A Brief History of Fart Jokes
Originally posted on the 5th of March, 2008
This is a response to a guest blog that DC comedian Eli Sairs wrote on the DC Comedy 4 Now website. The original article can be found here.
Eli, your point about Steve Martin is well taken. The same could be said for Steve Allen and Steven Wright. Maybe Alternative comedy is all about being named Steve. More to the point, I think the idea is that alternative comedy is “supposed” to be a conscious response to what has become predictable, and what might even be called “hacky” joke and set structure of more traditional mainstream comics. Of course these traditional mainstream comics were alternative in their time too. I think all of this needs to be looked at from a historical perspective. I’ll summarize my interpretation of the roots of modern stand-up and see if that helps. I’m skipping a lot of stuff and only focusing on a few parts of it, but I’m compressing what could be several books into a blog response, so I think that’s fair.
Vaudeville
1880’s – 1930’s
Style: Short to the point Jokes, included musical instruments, short films, costumes, acrobatics, two-man scenes. The shows were structured to have lots of different types of act in an evening.
But in Vaudeville you could perfect a 10 minute show and get away with doing it around the country for 40 years. (This also gets into the issue of how technology has changed comedy — Vaudville was killed by film, radio and TV — but that’s a whole other powerpoint).
Legacy: Basic joke structures, short jokes and instruments have made a reappearance over the years (cough).
Borscht Belt
1940’s – 1960’s
Style: Short jokes, complaining about growing up, bad luck, annoying relatives and nagging wives, puns Physical complaints (remember this started as a Jewish thing, and we have an amazing amount of IBS and back problems).
A lot of the comics who defined what we consider modern stand up came out of the Borscht Belt: e.g., Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Phyllis Diller, Milton Berle, Rodney Dangerfield, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Jerry Lewis, Jonathan Winters, Henny Youngman and a lot more. Again, technology is a big part of what killed the scene — air conditioning, if you can believe it, along with air travel, and also the new technology of not hating Jews (as much. Which resulted in them getting jobs elsewhere).
Stand-up Legacy: One important thing Borscht Belt brought to the table that was less present in Vaudeville was that people started dealing with more personal topics, more autobiographical material.
Modern stand up
1950’s → (I’m compressing several waves of comedy into the term “modern” stand-up for brevity’s sake.)
After Borscht Belt people started dealing with more social and political topics. The introduction of Jewish, black, and female comedians to more mainstream venues resulted in people talking more about society, race, and sex. People like Lenny Bruce and Redd Foxx gave way to people like George Carlin and Richard Pryor. Carlin and Pryor are probably two of the big grand daddies of modern stand up and I’ll trace some lines from them and then call it done.
Carlin talked about language and daily minutia – Something that Seinfeld, for instance, later took up. Steven Wright combined Carlin’s focus on little things with Woody Allen’s absurdist humor and Henny Youngman’s one-liners to make something completely different. Which led in part to people like Mitch Hedberg, Zach Galifianakis Demetri Martin, Nick Thune, Eli and Myself. In my estimation, Eli also draws a strong influence from Steve Martin, who was also around being absurd and bringing anti-humor to stand up.
Pryor talked about his life growing up, racism and how blacks and whites were different (which at the time was groundbreaking. From what I hear he invented the black person talking like a white person voice). He also had strong physical act-outs. Pryor may be the most influential stand-up comedian ever in terms of determining what modern “mainstream” stand up sounds like. His style produced people like Dave Chappelle, Robin Williams, Bill Hicks, and alternative comedians like David Cross and Patton Oswalt as well.
So you can see that “modern” stand-up reacted against borscht belt by telling longer stories and being more willing to delve into every day things rather than just jokes about your fat mother in law. But then this kind of everyday observational humor, in its own time became mainstream and is being reacted against by what we’re calling “alternative” comedy.
Alternative?
The bottom line is that Alternative is just another branch of comedy that is reacting against mainstream stand up. A lot of people use the word “alternative just to mean “good” and a lot of people use it to mean “bad” and I think both are silly. There are shitty alternative comedians just like there are amazing mainstream comedians. Dave Chappelle, although using the trappings of mainstream comedy, tells long personal stories involving surreal or absurdist twists and have political undertones, which are all characteristic of what we commonly think about as being “alternative.”
One story is about getting driven into the ghetto against his will (“I started looking out the window, see gun store, gun store, liquor store, gun store, where the fuck you taking me?”). The story combines that inherently political subject with non-traditional act-outs (“A fucking crackhead ran this way, tktktktktktk! Then another one jumped out of a tree and shit, tktktk!”) and absurdist twists (“”Hey baby! Baby, go home, man! It’s 3 o’clock in the morning man, what the fuck are you doing up?” The baby says, “I’m selling weed, nigga!”) How much more alternative can you get?
My point is just that the lines between alternative and mainstream are way more blurry than people think, and I think a lot of distinctions which exist for geographical reasons (LA scene vs. NY scene) and cultural reasons (younger vs. older) get labeled as stylistic differences, sometimes with good reason, sometimes not.
Eli’s response and my response to his response:
4 years ago • 0 notes
06 Mar 2008 - 7:41
good post dude. works well as both an over-view and an analysis. ive noticed it before, and find it re=enforced here, that whats called alt today seems closest to vaudeville. two-man act outs, short films, one-liners and instruments. have we come full-circle?
07 Mar 2008 - 7:46
I think that alternative is really just a conscious reaction against the constraints assumed in mainstream stand-up. I think the inclusion of multimedia can be linked to vaudeville, but it has more to do with the proliferation of low-cost multimedia production tools which has occurred over the past 10 years or so. In terms of the act-outs and musical instruments… I don’t know, I mean, Steven Wright used one liners and a guitar in his album “I have a Pony” and that predates the ‘alternative’ scene, and he’s not the only one to do so by any means. I think there are a lot of elements from Vaudeville, borscht belt and modern stand-up in alternative. I think it just really depends on the performer. The alternative ideal, in my mind, should just be to be imaginative with form and structure, and focus just on what’s funny and not what people are necessarily used to. Of course since people are often uncomfortable with laughing at something totally alien, you have to find structures or tools that they’re used to to let the in, whether that be narrative structure, an instrument, or some kind of multimedia presentation to set the scene.
In doing my stuff I’ve used a powerpoint, a flip-chart, a video presentation, a guitar, a harmonica, and a banjo (didn’t go over). I think that for the most part I’ve used them to facilitate the presentation of my ideas and not just to be like “look, stuff!” and in fact I stopped using the banjo and harmonica (for now at least) because I wasn’t proficient enough to make them work as more than a gimmick. So right now the thing I’m wondering is just how many other, original ways are there to present things, and what will it take for me to figure it out. There is a fine line between a gimmick and a presentation device, but it’s vital to try to stay on the right side of it lest we all become self-righteous carrot-tops.