Eastern Europe was blocked off from the rest of the world by an iron curtain, so they told us. I remember seeing an animated film on TV showing this curtain going up, and I believed it really existed; that if you went to Europe when you got to the border of West Germany you'd actually come up against an iron wall of some type, keeping everyone away.
Now it looked like we would have Cuban Communists just 90 miles off shore, and our soldiers were still over in South Korea, keeping an eye on the Communists from the north.
And what about that little country-somewhere over there in Southeast Asia was it? A country that the French got kicked out of. Someplace called Vietnam. The Communists were making trouble there too.
The nuclear bomb hung over all of our heads. The end of the world could come at any moment, heralded by sirens and that harsh moan of the warning signal on the TV. Our last moments on earth spent staring at the walls of our school, or bent beneath the desks in our classrooms.
We needed to laugh and there were plenty of men and women with the talent and the personality to take our minds off of all the worries in the world. The greatest crop of stand-up comedians would parade before us on TV, brightening our lives with laughter. As children of the time we saw most of them on the Ed Sullivan Show; the other programs of the day would be on way past our bed times.
The oldest and greatest were still there, showing us that truly good comedy never goes out of style. We could still see Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Henny Youngman, Milton Berle and George Burns and Gracie Allen, proving that old could still be good.A new crop of comedians were grabbing the stage. Some were edgy and political, and some spoke of the gentler times of childhood.
Black comedians could talk about racism, and women were finally able to present their point of view.
This new generation of comedians would change our ideas about what was funny, and many of them would have a dramatic impact on the future of comedy in movies, on TV and in the nightclubs all over the world.So I offer up a roster of some of the best minds and practitioners of the art of comedy. The folks who made us laugh with one-liners, insults, timely commentary on the political and racial issues of the day, and just plain craziness. I'm sure I'll miss a few, so feel free to add your own. Here's to the ladies and gentlemen who gave us the ability to laugh at the world and at ourselves during a time when it seemed as though the whole world was going mad.
Jack Benny
Henny Youngman
Milton Berle
Bob Hope
Phyllis Diller
Bill Cosby
Woody Allen
Selma Diamond
Jonathan Winters
Moms Mabley
Burns and Allen
Victor Borge
Bob Newhart
Don Rickles
Godfrey Cambridge
Joan Rivers
The Smothers Brothers
Lenny Bruce
Totie Fields
Dick Gregory
Allen and Rossi
Rodney Dangerfield
George Carlin
Mike Nichols and Elaine May
Mort Sahl
Minnie Pearl
Stiller and Meara
Their gift to us is priceless.
2 comments:
Jim,
That's a good list, but there're two big omissions that come to mind -
Jackie Gleason "And away we go!"
and
Red Skelton - "Good night and may God bless"
Bob,
You are right about Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton. Extremely funny and talented, and both strong influences in the history of American comedy, and I watched them regularly. I left them off of the list mainly because at the time I considered them television actors. Red still did his stand-up stuff, but mostly on his TV show, and I thought of Jackie Gleason as a sketch comic. You'll notice I left out the impressionists and the ventriloquists as well. There are so many to pay tribute to.
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