The Wall Street Journal-20080131-When the Funny Business Changed Hands

Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080131

When the Funny Business Changed Hands

Full Text (1290  words)

Comedy at the Edge

By Richard Zoglin

(Bloomsbury, 247 pages, $24.95)

Viewers of "The Mike Douglas Show" one afternoon back in 1974 witnessed a stark example of a comedy era in its final days colliding with the brand of humor that hastened its end. Guests on the talk show that day were Milton Berle, whose comedy roots extended back to vaudeville, and Richard Pryor, whose profanity-laced, racially charged comedy albums were blistering the paint off walls in countless dorm rooms across the country. Berle had just published his autobiography and was solemnly telling Douglas about one of the book's central revelations: He had fathered a child out of wedlock. Pryor began to snicker.

Berle, enraged, halted the confessional and wheeled on the young comedian: "I want to ask you why you laughed." Pryor replied: "I laughed because I thought it was funny, man. It's funny to me. It ain't got nothing to do with you. . . . I apologize because I don't want to hurt your feelings. I respect you, but I don't want to kiss your ass."

The Berle-Pryor contretemps is one of many evocative vignettes in Richard Zoglin's first-rate "Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America." Comedians who came of age in the '70s might not have changed America, but they certainly changed what the country thought was funny. The stand-ups of Berle's generation got easy laughs with one-liners, physical humor and gentle observational humor -- it was comedy that could entertain both the grown-ups watching "The Ed Sullivan Show" and their baby-boomer children, Mr. Zoglin among them. The jokes stayed in a comfort zone where the audience didn't have to think too much about the messier parts of life or glimpse a comedian's tortured psyche.

For Milton Berle -- who "worked clean" despite having a notoriously filthy mouth -- siring an illegitimate child wasn't fit material for a stand-up routine. For Richard Pryor, it might have been a comic gold mine; any public confession had better come with plenty of laughs. As boomer children entered adulthood amid the social tumult of the 1960s and '70s, the comedians they had been weaned on -- Berle, Jack Benny, Bob Hope -- seemed hopelessly outdated. Young audiences were as primed for a revolution in comedy as they had been for upheavals in music and movies. Emerging comedians such as Pryor, Steve Martin and George Carlin practiced a kind of humor, Mr. Zoglin writes, that was "ironic, skeptical, media savvy, challenged authority, punctured pretension and told uncomfortable truths."

It's important to take notice of this break with stand-up humor's past, he argues, because the new attitude became "the lens through which we view everything from presidential politics and celebrity scandals to the little trials of our everyday lives."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Zoglin traces the roots of this revolution to Lenny Bruce in the 1950s and early 1960s (though other observers might lean toward Mort Sahl and his barbed political humor). Bruce, a manic monologist, died broke in 1966 at age 40 from a morphine overdose, but he quickly became a "renegade model" for other comics, according to Mr. Zoglin, "the comedian who showed the possibilities of an art form that suddenly seemed cool and consequential." The old set-up/punch- line structure was passe, in other words, and no subject was taboo if it got laughs.

"Comedy at the Edge" begins by describing how a trio of Bruce disciples -- Pryor, Carlin and Robert Klein -- transformed themselves from conventional stand-ups into renegades. Mr. Carlin's makeover was particularly dramatic as he moved from doing traditional stand-up in a suit and tie in the 1960s to performing in a T-shirt, jeans, long hair and a beard in the early 1970s, when he became a counter-culture hero with a routine called "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." Mr. Carlin was especially influential on legions of comics who followed him, Mr. Zoglin says. (The book opens with an incident in 1962 when Mr. Carlin shared a paddy wagon with Bruce after the latter had been busted on an obscenity charge; Mr. Carlin was in the audience that night. Bruce: "What are you doin' here?" Carlin: "I told the cops I didn't believe in ID." Bruce: "Schmuck.")

It's hard to buy Mr. Zoglin's inclusion of Robert Klein with the likes Richard Pryor and George Carlin, and indeed even the author admits that Mr. Klein was a "slicker, soft-rock alternative" to the harder-edged comics of the day. But plenty of successful stand-ups from a later generation interviewed by Mr. Zoglin -- Jerry Seinfeld, most prominently -- insist that Mr. Klein was a transformative figure. Mr. Klein was "contemporary and intelligent," Mr. Seinfeld says, and showed comedians not to be "afraid of going over the audience's head."

Mr. Zoglin does an admirable job of showing, not telling, in relating his story. And when some telling must be done, he generally leaves it to the wide array of comics interviewed for the book -- the roster includes Messrs. Carlin, Klein and Seinfeld, Larry David, Robin Williams and even David Letterman, who rarely chats for public consumption anywhere but on his chat show. There are plenty of tales about life in the clubs, such as the Improv in New York and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, that were a hotbed of creativity and the sort of camaraderie that forms between performers with little money but plenty of artistic drive. Comics would try to "squeeze in six shows a night on a typical weekend," Mr. Zoglin reports, "an early and a late show at each of three clubs. Jimmy Brogan managed to do it so often that comics referred to the double hat trick as 'doing a Brogan.'" We hear about the sexcapades, booze and mountains of cocaine that fueled some careers and destroyed others. And we get a front-row seat as today's celebrities offer clashing recollections of their salad days.

Mr. Letterman, who gave up a radio job in Indianapolis in 1975 to take his chances in Los Angeles, fondly recalls the Comedy Store and its proprietress, Mitzi Shore. "She had this place where we could all come, and be silly and make mistakes and have fun and go home with a waitress. I left a job for what I thought could be nothing, and then found this life and friends and home and creative outlet. And without Mitzi I don't know what I would have done."

But Mr. Seinfeld remembers the club as having "kind of a sick culture. . . . Unless you were kind of a broken-wing bird, they had no interest in you. Mitzi Shore didn't like me. I came presold from New York -- people kind of told her, this guy's coming out, he's really good, you should put him on. Well, she didn't like that." Ms. Shore, for her part, says of Mr. Seinfeld that she simply "didn't like his attitude" and "he didn't fit in."

Mr. Zoglin offers portraits of some of the less well-known innovators in the 1970s, notably Albert Brooks, David Steinberg and the late Andy Kaufman. And the author consults club owners in addition to Ms. Shore, agents, producers and managers -- unknowns who nonetheless also played important roles, according to the author, in shaping a comic sensibility that still dominates contemporary humor, whether it's Chris Rock roaming the stage in a jam-packed arena or Jon Stewart holding court on "The Daily Show." When the comedy works, it can be exhilarating, but when it doesn't, you long for the days of Uncle Miltie -- or at least the vaudeville hook.

---

Mr. Robins, the former editor in chief of Broadcasting & Cable magazine, has covered the media industry for more than two decades.