The Best Stand-Up Comedy Albums
This week, newcritics kicks off its first ever blogathon, devoted to the subject of all things funny, timed to coincide with the New York Comedy Festival (and its ancillary programming at The Paley Center for Media). While newcritics’ writ is large, the focus of the comedy fest is narrower: standup comedy, and so it’s here that we at newcritics begin.
I’m not sure where the history of stand-up comedy starts, but I suspect it is with English actor Charles Matthews.
Born in June 1776, Matthews’ early career as a bit player exploded when he struck upon a format for performance that highlighted his remarkable gifts as a mimic. At Home, his play which opened in 1808 at the Lyceum in London was a one-man-show, a series of monologues delivered by different characters, various common English types, whose guises Matthews assumed without changes in costume. Matthews mimicked his characters’ postures and accents, telling stories loaded with local color and political commentary. Performances of At Home featured poetic recitations, extended storytelling, impressions, improvised sections, even comic songs. The show was a smash, leading Matthews eventually across the Atlantic to New York, where he developed shows that parodied local American characters, black and white. I suspect Matthews’ performances would be recognizable today to fans of something like Whoopi Goldberg’s early Broadway performances.
The older approaches to comic performance persisted, and even persist to this day. Sketch comedy troupes harken most directly back to the early comic stage, performing routines with recognizable dramatic arcs. For a while the comic duo reigned supreme. A small troupe variation on comic acting, recognizable from their origins in the vaudeville stage, these teams (Abbot & Costello, Burns & Allen, Brooks & Reiner, Bob & Ray, hell, even Cheech & Chong or Nichols & May) ceded us the familiar combination of straight man and comic and the rhythmic beat of step up and punchline that still persists on TV sitcoms.
But when we think of standup comics today we think of something a lot more like what Matthews pioneered - a man (or woman) alone on stage performing observational material as a running commentary on our lives and times.
In the 21st century, comedy’s media menu is almost infinite–standup specials on Comedy Central and HBO, DVDs, YouTube, etc. augment a vast array of concert and nightclub options from big cities to college towns, satellite radio channels, and the like. Today standup comedy is not only a big business, but even at its bluest it’s downright reputable: investment bankers compete in “Funniest Person on Wall Street” contests, and soccer mom’s buy their kids Chris Rock DVDs.
But for a generation of Americans, standup comedy was something more dusty, distasteful, and surprisingly rare, an arcane practice glimpsed in one-minute snatches late at night on Johnny Carson.
Rarely if ever did you see a comic perform live, except maybe as an ignored act opening for Jethro Tull or Anne Murray. Until the widespread adoption of cable television, the cherished secret texts were comedy albums.
It would be easy enough, in making a list of my favorite comedy albums, merely to rank Richard Pryor’s records in order of personal preference. Nearly two years after his death, Pryor remains the black hole at the center of the stand up comedy galaxy, the gravitational force around which every other comic rotates. If I had to chose a desert island collection it would be the Rhino Pryor box set … And It’s Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968-1992).
Of Pryor’s individual albums, the tops for me is 1974’s Grammy Award winner, That Nigger’s Crazy. Recorded at Don Cornelius’ Soul Train club in San Francisco, That Nigger’s Crazy skims 32 minutes of genius from Pryor’s act delivered at the height of the comic’s powers.
By the mid 1970s Pryor had cast off his early, conventional routines which had been inspired by Bill Cosby (whose 1966 debut Wonderfulness should make anybody’s short 
list of great comedy albums), in favor of a series of routines that revealed to white America a previously unimaginged ghetto demimonde (and only Redd Foxx’s dirty records of the 1960s hinted at Pryor’s explosively honest language). Pryor’s new comedy was unflinching–loaded with all the tragedy and sorrow that yucks could bear. The winos, junkies, hipsters and hustlers of Pryor’s new bits were like a dark parallel to Cosby’s cute Fat Albert kids. That Nigger’s Crazy catches Pryor’s new act fully formed but still subversively bumping up against more conventional comedy (listen to the brilliant bit about the wino encountering Dracula in an alley, or the differing reactions of an older, rural black man, and a younger urban hustler encountering aliens).
Later records were even more unstinting (the preacher routine from Bicentennial Nigger is essential Pryor), and by the late 1970s, Pryor was a rock star, innovating in the comedy business by turning standup routines into feature films and reshaping his comedy into something deeply confessional. There’s not a single moment on 1979s Wanted/Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, that is less than brilliant, and 1982’s Live on the Sunset Strip remains the reference standard for confessional comedy.
After Pryor’s records, the comedy albums I hold in the highest esteem are Woody Allen’s three mid 1960s records, originally recorded for the Colpix label, from which a 
selection was available in the 1970s on a two-LP Casablanca set, and are available today on Rhino’s Standup Comic: 1964-1968 CD. [Stay tuned for a piece by David Bushman, TV Curator at Paley about Woody's little known TV work.] Allen was personally indifferent to stand-up performance which is a damn shame because he was brilliant at it. The Casablanca and Rhino collections unfortunately trim some of the references that seemed dated to producers (a girl Woody tries to pick up at a party tells him she wouldn’t have sex with him “even if it would help the space program”) but more evergreen routines, like The Moose remain intact and indelible. Even my 16-year old daughter knows every word.
Finally, I must give a shout out to the first comedy album ever to reach #1 on the Billboard pop charts, Bob Newhart’s 1961 debut The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. An accountant who was signed to Warner Brothers by the great producer and record company executive George Avakian on the basis of radio-friendly demo tapes he had recorded, Newhart had never even performed in front of an audience before Avakian arranged the club date at which The Button-Down Mind was recorded. Newhart was almost an anti-comic. His self-depricating, extra dry, Midwestern deadpan masked the deeply subversive nature of Newhart’s comedy, perfectly exemplified by the album’s opening track Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue. Newhart plays a press agent talking Lincoln out of making changes to the Gettysburg address. Besides the bit’s remarkably prescient critique of focus group-driven politics, the routine also introduced a Newhart trademark–the one-sided phone conversation, a form in which Newhart plays straightman to unheard punchlines.
Your turn. What are the best comedy albums you’ve heard? Some records that made my short list included Lenny Bruce’s Carnegie Hall performance, George Carlin’s Am/FM and Class Clown, and Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small. What records make your lists?
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