[78-L] Live comedy

[David Sanderson]

On 4/10/2011 4:12 PM, Michael Biel wrote:
> On 4/10/2011 12:50 PM, David Lennick wrote:
>> On 4/10/2011 2:16 AM, Michael Biel wrote:
>>> Ah, now I see what their point is -- MODERN stand-up comedy.   Does it
>>> have to be about contemporary politics and society?  Will Rodgers would
>>> qualify.
>> I would definitely include Rogers, and his 78s have the "top of my head"
>> atmosphere even if there was no audience. By the way, just this morning I read
>> a great line about him in a letter from James Thurber to Fred Allen.."Actually,
>> this bosom friend of senators and congressmen was about as daring as an early
>> Shirley Temple movie."
>
> Notice that he specified EARLY Shirley Temple movies.  Remember, Shirley
> was TOPLESS in her first films.  Speaking of bosom friends . . .
>
> Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com

My take on this would be that live comedy didn't get on records until 
radio transcriptions proliferated in the 1930's.  Remember, "standup" as 
we think of it didn't exist until pretty recently, although it was 
actually invented by Artemus Ward about 1862, when he began doing 
"lectures" that were satires on the popular lectures of the period. 
This thread follows through to Mark Twain, Bill Nye and others who were 
comic lecturers.

The other thread that existed developed in vaudeville, where the pieces 
ran about 20 minutes, and where there was a push towards physical 
comedy.  The recorded comic monologues are examples of this performance 
style - consider "Cohen at the Telephone," short, hugely popular, part 
of yet another piece of it all, the dialect humor tradition.  Chautauqua 
shows included recitations in character as well, variously literary and 
dramatic.

As to Will Rogers, remember that he did a lot of vaudeville, so that 
recordings may or may not reproduce what we think of as "live comedy," 
but rather the rehearsed and polished vaudeville performances that 
produced the likes of W.C. Fields, whose famous short films from the 
1930's largely reproduce vaudeville routines going back to his Ziegfeld 
Follies days and before (at one point he was traveling with a pool table 
for the pool routine that most of us have seen).

-- 
David Sanderson
East Waterford Maine
dwsanderson685 at roadrunner.com
http://www.dwsanderson.com