Now that Lenny Bruce is lionized for freeing stand-up from most constraints on material and language, Nachman figures it is time other "rebel" comics of the 1950s and 1960s got some attention, and he certainly knows whom to attend to. Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, and Jonathan Winters are arguably the standouts in the section on the '50s, but even Jean Shepherd, most famous today as creator of the classic Christmas flick A Christmas Story, gets his due, in the same chapter as absurdists extraordinaire Bob and Ray. In the '60s section, figures as diverse yet comparably insightful as Bob Newhart and Godfrey Cambridge are profiled. Lenny does, of course, get his chapter, and so do the Smothers brothers, Dick Gregory, and Mel Brooks, plus the now relatively unknown David Frye, Vaughan Meader, and Will Jordan. Rather like aesthetically pondering rock musicians' instrumental techniques, serious discussion of comedy is a chancy proposition. Nachman manages, however, to leaven his content analysis with sheer enjoyment. All entertainment scholarship should be this enjoyable and informative. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From the Inside Flap
s of the 1950s and 1960s were a totally different breed of relevant, revolutionary performer from any that came before or after, comics whose humor did much more than pry guffaws out of audiences. Gerald Nachman presents the stories of the groundbreaking comedy stars of those years, each one a cultural harbinger:
Mort Sahl, of a new political cynicism
Lenny Bruce, of the sexual, drug, and language revolution
Dick Gregory, of racial unrest
Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge, of racial harmony
Phyllis Diller, of housewifely complaint
Mike Nichols & Elaine May and Woody Allen, of self-analytical angst and a rearrangement of male-female relations
Stan Freberg and Bob Newhart, of encroaching, pervasive pop media manipulation and, in the case of Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, of the banalities of broadcasting
Mel Brooks, of the Yiddishization of American comedy
Sid Cae
About the Author
Gerald Nachman has for more than forty years covered theater, movies, cabaret, and television for newspapers and magazines. His previous books include Raised on Radio; two collections of humor pieces, Out on a Whim and The Fragile Bachelor; and a humorous book on marriage, Playing House. He lives in San Francisco.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The 1950s
A Voice in the Wilderness -- Mort Sahl
If you were the only person left on the planet, I would have to attack you. That's my job.
Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming. When he arrived, the revolution had not yet begun. Sahl was the revolution, at first, although he had no such grand idea in mind. He wasn't plotting the violent overthrow of the conservative comedy government. He was never a rebel, deep down. In thought, yes, but rarely in deed. His secret desire-a pipe dream, really-was to work somewhere as a comedian. He had no experience and little idea where to go to be funny, other than parties and all-night campus hangouts, where he held forth in his motormouth manner.
Of all the great groundbreaking comedians of that era-which officially began with Sahl's inauspicious debut on Christmas Night 1953 before a friend-packed audience at a San Francisco folksinger haven called the hungry i-nobody could have been more different from the standard stand-up comic than Mort Sahl. Even the revolutionary comedians who followed him-Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Dick Gregory, Phyllis Diller, Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters-were cast in a familiar nightclub comic mold; all but Allen, a writer, had worked as actors, or in radio, or as entertainers of some sort. Other comedians labored to find a stage persona, a voice, but Sahl's actual persona was eccentric enough, and his voice was loud and clear. He was a force of nature, a whirlwind whose ideas defined him; behind each joke lurked a sharply etched, cynical worldview.
Everything about him was candid and cool, the antithesis of the slick comic: his casual campus wardrobe (the signature cardigan sweater, slacks, loafers, rumpled hair, open collar, rolled-up shirtsleeves); his material (partly political but heavily laced with social commentary on fads, trends, and the American mind-set at midcentury); his consistently high level of original wit; and, to be sure, his conversational, in-your-face delivery. Unlike the comics of the day, he didn't attempt to ingratiate himself with the audience, yet he connected with them on his own terms. Often he didn't finish sentences-he spoke in a kind of shorthand and didn't worry about building to a finish or making logical segues; he didn't sing or dance. He was unlike any comedian who had ever been-except that he was stunningly funny. The mere idea of a stand-up comic talking about the real world was in itself revolutionary.
Sahl had "attitude" before it became trendy-and, much later, in the 1980s, before it passed itself off as a substitute for wit. Attitude comedy didn't stem from Steve Martin, David Letterman, and Dennis Miller. It started with Mort Sahl, whose audacious position was that, basically, the fix was in-that life in the 1950s, and politics in particular, was a joke and that he was simply reporting what went on in Washington.
That had also been Will Rogers's pose, but Sahl was citing chapter and verse, and was no benign, lovable, head-scratching cowboy philosopher. Sahl, it seemed, had never met a man he liked-or, as he cracked, "I never met a man I didn't like until I met Will Rogers." Sahl had read Rogers and concluded, "I'm not flattered when people say I'm the new Will Rogers. You read over some of the old things Rogers wrote and you find out he wasn't very funny." Sahl conceded that Bob Hope "works in some political material," but Hope had no political viewpoint beyond a glib patriotism. Of all the comedians of that time, his closest ancestor-and influence-was the bitter and acidic Henry Morgan, the iconoclastic radio satirist. "He really impressed me," said Sahl. "It was a great blow for freedom that this guy could get it across-it was a rallying point." Sahl was perhaps closer to H. L. Mencken than to any comic-in his ferocity, his lacerating wit, his language, his hyperbole, his imagery, and his impact.
For a time, when he was riding high in the early 1960s, he was almost a fourth branch of government-"the nation's only employed philosopher," said the Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, and "almost certainly the most widely acclaimed and best-paid nihilist ever produced by Western civilization," wrote The New Yorker's Robert Rice in a 1960 profile. The press's careless comparisons of Sahl to Rogers and Hope were way off the mark. When Rogers or Hope did political material, their jokes weren't meant to wound or to make anyone squirm; Sahl's were, and did. "Will Rogers with fangs," he was labeled, or "the Will Rogers of the beat generation," "the surrealist Montaigne," and "a beat generation Cotton Mather." Sahl was, in fact, virulently anti-beat ("The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on"). He said, "The beatniks don't want to be involved with society, which is the antithesis of what I do." Pre-Sahl, it was heretical, even career suicide, for a comedian to discuss politics, much less to cut up a sitting president onstage. Rogers and Hope were establishment figures, national heroes, but Sahl was completely out of the Washington loop when he began. Rogers used to say, "All I know is what I read in the papers," a posture close to Sahl's own, though Sahl's slant was that all he knew is what he didn't read in the papers.
Roger Ailes, the head of Fox Cable News, recalled: "I once sat with Mort Sahl in Mister Kelly's, and watched him read a paper in a booth. He got up onstage six hours later that night with forty minutes of new material. With no writers, he just did what he had seen in the afternoon papers. He was a genius." Later, Sahl would tell lengthy stories of attending White House dinners, heavily embellished, that depicted him as an outsider who had snuck in a side entrance to the West Wing when nobody was looking. He was no crony; he didn't hobnob like Hope or wish to be beloved like Rogers, both of whom emerged from vaudeville. Sahl was no show-business baby. He was a guy with things on his mind.
As he later wrote in his memoir, "Something was stirring in the late '50s in America even if people couldn't define it." Sahl defined it. Comics were utterly befuddled by him and what Ralph J. Gleason labeled "the new comedy of dissent." "Who wants a comic you gotta have a dictionary on your lap so you can figure out what he's saying, and even then he ain't funny," said Buddy Lester, a paid-up member of the comic rear guard. Other comedians, Woody Allen recalled, "became jealous, because Sahl was so natural. They used to say, 'Why do people like him? He just talks. He isn't really performing.' " Not performing in a traditional sense, but his mind did an astonishing tap dance across the front page.
Although Sahl clearly loved the attention and later even the friendship of politicians, he didn't seek their approval, only their attention. It cost him dearly when the Kennedy clan-although not John Kennedy himself-mistakenly assumed that, because Sahl had bashed the Eisenhower administration, he was the Democrats' boy. Mort Sahl was nobody's boy. Some took him for a comic hired hand because he had made the mistake of writing jokes for Kennedy during the campaign. Lenny Bruce liked to say, "I am not a comedian, I'm Lenny Bruce," but it was Sahl who truly was not the standard comedian.
Sahl was misjudged as merely a comedian just because he made his living in show business. He embraced fame and success, appearing on major television shows and rubbing elbows with celebrities and collecting all the trinkets of stardom, but he refused to play the logrolling celebrity game-and that conscious rejection would later come back to bite him. He was, like other great comics of that era whose careers skidded off course early, his own worst enemy. He was not just a political rebel, as his later sharp turn to the right revealed, but he had a rebellious personality that cost him friends, colleagues, club dates, managers, agents, wives, and girlfriends. Sahl still goes it alone, with a major ego that assures him he's superior to his fellow comedians. His deeply indignant, contrary streak fuels his passion and sparks his wit, but it also burns bridges.
The event that proved he could be as politically committed as, say, Dick Gregory or Lenny Bruce-someone willing to put his name and reputation on the line-was the Kennedy assassination. It scarred his career, and really his life, because his career was his life. In 1963, after blazing across the comedy skies in the 1950s and early '60s, Sahl all but fizzled out after JFK's death. The Warren Report so traumatized him that he never recovered his footing and still struggles against an ancient stigma that he's a head case.
Sahl was just gaining mainstream acceptance on TV when the assassination brought him down as clearly as it did Kennedy impressionist Vaughn Meader. Unlike Meader-a novelty item and a relatively minor talent-Sahl, with his boundless and resourceful wit, might be riding high even now if he hadn't got so immersed in the dubious findings of the Warren Commission that it damaged his objectivity. His major tactical mistake was in not maintaining a certain artistic distance, as a wit and commentator, from his material; and he failed, utterly, to recognize that this was how the public viewed him.
He miscalculated the fickle and perverse nature of show business and the copycat media, which hastily and wrongly wrote him off as a radical kook and, with cruel irony, as yesterday's newspaper. By 1966, only six years after he had appeared on the cover of Time-a stamp of approval that carried far more clout than it does now, the first true stand-up comedian so honored-and been profiled by The New Yorker two months later, Sahl was scrambling for club dates and trying to salvage his career. His fall from grace was Bruceian. To many he appeared to be preoccupied with the Warren Report, from which he read long excerpts onstage...
