Funny business

NOTHING ages as poorly as a joke. It’s a dirty little secret -- the records of Mort Sahl, that revolutionary genius, no longer play funny. How do I know? Because when I listen to them, I don’t laugh. Monologues that kept my father in stitches don’t touch me. In the end, all that remains of the old comedian (or of most old comedians, since I still find the Marx Brothers pretty funny, ditto Jackie Gleason) is the pose of the comic, the way he held his cigarette or stood in the light -- the way, in other words, he faced the world.

In fearful times, comedians are often the first to stand up to authority. It’s in their nature. They know the teacher is going to come down with the ruler, but they go for it anyway. In fact, if you study the history of comedy, you study the history of dissent. This is what Stephen E. Kercher has done in “Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America,” a survey of the “satire boom,” the comedic flowering that ran from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s. “Far from being mirthless,” he writes, “the two decades following World War II spawned satiric forms and techniques that have permanently altered the direction of modern American comic expression.”

Kercher, who is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, has watched and analyzed legions of lost television shows, comic strips, routines, sketches. The old names keep turning up: Dick Gregory, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, Bob and Ray. Much of their work was heroic because it flourished in the wake of McCarthyism. This was life re-asserting itself, the giggle that wells up in your chest after the gym teacher has chewed you out.

It began with the cartoonists -- people like Bill Mauldin, a World War II grunt who painted Army life as it was lived, not as it was sold; or Al Capp, Herblock and Walt Kelly, whose “Pogo” comic strip became a national sensation. “By 1958,” Kercher writes, “an estimated fifty million readers followed ‘Pogo’ in five hundred newspapers worldwide.... The quadrennial ‘I Go Pogo’ presidential campaigns that Kelly initiated in 1952 -- campaigns intended to parody presidential candidates and their campaigns -- became sizeable high school and college fads.”

Plays, films, nightclub routines: Each is minutely detailed in “Revel With a Cause.” Reading the book is like watching a slo-mo explosion, one triggered by Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, Henry Morgan, Stan Freberg and Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine. Then Steve Allen’s “The Tonight Show,” the Compass Players in Chicago -- who spawned Shelley Berman -- and Second City, a reflection of which can still be seen on “Saturday Night Live.”

According to Kercher, many of the comedians who made their names in the 20 years after World War II were Jewish or African American -- outsiders no less obsessed with the phoniness of the system than J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield or Norman Mailer’s White Negro. “[F]or many of these artists and performers,” he points out, “humor did not provide an escape from reality but instead a momentary flight from the unreality of postwar American life.”

By the late 1950s a parallel universe had developed, a world of funny people who saw themselves as distinct from the bourgeoisie. “We were members of a comic underground,” cartoonist Jules Feiffer recalls, “meeting in cabarets and cellar clubs, making startlingly grave and innovative jokes about virginity, Jewish mothers, HUAC and J. Edgar Hoover.”

When listening to these old routines, you have to ask yourself: What comes first, the joke or the message? Is the latter a byproduct, something that arises naturally, or is the joke the candy that hides the medicine? Because in the end -- and the end is now -- the candy rots and you are left with a generation of young people looking for what makes this stuff funny. Old newspapers are read only by historians and conspiracy nuts.

At times, “Revel With a Cause” strikes me as too earnest, too academic -- that’s my beef, as Jay Leno used to say. It reads like a college survey in which the professor shuts you up by saying: Comedy is no laughing matter! “By considering their humorous work seriously,” Kercher writes, “I will demonstrate that American postwar satiric writers, artists, and performers responded critically and creatively to concerns many middle class Americans shared over race relations, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the spread of hypocrisy and deceit.”

Kercher is the sort of guy who takes four hours to tell you the plot of a 90-minute movie, who explains why a whoopee cushion is funny rather than letting the humor stand for itself. I’m not suggesting that a writer chronicling comedians has to be their equal on the page, but because these men, the best of them, were defined by a daredevil, hope-we-don’t-get-lynched recklessness, I do think they are owed some liveliness.

Yet “Revel With a Cause” is saved by its portrayal of Lenny Bruce, who is its hero and stands as an endpoint to all the comedic kvetching. Pictures of Bruce never fail to touch me. His face is as melancholy as that of Chaplin’s Tramp. He was a hero of the age, so had to be broken on the wheel. That’s the way it is with revolutionaries. Their ideas might sound dated, but their example lives.

Bruce was born Leonard Schneider. He never made it past fifth grade. He served in the Navy, where he handled bombs, which seems like a literary symbol. (Almost all the comics Kercher writes about served in the military, which gave them the authority to take on the generals; this lack of authority -- today, most humorists come from the class that does not serve -- is one of many problems of having an all-volunteer military.)

Bruce began doing conventional stand-up but soon broke out and started speaking his mind. He made fun of Catholics, Jews, everyone. Talked about sex. A New York critic called him “a truthteller, a kind of prophet, the kind that goes right back to Ezekiel.” Walter Winchell called him “America’s No. 1 Vomic.” He was arrested for obscenity and tried and arrested and tried again. In Los Angeles, the case against him was made by none other than Johnnie Cochran Jr. -- part of the legal team responsible for O.J. Simpson’s acquittal -- who tried to nail Bruce to the cross.

The People of the State of New York v. Lenny Bruce was the case that killed him -- that, and the heroin. It was prosecuted by Frank Hogan, who also went after members of the Jewish Mob. Bruce was convicted, or so it seems, for not being funny enough, because the judge didn’t “get” his act. The decision called his routine “chaotic, haphazard, and inartful.” It’s a comedian’s worst nightmare: sentenced to prison because he bombed. On appeal, he did his routine for a panel that included future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

The satire boom was ultimately devoured by the forces it helped bring into power: Camelot and the New Frontier. “In terms of its political outlook, certainly,” Kercher notes, “most of the satire celebrated throughout American popular culture during the 1950s and early 1960s dovetailed with the cold war liberalism of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Once they began to see themselves as part of the liberal establishment, American satirists yielded their positions as critical outsiders for the sake of becoming court jesters.”

To highlight this, Kercher quotes, among others, Feiffer, who suggests that the Kennedys “learned how to make [satire] ineffectual by embracing it.” In 1963 the cartoonist told a reporter that what most bothered him was the way he had been “accepted by the very people I’m trying to wound. They wound me by loving me to death while I’m expressing my hostility.”

The satirist is an insurgent -- he can snipe and detonate and oppose, but he can never govern.

In the end, Kercher offers a compelling picture of a time when the funny man ruled, although he fails to explain just what made the funny man funny, what made the audience laugh. Partly this has to do with the nature of jokes, which, even more quickly than the comics who crafted them, fall into haggard ruins. Partly it’s the fault of Kercher, who simply does not have an ear for comedy. He is like a scholar who can explain what the invention of dessert meant in a sociological sense, but cannot tell you what the pudding tasted like, or why people keep ordering profiteroles. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot, that great lover of Borscht Belt comedy, who said: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” *