June 8, 2003

'Seriously Funny': Beginning at the Bitter End

merica's culture of conformity in the 1950's bred a cultural renaissance: jazz rebels, Beat poets, Abstract Expressionists, the pioneers of folk and rock and soul music, film-noir directors and daredevil satirists. Initially they found one another and their audiences at the edges. Disc jockeys controlled their own shows, created ''personalities'' and could ignore network radio taboos by playing rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll and country music, rather than the crooning stars of the day. Mushroomlike, small wayward clubs sprang up from coast to coast, joining jazz and strip joints to incubate the likes of Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, Josh White and Bob Dylan, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce in front of cult audiences. Those oddballs represented the complex decade's most exciting and creative urges, cultural vectors that would appear more fully and divisively during the 60's and 70's.

In ''Seriously Funny,'' Gerald Nachman sketches in some of these contexts while revisiting what he calls the ''comedy renaissance.'' Mort Sahl, Sid Caesar, Tom Lehrer, Steve Allen, Stan Freberg, Ernie Kovacs, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, Nichols and May, Bob & Ray, Bob Newhart, Lenny Bruce, the Smothers Brothers, Mel Brooks, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Joan Rivers -- his selections seem a pretty heterogeneous bunch. But Nachman asserts, ''Taken together, they made up the faculty of a new school of vigorous, socially aware satire, a dazzling group of voices that reigned roughly from 1953 to 1965.'' He omits Alan King and Robert Klein because, he says, they stand on the cusp between older Catskills tummlers and the new comedy, and he argues that Richard Pryor and George Carlin, also omitted, were not fully formed until the 70's. This perspective dovetails with his shrugging off comedy after 1965, when, he declares, satiric humor rapidly degenerated into superficial post-''Saturday Night Live'' ''attitude,'' and American audiences lost their sophistication.

Nachman's introduction draws the reader into the comics' scene by crunching details from the era's colorful panorama, which his book then rings changes on: Enrico Banducci's hungry i, Fred Weintraub's Bitter End, Art D'Lugoff's Village Gate, Hugh Hefner's Playboy , old-time radio and Catskills comics, censors and gatekeepers on TV and radio, sidelong glances at also-rans like Allan Sherman. Each chapter sets a mini-biography focused primarily on the subject's stand-up career against a backdrop of historical and social developments: the onset of the personal monologue and disappearance of the ''fourth wall''; the rise of late-night TV, comedy recordings and (eventually) movies as career vehicles; the in-crowd sensibility of hipster audiences in tiny joints digging outre talent; the tang of these small, sequestered worlds framed with glimpses of larger movements, like civil rights and feminism, as well as long-term cultural trends, like the Jewish influence on popular American humor.

A veteran newspaper entertainment columnist, Nachman lights up when he is reporting; at its supplest his prose crackles with snappy one-liners and bright turns of phrase. He has done homework, ransacking clip files and absorbing standard sources that he borrows from liberally for both opinions and facts, sometimes with acknowledgment and sometimes without. And he has done legwork, interviewing a gaggle of people intimate with postwar comedy and its milieu, from key agents like Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins to fans like Roger Ailes, a Sahl devotee, and Robin Williams, who grew up idolizing Bruce and Winters. Generally, Nachman weaves his wide-ranging materials into effective, evocative portraits. As an introduction to postwar comedy, ''Seriously Funny'' does a solid, entertaining job.

Nachman's passion about his loves and hates is engaging. He shares Mort Sahl's political cynicism and sympathizes with the obsessions about the Warren Report and entanglements with Jim Garrison that ruined what was left of Sahl's livelihood; Nachman admires Sahl's colossal ego while demonstrating the writhing insecurities underneath. He rides the roller-coaster madness of Sid Caesar's career, from the Darwinian chaos of writers' meetings for ''Your Show of Shows'' (Nachman's versions are as funny as those in ''My Favorite Year'') to the final drop, when Caesar was left like a fish in a drought by the ebbing of television from creative experimentation to lowest common denominator pablum. For Steve Allen, whose astonishing productivity in TV, books, music and comedy makes him nonpareil, Nachman can't find enough accolades.

He trawls happily through the personal and professional tensions that both made Mike Nichols and Elaine May great and blew the team (and the Compass Players, already fractured by the scene-stealing antics of Shelley Berman) apart. He delights in Mel Brooks's brilliantly zany willingness to jump off comedic ledges and either soar or plummet. He respects Tom Lehrer's willingness to bail out of satire and return to civilian life, and commiserates with Jonathan Winters about his bad press and curtailed film career. And he gleefully snipes at Bill Cosby, whose offstage arrogance and greed fuel Nachman's contention that Cosby's comedic ''colorlessness'' is little more than cynical marketing.

Unfortunately, annoying stylistic tics mount up as the pages turn: Nachman's habit of restating an idea several times; his hammering of the obvious, like Allen's neuroses or Rivers's bitchiness; his multiplying lists of names and adjectives and even speculations that surround a point without ever quite nailing it. After a while, Nachman's fondness for superfluous celebrity quotations -- he cites Jerry Seinfeld pooh-poohing the cliche that all comics are by nature unhappy, for instance -- gets tiresome.

More important is Nachman's dismissal of comedians of the 60's and of the decade itself, which he doesn't understand and clearly loathes. He only passingly mentions Flip Wilson, and ignores the Firesign Theater -- an especially striking omission given his recurrent emphasis on recordings as a comic medium. After he sidesteps Pryor and Carlin, he overlooks Second City except in passing references to the Age of Irony, and allots Godfrey Cambridge an embarrassing seven pages, a fraction of most other chapters. His historical asides slight the Marx Brothers, models for so much 60's satirical humor. Although he enjoys the Smothers Brothers' sibling rivalry and parodies of what he derides as ''the era's folk song mania,'' he dislikes their TV show, one of the very few satirical series with real bite ever to land on an American network. He sneers at what he calls ''rock 'n' roll comedy'' as purveyed by Robin Williams and Steve Martin. But he goes gaga over Stan Freberg -- a direct ancestor of the ''Saturday Night Live'' school of comedy he disdains, whose wackiest parodies surfaced not on his toothless comedy records but in his Madison Avenue advertising work -- and Bob Newhart, whose button-down mind threatened the Establishment less than Dilbert's.

So what does Nachman mean by satirical comedy? ''The great comedians collected here changed comedy forever,'' he writes, between bouts of insisting that no one has picked up the torch because audiences became unable to grasp genuine wit. ''As a group they left behind a satirical legacy distinguished by its social and political awareness, literacy, ingenuity and theatrical flair.'' This is accurate and vague enough to encompass most of his subjects, but does it explain a chapter on the impressionists David Frye, Vaughn Meader and Will Jordan? Is he serious when he declares that ''Diller and Rivers are the Mother Jones and Betty Friedan of stand-up''?

Wrestling with why his favorite 13 years were so fertile for comedy, Nachman writes, ''Well into my search for a logical answer, I concluded that the comedy renaissance, like all artistic flowerings -- the French Impressionists, the Bloomsbury circle, the Italian and French New Wave cinema, Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the 30's and 40's, the 1927 New York Yankees -- was just a lucky accident.'' Maybe. But the salient feature of Nachman's list, of which he seems curiously unaware, is that these groups all worked as teams, exchanging information and ideas, consciously striving to create something new -- hardly what you could call an accident. Those of us who think the manifold undercurrents of mainstream culture in the 1950's had to find modes of expression sooner or later, perhaps all the more explosively for being pent up, would disagree with Nachman's overall assessment of how and why rebel comedians came to be -- and even who they were.

Gene Santoro is the author of ''Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus'' and the forthcoming ''Highway 61 Revisited: Alternative Visions of Jazz, Blues, Folk, Rock and Comedy.''