On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957–1973
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2016 On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957–1973 David Michael McCarthy The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1515 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ON THE APPEARANCE OF THE COMEDY LP, 1957–1973 by DAVID MICHAEL McCARTHY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 ii © 2016 DAVID MICHAEL McCARTHY All rights reserved. iii On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957–1973 by David Michael McCarthy This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Music in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ___________________ __________________________________________ Date Amy Herzog Chair of Examining Committee ___________________ __________________________________________ Date Norman Carey Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Jane Sugarman, Advisor Anne Stone, First Reader Sumanth Gopinath Amy Herzog THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957–1973 by David Michael McCarthy Advisor: Dr. Jane Sugarman Many observers of contemporary comedy in the United States during the 1960s referred to musical aspects of extra-musical performances. Comedy LP records furnish important artifacts for the study of the musical appearances these observers produced for themselves. Where contemporaries described appearances characterized by printable words and polemics as “satirical,” the musical appearances discussed in this dissertation can instead be described as “comic”: instead of mocking persons or ideas, they show people and things becoming involved with one another in absurdly triumphant ways. These two different sorts of appearances correspond to two different uses for comedy in a class society, one consolidating a hegemonic middle-class “consensus” against ridiculous adversaries, the other exploring surprising potentials in even the most ridiculous circumstances. A history of antagonistic ways of listening to sixties comedy can be read as a history of the making of class relations in an advanced capitalist society. This dissertation discusses four case studies selected with two complementary aims: to produce an appearance of the comedy LP as a densely varied form and to produce knowledge of the political stakes involved in historical conflicts over formal appearances. In each study, a musical appearance becomes involved in the making of class. The jazz critic Nat Hentoff insisted on musical appearances of the iconic sixties comedian Lenny Bruce over and against what he v derided as “liberal” readings for printable messages. His chief artifacts were comedy LP records. Elaine May and Mike Nichols—television stars, dinner club sensations, and luminaries of the most popularly influential improvisatory theater in the United States—used a tangled musical texture associated with affluent social circles. By invoking descriptions of the self as she might have found them in her widely reported readings of Freud, May seems to undermine the ethical significance of the tangled texture as previously determined by Katharine Hepburn’s films. The “blue record” or “party record” produced by and for black Americans in the 1970s was advertised in middle-class periodicals as a genre characterized by “dirty words.” But Tramp Time Volume 1 (La Val LVP 901, 1967), a purportedly early example of the party record featuring an itinerant Midwestern performer named Jimmy “Mr. Motion” Lynch, instead seems characterized most importantly by features of blues music. The Firesign Theatre, a Californian comedy troupe popular with the “dormitory debauchee set,” performed a peculiar involvement in history using a quasi-musical style based upon the characteristics of radio as a broadcast medium. This radiophonic style places observers “inside” history after the perceived closures of 1968. Art-critical, archival, and philological methods shape this dissertation’s argument. Formalistic descriptions based upon vocabularies critically adapted from modern and contemporary writings produce “abstract” appearances. Artifacts collected through archival research ground these abstract appearances as “historically possible appearances.” As a formalism, this historical method uses its thickening self-referential vocabulary to invent its own critical universe. As a historical method, this formalism produces knowledge of appearances which, because they are grounded in activities, leave no self-contained artifacts. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The librarians and archivists responsible for the collections I consulted while preparing this dissertation were invariably the model of generosity. Thank you to Brian DeShazor, Mark Torres, Mariana Berkovich, Shawn Dellis, Edgar Toledo, Jolene Beiser, and Joseph Gallucci at Radio Pacifica for welcoming me into their workspace. At Stanford University’s Archive of Recorded Sound, thank you to Jonathan Manton. Wendy Shay of the National Museum of American History (Smithsonian) was my enthusiastic guide to sixties comedy and the collections I needed to study it. Thank you, Wendy. Michael Henry of the University of Maryland (College Park) pointed me in the direction of collections I would otherwise have overlooked. Lesley Ruthven at Goldsmiths (University of London) saw that the little time I had in London was used efficiently. Thank you to the cheerful trio in the subterranean lair at Brandeis: Sarah Shoemaker, Max Goldberg, and Anne Woodrum. Thank you to Kitty Bruce and her representative Tracy Demarzo for helping me gain access to a collection which was in the process of being moved. And the warmest thanks to Vincent Taylor for opening his home and his private collection to me and for sharing his recollections of a brilliant family. This dissertation has been shaped by the training I received from the faculty at the Graduate Center (CUNY) and the University of Minnesota. I am grateful to the faculties of both institutions. Special thanks is due to the members of my dissertation committee—Sumanth Gopinath, Amy Herzog, Anne Stone, and Jane Sugarman—who read and provided important feedback on drafts of this dissertation. My mentor Marshall Berman (1940–2013) passed away vii during the early stages of this project. I have had many occasions to think of him as I completed it. To his loved ones I say, as he often said to me, shalom. I had the good fortune of preparing this dissertation while Norman Carey was the Acting Executive Officer of the GC music department. Thank you once again for all you did. Along with everything else produced by my department, this project would not have been possible without the quiet labor of Tonisha Alexander and Jacqueline Martelle. I never could have said it enough, thank you both. Thank you to the family and friends who allowed me to live with them, some of them for long periods of time, as I traveled across the country for work: my grandmother Patricia Francis, my aunt Jeanne Loomer, John and Janke Elliott, Glenda Goodman and Ben Ullery, Anna Schultz and Mark Nye, Joseph and Charlie Wojtysiak, Michael Lupo and Lindsey Eckenroth, You Nakai and Lindsey Drury, and Benigno Ayala and Ashleigh Doop. I think of our conversations often. I am sincerely sorry if I ever ate your leftover chicken when I shouldn’t have. Thank you to all of my beautiful friends, especially those who helped me learn how to write about comedy LP records musically, including Elise Bonner, Georgina Chinchilla, Lars Christensen, Jake Cohen, Stephanie Jackson, Dani Kuntz, Jessica Narum, Jeremy Orosz, Catherine Provenzano, Daniel Sadowsky, Brian Schmidt, Joshan and Steve Soma, and María Zuazu. I look forward to celebrating the completion of this dissertation next winter with James Fusik, Pat Harris and Ashleigh Wisser, and the Terreri-Teager family, Mike, Kristen, and Hudson. Thank you to César Potes and Marcie Ray for helping me get plugged into a musical and intellectual network in Lansing, where the better part of this dissertation was written. viii Thank you also to John Nichol and Gary Clavette. I could not imagine pursuing a career in music without your early guidance. Much appreciation goes to Devora Geller and Heather Hancock for sharing their knowledge of Yiddish and German with me. An earlier version of chapter two appears as “Textured Voices and the Performance of Ethical Life in the Case of the Laff Box (1966),” Twentieth Century Music 13, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 109–137. Substantial portions of this article have been reproduced here with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Above all, I thank my family. I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, my first teacher, Catherine Rose McCarthy. It is an old saying but a wise one: this dissertation’s faults are my own, but for its merits, I owe a debt to all of you. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES and TABLES......................................................................................... xii ARCHIVES, COLLECTIONS, and ABBREVIATIONS...................................................... xiv NEWSPAPERS.....................................................................................................................