stand-up comedy

stand-up comedy, comedy that generally is delivered by a solo performer speaking directly to the audience in some semblance of a spontaneous manner.

Origins

Stand-up, at least in the form it is known today, is a fairly recent entertainment phenomenon. In the United States, where it developed first and reached its greatest popularity, it had its origins in the comic lecturers, such as Mark Twain, who toured the country in the 19th century. It began to emerge as populist entertainment in vaudeville in the early decades of the 20th century. While comedy was a staple of every vaudeville bill, it most often took the form of packaged routines delivered by comedy teams (who spoke to each other, not to the audience). But a few performers, such as Frank Fay, became known for their facility at off-the-cuff patter while serving as emcees in vaudeville houses such as the famed Palace Theatre in New York City. This solo style was honed further in the resorts of the Catskill Mountains region of New York in the 1930s and ’40s. The predominantly Jewish comedians of the so-called Borscht Belt developed a brash gag-filled monologue style that played on familiar comic tropes—the bossy mother-in-law, the henpecked husband—exemplified by Henny Youngman’s famous line “Take my wife—please.”

Yet the comedian who probably did the most to make stand-up comedy a staple of American popular entertainment was Bob Hope, a British-born former vaudeville song-and-dance man. Hope, an admirer of Fay, developed an engaging rapid-fire style as an vaudeville emcee and, beginning in 1938, as host of his own top-rated radio program. Forced to come up with fresh material for his weekly radio monologues—and for the military audiences that he frequently traveled to entertain—Hope hired a team of writers who came up with jokes that played off the day’s news, local gossip in the towns and military bases he visited, and the offstage doings of Hope and his show business friends. This was a significant departure from the vaudeville and Borscht Belt comics, whose gags were generic, were largely interchangeable, and could be repeated almost endlessly.

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The new wave

Hope and the Borscht Belt comics established the classic stand-up style that dominated popular entertainment well into the television era, when it became a staple of television variety programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show. But in the 1950s a new wave of stand-up comics emerged who rejected the detached mechanical style of the old joke tellers. The groundbreaker was Mort Sahl, who appeared onstage sitting on a stool with a rolled-up newspaper in his hand and talked in normal conversational tones—delivering not gag lines but caustic commentary on the political leaders, popular culture, and pillars of respectability of American society during the conservative 1950s. (“Are there any groups here I haven’t offended?” he would typically crack.) Sahl’s brainy politically dissenting comedy became a hit in the hip night spots of the Beat era and inspired a spate of new comedians who showed that stand-up could be smart, personal, and socially engaged.

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Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, and the comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May created extended improv-style bits—one-sided phone conversations, people talking to their psychiatrists—that satirized various aspects of an uptight conformist era. Jonathan Winters blew apart the set-up/punch-line structure of traditional stand-up, pummeling the audience with a wild stream-of-consciousness barrage of characters, jokes, fragmented scenes, and physical bits. African American comedians such as Dick Gregory used stand-up as a vehicle for acerbic commentary on the racial tensions of the period of the civil rights movement, while Woody Allen turned himself into the butt of his own comic confessionals: the neurotic, sexually insecure New York Jewish nebbish.

The most influential comedian of this group, however, was Lenny Bruce, who spent much of his early career entertaining in strip clubs and other small-time venues and developed a cult following as the most audacious provocateur of stand-up’s new wave. Bruce attacked America’s most sacred cows—from organized religion to moralistic attitudes toward sex and drugs—and exposed himself more nakedly than any comedian had before. His renegade, free-form, often X-rated comedy made him a pariah for most of mainstream show business (Bruce was almost totally shunned by television); after numerous arrests for his performing allegedly obscene material in nightclubs, it also thrust him into a series of legal battles that virtually destroyed his career. Bruce’s death from a drug overdose in 1966 solidified his legend and made him an inspiration for a new generation just coming of age in the turbulent late 1960s.