Stand-Up Comedy Pt I

Stuff You Should Know

Chuck and Josh trace the evolution of stand-up comedy from its vaudeville origins through the mid-20th century to the rise of cable specials and late-night

Key takeaways

• Vaudeville and the Borscht Belt established early stand-up structures, with Charlie Case and Frank Fay pioneering solo performance styles that moved away from slapstick.
• The 1950s introduced personality-based 'sickniks' like Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman, who brought political commentary and launched the comedy album era.

Main topics

• Vaudeville and early solo performance
• Borscht Belt and Chitlin Circuit

Notable quotes

"You can't talk about the history of stand-up comedy without talking about some bad people, as it turns out."

Conclusion

The episode provides a foundational understanding of how stand-up evolved from resort circuits and

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Speaker 4 (0:02) Guaranteed human. Speaker 1 (0:04) Do you love golf? If so, you should listen to 3-Putt Bogey. I'm Chuck Bryant from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. And I'm Adam Pranica from a couple of embarrassing hit Star Trek podcasts. And Speaker 3 (0:15) each week on 3-Putt Bogey, we're going to get into the bunker and get to the bottom of what is just so alluring and frustrating about the most beautiful game in the world. Speaker 1 (0:23) So whether you're someone who pipes it on the driving range but freezes up on the tee box. Or misses that 3-foot putt when everything's on the line. We're there to laugh about it with you on 3-Putt Bogey. a podcast about two mid-handicappers, one great shot, and the three-putt that spoils it all. Speaker 3 (0:39) You can listen to it now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (0:48) Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice. But will it be heard? I'm Nancy Grace. On Crime Stories, we go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us at Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts. Hope, you join us. Speaker 4 (1:17) I'll see you there, friend. Detectives said he had stalked her before she died. Years later, they said he remained the person they continued to focus on. This is Hunter Gilmore, host of Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast, shedding light on the silent epidemic of missing and murdered Black women and girls, bringing attention to stories that equally deserve to be told and to the questions that still remain. Listen to Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (1:50) Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 2 (2:00) Waka 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. Speaker 3 (2:13) You know what? This one has some COAs, unfortunately. Speaker 2 (2:18) Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, we're talking about genuine stand up comedy and, you know, they're edgy. They push the envelope. Speaker 3 (2:24) Yeah. I mean, we're going to there. There are people throughout this pepper 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 Faye? I mean, there's a bunch of people throughout here. Speaker 2 (2:44) Oh, okay. Well, I'm not familiar with a lot of the badness here, so let's just avoid it. Speaker 3 (2:52) That and, you know, this is a 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? For Speaker 2 (3:22) 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. Speaker 3 (3:31) Yeah, but we 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, Speaker 2 (3:41) 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. Speaker 3 (3:49) And I pledge to do a full episode on Andy Kaufman. Speaker 2 (3:53) Okay. All right. Okay. Well, I pledge to do a full episode on Zach Galifianakis. Speaker 3 (4:00) Hey, I'd do one on Zach in a second. Speaker 2 (4:02) 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? I'm ready. We're talking about stand-up comedy, as we've said. Speaker 2 (4:23) 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 long, 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. Speaker 3 (4:44) 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. Like we've done. shows on specific comedians, The Science of Funny, Speaker 1 (4:57) and Speaker 3 (4:58) 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. Yeah. 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. Speaker 2 (5:24) Yeah, 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. So he moved on around 1900 to doing essentially what's a stand up act. Speaker 3 (6:00) 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. Speaker 3 (6:14) Which could, you know, it's about talking about parents is probably 90 percent of stand up since then. 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. Speaker 2 (6:38) Yeah, there's a guy I already mentioned him because you mentioned terrible people. His name is 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. The type of comedian like that David Letterman was in the vein of. But I really hesitate to even associate Letterman with Faye 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. Speaker 3 (7:30) Yeah, for sure. uh and 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. You 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 to take its like form that we know today. Speaker 2 (8:18) 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. The full line is, women today are crazy. I mean, take my wife, please. Speaker 3 (8:41) Yeah, he was a social director at a resort, something called a Tumbler. And this is where a lot of the standups would get their start is like social chairs and social directors at these resorts. Yeah. And he was a big one. Like this was a time where standup was like very much joke, joke writing. It didn't, you know, we'll talk about the changes of standup over the years where it morphed into like storytelling and then. alt comedy and all that stuff, but early standup and you, you don't see a lot of that stuff anymore. Um, Brian Kiley, uh, a pal of mine and a friend of the show that was the, uh, with, along with a couple of other guys, a monologue writer for, uh, Conan O'Brien for the entire run and has written for the Academy Awards and just like a great throwback, like joke writing comedian that you don't see much anymore. So I love Brian stuff. Speaker 2 (9:31) Awesome. Shout out Brian. Um, 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. And I couldn't help thinking, she should move. Speaker 2 (10:00) Yeah, 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? Speaker 3 (10:15) 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 Kutscher's Country Club right there in the Catskills. Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:42) And so the start of the stand-up comedy, especially as it came out of the Borscht Belt, was very clubby, very Jewish, very male. But women were kind of. They kind of emerged a little later, I guess mid-Borscht Bell, 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? Speaker 3 (11:14) Yeah, I think. Comedy-wise, and I know sort of the look was based a little bit on Gene Carroll, so it was a bit of a mashup. But I think I watched the first couple of seasons of Speaker 2 (11:25) 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. Speaker 3 (11:38) 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. That means like he liked you. So you get that stamp of approval. Speaker 2 (11:52) 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. Speaker 2 (12:03) So 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. Speaker 3 (12:26) Yeah. I mean, you can't get any better than Red Fox and Flip Wilson. Those guys definitely played the Chitlin circuit as well as a very funny woman who went by Moms Mabley on stage. And 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 Moms Mabley did. Speaker 2 (12:57) 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