Borrowing Laughter
How the library sparked a love of standup comedy.
“I get her home, I’m on the couch, I’m really getting into it, and, uh, she comes into the room...”
-Garry Shandling, Comic Relief (1986)
That’s the first standup comedy line I ever remembered. I wasn’t even sure what Garry Shandling was referring to (playing Nintendo?), but I was delighted by the twist of him getting caught by the person I thought was with him all along.
Although my family didn’t have cable and I had no way of watching the Comic Relief shows on HBO, my mom often took me and my brother to the original Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in downtown San Jose which housed an enormous media collection. (They had all the WrestleMania tapes!!! Oh, and don’t get me started on looking up old NFL box scores with the microfiche machines! You young bucks missed out on all the fun.) There, in this massive media collection in the library’s basement, is where I first saw a Comic Relief tape. Existing from 1986 to 2011, Comic Relief USA was a charity that held televised fundraisers on HBO that were wildly popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s and I watched most of those thanks to the library.
From those tapes, like Comic Relief III (1989), I still remember Penn & Teller’s rat cage stunt and I think I remember Shelley Long as a character in the audience offering someone male or female brownies (“with or without nuts”) but I cannot find the clip anywhere. I know Penn & Teller aren’t standup comedians, but they were standing and hilarious. Maybe one day I’ll write about my love of comedy magic, but I digress.
In addition to the Comic Relief tapes, I was also obsessed with comedy specials from the watermelon-smashing comedian, Gallagher. Young me was a sucker for colorful suspenders and a giant hammer, apparently, because I don’t remember any of his material. I do, however, remember enjoying him say “sumbitch,” which I later grew to appreciate to monumental heights when I discovered Sheriff Buford T. Justice in Smokey and the Bandit.
At the time, being a kid with a respectable bedtime made it very difficult to learn about new comedians but it didn’t seem to matter much because the early 1990s were a period of comedy bust. After booming in the 1980s, the Comic Relief shows being perfect examples of the sheer growth, standup comedy crashed in the early 1990s not unlike how hair metal gave way to grunge. While grunge exploded in late 1991 with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden releasing Nevermind, Ten, and Badmotorfinger, respectively, standup comedy felt forgotten for years. To add to the misery felt in the standup world in the early 1990s, legends Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks passed away within two years of each other and neither reached the age of 40. To illustrate how much standup comedy changed from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, here is the list of winners of the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album, 1987 to 1994:
Bill Cosby, Robin Williams, Robin Williams, Peter Schickele, Peter Schickele, Peter Schickele, Peter Schickele, George Carlin.
Peter Schickele.
Peter Schickele?
This is direct from Schikele’s Wikipedia entry:
“From 1990 to 1993, Schickele's P.D.Q. Bach recordings earned him four consecutive wins for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.”
Peter Schickele was a very talented and revered composer, musical educator, and parodist but I, a standup comedy junkie, had no idea he existed until I got to this part of this piece. With all due respect to Peter Schickele, in the early 1990s, the best comedy albums were essentially classical music recordings with spoken sketches mixed in. That was the state of standup comedy back then. At least according to the Grammy people. Oof.
Fortunately for standup comedy fans, George Carlin won the award in 1994 for the brilliant Jammin’ in New York album that closes with the ever-increasingly relevant “The Planet is Fine” bit.
The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the Earth plus Plastic.
- George Carlin, Jammin’ in New York, recorded in 1992
Since the special aired on HBO, I had to wait nearly 10 years to listen to on CD, but I didn’t have to wait long to listen to my first favorite standup comedy CD: Jeff Foxworthy’s Games Rednecks Play. I probably still owe Columbia House or BMG for the CD, but I cherished it and listened to it as much as possible. Ah, the bit about Atlanta hosting the Summer Olympics, or the one about lunchroom lady bras, or the vasectomy, they’re all hilarious but my favorite is still “Clampetts go to Maui.” Go check out the album on Apple Music or YouTube and treat yourself to learning who won the first “peeing for distance” contest held at the hotel where his family (the “Clampetts”) vacationed.
Standup comedy started to see a resurgence in the mid 1990s, with new faces like Foxworthy building his “You Might Be a Redneck” empire and Chris Rock, whose 1996 album Chris Rock: Bring the Pain is so influential that it was referenced in the second episode of The Office, “Diversity Day.” Rock followed up with Bigger & Blacker in 1999, which won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album the following year.
As the millennium approached, it felt like a new comedy dawn was approaching. In these pre-social media days, most of us had no idea what had been brewing in the northeast comedy scenes, or in San Francisco, or even in Minnesota from where a shy, awkward, modern hippie-type named Mitch Hedberg caught fire and burnt out in what now feels like a blink of an eye, becoming my favorite standup comedian of all time in the process.
David Letterman is my overall comedy hero but back in 2001, I watched his show only through the monologue and maybe through the first guest. Sometimes, I’d program my Goldstar VCR and record a specific episode, like his return after a quadruple bypass in 2000 or his first episode after 9/11, but I rarely watched those second and third slots. By November 2001, this meant that I had already missed several appearances by Mitch Hedberg, but the stars aligned on November 23, 2001 – the day after Thanksgiving – when I watched Mitch Hedberg perform for the first time.
Hopefully, the fine folks at Worldwide Pants will post the performance at some point, but here’s a snippet of Mitch Hedberg performing on Late Show with David Letterman on November 23, 2001:
Although not on that video, this is the part of his performance that absolutely hooked me:
You know when you have a medication that makes you drowsy, they print a warning label that says, ‘Do not operate heavy machinery while under the influence of this medication’? The way I feel, do not operate heavy machinery… ever. ‘Cause it’s heavy. Just put it down and back up. Pick up some light machinery, like a stapler. Put the forklift away!
I’d like to see a forklift lift a crate of forks. It’d be so damn literal.
I was three months away from being able to get into a comedy club, and I had just found my favorite comedian. With many of today’s biggest names just getting started back then, I had no idea yet what a wonderful time it was to be a standup comedy fan.
To be continued…