Humor/satire of the 1950s and 1960s

Cafe Society
21

Poor Vaughn Meader! He woke up the morning of November 22nd, 1963, on top of the world as the most popular comedian in America only to go to bed that night a has-been, persona non grata anywhere in the free world.

We had a copy of “The First Family” in our household. (Didn’t everyone?) We played it so often we had it memorized. I picked up a copy for a dollar at a yard sale several years ago, played it one night, and after all these years, it still made me laugh.

The night of 11/22/63, Lenny Bruce was set to perform at a nightclub. The audience waited in anticipation. What would Lenny say?!!. He came out on stage, stood there for a moment, as if in contemplation, and said “Vaughn Meader is screwed!” It brought down the house!

But getting back to the OP’s question: Meader, with writer/producers Bob Booker and Earl Doud, were certainly among the first to do that level of political humor/satire and put it on vinyl records, leading the way for many comedians who came after.

22

Another vote for Mad Magazine. Mad didn’t just crack me up as a kid—it built my love for satire and sarcasm, setting me on a path of irreverent humor. I’m sure it did the same for many others.

To the OP: I recommend the hardcover Mad For Keeps (1958, complete with a foreword by Ernie Kovacs)—it’s a classic. I’d grab my copy, but it’s currently “archived” in the basement chaos, somewhere beneath an avalanche of old boxes.

23

Going further back than Erna Bombeck, my mother enjoyed Betty Macdonald’s The Egg and I and The Plague and I, and Peg Bracken’s I Hate To Cook.

And for fans of Tom Lehrer, the UK produced Flanders and Swann and Paddy Roberts.

24

I know he is infamous now, but in the 1960s Bill Cosby recorded LP records of his stand-up routines that were absolutely hilarious - one I especially recall is “To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With.”

25

Arguably the greatest screenwriter of the 1960s. The few of his novels I’ve read were generally inferior, but some of the short pieces in Red Dirt Marijuana and other Tastes (1967) exemplify his signature “dark and often absurdist style of satire.”

26

“Why is there air?”

27

@ggf.nyc asked me this question in my thread about my humor website, but it made more sense to tag it on to everybody’s else’s answers. He wanted books specifically about New York, too. I did some hunting on my shelves and came up with a load of possibilities.

Terry Southern was the best dark humorist of the era. He’s known for Candy but try Flash and Filigree. The Firesign Theatre stole that novel’s “What’s My Disease” game show as “Beat the Reaper.” And by all means listen to the Firesign Theatre. My roommate and I would not only memorize their records, but try to uncover ever allusion and reference.

Bruce Jay Friedman. Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants is one of the great collections of short stories. Don DeLilloGreat Jones Street is about early rock in Greenwich Village. He’s a 70s writer but close enough.) Philip Roth for Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, his early Newark novels. E. L. Doctorow for books about New York, with Ragtime and Billy Bathgate the lightest. The Book of Daniel isn’t funny but packs a punch.

Donald Barthelme’s short stories could be hilarious. So could some of John Barth’s. The Sot-Weed Factor is very long and not my taste but some says it’s his best.

Jean Kerr’s books of humorous essays were the bestselling ones in the fifties, topped by Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, later made into a film and sitcom. She wrote about life in the New York suburbs. Cornelia Otis Skinner was another major writer of humorous essays. And of course Erma Bombeck was already writing her column and collecting those in books.

Work through the names in The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire. Most of those already mentioned in this thread are there, but others aren’t like Shepherd Mead (good novels, too), William Iverson, H. Allen Smith (lots of 40s writing about New York). Playboy did another half dozen paperbacks collecting their humor, but they’re relatively easy to find. Dan Greenberg is in several and had a number of books as well.

When Jack Paar hosted the Tonight Show, he brought on wits and raconteurs who loved to talk. Many of them wrote funny memoirs that sold like crazy based on those publicity or maybe because of their great titles. Alexander King - Is There Life After Birth? Jack Douglas - My Brother Was an Only Child. Oscar Levant - Memoirs of an Amnesiac. Patrick Dennis. Brits Robert Morley and Peter Ustinov’s books were bigger in England, but everything is findable somewhere. Jonathan Winters broke out on Paar’s show. Few remember he wrote several books, including Mouse Breath, Conformity and Other Social Ills. Cliff Arquette played hayseed Charley Weaver and got several books out of it.

Bruce Jay Friedman also edited an important anthology titled Black Humor. It shades over into nonfiction, but a must if you want to take a deep dive into that era.

28

Thank you! I was familiar with some of these (Southern, Roth, Coover, DeLillo, Barthelme), but Jean Kerr, Iverson, Allen Smith, and others are new to me! I’m also definitely picking up the Playboy Book of Humor and Satire (though sadly that doesn’t sound like it will include a centerfold). This is great.

29

Leo Rosten:

As Leonard Q. Ross:

In my family, one need only remark “Mine oncle has a gless eye” to undo any grammar correction.

30

Jack Douglas - “The Jewish-Japanese Sex and Cookbook and How to Raise Wolves,” “My Brother Was an Only Child,” “Going Nuts in Brazil with Jack Douglas,” “Rubber Duck” and quite a few more, all sadly out of print.

31

American humorist writer Richard Armour is about the first name that comes to mind.

32

I ordered a book by him after finding @ Exapno_Mapcase’s Forgotten Humorists website! I can’t wait to get it.

33

To my shame, I went through the entire The Marvellous Mrs Maisel without realising Lenny Bruce was a real life person.

34

If you’re trying to get a bead on the type of humor/satire one would find in a mid-century issue of the New Yorker, I’d suggest starting with James Thurber.

35

Oh yeah, I’ve read a ton of Thurber, he’s the reason I read De Vries (he got De Vries his gig at the New Yorker). Thurber’s autobiographical stuff is really the best.

36

If you do plan to consume any Jean Shepherd radio recordings, i highly recommend The Great Ice Cream War.

My dad made me listen to it once, then forgot, and played it for me again a few weeks later. I didn’t mind because it was so good!

37

I’m pissed they’ve never collected Jean’s Army stories that were published in Playboy, like “Banjo Butt Meets Julia Child.”

38

I read somewhere that Southern was actually recruited/hired as the head writer of a TV show (maybe SNL after Lorne Michaels left in 1980), but was so turned off by network executives that he went home and got rid of his TV set.

The UK version of That Was the Week That Was starred David Frost and featured performers like a very young Millicent Martin (Daphne’s mother on Frasier). It had segments drawn from the news and could be really biting with its satire. (I know there was an American version of the show, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it—just the British version.)

39

I left off writers that I knew ggf could find on my site, but that was a mistake. Not a mistake was taking it over here, where a flood of names resulted.

Others I’ve written about from the fifties include Corey Ford and Marvin Kitman. For Monocle, the political satire magazine that ripped apart Johnson, Kitman wrote a parody of Animal Farm called Animal Ranch, larded with amazing caricatures of everyone famous from Johnson to Martin Luther King. Nobody remembers it.

I also did Will Cuppy, whose comic history of famous people, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, certainly inspired Armour’s comic histories, starting with It All Started With Columbus.

40

Oh, I forgot. Terry Southern is unimaginable on television. Michael O’Donoghue was as dark as could live with the censors. The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, a cartoon parody of fifties’ men’s magazine misogyny, had to be published in Evergreen magazine. No standard magazine could have touched it. Southern was darker than that and much more political. And he got into fights with everyone.