CLASSIC BITS: Woody Allen

During last year's Comedians of Comedy show at The TLA, Eugene Mirman did a bit making fun of a ska/reggae band that had messaged him on Myspace. He played one of their songs and as a way to insult them, said that it is what he thinks about when he wants to hold out in the middle of the dirty dance in the sack. "Sorry, baseball," he concluded.

A reference to a Woody Allen joke? Maybe, maybe not. And did the audience laugh because they got the reference? Maybe, maybe not.

Nevertheless, here is Woody Allen performing that bit. It's part of the track "Second Marriage" and was recorded in San Francisco in 1968 for debut album, Woody Allen, which was re-packaged on a two LP set The Nightclub Years 1964-1968 in 1972 by United Artists Records and then as part of a single CD, Standup Comic, by Rhino Records in 1999. This is only a portion of the specific track and you should really buy the CD if you want all 25 tracks.



Woody Allen's stand-up demeanor was very much like in his films: the ultimate neurotic and completely self-conscious. Always talking about himself, he seems vulnerable but always in control. In the 1960s, he was a unique stand-up character, according to Gerald Nachman in his book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s:

The waiflike Allen's mere presence on a nightclub stage in the early 1960s was in itself funny, even startling. He exuded what one writer termed a "wistful futility"; critics referred to his "lemur-like" visage. Apart from Wally Cox, there had never been anybody in nightclubs who remotely resembled Allen, a pipsqueak with the chutzpah to invade the territory that had for decades been the province of brassy guys in tuxes. Even Mort Sahl, who altered the stand-up dress code and elevated the intelligence quotient, was brash and frenzied. Woody Allen was none of that. He looked like a bookworm in a green corduroy suit who, blinking at the light, seemed to have just crawled out from the library stacks, unprepared to meet the world.

Yet something unlemur-like happened when Allen stumbled onstage and began to talk. People paid attention, if only out of curiosity. Audiences took pity on him. Anyone who saw Allen in those first weeks at the tiny room upstairs in a Greenwich Village club called the Duplex must have thought, There seems to be some mistake, and wondered what time the real comedian came on. He wasn't a wuss, like Cox and Jackie Vernon, who traded on meekness. If you felt sorry for him, it was only because he was so uneasy onstage. But the strenth of his jokes sustained him over those first shaky months, when Ralph J. Gleason wrote warily, "Woody Allen might be worth hearing more than once."

RELATED: Woody Allen performing another classic, "The Moose" on English television in 1965.


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CLASSIC BITS: "Religions, Inc." by Lenny Bruce

Today you can say basically anything you want in front of a microphone in the name of comedy. Sarah Silverman and other comics have torn down the last wall of taboos. We've run out of a diseases to poke fun of to the point that comics are going back to cured diseases like polio for fresh laughs.

But the late 50s and 60s were a different time. I'm not going to pretend that I knew what America was like then, but you couldn't go on a stage and just say anything. Lenny Bruce helped change that and it wasn't just his swearing and drug use. While it was what got him infamously arrested and led to his heroin overdose in 1966 (Phil Spector said he died "from an overdose of the police"), there was even more to him.

"Religions, Inc." was originally released on Bruce's second album, The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce (1958, Fantasy). In 1991 it was re-released on CD in the The Lenny Bruce Originals vol. 1 collection with his first album Interviews of Our Times (Fantasy). And it was also included on the Let The Buyer Beware 6-CD set from 2004 (Shout Factory).



Richard Zoglin explains in his new book Comedy at the Edge:

Heard today, unfortunately, most of Bruce's best-known routines aren't great advertisements for this talent. "Religions, Inc.," his acid re-creation of a Madison Avenue-style meeting of evangelical leaders, was a brave piece of commentary, a swipe at commercialized religion that was years ahead of its time. But as comedy, the juvenile one-liners must have seemed ham-handed even then.

Some of the references are obscure today to the point that The Lenny Bruce Originals Vol. 1 includes a glossary. "Philly Joe" was Miles Davis' drummer and a friend of Bruce's known for his on stage impersonations of Bela Lugosi's Dracula. "C.C. Camps" were a string of work-camps nationwide inaugurated by FDR to combat unemployment during the Great Depression.

The middle can be confusing and it's not quite as "tight" by today's standards. Yet the voice and point-of-view are relevant even today. It's been over 50 years and it's not too often that we hear such a biting and relentless critique of a major institution of our society. Today, many jokes about religion today don't go beyond young boys and Catholic priests.
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Classic Bits: "Black Nationalist" by Richard Pryor

This week's classic bit comes from Pryor's 1978 album Big Ben The Blacksmith. The details on this record are very cloudy and the only thing on the internet I could dig up was from the wikipedia entry of Laff Records:

Pryor released only one album for Laff, Craps (After Hours), with his direct participation, then later signed a deal with the larger Stax label. Laff sued Pryor after Stax released That Nigger's Crazy in 1974; the case was settled when Laff gave Pryor his freedom in exchange for being allowed to compile albums from recordings they made with Pryor between 1969 and 1973.

In 2002 Richard Pryor and his wife/manager Jennifer Lee Pryor won the rights to all of Richard's Laff masters and raw tapes in a court case. The Pryors then gave free rein to Rhino Records to go through the tapes and make an anthology that included the entire Craps (After Hours) album and the best of other Laff releases. The results were released in 2005 on the 2-CD set Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966-1974).

This explains the cheesy album cover and horrible editing of this record. Often the audience laughs and applauds uproariously in places that don't seem right and certain parts of a bit are simply cut out. But even so, in this bit Pryor mocks six different characters as they discuss religion on television and not even the Black Nationalist is safe.

So at the risk of looking like someone else taking advantage of Richard Pryor, here it is. This is a vinyl rip, so please excuse the scratchiness.



In 1994 the album was re-released on compact disc by Polygram/Island and in 2005 Pryor sued the Universal Music Group claiming that they were selling 11 of his recordings without actually owning the rights.
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Classic Bits: "You Can't Get Bitter" by Bill Hicks

Bill Hicks is one of my favorite comedians ever. Not only was he incredibly honest, brave and unique, but he could write a great joke. That's not a backhanded compliment. Rather, it's easy to spout unconventional ideas, but it's difficult to always make it funny. Bill could do that no matter if he was talking about far-out politics, conspiracies or amazing drug trips. But he also had jokes about the beach and how moths were always attracted to light.

This bit is from the 2002 compilation Love, Laughter and Truth.



Love, Laughter and Truth is a collection from Hicks' personal tapes that weren't intended for public consumption. In most of them, like this one, he isn't killing and sometimes the crowd is yelling out at him. At the beginning of this bit he starts slow and seems to dig himself a hole. But as he sets the scene and it becomes more descriptive and grotesque, the laughs and moans come rolling in. These aren't just standard punchlines but incredibly dense turnings of phrase until the applause at the end.
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