Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America John Limon Tseng 2000.4.3 18:27 6030 Limon / STAND UP COMEDY / sheet 1 of 160 Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America 6030 Limon / STAND UP COMEDY / sheet 2 of 160 New Americanists A series edited by Donald E. Pease Tseng 2000.4.3 18:27 Tseng 2000.4.3 18:27 6030 Limon / STAND UP COMEDY / sheet 3 of 160 John Limon Duke University Press Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America Durham and London 2000 6030 Limon / STAND UP COMEDY / sheet 4 of 160 The chapter ‘‘Analytic of the Ridiculous’’ is based on an essay that first appeared in Raritan: A Quarterly Review 14, no. 3 (winter 1997). The chapter ‘‘Journey to the End of the Night’’ is based on an essay that first appeared in Jx: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 1, no. 1 (autumn 1996). The chapter ‘‘Nectarines’’ is based on an essay that first appeared in the Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 1 (spring 1997). © 2000 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ! Typeset in Melior by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Tseng 2000.4.3 18:27 6030 Limon / STAND UP COMEDY / sheet 5 of 160 Contents Introduction. Approximations, Apologies, Acknowledgments 1 1. Inrage: A Lenny Bruce Joke and the Topography of Stand-Up 11 2. Nectarines: Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks 28 3. Analytic of the Ridiculous: Mike Nichols and Elaine May 50 4. Journey to the End of the Night: David Letterman with Kristeva, Céline, Scorsese 68 5. Scatology: Richard Pryor in Concert 83 6. Skirting, Kidding: Ellen DeGeneres and Paula Poundstone 104 Notes 125 Works Cited 139 Index 145 Tseng 2000.4.3 18:27 This page intentionally left blank 6030 Limon / STAND UP COMEDY / sheet 7 of 160 Introduction: Approximations, Apologies, Acknowledgments It was once my pretense that I was using stand-up comedy to write cultural history; the book I had in mind would have been thin as cultural history, but in any case I did not write it. The book I have written does not exploit stand-up but attempts to provide it with a theory—or a first approximation of one. It would be gratifying to imagine that the theory will contribute to some future cultural history, probably not written by me. Here is a first glimpse of the cultural-historical data I hope this theory will eventually clarify. Around 1960, Jewish heterosexual men formed the pool of American citizens that produced most American stand-up come- dians. According to one guess, 80 percent of nationally known stand-ups at the time were Jewish men; that they were Jewish men is more verifi- Tseng 2000.4.3 18:27 able than that they were heterosexual, though that was the universal under- standing.1 There are, of course, many ways to look at this, but it is easier to begin by specifying how not to look at it. I do not infer from their prevalence in stand-up that Jewish heterosexual men were, in 1960, the funniest people in America. That would be impossible to substantiate; it is impossible to be lucid about what that would even mean. However, I do not want to re- duce Jewish stand-up dominance to a merely institutional fact, as if to say that just as many Methodist women were very funny but were simply not 6030 Limon / STAND UP COMEDY / sheet 8 of 160 given the same breaks by the stand-up establishment as Jewish men. That many comedy sites were owned by Jews is of course true—but this would be a cultural and historical fact to be explained, not entirely dissimilar from the one that occupies us at the beginning of this study. Furthermore, the fact that Jews owned and operated many nightclubs did not entail the prevalence of Jewish popular singers, nor did it force Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen to promote Jewish comedians before a national audience. These antithetical hypotheses—that Jewish men were the funniest Amer- icans or that Jewish male comedians were simply preferred by Jewish male comedy impresarios—fail for the same reason: humor is (I shall say more about this) unfalsifiable and incorrigible. If there were comedy audiences (at the Grand Ole Opry or the Apollo, say) who had non-Jewish comedic preferences, they had a right to them. If, on the other hand, the general American public wanted Jewish male comedians above all, for reasons we should be able to reconstruct, then male Jews were the best ones for the job. The cultural fact I want to isolate as my starting point is the connection between being a Jewish heterosexual man in America in 1960 and making one sort of living. The job was, I take it, to provide humor of a certain kind in a certain set- ting. Not the humor of the dozens, for example, or of camp. And so I began with what seemed to me a promising aperçu: the tense intimacy of national stand-up comedy as it was practiced in 1960 and the suburban moment of modern American culture. Lenny Bruce provided one take on suburban- ization. From the far reaches of Long Island, he came to New York City to learn how to be a Jewish comedian, and his humor was an affront to subur- bia on behalf of hip urbanites and suburbanites alike. The comedy of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner was another take. Carl Reiner was the suburban- izer (he would set his humor commuting to New Rochelle for The Dick Van Dyke Show) in loving proximity to Mel Brooks’s weird Englishing of urban Yiddishkeit. The suburbanizing Jew and the citifying Middle Ameri- 2 Tseng 2000.4.3 18:27 can (whose prime comedy habitat was the late-night New York talk show: Jack Paar of Michigan, Johnny Carson of Iowa and Nebraska, Dick Cavett of Nebraska, David Letterman of Indiana) together formed the chiasmus of our postwar national humor. ‘‘National’’ is key: Judaism on The Tonight Show was a contribution to nation rebuilding on the suburban model as a turn from Zionism and Marxism. Freud’s joke theory, which centers on the covering up of laughter’s sources in aggression and sex, has at least the merit of elucidating the suburban moment of American comedy and cul- ture, if suburbs grew on the energy of the same concealments. 6030 Limon / STAND UP COMEDY / sheet 9 of 160 This is not by any means the whole story of Jewish stand-up success, but it is the cultural part of the story that first occurred to me, and I still vouch for it. It is the basis of the structure of this book: three essays on Jew- ish stand-up as it flourished for several years before 1960 and a few years after (first on Lenny Bruce, second on Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, third on Mike Nichols and Elaine May), three essays on stand-up in its wake (first on David Letterman, second on Richard Pryor, third on Ellen DeGeneres and Paula Poundstone). I was not trying to locate and analyze the most influen- tial post–World War II American stand-up comedians (where is Mort Sahl? Woody Allen? Lily Tomlin? George Carlin?) or the funniest ones (where are Jonathan Winters, Buddy Hackett, Robin Williams, and Steve Martin?). I am not, for the purposes of this book, interested in the brilliant Jewish stand-ups of the present. I confess that I only chose to write about come- dians who seemed essential to my story. Its outline is this: America, between 1960 and the millennium, in a pro- cess that began around the ascension of Johnny Carson or the Kennedy as- sassination, comedified.2 Stand-up was once a field given over to a certain subsection of a certain ethnicity. By now, roughly speaking, all America is the pool for national stand-up comedy. So, in the second half of my book, I needed to examine comedians who were not Jewish, or not male, or not heterosexual, or not any of these. The problem, from the cultural studies point of view, is that the end of my narrative had plenty of potential exemplars to support my argument, but no moral. I was quite sure that what I was describing was not redu- cible to a triumph of multicultural inclusiveness. That is no doubt a part of the significance of the plot. But what would it mean to add that society has taken to its heart such distinctly non-Jewish comedians as Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and David Letterman? (Would it signal a recentering or de- centering of culture in America? Comedy exists to upset such primer anthropology.) I seemed to need some cultural fact equal and opposite to Introduction 3 Tseng 2000.4.3 18:27 suburbanization for the story of stand-up’s post–high Jewish continuation, but I could not think of one that did not seem to me banal or prophetic or false. It was at this impasse that the project turned theoretical rather than cul- tural. But it happens, I think, that you can get back to the cultural after all. This remains to be seen; in what is left of this introduction, I make a few theoretical suggestions, with the hope that it is possible to find in stand-up theory per se some indication at least of how the comedification of America might be explained.