The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form

by Eddie Tafoya

Despite the claim of many a Borscht Belt comic that he is a practitioner of "the world's second-oldest professsion," stand-up comedy is a young and distinctly American literary form. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century when, enabled by unprecedented prosperity and the right to free expression, that monologists began appearing in American vaudeville halls. Yet even though it has since become an entertainment industry mainstay, stand-up comedy has received precious little scholarly attention. The Legacy of the Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form looks at the theory of stand-up comedy, its literary dimensions, and its distinctly American qualities as it provides a detailed history of the forces that shaped it. The study concludes with a look at the works of specific comedians such as Steven Wright, whose three decades of performances comprise a single picaresque tale, and Richard Pryor, whose 1982 masterpiece Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip serves as modern America's answer to Dante Aligheri's epic poem, Inferno. The result is one of the first serious treatments of stand-up comedy as a literary form.

Genres: Comedy, Humor

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Born, raised, traumatized, indoctrinated, oppressed, and arrested while scurrying like a beetle through the dust, streetgrime, alleyways, lavender dawns, and mercury-vapor hazes of Albuquerque's Old Town, Downtown, and Uptown; educated, bewildered, beat-up, picked on, lied to, suspended, led astray, and introduced to the rigors of impotent rage via the Archdiocese of Santa Fe's parochial schools; entered the University of New Mexico as an art major, asked to leave while a psych major; found myself at age 21 broke, alienated, ostracized, psychotic, neurotic -- deep in the throes of the post-pubescent blues -- and sweeping up cigarette butts in a posh Colorado resort to earn my keep. A fit of despair. No television. My sister's portable 8-track player finally unfixable. Signed up for five free books from the Literary Guild. Chose the Hemingway set -- three books count as one selection. Missed the stuff about the missing equipment at the core of The Sun Also Rises. Fell in love, anyway, with the sparse and textural brilliance of Hemingway's prose. Spent the next three years as a virtual placenti spongiosi (those soulless medieval beings produced by unimpregnated but extra-fertile women)* wandering the catacombs of inner Albuquerque; experimenting with artforms of various sorts, dimensions, respectabilities: painting, drawing, poetry, playwriting, acting, beatniking, stand-up comedy, hallucinatory fits, performance art, guitaring. Figured I had little in the way of manual dexterity or instant charisma, so I best become a writer.

*Thanks to Jack Vernon.

Reviews

[John G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was quite an exceptional book, perhaps the best I've read on what humor and stand-up comedy is and what it can do. It's a very serious and deep book and is only book I've really seen that talks about the spiritual dimensions of humor and the comedian. This author has an incredible background, that of literature and creative writing professor, and also a New Testament scholar. I loved this book because it treated comedy and humor as important topics worthy of serious study. This book forces you to work, but enriches you for your effort, I have to give a listen to Steven Wright soon after reading the chapter on him. There is a recognition and respect and honor paid by the author towards the subject of his study. This book is a scholarly work, but it's not written in esoteric, dense foggy language, but in understandable terms. This is not only a book about comedy, it's about the joy and rewards of reading and thinking, the power, beauty and mystery of words to communicative subjective meaning and how comedy fills a special niche in the use of language. This is an important book, not only in terms of comedy, but about life in general. Something tells me this author could probably lay down a pretty smoking sermon himself! Preach on brother! I wish we had more professors out there like this author willing to share his gifts of insight and analysis with his students and the rest of the world instead of the barren wasteland that academia has been for ages.