160 Years of Jokes in 90 MinutesBy Ethlie Ann VareLos Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 12/18/21 – “I intend to make them laugh as hardas they can for as long as I can,” said Cleveland newspaper columnist Artemus Ward,who first took his “humorous lectures” on the road in the 1860s. The London pressdubbed his act “an American original art form,” later to be known as stand-up comedy.“Stand up,” it seems, was slang for a boxer who could take a beating in the ring and notkeel over. The term worked well for a fellow (and it would only be a fellow, for a longtime) who could get in front of a crowd armed only with his wits and stay upright.If you didn’t know any of that – well, neither did I, until I laughed my way through RitchShydner’s History of Stand-Up Comedy at the intimate Yard Theater on Melrose Avenue.You may know Shydner from appearances on The Tonight Show Starring JohnnyCarson, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, or his ownHBO stand-up special. He’s written for Roseanne, The Jeff Foxworthy Show and Titus. Butat heart, it turns out, Ritch Shydner is a historian.“It was Phyllis Diller who wanted me to write a book about stand-up comedy,” saysShydner, checking in from his home in Asheville, North Carolina. “I started on it, but itwas reading like a textbook and I couldn’t think of anything worse than writing anunfunny book about comedy.” So he and director J. Elvis Weinstein (Mystery ScienceTheater 3000) put it on its feet.Now Shydner presents his own“humorous lecture” in clubs and on cruise ships, and is currently developing it for off-Broadway and as a limited series. The hardest part of putting the show together, hesays, was figuring out how to contain it. “It’s 160 years in 90 minutes – I try to cover thebig changes and big moments, but there’s so much.”Turns out, when you cherry-pick through a century and a half of jokes, the audience is infor a lotta laughs.The format is loosely structured around big changes like new technology and historicalmoments, changes that shaped the way comedy looked and sounded. The introductionof the microphone took us from Mark Twain lecturing at a women’s auxiliary, to WillRogers selling out Carnegie Hall. The lecture stage begat the vaudeville stage, but thenProhibition drove comedy into the speakeasy. W.C. Fields was actually arrested in 1905,just for talking about drinking.The introduction of radio rendered slapstick gags and funny faces obsolete, and alsointroduced the network censor, who literally blue-penciled things you can’t say on theradio. This is why comics who used bad language were said to be “working blue.”It was the LP that allowed people to listen to what they damn well wanted in the privacyof their own home, which let stand-ups from Redd Foxx to Mort Sahl to George Carlinencroach on the family friendly Jack Bennys and Bob Hopes. Television brought backslapstick, but it also brought back censorship… until a disillusioned post-Vietnam publicand the advent of cable TV unleashed the likes of Sam Kinison.Shydner runs through all this plus the influence of social media, YouTube and thepodcast at a gallop, and he says it kills him to think of all the great comics he still had to
