In the same way that what I looked for in stand-up comedy evolved as I got older, stand-up comedy at large has taken many different shapes over the past 100 years, as the needs of the people changed and evolved. For example, America in the 1950s and 1960s needed someone like Lenny Bruce to go up and talk about real things. In the post-WWII era and the repressive mono-cultural of that time, society needed a release-valve, and that release valve happened to be a rebellious New Yorker named Leonard Alfred Schneider. He talked about politics, religion, and sex, and he questioned every symbol of authority that came before him. Bruce’s material often followed rabbit-trails into topics that were rarely fit for the dinner table, and he used “four-letter words almost as often as conjunctions.” He was often quoted as saying that the other comics were just “wind-up dolls,” on stage, telling the same jokes to different audiences night after night. He even made a point of saying that a comedian who has writers isn't a comedian at all, but an actor. This speaks to the core of Bruce’s comedic philosophy and how important authenticity was to him and his craft. Lenny was arrested from stage multiple times during his career for public indecency, and his court case was still underway at the time of his suicide in 1966.
Bruce and his contemporaries, dubbed the “Sick-Niks” by TIME Magazine, ushered in a new era in stand-up comedy never before seen. By the 1970s comedians like Richard Pryor and George Carlin had taken what they learned from Lenny pushed it one step further. They traded on vulnerability and invited the audience into the twists and turns of their hearts. However, by the end of the 1970s the country was in a very different place that it was for Lenny. The hippies were getting old, not to mention Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate. The world was scary and stressful and we no longer needed comedians to tell it like it is was. We knew how it was, and we desperately needed a break from it.
Enter Steve Martin, with his juggling, his magic tricks, his arrow through his head, and his banjo. Steve Martin’s ditsy, silly anti-comedy was the perfect answer to a culture that needed some distraction and some levity. “You know, a lot of people come to me and they say, ‘Steve, how can you be so fucking funny?’” He starts. “There’s a secret to it, it’s no big deal. Before I go out, I put a slice of bologna in each of my shoes. So when I’m on stage, I feel funny.”
The Grammy for Best Comedy Album went to Richard Pryor in 1975, 1976, and 1977, accounting for three of his five total wins, making him second only to Bill Cosby for most wins in the history of the award. Then in 1978, Steve Martin seemingly came out of nowhere. This is because he spent the better half of his early career behind the scenes learning from the best, working as a writer for comedy programs like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Dick van Dyke and Company. Martin won the Grammy after releasing his debut album, Let’s Get Small, which went platinum. He followed it immediately with his second album Wild and Crazy Guy, which went double platinum and won him the Grammy again the following year.
Steve Martin was able to see a gap in the industry and capitalize on it, bringing joy and silliness to a society that desperately needed it and rocketing himself to stardom. Martin later wrote about this time, saying,
“Vietnam, the first televised war, split the country, and one’s left or right bent could be recognized by haircuts and clothes. The country was angry, and so was comedy, which was addressed to insiders ... In general, however, a comedian in shackles for indecent language, or a singer’s arrest for obscene gestures, thrilled the growing underground audience. Silliness was just not appropriate for hip culture. It was this circumstance that set the stage for my success...”
in their pocket.
It is for these complex reasons that delineated genres haven’t emerged in stand-up comedy in the same way that they have in virtually every other art form. While you might go to the theater to see a western or turn to a station that plays hip-hop, you simply go to a comedy club to see comedy. While some clubs have themed nights (typically centered around ethnicity or genre) there aren’t specific genres outlined within stand-up comedy when entering a club or turning on a special/album. We can ascribe genres and trends retroactively with moderate success, but it is this dialogical aspect of stand-up comedy that keeps the art form from being something that can be easily labeled and packaged. Perhaps this speaks to the expression oft-heard in the world of comedy: “You had to be there.”While other art forms ebb and flow with mass culture, stand-up comedy seems to have a particularly close relationship with the zeitgeist. Due to the nature of humor, stand-up comedy doesn’t always age well, and something that resonates with one audience may fall completely flat with another audience. In Ian Brodie’s book A Vulgar Art, part of his definition of stand-up states that this is an art form created “in front of, to, and in collaboration with an audience.” All those prepositions work to highlight how integral the audience is to the formation of the comedian’s set. By definition, stand-up comedy is a dialogue. It is a back and forth between the audience and the comedian, and it is the comic’s job to “find” the audience -- listening to what they do and don’t laugh at and using their arsenal to try and win them over and keep them.