We all have that whacky relative who says to you at a family gathering, things like, “Hey, you don’t want to know what that’s made of.” Or, “You know those leftover meatballs in the back of your refrigerator? What’s happened to them? You don’t want to know!” How about “That alternator in your car? They just put that in there to rip you off.” “You want to know what car wax really is? No, you probably don’t.”
Kind of sounds like lines that might have been cut from a Drunk Uncle skit starring Bobby Moynihan on Saturday Night Live. Those lines you may hear from Uncle Dave or Johnny B aren’t the comedy – they’re the material. What you do with them – how you remember those lines, mine them into gold and then…what? You need a stand-up gig, an arc, a story. In other words, you need a framework to build all your thoughts into something that builds the jokes into something that is not only funny but makes a statement about how you view the world, what kind of wry mind and observations you have.
But it also has to resonate with an audience so that your wit or absurdity or outlandishness connects with an audience. Some comedians are great at telling jokes (Rodney Dangerfield: “When I was born, I was so ugly, the doctor slapped my mother.”) Some are great at building up to a punchline after providing the setup (George Carlin’s routine of comparing and contrasting the sports of football versus baseball is priceless, a five minute sojourn that builds gradually, yet is funny from opening to conclusion: “Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.” As George Carlin continues, he compares the seemingly pastoral image of baseball with the rough and tough, serious sport of football).
So many comedians are great in the Rodney Dangerfield mode (one rapid-fire joke after another, many unrelated to the preceding joke) or the George Carlin mode or somewhere in between or somewhere completely different. It would take years to explain all comedy types and nuances; instead, you can watch The History of Comedy a 2017, a CNN Original Series documentary which is funny and entertaining as it explores everything from the Marx Brothers (who enjoyed a huge revival of their movies when I was in my teens and early 20s) to the comedians of the 40s and 50s to the phenomenom of Seinfeld and new up and coming comedians.
Do all comedians have ADHD? Why do so many comedians like Brian Regan talk about how dumb they are? Were they all class clowns (Carlin even had a 1972 comedy album titled Class Clown). Early in Steve Martin’s stand-up comedy years, his jokes revolved around the guy who was out of touch and later evolved into the movie, The Jerk and the SNL routine of the Wild and Crazy Guy.
But these people are anything but stupid. Sure, many have appeared on TV talk shows and spoken about how they struggled in school and just couldn’t get it together. But many of them also realized early on that they could gain respect by being funny. You listen to the best comedians and their observations about us, not just themselves. They are so pointed and spot-on and smart: they make us realize how absurd we all can be. We just never realized it until they pointed it out to us.
I’m an older generation now, 68, so I grew up with a wide range of comedy. In the 1950s, TV was still in its relative infancy: not a lot of programming had been produced to sustain all the different networks and local/regional TV stations. Consequently, they had to fill as they say. So they filled airtime by going to the movie studios and offered to broadcast their old movies. Reluctant at first, the studios came around to realizing that they could have their old movies broadcast on TV thereby generating a new revenue stream. After all, many of those old movies from their vaults were just collecting dust as most movie-goers only wanted to see new movies.
Now here was TV offering to show their films on Million Dollar Movie or Saturday Night at the Movies or on non-network channels that back in the 1950s, did not produce as much original programming. So, I watched all the classics (westerns, dramas and musicals) but I also loved the old comedies and I was captivated by Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp in movies such as the Gold Rush which I must have seen at least five times and Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and all the other great movies from the Silent Era.
I also enjoyed the bombshell comedies of the 1930s with Mae West as well as the movies with W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy and so many more. In short, I and others of my generation lucked out. Because TV was not as “produced” as it is today. Movies from every era were constantly available – free. No subscriptions to HBO or Showtime, no streaming services required. It was all there as long as you could wait for your fave to be listed in TV Guide, my bible at the time.
So, I grew up on the Bowery Boys, Abbott & Costello, the Three Stooges, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Barbara Stanwyck (because I loved her turn in The Lady Eve with Henry Fonda, which was a comedy which I also saw more than a few times). Yes, TV is bad for you. “Too much TV, go to bed!” “You don’t need to watch that crap!” (Oh yeah? Why do you watch it when I go to bed and I hear YOU laughing?)
Ed Sullivan and The Tonight Show (Steve Allen, Jack Parr and Johnny Carson) always had the top comedians on and I grew up watching comedians such as Jonathan Winters, Mort Sahl, Jack Carter, Alan King, Phyllis Diller, Bob Newhart, David Steinburg and so many more. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In focused more on skit comedy with the talents of Lily Tomlin, Ruth Buzzi, Alan Sues, Arte Johnson and an ever-changing cast and an even bigger guest list. After The Carol Burnett Show and other variety shows slowly died off, SNL came along and changed everything once again. Over the past decades, comedy specials including stand-up concerts have become the norm along with a second growth-burst of situation comedies. Variety shows have tried to make a comeback here and there, but SNL is the only survivor and will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2025.
We have come full circle. In the early days of TV, lack of content led to many old movies and gradually, new comedies were produced for the small screen such as Leave It to Beaver, the Danny Thomas Show and The Honeymooners and so many more. Now, we all have 500 channels and there is so much content available, there is not enough audience to guarantee the costly production of a new variety show.
These days, I still have my favorites and Rodney and Richard and George are long gone. But new comedians always rise out of the comedy clubs. I have my faves and there are many I don’t fully get. But that’s okay. Each era, each generation needs a new spokesperson to remind everyone of how absurd this all is.
I can’t end without a few jokes:
From standup comedian and former SNL writer John Mulvaney:
“I always thought that quicksand was gonna be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. You watch cartoons and quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about, behind actual sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky.”
Here’s Carol Leifer:
“Women in the workplace — we still have big strides to make. Girlfriend of mine just got a new job. First question the new boss asked her was if she could make a good cup of coffee… Yeah, she stormed right out of that Starbucks.”
And finally, Chris Rock:
“Who’s the biggest liar, men or women? We all lie! Men, we lie all the time. You know what a man’s lie is? Like, I’m at Tony’s house. That’s a man’s lie. A woman’s lie is like, It’s your baby.”
Chris Ebel
3/31/22
Photo credit: @mexikids