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Alternate titles: stand up, stand-up, standup, standup comedy

Introduction
Stand-up comedy, comedy that generally is delivered by a solo
performer speaking directly to the audience in some semblance of a
spontaneous manner.

AP

Origins 

Stand-up, at least in the form it is known today, is a fairly recent entertainment phenomenon.
In the United States, where it developed rst and reached its greatest popularity, it had its
origins in the comic lecturers, such as Mark Twain, who toured the country in the 19th century.
It began to emerge as populist entertainment in vaudeville in the early decades of the 20th
century. While comedy was a staple of every vaudeville bill, it most often took the form of
packaged routines delivered by comedy teams (who spoke to each other, not to the audience).
But a few performers, such as Frank Fay, became known for their facility at o -the-cu patter
while serving as emcees in vaudeville houses such as the famed Palace Theatre in New York
City. This solo style was honed further in the resorts of the Catskill Mountains region of New
York in the 1930s and ’40s. The predominantly Jewish comedians of the so-called Borscht Belt
developed a brash gag- lled monologue style that played on familiar comic tropes—the bossy
mother-in-law, the henpecked husband—exempli ed by Henny Youngman’s famous line “Take
my wife—please.”

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Yet the comedian who probably did the most to make stand-up
Cpl. Alex Klein—Army/U.S.
comedy a staple of American popular entertainment was Bob Hope,
Department of Defense
a British-born former vaudeville song-and-dance man. Hope, an
admirer of Fay, developed an engaging rapid- re style as an vaudeville emcee and, beginning in
1938, as host of his own top-rated radio program. Forced to come up with fresh material for his
weekly radio monologues—and for the military audiences that he frequently traveled to
entertain—Hope hired a team of writers who came up with jokes that played o the day’s news,
local gossip in the towns and military bases he visited, and the o stage doings of Hope and his
show business friends. This was a signi cant departure from the vaudeville and Borscht Belt
comics, whose gags were generic, were largely interchangeable, and could be repeated almost
endlessly.

The new wave 

Hope and the Borscht Belt comics established the classic stand-up style that dominated
popular entertainment well into the television era, when it became a staple of television variety
programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show. But in the 1950s a new wave of stand-up comics
emerged who rejected the detached mechanical style of the old joke tellers. The groundbreaker
was Mort Sahl, who appeared onstage sitting on a stool with a rolled-up newspaper in his hand
and talked in normal conversational tones—delivering not gag lines but caustic commentary on
the political leaders, popular culture, and pillars of respectability of American society during the
conservative 1950s. (“Are there any groups here I haven’t o ended?” he would typically crack.)
Sahl’s brainy politically dissenting comedy became a hit in the hip night spots of the Beat era
and inspired a spate of new comedians who showed that stand-up could be smart, personal,
and socially engaged.

Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, and the comedy team of Mike Nichols
Newhart, Bob and Elaine May created extended improv-style bits—one-sided
Columbia Broadcasting System
phone conversations, people talking to their psychiatrists—that
(CBS)
satirized various aspects of an uptight conformist era. Jonathan
Winters, Jonathan Winters blew apart the set-up/punch-line structure of traditional
CBS/Landov
stand-up, pummeling the audience with a wild stream-of-
consciousness barrage of characters, jokes, fragmented scenes, and
physical bits. African American comedians such as Dick Gregory used stand-up as a vehicle for
acerbic commentary on the racial tensions of the period of the civil rights movement, while
Woody Allen turned himself into the butt of his own comic confessionals: the neurotic, sexually
insecure New York Jewish nebbish.

The most in uential comedian of this group, however, was Lenny

Bruce, Lenny Bruce, who spent much of his early career entertaining in strip clubs
Everett Collection Inc./age
and other small-time venues and developed a cult following as the
fotostock
most audacious provocateur of stand-up’s new wave. Bruce attacked

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America’s most sacred cows—from organized religion to moralistic attitudes toward sex and
drugs—and exposed himself more nakedly than any comedian had before. His renegade, free-
form, often X-rated comedy made him a pariah for most of mainstream show business (Bruce
was almost totally shunned by television); after numerous arrests for his performing allegedly
obscene material in nightclubs, it also thrust him into a series of legal battles that virtually
destroyed his career. Bruce’s death from a drug overdose in 1966 solidi ed his legend and
made him an inspiration for a new generation just coming of age in the turbulent late 1960s.

Countercultural comedy 

The rst of these Bruce acolytes to break through was George Carlin.
Carlin Productions
Though already a successful relatively straitlaced comedian known
for his parodies of television commercials and game shows, Carlin at the end of the 1960s let
his hair and beard grow long, turned away from mainstream nightclubs, and reinvented himself
as the comedic voice of the counterculture—skewering the war culture, middle-class hypocrisy,
and his own Catholic upbringing. In his most famous routine, Carlin parsed, with devilish air,
the “seven words you can never say on television”; the taboo words that had gotten Bruce
thrown in jail a few years earlier helped make Carlin a star.

Carlin’s close contemporary Richard Pryor went through a similar


Pryor, Richard; comedy4:16
reinvention. Outgrowing his youthful clean-cut television persona, in
Displayed by permission of The the early 1970s he transitioned to hard-edged, racially charged,
Regents of the University of brilliantly improvisational comedy that drew on the characters—
California. All rights reserved. winos, pimps, junkies, street preachers—he had grown up with in
the Peoria, Ill., ghetto, as well as the increasingly baroque details of his troubled private life.
Robert Klein, the third major comic of the early ’70s to colonize the territory that Bruce had
opened up, was a veteran of Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe who developed a smart,
supple, socially aware style of stand-up that was widely in uential among a younger generation
of comics.

By the 1970s stand-up comedy had become as potent a voice of the

Prinze, Freddie
Vietnam War generation as rock music and Hollywood’s new
NBC Photo
independent lms such as Easy Rider. Comedy clubs sprouted in New
York and Los Angeles, giving a bumper crop of young comics a place to hone their craft and
develop an audience. Working night after night for little or no money, these young, mostly New
York City-based comedians—among them Richard Lewis, Freddie Prinze, Elayne Boosler (one of
the few women in a largely male-dominated crowd), and later Jerry Seinfeld—developed an
intimate “observational” style, less interested in sociopolitical commentary than in chronicling
the trials of everyday urban life, dealing with relationships, and surviving in the ethnic melting
pot.

As the best young stand-ups began moving from New York to Los
The Tonight Show Angeles—where their most important television showcase, The
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NBC photo Tonight Show, hosted by Johnny Carson, was located—

experimentation ourished. For a popular culture now awash in stand-up comedy, many of
these innovators turned to self-parody and ironic put-on. Albert Brooks, the son of a radio
comedian known as Parkyakarkus, became a regular on TV talk and variety shows in the early
1970s with a string of put-on bits in which he parodied bad show-business acts—a terrible
mime, a bumbling ventriloquist, and a succession of amateur songwriters trying to rewrite the
U.S. national anthem. Andy Kaufman started out in New York clubs by posing as an inept
wannabe comedian with a vaguely middle-European accent and unleashed series of deadpan
Dadaist stunts, from singing children’s songs to testing the audience’s patience by reading F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925) out loud or doing his laundry onstage.

The vogue for stand-up self-parody reached its pinnacle with the
PRNewsFoto/Disneyland/AP
phenomenal success of Steve Martin, a former television writer who
Images
poked fun at old-time show business by impersonating the worst
practitioner imaginable: a smug, ludicrously un-self-aware clown who puts arrows through his
head and dubs himself a “wild and crazy guy.” By the end of the 1970s, Martin was selling out
20,000-seat arenas and releasing best-selling comedy albums, becoming arguably the most
popular stand-up comedian in history. This set the stage for a boom in the 1980s, when at least
300 comedy clubs blanketed the United States and cable TV shows such as An Evening at the
Improv gave even mediocre stand-ups their moment in the national spotlight

The British tradition and the spread of stand-up comedy



Stand-up comedy—which depends so much on shared experiences,

comedy: innuendo and assumptions, even nuances of language—has rarely traveled well
double entendre 
4:10
beyond its national borders. As the form was ourishing in the
© Open University United States, parallel but largely separate stand-up traditions were
developing in other countries, most notably the United Kingdom.
Alan Howard—Hulton
British stand-up comedy had its origins in the music-hall performers
Archive/Getty Images
of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially Max Miller, who
dressed in ashy suits and delivered cheeky fast-paced comedy patter in between song-and-
dance bits. The more progressive British comedy of the 1950s and ’60s was largely an
outgrowth of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge tradition of satirical college revues,
including the Beyond the Fringe quartet (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and
Jonathan Miller) and the wilder, mixed-media antics of the Monty Python troupe. A more
working-class breed of solo stand-up, meanwhile, was emerging in Britain’s equivalent of
America’s Borscht Belt: the workingmen’s club circuit in the north of England, where comics
assaulted the audience with brash joke-driven monologues that often traded on racial and
sexual stereotypes. Stars of these clubs, such as Frank Carson and Bernard Manning, gained
national fame in the 1970s via the popular British TV show The Comedians. Television, at the

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same time, provided an ideal platform for a far di erent kind of stand-up comic, Dave Allen.
Allen, an urbane Irishman, hosted several popular talk-variety shows on British TV and would
typically sit on a stool, cigarette in one hand and drink in the other, as he delivered wry stories
and commentary on everything from the minor annoyances of life to the hypocrisies of the
Roman Catholic Church, one of his favorite targets.

With the opening of the rst American-style comedy club in London, the Comedy Store, in 1979,
a new generation of alternative comedians began to emerge who rejected the retro joke-driven
monologues of the old school and experimented with new styles and subject matter. One of
the biggest stars of this new generation had actually made a splash a few years earlier: Billy
Connolly, a former folksinger from Glasgow who achieved huge popularity in the mid-1970s
with his irreverent, high-energy observational stand-up. He was followed in the 1980s by a rush
of younger comics, including Alexei Sayle, emcee of the in uential Comic Strip club that was a
hothouse for new comedy stars in the ’80s; the comedy team of Dawn French and Jennifer
Saunders, the latter of whom starred in the situation comedy Absolutely Fabulous; and, a bit
later, Eddie Izzard, whose amboyant free-form stand-up made him one of the few British
comedians whose work translated successfully in the United States. By the turn of the 21st
century, stand-up comedy had taken root around the world, from Australia—where Barry
Humphries, in the guise of Dame Edna Everage, became that country’s most popular comedy
export—to nascent stand-up scenes in countries ranging from Argentina to the Philippines.

Jerry Seinfeld and beyond 

Back in the United States, meanwhile, the stand-up explosion had

KPA/Heritage-Images/Imagestate
faded considerably as the glut of comedy clubs and TV outlets led to
© Castle Rock Entertainment; all
overexposure and a dilution of the talent pool. TV sitcoms were
rights reserved
cannibalizing many of the best and brightest—from Bill Cosby,
whose gentle family-friendly monologues became the basis for a
hugely popular NBC sitcom, The Cosby Show (1984–92), to Jerry Seinfeld, whose self-described
“comedy about nothing” gave rise to Seinfeld (1989–98), the most critically acclaimed sitcom of
the 1990s.

Seinfeld, who resumed a thriving stand-up career after walking away

O cial White House photo by
from his still-popular TV series, became a model for American stand-
Pete Souza
up comedy success well into the new century. But his small-bore,
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
PG-rated comedy was increasingly an aberration as the proliferation
of cable TV outlets (with their more permissive standards) and an
increasingly freewheeling club scene encouraged comics to work even harder to demolish the
last taboos of language and subject matter. At the same time, the institutionalization of the
late-night-TV monologue—led by David Letterman, Jay Leno, and (with the help of his Daily
Show repertory company) Jon Stewart—reinforced stand-up’s role as American culture’s

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primary means of processing and commenting on political leaders, Hollywood gossip, and the
headline news of the day.

Richard Zoglin

Additional Reading
WILLIAM ROBERT FAITH, Bob Hope: A Life in Comedy (2003), provides the most authoritative account
thus far of the life and work of the father of American stand-up. GERALD NACHMAN, Seriously Funny:
The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (2003), pro les the comedians who reinvented
stand-up in the 1950s and ’60s, from Mort Sahl to Woody Allen. ALBERT GOLDMAN and LAWRENCE
SCHILLER, Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!! (1974), o ers a quirky and amboyant but
nonetheless de nitive account of the life of stand-up’s most in uential rebel. LARRY GELBART et al.,
Stand-up Comedians on Television (1996), is a collection of essays for the Museum of Radio and
Television that includes an excellent survey of the origins of American stand-up by David
Bushman. RICHARD ZOGLIN, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (2008),
is a critical and historical survey of the stand-up explosion that followed the death of Lenny
Bruce, from Bruce acolytes such as George Carlin to comedy superstars such as Steve Martin.
PHIL BERGER, The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-up Comics, updated ed. (2000), presents a
avourful and entertaining look at the world of stand-up comedy, more impressionistic than
historical but probably the best inside glimpse of stand-up comedians at work. WILLIAM COOK, Ha
Bloody Ha: Comedians Talking (1994), among the relatively few books about British stand-up,
nicely surveys Britain’s new wave that began with the opening of London’s Comedy Store in
1979.

Richard Zoglin

Article Contributors

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