RATLINKS: October Sky
JOKES AND JOKES AND JOKES. SPAGHETTI SPAGHETTI
I started a joke
Any high school senior worth their salt knows Shakespeare wrote three types of plays: Tragedy, History, and Comedy. Comedy is the most difficult to define, but the easiest way to tell if something is funny is the threshold test for obscenity, best summarized in the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case of Jacobellis v. Ohio.
I know it when I see it
— Justice Potter Stewart
Comedy comes in many flavors:
Slapstick
Dark Humor
Observational
Sketch
Improv
Physical
Insult
Satire
Standup comedy remains one of the most popular but also the hardest types of comedy. The best comics must be masters of their craft. Spending years perfecting their material, timing and delivery to make sure their routine hits the audience right every single time.
What makes standup so hard, aside from the obvious, whole performing in front of a large likely drunk audience with the potential to bomb. Other than that, the hardest part of standup is the shelf life of your best material.
Chris Rock explained the struggle:1
If you are a rock band everyone wants to hear your old stuff.
No one wants to hear a comic’s old stuff.
That’s why most comics don’t want people to have cell phones during shows. Before a show often people watch a Chris Rock standup on YouTube, that might have been recently recorded and uploaded.
Then in the middle of the set, the audience gets restless with a guy standing up heckling “How dare you say the same funny thing you said before! Do your new stuff!”
Rock often responds: This is my new sh!t, somehow you heard it already.
LOOSEN YOUR BORSCHT BELT
Many legendary comedians got their start in The Borscht Belt, a group of hotels in the Catskills, a mountainous region of southeastern New York State. Catskills hotels like The Nevele, Fallsview, The Concord Resort Hotel, Grossinger’s, and Kutcher’s Country Club were all popular destinations beginning in the 1920s, peaking in the 1970s when cheap air travel diminished the Catskills appeal.2
The Catskills attempted a comeback in the 1990s only to be thwarted by nonother than once and future President Donald J. Trump, because as Newton’s 4th Law of Motion states “there is always a Trump story.”3
Mr. Trump and his associates were fined $250,000 in 2000 for failing to disclose to the state lobbying commission that he had financed a series of newspaper advertisements opposing casinos in the Catskills. He feared that a major gambling operation in Monticello would have undermined his casinos in Atlantic City.
“Life makes many turns,” Mr. Trump conceded in the interview.
Hundreds of well-known comedians got their start playing the Catskills. Comedians like Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, George Burns, Jerry Lewis, Peter Sellers, and Carl Reiner to name a few.
At the time, most comics frequently recycled each other’s best jokes, a practice that would be blasphemous today.4
I stayed at The Concord when I was 10 years old, for a family reunion of sorts. Both my Grandmother and Aunt met their husbands at the hotel. Over breakfast, talk turned to the prior night's show, every show always had two acts a singer and a comedian. I asked my grandfather, a funny man in his own right, if the comic was good to which he dryly replied “I knew all the jokes.”
I make fun of everyone indiscriminately
Jackie Mason was known for his staccato, arm-waving delivery and thick Yiddish accent kept the borscht belt style of comedy alive long after the Catskills resorts had shut their doors, Mason’s career reached new heights in the 1980s with a series of one-man shows on Broadway. He struggled at first, playing the Catskills and, with little success, obscure clubs in New York and Miami. All three of Mr. Mason's older brothers and father were rabbis; Mr. Mason was ordained as a rabbi and practiced as one for several years before exchanging his pulpit for a nightclub stage.
''I make fun of everyone indiscriminately'' Mr. Mason said proudly, his performances described as a fiesta of defamation, with Mr. Mason slurring every imaginable group along with a penchant for insulting members of the audience. I don't care, Mr. Mason says, pointing to a gentleman in the first row. I never judge anyone by their race or creed or color - I just don't like this man!5
I went to a reformed service the other day, it was so reformed the rabbi was a gentile
Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.
In Las Vegas in 1966, after Mason made a few ill-considered remarks about Frank Sinatra’s recent marriage to the much younger Mia Farrow, an unidentified gunman fired a .22 pistol into his hotel room. “Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces,” one joke went.
“He was exquisitely trained on the Borscht Circuit,” comments the writer Kurt Vonnegut, who is a Mason-watcher. “It looks effortless, and you never realize all that goes into it. It's a matter of construction. I find myself laughing uproariously at jokes I'd heard before.”6
My material is as new as anything on the dinner table. What difference does it make if I'm 70 or if I'm 20? The audience knows they aren't getting any old stories from me.
Jackie Mason continues, describing his humor as —
“It’s a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you. The standard at that time was Danny Kaye, Milton Berle - there was nothing profound or original. I was so new to comedy I didn't even know who Lenny Bruce was. But I realized that Lenny Bruce was doing with filthy words what I did with clean words.''
Please don’t applaud, it breaks my rhythm
In less than two years, Lenny Bruce was arrested 15 times and charged with obscenity over his act. Club owners were afraid to book him. He couldn’t get a gig for six months.
On Oct. 13, 1965, Lenny’s 40th birthday, instead of surrendering to the authorities in New York, he filed a suit at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco in an attempt to stay out of prison, and he got himself officially declared a pauper. Two months before his death in 1966, Lenny wrote “I’m still working on the bust of the government of New York State.” He included his doodle of Christ nailed to a crucifix, with a speech balloon asking, “Where the hell is the ACLU?”
At his funeral, his sound engineer friend dropped Lenny’s microphone into his grave before the dirt was piled on. Lenny’s problem had been that he wanted to talk on stage with the same freedom that he had in his living room. That problem doesn’t happen to stand-up comedians anymore.7
Lenny Bruce spent a summer as the activities coordinator at Kramers Hotel where the owner suggested that he invite some of his entertainer friends to do a late show at the hotel’s casino a few nights a week. In return for providing extra entertainment for the guests, Lenny wanted 50 percent of the bar take after midnight. Since most guests were all asleep by midnight, and the bar take past that hour was zero, the offer was gladly accepted.
Lenny brought in jazz musicians, comics, even strippers to the little casino. For 1951 only, Kramers was the hottest hotel in the Catskills.
Take my wife, please
Like many comedians, Henny Youngman treated his profession as a working job, one where making a living is difficult, and getting paid for the work is all-important.
Roger Ebert observed Henny Youngman taping a TV show in the old NBC studios at the Merchandise Mart:
We got into an elevator together. It stopped at the second floor, a private club. A wedding was under way. Youngman got off the elevator, asked to meet the father of the bride and said, "I'm Henny Youngman. I'll do 10 minutes for $100."
Youngman was known for appearing on stage holding a violin while delivering rapid one-liners like “Take my wife, please” which began as a misinterpretation. Henny took his wife to a radio show and asked a stagehand to escort his wife to a seat. But his request was taken as a joke, and Youngman used the line countless times ever after.
When the New York Telephone Company started its Dial-a-Joke in 1974, over three million people called in one month to hear 30 seconds of Youngman's material—the most ever for a comedian.
I once wanted to become an atheist but I gave up. They have no holidays
While playing golf today, I hit two good balls. I stepped on a rake.
A guy complains of a headache. Another guy says, Do what I do. I put my head on my wife's bosom, and the headache goes away. The next day, the man says, Did you do what I told you to? Yes, I sure did. By the way, you have a nice house!
— Henny Youngman
Guy shows up, and he’s got a big tray at a canted angle
Norm Macdonald was a legendary comedian who died last month after a long battle with cancer. Norm Macdonald burst onto the scene with a deadpan style honed on the stand-up circuit, first in his native Canada and then in the United States. By 1990 he was doing his routine on “Late Night With David Letterman” and other shows. Then, in 1993, came his big break: an interview with Lorne Michaels, a fellow Canadian, that led to a job on “Saturday Night Live.”
Much like the Borscht Belt comedians, Norm Macdonald was skilled enough to spend four months opening for the comedian Sam Kinison.
Norm took over the anchors chair for Weekend Update but was eventually booted from the anchor chair, reportedly at the behest of Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC Entertainment, West Coast, who was said to have been annoyed by Mr. Macdonald’s relentless mocking of his friend O.J. Simpson.
“There’s something in his comedy — there’s just a toughness to it,” according to Lorne Michaels. “Also, he’s incredibly patient. He can wait” — that is, wait for a punchline. He liked jokes that would still be funny years in the future.8
SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY
Children are our future and likely our future comedians. Unfortunately, most children learn this terrible wordplay as their first joke:
when is a door not a door? when it’s ajar
Parents be better than that. Be Best! Or at least use this joke instead
A man walks into a bar with a piece of asphalt under his arm.
Bartender, one for me and one for the road!
WRITE YOUR OWN JOKES
“I don't believe that anybody has come to a conclusion on why something is funny. It's funny because it's ridiculous and it's ridiculous for different reasons at different times.”
— Jackie Mason