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Review: CNN’s ‘History of Comedy’ Has Good Timing
Review: CNN’s ‘History of Comedy’ Has Good Timing
It’s probably just a coincidence of scheduling, but comedy seems to be in an introspective, somewhat defensive stretch. Last summer the documentary “Can We Take a Joke?,” a theatrical release, explored how hard it is to tell a joke these days without offending someone. Next month, another documentary, “The Last Laugh,” looks at similar issues. And on Thursday, CNN kicks off “The History of Comedy,” an eight-part docu-series full of illuminating perspectives on how far comedy has evolved — or, some might say, degenerated — over the decades.
The CNN program would be enjoyable just for its wealth of vintage clips. The comedy scene today is so crowded and devoted to envelope-pushing that it’s easy to define it merely through the hot names of the moment. To watch this series is to remember — or, depending on your age, to be introduced to — earlier comics who were incendiary in their own way, in much less permissive times.
The series is broken up by subjects, and Part 1 on Thursday night is devoted to ribaldry and raunchiness. An assortment of well-chosen current comics invoke the usual gods — Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor — as they talk about the storming of the censorship battlements, but they also note some less familiar figures. Those who know Redd Foxx only from his relatively mild 1970s sitcom, “Sanford and Son,” might be surprised at the snippets from the risqué comedy albums he was recording way back in the 1950s.
The episode, which of course spends time on Carlin’s seven-dirty-words battle of the early 1970s, ends hilariously as some current comics — Sarah Silverman, Lewis Black, Penn and Teller, Patton Oswalt and more — try to list what the seven actually were. Turns out there are rather a lot more than seven.
Next week’s installment, “The Funnier Sex,” traces the long struggle of female comics to be heard in the writers’ room and onstage. It, too, is full of archival material, well deployed to make clear just how stifling the environment was for a very long time and how bold the women were who broke through. Female comics today have acts full of audacious material, and the episode includes a delicious sampler, but the brashest line in the hour may come from Joan Rivers in an undated clip.
“There are some people who say that some of the things that you do or say are vulgar,” an interviewer says, setting up a question.
“Life is vulgar,” she replies, cutting the interviewer off, seeming peeved at the condescension. “Life is outrageous.”
Have women finally attained parity?
“The fact that people have to keep talking about women in comedy indicates that it’s not equal,” Anne Beatts, a former “Saturday Night Live” writer, says bluntly.
Later episodes include “Spark of Madness,” which examines the careers of brilliant but tormented performers like Pryor, Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams, as well as the highs and lows of the art form, to try to get at what drives comics.
“It has the same rhythms as combat,” Mr. Oswalt says, “where it’s a lot of boredom, and then incredible tension, and either victory or just crushing failure.”
“Ripped From the Headlines” makes a connection between biting topical comics like John Oliver and that most staid of stand-ups, Bob Hope. It was Hope, we’re told, who, when he was entertaining soldiers in World War II, developed the now standard practice of using a staff of writers to come up with jokes based on the news. The template carried into the era of Johnny Carson and eventually Jon Stewart. Also covered: the dicey subject of when it’s too soon to joke about a tragedy like 9/11. In comedy, of course, timing is everything.
The final episode, “Politics Aside,” will look at the lampooning of political subjects and personalities. It wasn’t available for advance viewing, but it might be most relevant to the current moment, when late-night hosts and “Saturday Night Live” seem committed to finding new ways to annoy the Trump administration, yet comics have reason to wonder just what effect they are having.
There is a lot of bravado in this series about how comics are society’s truth-tellers. As Keegan-Michael Key puts it: “The comic has become the person who pulls back the curtain to show the world that: ‘Do you see that this is happening? We didn’t make this up.’”
Of course, we’ve just been through a period in which comedians of all sorts joked about one possible outcome of the American presidential election as if it could never actually come to be, and it came to be anyway. Now, the comics holding that curtain may be realizing that, sometimes, the world isn’t listening or doesn’t care.
imo. 
