Vaudeville was the next logical extension of the music hall, a popular form of urban entertainment in the mid-19th Century, which provided for a variety of acts to perform in front of an all-male audience, while it enjoyed a beer or two. Music hall (or variety, as it was also called) was basically a theater with a saloon attached. One of the great pioneers of vaudeville was producer Tony Pastor, who opened his eponymous theater off New York’s Union Square in 1881, with the provision that there be no liquor in the audience and that the material on-stage be fit for middle-class audiences; this subsequently opened the doors for women to attend and vaudeville soon achieved massive, nationwide popularity. The roots of its name are shrouded in legend (voix de ville, or French for “voice of the city” sounds pretty reasonable), but Americans in nearly every city—by 1900, there were 2,000 vaudeville houses, half of all theaters in the country—understood that vaudeville meant the best, or at least the most energetic, form of live entertainment.

Shows in vaudeville featured almost a dozen different artists, or acts, at a time, performing all kinds of material—songs, comedy routines, magic, acrobatics, novelty acts, dramatic readings–on what were called “bills.” The performers repeated their acts (which lasted around ten minutes) at least twice a day for a week, and then moved on to the next town (or in big cities, the next theaters). By the turn of the century, vaudeville was such a big business that it needed a monopoly to come in and manage its bookings and presentations. E.F. Albee and B. F. Keith joined forces to create the largest network (or circuit) of theaters and artists in the country; their business means involved a 5% charge to each performer and their strict regulation of conduct, salaries, and material (the phrase “blue material” supposedly comes from the blue envelopes in which Keith managers would send back censored gags) made them detested figures in the eyes of performers. Still, their management of family-friendly acts, railway logistics, and “continuous” vaudeville (non-stop shows from lunchtime to after-dinner) created a system that drew thousands of performers to devote their whole lives to breaking into the “Big Time”—the best theaters on the best circuits—a vaudeville phrase that, like many others, has entered the American lexicon.

To develop one’s act in vaudeville was often a career-long endeavor. A performer had to define and refine his or her skills in a hotly competitive world and come up with something that no one else could do—or at least no one could do as well. For a comedian, this was a particular challenge. A dog act or a magician required little from an audience other than sheer amazement; a comedian had to land a gag whether he or she was in Sheboygan or Brooklyn or Fort Worth, Texas. It was in the latter town that a young Bob Hope flopped with his audience, using material that had scored elsewhere.

A vaudeville manager came backstage and told him, “Why don’t you slow down and give them a chance? These people aren’t going anywhere. They came in here to be happy. It’s summertime. It’s hot. This is Texas. Let them understand you. Why make it a contest to keep up with your material? Relax and you’ll be all right.” Hope took the advice—grudgingly—and within the week he was all right. Texas seemed a particularly tough state for urban acts: when an early incarnation of the Marx Brothers were playing Nagodoches, someone burst into the theater in the middle of their act and announced that there was a runaway mule on the main street. The audience quickly filed out to catch that event, leaving Groucho to remark, “Nagodoches—is full of roaches.”

Comedians also had to suffer through the easy transmission of their material. Fred Allen, who stumbled up the ladder as a comic juggler recalled:

Comedy acts were always the target of pirates. For many years performers had no way to protect their gags, parodies or bits of business. . . and good gags spread like bad news. There was a young comedian whose father regularly attended the opening show at the Palace. If any of the acts had new lines, jokes, or song titles, the father copied them down and wired them to his son. The act continued convulsing the Palace audience in New York, little dreaming that its best jokes were being told in Omaha, San Francisco, or wherever the son happened to be playing.

There was little remedy for such deviousness. Some comedians even made it part of their act; Milton Berle was so open about his larceny that he was dubbed by Walter Winchell as “The Thief of Bad Gags.”

Vaudeville was tough on anyone working their way up the ladder; the pay was poor, the conditions were terrible, the billing was never big enough. Still, performers kept at it, even if they had little to offer. The young George Burns, ne Nathan Birnbaum, was so lousy that “after playing a theater, I would have to change my name. The booker who booked me would never give me another job if he knew who I was. It never crossed my mind that there was any reason to change the act, so I changed my name instead.” Among Burns’ more than two dozen noms de guerre were Jimmy Ferguson, Jimmy Delight, even a member of the team of “Links and Burns”—although he was “Links.” Go figure. What vaudeville did offer was an unparalleled training ground for comedians to refine their personalities into something so special it was money in the bank. It also created a variety of performance styles that still exist to this day: genial hosts with witty banter (Frank Fay, Milton Berle), double-acts (Smith and Dale, Burns and Allen), triple acts (Durante, Clayton, and Jackson; the Three Stooges), even quadruple acts (the Marx Brothers). Even the impressionist act—extremely popular up until the early 1980s—was created in vaudeville. What comedians really had to learn was economy, speed, and variety—it often helped if, like Eddie Cantor or Jimmy Durante, you could tell jokes, sing, dance, and play a musical instrument. “I got a million of ‘em!” rasped Durante about his jokes—and he wasn’t exaggerating, either.

Much has been made about the sudden death of vaudeville. It wasn’t all that sudden. The Broadway revue siphoned off stars, as did radio by the mid-1920s. Vaudeville might have drifted away without the rivalry from technology or more upscale entertainments; it was an exhausting grind, with a pretty low ceiling for success; once it turned into a stepping stone for other, more lucrative and more relaxing professions, its days were numbered. Sound film provided the final resting place for vaudeville; many historians claim May 7, 1932 as the funeral date, when the Palace, New York’s most prestigious vaudeville house switched from two-a-day shows to the lower rent four-a-day shows, interspersed with short films. A few months later, they began to screen feature films exclusively; ironically, the first one was The Kid from Spain, starring Eddie Cantor, one of the Palace’s greatest headliners.

Perhaps, at least at the beginning of vaudeville’s demise, Broadway inflicted more wounds than did the motion pictures. Broadway revues were becoming increasingly upscale after World War I, and more competitive with each other. (Variety magazine added a category called “Legit” to distinguish these classier productions from “Vaude.”) One way for a revue producer to rise above the crowd was to import a vaudeville superstar, or, even better (and cheaper), to create a Broadway superstar from the rank-and-file. No one was better at this than Florenz Ziegfeld and his stable of comedians—Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantor, among many others—was legendary. But tastes changed somewhat in the mid-1920s and audiences demanded narrative shows and, thus, the musical comedy was born: a trifle, to be sure, but at least a trifle with the pretensions of a plot. This proved to be a boon for a successful comedian—the first “crossover” in popular entertainment. A comedian could now go from touring in vaudeville to being one of several bananas in a Broadway revue to holding down an entire musical comedy vehicle that showcased his talents exclusively. Cantor was the most successful of these crossover comedians, but Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Willie and Eugene Howard, Ed Wynn, Clark and McCullough, Bert Lahr, and Bob Hope eventually followed suit and created brand-new audiences for themselves.

At the same time Broadway comedies were beginning to find their own unique voices, with or without crossover comedians. Before the 1920s, native comedies were skimpy and formulaic: scrappy boy meets scrappy girl, he loses her, he gets her and they live scrappily ever after. But these plays said little about who we were as a culture, and confronted few, if any, of the issues that preoccupied the rapacious and, well, scrappy Americans who emerged after World War I. That soon changed with the emergence of playwright George S. Kaufman who, along with collaborators such as Marc Connelly and Edna Ferber, created the first full-fledged American satires, such as the silent-film spoof, Merton of the Movies and the show business comedy of manners The Royal Family. With the Gershwin brothers, Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind were the first playwrights to poke fun at American government and the presidency in musicals like Of Thee I Sing and Kaufman even took on the unenviable task of corralling the Marx Brothers into their first legitimate musical comedy, The Cocoanuts. Following in Kaufman’s rat-a-tat-tat, wise-cracking satirical style were other gifted playwrights like Moss Hart (a frequent Kaufman collaborator), George Abbott, Mae West, Philip Barry (more genteel), and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, whose blissfully anarchic The Front Page and Twentieth Century would both go on to have major Hollywood legacies.

The Golden Age of American stage comedy would be further diluted by the advent of sound film as many idiosyncratic stage comedians and Broadway writers went West. With the exception of zany, free-wheeling Hellzapoppin in 1938 and a few classics, such as Kaufman and Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, the “take-no-prisoners” style of 1930s comic anarchy no longer seemed appropriate during the Second World War. Serious minded musicals, created either by or in the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein mode, precluded outsized comedians and the successful comedies of the 1940s, such as Harvey and Arsenic and Old Lace were comparatively benign. In the 1950s, stage comedies were forced to compete with television and did so with the only weapon available to them: mild doses of suggestive sexuality. The best of the breed was George Axelrod’s The Seven-Year-Itch (a more interesting play than movie, despite the appearance of Marilyn Monroe), but more typical was Never Too Late by Sumner Arthur Long, in which a man in his fifties discovers that he has impregnated his wife.

Ironically, just as sound films gave vaudeville stars a new immortality by capturing their work forever, television managed to reinvigorate Broadway comedy in the 1960s, especially musical comedy. Five veterans of the writing staff of Your Show of Shows turned their hands to writing successful musical comedy librettos: Larry Gelbart (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), Neil Simon (Little Me; Promises, Promises), Michael Stewart (Bye Bye Birdie, Hello, Dolly!), Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), and Mel Brooks (actually, his 1960s musicals were flops—but wait until The Producers). They were joined by such veterans as Abe Burrows and Betty Comden and Adolph Green in creating a new era of joyously silly musical comedies—shows for the proverbial “tired businessman.” A new generation of Broadway clowns invigorated the proceedings, almost all of whom originally started on stage, but were now television stars eager to spread their wings, bring their comic talents to a starring role in a narrative musical, and, not coincidentally, grab a huge percentage of the weekly gross. They included Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, and Carol Burnett. Among these buoyant musical comedies, pride of place must be given to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), written by Gelbart, Burt Shevelove, and Stephen Sondheim, an homage to burlesque reset in Ancient Rome. Forum maintains its low comic genius and, over the years, in revivals, tours, and a film version, has provided a happy home for such varied comics as Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, Mickey Rooney, Buster Keaton, Nathan Lane, and Whoopi Goldberg.

The last three decades have not been kind to stage comedy. Clearly television and the movies have swallowed up not only writers, but the performers whose finely crafted and often manic personas inspired decades of comic writers. But, Broadway has recently seen a rebirth of the musical comedy, after about a two-decade preponderance of ponderous pop operas. Led largely by Mel Brooks’ The Producers in 2001, there has been a march of shows conceived almost exclusively to tickle the funny bone in song and dance: Hairspray, Avenue Q, Monty Python’s Spamalot, Xanadu, and Young Frankenstein. Such hijinks would have been inconceivable in the 1990s, when Broadway was mired in the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Co. But the theater has always embraced certain stars as their own, comedians who both ennoble and energize a live event with their presence: Beatrice Lillie, Carol Channing, Sam Levene, Robert Morse, Zero Mostel, and Nathan Lane (and Lane often succeeded in some of Mostel’s great parts). Alas, these comedians were not always able to make successful transitions into film or television—something about them being larger-than-life.

But, “larger-than-life” is what a comedy audience demands, whether it knows it or not. Vaudeville and Broadway have given center stage to a special kind of performer who can connect with a spectator across the footlights all the way to the back row in the balcony. When you bought a ticket to see them, in person, cavorting around a stage, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event; it was the stuff of legend.

Conviviality and comedy have gone together for centuries. In the 19th Century, music halls sprung up in urban centers, which essentially allowed working men to enjoy a pint or two while listening to a song or watching a couple of lowbrow baggy pants comics hammer it out with each other. When vaudeville came along, it added the provision that there was to be no drinking during the show (which made it permissible for women to attend the performances) and this conferred respectability allowed vaudeville to grow and prosper. When Prohibition was enforced in 1920, it created a new venue where covert imbibers could drink and be entertained: the speakeasy. The most famous figure of the New York speakeasies was, in fact, a mistress of ceremonies, Texas Guinan. While not strictly a comedienne, Guinan certainly knew how to break up a crowd; she would crack jokes, flirt with customers, initiate pranks, introduce celebrities, bring on the dancing girls. Guinan’s antics—with her legendary cry of “Hello, suckers!”—were the perfect cocktail of hooch and hilarity, confirming the basic fact that, for many consumers, a drink went down better with a joke as a chaser.

After the Federal government restored the legal procurement of alcohol to the American public in 1933, it seemed unlikely that profitable speakeasy owners—or their clients—would give up their post-prandial amusements. Organized crime had discovered a lucrative source of income and, therefore, backed many nightclubs—as they were now known—in cities across the country. In 1940, the mob invested in the Copacabana, a Latin-accented club on New York’s East 60th Street, and it quickly became not only one of the most successful nightclubs in America, but one of the premiere venues to watch ascending stars of comedy. Typically, in the 1940s and 50s, a club like the Copa offered dining, drinking, and dancing (back when couples knew how to dance cheek-to-cheek) which were temporarily halted three times a night at 8, 10, and 2 AM, to provide a fully produced floor show. There would be an orchestra, a bevy of dancing girls, a crooner, and, more and more frequently, a comic.

A high-profile nightclub like the Copa (or the Los Angeles-based clubs such as Ciro’s or the Cocoanut Grove) could provide a unique launching pad for a comedian. In 1948, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were signed, against their better instincts, for a two-week engagement at the Copa. They thought working in a nightclub was a step sideways on their career paths, and were displeased to open for a singer, Vivian Blaine. But, the night they debuted, Martin and Lewis were such a sensation clowning around on the bandstand—and in the audience—that, when Blaine came on to sing, she was hooted off the stage. The Copa management extended Martin and Lewis’ engagement for eighteen weeks, raised their salaries to $5000 a week, and basked in the rave reviews from the gossip columnists—back in the days when gossip columnists meant something. They certainly meant something to Martin and Lewis; the buzz on the duo was so strong that Hal Wallis, a producer at Paramount, came to see them and signed them for a film contract. The Copa provided a showcase for other comics—Jimmy Durante, Joe E. Lewis, and the occasional hijinks of the Rat Pack—but the club was practically synonymous with Martin and Lewis; they played there every year and it was at the Copa that they played their farewell engagement as a team in July of 1956; it was the hottest ticket in the country.

The nightclub life for a comedian was not the easiest one. Usually the comedian opened for a singer (only with a great comedian was it the other way around) and three sets a night, seven nights a week, four weeks an engagement (not to mention the travel) was grueling work. That kind of gig was, of course, not helped by the whispered drink orders or tinkling silverware that formed a distracting accompaniment to the act, but with a weekly salary that often cracked five figures, such annoyances could be endured. Hecklers were an occupational hazard, but they kept a comedian on his toes and each had their preferred way of dealing with an obstreperous drunk: “Oh, I remember when I had my first beer,” was the way Steve Martin dispatched hecklers in the mid-sixties.

Perhaps the epitome of the post-war comics was Joe E. Lewis. Lewis had started as a singer in Chicago; when he ran afoul of a mob boss in the late 1930s, Lewis’ throat was slit as a vendetta. Eventually, he regained his ability to speak, but turned more to joke telling: “A man is never drunk if he can lay on the floor without holding on,” went one of his more famous remarks. David Steinberg remembers that “he started to expand talking to his piano player. So he talked to his piano player about his ex-wife, his gambling. Eventually people flocked to see him. He was always upset if you saw the first show, because he was always drunker for the second show and was always more hostile and funny for the second show.” Lewis, with a Scotch in one hand and a cigarette between two fingers, standing in front of a mike in the middle of the night in a pressed tuxedo, was the picture postcard of a nightclub comic.

Catching a comic in a major nightspot such as the Copa would be the kind of thing out-of-towners would consider the height of post-war urban sophistication. However, there was also another place to catch some of the best comics in America, although it was as far removed from city life as possible (well, an hour and a half, anyway): the Catskills. The Catskill Mountains, located northwest of New York City in Sullivan and Ulster Counties, had been a popular resort area since the 1880s; the hotels, bungalows, and camp sites there provided relief to a largely Jewish population fleeing the city for the summer. The Catskills were bred and sustained out of a racial insularity. Jewish vacationers knew they would be welcome at these resorts and, likewise, the resorts catered (and that is the word) to Jewish sensibilities in terms of food, socializing, and entertainment. The entertainment, in particular, included seminal work by some of America’s most successful comedians. They, too, were defined by the heavy Jewish food offered in mammoth proportions at these resorts, specifically the cold beet soup smothered with sour cream—the Borscht Belt.

Although the Catskills began as a collection of low-maintenance cottages, in the 1940s and 1950s, the resorts expanded and bigger and bigger hotels were built. Reports proclaim that there were eventually more than 700 of them. In order to keep competitive, the hotels would have to provide first-rate entertainments for their vacationers. The Saturday night show was the major social event of the week, and hotels such as the Concord, Kutscher’s, Brown’s, and Grossinger’s built larger and larger show rooms for the headliners to play for their eager, well-dressed, well-behaved audiences. (The Concord supposedly had the largest nightclub in the country at one time, over 3000 seats.) Needless to say, the comics who played there traded on Jewish clichés and Jewish jokes. (“The food is terrible here.” “Yes, and such small portions,” ran one famous joke.) Like the city nightclubs, it offered opportunities for comics to find their voice: Red Buttons (who changed his name from Aaron Schwatt at the Catskills), Buddy Hackett, Jerry Lewis, and Alan King joined such Jewish comic stalwarts as Myron Cohen and Henny Youngman. The plethora of resorts in the Catskills allowed comedians to play one hotel after the other—the Borscht Belt Circuit—and if a comedian scored big in the Catskills, word of mouth spread swiftly back to the city.

The Catskill resorts, so desperate to keep their clientele amused, often employed full-time jester/social director/cheerleaders called tummlers to make sure there was never a dull moment. Mel Brooks famously got his start in this capacity; one might say he never stopped. Tummlers, however, were not welcome at all resorts. In the Poconos, the Pennsylvania mountain resort area, a number of summer camps opened up in the 1920s, the most famous of which was Camp Tamiment, which prided itself on being a social meeting place for Jewish singles, but with a high ethical component; hence, no tummlers. Beginning in 1921, Tamiment provided week-long vacations in the summer, the highlight of which was a highly professional Saturday night revue. The revues at the Tamiment Playhouse have become the stuff of legend, especially during the regime of the social director/producer Max Liebman from 1933 to 1949. Liebman was in charge of putting on a brand-new revue every week; he had an excellent eye for talent and recruited, among many others, Sylvia Fine and Danny Kaye (who began their personal and professional partnership at Tamiment), Imogene Coca, and choreographer Jerome Robbins. The Tamiment revues were so good that one of them transferred to Broadway in 1938, and when television came along in 1948, Liebman was recruited to produce the first real original revue for broadcast. His show was The Admiral Broadway Revue, featuring Coca and a comedian he had worked with before, Sid Caesar.

Liebman left Tamiment to concentrate on producing television full-time (Your Show of Shows was the outgrowth of Admiral, and he used several writers from Tamiment on the program), but the camp still brought in major young comic talent to churn out its weekly revues: Carol Burnett, Danny and Neil Simon, and Woody Allen, who made both his directing and acting debuts at Tamiment, when he felt the staff wasn’t doing justice to his comedy material. Ironically, the Catskill resorts across the state line put an end to Tamiment’s heyday; when those hotels began to bring in major headliners, Tamiment’s clientele grew quickly bored with the “unknowns” pouring our their hearts and souls every Saturday night for their amusement. The camp closed in 1962, a victim of television—which it did so much to ennoble—and air-conditioning, which made the urban nightclub a comfortable fixture 52 weeks a year.

Nightclubs were part of the diurnal rhythm in big cities across America well into the early sixties, before crime and the call of suburbia made catching the 7:21 to Scarsdale a higher priority than catching Jack E. Leonard’s act at 2 AM. Each city had its premiere clubs and its second tier clubs, just the way vaudeville had the big time and the small time, and comics seemed to prefer it that way, tailoring their material to the tastes of the clientele. Back then, music was an integral part of the nightclub scene. Every comic played in front of a band, a combo, or at very least, a piano player and the tone of the club was determined by the kind of musicians it booked, rather than by the comedians it hired. New York’s best clubs were the Copa, the Latin Quarter (run by Barbara Walters’ father, Lou), and the Basin Street East; Le Ruban Bleu, the Blue Angel, the Village Vanguard, and Julius Monk’s Upstairs at the Downstairs catered to a more intimate, cabaret crowd. Chicago had the Palmer House and Chez Paree for the expense account crowd, Mr. Kelly’s Mill for those who liked their comedy a little on the raw side. Los Angeles had the Cocoanut Grove for the movie stars and the Crescendo for the hipsters. Miami was building fancy hotels at an expansive rate—the Fontainebleu, the Eden Roc, and the Diplomat—to accommodate the older generation who were fleeing the East Coast. Lou Walters established a Latin Quarter down there and headliners like Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason were packing them in; at a tiny club called Murray Franklin’s, one could catch a balding barracuda named Don Rickles.

Then, Vegas, fittingly, raised the stakes. The first major casinos, like the Flamingo, sprouted up after World War II and, of course, comics were hired to entertain the customers in between gambling binges. In the early days, according to Dick Martin, “you used to walk from place to place over the sand.” But, with the addition of major hotels like the Desert Inn, the Sahara, and the Sands (the last two opened in 1952), the modern age of Las Vegas entertainment had begun. Vegas had its own rules; no comic could play a set longer than ninety minutes, recalled Bob Newhart, because management wanted the audience back at the gaming tables. There were lounges, open all night, where comics could get their start, and the main rooms, which featured headliners, often earning five to ten times what they could make in New York at the Copa. Rickles, a feature at the Sahara’s Casbah lounge, remembered the thrill when his reputation grew at the lounge: “For the first time, they’ve even slapped on a cover charge. It’s only five bucks, but it makes me feel good. I’m no longer free. You have to buy me.” When Frank Sinatra convened the Rat Pack at the Sands in 1960, it turned Vegas overnight into the top dollar venue for comics and singers, and dealt a fatal blow to the tonier clubs in cities across the country; their payroll simply couldn’t compete anymore. For producer George Schlatter, the 1960s were a golden time for Vegas: “In the old days, Vegas was a thrill. Rickles went on at eleven o’clock at night until two o’clock in the morning and Frank and Dean and Sammy and Marlene Dietrich and everybody would come over to the Sahara and watch Rickles and there was again a sense of community. They all talked to each other, they all filled in for each other, they all went to see each other.”

Luckily, there were places springing up around the country where you could get a few laughs without being a high roller. In fact, some of the best and most interesting nightclubs of the 1950s and 60s were in direct contrast to Las Vegas—small, intimate, and definitely geared to the counterculture. Again, the tone of these clubs followed the tune of the musicians who played there, usually jazz musicians and folk singers. The pioneer was the hungry i in San Francisco, which opened its basement doors in 1951. Its legendary owner, Enrico Banducci, created a venue in complete opposition to a place like the Copa; customers were not allowed to order drinks during the show, table top candles were placed in soup cans, and hecklers were forceably ejected, often by Banducci himself. Still, although there was a heavy focus on folk music acts, the hungry i was a career-making showcase for Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Tom Lehrer, Bob Newhart, and Nichols and May, among many others. (Lenny Bruce often tried out material there in the wee small hours, but generally considered the club too “square” for his purposes.) The Purple Onion, also in San Francisco’s North Beach, shone an early spotlight on Phyllis Diller and the Smothers Brothers.

New York had a peculiar law on the books since Prohibition, a cabaret card ordinance which only allowed dues-paying (and bribe-paying) artists to perform in nightclubs. The controversial Lord Buckley had his card revoked in 1960 by the police and died a few months later; the ordinance was subsequently struck down, which opened the flood gates for broader material. The bohemian life of Greenwich Village was the perfect incubator for the kind of club that flourished in San Francisco. The Village Gate, the Bitter End, the Café a Go-Go, and Café Wha? allowed comics from off-the-beaten track to try out a newer kind of material–hipper, more political, more sexual, more idiosyncratic—and certainly without a tuxedo. Comedians such as Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Woody Allen, Robert Klein, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin found receptive audiences among the Bleecker Street crowd and their careers flourished at these clubs.

Chicago had an identity all its own by the 1960s. A group based out of the University of Chicago called the Compass Players introduced ensemble improvisations to the club world in 1950; their alumni included Nichols and May and Shelley Berman. That group evolved into the Second City in 1959, continuing a more disciplined version of the comedy improv group. Second City set a very high bar, as comedians such as Robert Klein and Joan Rivers passed through the ensemble in the 1960s, and it continues to provide a fertile training ground for comedians to this day. Perhaps the oddest, but most interesting, nightclub in Chicago was the Playboy Club. Opened by publisher Hugh Hefner in 1960, the Playboy Club was members only, with stiff drinks served by cottontailed waitress with a low décolletage. A key to the Club was, in the words, of comedian Dick Gregory, “a status symbol, like a Mercedes is now.” In 1961, Gregory was a black comedian struggling in segregated clubs on Chicago’s South Side. While Gregory admired routines like Shelley Berman’s airplane bits, he knew such material was off-limits to his crowd: “I could never do that back then in the black nightclub, because less than one tenth of one percent of the patrons had been on an airplane! But I could do the same thing about a Greyhound Bus.” One evening in 1961, when Professor Irwin Corey cancelled on Hefner at the last minute, he brought Gregory across town to do his material at the Playboy Club: it would be the first time a black comedian played in a white club. Gregory was a hit, the evening made national attention (and Gregory’s career), and the Chicago Playboy Club became a groundbreaking venue for artists like Lenny Bruce, Moms Mabley, and Redd Foxx, who required a hip audience that appreciated blue material, but not cheap material.

With the greater presence of comedy on television screens—talk shows, variety shows—comedians became much more in demand in the 1970s; also, the popularity of rock music made it difficult for the old-time crooners and saloon singers to attract audiences. It also proved a tough time for the Catskill resorts. The New York urban population had fled to other parts of the country, and air-conditioning and cheap airfare allowed customers to go somewhere else for their holiday vacations. The Borscht Belt style was also getting out-of-synch with the new generation. Comedy writer Alan Zweibel, who got his start writing jokes for various Catskill comedians while still in his twenties for $7 a pop, recalled, “There’s a joke that I had written for those Catskill guys about a new movie that was coming out–a porno movie with an entire cast of Hasidic Jews and it was very unusual because during the orgy scene, the men were on one side of the room and the women were on the other. But I was going nowhere because it was all piecemeal stuff for interchangeable comedians, none of them with a defined persona.” By the late 1970s, the Borscht Belt–with all its stuffed cabbages and one-liners—was on an irreversible decline.

Something new and different was needed to bring the next generation of comedians forward. In 1963, impresario Budd Friedman opened a nightclub on West 44th Street called the Improv; initially, the club followed the traditional alternation between singers and comedians, but soon its stage hosted only comedians. The Improv was the first comedy club in the country and it gave important crossover spotlights on David Steinberg, Robert Klein, Jimmie Walker, Andy Kaufman, among many others. The concept of a two-drink minimum to watch comics, young and old, experiment with their craft proved surprisingly appealing and “open mike” nights allowed a lot of beginning comedians to work on their material. New York soon played host to such groundbreaking clubs as Catch a Rising Star and the Comic Strip; comedian Rodney Dangerfield inaugurated a club of his own in 1970, Dangerfield’s, which continues to present comedians to this day.

The elimination of the singer in a standard nightclub and the concurrent spotlights shone exclusively on comedians behind a mike gave rise to a new and ubiquitous term: stand-up. The life of a stand-up comedian is no easier than it was in the 1940s—the rigors of touring, finding material, hecklers, and so on—but at least they no longer have to worry about the band, or musical arrangement, or putting on the kind of extended performance in Vegas that Bob Newhart said “required planning—you had to plan the whole evening.” The sheer technical ease of performing a stand-up act changed the nightclub landscape. Robert Klein observes:

Before you knew it there were more young people standing in front of brick walls with microphones than you could shake a stick at– if that’s your idea of a good time, as Groucho would say. And what happened is that comedy clubs began to open, specifically comedy, and there were no longer elegant nightclubs with martini glasses. As it turns out, a kind of Darwinian process happened and a lot of clubs folded and then a lot of comedians who probably should have been in living rooms were put out of work, and a lot of working comics resented that.

The middle ground of the sophisticated nightclub of the Copa days by this time is a thing of the past. The lure of gambling casinos had increased the number of hotels across the country—Lake Tahoe, Atlantic City, Foxwoods—that need a big attraction floor show. High profile comedians could still get a huge payday in these venues, but they lacked a certain kind of charm and intimacy. The performers—and their performances—become a commodity. Dick Smothers remembers seeing George Burns backstage at Caesar’s Palace when the comedian was still being trotted out in front of the high rollers in his late 90s. “He’d be ready to go on, he’d have a martini, straight up in one hand and a cigar in the other one. ‘Show business is great, Dick,’ he says ‘Great. Sing a few songs. Tell a few jokes. Fifty thousand dollars. I love it.’ They’d applaud him for being alive.”

For those audience members with hundreds of dollars to blow, Vegas and the other casinos will continue to offer impressive floor shows featuring top-notch, if undemanding, comics. The nightclub and cabaret life of the postwar era is as nearly extinct as the Catskill resorts; it’s nearly impossible to maintain a high-class boite for the very best singers anymore. Standing on top of the heap—on many heaps, actually, all over cities in America—is the stand-up comic. The quality of stand-up comics at these comedy clubs varies enormously; you might get stuck with a college sophomore up there, but, hey, you never know when Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock are going to try out some new material. Comedians should enjoy their new-found triumph in comedy clubs while it lasts—they certainly put up with enough crooners and combos over the years. As Budd Friedman put it, “But, you know, stand-ups have become stars. Stand-ups get the women now. Except for a handful of Milton Berles and Sid Caesars, stand-ups were basically opening acts and the singers got the girls. Well, comics are getting the girls now.”

Windsor McCay was one of the most successful and technically brilliant newspaper cartoonists of the early twentieth century. His baroque inventive Little Nemo in Slumberland series galvanized readers across the country as the title hero’s adventures sprawled over an entire page in the Sunday morning funnies. Influenced by his son’s “flip book,” McCay tried his hand at animating Little Nemo for a brief cartoon—it took him four years of painstaking work. After a second attempt, he decided to create a character specifically for the movie screen, a gentle giant named Gertie the Dinosaur, whom McCay unveiled in 1914. It took 10,000 separate drawings, each hand-drawn by McCay on onion-skin, to bring Gertie to life in a one-reeler. Audiences didn’t know what hit them, but clearly the animated short was going to be an essential part of film vocabulary.

The early days of silent cartoons are filled with as many different experiments as their live action counterparts. Animators had to find ways to get beyond the sheer novelty of the process and create something amusing and fluid, a particularly difficult chore, considering the huge manpower required to churn out cartoons at a time when all the technology was done by hand. Transparent celluloid, or “cels”, allowed for a more efficient way of reproducing each frame and pioneer animators Max and Dave Fleischer invented a process called the Rotoscope in 1916, which projected live-action clowning directly onto a drawing board. Their Koko the Clown character was initially created by having one of the Fleischer brothers act out Koko’s antics, while the other rendered the action frame-by-frame. Many early characters were simply transfers from newspaper strips—Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff—but in 1919, an original character appeared, a cat who was easy to draw because he was all black. His name was Felix, and his plucky resourcefulness led critics to compare him with Chaplin (who briefly appeared as an animated character himself in the 1910s). In 1923’s “Felix in Hollywood,” our hero actually unscrews his own tail and uses it as a cane for a Chaplin imitation. Felix was also the first animated character to be licensed for commercial products.

According to animation historian Leonard Maltin, as the 1920s ended, “more and more artists and cartoonists got the hang of animation and began to explore more and more with each passing year how you could do things in animation you couldn’t do in a live action film. They created a whole new language for the animated cartoon which gave those characters abilities even beyond Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton–and that’s really saying something.” But cartoon animation might have been stopped in its tracks without the invention of sound synchronization in the mid-1920s. There had been some crude “follow-the-bouncing-ball” shorts, which used music, but the industry was revolutionized in 1928, when producer Walt Disney reintroduced a character named Mickey Mouse in a short called “Steamboat Willie.” Mickey’s previous two silent adventures had not even been picked up for distribution, but his new short subject had a synchronized sound score (and was delightfully illustrated by Ub Iwerks). Audiences loved it and Disney built his empire on the little mouse—to whom he always gave credit.

Exaggerated sound fit exaggerated motion to a T—and it was just the element that cartoons needed to lift off the ground. Sound also accelerated the need for tempo; now it was even more crucial for a successful cartoon to have the right timing; it was a difficult trick to master. Pioneer animator Chuck Jones said that “animation is the art of timing. . . . the difference between a huge laugh and a flop can be one frame.” With the success of Walt Disney’s short subjects (Silly Symphonies), movie studios in Hollywood set up full-time animation divisions (Disney’s short cartoons were distributed by RKO); as every feature presentation at the time included several short subjects and cartoons, animation became crucial moneymakers for the studios. Also, as with the creation of real-live movie stars, studios needed to create characters with whom the audience could identify and welcome back week after week. The creators of cartoons now had to expand their canvas dramatically—and that meant becoming part of the world of drama. As another pioneer, Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker) put it:

An animator is like an actor before the camera, only he has to act out his feelings and interpret that scene with his pencil; he also has to know how to space characters because the spacing of their movements determines the tempo; he must know expression; he must know feeling; he has to know the character and make him walk with a funny action.

Life as an animator for a studio division was chaotic, intense, frustrating, and often heck of a lot of fun. Executives—other than Disney—rarely knew how to handle these strange men who drew cartoons and animators, frequently fed up with one slight or another, shuttled among the various studios with an alarming frequency; even the most ardent animation fan would have trouble keeping the scorecard straight. Warner Bros started its own division in 1930 by animating songs from their vast musical catalogue with the rip-off title of Looney Tunes and soon added another series of one-offs called Merrie Melodies. But these were initially conceived without successful characters; other studios were having better luck drawing their own stable of stars. Fleischer created Betty Boop in 1930 and brought the comic strip hero Popeye to the screen in 1931. Disney added Donald Duck to Mickey’s menagerie in 1934 and the cantankerous waterfowl soon outstripped his friend’s popularity. Disney outpaced all of his rivals during the Depression years, adding professional voice talent and Technicolor to his cartoons. In 1937, he offered his competitors the greatest challenge of all: a feature-length adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which used 750 artists who created a quarter of a million drawings at the cost of $1.5 million dollars. It earned six times that amount in its initial release.

Yet for many aficionados, the most exciting animation of the period (and into the 1950s) was to be found at Warner Bros. In the years 1936-1937, the studio (which stuck their animators in a remote bungalow they dubbed “Termite Terrace”) assembled the All-Star Team of cartoonists: directors Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Frank Tashlin, as well as voice professional extraordinaire Mel Blanc and musical director Carl Stalling. Working in deranged concert with each other, they demonstrated that classic comedy animation was a rare combination of design, voice, effect, character, timing, and point of view. Any combination of those would be amusing; to have all six at once, as Warner Bros often did, was exhilarating. Their stable of two-dimensional celebrities was impressive: Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and, joining them after WWII, Sylvester and Tweety, Yosemite Sam, Pepe le Pew, and Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. What the animators did with them was even better.

Each director had his own take on the material and although the differences might be subtle for the average viewer, they were clear to the animators. Tex Avery is widely created for taking a stock character, Bugs Bunny, and investing him with a definitive character for “A Wild Hare” in 1940. According to his biographer Joe Adamson, “Avery said, ‘How about a character who just isn’t fazed by anything? He comes up out of his rabbit hole, and he’s got a gun in his face, and he just chews his carrot and says, “What’s up, Doc?”’ Avery was known as a keen gag man who wanted his cartoons to be louder, faster, funnier and he was the first animator to have his characters talk to the audience

Chuck Jones, on the other hand, was interested in subtlety and the release of a quiet moment or humorous aside. He saw Bugs Bunny as a cool cookie, a character who only reacted when provoked. The creator of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, Jones was a comedy purist and the Stanislavksy of animation, for whom motivation was key: “It was important to give the characters some disciplines—rules that defined the limits of the game,” he once wrote. “Everyone I’ve ever respected used restricted tools. The greatest comedians were the ones who wore the simplest costumes and worked in prescribed areas like Chaplin.” Tashlin experimented in camera angles, blackouts, pace, and absurdity and went on to become a highly valued live-action comedy director, working with stars like Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. When, on his first non-animated assignment, he created some dueling gags for a Bob Hope period comedy, Tashlin recalled that “It was full of cartoon jokes. I remember Bob saying—they must have told him I came from the cartoon business—things like, ‘Jesus Christ, now I’m a rabbit!’”

However innovative the gang at Warner Bros was, the fact remains that as the 1950s began, short cartoons for the movies were on the wane. The studio system had broken down and executives could no longer insist that exhibitors take two or three cartoons as part of the presentation package. Animation, which was always labor-intensive, became more and more expensive to produce; even Disney was cutting back. New animation units were sprouting up, looking for new ways to do things. UPA was created in 1944, and cut costs by simplifying the visual depth of their characters and abstracting backgrounds. They called the process “limited animation” and their new characters were Gerald McBoing-Boing and Mr. Magoo.

Television soon opened up a whole new market for cartoons; the Faustian bargain was a huge drop in quality and detail. It did little good for animators to wring their hands over the decline of artistry—the small black-and-white rectangular screen mercilessly dictated what looked good and what didn’t. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had burnished their reputation with the Academy Award-winning Tom and Jerry series at MGM; when they bailed out of movies to work in television, they were shocked by the meager budgets offered by the networks. To make the numbers work, they created an even more limited animation style, often pixilating only the moving elements of a character: the mouth, the hands (or paws). Beginning in 1958, Hanna-Barbera introduced new characters directly to television: Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and, in 1960, created the first half-hour animated comedy series, The Flintstones, which was a huge ratings hit.

If you grew up in the 1960s, you had a nearly unlimited supply of cartoons available to you; every weekday afternoon, some local affiliate was repackaging old Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons, and every Saturday morning, there was nearly three hours of animated programming on each of the three major networks. Not to mention an entire menagerie of tigers, tunas, and toucans pitching products during the commercials. The quality of these candy-colored entertainments varied enormously—both as art and as literature—but they were omnipresent. Some shows broke out of the pack, such as Jay Ward’s various Rocky and Bullwinkle incarnations, which were absurdist, witty indictments of Cold War pieties (although Chuck Jones dismissed their visual crudity as “illustrated radio”).

While television often lacked the virtuosity to create first-rate animated comic characters, they borrowed an astonishing amount of real-life comedy to prime the pump. The Flintstones were Stone Age versions of The Honeymooners and another Hanna-Barbera prime-time show, Top Cat, was a feline adaptation of The Phil Silvers Show. The creators of Amos ‘n’ Andy resurfaced after a decade-long absence to create an animated rip-off called Calvin and the Colonel. Bargain-basement animated versions of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Laverne and Shirley, Jerry Lewis, the Fonz, the Mask, and the Three Stooges (once as human beings, the second time as robots) made the Saturday morning rounds, but even the best cartoons borrowed from their three-dimensional progenitors—who doesn’t recognize a shot of W.C. Fields in Mr. Magoo, a hint of Groucho in Bugs Bunny, a slather of Senator Claghorn in Foghorn Leghorn?

A combination of boredom with the limitations of television animation, computer technology, the freedom of cable networks, and some bright entrepreneurial thinking all help to, well, reanimate the field at the beginning of the 1990s. Disney found a way to recapture its old feature-length magic by tapping into Broadway-style musicals with The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, two major blockbusters that spawned countless imitations both at Disney and other, often brand-new, studios. Cartoon Network was added to the cable system in 1992, eventually acquiring the Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros catalogues while developing some immensely creative cartoons, such as Dexter’s Laboratory and Powerpuff Girls. MTV took their freedom in another direction, using crudely conceived animation to deliver such counter-culture slackers as Beavis and Butthead and Daria directly to the Generation X audience. First-rate comic talent was no longer reduced to Saturday morning purgatory; comedians such as Nathan Lane, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Ellen Degeneres, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Tim Allen, Mike Myers, Roseanne Barr, and Jerry Seinfeld gleefully leaped upon the voice-over bandwagon, providing signature personalities of such dimension in animated cartoons that they were often billed above the title for a film in which they never actually appeared. In 1997, The Simpsons beat The Flintstones’ record for most consecutive prime-time cartoon episodes, and they keep on ticking. . . .

In the 21st Century, animation has transformed, as Aladdin’s cartoon couple would put it, into a whole new world. Cartoons are more popular than ever, and they reach Americans in more ways, in more forms, with more resonance than ever before. It’s a medium that achieves hair-raising technical brilliance on one level—say, Shrek—while making countless viewers giggle uncontrollably with products that could be just as easily created with construction paper and school paste—say, South Park. Cartoon now exist in a wide, tense universe bracketed by alpha and omega, and it makes some purists wistful for the glory days. As Leonard Maltin put it, “Television has reinvigorated animation, has created a new audience for animation, but sadly, has forgotten the history of animation. Modern cartoons couldn’t exist without those [classic] cartoons, and yet they don’t have the heart or originality or the organic humor and originality of those cartoons.” Cartoons remain a comic medium; no matter how detailed a computer can pixilate the green fuzz on an ogre’s nose, it all begins with an artist brandishing a sharp gag and a sharp pencil.

From one perspective, all of radio comedy was a sight gag. Each individual listener had to see the comic event in his or hers mind’s eye—which meant there were millions of different imaginings of one comic’s gag from coast to coast. Within its first decade of broadcast programming radio rewrote the rules of comedy in America. In fact, radio created so many of the ways that Americans receive and perceive comedy that it is arguably the most influential medium for comedy in our history.

Comedy took a while to find its potent niche on the airwaves. After the first commercially licensed station broadcast the results of the 1920 presidential election, most of the programming to be heard on the nascent technology consisted of music, news reports, and chat. Comedians ventured skeptically into the new medium; first, it seemed counter-intuitive for a comic who had spent years, if not decades, making funny faces and funny gestures to have to rely solely on his voice, and, second, the poor transmission quality made it difficult for any comedian to land his material successfully. Eddie Cantor and Ed Wynn were two of the few name vaudevillians who briefly tried their hands at radio comedy in the very early 1920s, but the pioneers of the genre are generally considered to be Freeman Godsen and Charles Correll, two obscure entertainers from the Midwest. They were initially asked by a Chicago radio station to do some cross-promotion with a local newspaper by dramatizing a popular comic strip, The Gumps, but they stuck to what they knew better—the minstrel tradition—and created the first comic serial. The daily fifteen-minute adventures of Sam’n’Henry—a pair of black ne’er-do-wells—was broadcast for the first time in January of 1926. A contractual dispute led to their move to another station in 1928, and to the adoption of new names for, essentially, the same characters: Amos and Andy. Amos ‘n’ Andy would grow to become one of the most popular and enduring programs on radio, continuing for four decades.

That the roots of Amos ‘n’ Andy began with the funny papers seems entirely appropriate, because the radio serial was the performance equivalent of a daily (or weekly) comic strip; it was the first time Americans could follow the ongoing adventures of live characters. The desire to keep up with characters who had endeared themselves to the audience proved to be a potent one and it required immense energy and considerable imagination to fill the insatiable maw of a one-half hour episode every week (in an era when there were no summer re-runs).

The idea of creating a character that a comedian had to embody for weeks on end was an entirely novel one. Vaudeville comedians could dine out on the same gags for years, as long as they moved from town to town; in radio, they became sitting (or standing) ducks—one broadcast could send a year’s worth of gags to every town in America and vaporize your best material in half an hour. Even if you were a comedian in a Broadway comedy or revue, you still had only to play the same two hours of material every night, and then for a thousand people, at the most. There was no way to succeed with a strictly regional joke anymore and goodness knows you had to stick with your clean material, no matter how well the risqué stuff played. But radio was clearly the wave of the future and it would be a huge challenge for ordinary comedians to ride that wave. Small wonder, then, that when Eddie Cantor and Ed Wynn both attempted radio again in the early 1930s (Cantor debuted on The Chase and Sanborn Hour in 1931; Wynn as The Fire Chief), they used as much of their vaudeville/revue apparatus as they could comfortably drag into a broadcast studio.

A comedy variety show, like Cantor’s, allying radio’s two early mainstays, comedy and music, would seem to be what we’d now call a no-brainer. But, even here, the rules were unclear. In Cantor’s initial broadcasts, audiences were asked to try to stay completely silent during the proceedings, which were performed behind a glass wall, for fear their laughter would distract the home audience. Well, given Cantor’s outrageous antics, that wasn’t going to last long; during one of Cantor’s ad-lib gags, the audience fell apart, and, quickly, so did the glass wall, metaphorically speaking. Cantor liked it better that way and so did the home listeners, who sent in sacks of mail in support of such live spontaneity. Variety comedians had to try new ways to keep both the studio and the home audience engaged. The radio announcer was soon drafted in as a comic foil; ensembles of distinct comic personalities became common as did guest stars; even the sponsor’s commercial product was turned into comic fodder. (Sponsors initially disliked the idea, until they realized that humor helped to sell their products better than earnestness.)

By 1935, 70 percent of all American households had radios. Depression economics encouraged the growth of the medium, as radios grew cheaper in cost, and as people had less money to spend on traditional entertainment forms like theater or nightclubs. “First of all, it was the only source of home entertainment, unless you had some kind of silly uncle or something,” recalled Larry Gelbart. “Radio was a vital part of everybody’s life. At night, the comics came on and you shared it with the family. Nobody had a radio in their room. I didn’t think I had a room. It was a family affair, and of course, all the comedy was squeaky clean.” The audience for comedy developed at a rapid rate and many comedians now saw radio less as a terror than as a refuge—a necessary evil.

Life was made easier for the variety comedian once the technical rules were sorted out and they discovered those aspects of radio that could actually add to the fun. Although Jack Benny and Bob Hope employed scores of hard-working writers on their respective staffs, they never had to memorize scripts or rehearse them at great length. The loosey-goosey nature of a show like Hope’s or Cantor’s meant that characters and guests could come and go without much motivation or conventional set-up. Unlike a movie or a play, radio could be immediately topical—and it required no sets, props, or real estate other than a broadcast studio. Even a rare unscripted moment could be immediately wrangled from becoming a calamity to a classic. When an errant eagle broke loose from his trainer on a 1940 episode of NBC’s The Fred Allen Show, flew around the studio, and eventually made a natural deposit on the floor, Allen seized on the joke for weeks, referring to the “ghost’s beret” left on Mr. Rockefeller’s carpet. Less amusing, perhaps to Pepsodent, the show’s sponsor, was Bob Hope’s ad-libbed rejoinder to Dorothy Lamour when she told him one evening on The Bob Hope Show to “meet her in front of the pawn shop”: “Okay—you can kiss me under the balls.”

A clever comedian could wring enough subtle changes in the variety format to create something enduring that worked off his personality. Allen created, essentially, a Broadway revue, by alternating sketches, parodies, and recurring characters and segments. Jack Benny created an appealing hybrid between a variety show, which he hosted, and a situation comedy, where he played variety show host Jack Benny. Hope, a product of the slicker 1940s, eschewed sense and sensibility for speed and wisecracks. It was hard to judge what kind of comedian would appeal to a radio audience. Edgar Bergen, an unprepossessing ventriloquist, became a superstar jousting with Charlie McCarthy, and Abbott and Costello were able to use radio as a stepping stone from burlesque to film. On the other hand, Groucho Marx, that most vocally idiosyncratic of comedians, suffered mightily on radio before scoring as host of a quiz show as late as 1947. W.C. Fields was, at best, a marginal figure on radio; Milton Berle bombed on it; Laurel and Hardy never even tried it.

Perhaps audiences were more particular because radio was the first medium that allowed comedians into their homes. That may also explain why radio was so conducive to the form of the serial domestic comedy. While Bob Hope and his friends could be as outrageous and show-bizzy as they wanted to be, there was also a significant place for just plain folks on the radio. In addition to Amos ‘n’ Andy, there were scores of situation comedies that burrowed their way into the hearts of Americans. “These shows had a family of people,” said Jonathan Winters. “And you looked forward to listening to them.” Some early comedies were broadcast daily for fifteen minutes; later on, most adopted a half-hour weekly format, the better for audiences to grow accustomed to them. Fibber McGee and Molly was the quintessential domestic comedy, a slice of small-town Midwestern American life, centered by the eponymous married couple, played by a real-life married couple of former vaudevillians, Jim and Marian Jordan. McGee was a genial dope who always bluffed his way through some hair-brained scheme, only to be gently upbraided by his long-suffering wife. They filled out their domestic quarrels at 79 Wistful Vista with a parade of off-beat neighbors, relatives and servants. (Two of these—neighbor Throckmorton Gildersleeve and maid Beulah—were given their own spin-off series; this, decades before The Jeffersons.) The McGee’s overstuffed closet became almost as famous as the characters themselves and the show was on the air, in one format or another, for twenty-two years.

An odder, but equally beloved series was Vic and Sade, about another Midwestern couple, the Gooks, who lived in mythical Crooper, Illinois. The extraordinary conceit of this fifteen-minute daily comedy was that its on-air characters essentially consisted of only four people, the Gook family, who constantly referred to a legion of off-stage kooks and eccentrics who resided in their hometown. Somehow, the sole writer, Paul Rhymer, and his talented ensemble kept up this absurdist haiku of a comedy going for a dozen years, five times a week.

Of course, as listeners and entertainers alike were to discover, it was the very regularity of domestic comedy that made it so appealing. It was a tricky balance, to encourage repetition without incurring predictability, but the best shows could pull it off. These radio shows created something previously unexplored—the running gag, an idea so potent and so welcome that, like the McGee’s closet or Gracie Allen’s search for her long-lost brother, its very anticipation could engender waves of laughter. Radio comedies created national catchphrases, some of which survive to this day, even if their provenance is only known to a handful of nostalgia buffs: “It’s a joke, son!” or “Taint funny, McGee” or “Vas you dere, Sharlie?” Nearly all of radio’s serial comedy was domestic in nature (Duffy’s Tavern, a forerunner of television’s Cheers was a rare exception) and its basic vocabulary was bequeathed to television when the time came: marital spats, nosy neighbors, ethnic characters, the surprise guest star, the theme song.

After World War II, radio was on its last legs. Very few new shows of any interest sprouted up, except perhaps for a domestic comedy called My Favorite Wife, starring a fading movie star named Lucille Ball. A pair of whimsical geniuses named Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding broadcast their hilarious burlesques of radio’s pomposity out of a local Boston affiliate in the early 1950s and became cult figures. Bob and Ray’s ensemble of characters included a cowboy who did rope tricks on the radio, the spokesman for Slow . . . Talkers . . . of . . . America, and obnoxious sportscaster Biff Burns, who always signed off, “This is Biff Burns saying this is Biff Burns saying goodnight.” They paved the way for a legion of goofy broadcasters who dominated the rush-hour airwaves with their anarchic antics, most notably Howard Stern (although whether he is a pure comedian or a broadcast host or just an agent provocateur is open for question).

But although there is much on radio in the 21st Century that is amusing, the comic engine that primed the pump of its golden age is long gone (the only stations dedicated purely to comedy are on the satellite networks). Once television came along, Americans could continue to enjoy the funny faces and funny gestures that radio comedians had given up decades earlier. CBS executive William Tankersley recalled an evening in 1950, after the network had adopted television, in addition to radio, broadcasting:

I remember walking on stage at our studios on Sunset Boulevard when Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy had been on some radio show and the cast had gone out for dinner. And the stage was empty and the lights were kind of dim. And over in a corner there was a suitcase with some wooden pieces on it. Then I saw they were the arms and legs of Charlie McCarthy, whom we all considered to be a smart aleck, a very urbane, very funny character–and a live person. And there he was–just a pile of wood. And I thought that was a metaphor for the state of radio. And I’m getting the hell outta here.

If that’s a memory of yours from the early 1960s, or from the mid-1970s (when you were more likely listening to records in the basement or rec room, away from your parents), then it’s one you share with millions of people. But, in fact, you might have been sitting in the living room as far back as 1922, when “The Okeh Laughing Record” was stamped onto 78 rpm shellac discs. “The Laughing Record” consisted simply of three minutes of people laughing out loud; apparently it was contagious, as it became a huge best-seller.

Comedy recordings have actually been around as long as there were recordings. Monologist Cal Stewart recorded several jokes as the rustic “Uncle Josh” as far back as 1897. The first recorded comedy sensation was probably a comedian named Joe Hayman, who put out a series of routines about a Jewish immigrant besieged by technology, most famously “Cohen on the Telephone,” which came out in 1913. Comedy songs were particularly popular; every vaudeville or musical comedy star worth his or her salt, such as Eddie Cantor or Fanny Brice, waxed their choice bits. By the time these celebrities moved to radio in the early 1930s, there was so much comedy on the airwaves to be had for free that few people bought comedy recordings. In the late 1940s, bandleader Spike Jones had some big successes with his novelty numbers like “Der Fuhrer’s Face” and his frenetic desecrations of pop standards such as “Cocktails for Two.”

Unlike popular songs, which were routinely crafted in three-minute segments anyway, comedy was a victim of 78 rpm technology; the listener might get a “bit” from a comedian, but rarely a routine and never a performance. When the long playing record came along in 1948, it provided around 45 minutes of playing time, but even then comedy took awhile to catch fire. Listeners could purchase repackaged episodes of old radio comedy shows, but among the few pioneers to lay down tracks of original comedy in the 1950s were the eccentric hipster guru Lord Buckley, the radio parodist Stan Freberg (who had a hit single with his spoof of TV crime shows, “St. George and the Dragonet”), and Tom Lehrer, whose first album came out on a 10” LP.

The first comedy album of the modern age was Mort Sahl’s The Future Lies Ahead, released on Verve in 1958. Norman Granz was a pioneering jazz record producer and signed Sahl to record his routines in front of a live audience (an unauthorized recording of a Sahl concert was taped in 1955). Sahl’s records did very well and his largesse extended to his colleague Shelley Berman, who was making a name for himself performing comic monologues in nightclubs in Chicago and on the West Coast. Berman recalls how Sahl changed his career with a simple suggestion:

Mort, said, “Hey I’ve made a record with Verve. Why don’t you do the same thing?” I said, “Oh my God, put all of my material on a record? Forget about it! I’ll never be able to do it. Because the surprise will be gone and everybody will know my stuff.” And Mort said, “Go on, try it.” So the technicians came for two nights, or something like that, at the hungry i and just went to town recording me. And one day I saw my record in a window. An LP. With a picture of me. And they picked a title, “Inside Shelly Berman.” I was pretty thrilled about that. And then somebody told me I was on the charts. I said, “What the hell is that?” I didn’t know a thing. And suddenly I was handed a tremendous check for my royalties. And there, now, I realized, “My God, I’m a star.” I had no idea it would be so successful. I had no idea that it would make such a big difference in our industry.

Inside Shelley Berman is generally regarded as the first hit comedy album and was the first full album to win a Grammy in the “Spoken Word Comedy” category in 1959. (The only other previous Grammy for comedy went to—eek!—the single “The Chipmunk Song.”) It now occurred to producers (and listeners) that they could recreate the best 45 minutes of a comedian’s live set; it occurred to the comedians that they could reach a much larger audience. This innovation changed the life of a former accountant from Chicago who had been playing around with a tape deck, expounding on some funny phone calls he had made with another pal at work: his name was Bob Newhart.

I had three routines, I had the “Driving Instructor,” the “Submarine Commander,” and “Abe Lincoln.” So, a disc jockey friend of mine, Dan Sorkin, in Chicago, said that the Warner Brother record executives were coming through town, calling on Dan and some of the other top disc jockeys. Dan called me up, he said, “Put what you have on tape and I’ll play it for them.” So I put them on tape, brought it down there, they listened to it. And they said, “Okay, okay, we’ll give you a recording contract, and we’ll record your next nightclub.” And I said, “Well, we have kind of problem there, I’ve never played a nightclub.” So they said, “Well, we’ll have to get you into a nightclub.” So my first date was at Tidelands in Houston, Texas. It was the first time I ever walked out on a nightclub floor.

The resulting album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was released early in 1960; it zoomed to the top of the charts—not the “comedy” charts, the Billboard charts for all of popular music. “It just went crazy,” said Newhart. “I mean, a year and a half before that I was doing a local man-on-the-street show in Chicago, and I put out this record album, hoping it would sell maybe twenty-five, thirty thousand copies, you know? I was just totally unprepared for the commotion they caused.” Later that year, Warner Bros put out a sequel, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!—and that album shot to Number One. In fact, both of Newhart’s albums occupied the top two spots for nearly 30 weeks, a record not surpassed until 1991 when Guns N’Roses took the top two spots. Newhart is a good loser: “And I always say, “Well you hate to lose a record but at least it went to a friend.”

The comedy album phenomenon of the 1960s brought comics into American homes in a variety of different ways. For mainstream artists like Berman, Newhart, Nichols and May, the Smothers Brothers or Jonathan Winters, albums were a way of remembering favorite routines that one had seen on Ed Sullivan or a television talk show. For comedians under the radar, such as Dick Gregory, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, or Tom Lehrer, it was a way to attract a cult following. For an artist like Bill Cosby, his albums—he had three top ten records between 1966 and 1968—were a way of keeping his persona in the public imagination while waiting for better television or film projects to percolate. Albums were the only way that raunchier comedians like Lenny Bruce could reach a larger audience; Redd Foxx had a cottage industry with “party records”—records of blue material that cultivated a huge nationwide audience without drawing much attention to itself. The comedy album also exploded at an odd confluence of technology and society; it allowed a sophisticated audience, for the first time, unfiltered access to extended passages of mature comedy. Newhart sees the phenomenon as a matter of a shifting consumer demographic: “Nightclubs had kind of priced themselves out as far as a young family was concerned; they became quite expensive. So my understanding was that a lot of the college kids and the young marrieds would get together at somebody’s house and they’d have pizza and beer and, and they’d play a comedy album.”

College radio stations and inventive FM disc jockeys were eager to promote their cult favorites (and, as Cheech Marin said, playing an entire side of a comedy album allowed a DJ to go out for a smoke) and provided huge exposure. For the right kind of performer, many college students and young marrieds would be willing to shell out the $4.99 for an album. Singer/parodist Allen Sherman sold millions of records from 1962 to 1964. The most bizarre success in comedy album history occurred when a young comedian named Vaughn Meader released a studio album parodying the Kennedys called The First Family. From the get-go, the album was a rarity; it was conceived and recorded in a studio, rather than being a momento of a live club date. Stations around the country refused to play it—in the more sophisticated New York, it got some air play. Soon, orders for The First Family turned into a deluge; released on October 22, 1962, the album became the fastest selling album of any kind in history and eventually sold an unprecedented 7.5 million copies. Exactly one year and one month after its release, The First Family was transformed into a cruel jest and copies were pulled off the shelves. On the evening after Kennedy’s assassination, Lenny Bruce was playing a club date, and the audience eagerly anticipated how Bruce would comment on the national tragedy. He did not disappoint; his first words were “Vaughn Meader is screwed.” And, indeed, he was.

Comedy recordings turned a major corner in 1972 with two releases each by George Carlin (FM & AM and Class Clown) and Cheech and Chong (Cheech and Chong and Big Bambu). These were albums geared primarily to college students and best listened to in semi-darkness with a bong close at hand, preferably while there was a term paper that needed to be written. Most importantly, these albums presented routines that were not recoverable by other means—they would never have been performed intact on network television (indeed, all of Cheech and Chong’s albums were produced in the studio). When Richard Pryor hit the scene with This Nigger’s Crazy in 1974, it firmly established the comedy album as the lingua franca of the counterculture. These records could not be listened to in the company of your Aunt Sue, like Cosby’s Fat Albert fables, but nor were they the fringe albums of Lord Buckley and Moms Mabley, They were huge, huge commercial hits and all of the albums listed above went gold (selling over $1 million), as did practically every other album by Carlin, Cheech and Chong, and Pryor in the 1970s. (Albums by Robert Klein, David Steinberg, Lily Tomlin and various crews from National Lampoon deserve a nod as well.)

A hit album was so integral to a comedian’s fortunes in the mid-1970s that Steve Martin went through the tortures of the damned trying to get his routines on vinyl. When he finally succeeded with Let’s Get Small in 1977, Martin not only won the Grammy (beating Pryor’s three-in-a-row streak), he became the first comedian with a platinum album (over $2 million in sales). He was such an immense figure at the time, that his next album, A Wild and Crazy Guy, shipped platinum. It was a magical time for recorded comedy. As comedian Jeffrey Ross remembers, “Comedians were the rock stars of the time. You know, all my buddies in New Jersey, if we wanted to sit around and listen to Wild and Crazy Guy over and over and over, that was no different than listening to Queen’s We Will Rock You over and over and over. We didn’t differentiate between comedy and music. It was all just awesome.”

Yet, all awesome things must come to an end. Two new trends converged to curtail the glory days of the comedy album. When Richard Pryor filmed Richard Pryor–Live In Concert in 1978 (and, four years later, Richard Pryor Live On The Sunset Strip), he brought the full effect of a sold-out concert experience to a national audience (provided they were over seventeen years old). By the mid-1980s, home video and cable television were so ubiquitous that they obviated the voice-only appeal of the comedy album. (It must be admitted that it was often irritating not knowing what visual gag that woman in the audience was cackling at.) Oddly enough, the CD, which did damage to other aspects of the recording industry, has been a boon to comedy, with elegant and encyclopedic boxed sets of the albums of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Reiner and Brooks, among many others. And contemporary acts such as Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, and Jeff Foxworthy have done very well with CD releases of their work.

Still, for a twenty-year stretch, there was something special—an unrepeatable confluence of social habits and technology—about listening to a comedy LP on your turntable. As David Steinberg put it, “Just one person giving you all these ideas, a barrage of ideas that was how you thought and how you talked amongst yourselves–that had never happened before. So the albums were huge–they made sense in comedy because it’s all about your ear, it’s about what you’re hearing, what you try and repeat.”

In the early days of television, nearly all of the major broadcasting came out of New York and most of the comedy and variety shows—Admiral Broadway Revue, Texaco Star Theater, Colgate Comedy Hour—were performed live in front of the cameras from different studios throughout the city’s Theater District. Then, these signals were sent over telephone wires to Chicago, which was as far west as they could be transmitted. In Chicago, a tape would be made of these broadcasts, then sent on the West Coast, which would broadcast the show anywhere from four days to a week after its initial broadcast on the East Coast. Not an efficient way to bring the whole country together around a new entertainment medium.

All that changed in the fall of 1951, when the first transcontinental coaxial cable was laid (no jokes, please) by AT&T. Coaxial cable—a method of sending signals through cable, rather than through the ether—had been around since the late 1930s and had been in use among some rural communities that could not receive broadcast signals, but the transcontinental coaxial allowed for live broadcasts to originate from either coast. On September 4, 1951, President Truman gave a speech in San Francisco that was broadcast on both coasts simultaneously and by the end of the month, The Colgate Comedy Hour, hosted by Eddie Cantor, became the first network series to originate from the West Coast. The next month, I Love Lucy was able to transmit its half-hour filmed episodes via the coaxial cable from its Hollywood studio to homes across the country.

The cable created an enormous change in doing business. As Bud Yorkin, one of the original producers of Colgate observed, performers such as Martin and Lewis saw the cable as a lifeline to their California lifestyles. “So the minute that [the cable] happened, all these performers that were complaining that they didn’t want to leave their swimming pools and their golf courses and everything and come to New York to rehearse [could now stay in Los Angeles]. All of us that were involved in television in New York, we had to move too, because everything was coming out here.” Carl Reiner suggested that the coaxial cable, and its nation-wide access, was the beginning of “dumbing down” the programming that came out of New York, a change that was crucial to his program, Your Show of Shows.

Flash forward nearly a quarter of a century: after battling the FCC and the broadcast network on the numerous legal technicalities for decades, a pay cable network makes its debut in 1972. Home Box Office, based out of New York, feeds a live NHL game to its East Coast subscribers. By 1975, HBO is able to access satellite technology and spread its reach nationwide—via an improved network of coaxial cables—with a live broadcast of the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla from Manila.” What HBO was able to offer—at a time when there were only three major networks and, at best, an additional six or seven local stations in most urban markets—was what all broadcast competition wants: unique access. With Home Box Office, as its name suggests, audiences at home were allowed direct, unfiltered access to what audiences “on the town” could get: sports events, movies, music concerts—and comedy concerts. As Carolyn Strauss, the current president of HBO Entertainment put it: “Comedy was something that we could do in a way that followed in the footsteps of showing uncensored movies–programming that could exist in its pristine form.”

For its 1977 program On Location, HBO went after the best possible uncensored comedian they could find, the man who defined “censored,” George Carlin. For Carlin, the new venue couldn’t have come a moment too soon.

You’re never the fastest gun in town forever. [In 1977], I did not have a place because my albums were cooling down, and the heat and the fire were off, you know. I didn’t have a focal point for who I was anymore. And then cable came along in 1977. Now, it didn’t happen instantly for me. I more or less recycled things from the previous four years, but what cable did for me, it replaced recordings as a way for me to reach a mass audience and [still do my act the way it was.] They didn’t have the number of subscribers then, but you knew this idea would grow.

Carlin’s first HBO concert, On Location: George Carlin at USC even used an opening disclaimer about the language he used, “which of course is kind of quaint now when you look at it,” Carlin reflected. When he was showcased in On Location: George Carlin at Phoenix a year later, he cemented his reputation as cable’s signature comic; he’s gone on to do a dozen concerts for HBO since.

On Location allowed television audiences access to something they never had before—a front-seat view of what comics really do in front of real people. Said Strauss, “While it’s great to watch somebody on Johnny Carson, you hear that sort of disembodied laughter. We were able to bring the television audience into the seat of theater audience, and you could watch the comic and respond to the comic in concert with everybody else who was sitting in the audience.” The show wound up turning the spotlight on hot new comics, like Steve Martin, Robert Klein, Billy Crystal, and Roseanne Barr, while providing unadulterated versions of old-timers who had been forced to screen out some of the best stuff for Ed Sullivan and Merv Griffin: Phyllis Diller, Redd Foxx—even Borscht Belt pioneer Myron Cohen.

In 1992, HBO opened a window—or pulled back a rope line—onto an entirely different kind of comedy with Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam, which lasted five seasons in its original incarnation. It was a breakout show, introducing both white audiences and, not incidentally, white producers into the raucous world of a black comedy club. Although as Strauss admits, “there were some people who were better than others,” the hip-hop atmosphere brought artists like Martin Lawrence, Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey, and D.L. Hughley to a mass audience and to massive film and concert careers.

Such success spawns eager imitation and the proliferation of basic cable networks in the late 1980s made imitation easy to come by. By the end of the decade, it seemed as though every other cable network was putting a comedian against a brick wall; given only a few minutes to score, the talent would often rely on material that was raunchy only for raunchy’s sake, hoping to make either an impact or a deal for a sitcom or feature film. As Tommy Davidson put it: “I’ve seen a lot of comics resort to that because it’s just quicker, cheaper laughs, sort of like McDonald’s food compared to Ruth’s Chris steak restaurant. You know it’s faster food, but it’s not as good for you, you see.”

In 1991, two rival cable channels—The Comedy Channel and HA!—merged to become Comedy Central on, aptly, April Fool’s Day. Originally, its dance card was filled with recycled movies, British comedies (Absolutely Fabulous) and bargain basement shows (Mystery Science Theater), but it quickly became a media powerhouse when it was able to turn to original programming. Now, it houses some of the pioneers of the field: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Chapelle’s Show, Reno 911!, The Sarah Silverman Show, as well as numerous roasts, tributes, and documentaries. The crown jewel of their programming, if that’s the right phrase to use for a show that raises a piece of poop to glorified heights, is South Park, which debuted in 1997. South Park, a kind of vile version of Peanuts with the most rudimentary animation (part of its charm, partisans would claim), has become not only Comedy Central’s most popular show, but one of cable’s most reliable lightening rods for controversy. Still, its filth has a disarming disingenuousness; at the opening of each episode, a disclaimer reads, in part: “the following program contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.” Considering that, in one episode, South Park used the word “shit” 162 times and, in another, the word “nigger” 42 times, the disclaimer seems, if anything, to be an understatement.

What cable has clearly given the world is a verbal (and visual) freedom for comedy; the FCC still does not regulate cable programs, although considering the fact that more and more homes will acquire basic and/or pay cable programming, the kind of censorship endured by the broadcast networks seems inevitable. Whether such freedom is a good or bad thing remains a constant source of debate. Max Mutchnick, one of the cocreators of Will & Grace, praises cable “because I feel like they are able to write like people talk.” For Jim Burrows, the comic genius behind many network sitcoms, that’s precisely why cable is less interesting: “You’re talking to Mr. Euphemism here who firmly believes that finding a euphemism for penis is funnier then saying the word penis. So, God love cable for saying all the curse words they want. I love having to be able to come up with a euphemism because there’s still shock in saying those words.”

Largely through shows like South Park, cable has taken a lot of heat for the kind of material that now reaches audiences in every hamlet in America. For connoisseurs of comedy, it largely boils down to a matter of taste. As Laugh-In’s producer George Schlatter says, “The minute you drop the f-bomb in the middle of a show, you can’t be funny after that because you’ve already gone as far as you can go.” Strauss defends the kinds of programs made accessible by cable: “Certainly cable didn’t invent the blue comic. The blue comic has been around forever. So it certainly allowed a little more expression for people than it would have on network television.”

For Budd Friedman, the founder of the Improv Comedy Club, it’s not a matter of taste, tone, or material, it’s a matter of ubiquity—an unexpected consequence of unique access:

Somebody just asked me the other day, “Does doing The Tonight Show with Jay Leno get [comics] the same respect that it used to when they did Johnny?” I say, “Absolutely not.” Nothing to take away from Jay, but when The Tonight Show was on, there was no cable. Now, Leno, or the comic on Leno, has so much competition from cable and other shows that it’s impossible to make the impact that they did back then. Because, now, people see comics every minute of the day.