“Funny [and] fascinating . . . If you’re a comedy nerd you’ll love this book.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, National Post, and Splitsider Based on over two hundred original interviews and extensive archival research, this groundbreaking work is a narrative exploration of the way comedians have reflected, shaped, and changed American culture over the past one hundred years. Starting with the vaudeville circuit at the turn of the last century, the book introduces the first stand-up comedian—an emcee who abandoned physical shtick for straight jokes. After the repeal of Prohibition, Mafia-run supper clubs replaced speakeasies, and mobsters replaced vaudeville impresarios as the comedian’s primary employer. In the 1950s, the late-night talk show brought stand-up to a wide public, while Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Jonathan Winters attacked conformity and staged a comedy rebellion in coffeehouses. From comedy’s part in the civil rights movement and the social upheaval of the late 1960s, to the first comedy clubs of the 1970s and the cocaine-fueled comedy boom of the 1980s, The Comedians culminates with a new era of media-driven celebrity in the twenty-first century. “Entertaining and carefully documented . . . jaw-dropping anecdotes . . . This book is a real treat.” —Merrill Markoe, TheWall Street Journal
First published in 1939, the original blurb reads: We have learned much lately concerning theories of laughter, yet laughter is only what we do about comedy. What is comedy itself? In this work the history of comic instances is combed in the search for the truth about comedy. Today, when laughter is stifled in so many countries, an exposition of comedy shows it to have a universal and necessary character. Comedy, as its natures reveals, is one criterion of the state of human culture; it is highly contemporary and requires freedom – but freedom for adventure, not for routine. After a chapter devoted to the explanation of a logical theory of comedy, the modern comedians are examined, and the humour of every one, from the Marx Brothers to surrealism, from Gertrude Stein to Mickey Mouse, from James Joyce to Charlie Chaplin, is shown to be a constant, inherent in the same set of unchanging conditions.
Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. This was true not only of tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) but also its comic counterpart, opéra comique, a form tracing its roots to the seasonal trade fairs of Paris. While historians have long privileged the genre’s popular origins, opéra comique was brought under the protection of the French crown in 1762, thus consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. In The Comedians of the King, Julia Doe traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent prerevolutionary years. Drawing on both musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the royally sponsored Comédie-Italienne. Doe demonstrates how comic theater was exploited in, and worked against, the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular foundations was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a group of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.
This dissertation argues that the emergent performance of political standup comedy became a significant agent for mediating and complicating the relationship between the American people and the American presidency, particularly during the middle half of the twentieth century. The Dance of the Comedians examines standup comedy -- particularly its ramifications for the presidency and Americans' perceptions of that institution -- as a uniquely compelling form of cultural performance. Part ceremonial ritual and part playful improvisation, the performance of political comedy in its diverse forms became a potent site of liminality that empowered all of its constituents - the comic, the audience, and the object of the joke -- to reexamine and renegotiate the roles of all concerned. It is this tripartite bond of reciprocal and labile performance -- and its rise to cultural prominence in American history -- that comprises the heart of this study. Five chapters trace the development of political standup comedy with respect to the American presidency and analyze the ground-breaking performances by comedians on both sides of the footlights and both in and out of the Oval Office. During the early Republic, newspaper editor Charles Farrar Browne reinvented himself as Artemus Ward and pioneered the performative relationship between the emergent American humorist and the equally embryonic American audience. During the first third of the twentieth century, humorist Will Rogers masterfully exploited the liminality of stage and radio to insinuate himself between Americans and their elected leaders during a period of crisis and redefinition, and he permanently recast the roles of citizen and president alike. During the 1950s and early 1960s comedians such as Mort Sahl again cross-pollinated comedy and presidential politics, this time with the increasing acidity befitting postwar America. Impersonator Vaughn Meader and his phenomenally popular album, The First Family, consummated the marriage between entertainment culture and political culture, especially where Americans' perceptions of the presidency were concerned. As for the presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy understood humor's ability to reap political gain, and they too were cultural arbiters who prompted a more permanent shift in Americans' attitudes toward the office and those who hold it.