Word: stand-up
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When the culture began to change in the late 1960s - when the old one-liner comics on The Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the war in Vietnam - George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it's hard to think of Carlin as one of America's most radical and courageous popular artists...
Richard Zoglin's book Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America was published in February by Bloomsbury...
...Neither the press nor the President had a rebuttal to Colbert, then or now, so he was simply not invited back and officially forgotten. Ever since, the dinner had been a far less newsworthy affair. As is tradition, the President stood to do a short stand-up act, which included the retelling of an old joke about Vice President Dick Cheney watching Bush through a peephole in the Oval Office door while masturbating. Such is the state of Washington humor...
...somber story behind the novel, Allende’s tales were filled with humor and wit. When pressed by audience members about the source of her humor, Allende responded that “humor is not something you do consciously. I’m not a comedian or a stand-up comic.” She also showed a self-deprecating streak, saying, “I’m a sloppy writer,” and that she was “very bad at titles.” Although she is fluent in English, Allende continues to write...
...That's the key to Stuff White People Like - and the stand-up of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Roseanne Barr, Jeff Foxworthy's Redneck shtick, and Dave Chappelle's comedy, says Leon Rappoport, Kansas State psychology professor emeritus and author of Punchlines: The Case for Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Humor. "Instead of seeing these traits as something to be ashamed of, they're something to be laughed at." And the laughter is cathartic; it gives people a sense of empowerment and competence. "It's like they're mastering knowledge of themselves," he says...