Spinning Laughs Into Gold?

Comedy albums were a potent, talked-about part of the hipster culture of the 1950s and ‘60s, a time when Lenny Bruce records were passed around like so much contraband and people could instantly recite the routines of Woody Allen, Bob Newhart and Nichols and May.

It was an era when comedians could legitimately wear the tag “comedian-commentator.” And a time when comedy albums could sail straight to the top of the Billboard chart.

“People could listen to those albums a second and third time and find something they hadn’t heard,” Newhart says today, reflecting on the golden age of comedy recordings. “We became the young people’s nightclub. Somebody would put on a comedy album and get beer and pizza and people would sit around listening to it.”

Sustained by the super-stardom of Richard Pryor and Steve Martin, the comedy record kept its stature through the 1970s, but by the ‘90s, with the explosion of cable TV stand-up showcases and sitcoms featuring stand-ups, the idea of a comedy record seemed redundant. Or irrelevant. Or both.

Today, comedy recordings--now CDs--live on, though with sharply reduced expectations. They’ve become a niche enterprise, with independent recordings of relatively unknown or edgier acts at one end and the nostalgia business at the other, with classic recordings occasionally re-released on CD by the major labels.

This month’s releases typify the split market. From the independents there’s John Pinette’s “Show Me the Buffet,” Richard Belzer’s “Another Lone Nut” and Bobby Slayton’s “Raging Bully,” among others.

Warner Bros., meanwhile, is re-releasing five Bill Cosby records, Bob Newhart’s two top-selling “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” albums, and Steve Martin’s “Comedy Is Not Pretty” while Relativity has “The Very Best of Redd Foxx.”

For Pinette, there’s still a value to making a comedy album. “People have been trained to believe that comedy is the five- and 10-minute segments that you see on TV,” says Pinette, who was in town recently to tape a guest-starring role on the final episode of NBC’s “Seinfeld.”

“But in 10 minutes, you can’t really talk about yourself.”

No one involved with these CDs should have high hopes for a blockbuster hit. While every now and then a Chris Rock, Sam Kinison or Jeff Foxworthy (a two million seller who has another CD due in May) comes along to prompt an article or two on the “resurgence of the comedy album,” most remain on the fringes, selling modestly--often in the tens of thousands.

On the surface, the reasons for this seem self-evident. Why, after all, would anyone buy a CD to hear something they can get for free from television? Adding to the problem is radio. Once a welcome forum for comedian appearances and sound bites, the airwaves are today dominated by disc jockeys under the impression that they’re funny enough without help from the professionals.

Newhart concedes that he and other comics like Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman and Allan Sherman didn’t have television raiding the stand-up ranks so tirelessly back then. But no matter the era, Newhart says, the artists are ultimately what make comedy albums vital.

“Our material had relevance to people,” Newhart says, noting that there was an entire segment of young, college-educated people overlooked by many of the dominant nightclub acts. Newhart’s “Button-Down Mind” album was so popular that it reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart in the 1960s.

Now generations of Newhart fans, weaned on reruns of “The Bob Newhart Show” on cable TV, don’t even realize his classic one-way conversational skills (most famously as a driving instructor and submarine captain) were something Newhart developed 40 years ago.

“I would get letters saying, ‘I enjoyed “The Bob Newhart Show.” So what did you do before this?’ ”

By reissuing “The Button-Down Mind” albums, Warner Bros. no doubt hopes to turn on a younger generation of fans to Newhart’s early comedy.

For Rhino Records, that strategy has had limited results. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks’ “The 2000 Year-Old Man in the Year 2000,” has sold 30,000 copies since being released last October.

Even Reiner, who along with Brooks will have a “2000-Year-Old Man” book and CD signing April 28 at Book Soup in West Hollywood, admits he doesn’t listen to comedy albums anymore. “There’s too much media vying for your attention,” he laments.

Maybe the problem is that the 2000-Year-Old Man, for all his knowledge of mankind, forgot to ask God to give him a sitcom or cable special.

“Television has made [comedy] too accessible, so that there doesn’t seem to be this sense of adventure about hearing salacious material,” says Bill McEuen, who produced Steve Martin’s records in the ‘70s. “If you look at the long history of comedy, at people like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, in those days the language was hard to get exposure for. It was almost underground. That’s changed. This fear of words is gone.”

Several years ago, McEuen was so struck by a comedian named Robert Schimmel that he decided to back a recording of his work. The result was 1996’s “Robert Schimmel Comes Clean” from Warner Bros., an hourlong descent into the depressed psyche of a comedian whose depravity calls to mind the antic sexual musings of Bruce.

That’s hardly a coincidence.

“When I was growing up, my parents and their friends used to listen to Lenny Bruce and all these comics and I’d be upstairs and hear [them] laughing downstairs,” says Schimmel, 39. “I always thought, ‘I want to be that guy.’ Where people go, ‘Psst, you gotta hear this guy.’ ”

Even though “Robert Schimmel Comes Clean” has only sold about 20,000 copies to date, Warner Bros. has a follow-up concert CD planned for this summer. Schimmel’s received critical acclaim but the sitcom world hasn’t come knocking--not surprising, given his frank, R-rated material.

“I’ve been told, ‘Find different words for this and that, and then you can do the set on TV,” Schimmel says. I’ve refused to do that. . . . I could write my six or seven minutes for Letterman. But I’d rather come up with something new that doesn’t have to be changed.”

Like Schimmel, Pinette is a relatively unknown comic who’s worked the road for a decade-plus, time that has enabled him to develop a tight hour’s worth of material.

In Pinette’s case, the material on his CD is all about buffets, from the Character Buffet at DisneyWorld to the “Wizard of Oz” buffet at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas (“Prime rib and pork chops and scampi, oh my!”)

Pinette’s “Show Me the Buffet” comes from Uproar Entertainment, a Westlake Village label devoted exclusively to comedy CDs. For founder David Drozen, the venture makes business sense; after all his overhead is low, since basically all he has to do is record a comedian’s club act.

Drozen’s CD roster includes respected acts Margaret Cho, Dana Gould, George Lopez and Brian Regan. But in addition to the age-old paranoia about other comedians stealing material, Drozen often runs into skeptical managers and agents--an attitude articulated by Barry Katz, who manages emerging comics.

“Sure, comics make albums all the time, but how many break through?” says Katz. “It’s just not worthwhile until they’re at a point where they’re well-known. [A CD] makes more sense if you’re Tim Allen, as opposed to the fifth lead on ‘NewsRadio.’ ”

Strangely enough, comedians looking to parlay their material into cash find the ground more fertile in the book world, where the success of Jerry Seinfeld’s “Seinlanguage” touched off a wave of observational humor books that hasn’t really abated.

Schimmel has a book deal too. He hasn’t written the book yet, but he has the title--”Fail with Flair,” which he describes as a kind of self-fail book. In the meantime, Schimmel might want to consider moving to Grand Rapids, Mich., where a radio station has been giving so much airplay to his CD, it’s sold some 7,000 copies in the Grand Rapids area alone, according to Warner Bros.

Not exactly in the league of “Button-Down Mind” but it’s a start.