The license to be funny in America

0:00This message comes from National Geographic's Pompeii, Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, a new series from the executive producers of Loki. Pompeii Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston is now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from NPR and ThruLine. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. This week, the spirit of American humor. No matter how crude, rude, or distasteful, the Supreme Court has upheld that all people residing in the U.S. have the constitutional right to mock or criticize public figures and government officials.

0:50The First Amendment is first for a reason. The Second Amendment is just in case the first one doesn't work out. That's Dave Chappelle accepting the Mark Twain Prize in 2019. And for his part, Mark Twain, the prolific American satirist from a century ago, didn't mince words about comedy. He wrote in 1897,

1:19And so, in that spirit, on this episode, we take a romp into American comedy, in all its harshness and rawness, thanks to our colleagues in the NPR newsroom. Our first story is from Elizabeth Blair about the dance between comedians and politicians. That's coming up after a quick break.

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3:09Satirists are known to punch up, meaning people in power bear the brunt of their jokes. Here's Stephen Colbert on CBS. Apparently Trump learned that violent mass goons are not crowd pleasers, and he learned that from his most trusted advisor, the TV. Reportedly... They offend. Here's Bill Maher on HBO Max. And I can't fix that what the Democrats are scared of more than anything else. I mean, obviously, besides gluten.

3:37Satire is a way of looking at reality and heightening reality to take down a worthy target. Satirist Andy Borowitz points to Will Rogers, who died in 1935. Rogers, one of the most influential American humorists, often said that Congress made writing jokes easy. He said that about 100 years ago, and it's still true. We have this target-rich environment of the government, but not just the government, the oligarchs, the institutions. So we just wake up every morning and say, OK, who's it going to be today? Early American satirists like Benjamin Franklin and Washington Irving were influenced by Anglo-Irish writers like Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith.

4:20But the goat of American satire is Mark Twain. Man is a reasoning animal. Such is the claim. Though I do think that's open to dispute. Actor Hal Holbrook in the CBS broadcast of Mark Twain Tonight in 1967. Well, I've been studying this reasoning animal for years now, I find the results humiliating. Holbrook performed as Twain hundreds of times before he died in 2021. Actor Richard Thomas is touring the show now. When Twain speaks, he frequently just sounds like one of us, rather than somebody who's giving wisdom. Thomas says Twain would throw his darts, but was very careful not to simply offend.

5:04He's always the first to recognize his own frailties, which means that even when he's challenging you, he's also your friend. You know, he's also intimate with you because he's revealing as much about himself. Rich people were often the target of Twain's satire. Incredibly contemptuous of big money, wealth. But, you know, constantly trying to be a mogul, trying to be rich. When he went out west, he said the gold and silver fever was running high out there, and I came down to the disease right away. I knew that money was the root of all evil, and I wanted all I could get. That intimacy with the audience is so powerful, satirists are often more influential than politicians.

5:45Remember this? And I can see Russia from my house. Tina Fey's Saturday Night Live impression of Sarah Palin might be more memorable than Palin's actual campaign. Less than a month into President Trump's first term, Melissa McCarthy did an impression of Press Secretary Sean Spicer. I would like to begin today by apologizing on behalf of you to me for how you have treated me these last two weeks. And that apology is not accepted. For me, it was just completely surreal. Sean Spicer. I had a really tough time out of the gate at the White House. It's probably generous on my behalf. And so, look, it was fair.

6:30It was funny. It was a little well-deserved. Political players have generally accepted the ridicule, at least publicly. In the 1960s, Vaughn Meader's parody album of the Kennedy family was a sensation. Something must be done. Now, Bobby, it might just be a matter of a change of a few words. Now, for instance, let's take a word like vigor. I say vigor. How do you say vigor? Vigor. While Jacqueline Kennedy was not a fan, John F. Kennedy gave copies of The First Family as Christmas gifts. President Trump has vigorously criticized satirists who've joked about him, especially Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.

7:09Sean Spicer thinks it's justified. He says late-night comedy has taken a mean turn and become too political. It's not about being funny and entertaining and telling jokes. It's about advancing a liberal agenda and one against Donald Trump. It's the clearest indication of the power of satire. Danielle Fuentes Morgan is an associate professor in the Department of English at Santa Clara University. She isn't surprised to see the president criticize comedians on his social media. Because if it was just jokes, he wouldn't care. Morgan says satire has been a vital part of what it means to be American.

7:44It can even be a matter of life or death, she says. She's the author of a book about the history of African-American satire called Laughing to Keep from dying. Satire is about subversion. It is a survival tactic that is meant to open up space for Black life. And what it does is demonstrate Black resiliency, Black selfhood, and Black intelligence. Morgan cites comedians Richard Pryor and Jordan Peele. In her book, she writes about one of the earliest records of African-American satire from 1865. It's a letter from Jordan Anderson, a formerly enslaved man living in Ohio, responding to a letter he'd received from his former master in Tennessee.

8:27Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt and am glad that you are still living. That's actor Lawrence Fishburne reading Anderson's missive for the series Letters Live. Anderson's former master asked him if he and his wife would come back and work for them. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will better be able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again. It vacillates so beautifully between comedy and horror. Our earnings would amount to$11 ,680. Add this, the interest for the time of our wages have been kept back.

9:19It is a really precise indication of Jordan Anderson's ability to speak the truth about what happened in a way that still provides him some cover by pretending like he's just being very earnest. Humor, says Morgan, can lower people's defenses and get them to listen to topics they might otherwise avoid. You've created a space where people are a little bit more willing to hear it because they're laughing. American satire paved the way for stand-up comedy, considered by many practitioners to be a truly American art form. That is, if you can take a joke. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.

10:12But where did stand-up come from? Well, we found an origin story from Cliff Nesteroff, who wrote The Comedians, Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy. Turns out, the term stand-up came from the mob. To explain, Nesteroff brings us back to the start of the 20th century. He chatted with NPR's René Montaigne in 2015. The idea of what a comedian was was very different back then. In vaudeville, comedians often wore costumes. They had partners. They would go around on roller skates delivering punchlines. The old cliche of the seltzer bottle and the baggy pants. That was all very much a reality at the turn of the century in comedy in vaudeville.

10:56There was a guy named Frank Fay who changed the whole game. It was revolutionary at the time. He decided to go up on stage without a costume. He had been doing baggy pants comedy and he couldn't live with himself. He hated gimmicks, you know. So he'd go up on stage just wearing a tuxedo and a carnation in his lapel the same way he would have offstage. Just stood on stage and told jokes. Slowly but surely his style gave way as it influenced other young comedians, guys who were starting out like Bob Hope and Milton Berle and Jack Benny. They were all influenced by this guy, Frank Faye. But at that time they were just called comedians.

11:30The phrase stand-up comedy didn't come later until the mafia started to control show business. And that goes back to speakeasies. When Prohibition ended, those illegal gin joints became legitimate nightclubs, still though, in many cases, controlled by mobsters. Just one of many examples, the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago was co-owned by Al Capone associate, machine gun Jack McGurn. In my book, I interviewed a 90-year-old comedian, kind of an obscure guy who never made it, named Dick Curtis. And he worked all kinds of small mob-run nightclubs. And he argues that the mafia invented the phrase stand-up comedy because in those days, they managed a lot of fighters.

12:13A lot of boxers were owned by the mob. And a fighter that could stand up and take abuse and keep punching was called a stand-up fighter. And a guy that the mob could rely on was called a stand-up guy. So a stand-up comic was a guy who could go up on stage, take abuse from hecklers, joke, joke, joke, joke, very reliable performer. They called him a stand-up comic.

12:38Back in the early 1980s, Eddie Murphy rose to national attention as a stand-up comic. At just 19 years old, he was tapped by SNL. And he went on to make dozens of movies and millions of Americans, including me, laugh. America is great indeed. Imagine a country so free, one can throw glass on the streets. You must be out of your mind. Do you want to do it? Do you want to do it? Black comedians like Eddie Murphy and before him Richard Pryor brought a new sense of storytelling and raw critique of America. Their humor allowed Americans to see themselves more clearly by inviting everyone in on the joke.

13:17That's what journalist Jeff Bennett argues in his book Black Out Loud, the revolutionary history of Black comedy from vaudeville to 90s sitcoms. It's this new vein of humor, he says, that transformed American comedy as we know it. He spoke with Scott Simon this past spring. Jeff, thanks so much for being with us. It is a joy to speak with you, Scott. Thanks for the invitation. Let's begin with Burt Williams, first Black recording artist, highest paid performer, and in otherwise all-white Ziegfeld follies of 1911, W.C. Fields called him the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest I ever knew. How do we put all that together today?

14:00The funniest man he ever saw and the saddest he ever knew. It really speaks to the contradiction of black performers at that time who were so talented and had so much to offer but were forced to perform within the narrow limits of the racist structures back then. Even Burt Williams found ways to infuse some semblance of dignity and humanity into his performance when the only thing he was really allowed to do was to poke fun at blackness. Vaudeville and minstrelsy, that was mass entertainment at the time. And so the DNA of black comedic performance really begins with that era. Do black comedians, dare I say, like Jewish comedians, carry the weight of history?

14:45They do. And what's so particular about the 90s, and one of the reasons I wanted to focus on this era, is that I'd always had this sort of lingering sense of curiosity about how all of these shows, Martin, Living Single, Fresh Prince, In Living Color, Family Matters, A Different World, how they all existed at the same time. And after doing the research, I realized that that wasn't a coincidence. And you can draw a direct line. From that era to the early days, to the Burt Williams who you mentioned, to the Billy Cursans. But beneath that, to your point, they also had to sort of carry the responsibility of being a black artist and representing the fullness of that experience.

15:31I have to tell you, I was surprised to see the names Amos and Andy in here. Well, long before sitcoms that many of us grew up with, I think one of the most popular comedy programs in America was Amos and Andy. And at its height in the 1930s, nearly half of the country was listening to that program every night. And the complication of that show was that it was originally performed by two white actors using exaggerated black dialect. And it relied on stereotypes that today are obviously deeply uncomfortable to hear. Right now, Amos and the Kingfish are in the office discussing Andy's feeling for Madam Queen.

16:08Oh, I tell you, Kingfish, the way Andy looks at Madam Queen, I can tell that he is in love with her again. Yeah, I still don't believe it, Amos. I always say that you can't cook an omelet but once. But in the early 1950s, with the advent of television, Amos and Andy moved to TV, and the roles are played by black actors. And so for the first time, millions of Americans are seeing a black cast on television every week. Greetings from the president of the United States. You have been chosen by your friends and neighbors to serve. Holy smoke, Andy. They're going to induction me. Induction you? I guarantee you they don't want you.

16:49You ain't got nothing to worry about. All you got to do is call them up and tell them they done made a mistake. Yeah, that's the thing you do. What fascinated me is that realizing the story of black comedy, it has always moved through contradictions like that. moments of limitation that eventually open the door for something bigger and something better. I want to get you to talk about Richard Pryor, because the word genius still clings to him, doesn't it? I mean, before Pryor, a lot of comedians performed safe material, I guess you could say, observational jokes, funny stories about everyday life.

17:23But Richard Pryor walked straight into the truth. He talked openly about race, addiction, poverty, police violence, his own mistakes. When I was drinking though, it was fine. I had to stop drinking though, because I got tired of waking up in my car driving 90. There was this full complexity of being human, and he did it in a way that was raw, that was vulnerable, that was hilarious, and it really gave permission to comedians to tell the truth on stage. So for this book, I talked to a number of the performers and showrunners and producers who were key to the shows that we saw in the 90s, one of them being Sinbad.

18:02And he told me a story about how he grew up in a religious family and he got his hands on a Richard Pryor album and was playing it in his room. And what he remembered, he told me, was his parents cracking up and asking, who is that? Who is that? And of course it was Richard Pryor. And he said, you know, Richard Pryor was able to catch everybody. And that's certainly the truth. Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, great talents today. Do you think black comics have a special calling in today's America? I would say it this way. I think that... I'm going to think about this because I don't want to put more responsibility on black comics than is due.

18:37Let me put it this way. I really like Dave Chappelle, and he's irritated some people in recent years. I guess he even irritated me every now and then, but I find him very much worth listening to. I think it's true that for a Chris Rock and a Dave Chappelle, or frankly, any comic that works at that level, black comics for sure, that the comedy has never just been about the laughter. You see comedy as a survival tactic, as a political language. In the 90s, it was an economic engine with these really popular sitcoms. Black performers have used humor to critique power. And I think in doing so, they've shaped American identity itself.

19:20It's Saturday. What would you recommend people watch tonight? I would say, cue up, Coming to America. That's a foundational text in terms of black comedy. This is the first time I've heard Coming to America called a foundational text. America is great indeed. Imagine a country so free, one can throw glass on the streets. You must be out of your mind. You crazy! You crazy! I am not crazy. Listen. Real American. And then if you're thinking about sitcoms, the Whitley and Dwayne's wedding on a different world, the second season of In Living Color, I think was unmatched. There was chaos and genius at the same time.

20:03Will's monologue about his father in Fresh Prince, this really resonant emotional moment that nobody saw coming in the middle of a sitcom. On Martin, Martin and Gina just talking the way that they talk to each other like real people. And that's what I keep coming back to with these sitcoms in particular, is that, yes, they were funny. Yes, they were hilarious. But there was a specificity and authenticity that made them universal. So it was Black audiences and white audiences watching these shows side by side. And that's why they've been so culturally impactful.

20:39That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. And join us next week for our final installment, when we celebrate a song woven into the tapestry of the 20th century, one that's become a global anthem. There's a little song that we sing in our movement down in the South. I don't know if you've heard it. I'm usually credited with changing it to Shell. It is one of the most powerful, at the same time, sacred moment when we were saying we shall overcome. That's next week. This episode was produced by Nick Neves and edited by Julia Redpath with support from the ThruLine production team. Music by Ramtin Adablui and his band Drop Electric.

21:24Special thanks to Irene Noguchi, Yolanda Sanguini, Liana Simstrom, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm your host, Ran Dhabdelfattah. Thanks for listening.

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