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

Washington Monthly, April, 2003 by Matthew Cooper

Bruce was edgier. The police would bust up shows for phrases like "cocksucker." His 1964 New York trial became a cause celebre, with the likes of Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, and Reinhold Niebuhr signing petitions for him. Still, he was about more than shock. He helped make Jews seem cool and hip before Woody Allen. One of his signature shticks was "Jewish and Goyish": "Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's Goyish. B'nai B'rith is Goyish; Hadassah, Jewish. If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're Goyish even if you're Jewish. Kool-Aid is Goyish. Chocolate is Jewish, and fudge is Goyish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is Goyish. Drake's Cakes are Goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish. Balls are Goyish, titties are Jewish. Baton-twirling is very Goyish. All Negroes are Jewish." Ks Nachman notes: "He saw humor in everything--in racism; in asking men in the audience if they'd rather sleep with Lena Home or Kate Smith; in the Holocaust (holding up a fake newspaper with the headline "Six Million Jews Found in Argentina"); in marital relations (husband begging his wife to "touch it just once").

What Nachman gets is that the seemingly safe comedians could be just as dangerous. The idea that Bob Newhart was as much a rebel as Lenny Bruce seems odd at first. But Newhart--the original Dilbert as Nachman puts it--offered a more comprehensive critique of society. Before his 1970s and 1980s TV shows, Newhart's comedy albums were huge. His "Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart" hit number one for a time. His shticks like Abe Lincoln's PR agent trying to get him to change the Gettysburg address are gentle but knife-edged stabs at a PR culture that waters everything down. In one, he captures everyman's helplessness when he plays Superman calling the dry cleaner trying to get his cape back: "Yes, the leotards are kind of an off blue." Who's to say which is edgier, that or Bruce's self-conscious rebelliousness?

The same was true of black comedians. When Dick Gregory was out doing edgy racial humor--before he became a long-in-the-tooth activist, a mainstay at save-the-Ukrainian-sea-turtle political rallies--he was funny: "In my home town, they make us take a test to vote--nuclear physics in Russian." But was it really any edgier than Godfrey Cambridge, the safe Negro from TV who did a great act about liking watermelon but being too embarrassed to buy one? "That big squash over there. Wrap it up. And put handles on it." Bill Cosby was pushed by his agents and handlers to do racial jokes but rarely did. "I'd do guilt material sometimes," he said years later. He and Cambridge caught hell for not being black enough in their acts. (He'd do the racially neutral Fat Albert riffs about his childhood and timely jokes about the fast-growing sport of karate but not the explicitly racial.) But Cosby's color-blindness was, arguably, more revolutionary than Gregory's doting on race--a point made time and again when Cosby, in the 1980s, became NBC's biggest moneymaker. In time, Cosby came to be seen as having more racial edge. He gave money to black colleges and seemed less "I Spy." He worked a little more blue. But he was still essentially the black man all of America loved.