Stand-Up Comedy Pt I

Introduction to stand-up

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1:57Waka waka, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And I just made sure to kick this two-part episode on stand-up comedy off in the worst way possible.

2:11You know what, this one has some COAs, unfortunately.

2:16Well, yeah. I mean, we're talking about genuine stand-up comedy, and you know, they're edgy. They push the envelope. Yeah, I mean, we're going to, there are people throughout this, peppered throughout this episode that, you know, some of them, they're like bad people. Some of them have done bad things. But you can't talk about the history of stand-up comedy without talking about some bad people, as it turns out. Are you talking about Frank Fay? I mean, there's a bunch of people throughout here. Oh, okay. Well, I'm not familiar with a lot of the badness here, so let's just avoid it.

2:47That, and you know, this is the thing on stand-up comedy, so we're seeing our own A, because like, you can't do justice even in a two-parter. Like, after we got all this together, I was like, oh, well, we're not even talking about truly weird stand-up, like Andy Kaufman and Zach Galifianakis, and we're not talking about this and this. And you just have to stop at a certain point and realize you can't cover something completely that's so deep and vast like this, you know?

3:20For sure. Every once in a while, we record an episode, and then like the next day, I'm like, oh, I should have said this. I think that's going to happen 15 or 20 times. Yeah, but we've got to let ourselves up, because I know we're going to get emails. How could you not talk about blank? Right. It's just the deal, you know? It's too much to cover. No, but shoot us those emails, especially ones we didn't bring up, because we might not have heard of them. And not only name-check them, send us your favorite joke of theirs, too. And I pledge to do a full episode on Andy Kaufman.

3:51Okay. All right. Okay. Well, I pledge to do a full episode on Zach Galifianakis, then. Hey, I'd do one on Zach in a second. And one other COA, too, just to throw in. Some of these jokes are maybe slightly edgier than stuff we would normally say, but that's, you know, we're covering stand-up comedy, which is inherently edgier than what we normally do. All right. You ready?

Vaudeville and Charlie Case

4:15I'm ready.

Vaudeville and Charlie Case

4:16We're talking about stand-up comedy, as we've said. And Olivia helped us with this, and she points out that basically, if you're talking about being funny in front of an audience, stand-up comedy is pretty much as old as humans are. As old as human speech is, I would guess. Yeah. Well, you could have made gestures that were funny. But to really just kind of shore it up, you want to just zero in on vaudeville. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this stuff we've covered in other episodes, it's funny, this is another one of those we've danced around.

4:48Like, we've done shows on specific comedians, The Science of Funny, and like two or three other ones, and then, of course, vaudeville. But here we are with stand-up, but you have to start at vaudeville because, you know, vaudeville had a lot of skits and stuff like that, but it wasn't too long before there were people all of a sudden, whether they were hosting the night or something, did something that resembled stand-up. And Charlie Case is, you know, one of those people that people say like, hey, maybe he was the first person doing this.

5:21Yeah, he was the son of a freeborn black man and an Irish mother, and he was educated and became a lawyer and a salesman, but he also was known as a great storyteller. And so starting in, I think, actually 1880, he joined vaudeville, and being a vaudeville performer of any race, he, whenever he talked about black culture, it was in a mocking way. He had to wear blackface, all that stuff, and eventually he was like, I'm not really down with this. This is trite.

5:52So he moved on around 1900 to doing essentially what's a stand-up act. Yeah, he, you know, a tried and true thing. He talked about his family a lot, and I found this part hysterical. At one point, his performance was, on the billing, was billed as the man who talks about his father, which could, you know, it's about, talking about parents is probably 90% of stand-up since then. And, but, yeah, it was, you know, the 20th century had rolled around, and like I mentioned, being an emcee kind of led, you know, at vaudeville kind of led to, you know, hosting the night and telling jokes in between other acts, and that kind of morphed into what we would know as stand-up.

6:36Yeah, there's a guy, I already mentioned him, because you mentioned terrible people. His name was Frank Fay. He was the first one to really kind of take stand-up comedy out of the realm of like a pie in your face, or wearing baggy pants and suspenders, or making yourself the butt of the jokes at all. He was an acerbic wit, and he was very refined, and he gave us those kind of like the type of comedian like that David Letterman was in the vein of.

7:09But I really hesitate to even associate Letterman with Fay, because he was a Nazi and a virulent racist, too. He really was a terrible person, but he, his form really created a certain type of stand-up comedian, and he was also one of the first stand-up comedians of any kind. Yeah, for sure.

The Borscht Belt

7:29And that's early 1900s, and then, you know, by the time you get to the 30s, you had something called the Borscht Belt, which were these Jewish resort communities up in the mountains in the Northeast, the Catskills and the Adirondacks. And, you know, I'm sure people who know anything about the history of stand-up know about the Borscht Belt. You know, comics would basically go and like summer there. They would do shows in New York City and stuff, but they would summer in the Catskills and the Adirondacks, just going sometimes residencies, but going from resort to resort.

8:00You know, it was kind of a Jewish medium at the time, a lot of jokes about Jewish life and Jewish culture and Jewish food, lots of self-deprecation. And this is where stand-up kind of take its, like, form that we know today. Yes. And one of the kings of the Borscht Belt who really broke out as a legendary stand-up comedian was Henny Youngman. He was known as King of the One-Liners, and he's best known for the line, Take My Wife, Please. It's actually funnier than that.

8:31The full line is, Women today are crazy. I mean, take my wife. Please.

8:38Yeah, he was a social director at a resort, something called a Tumblr. And this is where a lot of the stand-ups would get their start as, like, social chairs and social directors at these resorts. Yeah. And he was a big one. Like, this was a time where stand-up was, like, very much joke writing. It didn't, you know, we'll talk about the changes of stand-up over the years where it morphed into, like, storytelling and then alt-comedy and all that stuff. But early stand-up, you don't see a lot of that stuff anymore. Brian Kiley, a pal of mine and a friend of the show that was, along with a couple other guys, a monologue writer for Conan O'Brien for the entire run and has written for the Academy Awards.

9:21And just, like, a great throwback, like, joke writing comedian that you don't see much anymore. So, I love Brian's stuff. Shout-out, Brian. There's a guy, there's a comedian named Jimmy Carr, who's British, who basically carries on the Henny Youngman mantle. But it's way darker than anything Henny Youngman said. I turned up one that he was saying that he saw an ad for charity. And it said, little Zuki has to walk 13 miles a day just to fetch water.

9:52And I couldn't help thinking, she should move.

9:57Yeah. That's dark. It is pretty dark. But it's a one-liner, and that's all he does. Just like Henny Youngman did. Henny Youngman was known for doing, like, 50 jokes in eight minutes, which is less than 10 seconds a joke. Like, that's, you just can keep people in stitches if you do that, right? Yeah, and, you know, the Borscht Belt lasted way longer than I thought. Like, it was a thing kind of through the 1970s, and a lot of big comics got their start here. People like Mel Brooks and Jackie Mason and Sid Caesar. But Jerry Seinfeld even got his start in the Borscht Belt in the 70s at a venue, kind of one of the last Borscht Belt venues, called Kutcher's Country Club, right there in the Catskills.

10:38Yeah. Yeah, and so the start of stand-up comedy, especially as it came out of the Borscht Belt, it was very clubby, very Jewish, very male. But women were kind of, they kind of emerged a little later, I guess mid-Borscht Belt if it went into the 70s. Joan Rivers is a good example, and so is Jean Carroll. Both of them just basically, they broke a glass ceiling that was very much in place. And I think that, isn't Joan Rivers, her biography is what The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is based on?

11:11Yeah, I think comedy-wise, and I know sort of the look was based a little bit on Jean Carroll, so it was a bit of a mash-up. But I think I watched the first couple of seasons of that show and quite enjoyed it. Yeah, well, Kevin Pollack's on it, friend of the show, Kevin Pollack. That's right, Pollack's great on it. He started out as a stand-up too, didn't he? Oh, yeah. I just think of him as an actor almost through and through, but yeah, he was a funny stand-up. Yeah, he famously got called to the couch with Carson. That was one of the big signs of respect if you performed on The Tonight Show and Johnny Carson called you over to the couch afterward for a brief interview.

11:47That means, like, he liked you, so you get that stamp of approval. Nice. I found a quick, funny Jean Carroll joke. She said that she had a cold and the woman said, why don't you take something for it? And I said, make an offer.

The Chitlin Circuit and Bob Hope

12:00So we talked about the Borscht Belt in vaudeville. We also talked about the Chitlin Circuit, which was essentially the Borscht Belt for black comedians, a series of venues that black comedians played vaudevillish around the country, around the United States. And this is just like with the Borscht Belt. This is where black stand-up comedy started to emerge as well. Yeah, I mean, you can't get any better than Red Foxx and Flip Wilson. Those guys definitely played the Chitlin Circuit, as well as a very funny woman who went by Mom's Mabley on stage.

12:36And she had sort of a shtick, like she would dress up and had kind of an onstage persona. And as we'll see as we go, like, there's lots of ways to skin a cat when it comes to stand-up. But one way is to be up there or something other than yourself. And that's what Mom's Mabley did. One of the people who is usually pointed to is the guy who carried stand-up out of the resorts and into mainstream is Bob Hope, who's British. I did not know that. Did you?

13:08I think I knew he was born in Britain, but I don't know that he considered himself British. So he was a—he was—one of his acts was about how rich he was and all that. It's very mid-century. But he also kind of broke tradition by having a team of writers working for him. And he would talk about current events, things that were going on, like, that day. You know, stuff that, like, if you were looking through, like, Us Weekly today or something like that, you could get a bunch of jokes from.

13:38That was his act. And he was also really well-known for touring military bases around the world and performing. So he was the one who was like, hey, there's this thing called stand-up comedy, and you guys should all start going to see it. Yeah, and I think Bob Hope is one of those guys where he was one of the first real big influencers of the craft. Because anyone that kind of followed after those years, if you ask them, they'll say, like, Bob Hope was kind of the guiding light.

14:09Yeah. They actually based the soap opera guiding light on his life story. You should do stand-up. That's gold. Hey, we'll get to that, about how being funny on a podcast doesn't necessarily make you a good stand-up. Well, I think you just spoiled that, didn't you? Yeah. We'll edit in spoiler alert.

Sick comedians of the fifties

14:34Sick Comedians was sort of the next wave. In the 50s and 60s, there was a new style that kind of came around where it wasn't just like, hey, can you write a good joke? It was more like, hey, I've got a unique point of view or I have a unique voice that's going to add to my act. And San Francisco was one of the cities where a lot of this is taking place, especially at a club called the Hungry Eye. And, you know, we'll go through a few of these guys, but Mort Saul was one of them.

15:04He started in 1953. And he wasn't doing one-liners. He was like, he would sit down on stage with the newspaper sometimes and talk about, like, current events and politics and stuff like that. Yes. And he kind of kicked off that preachy, hip, insightful, kind of biting social commentary type of stand-up comedy. A lot of people associate that with Lenny Bruce. Mort Saul came first. One thing I saw about Mort Saul, though, is he was, I guess, canceled in an early way.

15:41He called it getting blacklisted. He said that the right never came after him, but that it was the liberals who supported Kennedy who kind of got him pushed to the side because they didn't like him attacking Kennedy. And his whole jam was going after whoever was in charge. That's who you attack. That's who you criticize. Yeah. Because just by default, they were in charge, so they were probably doing something horrible, too. But after it became, you know, cool to attack the establishment again after JFK was dead and America was mired in Vietnam, Mort Saul came back into fashion.

16:17But I thought that was interesting. Yeah, totally. Shelley Berman is noteworthy because he had a kind of the first big comedy album that hit. It was in 1959, and the record was Inside Shelley Berman. And it was the first comedy record to go gold. And then the first Grammy Award winning, like non-music Grammy Award winner was Shelley Berman. Yeah. Cute. It was cute stuff. Nothing like Mort Saul's stuff. But it was based on his personality, right? Yeah. Not his ability to remember tired jokes.

16:50Dick Greger, who's another one of this era, too. He was really well known as being like a huge civil rights activist. He's come up several times in other non-comedy related episodes we've done. But he was also super funny, too. And he started out as a stand-up. Apparently, he started out because Hugh Hefner discovered him in 1961 and gave him time at his Playboy Club in Chicago. Did you know Atlanta used to have a Playboy Club? I didn't.

17:21I know pretty much every decent-sized city did. Oh, did they? I think so. I could be wrong. If Atlanta had one back in the 60s, surely. You know? There was like a Kansas City one, too, or something. Yeah, probably. So Jonathan Winters is another that we should mention from early on. He did a lot of kind of character work that I don't think a lot of people were doing at the time. And he was one of the early people to kind of talk about the tragedies of his life in a funny way on stage because he would later on to be known as bipolar disorder.

17:56But he spent time in mental hospitals, and he would take that stuff to the stage, and not many people were doing that kind of thing at the time. No. And he was just totally making wacky fun of it. He called those places funny farms. Like, it was not any, you know, tear-jerking or gripping comedy from it. But just even making fun of it for himself going through it was something. Another big name of this era who was really different-ish, he definitely had one foot solidly planted in the borscht belt still, is Don Rickles.

18:29I think the funniest thing Don Rickles ever did was an inadvertent, unintentional facial expression where he got up to get the shotgun in Casino. I'm pretty sure it was Casino. When De Niro thinks that they're coming for him, Don Rickles gets up and goes and gets the shotgun, and just the look on his face is hilarious. You think that's the funniest thing Don Rickles ever did? Mm-hmm. I loved Rickles. I was a huge fan. Really? Really?

18:59Oh, yeah, man. He was great. Like, I remember growing up watching him on The Tonight Show, and he would just send Carson into, like, stitches. Yeah, that made it fun to watch Carson just lose it, too. Yeah, that was good stuff. And then you mentioned Lenny Bruce. You can't talk about this early generation without talking about Lenny Bruce. He was a guy that kind of became, I mean, his comedy was great, but he kind of became famous for getting arrested. He would talk very frankly on stage in the late 50s and 60s about sex and about religion and racism and stuff that was pretty controversial to talk about on stage, such that he was arrested many times on obscenity charges and was a huge, huge influence on the people that followed him.

19:45Huge. Huge. He's also controversial in that, like, calling him a comedian is odd because he wasn't that funny. It was just he was a really important person in comedy and also in free speech in the United States, too. I think he was very funny. Yeah, he had some funny stuff. But, yeah, I just, I mean, I guess I'm speaking for everybody from my opinion. Thanks for bringing me back down to earth, man. Well, I mean, comedy is one of those things. It's so subjective on what people find funny.

20:17Like, I've had people say, you've got to watch this comedian special that I just literally did not laugh once during. And there are other people that I know I love that other people can't stand. It's just, it's, I think even, I think it's one of the most subjective sort of art forms, you know, even more so than some others. Yeah, for sure. Wrapping this up, and then I say we take a break. This is the 50s. This was a huge shift in comedy. And Time Magazine noted it in 1959. They labeled these kind of comedians that were personality-based sick comedians or sicknicks in a very kind of loving way.

20:56But also in, like, a what the heck is going on here way. It was pretty interesting. But I say we take a break and we're going to jump in. We're going to basically pass the 60s and really go into the 70s. Things are heating up, everybody. Oh, yeah. Hey, everybody.

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Counterculture and the seventies

24:48All right.

Counterculture and the seventies

24:49So we're out of the 50s. We're into the 60s. In the wake of Lenny Bruce, we get a bunch of people highly influenced by him, willing to take a little more chances and a little more risks, I think, with their comedy. They talk about sometimes the holy trinity of the counterculture comedians of the 70s and late 60s. And that would be George Carlin and Richard Pryor and the great Robert Klein. What? I don't even consider him counterculture. That was the only thing.

25:19He is funny, for sure. But he's much more observational and much less political. Yeah, for sure. Carlin, I went and watched. He apparently started out, like, telling jokes in suits and, like, they were pretty clean. And I went and watched one of his early performances and he's almost unrecognizable. And then he starts doing, you know, conversations with two people by himself. Yeah. And I was like, oh, yeah, there's Carlin. But he switched over to the counterculture in the early 70s. And one of the things he became quickly famous for was the seven words routine, which are seven words you can't say on television, which also were words that I think Lenny Bruce got arrested for saying, like, each one.

26:02Yeah, and then, of course, Richard Pryor was the third, and he's another guy who started out a little more straight-laced. And then, you know, I feel like all these guys, what the switch was was I'm going to start being myself a little bit more on stage and having the courage to kind of, like, you know, speak in my own language and whether it's, like, dirty words or in Richard Pryor's case sort of really accepting, like, that he's, you know, one of the great black comedians and he can just sort of let loose.

26:32Yes. He was, I guess, often pointed to as, like, the first black comedian who truly removed, like, the palatable jokes for white audiences. Like, he just, he basically was a black comedian in front of white audiences that didn't code switch. That's what it's called. He was probably the first black comedian to not code switch. Um, and then it's also even hard, I mean, it's not that hard, but I think of Richard Pryor more as just, like, a mega movie star because he was in so many great movies of my youth, like, Stir Crazy, Silver Streak, Hear No Evil, See No Evil.

27:12Those were all what, um, those were with Gene Wilder. Yeah, yeah. Bustin' Loose. Moving. Uh, Brewster's Millions. What else? Harlem Nights. Okay. What else? There's plenty of others, but those are the ones that I watched a lot when I was younger. Yeah. I mean, he, I mean, as you'll see, a lot of these comedians went on to have great careers as actors. Yeah. Uh, which is not always a given because, uh, a lot of stand-up comedians are really, really bad actors. It's true. And it's really surprising how many of them become great actors.

27:45Like, Tom Hanks started out as a stand-up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Tom Hanks is great. But Peter Scolari? No. Uh, and then Robert Klein was the third of that trio. Uh, he grew up, um, going to some of these, um, Jewish kind of summer camps and resorts in the Borscht Belt and worked at some of them. And so he kind of got that education there. And he did, he did a lot of political stuff, a lot of social commentary, um, as well as just his Robert Klein-ness. And he was another guy that was really influential.

28:16Yeah, and just beloved for his personality, like, who he was. Yeah. You know? Like, he told lots of stories. He didn't have, like, one-liners or punchlines, necessarily. Yeah. Uh, so one of the other big things that happened in the 70s was, um, comedy clubs started opening up. And the two that really kind of quickly, um, jumped to the forefront was the improv and the comedy store. One of the other things that those, it kind of went hand in hand with these comedy clubs opening up across the country, um, was a switch from social commentary, uh, more to, like, observational stuff, too.

28:58Yeah, and those, those comedy clubs, all of a sudden you had these places where you could, you know, go up a few times a week and really workshop your material. And, uh, you know, very small audiences generally at these places. Um, I think the improv, uh, eventually expanded into a chain. It started in, in New York City, um, but expanded to 15 clubs eventually. Uh, and then the comedy store, I know we talked about the comedy store before in other episodes, but, um, it really changed the game in Los Angeles in 1972.

29:30Uh, when Mitzi Shore, Polly Shore's mom, uh, took it over when she got it, uh, won it in a divorce settlement and was, I mean, ran the show there, uh, for decades, basically. Yeah, she also went on to found the company that became Comedy Central, from what I understand. So, yeah, she was a huge influence in comedy. Um, and then I also mentioned one of the things that was happening hand in hand with the 70s, um, comedy clubs was that, uh, switch from political and social commentary necessarily more to, like, personal stuff, observational stuff.

30:04And I found a great example of that in Elaine Boosler, who, um, definitely helped kind of usher that in from the late 70s into the 80s when she was really big. But she had this joke that she said, like, she has six locks on her door now, and when she goes out, she only locks every other one because she figures that if somebody wants to come pick her lock, no matter how long they stand there, they're always going to be locking three of them. The great Elaine Boosler. That's great. Like, it has, it makes a social commentary and crime exists, but that's about as far as it goes, you know?

30:39Yeah, yeah, she's, she's awesome. Mm-hmm. Uh, late night talk shows. This is where stand-up, uh, took a huge jump, too, and Ed Sullivan started all of that out in the 1940s, and then, obviously, when The Tonight Show came about in the 1950s, like I talked about, eventually, Johnny Carson, you know, anointing you was a very big deal as a stand-up comic, uh, stand-up comic. Um, and then, like, records. Uh, I know we mentioned Mort Saul and, um, some of these other guys with their early records, but once LPs came around, um, and all of a sudden you could get your comedy on a, uh, on a record.

31:13Mm-hmm. And win a Grammy for it and, like, make money selling comedy records, that was sort of the early version of, like, the stand-up special that we have now was the comedy record. Yes. Uh, I say that we take a break and come back and talk about some of the comics from this era, okay? All right, we'll be right back. Hey, everybody.

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Comedy clubs and late-night TV

34:40Okay, Chuck, so we're back. And thanks to comedy albums, thanks to TV, there were suddenly way more places for comics to perform.

35:10Rather than just clubs and also get discovered. Joan Rivers is a good example of that. She started doing stand-up all over the place in New York. She had some hilarious bits. And then she got her big break on The Tonight Show. And a lot of people from Stephen Wright, one of the most amazing comics of all time, to Mitch Hedberg, another amazing comic too. All got their break on late night shows. And she was one of the early ones. And so she became a regular because she killed so hard on the late night shows that she almost took over for Carson.

35:48We've talked about this before. Yeah. But she upset him by trying to get her own show without talking to him first, getting his blessing first. But that's how good she was at late night. And she started out as just a stand-up comedian in the little clubs in New York before the improv even. Yeah. And, you know, if you were a comedian back then, it wasn't like today where it was just starting to become a thing where, like, hey, you can have a full career just doing this. Because a lot of these people did other stuff.

36:20Like they acted, I know Joan Rivers acted in plays and movies when she wasn't getting booked. Red Foxx did the same. He was on the Chitlin circuit. But he was too raunchy for white audiences at the time. Yeah. So, like, he would put out an album and they may not even sell it in mainstream stores. But then he becomes a huge star when he is an actor on Sanford and Son, one of my favorite shows as a kid. Yeah, I wasn't allowed to watch it because my mom thought Red Foxx was a dirty old man.

36:53He was. I found a hilarious Red Foxx joke. He said that, I carry a knife now. I read in a white magazine that all black people carry knives. So, I ran out and bought me one.

37:05He was great. I mean, he wasn't filthy on Sanford and Son. So, I feel bad that you didn't get to watch the show. Oh, I've watched it for sure. Oh, okay. You snuck it. I watched it a little later. Yeah, I had plenty of other stuff to watch, like Flintstones and things like that. So, I just saved it for later. I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much because I was five years younger than you. So, I had to wait until I got a little older to really think it was funny. But it is a great show. Great show. Steve Martin was another one. He was a comedy writer. He plays the banjo, I think, as most people know.

37:38So, he would work that into his early nightclub shows and worked as a comedy writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and other variety shows. And then, after SNL, and if you've seen the great documentary on Steve Martin, it's a two-part documentary. It's just fantastic. But he was the first, like, superstar of comedy. There had not been people that sold out, you know, basketball arenas before Steve Martin.

38:09And it's an incredible thing to watch in this documentary. Like, just what a – he was, like, one of the most famous people in the world in the 1970s and then just stopped. Just walked away from it all and never did stand-up again so he could do movies. I know, which is sad because some of the stuff he was doing was so creative. Like, I watched his comedy act for dogs, which he did on Carson, where he had, like, four or five dogs just lined up right in front of him. And he told the viewers to bring your dogs because this is going to kill them.

38:43They're going to love this. And then he did an act geared toward making dogs laugh. So they were all dog-centric jokes, not, like, about, like, to owners, but to the dogs. And then at one part he plays a little, like, a bit on a dog whistle that you can't hear anything. It's just – it's amazing. And this is, like, the kind of stuff he was doing, not just standing there telling jokes, but, like, hilarious bits. So, yeah, just – he should have been a superstar. He was so good. And I wish he was – I wish he would still do stand-up once in a while, you know?

39:15That would just – I can't imagine how many tickets he would sell if he came back and did stand-up once. Yeah, he kind of does it – you know, he and Martin Short have a road show that they do together, which is essentially a two-hander stand-up. But, you know, in the documentary he talks about just – he got so big that he was doing routines where the – you know how the audience will sing along at, like, a concert? Yeah. Where the audience was saying punchlines, you know, 20,000 people saying the punchline out loud with him.

39:49And it just – I think it got to be too much. And he was just like, that's not what this was meant to be. And, I mean, he had to – it takes a lot of bravery and guts to just be like, you know what? I'm done with that part of my life. They totally walked away. Yeah. Like Dave Chappelle would later on, 30 years later. Yeah. Eddie Murphy in between. Although there's rumors that Eddie's working on a stand-up set, which would just – that would – oh, man. That would be incredible. Yeah. So that's Steve Martin, superstar. Another superstar that came out of the 70s was Robin Williams, who rose to fame, like, just completely fueled by cocaine and just totally out of his mind.

40:30And I assume that that's why he was always, like, you know, going nuts and bouncing all over the place. Apparently, the exact opposite happened with him. Cocaine calmed him down. So he was naturally like that. And when he was mellow, it's because he was on coke, which I found quite interesting. Well, he was obviously Mork from Ork, which debuted as a character on Happy Days in 1978. And then he got his own show, Mork and Mindy, that same year, another favorite show of mine as a kid.

41:02And he's another one of those that, like, he always loved stand-up and, like, kept doing stand-up alongside of movies. Like, once he became even a dramatic actor at times, but he was still loved going on stage and doing stand-up. And I've heard lots of stories about him, like, showing up at the comedy store and stuff, like, even in his later years and, like, showing up to do a set and it would just, like, floor people. I'm sure. He also, remember, he appeared in our Coco live episode because he got to go hang out with Coco for a while and they just communicated.

41:36Yeah, they were buddies. Okay, so you've got, like, 20,000-seat stadiums with Steve Martin. You've got raunchy comedy albums with Red Fox. You've got Joan Rivers hosting late-night stuff as a guest. Cable was another thing that came along that really changed things for comedians for a couple of reasons.

HBO and cable specials

41:58One of the big reasons was they could say stuff on cable specials that they could not say anywhere else except in person. And now you were saying this instead of to 50 people in a small club, you were saying this to millions of people who got to watch your stuff. And then you went from 50-seat small clubs to, you know, pretty large venues after that. And then also, instead of, like, five minutes on a late-night show, you would have, like, an hour-long special. So you did your entire set.

42:28And that really changed things, as I said. Yeah, for sure. Like, HBO, it just can't be overstated what an important thing HBO was to the rise of comedy in the United States. Because that's where those first comedy specials started appearing. I think Robert Klein was actually the very first HBO comedy special in 75. And then Steve Martin, I think, kind of right after that, almost called him Stephen Martin. But then, and I know we talked about this in the Rodney Dangerfield episode, when Rodney started the HBO Young Comedian specials, that run of 19 years from 76 to 95.

43:08I just, I remember watching this when I was a kid and seeing all these, like, Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr and Rita Rudner, Jerry Seinfeld. That's where he got his start. Like, I was just a kid sitting around watching, like, every bit of stand-up I could get my hands on. And HBO was definitely the place. Yeah. Oh, it definitely was. Especially before Comedy Central, too. Yeah. Basically, everything I ever put on HBO was amazing. Because they didn't just give a special to just anybody. The cool thing was, is you didn't have to be an already established stand-up.

43:44Like you said, Jerry Seinfeld got his start on that. You just had to be really good at what you did. One of the other ways that HBO helped, too, they helped a lot of up-and-coming black comedians on Deaf Comedy Jam, which ran for years and years and years. And essentially, any huge black comedian that you know of today got their big break on Deaf Comedy Jam. It was, like, that important. Yeah, for sure. Huge hats off to producer Russell Simmons for that. It was hosted by Martin Lawrence.

44:15And, yeah, I mean, you name it. If you ended up being a famous black comedian in the 1990s, there's a pretty good chance you started on Deaf Comedy Jam. And that would lead, I know this is jumping ahead a bit in time, but to the Kings of Comedy tour. Man, that was so good. And then the original Kings of Comedy film of that tour from Spike Lee in 2000. Of course, that was Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and R.I.P. the great Bernie Mac.

44:45Yeah, for sure. He was great. His show was pretty great, too. I loved the Bernie Mac show. Yeah. Still holds up. Yeah, I bet. So we mentioned Comedy Central. And that started in 1991, even though Mitzi Shore had established something before it a few years before. Not sure why that's important, but I felt like I needed to mention it again. And the whole thing, I don't know if you remember this. I'm sure you do. It was just basically shows that were clips of comedians doing stand-up.

45:18That's how it started. And it was so pure that that's all you needed. They would just figure out different ways to package it, short attention span theater, stand-up, stand-up, or whatever. Yeah, yeah. But that's all it was. It was just stand-ups doing stand-up clip after clip, and it was wonderful. Yeah, it was great. You're right. There was a purity to those early days of Comedy Central. They did have shows that would come along, but they were shows from comedians like The Great Chappelle Show and I know a show that you and I both love, Dr. Cat's Professional Therapist.

45:54For sure. I'll always remember Dom Herrera saying, like, you can't get to a cat. Like, you just can't get under their skin. Like, you could throw them across the room, and the cat would be like, thanks, my man. I was going this way anyway. Dom Herrera's so great. Yeah. So, yeah, Comedy Central was an enormous driver, too, as you can imagine.

Saturday Night Live and sitcoms

46:13And then Saturday Night Live, as we mentioned, like, it's pretty difficult to overstate the importance that Saturday Night Live has had on launching, like, stand-up comedians into stardom. Yeah. I mean, you know, we already mentioned Eddie Murphy, but that's where he got his start at age 19.

46:31Again, I highly recommend his documentary. It's really, really good. And then he had his protégés to follow after he put out his two kind of groundbreaking comedy movies, Delirious and Raw, both of which I think a lot of Gen Xers can kind of quote by heart.

46:50Let's see. What else, Chuck? Well, Chris Rock. He was one of those protégés. So, he came out of that Eddie Murphy school, was on the SNL cast, and had a nice run of HBO specials, too. Okay. So, one of the other things, this is just, I love this part because it's so nostalgic for me, but one of the things that people figured out pretty early on is you could take a stand-up comedian, and even if they couldn't act, they could at least pretty much act like themselves. So, shows that were based on that comedian's life, where they played themselves, like Seinfeld is an excellent example.

47:28Those have come out over the years, and some of them have been just amazing. Like, Seinfeld, obviously, was on for almost 10 years. No, more than 10 years, 11 years. And the Drew Carey show was on for almost 10 years. Jamie Foxx show was on for five. Bernie Mac was on for five. And it just keeps going on. And then others didn't have quite as much staying power, but they weren't necessarily terrible. They just didn't draw the audience that the execs expected, like The Norm Show or Whitney or Mulaney all had very short runs, but they were all based around stand-up comedians.

48:03Yeah. Yeah, Louis C.K. had a couple of runs on TV. He had a sitcom, like an on-stage multicam sitcom called Lucky Louis, which not a lot of people saw, I feel like. He got a lot more attention with his show just called Louis. But, you know, Seinfeld was very famously, when he won an Emmy, got up on stage, I don't know if you remember this, and grabbed the Emmy and said, I am a bad actor.

48:34So he was always very upfront about the fact that, like, you know, I'm not necessarily an actor, but I guess I'm myself enough on TV. Yeah. And then I also want to shout out the Sarah Silverman program. Yeah. Not only was that a great show, but a lot of, like, alt comedians got their start either acting or writing for that show. Yeah. And that also kind of grew out of Mr. Show. Which was a big deal for alt comedy, as we'll see. And Sarah Silverman was on, she was one of the actors on that show, too.

49:06Yeah. So those were all sitcoms, basically, where, you know, they weren't all playing themselves, like, as comedians in real life. Like, Mad About You, it wasn't about, you know, Paul Reiser, the comedian. There were other shows sort of like Mad About You where there were comedians playing either thinly veiled versions of themselves or kind of like in Roseanne's case. She kind of took her act and formed that into the show, Roseanne, obviously, The Cosby Show, Ellen, Steve Harvey, Everybody Loves Raymond, George Lopez.

49:42I haven't seen a lot of these shows. Home Improvement and the great Bob Newhart show. And we got to shout out Tig Notaro and her great show, One Mississippi. Yeah, she didn't play herself in that?

49:55She did not play herself, I don't think. I'm trying to remember now. I really like the show. I had a couple of seasons, but I don't think she played a comedian. I'm trying to remember now because I don't want to get called out. So, I gotcha.

Prop comics and alternative styles

50:12So, there's also at the same time while people are standing there with a microphone and there's a bar stool with like a vodka tonic on it or something like that during the 80s and 90s. There were also people doing their own thing still. You got to shout out Gallagher who definitely did his own thing. You have to shout out another prop comic, Carrot Top. Sure. You could shout out Jeff Dunham who we talked about in our Ventriloquist episode.

50:42Yeah. Andrew Dice Clay was another one. He had his own shtick and not only did he have a comedy album called The Day the Laughter Died, which I grew up on, he starred in his own movie, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. Did you ever see that? I never saw that and I don't know why because I really was into Dice for a while when I was in high school. Did you dress like him? Oh, no, no, no, no. Nothing like that. I just thought he was very funny. He had some very recitable jokes.

51:14Yeah. One other comedy album that was really influential on me at the time was Dennis Leary's No Cure for Cancer. That was really great too. Yeah. I was never into Dennis Leary, but I got it. I thought his MTV stuff was pretty fun. Yeah. And you know what? I'm just now remembering, I think Tig Notaro played, I think it was one of those slightly different versions because I think she played like a radio host or something. Okay, yeah. And not a comedian. That's like Steve Harvey. I think he played a radio DJ or something like that. Yeah. So she stole Steve Harvey's bit.

Closing thoughts on part one

51:45So I say we sign off for episode one and we'll come back with episode two. But there's one thing I wanted to say that I didn't get to, but I found out from researching this. You know that famous saying that Ginger did everything Fred did, only backwards and in heels? Yeah. That's Joan Rivers. Oh, that was her original joke? Yep. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Okay. Well, that's it. Are we going to do anything aside from tell people our email?

52:15I don't think so. You know, we'll come back with part two, I guess, probably on, we'll probably do a Tuesday, Thursday, and we'll pick up with alt comedy in the 90s there. Okay. So we'll see you guys Thursday. And in the meantime, if you want to send us your favorite comedian and their favorite joke, send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com.

52:35Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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