Posted on 02/12/2017 6:22:15 AM PST by Kaslin
Comedy has been intertwined with my existence since my earliest memory. Every Sunday night we watched giants like Alan King or Myron Cohen on Ed Sullivan. Watching the Three Stooges over and over again or the Marx Brothers is how I grew up. As I got older I grabbed on to the brilliant Steve Allen and then was introduced to comic geniuses by the master himself, Johnny Carson. But today it seems like this country has lost its sense of humor, and it is killing me and the rest of us.
When I was in my early 20s we went to the comedy clubs of Los Angeles during the era when Jay Leno was the emerging king. We had Richard Lewis, Gary Shandling and Jerry Seinfeld as budding superstars. We used to party with Budd Friedman, the owner of The Improv, on the weekends after it closed for the night. My personal favorite was the often dark but always masterful George Carlin. The question is would any of these people make it today?
There is an assault on comedy from all sides. I recently watched Can We Take a Joke? which in 75 minutes will make you think ‘no, we can’t.’ The film reiterated what I already knew – the bastions of free thought (colleges) are killing comedy because of political correctness. I had already written how Jerry Seinfeld -- who does a very clean, but hilarious stand-up show -- will not appear at colleges. This movie showed how comedians like Jim Norton, Lisa Lampanelli and Gilbert Gottfried are fighting back against the killjoys. You know, the people who don’t want anybody to be offended even though comedy is usually about offending people.
I personally come from the Mel Brooks School of Comedy – throw everything you can up on the wall and hope something sticks. The sad thing is I make a lot of Jewish jokes, but I must say after I make the joke that “I can say that because I am Jewish.” We are all afraid someone will be offended.
One of the greats that is still around is Don Rickles. He is the king of insult comics. He insulted everyone so no one thought Rickles was ever actually offensive. He would probably never make it today. Great comics say edgy things. I remember seeing Joan Rivers live. There were times I covered my face and leaned over to my wife and whispered “Did she really just say that?” She was both funny and irreverent.
Can We Take a Joke? refers to the god of comedy freedom as Lenny Bruce who suffered for the battles to be able use certain questionable words in a public comedy routine. Not too long after Bruce’s death, George Carlin was doing his routine Seven Dirty Words with impunity. Would he be able to do that routine on a college campus today without being run off the stage?
Then there is the other extreme. Because of political correctness, the only people you can make fun of anymore are white males who happen to be straight and Republican. Political humor has been around for ages. Bob Hope was a master of making fun of politicians, but never getting political. Johnny Carson did a great stand-up routine every night for 30 years on the Tonight show and we never knew what his personal politics were and Jay Leno followed in that tradition.
Comedy Central started to change things with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. They occasionally attacked left-of-center stupidity, but their mainstay was attacking those stupid and bigoted Republicans. It used to be Republicans were just evil. Now they are stupid, racist and anti-woman. This has continued on with all the offshoots like John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah. Seth Myers is a very funny guy, but his decisions to cut off half of his potential audience is baffling. This happened with David Letterman who lurched more and more to the Left as his show on CBS continued and he became less and less funny. Making fun of people with whom you have political differences may seem funny to some, but it wears thin after a while telling the same old joke.
We now have television comedy all centered on attacking white male Republicans, and we have everyone else intolerant of anything that might offend anyone. We need to be able to laugh at whatever we are, whether that be Jew, black, Asian, gay, Hispanic, female, male or large-headed. I recently watched some episodes of You Bet Your Life from almost 60 years ago. Groucho skewered everybody of any background who was a guest on the show. It was flat-out priceless.
The funniest routine I ever saw was Mort Sahl, a man of the Left, sting the idiots in Hollywood over the scripts he wrote for their movies. You can take both sides. Richie Pryor, a comic genius, was never funnier than when he made fun of himself after he set himself on fire freebasing cocaine. Making fun of himself was mastered by Rodney Dangerfield. My wife and I went to see him on our second date. Sitting there doubled over in laughter may have sealed the deal as we were engaged 13 days later.
Lewis Black, maybe the funniest guy around today is another man of the Left, but if you go see him he attacks the Left as much as the Right. Carlin was like that also.
Possibly the greatest gift I ever received was from my son, who for Father’s Day a couple years back got me a complete box set of everything the Three Stooges ever made. I still think Curly is the funniest person who ever lived. Or was it Buddy Hackett or Groucho …?
The important thing is that we get back to not taking ourselves so seriously. Lighten up and listen to an Albert Brooks album. Life is short; laugh it up.
The battle boy wasn't really a dufus, he just had issues with toy soldiers and violent fantasies.
There’s a video of Bob Newhart making it’s way around Facebook where he reprises his role as a psychiatrist that is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. I love dead pan comedy and Bob is the king of that type.
Carlos Mencia skewers everyone.
I laugh myself into a coughing-jag!
Really - they were.....
To this day, I cannot hear the piece, "Swan Lake," without thinking of John Belushi dancing the ballet while wearing a white tutu. I looked for that on youtube once, but my effort was unsuccessful.
Krammer as “Battle Boy”
Absolutely Hilarious!
Has to be the one he did on "Mad TV", and it was great!
I was going to ask you if you remembered Melanie Chartoff, thinking that she had dropped off the planet since Fridays, but when I looked her up in IMDB I saw that she’s done tons of stuff.
Who could forget Melanie Chartoff? LOL!
Here’s some food for thought.
I was born in the early fifties and grew up with b&w, then color tv.
Every day at school we all talked about “the show” that we watched the night before. With only three channels we all shared the same experiences - Beatles on Ed Sullivan, etc.
We didn’t know it, but we were living in an unusual period of technology that was simple broadcast. The common experiences shaped our culture.
But we are far beyond that now. First came many more channels. Then came time shifting with recording machines. Then on demand streaming. All technologies that shifted power to the consumer (and that, by the way, upended all existing advertising models).
Now, there are few common experiences left (Superbowl comes to mind). So we live in a country with many small subcultures, bolstered by the ability to connect with anyone anywhere on the internet. Anyone can “broadcast.”
It’s no wonder that this fragmentation is having an impact on our culture. And there is literally no “going back.” We grew up in a technical transition period from broadcast to network which will never recur.
It’s a brave new world, like it or not.
Klem Kaditalhopper...
Did I spell it right?
How do you sink a Polish submarine?
Knock on the door.
Mining youtube for vintage entertainment is a hobby of mine. Currently digging into a lode of Steve Allen and a vein of Bob Newhart.
What is now called comedy is political satire. TV comedy shows are a political agenda wrapped in a laugh track.
Bass o matic. Landshark. Samarai delicatessen. The Lubeners.
“What happened to Bob Hope style humor?”
Bob Hope was very lurid in his humor off camera, he was loved by our TOUGH fighting’ troops for it.
The best news spoof comedy shows I remember were THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS back around 1964, and HBO’s NOT NECESSARILY THE NEWS from the 1980s.
SNL was trash as was Laugh In.
“Barbecue tongs, barbecue tongs, shoot the moon followed by a banana.”
Whenever my late wife or I would see an overwrought dancer, the mention of “barbecue tongs” would crack the other up. A running joke for years...
I'll tell you the impact it's had on me. It has me seeking foreign sources of entertainment. I watch KDramas, and because I'm learning Polish, I've started listening to Polish music instead of English music. So I couldn't tell you anything about today's new actors or singers.
“Do we fry it? no No No no”
“Shake and Bake it? No no no no”
“We SMOKE it! Yea Yea Yea Yea”
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