Countercultural comedy

The first of these Bruce acolytes to break through was George Carlin. Though already a successful relatively straitlaced comedian known for his parodies of television commercials and game shows, Carlin at the end of the 1960s let his hair and beard grow long, turned away from mainstream nightclubs, and reinvented himself as the comedic voice of the counterculture—skewering the war culture, middle-class hypocrisy, and his own Catholic upbringing. In his most famous routine, Carlin parsed, with devilish flair, the “seven words you can never say on television”; the taboo words that had gotten Bruce thrown in jail a few years earlier helped make Carlin a star.

Carlin’s close contemporary Richard Pryor went through a similar reinvention. Outgrowing his youthful clean-cut television persona, in the early 1970s he transitioned to hard-edged, racially charged, brilliantly improvisational comedy that drew on the characters—winos, pimps, junkies, street preachers—he had grown up with in the Peoria, Ill., ghetto, as well as the increasingly baroque details of his troubled private life. Robert Klein, the third major comic of the early ’70s to colonize the territory that Bruce had opened up, was a veteran of Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe who developed a smart, supple, socially aware style of stand-up that was widely influential among a younger generation of comics.

By the 1970s stand-up comedy had become as potent a voice of the Vietnam War generation as rock music and Hollywood’s new independent films such as Easy Rider. Comedy clubs sprouted in New York and Los Angeles, giving a bumper crop of young comics a place to hone their craft and develop an audience. Working night after night for little or no money, these young, mostly New York City-based comedians—among them Richard Lewis, Freddie Prinze, Elayne Boosler (one of the few women in a largely male-dominated crowd), and later Jerry Seinfeld—developed an intimate “observational” style, less interested in sociopolitical commentary than in chronicling the trials of everyday urban life, dealing with relationships, and surviving in the ethnic melting pot.

As the best young stand-ups began moving from New York to Los Angeles—where their most important television showcase, The Tonight Show, hosted by Johnny Carson, was located—experimentation flourished. For a popular culture now awash in stand-up comedy, many of these innovators turned to self-parody and ironic put-on. Albert Brooks, the son of a radio comedian known as Parkyakarkus, became a regular on TV talk and variety shows in the early 1970s with a string of put-on bits in which he parodied bad show-business acts—a terrible mime, a bumbling ventriloquist, and a succession of amateur songwriters trying to rewrite the U.S. national anthem. Andy Kaufman started out in New York clubs by posing as an inept wannabe comedian with a vaguely middle-European accent and unleashed series of deadpan Dadaist stunts, from singing children’s songs to testing the audience’s patience by reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925) out loud or doing his laundry onstage.

The vogue for stand-up self-parody reached its pinnacle with the phenomenal success of Steve Martin, a former television writer who poked fun at old-time show business by impersonating the worst practitioner imaginable: a smug, ludicrously un-self-aware clown who puts arrows through his head and dubs himself a “wild and crazy guy.” By the end of the 1970s, Martin was selling out 20,000-seat arenas and releasing best-selling comedy albums, becoming arguably the most popular stand-up comedian in history. This set the stage for a boom in the 1980s, when at least 300 comedy clubs blanketed the United States and cable TV shows such as An Evening at the Improv gave even mediocre stand-ups their moment in the national spotlight

The British tradition and the spread of stand-up comedy

Stand-up comedy—which depends so much on shared experiences, assumptions, even nuances of language—has rarely traveled well beyond its national borders. As the form was flourishing in the United States, parallel but largely separate stand-up traditions were developing in other countries, most notably the United Kingdom. British stand-up comedy had its origins in the music-hall performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially Max Miller, who dressed in flashy suits and delivered cheeky fast-paced comedy patter in between song-and-dance bits. The more progressive British comedy of the 1950s and ’60s was largely an outgrowth of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge tradition of satirical college revues, including the Beyond the Fringe quartet (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller) and the wilder, mixed-media antics of the Monty Python troupe. A more working-class breed of solo stand-up, meanwhile, was emerging in Britain’s equivalent of America’s Borscht Belt: the workingmen’s club circuit in the north of England, where comics assaulted the audience with brash joke-driven monologues that often traded on racial and sexual stereotypes. Stars of these clubs, such as Frank Carson and Bernard Manning, gained national fame in the 1970s via the popular British TV show The Comedians. Television, at the same time, provided an ideal platform for a far different kind of stand-up comic, Dave Allen. Allen, an urbane Irishman, hosted several popular talk-variety shows on British TV and would typically sit on a stool, cigarette in one hand and drink in the other, as he delivered wry stories and commentary on everything from the minor annoyances of life to the hypocrisies of the Roman Catholic Church, one of his favorite targets.

With the opening of the first American-style comedy club in London, the Comedy Store, in 1979, a new generation of alternative comedians began to emerge who rejected the retro joke-driven monologues of the old school and experimented with new styles and subject matter. One of the biggest stars of this new generation had actually made a splash a few years earlier: Billy Connolly, a former folksinger from Glasgow who achieved huge popularity in the mid-1970s with his irreverent, high-energy observational stand-up. He was followed in the 1980s by a rush of younger comics, including Alexei Sayle, emcee of the influential Comic Strip club that was a hothouse for new comedy stars in the ’80s; the comedy team of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, the latter of whom starred in the situation comedy Absolutely Fabulous; and, a bit later, Eddie Izzard, whose flamboyant free-form stand-up made him one of the few British comedians whose work translated successfully in the United States. By the turn of the 21st century, stand-up comedy had taken root around the world, from Australia—where Barry Humphries, in the guise of Dame Edna Everage, became that country’s most popular comedy export—to nascent stand-up scenes in countries ranging from Argentina to the Philippines.