Beware of Doug, you’ve got nothing. No proof is no proof. There’s no reason to accept your offhand observations that any other ramdom person’s.
Would you accept an assertion *short *of provability, then?
Something like “If you want to be an original, creative thinker or artist in America, you’re better off being in an outsider group - or, failing that, an outlier in your own group?”
How is stand-up clearly different from lecturers like Twain or after-dinner speakers like Chauncey Depew, or Juvenal, who told jokes and gossip at orgies?
Unless, of course, you do fit. Steve Martin, Cole Porter, Howard Hawks, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Heinlein all were creative thinkers who were not outsiders or even an outlier in their own class.
Couple of months ago, I read an article (Washington Post? Sorry, no got link…:() crediting Bob Newhart with the invention of modern standup comedy. Prior to Newhart, comedians told jokes, with distinct punchlines…you know, a priest, rabbi and a minister walk into a bar, that sort of thing. Newhart was different. He told funny stories, but more importantly, he recorded them and sold them as LPs (comedy records weren’t new, but tended to be “blue records” made by chitlin circuit comedians like Redd Foxx, and were sold “under the counter”). His records were huge hits with college kids, who couldn’t afford to go see him personally; what they could do, though, was afford his record (or bum one off of a friend that had one). From this, a new art form was born.
Both Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce had albums out earlier than Newhart. Whatever your definition of stand-up is they have to be included.
Newhart had the first bestselling comedy album, but that’s very different from first period.
Something in that tickled my memory and so I did some Googling.
Not only wasn’t Newhart first in modern comedy (in fact, you really should argue that he wasn’t in the least bit modern - who imitated him? - and that he was doing old fashioned monologues in a tradition that included contemporaries like Danny Thomas and Myron Cohen) but he didn’t even win the first Grammy Award for Comedy. (He won the second.)
That award was given out a year earlier. These were the nominees:
Berman won, BTW.
Redd Foxx was doing comedy albums starting in 1949, and he’s as much standup as Newhart or any of the others. Of course, they weren’t widely distributed because of their blue content.
Lord Buckley recorded “The Nazz” in 1952.
Both were what we’d call modern stand-up comedy.
At the turn of the 20th century? Discrimination against the Irish was virulent earlier in American history, but by the time Dunne was writing, the Irish had assimilated, especially in Dunne’s Chicago, and were joining the WASPs in beating up the Eastern European immigrants. Dunne was an established newspaperman, who could write his own ticket with any of the Chicago newspapers, and who, after he moved to New York was the editor of three established magazines (the American Magazine, Metropolitan, and Colliers). His wife was an Olympic gold medalist, and the daughter of Mary Abbott, a famous book reviewer and novelist who rubbed elbows with the city elite. Dunne himself was a member of the Chicago intellectual elite (such as it was), and was personal friends with both Mark Twain and Richard Harding Davis. When Theodore Roosevelt was President, Dunne was a frequent dinner guest. So it’s not like Dunne was some sort of outcast.
Stand up comedy and Jews got a close association because of one thing. Radio.
Before radio there were vaudeville shows and burlesque shows and then there was the Opera and the legitimate theatre.
Benny, like “Burns and Allen” were what were called “talk acts.”
When movies first started they were not a direct threat to lives shows. They still required the use of piano players (no sound) and often were just incorporated into Vaudeville shows.
The lighting and jerky motions hurt people’s eyes so it was a nice accompany to Vaudeville.
Then came talking movies and worse yet the Great Depression.
This threatened to cause a huge collapse of everything. But radio came in. Radio was perfect for the depression. Sets were a relatively cheap investment. Once you bought it all the programs were free. You could stay at home and get your entertainment.
Just so happens “Burns and Allen” and Jack Benny were perfect for the transition. They were just talking. What could be better for radio. Remember radio still was staticky so music while OK was still best heard in live concerts or the local opera company.
Very quickly radio came to dominate but first it had a few “wars” with other forms, such as legitimate theatre, opera, movies and Vaudeville.
The thing was acts like “Burns and Allen,” and “Jack Benny” had no real future in movies, other than a small “B” part or one reeler. So they had no reason to hedge their bets and they jumped in full force. While other actors/actresses were weary of it. The same way movies actors were weary of TV in the early 50s.
This lead to other Jewish comedians who were very good friends. Burns and Benny were best friends. Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Sophie Tucker (she was a favourite of the Beatles) and Milton Berle were all in the same group and all grew up in the lower East Side of NYC or got their start in the clubs of the area
With the Great Depression, the other industries like movies and opera learned they could use radio instead of boycott it. An opera sounded crummy on radio but it still brought the world of opera to people who’d never heard one, and now they’d go see it.
By the mid 30s “Burns and Allen” and “Jack Benny” went from being the top Vaudeville acts to the top Radio acts each making $10,000/week. Quite a huge amount in the Great Depression. Especially since all they did was read a script. Of course both George Burns and Jack Benny state they had to pay their staffs out of their weekly salary. George “YESSSSS” Nelson and Mary Jane Croft (from “The Lucy Show,”) were popular radio performers and said they were able to make a few hundred a week. This was for multiple radio jobs. Remember they didn’t have to really learn lines, just read scripts. Frank Nelson says he often took the subway in NYC from show to show to get all his jobs for the week.
Because George Burns and Jack Benny managed to be in the right place at the right time, and were very good for helping their friends in radio, this “Jewish clique” of comedians got an early start. They were by no means the only ones. But they were so dominant in radio (never leaving the radio top ten in all the while they were on).
And as you can see it’s always easy to break into the business if you got friends.
I disagree with your rendition of history.
The Jewish generation of stars entered vaudeville in the early part of the century. Vaudeville traded heavily on ethnic stereotypes, and the Jewish stereotype was certainly in use long before radio. Cantor, Jolson, Fanny Brice and others did Jewish characters.
But most of the Jewish comedians didn’t. Groucho started out doing a German stereotype, Chico of course was Italian, and Harpo was originally a dumb yokel. They never played specifically Jewish. Neither did George Burns or Jack Benny. Whether the greater public outside New York City identified them as Jewish is an interesting question. But they were playing alongside W. C. Fields and Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante and a million other non-Jewish comics whose styles were very similar.
In vaudeville you were allowed to get away with being ethnically identified. Radio was carefully scrubbed. Secondary character actors could be ethnic stereotypes, but no mention was ever made of Benny being Jewish. He was as Americanized as the Irish Catholic Fred Allen. Allen had a troupe of performers doing ethnic caricatures but he was sanitized.
You find as many non-Jewish comedians on radio as you do Jewish ones. This list from Wikipedia is typical.
The most you can say is that Jews were disproportionately represented in comedy. But you can’t make the case that this started with radio or that Jews first became identified with comedy there. That happened a generation earlier.