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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Anyone can make jokes about books on comedy. Even the grumpy-belletrist-in-a-bow-tie type can tap the dottle out of his pipe long enough to harrumph out the old one about how Mr. Murkle seems to have got comedy down and broken its arm, while the postmodernist professor makes garlicky puns about the subversion inherent in garlicky puns. Everyone feels smug about books on jokes, because we all know that there's no explaining jokes--though perhaps we wouldn't be so smug if we stopped and tried to explain why it so often takes a joke to explain us.
But comedy, like cooking, is a great subject, and should not be avoided just because it is also a hard one. This is especially true of books about the growth of a new comic style in mid-century America, of which Gerald Nachman's "Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s"(Pantheon; $29.95) is the example at hand. If any movement has changed the inside of our mind--or, at least, lined its cage with a different kind of newspaper--it is the movement in comedy which began in the mid-fifties, crested in the early sixties, and, in one form or another, is still with us today. In one neat formulation, popular American comedy changed then from wit to humor--from nicely packaged aphorisms about life (for that, when the pickle juice is shaken off, is what a one-liner like "Take my wife, please"is) to shapeless commentary on events and manners.
A terrific book might be written tracing the birth, dissemination, and eventual decadence of this manner, from coffeehouse to our house. This book is not that book. Instead, Nachman has given himself the narrower task of talking to the surviving comics of the fifties and sixties, and writing from clips and earlier interviews about the ones who aren't around or who won't talk to him. Drawing the line overtight at 1970, he tells the story of how the style started, leaving out the really interesting story of how the style spread. George Carlin and Robert Klein, for instance, are excluded, on the debatable ground that neither was much of anything in the sixties, even though they were surely the key figures in communicating coffeehouse humor to a television audience. (And Carlin, in his early infantry-standup mode, had become a regular on Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin by 1966.)
Nachman is, on his own terms, though, extremely thorough: there is a full recounting of what happened to Shelley Berman's career (he was seen, in a documentary, losing his temper and yanking a telephone receiver off the hook, and never recovered) and more than you probably need to read...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
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