"In fearful times, comedians are the first to stand up to authority."

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT book review: Funny business
In “Revel With a Cause,” Stephen E. Kercher argues that the “satire boom” of the 1950s and ’60s was not only just entertainment but also a social movement — one that changed American life.
By Rich Cohen

'Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America'
Stephen E. Kercher

....In fearful times, comedians are often the first to stand up to authority. It's in their nature. They know the teacher is going to come down with the ruler, but they go for it anyway. In fact, if you study the history of comedy, you study the history of dissent. This is what Stephen E. Kercher has done in "Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America," a survey of the "satire boom," the comedic flowering that ran from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s. "Far from being mirthless," he writes, "the two decades following World War II spawned satiric forms and techniques that have permanently altered the direction of modern American comic expression."

Kercher, who is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, has watched and analyzed legions of lost television shows, comic strips, routines, sketches. The old names keep turning up: Dick Gregory, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, Bob and Ray. Much of their work was heroic because it flourished in the wake of McCarthyism. This was life re-asserting itself, the giggle that wells up in your chest after the gym teacher has chewed you out.

It began with the cartoonists — people like Bill Mauldin, a World War II grunt who painted Army life as it was lived, not as it was sold; or Al Capp, Herblock and Walt Kelly, whose "Pogo" comic strip became a national sensation. "By 1958," Kercher writes, "an estimated fifty million readers followed 'Pogo' in five hundred newspapers worldwide…. The quadrennial 'I Go Pogo' presidential campaigns that Kelly initiated in 1952 — campaigns intended to parody presidential candidates and their campaigns — became sizeable high school and college fads."

Plays, films, nightclub routines: Each is minutely detailed in "Revel With a Cause." Reading the book is like watching a slo-mo explosion, one triggered by Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, Henry Morgan, Stan Freberg and Harvey Kurtzman's Mad magazine. Then Steve Allen's "The Tonight Show," the Compass Players in Chicago — who spawned Shelley Berman — and Second City, a reflection of which can still be seen on "Saturday Night Live."...

Yet "Revel With a Cause" is saved by its portrayal of Lenny Bruce, who is its hero and stands as an endpoint to all the comedic kvetching....

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-cohen3sep03,0,1169426.story?coll=cl-lat-homepage

[Lisa]

1. sounds like a cool book!

There is also a documentary film out, called "Hammer and Tickle", which looks at the role played by comedy and satire behind the Iron Curtain.