I picked up these two recently published books about the history of comedy in America for something to read on my long flight to Edinburgh. This felt ironic, because neither book spends much time on theater, while at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts festival, comedy and theater are so thoroughly intertwined, it’s hard to separate them. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society does try to do so in their almost 500-page catalogue, but even this is instructive. Comedy gets 134 pages, each page crammed with listings of a dozen different shows, and theater gets 100, by far the two largest categories. (Musicals and opera get 18)
Has the Fringe created a new hybrid of comedy and theater? Is there a Fringe genre of theater? Is there a Fringe genre of comedy, as concrete and identifiable as the genres, like stand-up, slapstick and sitcoms, that are discussed in the two books, which cover much of the same territory?
These are the questions I suspect I’ll be exploring once I recover from jetlag and start Fringing in earnest.
As for the books: “100 Years of Laughter: American Comedy in the Twentieth Century” by Garry Berman (Bloomsbury Academic, 288 pages) has the more attractive book cover, but Funny Stuff: How Comedy Shaped American History (Rutgers University Press, 348 pages) is better-written and more authoritative – a collaboration between the Smithsonian and the National Comedy Center (a Congressionally-designated archive and museum), whose two directors are the book’s editors. And its dozen contributors include Mel Brooks, who writes the foreword.
“Funny Stuff” is more effective when it profiles individuals and shows rather than generalizing about movements and eras, but the profiles are uneven. In the eight pages of “Phyllis Diller Cracks the Comedy Ceiling,” co-editor Laura LaPlaca provides an intriguing biography and analysis. We learn that Diller had a 48-drawer steel file cabinet containing more than 50,000 one-liners organized by topic, and get some examples: “I once wore a peek-a-boo blouse. People would peek and then they’d boo.” (We even see a picture of the cabinet, one of many photographs presumably from the National Comedy Center’s archives) But the eight pages on Bob Hope talk only about his USO tours; we get no sense of what his comedy was like. The most fascinating profiles are of now-obscure humorists, such as “Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby” (real name David Ross Locke), who was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite, and whom book contributor Jon Grinspan calls “the Stephen Colbert of the Civil War,” mimicking white supremacists in order to mock them.
The history is more or less chronological within each chapter, but the four chapters are thematic, asking us to think about what comedy has meant in America. Chapter 1: Comedy Shapes How We See Each Other. Chapter 2: Comedy Creates American Identity. Chapter 3: Comedy Provokes Conversation. Chapter 4: Comedy Breaks the Mold. But there is simply too much…stuff — too many examples — for the book to read like a synthesis; it feels more like an encyclopedia.
Both books about American comedy seem to see American theater primarily as a past inspiration for present-day comedy, although “Funny Stuff” is more generous about it:
“Broadway theater has been a laboratory for American comedy, a robust and durable cultural form in which writers and performers have created indelible works of topical humor, sending up society and culture….” Theater, “Funny Stuff” says, was “the first mass entertainment medium to take root in the United States”…”For audiences, theatrical comedy has entertained, provided catharsis, fostered a sense of belonging, and opened eyes to new perspectives and ideas…”
Both “100 Years of Laughter” and “Funny Stuff” focus on the history of vaudeville, a form that was born with Tony Pastor’s first vaudeville theater in 1881, Tammany Hall Theater, in Union Square, and had its hey-day with the Keith-Albee Theater circuit, which featured contracts that prohibited performers from using profanity or vulgar humor; theater managers called out objectionable material with notes delivered in blue envelopes – thus the phrase “working blue.”
“On its stages [of vaudeville], comedy performance evolved from its incidental dramatic and musical roots to something resembling today’s stand-up, sketch, and musical comedy forms,” co-editor Ryan Lintelman writes.
Later, Lintelman writes of Broadway’s effort to back away from its comedy: “At the zenith of Broadway theater’s cultural power, from the 1930s to the 1960s, many of the most popular musicals emphasized music, drama, and dance while sidelining comedy in an effort to stress the artistic merit of the form against critical dismissal of middlebrow entertainment. Playwrights like George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart found that political and social satire had uneven success, leading Kaufman to famously quip “satire is what closes on Saturday night.”
But to be fair, this paragraph is in a section entitled “Broadway: Crucible of Comedy” which elaborates on the story of three Broadway shows: “Avenue Q,” “Kinky Boots,” and “Abie’s Irish Rose,” a play about the marriage between a Jewish man and an Irish woman, written by Anne Nichols, who had to produce the show herself, mortgaging her house, because no established Broadway producer would touch it. It remains the longest running comedy in Broadway history,
