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.

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.