I saw Mel Brooks onstage back in 2016, when he was 90. Damn, he was funny!
Numbers used to be much funnier back in the olden days:
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Four Yorkshiremen - 1967
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Two Ronnies, Four Candles - 1976
That headline is absolute bullshit. Telling funny stories undoubtedly goes back to early Homo. Telling funny stories is not stand-up, as was noted in the OP. It’s a specific form. Exactly when it started and who were the earliest practitioners is basically a game academics play to get a paper published.
My personal opinion is that it evolved in vaudeville, from the need to keep audiences from walking out when lengthy stage setting was needed. They’d send someone out “in one,” or standing alone in front of a dropped curtain. That person might sing or tell jokes or sing jokey songs or whatever they were good at. Anything that worked was immediately copied by others. If jokes worked, then they found a copy of Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wit’s Vade-Mecum, written - not by Joe Miller - in 1739 and reprinted hundreds of times. Even better, they thought up their own. Virtually all the famous radio comics of the 1930s - Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope - played “in one” at times and used that to hone an act and a personality.
I find almost all radio humor from that era to be unlistenable today. I have a book of sketches transcribed from the radio and there’s not a laugh in it. Even when I listen to the original shows, the jokes are basically sausage, ground out by the thousands without enough spice to have flavor. A few exceptions exist here and there. Some of the early sketches between W. C. Fields and Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy still hole up before they got formulaic. But sketches aren’t stand-up. Who’s On First is not stand-up. Bob Hope was the closest thing to stand-up, and he was often funny, but the good stuff is buried in the thousands of formula jokes his writers needed to make it through another day.
Whether Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx invented stand-up on the “chitlin circuit” is questionable. That Foxx put out the first stand-up comedy albums as we know them is pretty well established. Laff of the Party - vol. 1 is at best sporadically funny. He starts with spoonerisms!
Dorothy Parker wasn’t a stand-up comic herself, but other people have turned her works into performable pieces that still play well. I personally did a monologue of her short story “The Waltz”-- which is written in a monologue form, and the reader is left to imagine the responses of the other person, and that makes it funnier. Some of it is things the monologuist actually says, but most of it is things she says to herself that she’d like to say but doesn’t.
I find “The Waltz” especially hilarious, and it is just pure laughs-- there’s only a small bit of poignancy, and no bathos-- it is of the same comic tenor all the way through, even though there is a slight twist at the end-- slight. If it’s performer right, it less of a surprise.
Short plays have been made of a number of Parker’s short stories, such as “Here We Are,” where a young, just-married couple after the frenzy of the wedding finally reflects on what they have actually done.
Then, there’s the poetry.
This she did used to personally recited, and once one person in the audience tittered, and then another giggled, finally giving a few more who really understood permission., to laugh. Then all and sundry would finally l am
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Exapno is right – what we would call standup today didn’t exist until after WWII.
There were vaudeville comics that still might fit. Will Rogers did a topical comedy act – writing his own material and telling jokes. His act was topical, so the jokes don’t land today, since they’re referring to events and people from a century ago. It was almost all original material, much like his newspaper columns. Here’s a taste of one of his radio monologues.
Jack Benny also did jokes, playing a few notes on his violin and then joking (much like Morey Amsterdam’s act with a cello). Here’s a transcript of his first radio broadcast:
It sounds quite modern.
Sounds like Bob Newhart and his famous one-sided phone calls. I’ve sometimes said that Newhart could be alone on stage and the other guy still got all the funny lines.
Val Kilmer also had a one man Mark Twain show.
I accept the edification in the posts above, so I understand that Twain wasn’t doing “stand up”. But he was a funny orator.
The problem with the OP as written is that many of us exhausted the meager recordings of that first generation of stand up comedians long ago. Bob Newhart, Shelly Berman, Bill Cosby, Red Foxx…were all funny when I first heard their records 40 or more years ago, but how many times can you listen to the same jokes. None of those records are going to make me laugh today and I have no way of telling if that’s because of overfamiliarity or if they just haven’t aged well.
Woody Allen’s stand-up from the early 60s is timelessly brilliant!
The one about the moose is very good.
I think this why George Carlin’s more observational rant-based comedy has lasted longer than straight up joke based comedy. Because a lot of Carlin’s rants have been become MORE insightful and relevant over time.
Another vote for Mark Twain from me.
I would have liked to see that. Parker was a fine, sharp writer as well as a wit.
I did see a presentation of selections from John Lennon’s books, with a cast of about a half dozen. The pieces worked much better when spoken than they did in print.
Everybody forgets that Woody Allen came to fame as a stand-up comic. He was indeed absolutely brilliant, and never sounded like anyone else. Any good list of top stand-ups probably should include him, though his career was so short. He only did a couple three albums and then went into films, with a side career of writing humor for The New Yorker, both of which meant he didn’t have to face audiences.
… but they always had a straight man.
Some of my questions are problematic, but as a rule I don’t like to clarify statements or insist on only one interpretation for questions of opinion
It is true past outputs were more meager than now. I grew up listening to Cosby, who was fairly funny but not LOL. His experiences are a bit too far removed from my own. I liked the television show Fat Albert but never watched The Huxtables.
I haven’t relistened to these old routines in decades (only a few appear on comedy radio). A friend of mine had a father who would play funny songs: When you visit American city/ You will find it very pretty/ Just two things I must declare/ Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.
Newhart is genuinely funny. Will never tire of his driver instructor thing (nor its less sexist modern update). Foxx has some clever moments as does Berman. But it’s not like I ever played their routines again and again, so I feel if I heard them I could assess my opinion their humour fairly accurately. Lots of comedians quote Pryor as a touchstone. I much prefer Murphy.
For a long time, this was the only Woody Allen I’d heard (it was on a comedy compilation album). It now lives on my phone, in a ‘Destress’ playlist.
So I’ve listened to it a couple hundred times, and I’ve never gotten tired of the moose that Woody hit, tied to his fender, but when it woke up he decided to take it to his friend’s costume party…
Here’s the transcript, so you can find out what happens to the Berkowitzes.
Oh, even better, there’s a video!
That is of course Tom Lehrer, another outstanding candidate for this thread! I should have thought of him first.
A few months ago TCM showed the Milton Berle movie Always Leaving Them Laughing. It’s the story of a comedian (MB) who takes over the act of another successful but seriously ill comedian, who just happens to be Bert Lahr (of Cowardly Lion fame). Lahr does a bit of his routine, which to me sounds like a cross between the Lion and Rodney Dangerfield. I’ve heard some say that Bert Lahr was the greatest standup of his time:
The movie is pretty bad, but it was fun to see Lahr do some of his skits.
“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
I love Tom Lehrer! I have a 10" recording of his first album.
Those who don’t remember vinyl will probably see nothing odd about that sentence. Talk about old times.
Incidentally, many of his songs can be heard in one video. This is a concert he did in Copenhagen in 1967. I can’t attach it to this post. You can see if you go to YouTube and put in “Tom Lehrer Full Copenhagen Performance”. Click on the video that’s not an advertisement.