In 1900, on the cusp of the 20th century, the philosopher Henri Bergson published ''Laughter,'' an essay in which he proposed the idea that comedy makes us human in the midst of the dehumanizing effects of a mechanized society.
Nearly a century later, comedy is threatened by the dehumanizing effects of network television, particuarly situation comedies.
Television comedy is the comedy of commercials, compromise, and celebrity where seven-digit salaries are the pay-off for smoothing the edges and straightening the curves.
Live stand-up is the antidote to television. A comic. A stage. A microphone. No big production. Just a single voice, speaking from experience, and going for laughs.
Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin stand as the triple threat of American stand-up. Questioning the culture and attacking sacred cows while putting their careers on the line, this trio symbolizes cultural comedy at its best. They played for laughs, and for keeps.
Before Lenny Bruce, comics told jokes. Mother-in-law jokes. Farmer's daughter's jokes. Wife and husband jokes. It's a long tradition that found its modern roots in vaudeville. When Bruce came along, comedy, for the first time in American popular culture, became dangerous. When Bruce pointed out religious and political hypocrisy, people laughed but it left an aftertaste. The same sort of spicy flavor left by his successors Pryor and Carlin.
During the past year, before audiences ranging from 15 to 2,000, I've heard black comics poke fun at white people, female comics deride their male counterparts, Catholics poke fun at Jews, and Jews poke fun at Protestants, and they all poke fun at Muslims. Fat comics poke fun at skinny comics. The Irish poke fun of the Italians and the Italians poke fun at the Poles and the Poles poke fun at themselves. There's a lot of poking. And a lot of fun.
''The only enemy we have is political correctness,'' says Jackie Mason, now preparing his latest Broadway show. ''Censorship is the enemy of comedy. Let me decide what's funny and let the audience decide whether they think it's funny. Let them vote with silence or laughs.''
Comedy has always been intertwined with politics and culture. In his thoughtful book on comedy, ''Subversive Laughter,'' Cambridge-based Ron Jenkins, who holds a master's degree in Clowning from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Clown College, writes, ''The cultural dynamics that have contributed to the increasing detachment of American comedy can be seen in the evolution of Afro-American humor.'' Jenkins goes on to describe the evolution of Richard Pryor's career from the safety of appearing with Merv Griffin to his breakthrough 1976 album, ''Bicentennial Nigger.'' On that recording, Pryor presents an American history lesson that's simultaneously uproarious and appalling, particularly with his monologue of a slave coming to America.
Over the past half century, comedy's greatest cash cow has also become its greatest enemy - network television.
In the early '60s, Ed Sullivan was television's kingmaker. His Sunday night show was aimed directly at the heart of middle America. A regular Sullivan guest was Mason - a Borscht Belt comic delivering humor to the Bread Belt. When Mason, who was getting big laughs, went over time, Sullivan cut him off. The story goes that Sullivan believed Mason flipped him the bird and Mason watched his career, as he put it, ''go down the toilet.''
That singular image - when TV's demands defeated stand-up's art - became a defining moment in American comedy.
Comedy wasn't king. TV was.
The situation comedy popularized laugh tracks, phony pre-recorded laughs injected by engineers and used to bolster comics who weren't getting big enough laughs by themselves.
Look at Roseanne's career. Remember when she was funny? As a stand-up, her material was organic - nurtured by her life as a put-upon, but tough, housewife. When they made her a TV star, playing a put-upon, tough, housewife, she got further and further away from the inner creativity that initially drove her and more dependent on writers. Her personality became a persona. Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart made the transition because the characters they played on television were extensions of their stand-up personae - essentially, the situation comedy audience in their living rooms was just an expansion of the crowds that made their summer stock shows sell out each year. Neither Newhart nor Cosby had to make much of an accommodation to television.
The economic, psychological, and cultural tension occurs when a comic such as Richard Jeni, pound for pound one of the great stand-ups, is offered TV money. In exchange for the salary and time spent off the road, Jeni allowed his unique edge to be sanded down and smoothed over when he starred in the woeful series ''Platypus Man.''
''Basically, it's the difference between being rich and having to work for a living,'' says Jeni. But the price is high.
Look at Jimmy Tingle. Those of us who have seen Tingle perform live in both his stand-up and one-man shows know that he filters his ''60 Minutes II'' routines through CBS management. His razor-sharp comedy has been dulled by the requirements of TV. His commentaries have been criticized as soft, something fans of Tingle's know he isn't.
Consequently, as television - with the exception of cable, particularly HBO, which fosters stand-up with its specials - becomes more homogenized, stand-up becomes more artistically valuable.
''Stand-up comedy is one of the last vestiges of free expression,'' says Carlin. ''We need it. Now, more than ever.''
Patrice O'Neal, one of the best stand-ups, resists playing TV because ''they want me to play a fat, black guy and do fat, black guy material.''
And while O'Neal could use the dough, he resists, content to follow his own more dangerous, insecure path. Unlike so many comics, his goal isn't to have a sit-com deal.
In his afterward to a recent edition of Bergson's ''Laughter,'' the late Simmons College scholar, Wylie Sypher, notes, ''we have lived amid the dust and crashes of the twentieth century and have learned how the direst calamities that befall man seem to prove that human life at its depths is inherently absurd.''
Carlin agrees.
''Comedy is one of the few arenas where individual expression is pure,'' he says. ''It may not be funny. It may not be provocative. But it should be personal. There's something wonderfully simple about a voice, a body, and a microphone.''
Over the next century, we'll see if stand-up comedy can survive in an over-televised society.
