Recent talk by Lebron James about the idea of a “basketball Mount Rushmore” and his self-nomination for inclusion in said monument sparked a separate idea –
Among comedians, who would you consider the top 4 faces of the genre – the important voices that helped shape the art form to where it is today?
I suppose it’s only fair that I go first:
Lenny Bruce
Will Rogers
George Carlin
Richard Pryor
This is, of course, to say nothing of luminaries like Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Abbott & Costello, The Three Stooges, Laurel & Hardy, Redd Foxx, Joan Rivers, Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Bill Hicks, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and countless others. To paraphrase Full Metal Jacket, “This is my list, there are many like it, but this one is mine.”
Groucho, Chaplin, Buster (“old stone face”) and W.C. Fields. A majority of all comic personas from movies and TV date back to these four monolithic and seminal “characters”.
The problem here is that there are several basic forms of comedy. You could create a Rushmore for each of written, stage, cinema and the general category of individual/standup (Will Rogers, Marx Brothers outside of film, all the traditional standups). Four total is too narrow a gate.
Written would begin with Twain, I think. Most predecessors wrote in other forms to other ends, or are too dated to have much modern influence, or just weren’t very good.
Like AB I think that limiting it to stand up is too constricting. If I were to go with only stand up I would have to stick with what I hear from most comics when talking about their craft. The ones that seem to have had the most lasting impact on the genre as it has evolved into are probably Carlin, Pryor, Cosby and Dangerfield. Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce barely don’t make it. Allen had a huge impact on stand up when he started but left too early for movies to go on the mountain. Bruce pushed the envelope and changed what was acceptable for comics to talk about forever. But he just wasn’t that funny.
Expanding it to other forms of comedy makes it much more difficult. Its hard to narrow it down to just four. I would go with Twain but to be honest it should be Oscar Wilde but Mount Rushmore is American so I’m going with Twain dammit. For a stand up its a toss up between Carlin and Pryor but I would give the edge to Carlin. For TV I’m am torn between Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason. But I’ll go with Caesar due to his vision and the people that came out of his shows. For movies: Chaplin. I actually like Keaton more from that era but as a visionary and founding father of comedy I would go with Chaplin.
tldr:
Stand up only: Carlin, Pryor, Cosby, Dangerfield
Comedians are not like Politicians: There’s WAY more than a 4 good ones!
But If I HAD to…
Steve Martin for sure…Groucho Marx, Louis CK, and then…jeez, I’m leaving out a lot of people, Bill Cosby.
But there’s a LOT more than 4!
I assume the foremost criterion that almost everybody is considering is the particular comic’s uniqueness. I’d put Sam Kinison up there. His portrayal of Professor Turgeson in Back to School ranks among the greatest comedic scenes of the 1980s. Other than that, I’m drawing a blank. There really are just too many to choose from. I’m tempted to nominate Lucille Ball, but I don’t really know enough about the history of comedy to evaluate her particular contribution to the genre. Was she unique, or was her style largely predicated on earlier forms of slapstick dating back as far as the early twentieth century?
