Obviously people have been making jokes since the evolution of human speech. There’s been humor in drama since at least Shakespeare.
But, the idea of paying money to see a person on stage with nothing but a microphone trying to make you laugh, when did that begin? I’m thinking maybe George Carlin? I’m thinking vaudeville was a different form of entertainment although stand up comedy could have evolved from there.
I guess by the letter of the OP not long after 1876.
Vaudeville featured stand up comics over a hundred years ago.
Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce started their careers in the early 50’s, so they predate George Carlin, at the very least.
And as has been pointed out, “monologue comedians” started in the late 1800’s as part of variety shows. Comedians performing stand-up routines in nightclubs date back to before WWII.
I believe the first “comedy clubs” started to pop up in the 60’s, but that was to accommodate the popularity of existing standup comedy, not to create the genre.
This cite suggests that the first stand-up routine was performed by Charley Case sometime in the 1880s or 1890s:
At least as far back as the Romans.
The question in the title wasn’t what’s the earliest stand-up comedians but when it became popular. So how about the early 20th Century, in the Borscht Belt resorts?
Mort Sahl is the name I have always heard as the first modern stand-up comedian. I know George Carlin talked about him in one of his interviews. George Carlin became a lot more famous than Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, but he seemed to always credit them. Mort Sahl for telling stories. Lenny Bruce for intentionally crossing the line whenever possible.
TV, with shows like Ed Sullivan, helped make stand up comedy more popular.
I don’t think Mort Saul did anything Will Rogers wasn’t already doing decades earlier. The only difference is Mort didn’t know any rope tricks.
It’s been popular for well over a century. Vaudeville featured what we would call stand-up comedians in almost every show. A further parallel is that some of these – Jack Benny, Will Rogers, Morey Amsterdam, Edgar Bergen – went on to become actors.
A lot of the single-performer “Song and Dance” routines included early elements of modern standup. A “talkie” short from 1923, A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor, is a good example of (very dated) material. Most modern standups don’t sing, but I can think of a few later examples, including George Carlin’s Wonderful WINO routines, Steve Martin’s King Tut, and, more recently, Jim Breuer’s AC/DC impressions.
It’s not clear if Case was black. He certainly didn’t look black. He may have been black, white, or of mixed race. He performed in blackface.
At least one author says Bob Hope was the first modern stand up comic. Telling jokes about what as happening in the world and in his life. Not that he was the first to tell jokes in front of an audience but the first to do so in a style that is still recognizable in comics today.
Even into the 50s and 60s many comics had a style that was much different than what goes on today. It seems very stiff and formal. They would introduce a bit and tell the audience the the premise and then go into a character and act out the bit. Bob Hope was always just Bob Hope telling jokes.
That link seems broken. And “he didn’t look black” is a non-starter of an argument.
It’s not really an argument. It’s thought that he was mixed but at this point no one really knows and no one is likely to ever know for sure. He performed in blackface but at the time both white and black performers did.
Sure, Ed Sullivan regularly had stand up acts on his show and on and on back into the mists of time.
But the key change in stand up came about with Steve Martin. He was selling out arenas. He performed in stadiums.
And he quit it in 1981 because it got too big to deal with.
Carlin and Pryor were big. But not this big.
Now you have folk like Jim Gaffigan performing in large venues. (He even did a thing for the Pope with a crowd estimate of 1.5 million.) That didn’t used to happen.
What was the largest crowd Mort Sahl ever performed in front of with him as the headliner? Stiller and Meara? Charlie Callas?
Bea Arthur: Job?
Mel Brooks: Stand-up philosopher.
Bea Arthur: Oh, a bullshit artist. Have you bullshitted this week?
This thread has the usual problems with trying to pin a definition on “stand-up comedy.” Comedy as joke-telling probably goes back before written history so that’s a non-starter.
I’d favor a definition that elevates the stand-up to the star performer, the one act that people came to see, even though others may have performed on the same bill.
That can be used to rule out Charley Case and even Will Rogers. They were part of a full evening of many acts, live versions of the Ed Sullivan Show. Wayne and Shuster were on Sullivan more often than any other act but people tuned in to the Ed Sullivan Show instead of them, just as people went to the Ziegfield Follies instead of to a Will Rogers show.
For me that puts the start of modern stand-up in nightclubs, where people really did go to see the headliner and secondarily to the club. Nightclubs as we know them emerged during Prohibition where suckers would spend outrageous amounts of money for watered-down drinks but expected to be entertained unrelentingly. A good place to start would be with the team of Jimmie Durante, Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson. They mixed jokes and music in a way that would lead to the Smothers Brothers and Tim Minchin and were so phenomenally popular that they owned their own joint, the Club Durant, before the feds raided it. (Like all speak owners, they moved down the street and opened another.)
Many made their bones at nightclubs after WWII, the schtick comics that Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce were the deliberate antitheses to. Jack E. “Fat Jack” Leonard was a Las Vegas star in the early mob days, doing his insult comedy a decade before Don Rickles thought of it. What was then called the “chitlin circuit” had its own set of headliners and could do “dirty” comedy that wasn’t acceptable in mainstream. (Although white “party” performers like Dusty Warren had similar acts.) Redd Foxx’s Laff Of The Party (Volume 1) in 1956 is generally credited with being the first stand-up comedy album. But Mort Sahl’s “At Sunset” is credited as the first recorded modern stand-up routine because it was recorded in 1955 but not released until 1958.
Firsts are hard, but the OP’s question of when stand-up became popular is easy: the 1950s. For the first time people could hear stand-up outside of the few nightclubs that specialized in it. The records were popular beyond modern belief. Bob Newhart’s first two albums, though they came out in 1960 and 1961, had the top two spots on the Billboard charts simultaneously. Only The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel matched that.
The Showtime cable channel regularly did standup comedy specials. Was that a factor in standup comedy’s popularity?