Comedy Isn’t Funny

Or, shall we say, topical comedy ceases to be funny within a decade or less of its performance. I was reminded of this truth when we were watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel recently, a show, by the way, I couldn’t really get into, given its stock, even stereotyped, Jewish characters and its in-my-view unconvincing portrayal of Greenwich Village bohemia. So, in the show you see Lenny Bruce perform, and while some of the bits rise to the level of amusing, what comes across to me is a sort of flattering of the audience in that they are the ones who get the "hip" lingo, unlike all those "squares." Or take Mort Sahl, the father of topical, political comedy. The overriding sense I get from him is a sense of self-congratulation among him and the audience for having the approved liberal opinions. Then there's Nichols & May. They seem to be lampooning the pretensions of the cultural in-crowd, but it's not funny, because we only understand them on an intellectual level like, oh right, people back in the Kennedy era did carry on like that. Then there's Woody Allen. I recently re-watched Annie Hall. It's still a great movie, but the gags he included, which I found so funny then, left me stone faced. I'm not going to make a totally blanket statement here, though. I bet Richard Pryor still comes across as very, very funny. But you know who definitely always remains funny? It's the people who simply tell jokes, like Rodney Dangerfield. I can pull up clips from him and do some literal laughing out loud. That's why you will laugh more at a vaudeville routine than you will at the more "serious" comics who replaced them in the 50s.