Without having read farther than this… I liked Steve Martin. The video in the OP still makes me laugh.
And I did laugh at The Three Stooges, though I always liked Abbot and Costello better. I still laugh at them too.
Remember this? I still can’t believe this was on TV. NSFW for racial epithets.
I tried watching some Three Stooges recently. I heard or read somewhere that when they were in Vaudeville, they had no microphones etc. so they had to talk loud enough to be heard in every seat. That also amounted to Moe slapping Curly hard enough…Curly’s cheek went permanently numb, eventually. And he died young, after strokes and mental deterioration, at age 48.
But that’s why they were so happy to do the film shorts—microphones, sound effects, and so on made it less painful. Violence = humor is an oldie, such as in Looney Toons.
Its uncomfortable watching A&C because Bud Abbott was such an asshole. They had some great premises. And Lou Costello had that lovable demeanor that also made Curly enduring.
I’ve often wondered what Kinison would be like if he’d survived. I think he’d today be a right-wing pundit, which would be a damn shame.
With Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, the issue was outlined in Chapter six of Scot McCloud’s Undertanding Comics. When a truly innovative creator starts out, their act is rough. As time goes by, their imitators refine it. If you are used to the imitators, the original seems crude, especially to those who are not trying to work in the genre. Bruce is dated – all political humor dates badly – but what he was doing was revolutionary.
How come there aren’t any really funny, Grammy award winning songs about spying on nude Girl Scouts nowadays?
Eddie Murphy’s Raw hasn’t aged well, particularly for homosexuals. David Spade’s Hollywood Minute pieces one joke about his sagging career got Eddie so bent up out of shape it prevented him from going on SNL for decades is pathetic. Thin skin coming from a dude who yelled ‘faggot’ decades ago repeatedly for applause.
Doesn’t humor age poorly generally speaking? Either social values change, the material becomes old hat and corny, or we no longer relate in the same way to situations people in the past might have found humorous.
Yet Fed Sanford and George Jefferson said it all the time and nobody blinked.
About 5 years ago I tried to listen to a 90s Bill Hicks album and had to give up because EVERY single joke was either about current 1992 American politics or OJ Simpson. I’m sure it killed at the time but its the definition of stuff that doesn’t age well because nobody today cares about what the Republicans taking control of the House in 1996 means for them.
If he was making actual jokes it would have maybe stood the test of time but it was entirely just observational humor and diatribes about 90s politics.
On the contrary - while what you can say on TV has changed, mostly for the better, I think that that sketch has aged extremely well. I’d maybe change a few words - “urban” and “thug” should be in there - but it’s just as relevant and funny now as it was than.
Observational humour can be really good when it’s done well, but political diatribes pretty much never hold up, and sometimes has an incredibly short shelf-life. For most of the political satire shows, I get the impression where the creators know they’ve got one, maybe two seasons at most out of the subject (Our Cartoon President being unusual that it managed to get three seasons), and as soon as the credits roll on the final episode it’ll be forgotten about completely by everyone who doesn’t need to put it on their resume.
One reason SM didn’t appeal to me was that I always found his smile to be insincere.
I’ve always loved Martin’s humor. In Born Standing Up, he talks about how he wanted to break from the topical, political humor that was in vogue at the time He also believed it was better for people to decide for themselves when to laugh, so he left out punchlines.
My favorite Steve Martin routines are when the audience is made to think that we are listening to some serious, authoritative white male, complete with booming announcer’s voice and gray hair, only to gradually realize that he’s an idiot. “You Can Be a Millionaire, and Never Pay Taxes” is a prime example. Apolitical as that is, there’s an undercurrent pointing out how media at the time served up smarmy, phony, empty suits as people we were supposed to automatically believe and look up to. Whenever I see spokesmen in old TV commercials, I think of Martin’s comedy.
Sixteen Candles was directed by John Hughes, who wrote an article in the National Lampoon called “Sexual Harassment: How to Do It”. Talk about not holding up well!
Molly Ringwald has spoken of being uncomfortable about the legacy of her role in “The Breakfast Club”, another John Hughes movie.
Likewise, the character of Long Duk Dong casts a long cultural shadow:
In real life, it was apparently the other way around. The coy and ingratiating lummox character that Costello portrayed wasn’t much like his real personality, from all accounts, and he could be quite petty. Bud Abbot was supposedly a real gentleman, and continued to be so even in his old age, voicing his own character for Abbott and Costello cartoons.
I still like the A&C movies – I have them on DVD. What was said above is correct – their best stuff was the vaudeville routines they invented (sometimes with the able assistance of the much-overlooked writer John Grant, who is supposed to have suggested that they team up), most notably the “Who’s on First” bit. In all of these, they played to stock characters of the Con Man (Abbott) and the Rube (Costello), with variations. Bud Abbott was supposed to have particularly liked the film The Time of Their Lives, which was a broad departure from their usual formula. They weren’t partners of any sort, and Abbott got to do the sort of physical comedy that he couldn’t do in the other films.
I was never a big fan of Steve Martin’s stand-up, although I am amazed at his work as author, playwright, and actor.
I REALLY can’t stand Andy Kaufman, but we’ve discussed him at length on these Boards.
I was surprised at how badly Woody Allen’s What’s up Tiger Lily? has aged. My wife can’t stand it. A lot of the jokes and bits (like just running the film backwards at one point) seem substantially sub-MST3K. It’s lost a lot of its charm now that I know the film they used as a basis Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi ( International Secret Police: Key of Keys) was itself a parody of James Bond-esque spy films. (in a particularly weird twist, Mie Hama from the film actually did appear the next year in a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice). Also, a lot of the humor worked , I think, because of a certain shock value. I still like much of it (“This Peter Lorre imitation is killing my throat!”), but not as much as I once did.
MInus the booming voice, this sounds like Robert Benchley’s The Treasurer’s Report. From 1928.
I remember in 1999 or so there was an hour-long tribute to Carlin that largely consisted of a sit-down with him and Jon Stewart. It was a pretty entertaining show, with an insightful interview and some classic bits. In Stewart’s introduction, he said something like “Carlin is part of comedians’ holy trinity: Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin. The rest of us are just followers.” I’ve loved Carlin’s work forever (he had some rough patches in the 90s) but I’ve tried with the other two and just never gotten it.
Back when I was in university, I used to record those hours of standup that A&E used to run every night, Caroline’s Comedy Hour and Evening at the Improv. I wore those tapes out, I swear, and could recite a lot of it from memory. This would have been in 92/93 or so, and I’m sure the shows had been recorded in 89/90 then rerun until everybody got sick of standup, so the crowd shots were always full of shoulder pads, Miami Vice shaves and poodle hair. I remember a bit by Johnny Dark, that even at the time I could tell was a total piece of hack work. It was the old “MTV is where I saw all the new wave heavy metal people. I saw Boy George one time, I was like…(astonished mugging)” bit. Unless this clip had slipped through from 1984, I was astonished even then that it was considered enough of a humor concept to make it into his set (to say nothing of the notion of a “new wave heavy metal” act).
The brilliant Benchley closely followed the gentle humor style of Stephen Leacock. But in Leacock’s first book, from 1910, he included a contrarian vignette called The New Food. In it, a large family is sitting around the Christmas table waiting to eat a food pill, resting on a poker chip and covered by a thimble. When the thimble is lifted, baby Gustavus Adolphus grabs it and immediately bursts into fragments, having eaten 13 Christmas dinners.
That was startling in 1910, would have been perfectly in place in the National Lampoon in the 1970s, but not something anyone could get away with today.
Listen to that audience yukking it up at…the perfectly sensible and intuitive way subtraction has been taught for decades?
