...that's a piece of shit with a band around it!

             Martin Short was on Letterman the other night and for my money still delivers the goods in a hilarious and very cool way. He's in his 60's now and is still hipper and vital than most of the current breed of hipper than thou slackers who rip and riff on the vox populi when in many ways they are in similar lock down too. Martin Short is one of the last descendants from Jack Benny and Bob Hope carrying on a comedy tradition that will disappear when he is laid to rest. Short can do it all, sing, dance, tell jokes, sketch act with such a high degree of talent and youthful exuberance that you begin to wonder how far entertaining in the classic sense has fallen in the last 30 years.

            First, there is very little physical comedy anymore. Pratfalling once a staple in a performer’s arsenal doesn’t exist. Instead we are treated to high-energy jibber jabber from stationary stand ups who for the most part never venture very far from the anchor of the mic stand.

            Secondly, comedy is completely niche now. Fan demographics are reduced to slivers as many comics draw audiences to live shows more by the heft of their social networking skills then by their abilities as stand up comics.

            While the demographics have splintered so finely, the types of comedy practiced has exploded exponentially too.  Today there are comedians who only do angry, or awkward, or nerd, or Goth, or confessional, or gay, or sports oriented comedy, never concerning themselves with narrowing down the comedy experience. No universal truths are told to the widest swath, just knowing chuckles from special interests. When I was young, comedians had the ability to span generations making laugh any and all that would watch. These performers had the skills to entertain disparate audiences. They could work clean or dirty with equal aplomb, do impressions, sing or dance in a pinch and were happy to employ any and all of their abilities to entertain an audience. Crowd pleasing, a term anathema to today's artist/comedian, is the dirtiest word as if there is something wrong with a crowd leaving a show pleased.

            What Martin Short does is universal. It will never, not be funny. This is an incredibly hard thing to achieve. If you listen to an old Sam Kinison CD or even a Richard Pryor CD, in my opinion, the shit doesn’t hold up. It is not the fault of either comedian. The fault lies with the evanescence of the medium itself. The laughs you hear on the recordings are laughs representative of the times in which they were recorded. This is the case for a very high majority of comedians both famous and unknown. The laughs don’t make it out of the times in which they were first heard.

            How many comedy records can you name that stand the test of time? Records that do not sound dated that transcend shifts in their own respective zeitgeists? Exactly two...Woody Allen's the Nightclub Years and Rodney Dangerfield's No Respect. I know there are probably a few more, but you get my point. The rest languish untouched in that giant "any CD for a dollar" bin at Wal-Mart. Even a giant like Bill Cosby suffers under close scrutiny. His “Noah” bit that was so loved in the mid sixties is excruciating to listen to today. Lenny Bruce, a face that would grace most comedy Mount Rushmore’s, if you’ve ever listened to any of his material, (I suggest the famous Palladium bit, 17 minutes long and so hip it can seem like drudgery getting through it) there are very few big yocks, because Lenny, like most comedians, was only specific to his times.

            In today's fractured comedy landscape if you are not confessing deep personal anecdotes, heightened and intensified for maximum impact, something perhaps about the unsolicited Rolfing you received by an overly affectionate uncle, or how you hilariously shit the bed when you were positive it was a fart, it is not comedy. What’s wrong with just being funny for funny’s sake? What about humor that is not embedded with the bitterness of failed dreams, but is funny for the very reason it is not…

            At the end of my run as a comedy club owner I remember how disheartened I felt watching the shows I was booking. These comics were getting the laughs they were hired to get. The audiences seemed to enjoy the product, but after 30 years the times were dictating the comedy subject matter more than ever. Most comedians were happy satisfying the crowd in the most basic ways imaginable. Unique styles were few and far between and as a result a shroud of homogenization descended. The comedians knew the laughs were easy now all you had to do was reference the sad meltdowns of marginal celebrities or reality show freaks.

            At a show one night I recall thinking to myself, "Man, I would kill right now for one good mother-in-law joke!”  By that I meant a joke that was funny 50 years ago, funny now and funny 50 years from now.

            Some comic on a cable stand up show recently was talking about women with big pussies and was wondering how great it would be if you could wear them as hats in the winter time when that jones for little old school began to itch. You know, some glistening one liner that wasn’t a slave to the times, a joke that was so well conceived, disguised and written no one was immune, a little confection so perfectly crafted its simplicity defies description, but the result of which is as resounding and total as anything any real comedian could ever hoped for, appeared in my mind's eye. I originally heard this jewel told by Milton Berle; In 1972 I was in Miami Beach during college spring break. All of my pals were in Fort Lauderdale chasing girls, as is the accepted practice during this particular week, but not me.  Uncle Miltie was performing at the Deauville Hotel. Jerry Lewis was opening the show. The girls can wait. I was hooked on stand up.

            Not a natural stand up Lewis was just OK. It was more about seeing a a star than the actual result, but Berle was a revelation especially at the end when he unleashed this perfect example of everything you’d ever need to know about the perfect joke. At the end of his set Berle pulls out a cigar from the inside of his tuxedo jacket pocket. He begins to unwrap the cellophane from this particular cheroot and as he does begins, “People always ask me what kind of cigars do I like to smoke. Well actually my favorite is this one right here. It’s called a Lawrence Welk* cigar...you know what a Lawrence Welk cigar is...? That's a piece of shit with a band around it!"

I rest my case.

* Lawrence Welk (March 11, 1903 – May 17, 1992) was an American bandleader who hosted The Lawrence Welk Show from 1955 to 1982. Welk was a purveyor of mostly uninspired, satiny arranged musical treacle catering to a predominantly white musical taste that came to be known to his large number of fans (and critics) as "champagne music".