Rebels with applause: how stand-up political comedy stopped being subversive

Washington Monthly, April, 2003 by Matthew Cooper

SERIOUSLY FUNNY: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s by Gerald Nachman Pantheon, $29.95

NO ONE, I THINK, PLANS TO BECOME A stand-up comedian the way you choose to become a doctor or a lawyer. Even acting is, to some degree, a chosen profession. But stand-up comedy is the kind of thing that one drifts into. My own foray into comedy has been quite accidental. As a kid, I'd crack up classmates with impersonations of my teachers, like Nino DePinto, my eighth-grade history teacher back in New Jersey who'd turn red talking about Garibaldi. "Il Risorgimento! Remember it."

A few years ago, I gave a toast at the birthday party of a friend, Walter Shapiro, the USA Today columnist and fellow alumnus of this magazine. Walter had begun to do standup at various New York comedy clubs. After my toast, he asked if I wanted to join him sometime. I did, and have been performing with him on stage every couple of months in New York and every now and then in Washington. What's it like to do stand-up? Of course, it's about as close as you can get to that dream you have of walking into class naked. If you're a singer, maybe a band can cover up a missed note. Short of doing a solo interpretive dance or a strip-club act, what else really could leave you more exposed? That's why I'm always a bit nauseous when I go on and have that I-just-survived-a-car-wreck feeling when I walk off. Sure, you come armed with some jokes you're confident will work. I did a Washington fundraiser gig not long ago, and I knew some lines MATTHEW COOPER, a Washington Monthly contributing editor, is Time's Deputy Washington Bureau Chief and a stand-up comic. would probably come off: "Howard Dean is kind of an interesting guy. For gay rights and against gun control--which means he's locked up the gay hunter vote." (For the sake of political correctness I forgo imitating two gay hunters: "Bruce, great shot! What a great throw rug he'll make.") They like the joke about John Kerry calling himself a rebel: "Kerry's idea of rebellion is having red wine with fish." But then you gotta read the crowd. Tom Daschle was in the audience, so I point out that he's there and then ask the audience to give him a round of applause. This softens the blow of the joke to come: "Been kind of a tough year, huh? You get to keep your health insurance?" It goes over pretty well. Then there's the question of what the audience will get. I talk about Bush's State of the Union idea from the night before, Project Bioshield, a plan to protect the country from biological weapons. "Project Bioshield," I say. "Sounds like a feminine hygiene product." I add, imitating Bush: "We're workin' hard to keep us safe. And fresh. And feminine."

The kind of political comedy I do is not exactly rare. In fact, it is everywhere. From Jay Leno to Dennis Miller, Al Franken to Bill Maher to Don Imus, our culture is awash in political comedy. Many Americans, it's often remarked, who don't read the papers get their news from the likes of J on Stewart and David Letterman. Comedy needn't have a political purpose. It can just be funny. But at its best, political humor can be subversive, pushing the world in at least a different direction. Rush Limbaugh, a former deejay, who is as much a humorist as polemicist, had this effect 10 years ago, though probably not any more. But, in general, because political comedy is so pervasive, it may have lost much of its ability to be persuasive.

With political comedy now 24/7, it's startling to be reminded that the art form, as we know it, didn't exist until about 40 years ago. The early days of stand-up political comedy is the subject of Gerald Nachman's book, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s.

A longtime newspaper critic, Nachman has put together a couple of dozen mini-biographies of what he calls the "rebel comedians" of the 1950s and 1960s, famous angry men like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Dick Gregory; intellectual wits with New Yorker sensibilities like Tom Lehrer and Nichols and May; and a slew of TV favorites like Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, and Steve Allen who it's hard to think of as rebels at first glance.

For Nachman, as for many historians, the `50s weren't an era of Eisenhoweresque consensus. He focuses on the roiling waters beneath the surface of American life--more Rebel Without a Cause than "Ozzie and Harriet." "Nearly every major comedian who broke through in the 1950s and 1960s was a cultural harbinger: Sahl, of a new political cynicism; Lenny Bruce, of the sexual, pharmaceutical, and linguistic revolution (and the anything-goes nature of comedy itself); 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; Start Freeberg and Bob Newhart, of the encroaching, pervasive manipulation by the advertising and public relations culture; Mel Brooks, of the Yiddish-ization of American comedy ..."