Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars

by Kliph Nesteroff

If you want to get comedians … allow them freedom of speech. They haven’t got any … That’s why I think there’s no more comedy. —Groucho Marx, April 1962

For generations, comedians were censored if they joked about sex, politics, or religion. Today these are among comedy’s most commonly discussed topics. But not long ago, if a comic insisted on covering any of those three categories, the result was not just censorship, but potential arrest. Lenny Bruce was arrested for saying the word “schmuck” onstage in Los Angeles in 1962. George Carlin was arrested for vulgarity in Milwaukee in 1972. Richard Pryor was arrested for swearing in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1974. Andrew Dice Clay was threatened with arrest in Dallas, Texas, in 1990. The harassment of comedians was far more serious when they were up against the law.

With each new round of immigration, comedians perfected ethnic dialect at their expense. The mockery of immigrants using mangled English gave comedy one of its most effective devices: malapropisms.

Ironically, vaudeville largely consisted of assimilated immigrants who held contempt for newer arrivals.

the more established the immigrant group, the less patience they had for being insulted. By the end of the 1890s, Irish and Italian immigrants were objecting to portrayals of intoxicated leprechauns and moronic organ-grinders. And when their children came of age, they organized sustained protest movements to end ethnic stereotyping on the stage. Vaudevillian Walter Kelly received “a letter threatening his life if he did not immediately cut out several Ital...

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle concluded, “Sensitiveness under such conditions may very easily be carried to extremes. The stage abounds in racial types of which a multitude are frankly caricatures. The violent objection … is a spirit that reveals a regrettable absence of the sense of humor.” In their opinion, ethnic minorities were selfish for wanting to eliminate stereotype comedy when it was enjoyed by so many: “A few may seriously object, from rooted prejudice to racial caricature. But more enjoy and applaud, and they have rights that are at least worthy of consideration.”

Not new

An editorial published in the Topeka Daily Capital in 1903 cautioned vaudeville comedians not to succumb to pressure groups because it might inspire others: “This may well worry the playwrights and players, for racial caricature … has been regarded as legitimate ever since Shakespeare. If the well-known and almost indispensable Irish policeman is to be abolished from the stage by decree of the Clan-na-gael, what is to hinder the ‘Afro-American’ societies from following suit and threatening dire consequences on the heads of players who represent the stage type of negro?”

The writer predicted it would lead to the d...

“The final upshot [would be] to strip comedy of its most engaging and popular features. If the raid should extend to all sorts of people caricatured in the the...

Black stereotypes were seldom objected to in the white newspapers, but complaints were ...

Some comedians were forced to throw out racial material they had honed for years. In an era when comedians seldom wrote their own material and veteran comics rarely changed their act, coming up with an all-new routine seemed an insurmountable task.

“Should this disposition on the part of offended races that are for stage caricature continue, the poor vaudeville actor and imitator will be put out of business,” reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1915. “To object to the reproduction of the speech and supposed lineaments of Shylock, for instance, if done with intelligence should not be a ground for resentment.”

The Chicago Record-Herald took the opposite view, encouraging comedians to adjust material to reflect the new era, “Let our humorists try fresh fields and new pastures. Let them exercise their ingenuity, their imagination, their power of observation … give us a sense of freshness and unexpectedness. Profession...

“Certainly our ideas of what is funny have changed,” he wrote in April 1915. “Humor is an ephemeral thing. A generation ago we laughed at what today would merely make us ill.”

Filmmaker D.W. Griffith optioned The Clansman for the big screen. Griffith would evenutally change the title from The Clansman to The Birth of a Nation. He saw nothing wrong with its content. Griffith had grown up in the Confederacy.

Black protest mobilized in advance of The Birth of a Nation premiere on February 8, 1915. The California Eagle, the most influential Black newspaper on the West Coast, published editorials in opposition. Thirty thousand African Americans marched in opposition in Los Angeles. May Childs Nerney of the NAACP mailed “pamphlets by the thousands to the smallest of towns, compiling a list of pending state censor bills.” She called The Birth of a Nation a “deliberate attempt to humiliate 10,000,000 American citizens and portray them as nothing but beasts.”

The Birth of a Nation was intentionally incendiary. Actors posing as Klansmen rode horseback through downtown Los Angeles to promote the film. At the Atlanta premiere, the real Ku Klux Klan rode through the streets.

The movie was banned in Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. It was rejected in Newark, St. Louis, and Atlantic City. Screenings were delayed in Boston for eight weeks while protesters marched en masse.

While the Black press encouraged the protests, white newspapers condemned them. The Macon Telegraph said the protesters were “born of narrow-mindedness and ignorance.” The Houston Chronicle asked whether “the people of Houston are to have their standards of thought or taste set or fixed or regulated by the negro citizenship.”

A newspaper in Rhode Island warned that suppressing The Birth of a Nation would set a bad precedent, for “then there is no room on the stage for The Merchant of Venice or any other play that may be unwelcome to a relatively small element of the public in a given community.”

D.W. Griffith said his right to free speech was being challenged and the controversy constituted “a fight for the whole institution of the screen.” He published a pamphlet titled The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.

“Today the censorship of moving pictures throughout the entire country is seriously hampering the growth of the art,” he wrote. “So long as censorship holds the motion pictur...

Censorship was possibly at its height during World War One. President Wilson’s Espionage Act and subsequent Sedition Act suspended civil liberties in 1917 and silenced critics of war. If anyone so much as questioned the morality of international bloodshed, they were subject to immediate arrest by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. Simply for saying the country “could not afford the economic costs of sending an army to Europe,” a deaf man from Atlanta was sent to the penitentiary.

To those who say cancel culture is "at an all time high"

The Nazi politicians of Germany hated many of the same things being demonized in the United States. Crooning, jitterbugging, and jazz music were among the first things banned by the Nazis. German Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen called the genres a “corroding poison [that] threatens to destroy the moral code” and categorized them as “Cultural Bolshevism.”

“Comedians have no right to be jocular about such things as the Nazi four-year economic plan or Adolf Hitler’s demand for colonies because they are too important and require too much careful thinking on the part of big minds,” said Goebbels. The Nazis banned nearly all comedy—with the exception of anti-Semitic jokes and racist humor.

Fibber McGee and Molly was a popular radio comedy that used Greek, Irish, Black, and Asian stereotypes. When the program was pressured to eliminate them, head writer Don Quinn was angered. He called the campaign “snoopery, meddling, finger pointing and thin-skinned crybabyism.” Quinn felt Americans had gone soft: “We’ve got an epidemic of war-born touchiness; a mass yearning to regulate and restrict … Everybody wants to be a censor [or] maybe it’s just that a few people are getting louder.”

“We are now in the midst of a total World War and changes are already taking place, changes for the better, changes which concern all of us deeply … The next time you hear someone start to tell what he considers to be a great joke, using certain distasteful words concerning colored people … you might urge the individual to stop using those words and, even better, to stop telling that kind of joke. These days, jokes like that are not very funny except to the Germans. It’s a little thing, yes, but the little things do as much as the big things to wear out the nerves of decent, self-respecting Negroes in our community.”

WWII perspective

The American Guild of Variety Artists, a union that represented nightclub performers, drafted a resolution in July 1944 that forbade “all clichés and racial caricatures for comedy purposes.”

“Feeling has long been manifest in some quarters that racial disunity is being engendered by frequent cracks in niteries at the expense of minority groups,” reported Variety. “More often than not contempt … is implied via makeup and costume, to the embarrassment of many in the audience.”

“Comedians persist in being among the worst offenders against racial minorities. This is not because comedians are biased, but because so many are thoughtless of consequences. Anything for a giggle. Moreover, a comedian’s habit of thinking exclusively in terms of gags … often makes him unwilling to admit—when challenged—that much of what used to be innocent fun is now vicious political propaganda … They do not acknowledge the offense, pro...

The Jack Benny Program also featured Eddie Anderson, the country’s highest-paid African American comedian. He was beloved for the role of Rochester, a sarcastic manservant who ridiculed the vanity of his white boss. In real life Anderson owned racehorses, designed his own sports car, and purchased a Los Angeles city block, which he renamed Rochester Circle. Enjoying his fame and wealth, he denied the existence of discrimination.

“I believe those who have shown that they had something to offer have been given an equal opportunity,” said Anderson. “I haven’t seen anything objectionable. I don’t see why certain characters are called stereotypes.”

Lil Wayne

She defended herself among the sea of white do-gooders. “I am very proud that I can portray a stereotyped role,” she said. “When you take that away from me, you take away my birthright. We are not doing anything to disgrace anybody. Such things as that should be left alone. There are certain traditions we can’t get rid of. [I will] fight the above resolution to eliminate the stereotyping of Negroes on the radio.”

Randolph was criticized in the Black press.

“Negro delegates spoke of portraying … stereotype as their birthright—I am embarrassed as a human being and as a Negro. They might well look to other of their birthrights for which such men as Frederick Douglass foug...

The corporate interests that dominated radio quickly seized control of TV. Censorship decisions were made solely in the name of protecting sponsor profit. Programming was sanitized to the point of blandness so as not to offend the consumer. America seemed ready for greater maturity, but sponsors, television networks, and the government imposed even heavier censorship.

The Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle was an early television hit and it frequently featured the comedian in drag. Wearing a wig and crooked makeup, the laughs came from Berle’s homely appearance, but critics accused him of perversion.

“Milton Berle’s show has too many two-sided jokes,” wrote a woman from Waynesville, Ohio. “People wonder where their children pick up all this trash. Could it be due to TV shows such as this?”

“Why station WNBC or the sponsor, Phillip Morris Cigarettes, should permit this interloper to ridicule a sacred occasion many cannot fathom. It was thoroughly anti-Christian.”

NBC censors complained about the “swishy manner” of comedy team Olsen and Johnson, banned all references to transgendered woman Christine Jorgensen, outlawed any mention of the Kinsey Report, and scolded comedian Jack Carter for making a live appearance “in too-tight long johns causing the home audience to clearly see the contours of his penis.”

The Jack Benny Program, the comedian bragged about the brutal toughness of his new bodyguard, Killer Hogan. The studio audience exploded in laughter when the bodyguard delivered his first line in a sing-song lisp. NBC told Benny to immediate...

Comedians, authors, and newspapers obsessed over the changes. Columnist Erskine Johnson complained that there were too many “taboos under which all comedians now work … No dialect jokes, no working in blackface, no this and that.”

“Americans are losing their sense of humor,” said former burlesque comic Jack Albertson. “Minority groups carry chips on their shoulders … Blackface comedy, a traditional American form of humor, is unfashionable now.”

Black people should not be upset with stereotypes, went the argument, because Italians, Irish, and Jewish people never complained. But all of the aforementioned groups had indeed complained, picketed, and protested, sometimes violently, decades earlier.

In an article published in September 1958, the Saturday Evening Post concluded things had gone too far: “Dialect jokes are taboo, a political gag may brand you un-American, and racial jokes bring a deluge of enraged mail from sensitive ‘minority groups!’ In fact, most of the material that immortalized our old-school comics is strictly out of bounds today!”

“Now you can’t kid anyone anymore,” complained broadcaster Arthur Godfrey. “Negro and Italia...

“We’re losing our sense of humor,” warned author Corey Ford. “One by one we’ve herded all our sacred cows behind a high barbed-wire fence of patriotic or social or racial sensitivity. If a comedian trespasses ins...

Popular comedian Danny Thomas said he was sick of “over-sensitive groups and individuals” who were “too thin...

“From now on I’m going to use as much dialect material as possible in my guest appearances,” said Thomas. “I’ll do Yiddish, Greek, Arabic, Negro, Italian and Iris...

“The area of life in which ridicule is permissible is steadily shrinking,” wrote Malcolm Muggeridge in the April 1958 issue of Esquire. “Never since American television began has the viewer’s comedy ration been smaller than it is tod...