LAUGHING STOCK OF THE MID-CENTURY
Crazy, cutting-edge comedians who made America
a safer place to improvise, analyze and criticize
From the pages of the CA-Modern magazine
By Jeff Kaliss
Some funny things happened on the way to the second half of the 20th century: America found new ways to laugh and new places to do it.
With shifts towards progressive theater, social issues, and psychoanalysis following World War II, performers uncovered plenty of source material for comedy and tantalizing ways to dish it up. At the same time, the evolving media of home entertainment -- television and the long-playing record player, as well as radio -- gave many practicing comedic performers the means to reach audiences far larger than the clubs and halls to which they'd been limited.
As with any other genre of performance or art, mid-century comedy was neither absolutely new nor absolutely distinct. For a case study, take Sid Caesar, please. Prior to becoming a TV celebrity in the early 1950s, Caesar performed on saxophone and in sketches in New York State's Catskills region, where an older style of comedy -- a patter of short jokes and one-liners -- had become institutionalized at summer resorts. Caesar had also entertained his fellow troops while enlisted in the Coast Guard, and his personal experience helped him understand what postwar audiences might be seeking.
"These men who came out of the war appreciated being alive," Caesar pointed out in an interview in the 1990s. "Crying and laughter are one and the same emotion...and America was tired of crying. There had been a depression, we'd just been through a war, there was a lot of pain...So you wanted to get something to take your mind off."
The pain was somewhat staved off by an infusion of hope. "You came back from the war, and you could go to college because of the G.I. Bill," Caesar said. "You didn't have to live in the city, you could have your own home."
Caesar found himself ensconced on the large, wood-framed television sets that were becoming a fixture in the living rooms of the new mid-century dream homes across the county also made possible by the same the G.I. Bill. His 'Your Show of Shows,' on Saturday night on NBC from 1950 through 1954, centered on hilarious, satirical sketches featuring Caesar and his petite partner Imogene Coca, with a cast including Carl Reiner appearing in other sketches.
Helping them serve up the funny stuff at the International Theatre in New York City was a staff of what Caesar called "the world's best writers," whose impact on comedy persisted for decades. Two of them, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart, went on to create very funny plays and situational comedies (sitcoms) for TV. One, Mel Brooks, would be cutting up all over: in a comedy team (with Reiner) and as a film scriptwriter, director, and actor. And another, Woody Allen, after developing his own prolific stand-up career, would become an Oscar-winning writer and director of both comedies and dramas.
Out on the West Coast, without benefit of a network broadcast, comedy struggled to fit in among the live acts at nightspots such as the hungry i and the Purple Onion in San Francisco's North Beach, the neighborhood of the Beats.
Jerry Nachman, then a journalism student at San Jose State College (and now Gerald Nachman, the author of a resourceful study of mid-century comedy, Seriously Funny), was among the curious youth who frequented the San Francisco club scene back then. "It was a different kind of comedy -- different from radio and TV, Jack Benny and Bob Hope, which I loved too," Nachman recalls. "These [new] people were making social commentary, satirizing society...making a difference."
One of the first of what would come to be called stand-up comedians booked at the hungry i was Mort Sahl, a frustrated playwright from Southern California who, as Nachman suggests, looked and sounded like nothing that had preceded him. Sahl tickled minds and funny bones by reading between and behind the lines of the San Francisco Chronicle, which he held rolled up in his fist as a prop. And he'd discarded the suit and tie of the older funny men in favor of a collegiate sweater and jeans.
Bay Area columnists and critics and the hip club goers among their readership served as a launching pad for several comedy stars, including Sahl, who in turn took the new brand of comedy across the country. Sahl also advanced the form by recording what may be the first stand-up comedy long-playing (LP) album.
Among those following Sahl's geographic and professional paths to the hungry i, the nearby Purple Onion, and beyond was Lenny Bruce, whose act displayed both the common themes and the variety of approaches among mid-century comedians. Bruce had a critical intellect as sharp as Sahl's, as well as a fast-paced delivery, but Bruce also had an appetite for sexual references and obscenity, which gained him a different kind of public notice: repeated brushes with the law.
For Bruce, the reactions of the authorities and of the more uptight segment of the pubic worked well in his stand-up routines, as did race relations, religious dogma, and the pretensions of lesser comedians. Bruce's arrests and trials for alleged obscenity made him something of an early champion of free speech.
Bruce was also a role model for those with a penchant for mouthing off, as were such later luminaries of the San Francisco comedy stage as Jonathan Winters and Phyllis Diller. Diller's bawdiness might be considered something of a throwback to the burlesque tradition, though with a thoroughly modern and far-out sardonic twist. However, she pretty much played herself on stage (with ample asides about her husband, 'Fang'), while Winters transformed himself into a menagerie of the sort of Midwestern whackos he'd grown up with in Ohio.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, a group of young actors in the Compass Players discovered comic gold in their streams of improvisation. Shelley Berman took an act built on anguished telephone conversations to the stand-up stage and to unprecedented sales (and a Grammy award) on LP. Bob Newhart, another Chicago-area native, based his stand-up act on sketches, but his 'button-downed' image was an extension of his previous career as an accountant and copywriter.
Both of these Chicagoans are still in the business, and Berman, though he didn't think about it back then, can now reflect on the profound changes he and his peers wrought on the art of comedy. They wanted to evolve past the established formula of set-up and punch line.
"We didn't want to tell the 'big joke,' and those of us who did were not looked upon well," Berman pointed out in a recent interview. "We'd had a terror in our country about opening your mouth -- and comedy, as a matter of fact, had become very placid, very ordinary, just ordinary jokes. But here we [the Compass Players] were, in the background, doing improv, and we were saying whatever we wanted, because we had no fear."
Unlike some of the West Coast luminaries, Berman and Newhart didn't mine the hazardous material of political criticism. Berman praises the example set by TV's Jackie Gleason and Sid Caesar in the decade preceding his own debut. "They did not make fun of the country -- they were just guys being intensely funny, but intensely self-directed," says Berman. "They came out as a result of the repression, but they weren't hurting anybody."
Black comedians such as Dick Gregory and Redd Foxx, both from St. Louis, were more inclined to take on racial and social issues, as did Bill Cosby, Nipsey Russell, and Godfrey Cambridge, in very different ways.
The medium of television grew up alongside mid-century comedy, in the process discovering how to make use of it. Sid Caesar's 'Your Show of Shows' in 1950 was followed a year later by the long-running 'I Love Lucy,' starring Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz and his then-wife, the film comedienne Lucille Ball, in a paradigm sitcom built on zany situations.
Things got even zanier on the tube in 1952 with the elaborately produced visual stunts and impersonations of 'The Ernie Kovacs Show,' and the multiple personalities of the main star of The Jackie Gleason Show, who went on to sitcom legend a few years later on The Honeymooners.
Although 'The Ed Sullivan Show' preceded all of the above, TV's variety format only occasionally and cautiously allowed for stand-up comedy, which found a much more cordial and talented host in Steve Allen, himself a comic performer (and jazz musician and composer) on 'The Tonight Show,' beginning in 1954, and 'The Steve Allen Show' a couple of years later.
'The Phil Silvers Show,' which began in 1955, had its title star, a character actor with stage and film experience, satirizing a peacetime Army and setting the standard for sitcom assaults on established institutions, persisting to the present day. These pioneering efforts helped jumpstart the careers of several comic performers and advance the appetite for humor among American consumers.
Meanwhile, comedians and record companies continued to try to follow Shelley Berman's early and enviable standard of success. In 1960, a year after Berman's 'Inside' album, 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' went so far as to borrow Berman's phone prop, in the process beating out both Elvis Presley and the soundtrack from 'The Sound of Music' at the top of the pop charts. Stan Freberg put his pointed parodies of popular culture onto both 45-rpm singles and LP's.
Although few of the gifted mid-century comics would ever make as much money as did Freberg, who was amply rewarded for introducing comedy to advertising copy, some went on to work in movies in the following decades, the greatest successes falling to former Sid Caesar scribes Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. A few mid-century veterans, including Shelley Berman, are still getting booked alongside the younger generations of stand-ups, for whom they made it safe to improvise, analyze, and criticize.
CRACK CUTUPS
From the bounty of funny folk on the cutting edge who kept us in stitches into the second half of the 20th century, we've singled out a baker's dozen of some of the best, most meaningful, and most memorable.
1. SID CAESAR
His hugely popular TV show never required him to improvise or be himself, but Sid Caesar was very good at watching and listening to other people and then making a show out of it. "When I was a kid," he says, "my father had a restaurant in Yonkers, New York, a very blue-collar town with a lot of Pollacks, Russians, Irishmen, and Germans who used to come in and eat and talk, so I listened to 'em. You have to be there at the right place at the right time."
Caesar was at the right place again, during the infancy of television in 1950, where he was able to showcase his madcap gift for mimicry to an audience that would number millions, on 'Your Show of Shows.' He had plenty of help, from his primary sketch partners Nanette Fabray and later Imogene Coca and supporting players such as Carl Reiner, as well as from a precocious writing staff.
An energetic entertainer but never really an actor or a stand-up, Caesar had no secure fallback after Caesar's Hour, the successor to his original show, ended in 1957. But he managed the occasional appearance on TV and film until he and Coca were able to mount a nostalgic comeback in the late '80s.
See him on YouTube.
2. MORT SAHL
Drawn to the early 1950s intellectuals at the University of California at Berkeley by his girlfriend and first-wife-to-be Sue Babior, Mort Sahl developed a groundbreaking comedy act across the Bay at North Beach's hungry i club, channeling the cognoscenti but also poking fun at them and at the conformist, trendy, authoritarian society that surrounded them. It was more like commentary than it was a joke fest or any other kind of performance, but Sahl might be called the first of the new stand-ups to succeed in a club setting.
Saul's hungry i booking lasted a year, and he extended his success to Chicago and New York (where he impressed a teenaged Woody Allen) and to the recording industry. His national fame was certified by a cover story in Time magazine in 1960, but over the following decades Sahl's personal independence and quirkiness made it difficult to sustain his popularity. He worked as a scriptwriter and college teacher, and recently returned to the stand-up mike, stimulating the nostalgia of old fans and the curiosity of the latest generation of intellectuals.
See him on YouTube.
3. JONATHAN WINTERS
Although he's been cited as a touchstone by generations of younger comedians, most notably Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters achieved a level of energetic and brilliant wackiness well beyond the reach of most mortals. He managed, however, to market it successfully on club stages and recordings in the '60s, mainly on the strength of his impersonations of the older generation of Midwestern Americans with whom he'd grown up. A favorite among his characters was the rambunctious senior female Maudie Frickett, who, like Winters himself, was beyond pigeonholing in any place or period.
In his native Ohio, Winters studied art, but his knack for humor got him onto radio, and then on to the comedy showcase clubs of New York City. In turn, he was booked for national TV appearances while further developing his ear for rib-tickling speech patterns and sound effects, and his eye for quirky mannerisms. He pumped out this blend as high-octane free association. Winters' personal eccentricities sometimes kept bookers at a cautious distance, but his respect among peers has returned him repeatedly to the small and big screens.
See him on YouTube.
4. LUCILLE BALL
One of the first and longest lived of the situation comedies to settle in the early days of television was I Love Lucy, and its title accurately reflected the adoration of its fans, who have continued to watch it in reruns and on YouTube snippets long past the death of its star, Lucille Ball, in 1989. When she started the show in 1951 with her then-husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, Ball had already been struggling in the business for a couple of decades, as a model and an actress on Broadway and in so-called B movies.
Aside from the challenge of a medium still finding its footing, Ball and Arnaz had to overcome skepticism about publicly broadcasting, with fictional names, a marriage between a Latin male (with a prominent accent) and a red-headed Anglo female, but the couple were their own producers (through their company, Desilu) and wielded considerable power. Ball also insisted on working her subsequent two pregnancies into the scripts, and her fans were delighted when the expectant mother graced the cover of the first issue of TV Guide.
Effectively setting the stage for decades of domestic sitcoms to come, Ball proved a hard act to follow--a strong and innovative physical comedienne who was also eternally appealing.
See her on YouTube.
5. SHELLEY BERMAN
Although 'Inside Shelley Berman' has been immortalized as the first comedy album to garner gold-record status, its creator had not intended to be a stand-up. In his youth, Berman found expression in the Compass Players, a progressive acting workshop in his native Chicago and a precursor to the more-famous (and hugely influential) Second City. In the company of fellow aspiring comedians Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Berman learned how to build solid sketches inspired by improvisation, not unlike the approach to comedy of such earlier pioneers as Sahl and Bruce but with clearer theatrical intention and structure.
"We emerged in that time when all of a sudden our mouths could work," Berman said, looking back on comedy's emergence from the shadow of Joe McCarthy, following the censorial senator's death. Berman's numerous record albums helped earn him club bookings. But he soon began to run out of material for recording, and he suffered some unfair publicity about his offstage behavior. Berman returned to acting, which he continues to the present day, on 'Boston Legal' and as Larry David's rambunctious father Nat on 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.'
See him on YouTube.
6. LENNY BRUCE
Perhaps the most infamous funny man in our lineup, Lenny Bruce was also one of the most exciting and talented. He inherited humor and the show biz life from his mother, a burlesque performer in New York City, where her son also staged his debut. A tie-win appearance on radio's 'Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts' (during which he acknowledged elder comic Sid Caesar as a source) gave an early boost to Bruce's career, though he took a few missteps before finding his way to San Francisco and favor with media, jazz musicians, and audiences there.
There was much good and heady stuff in every Bruce set. He poured out a stream of impersonations; nods to high culture and art; hip jargon; and the occasional off-color word, phrase, and reference. His flaunting of convention drew persecution from the law, and admiration from such peers as TV host Steve Allen. As brilliant a social critic as he was an improviser, Bruce was ultimately bedeviled by his legal hassles, and he died of a morphine overdose in 1966.
See him on YouTube.
7. BOB NEWHART
Aside from Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart may have had the greatest and longest success at mutating from stand-up comic to comic actor. His ease in portraying credible characters in a variety of TV shows and films seems linked to his original transition to comedy from the professions of accounting and advertising. In fact, his hit 1960 debut album, following on the heels of fellow Chicagoan Shelley Berman, was titled 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' and depicted the straight-faced performer in downtown office clothing on the cover.
Newhart's characteristic dry, constrained delivery matched the image, and allowed fans to laugh at the everyman conventions he represented, even when built on such fantastic premises as a phone conference between an adman and Sir Walter Raleigh about the 'discovery' of tobacco. A pair of popular sitcoms in the '70s and '80s sustained both Newhart and the gently ticklish appeal that had sold his stand-up act. Newhart remains in demand for character parts in film comedies.
See him on YouTube.
8. STEVE ALLEN
More than many an entertainer and most TV hosts, Steve Allen always looked like he loved life and was able to laugh with it as much as at it. In turn, there were many cultural figures of the '50s who were more than happy to keep Allen company in his TV productions, the original 'Tonight Show' and the 'Steve Allen Show,' and many thousands of viewers who wanted to be there with them. Like Lenny Bruce, Allen was nurtured by comedy, in his case by an ex-vaudeville mother and an extended Irish-American family.
Early on, Allen became adept both at jazz-wise piano playing and at innovative on-air radio patter, both of which he transferred, in 1954, to a tenderized but tantalizing approach to television in a hosted variety show format, a user-friendly alternative to Ed Sullivan. Though never a stand-up or a trained thespian, Allen seemed comfortable appearing with such performers, chatting it up with them on camera and even sharing shtick. After the '50s, Allen continued to find plenty of work on and off the small screen, until his death in 2000.
See him on YouTube.
9. DICK GREGORY
 A civil rights activist in the 1960s and a health-food advocate today, Dick Gregory has proven himself as funny in confronting these issues in his comedy act as he is serious about demonstrating for them. His determination dates back to his early days as an award-winning student track star in St. Louis, where he advocated for proper recognition of black athletes.
In circumstances parallel to those of Lenny Bruce, Gregory found that some bookers in the '60s were skeptical about his forthrightness, but his onstage demeanor was always far less racy and threatening than that of Bruce or even Redd Foxx, dependent instead on meaningful storytelling and ironic wit. His approachability gained him relatively early access to high-scale venues, at a level achieved by few black comics apart from Bill Cosby. After a long hiatus, Gregory recently returned to performing, sometimes in the company of former colleague Mort Sahl.
See him on YouTube.
10. PHYLLIS DILLER
The stand-up scene in 1950s San Francisco seemed to have virtually overlooked women, without a trace of guilt, until local singer and copywriter Phyllis Diller opened at the Purple Onion in 1955. From the start, Diller fashioned her onstage outfit and hairdo and much of her comic material around lampooning gender stereotypes and polite archetypes of marital relations. (In 'Seriously Funny,' Jerry Nachman describes Diller as "the anti-Harriet Nelson.")
Delivering her self-criticisms and pokes at her husband 'Fang' in an abrasive but infectious screech, Diller was an acquired taste, but her indelible image became more familiar and entertaining over time. While never counted among doctrinaire feminists, Diller must be credited with shoving her gender into its rightful place in the comic spotlight, where she's remained a role model to female stand-ups.
See her on YouTube.
11. REDD FOXX
While still a teenager and already performing in the early 1940s, Redd Foxx moved out of poverty in his native St. Louis and on to Chicago and New York City, where he worked the so-called Chitlin Circuit, entertaining other blacks as a nightclub comedian and actor. In Los Angeles in the early '60s, Foxx began recording raunchy material, which helped establish him as a guilty pleasure among both blacks and whites. Onstage, his trademark swagger and carping delivery created a curious and compelling combination of cockiness and raw vulnerability.
One of the first black comics to play to white audiences on the Las Vegas strip, Foxx was far more credible at establishing a black presence on prime-time TV, in his highly regarded '70s sitcom Sanford and Son, than fellow ex-comic Bill Cosby would be in the following decade. Foxx maintained his incisive but amusing portrayal of racial and generational stereotypes in other series and in a return to stand-up, until his 1991 fatal heart attack on the set of 'The Royal Family.'
See him (with Flip Wilson and Joan Rivers) on YouTube.
12. STAN FREBERG
Back before rock 'n' roll, when novelties were still welcome in the pop music market, Stan Freberg got on radio play lists and into record stores with a series of 45-rpm takeoffs on popular culture. Among the earliest, in 1951, were a subversively erotic spoof of soap operas, 'John and Marsha,' and a dig at the popular detective TV show 'Dragnet,' titled 'St. George and the Dragonet.'
As a teenager in suburban Los Angeles, Freberg had gotten a start in funny business by voicing cartoons for a variety of animators, and by the time he'd progressed from releasing singles to albums, he'd established his additional multi-talents as a natural scriptwriter, musician, and producer. Throughout the '50s, Freberg's choice of satirical targets made recording and broadcasting executives nervous. They included the commercialization of Christmas, prime-time TV programming, and, after he'd secured his own radio show, some of the sponsors who funded his fun-making.
Chafing against media restrictions, Freberg turned to the more lucrative field of advertising, where he once again broke the mold (and advanced the form) by using humor to sell things. The creative standard set by Freberg in all these areas still stands well beyond the reach of most pretenders.
See him on YouTube.
13. LORD BUCKLEY
Several decades older than most of the mid-century comics and their fans, and working outside their arenas, Richard Myrle 'Lord' Buckley nonetheless exercised a profound influence on all. Born in the California Mother Lode of English parents, Buckley emceed dance marathons in the 1920s, and then became a favorite in Chicago vaudeville and burlesque clubs controlled by the Mob. During the next decade, he began absorbing the hip argot of the city's black and white jazz musicians, while perfecting a well-paid stage act that involved gymnastics and ventriloquism.
With vaudeville passé, Buckley entered the '50s with an act assembled from historical accounts and classic monologues refashioned in an hilarious amalgam of proper English diction and hip discourse, for which he credited Cab Calloway, Frank Sinatra, Redd Foxx, the Beats, and others. Buckley's concepts were all his own, though, and included riotous 'cool' raps about Jesus and Gandhi ('The Nazz' and 'Hip Gahn,' respectively).
Buckley was befriended and repeatedly hosted by Ed Sullivan, showcased in jazz clubs and coffeehouses, and immortalized on more than a dozen albums, one of which took its title and spirit from his characteristic onstage rephrasing of Shakespeare: Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin Daddies: Knock Me Your Lobes.'
See him on YouTube.
|
Special thanks to Mickey McGowan of the Unknown Museum for archival research and graphic support
Photos: John Springer, Rose Eichenbaum; and courtesy Richard Buckley, Corbis Sales, San Francisco History Center (S.F. Public Library), Capitol Records, Inc., Verve Music Group, Warner Music Group, Blue Note Label Group
For more on the classic comedians of the mid-century, don't miss Gerald Nachman's book, 'Seriously Funny: the Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s' (Pantheon Books, 2003).
|
