|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Good, Clean Fun
| Article
# : |
11648 |
|
|
Section : |
Life
|
| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
2,072 Words |
| Author
: |
Barry Farber
Barry Farber is the host of a radio talk show for WMCA in New
York and has done extensive writing for national magazines and
newspapers. |
"Do you know what good, clean fun is?" Asks the straight man in the vaudeville skit.
"No," snaps the wise guy. "What good is it?"
And for years the wise guy had the upperhand. Good, clean fun--at least from the performing stage of comedy--was no good at all. It was met, challenged, defeated, humiliated, and exiled to YWCA picnics in places like Gaffney, South Carolina, by the profane comedians who never let themselves get more than eight words away from the familiar folk expressions foresworn by the polite among us.
The themes that endeared the crowds to the comedians and jammed them into the classier emporia of Las Vegas and all the elsewheres were those you'd reach if you dropped a bowling ball down the Well of Good Taste and waited for the splash; fornication, adultery, drugs, ethnic and religious indignity, and personal insult.
Joan Rivers reached the top with a genre that's come to be known as "hysterectomy humor."
The "nice" comics have much in common with the valiant Polish cavalry troops that stormed forth to defend their nation against the Nazis--and wound up dizzy and bloody on the ground as Hitler's tanks ground through their horses without even losing speed. When Lenny Bruce stood up in the 1950s, cleared his throat, and proceeded to shout that unforgivable word over and over into the cabaret microphone, it was over for the clean ones and full-speed ahead for those willing and able to deal dirty in word, deed, gesture, and innuendo.
The easy laughs engendered by irreverence and shock were always there; they were just forbidden. The only laughs a comic was permitted to pursue were the clean ones. Can you imagine Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Milton Berle, George Gobel, Myron Cohen, or Harry Hirshfield playing for smirks and snickers or embarrassing you on a night out with the kids?
In an interview with Jimmy Durante, the famous Schnozz, toward the end of his career, I told him I'd researched his entire history looking for the dirtiest joke he ever told in public. It was a one-liner about a young lady taking a trip alone to Wyoming who wound up in a room with running water. "Tell her she'd better get rid of that Indian!" Durante advised.
When
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
