Laughing from the Outside: Hipsters and American Stand-Up Comedy
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LAUGHING FROM THE OUTSIDE: HIPSTERS AND AMERICAN STAND-UP COMEDY By CHRISTOPHER PERKINS Bachelor of Arts in English Texas State University San Marcos, Texas 2006 Master of Arts in English Texas State University San Marcos, Texas 2008 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May, 2017 LAUGHING FROM THE OUTSIDE: HIPSTERS AND AMERICAN STAND-UP COMEDY Dissertation Approved: Dr. Elizabeth Grubgeld Dissertation Adviser Dr. Jeffrey Walker Dr. Richard Frohock Dr. Perry Gethner ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was made possible through the support of the faculty in the English department at Oklahoma State University, the careful critique of my advisory committee, and the thoughtful guidance of my advisor Dr. Elizabeth Grubgeld. I am also eternally grateful to my family for their love and support throughout the years. Finally, Dr. Jennifer Edwards has remained by my side throughout the process of composing this dissertation, and her love, patience, and criticism have played an essential role in its completion. iii Acknowledgements reflect the views of the author and are not endorsed by committee members or Oklahoma State University. Name: CHRISTOPHER PERKINS Date of Degree: MAY, 2017 Title of Study: LAUGHING FROM THE OUTSIDE: HIPSTERS AND AMERICAN STAND-UP COMEDY Major Field: ENGLISH Abstract: In recent years, stand-up comedy has enjoyed increased attention from both popular and scholarly audiences for its potential as a forum for public intellectualism. This study traces this rise in prominence to the hipster as both a cultural figure in post- war America and a comic persona in the years that followed. Through identification and analysis of the hipster and its aesthetic traits, I attempt to follow this persona and the type of comedy it performs from its origins to its current examples in order to understand what role this persona may play in both stand-up’s popularity and in society at large. The hipster is a stand-up persona that utilizes a hip sensibility and satiric perspective both to produce itself and to critique the modes of production and consumption with which it interacts through constant and evolving use of technology and new media as a conduit for personal, existential, and social play. I begin with Lenny Bruce’s hipster and, using the development of technology as my organizing principle, follow the footprints of hip through Bruce to Richard Pryor and then to twenty-first-century comedians Bo Burnham and Aziz Ansari. This study reveals the comic and intellectual sensibility of the hipster persona in its various iterations and examines that persona’s role in the development of comedy as an intellectual forum in American society in the last half-century. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page PREFACE: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT STAND-UP COMEDY ................................................................................................................1 I. WHAT IS A HIPSTER? .............................................................................................6 Footprints: Tracing the Hipster ................................................................................7 Hip Performance ....................................................................................................14 Hip Humor: A Beginning.......................................................................................23 Hip Satirists and Satiric Hipsters ...........................................................................26 Hip Conduit: Hipsters and Media, a Shape for this Study .....................................33 II. COMEDY ALBUMS: VERBAL AND VISUAL PERSONA ON FANTASY RECORDS’ LENNY BRUCE ALBUMS 1959-1961 ...........................................40 Autobiography and Confessional Poetry ...............................................................44 Lenny Bruce and Hipster Comedian ......................................................................51 Visual Rhetoric/Visual Persona: The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce (1959) ............57 Who Wore it Best?: Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Jewish Masculinity ................62 What’s so Sick about Peace, Love, and Understanding? .......................................68 The Humor of The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce ....................................................72 Audaciously Paradoxical: I am Not a Nut, Elect Me! (1960) ................................80 American (1961) ....................................................................................................90 III. HIPSTERS ON FILM: LENNY BRUCE, RICHARD PRYOR, AND STAND-UP’S NEXT MEDIUM ...................................................................................................96 People v. Hipster: Lenny’s “Blah Blah Blah” .......................................................99 Old v. Aging Hipsters: Performance Films and Rhizomatice Persona ................105 Exit Bruce. Enter Richard Pryor: A Portrait of the Hipster on Film....................115 Wattstax , Documentary Film, and the Signifying Hipster ...................................119 Hip Interpreter: Richard Pryor Live in Concert ..................................................123 The Hipster’s Evolution: Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip .......................130 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................140 v Chapter Page IV. NEW AND CONVERGENT MEDIA: POST-HIPSTERS BO BURNHAM AND AZIZ ANSARI.....................................................................................................142 Becoming Bo Burnham........................................................................................146 The Postmodern Self as Comic Subject ...............................................................148 what. Who: Beckett and Burnham and Postmodern Comedy..............................152 what. Why: Burnham and Bruce and the Post-Hipster ........................................158 what. Who: The Remix ........................................................................................161 Aziz Ansari: The Brown White Negro ................................................................164 The Sitcom Hipster: Aziz as Tom Haverford, or, Satirizing Superficial Hip ......166 Love and Marriage and Hipsters ..........................................................................172 Love, Empathy, and the Hip Nightmare: Superficial Reflections on Rude Shitty People ..................................................................................................................179 CONCLUSION: HIP TODAY AND TOMORROW: AZIZ ANSARI ON SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE , JANUARY 21, 2017 ....................................................................184 REFERENCES ..........................................................................................................192 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................202 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1: The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce ...........................................................................63 2: Mort Sahl’s Sweaters ............................................................................................64 3: I am Not a Nut, Elect Me! .....................................................................................84 4: Lenny Bruce--American ........................................................................................92 5: Bo Burnham: Postmodern Rock Star ..................................................................163 vii PREFACE WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT STAND-UP COMEDY Comedy is all the rage these days. In popular media, critics like The Atlantic ’s Megan Garber seek to understand “How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals” (May 2015). Beginning February 2017, CNN aired its eight-part documentary The History of Comedy exploring “what makes people laugh and how comedy has affected the social and political landscape throughout history.” In academic circles, the 2016 MLA Convention included its first-ever panel on stand-up, seeking “to provide a forum for serious consideration of the cultural and rhetorical work of stand-up comedy” (Rhetoricomedia ). And, at the recent conference on Lenny Bruce’s legacy held at Brandeis University in October 2016, comedian Lewis Black jokingly accused conference participants of “legitimizing” comedy. Taken together, these examples indicate a growing awareness that, at this moment in American history, comedy seems particularly capable of capturing the public’s imagination and inspiring critical thought. To explore this phenomenon, I suggest a literary approach to the examination of American stand-up comedy’s rise in popularity and continued social importance by focusing my attention on the development of the 1 trickster figure as a stand-up persona. In the postwar years, a new type of trickster came onto the scene and altered the course of stand-up comedy and, I will argue, America’s relation to it. The trickster—well known and theorized in discussions of comedy, folklore, and American culture—becomes a popular and visible figure in stand-up comedy through the hipster persona of Lenny Bruce and then in the various hipsters that have taken the stage in the half-century since Bruce’s death. 1 Recognizing that the label “hipster” is fraught with multiple, contradictory, and often negative connotations today, I want to employ it here as the