar.  The extended narrative involves one of husband Edgar’s former/current girlfriends, Sherry, coming over for dinner.  Note the spritz of one-liners embedded in the narrative arc.  Note also the surreal turn with the descriptions of Wino Chicken and Lime Edgar (Lime Edgar takes us into very strange territory).

Joan Rivers on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967 weighing in on gender, dating, marriage, and growing up in Larchmont.  She starts with lines about rising hemlines and Twiggy, a famous (and famously thin) model of the sixties.  Lots about gendered expectations on the dating scene.  We get the “last girl in Larchmont” tableau stretched out to describe her mother’s descending expectations about possible husbands, even considering the guy breaking in “with a mask and a gun.”  Here we get “phony operations” instead of illegal operations.  She mentions her Barnard degree in Philosophy, adding a line about the impracticality of going to the butcher to “prove that meat doesn’t exist.”  Among the repeated lines that became staples in her routines, note “where in the scriptures does it say that women cook,” riffing “show me where it says Bathsheba went forth and she basted.”

Joan Rivers in 1968 reminiscing about her childhood on a set offering a facsimile of her old neighborhood.  It was rough.  The neighborhood bar served “children’s portions.”  Rivers talks about her weight as a child, like Jean Carroll addressing her weight in her act, though for Rivers the reference fits into a portrayal of parental and societal cruelty.  “I was so fat I was my own buddy at camp.”  Her father refers to her as “the lump.”  She mentions her progressive school, giving it the name “The Fanny Hill School.”  Her father the doctor performs “illegal operations” to make enough money to pay tuition for the progressive school.  Note the description of the rich friend’s Crayola box.

Joan Rivers introduced by Carol Burnett on The Carol Burnett Show in 1970.  Rivers jokes about the travails of getting to the show on Trans Jersey Airlines.  Note how her comic persona has evolved, with more direct interaction with the audience and more edge, prelude to her later persona’s standard line “Can we talk?” She repeats several jokes from the Carson interview, one about “aluminum hands” and another about her father’s “illegal operations” to pay for her schooling.

Killer Diller

Phyllis Ada Driver was born in 1917 in Lima, Ohio to Frances Ada Romshe and Perry Marcus Driver.  She said this about her childhood school experience: "I was always a pro— even as a little tiny kid. I was an absolutely perfect, quiet, dedicated student in class. But outside of class, I got my laughs."  She studied piano at the Sherwood Music Conservatory at Columbia College Chicago but moved away from the piano as a career when she realized she couldn’t reach the level of skill demonstrated by her teachers and mentors; she transferred to Bluffton College back in Ohio before leaving without a degree to marry Sherwood Diller in 1939.  She took care of their five children before embarking on a career in radio and television in 1952.  One of her fledgling efforts, according to Wikipedia, consisted of  “several 15-minute episodes of Phyllis Dillis, the Homely Friendmaker—she dressed in a housecoat to offer absurd ‘advice’ to homemakers.”  We see in the show’s title wordplay that disrupts the everyday phrase “friendly homemaker.” She finally made her debut as a stand-up comic at The Purple Onion in San Francisco in 1955.  As Sherwood Diller (who likely had ambivalent feelings about becoming husband Fang in her act) failed in business, she ascended in show business: "I became a stand-up comedian because I had a sit-down husband."

Phyllis Diller on You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx in 1958.  This curiosity shows a relatively soft-spoken Phyllis Diller before she developed her standard stage persona including the fright wig, exaggerated make-up, cackling laugh, and long cigarette holder (she didn’t smoke); when she picks up steam, though, after Groucho prompts her to do part of her act, we can hear and see the stirrings of the persona to come.  You can skip the George Jarvis part to get to Phyllis from about the five to the nine-minute mark.   

Phyllis Diller performs in 1965.  Note the upending of enthymemes about motherhood.  “Used baby.”  “Cute little monkey, but one ugly baby.”  She names all her children “kid” for convenience.  She compares the kid to a car and consistently takes aim at Fang, the husband (just as Jean Carroll and Joan Rivers made use of their boyfriends and husbands for material).  She jokes about the shortcomings of a kid’s intellect (the banjo as a tennis racket) and the age of her twins (they’re “18 and 20—I’ll never forget that birth”). 

Part two of the same Phyllis Diller performance in 1965.  Here Diller moves the focus out of the house to joke about going downtown.  We learn that Fang drinks so much that he has gills.  We also get a longer narrative involving the garage, driving, and a surreal story arc with the other woman driver involving a fence and a kid dragging along behind the errant car.  Consider the difference in the invitations when comparing a one-liner with a narrative, with the first hitting us with a snapshot and the second a mini-movie or narrated sketch. 

A Diller performance from 1966.  We can see how she has staked out her comic territory, similar to the Rivers clips from the sixties, making jokes about her driving and of course about husband Fang, who drinks a lot and has his own driving issues when drunk.  Like Rivers, she treads familiar ground, sometimes repeating jokes and sometimes slightly reordering or revising them. 

Diller introduced by Shelley Berman on the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1967.  The set begins with a chorus line all dressed as Phyllis Diller, singing an encomium to the comic they adore.  Diller comes onstage to joke about a cookbook and a stove falling through her kitchen floor to the basement.  That sets her on a narrative journey during which she warms up dinner in the dryer and tells Fang “Eat it.  It’s lint.  How did I know he’d given up lint for Lent.”  We get both the staccato pace of the punchlines and a surreal vignette featuring the turkey.

Button Down Spritz—Bob Newhart and the Implied Interlocutor

George Robert Newhart, born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1929, lived nearly as long as George Burns and Jean Carroll, passing in July 2024 in Los Angeles.  He attended Catholic schools in the Chicago area and then Loyola University, completing a degree in business management in 1952.  After a stint in the Army, he started law school but left quickly, taking a job as an accountant and then as an advertising copywriter for a film and television production company; those earlier jobs, particularly as an accountant, contributed to the title of his breakout comedy album, The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart released in 1960.  He developed the telephone conversations that launched his career with a co-worker, recording them; when the partner left for a job in New York, Newhart became a solo act, with the other voice implied rather than heard.  This gave Newhart two advantages as he moved into stand-up performance: first, he could hone the way he used his pauses and facial expressions as comic strategies, offering an alternative to the rapid-fire delivery of most other comics; and two, he kept the audience focused on him, studying his expression in order to imagine what the other character was saying to prompt the next response—we can consider this a kind of invitation asking the audience to anticipate and collaborate.  (Side note: Shelley Berman also did telephone routines, and he got a booking at Carnegie Hall before Lenny Bruce.  I highlight Newhart for purely personal reasons—I find him funnier.) 

Bob Newhart performs the USS Codfish submarine routine on one of his popular comedy albums.  The version from The Ed Sullivan Show in 1961 is no longer available.  In that clip Sullivan asks him to perform the solo sketch, referencing an audience survey that put the routine at the top of their list of Newhart’s “greatest hits”—note the parallel with hit songs that singers or bands had to perform to meet audience expectations (Codfish, Free Bird, all the same).  Note the patience of the delivery, the pauses, the evocation of the crew listening to the captain’s remarks.  This strategy is integral to the telephone routines as well.

Bob Newhart performs at the Kennedy Center in 1962, delivering one of his telephone routines with the director of the West Indies company in England speaking with Sir Walter Raleigh about tobacco.  In these Newhart clips, again consider how the immediate audience of the crew and Walt invite the performance audience to fill in the other side of the conversation during Newhart’s pauses.  This creates a collaborative space quite different from an audience having to rush to process the stream of jokes in that kind of spritz performance.  Newhart does gentle cycle spritz.

Dean Martin introduces Bob Newhart on his show, leading to a phone bit about a small town police officer reporting to his chief that he discovered an unexploded shell on the beach.  We hear the chief’s side of the conversation.  Offhand opening set-up includes a reference to the “princess phone” Newhart carries onstage.

In 1969, Newhart pursues a form of switchboard logic, acting out the harried work life of the man responsible for answering lots of help lines.  Note the weaving together of the various calls into a narrative, though we also get to experience Newhart working at a faster pace, akin to a patter comic.

Also from 1969, we get the biblical Lot (yes, we get a joke about Lot’s wife as the “salt of the earth”) on the phone with Noah explaining why he bought all the lumber and what’s about to happen to the wicked earth.  Noah gets the news about the coming flood from a bush—the bit doesn’t exactly conform to scripture.

Let’s flash forward to 1995 when Newhart hosted Saturday Night Live for the second time.  He reprises the telephone routine, this time with King Kong scaling the Empire State Building on an unfortunate night guard’s first night on the job. 

Just for fun, I provide a couple of clips from Newhart’s appearances on The Big Bang Theory as Professor Proton, Arthur Jeffries.  In this first one he appears to Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons, as Sheldon grieves for his boyhood idol and lost friend and mentor.  Note Newhart’s enduring mastery of comic timing even when he’s working with other performers.

Another scene from The Big Bang Theory featuring Newhart in his jedi robes, this time in a deli on Yoda’s swamp planet hideaway Dagobah, where Yoda trained Luke Skywalker in the second Star Wars movie.  I could put the lines about the Reuben on auto-repeat and listen to them for the rest of my life.  But wait, we also get a short list of rules about married life that would fit into a stand-up routine in the fifties.  Newhart disappears once Sheldon wakes up to apply the first rule, but I’ll always think fondly about the Dagobah Deli.

Spritz in Conversation

This section will focus on clusters of jokes from Joan Rivers and Rodney Dangerfield that engage with cultural enthymemes about marriage, but first an introduction.

Jacob Cohen was born in Babylon, New York in 1921 to parents Dorothy “Dotty” Teitelbaum and Phillip Cohen, who performed in vaudeville using the name Phil Roy.  Young Jacob’s father toured extensively and eventually abandoned the family entirely, leading his mother to move herself and her two children to Queens, where Jacob graduated from high school in 1939.  He worked many different jobs to provide support for his mother and sister.  He began writing jokes to sell in his teens and changed his name to Jack Roy at the age of nineteen—interesting that he used his absent father’s stage surname as his professional name.  He didn’t find any success as a comic through the forties and early fifties, eventually selling aluminum siding to support his wife and children.  He took another shot at comedy in the early sixties, taking the name Rodney Dangerfield from old episodes of the Jack Benny radio show that utilized the name to refer to an unseen movie actor friend.  Parallel to Phyllis Diller, he came to prominence well into adulthood, already responsible for a family.  

Rodney Dangerfield does a stand-up set on the Sullivan show in 1969, working through his standard range of topics from his tough neighborhood, the old building he lives in, and his relationships with his wife and children.  He weaves in what became his refrain and his personal punctuation mark, the phrase “I tell ya, I get no respect.”

Now let’s think about Dangerfield and Rivers as purveyors of comedy that relies on the comic and audience’s shared knowledge and understanding of the world, often proceeding from enthymemes, premises left unstated because the comic assumes that the audience will quickly supply them and laugh at the joke.  We might call this world-confirming, or perhaps assumption-confirming, or even bias-confirming, humor.  This kind of humor manifests in categories of jokes, for instance, as documented from both sides of the gender divide, jokes about the comic’s unhappy marriage and humiliating sex life, drawing on assumptions that a wife will be unfaithful, critical, judgmental, and impossible-to-please and a husband equally unfaithful, emotionally distant, demanding, and of course impossible-to-please.  First some examples from Rodney Dangerfield, all stemming from his foundational guiding premise “I get no respect.”  I won’t analyze each of these lines, but I ask you to read through them as questions on the lost Popular Culture SAT Exam, intended as part of the Verbal Section—the task, Identify the Enthymeme and its subversion.  Take it away, Rodney:

          I have good looking kids. Thank goodness my wife cheats on me.

          One night I asked a cabbie to take me where the action is. He took me to my house.

          My wife wants sex in the back of the car, and she wants me to drive.

          I went to look for a used car and found my wife’s dress in the back seat.

          My sex life is terrible; my wife put a mirror over our bed. She says she likes to watch herself laugh.

          I told my wife a man is like wine; he gets better with age. She locked me in the cellar.

          One night I came home. I figured, let my wife come on. I’ll play it cool. Let her make the first move. She went to Florida.

          My wife and I were happy for 20 years. Then we met.

          We sleep in separate rooms. We have dinner apart. We take separate vacations. We’re doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.

          Now, we’ll stay in the same section of the SAT, but switch to jokes from Joan Rivers on the same general topic:

          A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp.

          It's been so long since I made love I can't even remember who gets tied up.

          I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was 'the man goes on top and the woman underneath.' For three years my husband and I slept in bunk beds.

          My husband wanted to be cremated. I told him I'd scatter his ashes at Neiman Marcus -- that way, I'd visit him every day.

          My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on.

          Before we make love my husband takes a pain killer.

          I have no sex appeal. If my husband didn’t toss and turn, we’d never have had the kid.

          My husband killed himself. And it was my fault. We were making love and I took the bag off my head.

          When the rabbi said, “Do you take this man,” 14 guys said, “She has.” My husband bought the horseback-riding story, thank God.

          The one thing women do not want to find in their stockings on Christmas morning is their husband.

          I got a waterbed, but my husband stocked it with trout.

          Want to know why women don’t blink during foreplay? Not enough time. 

The time allotted for this part of the exam is over.  Please put down your pencils and turn the exam face down on your desks. 

Orwell That Ends Well: Comedy and the English Language

George Orwell published the oft-anthologized essay “Politics and the English Language” in 1946, around the same time he published “Funny, but Not Vulgar,” the essay with which we started this installment.  Politically, Orwell sought revolution or at least dramatic progressive social change; as we saw earlier he considered jokes a form of revolution in how they jolted the status quo with their capacity to “upset the established order.”  Let’s apply Orwell’s critique of political language to comedic language.  He disapproves of both political hacks and comedy hacks.

For instance, he writes “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”  Transposing this to the comedy realm, we can venture “Modern comedy is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary first step toward comic regeneration: so that the fight against bad comedy is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional comics.”  He wants the audience to demand better jokes just as they ought to demand better political speech and writing.

I find these next two excerpts from the essay relevant not only to the invention and delivery of jokes but also to describing the threat of the large language models that provide the foundation for generative AI: “As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.”  Here Orwell’s words apply equally to hack politicos, hack comics, and writers of all stripes willing to offload responsibility for their language to “someone else,” with that someone now a computer program trained on infinite “long strips of words” and created by tech companies to gum them together based on previous patterns of use.  Orwell describes the results this way: “This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.”  We can apply Orwell’s critique to jokebooks organized by theme or topic and also to the results of prompts to generative AI, which generally consist of abstract responses and “hackneyed” language.  Orwell’s mid-20th century image of “the sections of a prefabricated henhouse” won’t come up in discussions of AI a quarter way through the 21st century—we’ll need to come up with our own fresh metaphors.

How does Orwell characterize the ethos of the political writer/speaker he exhorts to bring clear, vibrant language to the public deliberative sphere?  He states, “In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line.’ Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”  Thus both the Orwell-approved political writer and by extension his ideal comic writer/speaker qualify as a “rebel” committed to “expressing private opinions” (I would add “expressing a distinctive worldview”)—this almost automatically requires questioning enthymemes and often exposing them as social constructions that can lead to stultifying lifelessness in politics and popular culture.

Orwell gives us this memorable description of the political hack hypnotized by automatic language: “When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand should to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful.  A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.”  In a later installment we’ll spend some serious time with French philosopher Henri Bergson, who defines the essence of the comic as “the mechanical encrusted on the living” in his long 1900 essay Laughter.  I don’t know for certain that Orwell knew Bergson’s work, but the haunting image of the hack “turning himself into a machine” brings Bergson’s formulation to mind.  Bergson also refers to human beings’ obligation to maintain constant alertness to the ever-changing current situation (he doesn’t use the term kairos, but he could have) to avoid falling into mechanical behavior.  Orwell echoes him here: “This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”

He continues, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”  We can extend this judgment to cover comedy in our media-saturated, algorithm-plagued age.  Comics interested in fomenting “tiny revolutions” must avoid tired, predictable language, topics, set-ups, and punchlines.  Yes, comics draw on the stuff of the world, but the comic revolutionary pursues rhetorical alchemy through invention, illuminating the world we know and sharing visions of the world we can create.

Orwell claims that too much political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase… into the dustbin, where it belongs.”  Comics can do the same through exposing the assumptions (sometimes lies) smuggled into our brains and our public discourse by enthymemes; comics must implicitly or explicitly mock the inherited premises that maintain the status quo.

Next Time in Coming to Comedy, Part Three: Improv—Something Wonderful Right Away