I can’t find video of it now, but several years Lenny was performing locally as a weekend headliner at a comedy club.
He brought out some props, one of which was a mini-guillotine. He made a Lorena Bobbitt joke, and demonstrated how the guillotine worked by sticking a banana in the device and chopping the fruit in half.
One section of the banana shot out and landed on an audience member, good naturedly tossed it back at Lenny. Not a throw, just a toss. But it hit Lenny.
Lenny retaliated by just grabbing random things and throwing them at the person, who was in the front row. He swung his fist at the person, too, although that didn’t land.
I was a huge comedy club junkie during my 20’s, did standup for about 6 years, and got to be pretty chummy with the stage manager at the club where this happened. He used to show me wild shit like that all time.
Yeah, I think that was its original appeal. Carol’s early work is full of that contrast between expectation and actuality. She has this big number in “Once Upon a Mattress” in which her character is barging around the stage singing (loudly) a song called “I’m Shy!” and she had a huge novelty song success with “I Made A Fool of Myself over John Foster Dulles” - a bobby-socker love ballad about the famously dull Secretary of State:
Wait, Bob Hope was a comedian? I thought he was just a Bob Hope.
For my entire lifetime, whenever there was some TV special starring Bob Hope, it was always “Starring So-and-so, the actor, and so-and-so, the comedian, and Bob Hope, who is Bob Hope”.
Bob Hope’s stand-up comedy was of a kind that is very much out of fashion nowadays. It’s definitely not the storytelling or relatable observational humor of more modern comics. It’s rapid-fire topical jokes of the sort that go stale very quickly.
I think the humour in the “I just flew in from Philadelphia, and boy are my arms tired” joke was that it came out when the idea of mass travel by flight was still new, in the 50s.
Yep. It’s like the old joke about Shakespeare: “why is this guy considered a genius playwright? His writing is just a bunch of old cliches strung together!”
Re Laurel and Hardy – they cranked 'em out back then, but there were some gems. Take a look at The Music Box (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy7YuAj3xd8) or Two Tars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoWhKv5IQG8). Of course this is all physical comedy – which is to say mostly (or entirely) variations on the banana-peel joke: somebody tries to do something innocuous and as a result loses every shred of dignity. If that’s too crude for your tastes, remember that there are certainly other people who find it funny.
Something I never saw/see on British comedy shows, but seemed very weird to me when we began to get American shows: the comedian/presenter will tell a joke, immediately followed by a drum roll from the orchestra. Like the audience needed to be told, “that was a joke, you need to laugh now”.
The rim shot probably started in vaudeville, but it’s now part of the joke. A lot of the time, hearing it is what really makes you laugh, just because it sounds so silly.
I do a vocal rim shot whenever I tell a particularly dumb joke, just so the listener knows I’m joking.
I’ve found unfortunately that the version first related in the thread is the usual version, also known as 121. Varieties that swerve from the predictable course of events are a bit better, or 604, 728, and 903 that we provided.
There was a period in the 70s where he was owned by some energy giant and was obliged to make regular commercials for them. Often he was at a refinery, wearing a white hard hat. They were dour, lacking any levity at all.
A lot of jokes rely so heavily on context and delivery that they’re only really funny in one time and place.
Bob Hope’s original style was rapid-fire wisecracks similar to the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s - they don’t seem that funny anymore, either. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In stole every two-bit vaudeville joke ever told, except delivered by a bunch of young people popping through holes in a wall with Goldie Hawn giggling so much she couldn’t talk. The Three Stooges without sound effects isn’t funny at all, and Robin Williams humor is entirely performance. Try to read a transcript of a Robin Williams standup routine and you won’t even crack a smile.
