E-mail a friendRichard Zoglin
original airdate May 9, 2008
Richard Zoglin is a senior editor and theater critic for Time magazine. He joined the publication as a staff writer in '83 and has examined media coverage of major news events and written on a variety of cultural topics. A Kansas City (MO) native, he began his journalism career as a copy editor for Saturday Review and covered the start-up of CNN for the Atlanta Constitution. He also helped launch Time Inc.'s TV-Cable Week. Zoglin honors an important generation of stand-up comics in his book, Comedy at the Edge.
Author of "Comedy at the Edge" explains how stand-up comedy in the late '70s changed America. (3:03)
Full Interview. (10:14)
Richard Zoglin
Tavis: Richard Zoglin has covered entertainment for "Time" for twenty-five years and now serves as senior editor at the magazine. He's turned his attention to the world of stand-up comedy for his latest project. The critically acclaimed new book is called "Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America". Richard Zoglin, nice to have you on the program.
Richard Zoglin: Good to be here.
Tavis: That's a bold proclamation, "How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America". Did it do all that?
Zoglin: Well, you know, a lot was going on, of course, in the 1960s and 1970s. We had a whole cultural revolution in this country. You know, the arts were part of it. I mean, we talk a lot about the rock music and the movies of the era that kind of changed our way of thinking, and I think stand-up comedians were sort of the forgotten heroes of that era. They too were talking about all the new attitudes that we identified with that counter-culture era.
Tavis: Give me a sense of what they were talking about, for those who were not around.
Zoglin: You know, the suspicion of authority, anti-Vietnam, the new freedoms of speech and sex and all the kind of, you know, '60s, that kind of counter-culture attitudes. That's what the comedians were talking about. Now they were reflecting what was happening in the culture, but actually I think they were helping us move forward, move into that whole new era that we're in now.
Tavis: This calls for a general answer, Richard, and we'll get a chance to unpack it in more detail in just a second. But generally speaking and broadly, how did this crop of comedians that you talk about in the book talk about those issues in a way where they made us laugh, but also made us listen? Because so much of today's comedy is about trying to get the laugh, but it's not really empowering you in anything.
Zoglin: Well, you know, they took from -- actually, Lenny Bruce was the kind of the key comedian who I think showed that a comedian could be a social commentator and not just a comedian, a guy getting laughs. He was also a guy who, you know, was a truth teller and he was calling into question all the moral attitudes and social conventions of, you know, the old-fashioned '50s and '60s.
I think the comedians that followed him took that as their mission. We are the truth tellers. We're going to tell you, you know, really where the hypocrisies are in our society, you know, and the attitudes that were changing. They were trying to sort of be the truth tellers.
Tavis: And the people that you say followed him who took that brand of truth telling, we're talking about Carlin, Pryor, Klein?
Zoglin: Right, that's right. Robert Klein. Richard Pryor and George Carlin, I think, were the two key figures. They were both great admirers of Lenny Bruce and they were both guys who went through very similar kinds of career changes. You know, they were both sort of old-fashioned kind of comics.
You know, Pryor was on the Merv Griffin Show all the time, a short-haired kid who did a lot of physical comedy. George Carlin was a short-haired comic with skinny ties who went on the Ed Sullivan Show and did parodies of commercials. Both of them in the late '60s, I think, got hip to the new attitudes. They were, you know, into what was happening in the culture and they changed.
Carlin grew his hair long, grew a beard and started talking about The Seven Dirty Words. Pryor too started to do comedy about his culture, growing up as a kid in the Peoria ghetto, talking as a cross-over comedian to white audiences about the Black experience that they had not been exposed to.
I think you talk about how they changed America? I would say that Richard Pryor talking about that Black experience, bringing that to a white audience, was part of what changed America in terms of racial attitudes.
Tavis: At the center of his brilliance, you see what? And I ask you that question, Richard, because every comedian I've ever talked to who I've asked about his or her influences, Pryor is like always at the top of everybody's list. So how did in the '60s, no less, this Black guy make that turn?
Zoglin: Right. Well, it was his ability to do characters and to create comedy in an improvisational way, but to kind of recapture his background, his childhood growing up, you know, in the Peoria ghetto, and creating those characters in such a vivid way that, you know, it was not sort of just Black humor. It was human. It was everybody could identify with it. So Pryor's ability to sort of create these scenes and these characters in a spontaneous way was just unbelievable. No one could really match him and every comedian looked up to him.
Tavis: You mentioned Robert Klein and I was a bit surprised. I just saw Klein the other day, as a matter of fact. Great comedian, but I was surprised that you give him as much love. The kind of shout-out you give to Klein in this book is pretty significant.
Zoglin: Yeah. Robert Klein, I think, was a much under-rated comedian because he was a smart guy. He'd gone to college and he talked like, you know, the kids that were in that college age in the late '60s protesting Vietnam. He kind of expressed everything that they were thinking.
The other thing about Klein is he had a style. He told jokes, but he also did characters and impressions and he kind of put it all together in this stream of consciousness way that is a style that you can actually see in so many comedians today. Everybody from Jerry Seinfeld to Jay Leno will really talk about Robert Klein was the guy they modeled themselves after.
It was interesting. Even Carlin and Pryor were a little bit distant to them. You know, they were a little bit older. Klein was a little bit closer to their age and there was something about that style, the way he did comedy, that every other comedian who followed really modeled themselves after.
Tavis: Maybe I'm over-stating this. You tell me if I am, Richard. When you look at the text, you get the sense -- at least I do -- that there was something about America or maybe even something about these comedians or the combination of the two that allowed -- this may sound a little strange -- that allowed comedy to be taken seriously back then. Does that make sense?
Zoglin: Well, yeah.
Tavis: I don't know if that's the case today, that comedy is taken so seriously.
Zoglin: Well, I think comedy is taken seriously today. As we know, all of our candidates for president are going on, you know, comedy shows late at night. I think the idea that they can do that, that there wasn't a line piding comedy. Here's comedy on one side and here's the real world on the other. These were the guys that helped merge those worlds.
I mean, the old-fashioned comedians who did jokes, the old one-liner guys, they were entertainers. Then there were the politicians and the Op Ed writers who were the serious people talking about real issues. These are the guys that merged the two. They were funny and they were talking about what was happening in society. I mean, you could listen to these guys and they were as, you know, potent and as insightful about what was happening in the culture as any Op Ed writer or politician of the time.
Tavis: I always hate these kinds of questions and yet I'm gonna ask it of you, so forgive me in advance. You got Carlin, you got Klein, you got Pryor back then. If comedy has the capacity to say something about our society today, if comedy has the capacity to change the America that we live in today, who's on your short list for being able to do that with their stand-up?
Zoglin: Well, I would have to say that David Letterman is doing a lot of it with what he does at night. You know, I don't think that the people in stand-up comedy today, there are a lot of pretty good people out there.
Tavis: Chris Rock?
Zoglin: Chris Rock is very influenced by Richard Pryor, of course. Chris Rock, a really important comedian. I think that Jerry Seinfeld is a guy who -- amazing. Even though he doesn't talk about politics and social issues, that whole kind of attitude toward life, I think that's a really kind of important thing that he's continuing to do stand-up.
He did a sitcom that was incredibly successful and then he walked away from it and he went back to do stand-up comedy. You know, Jerry Seinfeld is put down a little bit, but Jerry Seinfeld is a really important comedian, I think.
Tavis: Are there, and if there are, what are they, lessons that you -- maybe lesson is the wrong word. Either lessons or things or notes that you would want comedians today to take from these guys who did what they did so well back in the 1970s?
Zoglin: Well, one thing I'd like them to take away is to realize -- and one of the reasons I wrote the book -- stand-up comedy is a really important art form. I think these guys realized they were doing something new. They were developing an art form and moving an art form forward.
Later on in the 1980s when these stand-up comedians started going into sitcoms, I think the attitude changed and it was kind of like, "Let me just develop enough stand-up comedy so that I'll be able to give notice by the Tonight Show or whatever or I'll get a sitcom and a network producer will pick me up and I'll become rich and famous on TV."
I would like stand-up comedians today to realize that, you know, a lot of these guys went off into movie careers and TV careers, but they were never better than when they were doing stand-up. Stand-up is an art form that's, you know, valid and worth working hard at. I think too many comedians maybe today still think of it as a road to something else.
Tavis: You called it valid, stand-up, that is. You called it valid and you called it important. The valid part I get, but why is it important?
Zoglin: Because I think stand-up comedians are able to say things in a comedic form that maybe are a little too difficult for us to hear. They can make fun of things and really enlighten us to things, the moral standards that maybe need to be called into question, the hypocrisies that need to be called into question. Stand-up comedians, by putting into, you know, humorous form, can really tell us truths that are maybe too difficult for us to hear in other forms.
Tavis: I've got about forty-five seconds here. While it is clearly still the case that from time to time you see stand-ups showcase on the late night shows, does television today, like Carson did back in the day, break comedians like it used to?
Zoglin: Not as much. You know, Johnny Carson was so far and away the most powerful figure in stand-up comedy. Every one of these I talked to talk about their first time on the Carson show. Today there's a lot more perse and diffuse, you know, so there are comedians that go on the different late night shows, but there's no one that can really break a comedian. I think there's cable TV out there, so there's more outlets for comedians, but no one that can break a comedian the way that Carson could.
Tavis: His name, Richard Zoglin. You know his work, of course, from "Time" magazine for almost twenty-five years now. His new book is called "Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America". Richard, nice to have you on the program.
Zoglin: Good to be here.
Tavis: Glad to have you.
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