Fat Albert, Edith Ann, Maude Fricket, Geraldine, and Imus

.Pace the Imus Affair, Maha has a thoughtful post looking at the strain of misogyny that has been a long-running theme of American gag writing, the essentially agressive nature of humor, the difference between Bob Hope and Ann Coulter (you'll see when you read it), and how while some of her favorites come close to the line they don't cross it.

It's a great post but I don't agree entirely with a conclusion she reaches in this paragraph.  Maha writes:

I often wish someone would research the stand-up comedy routines presented on such venues as the Ed Sullivan Show and analyze how much of it amounted to complaining about women. Mothers-in-law, women drivers, nags, and of course ugly wives were the meat and potatoes of comedy in those days. A comedian — always male, of course — had only to say “my mother-in-law!” or “women drivers!” and roll his eyes, and the audience would howl. Thanks in large part to second-wave feminism, by the late 1970s television comedy had mostly moved on to other topics...

Maha's talking about the stand-up comics she remembers from the 50s and 60s. But I don't think it was feminism that drove those guys into retirement and guest shots on Merv Griffin.  It was the up and coming generation of comics.

Through most of the 1960s I wasn't allowed to stay up past 8:30, even on nights that weren't school nights.  I still remember what a big deal it was when my folks let me start watching Get Smart, which was on at 9 on Saturdays.  But either my parents were inconsistent about enforcing bedtime or I did a lot of sneaking down to the foot of the stairs to eavesdrop on what they were watching, because if I remember anything from television in those days beyond Gilligan and Maxwell Smart, I remember the comedians.

Try these names out:

Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen, Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers...

They all came into their own in the 1960s.  George Carlin got his start then.  He used to appear on the Tonight Show in a jacket and tie.

They were immediately preceeded by Mort Sahl, Bob and Ray, and Nichols and May, and they were followed pretty closely by Robert Klein, Flip Wilson, Robin Williams, and Lily Tomlin.

All of these comics were and are in their own ways storytellers not gag artists.  Their humor was socially observent, ironic, satirical, and self-inclusive, and while they were often angry they were also essentially kind.

Aren't people strange, they all said, aren't they crazy, weird, maddening, and sad?

They saw us all as constantly walking along the edge of the cliff of absurdity, and while they let us laugh at people who wandered too close to the edge or fell off, there was always the warning, Watch out, next time it'll be me or you.

And they were careful with their words.  Words were their tools, precision instruments, scalpels not sledgehammers.  They didn't say things because they sounded like jokes.  They didn't get laughs by reminding their audiences of stereotypes and other, lesser, old-fashioned comics' stock company of villains and fools.

They hated cheap laughs and mothers-in-law and women drivers were cheap laughs.

I don't mean to quibble with Barbara.  I'm just expanding a bit on what she says, which is basically that the kind of "humor" Imus practices isn't funny, it's just nastiness in the form of a joke.  My point is that Imus came of age when the comics I mentioned were the heroes and heroines of American humor.  His kind of humor was disdained by the best comics of his generation.  Imus knows it.  Or at least he has no excuse not to know it.

His guests know it.  His older listeners know it.

His younger listeners...?

What do they know?

Who do they know?
________________________________

You probably noticed that I left Richard Pryor off my list. That's only because I didn't want to have to stop and explain the obvious.  I suspect there are a lot of people who might not understand how well Pryor fits onto the list.  If you can't see how, even as much as is Robin Williams, Pryor is a natural heir to Jonathan Winters you need to go back and watch Pryor imitate a lion, and if you can't hear how much Pryor owes to Bob Newhart then you need to go back and listen to both of them tell a story.

Pryor knew what he owed and he made a point of thanking Newhart. When they met, sometime in the late 1970s, Pryor gushed to Newhart, explaining how much Newhart's work had meant to him when he was young, "I stole your album."

He didn't mean he stole from Newhart's album, the way Don Adams stole a routine from him once.

He meant he went into a record store, put The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart under his coat, and ran.
_____________________________

Newhart has a great routine, The Driving Instructor, that features a bad woman driver, but!

She's really a bad student driver and the routine needs her to be a woman in order to work because the joke isn't how bad she is, it's how polite and patient her instructor is trying to be while she's in the process of terrifying him.  The joke is that his chivalry (or his patronizing attitude, if you prefer) is what's keeping him from jumping out of the car.  His own timidity is going to get them both killed.  He's one of those nice, shy, slightly timid guys who are afraid of hurting anyone's, but especially a woman's, feelings.  In other words, he's a guy very much like Newhart himself.  Which makes the joke about Newhart not about women drivers. 

Now let's practice some turns. Um, the important thing on turns is not to make them too sharp, just kind of make a gradual...                    
Now that was fine...
That was a wonderful turn...
It's hard for me to believe you only had two lessons after you make a turn like...
Are you sure you haven't had more now?...
I find that very difficult to believe...
One little thing...
This is a one way street...
Well, no, no, actually it was partially my fault, you see, but, uh, you were in the left hand lane and you were signaling left, and I just more or less assumed you were going to turn left.

Related advertisement for self:  A very old post of mine on funny women, One ringy-dingy.

Related advertisement for someone else:  Dennis Perrin letting George Carlin demonstrate How it's done.

Comments

[harry near indy]

sadists, and masochists who are secretely sadists, would laugh at the suffering of those weaker than themselves.

iirc, there's a scene in huck finn where huck sees some locals in a small town tie firecrackers to the tail of a cat or a dog, light the firecrackers, then laugh like hell as the cat or dog runs around -- probably in fear and pain.

same old stuff today.

the better form of humor will always be the smaller and weaker taking it to the bigger and stronger, and winning that fight.

people could look at vonnegut the same way -- for what is bigger and stronger than fate and its associate, death?

[Kevin Wolf]

As Mel Brooks would say, putting on his best Germanic accent, "Vell, see, now ve're in da ballpark." I love talking about this stuff. (And The Driving Instructor is my favorite Newhart routine, so that's a bonus.)

I read Maha's post with interest but I think I'm with you on your "clarification," if you will.

But I'd add that, IMO, by the mid-70s the TV variety program, which often featured or was even hosted by comedians, was already on the way out. I think that may have done more to change the complexion of comedy at that time than any other social force, such as feminism.

By chance I've recently watched some old Flip Wilson Show DVDs and have been trying to piece together a post of my own about that. I can say that the two women comics featured in these particular episodes, Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller, both used the exact same type of humor as the men Maha finds so outmoded - only with reversed gender. It's all husbands this and that. There's the housework, of course, that these women are clearly expected to do but you need only take one look at Rivers and Diller to see that ain't how they're spending their time; it's become an abstraction.

Re any Imus connection, I'd say many comedians, even those who work blue or sound mean, are typically dealing with their own inner demons. The need for rehab, which often comes, is real and physical. The humor is pointed inward as much as out. (I liked Maha's acknowledgement of the Rodney Danerfield type of comic.)

With Imus and a lot of the politicians who we saw in the 2006 election cycle, the "humor" is definitely pointed outward and the later "rehab" is actually an attempt to rehabilitate their images. I'm thinking, if Imus is an accurate reflection of the zeitgeist, that perhaps most people these days are getting sick of his brand of "joke."

[OutOfContext]

My big problem with this whole controversy is I never thought of Imus as a comedian or a social satirist. I guess that just comes from not having listened to him much, except for a few of his msnbc broadcasts. I thought of him more in the news/political opinion context and, I have to admit, I found it entertaining when he called bullshit on political figures. So I find it hard to compare him to the comedians (or rappers) against whom he is so often measured. Now maybe there shouldn't be a context in which something is acceptable or not, but there are some situations that call for personal moderation and some where anything goes. I wouldn't want my ten year old daughter listen to Bill Hicks or Bobcat Goldthwaite (an excellent cd by the way), nor would I think it is appropriate to hear Jim Lehrer call Bush an idiot.
An old story, true, but the blurring of news and entertainment is the area of interest here for me.

[grkent]

I hasten to remind you as you go down the happy memory lane of comedians who were quite successful -- at least two names -- Don Rickles and Fat Jack Leonard.

[Ken Houghton]

And here I was going to ask why you excluded Greg and Lenny from your list.*

Rickles made his living by insulting anyone and everyone. Imus panders to the straight white male)—not by elevating us, but by belittling teh gay, teh non-white, and teh female.

*And that I assume I can type "Greg" and your readers will know I mean "Dick Gregory" probably shows my age.

[Jim Tourtelott]

The demise of Imus reminds me of A Christmas Story and a real radio genius, Jean Shepherd. At one point, Shepherd says that in the kid's world, you were either a bully, a toady, or one of the nameless mass of victims.

Imus, hat and all, is the spitting image of the bully with the green teeth and the coonskin cap. The toadies, in this case, are the "luminaries" of politics and news who would routinely show up to suck up. and the Rutgers team collectively is Ralphie.

Who that has seen that movie doesn't love the moment when Ralphie beats the bully senseless?

[velvet goldmine]

I understand that your list is based on the standup acts, and not the personal lives and lawsuits of the comics, but I really cringe to see Cosby as an example of a non-misogynist.

Sure, Bill Cosby loves women. He gets women. He feels women.... Especially when they lie back and let those roofies work their magic.

[joanr16]

Shepherd says that in the kid's world, you were either a bully, a toady, or one of the nameless mass of victims.

Brilliant. Watch out for the ones with yellow eyes! Too bad you can't see them on radio.

[Ken Houghton]

I have to agree with velvet goldmine; go back to those old Cosby albums and you'll find the contrast of the woman preparing to go to Lost Wages with (iirc) "slap some Ban [Right Guard?] under his arm, write an IOU to his body" or "My wife is urping [pregnant] again. Yes, I know we have four daughters but as my high school football coach said, 'You keep running that play until you get it right!' "

[Rich]

Pryor owed a lot to Bill Cosby, too. His early standup was very much modeled on Cosby's non-racial style.

Two other important, but very different African-American comics: Nipsey Russell & Dick Gregory. Both were part of the era where comedy went from joketelling to story telling. Russell was the more gentle of the two and was the first African-American to have a recurring role on a tv show that wasn't a servant (he was a cop on "Car 54, Where are You"). He had a very gentle style, but knew how to use it to make a point, as during the riots of the 60s. Gregory was/is an angry man and took on race and war very directly. It's difficult to know how much this cost him his career as a comic or how much he felt he had to liberate himself from the entertainer role. He definitely was one of the people who gave us the Richard Pryor we remember.

Joan Rivers was very different from Phyllis Diller, who essential did the female version of a conventional male comic's act. Rivers had improvisational experience from Second City and clubs in Greenwich Village--her style was more truly confessional than Diller and she made no effort to come up with some sort of persona. Rivers was definitely part of the wave of new comics in the 60s, rather than an ajunct to the old era, as was the case with Diller.

What's also missing here is that perhaps with the glut of stand-up venues, a lot of humor has reverted back to the predictable and the schtick. Ancient racial jokes from the Def Jam crowd. Tired male-female jokes from so-called "blue collar" comics Jeff Foxworthy, along with his "You know you're a redneck.." drek. The subversive streak that has often characterized gifted outsiders is totally missing from these so-called "blue collar" guys (Foxworthy is from a middle class family and lives in an vanilla upscale suburb of Atlanta). And it's also worth mentioning derivative, unfunny observational comics like Ellen Degeneres. The only worthwhile thing she ever did was her "coming out" show. Unfortunately, she's no funnier as an "out" lesbian than as a closet case.

[Henderstock]

Winters was part of that new crowd (Sahl, Berman, Bruce, Nichols & May) that started coming in in the mid-'50s. I was in high school and college in that period and those comics, along with Tom Lehrer, had a special appeal to us. We all wondered how and why anyone had ever laughed at the old Borscht Belt types. Unfortunately, that golden age was brief, and we're back where we started.

[Ken Turetzky]

Here's something new on Mort Sahl, who's turning 80 on May 11.

Mort recently appeared on the Schnauzer Logic podcast. I recommend the interview. Download here.

Summary: Mort Sahl = intellectual crack