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    The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy
    Unavailable
    The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy
    Unavailable
    The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy
    Ebook723 pages9 hours

    The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy

    By Kliph Nesteroff

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In The Comedians, comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff brings to life a century of American comedy with real-life characters, forgotten stars, mainstream heroes and counterculture iconoclasts. Based on over two hundred original interviews and extensive archival research, Nesteroff’s groundbreaking work is a narrative exploration of the way comedians have reflected, shaped, and changed American culture over the past one hundred years.

    Starting with the vaudeville circuit at the turn of the last century, Nesteroff introduces the first stand-up comedianan emcee who abandoned physical shtick for straight jokes. After the repeal of Prohibition, Mafia-run supper clubs replaced speakeasies, and mobsters replaced vaudeville impresarios as the comedian’s primary employer. In the 1950s, the late-night talk show brought stand-up to a wide public, while Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Jonathan Winters attacked conformity and staged a comedy rebellion in coffeehouses. From comedy’s part in the Civil Rights movement and the social upheaval of the late 1960s, to the first comedy clubs of the 1970s and the cocaine-fueled comedy boom of the 1980s, The Comedians culminates with a new era of media-driven celebrity in the twenty-first century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateNov 3, 2015
    ISBN9780802190864
    Unavailable
    The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy
    Author

    Kliph Nesteroff

     Kliph Nesteroff is the author of We Had a Little Real Estate Problem.

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    Reviews for The Comedians

    4/5

    47 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Stories about comics. Many were Drunks, Thieves, etc but some were the biting voice of their generation.
      The book jumps around, sort of like an uncle, on the edge of doddering, who tell you story after story. But interesting ones. You find out who were the real assholes , the junkies, the clever, and the screwed over.
      A nice for a break from heavy reads.
    • 5/5
      This was a Christmas gift to my husband, who is a true lover of comedy and all sorts of comedians. He read it in a matter of days and thoroughly enjoyed it. Based on this alone, I recommend it to anyone who is a lover of comedy and the lives of those who make so many laugh.
    • 4/5
      This is a very well documented (dozens of pages of end notes citing sources) history of the American comedy business. Note that I said, "comedy business". Despite its title, this isn't really a book that focuses on the comedians themselves, although there is lots of good history, along with revealing anecdotes, and the author throws in a few of their jokes along the way. The real story here is the rise and fall (and rise and fall, etc.) of comedy for the past 150 years or so. It is a pretty fascinating story, but it gets more and more detailed (and less compelling) as it comes up to the present day. While the mobsters who used to run most comedy venues across the country (and owned Las Vegas) were quite generous to comedians if they played along, the latter day club owners expected comedians to perform without any pay at all. And the rise of extreme drug use (mostly cocaine) takes its tool as well. One could conclude that you have to be high to do standup after reading the latter part of this book.So, overall, this is a very informative, worthwhile read. It just isn't the entertaining story of American comedy it started out to be. Nesteroff writes well, however. He also isn't afraid of trashing everything and everybody through the use of devastating quotes about various comedians by their contemporaries. Some of this isn't for the fainthearted.
    • 4/5
      While I enjoyed this book, I found it overly long. And, I have to admit, I didn’t recognize 40% of the comedians mentioned by Nesteroff. Being 72-years-old, I was most interested in the early comics and the early history of comedy. That was both educational and entertaining. I would think that anyone doing any research on the history of comedy would find this book a gold standard source.
    • 4/5
      As the title suggests, the history of comedians is the story of a profession fraught with hardship and challenges as they navigated the ever-changing mediums of the times. The writing itself reads as more academic than comedic, and thus a little dry given the subject, but there are one or two true stories that are so shockingly funny that it seems like it could've only happened to a comedian. Here's an example:"Harvey died at sea [working on a cruise ship], and at the time he and his wife were estranged. The cruise ship called and said, 'Your husband, Harvey, died. We have the body on ice. Should we hold it or should we fly it back to New York?' Harvey's wife wasn't too thrilled and said, 'Oh, well, few people knew this, but Harvey always wanted to be buried at sea.' She got rid of him that way! Here's a Jew from Detroit who never saw a boat in his life. They dumped him in the ocean. And that was the end of Harvey Stone."
    • 4/5
      I read this book because Kliph Nesteroff showed up on WTF with Marc Maron and talked about putting together a book on the history of American comedy. If you're looking for an in-depth history you've come to the right place. On the other hand, if you're expecting a balanced treatment, you won't find that in these pages. Envy might top the list of sins associated with being a comedian. Mr. Nesteroff was a comedian himself for quite a few years, and that gives him an insight into the comedy world that few outside journalists would understand. It's a ridiculously difficult life and few practitioners would seem to be happy, if indeed that was your goal in the first place. I enjoyed it quite a lot, but then I am a comedy nerd, so your mileage may vary.
    • 4/5
      While I enjoyed this book, I found it overly long. And, I have to admit, I didn’t recognize 40% of the comedians mentioned by Nesteroff. Being 72-years-old, I was most interested in the early comics and the early history of comedy. That was both educational and entertaining. I would think that anyone doing any research on the history of comedy would find this book a gold standard source.
    • 5/5
      The Dramatic, Definitive StudyThe difference between Kliph Nesteroff’s The Comedians and the hundreds of other collections on comedians is that this is an order of magnitude above all the rest combined. While others collapse lives into three paragraphs, listing achievements quickly for a template, The Comedians is a narrative of eras. The chapters are on vaudeville, radio, nightclubs, television. The eras are populated and propelled by comedians making their way in the world, paying their dues, and sometimes risking their lives. The constraints of the medium, the politics and the time throw their careers into high relief. There is far more excitement, far more intrigue, far more curiosity in how they pulled it off than in any other such book. And I have about 200 of them right here beside me. This is by far the best.The trek is all about change. How the eras changed the approach, how young comics fought the establishment, how differently the audience approaches comedy. It provides endless insight without dwelling too long on the accomplishments or famous lines of anyone. Most of the stories are (thankfully) not the standard, trademarked tales everyone’s heard, but other, more purposeful ones we likely have not encountered before. This too keeps the reader locked in. The transitions Nesterhoff employs – from radio to tv, late night to internet – are so integral they are elisions, seamless segués. The overall effect is pure pleasure for anyone interested in how the who’s who got that way, interacted, and how their era defined them. The evolution is markedly clear and relentless. The takeaways are endless.We even learn about the use of cigars by a certain generation (Burns, Benny, King, Youngman, Berle, Levenson, Leonard…), to let jokes set in or to stall for time while they switched gears when one failed. We learn that untold numbers of comics changed their names to Jack/Jackie and Joey/Joe E. For some reason, this rated as enormously professional in the first half of the last century. The finest insight comes from Tommy Smothers, who didn’t hire writers so much as musicians, confounding, as he constantly did, the powers that employed him, if not the whole industry: “People in music are used to expressing themselves; they have more rhythm, better pacing,” he said, proving himself a far superior observer once again. Of course, not every comic is profiled or even mentioned. Missing entirely is the man who started it all, Mark Twain. At a time when there was nothing like it, Twain would entertain alone on a bare stage (with cigar). People laughed so hard their sides ached all the next day and no one could remember a single thing he said. I know of only two others who could do the same, any time, with no preparation whatsoever and for endless hours without a break: Jonathan Winters and Peter Cook.Wondering how Nesteroff could possibly wrap it all up, he concludes simply with poignant words from Robin Williams about how comedy owned him. It was actually said better by Cocoa Brown: “Comedy is a jealous boyfriend I like to call Ike 'cause it beats the hell out of you every day, but I love it just the same.”David Wineberg