Six Books Better Than Born Standing Up

Mark Twain once said that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog: few people are interested, and the frog dies of it. But don't be fooled by the skeptics — there are plenty of good books about comedy, and all are better than Steve Martin's Born Standing Up (reviewed here). Here are six to get you started.

Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s
by Gerald Nachman (2003)
Pantheon

As undeniably brilliant as Lenny Bruce was, conventional wisdom gives him too much credit for the upheaval in American comedy that occurred in the 60s and 70s. So Gerald Nachman argues in this book which places Mort Sahl, Ernie Kovacs, and, a little later, Nichols and May right alongside Bruce. The resulting panorama moves the forgotten irreverence of '50s comedy to the foreground in an exciting reframing of America in the Eisenhower years.

Funny People
by Steve Allen (1980)
Stein and Day

The year this book was published, NBC gave David Letterman his first talk show. To prepare for the grind of producing a ninety-minute morning program, the 32 year-old stand-up from Indianapolis spent several afternoons with his writing staff at the Museum of Television and Radio finding inspiration from Steve Allen's legendary stint as the first host of The Tonight Show. It was a shrewd move, as no one surpassed Allen in his understanding of comedy through all its varied forms. Funny People is encumbered by the author's immodest claims of originality (made at the expense of the then new generation of comics — Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, Steve Martin, and others. But the author's perceptive dispatches from a close proximity to his subjects is well worth the distinct aftertaste of sour grapes.

Rationale of the Dirty Joke
by G. Legman (1969)
Jonathan Cape

At over 800 pages, G. Legman's study of scatological humor carries the weight and purpose of pre-Enlightenment tomes like Montaigne's Essays and Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. This comparison is not so unlikely when we consider Legman, like his Old World predecessors, was something of a dilettante with exceptional follow through. Though the one-time researcher for The Kinsey Institute published scholarly works on subjects as diverse as origami and fellatio, it was Rationale of the Dirty Joke which prompted a posthumous 2004 profile on Legman in The New Yorker.

A Great, Silly Grin
by Humphrey Carpenter (2000)
Da Capo

Before Monty Python came Peter Sellers and The Goons. But between these two institutions of British anarchic comedy came a generation of satirists who had a greater influence on American Comedy, from Saturday Night Live to The Onion. A Great, Silly Grin is Humphrey Carpenter's engaging history of the '60s satire boom in England; a story that stretches four years from the 1961 premiere issue of Private Eye (a pamphlet so cheaply made it looked like it was photocopied with a daguerreotype) to the BBC's cancellation of That Was the Week that Was.

On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy
by Eric Lax (1975)
Charterhouse

As we flit from fast-food restaurants to editing suites to hotel rooms to the comedian's own Manhattan apartment, Woody Allen opens up in a way he'd avoid for another 20 years about comedy writing and loneliness, two ideas we begin to think of interchangeably in this book-length profile. On Being Funny's prize is the fragile self-possession Allen reveals. With the script to Love and Death overdue, Allen remarks to the author, "it may turn out that I can make only surreal movies that are indifferent to everything but the joke.... I hope that's not true but it's possible." The anguished hint is unmistakable as two years later, Allen won four Oscars for Annie Hall, thus ending his "early, funny" period with little incentive to return to its frivolity.

On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy
by Mel Watkins (1995)
Lawrence Hill Books

In this mix of history and essay, Mel Watkins's synthesizes a variety of African-American comedic traditions into his analysis of Richard Pryor's act. Along the way, Watkins revives the forsaken reputations of Vaudevillians like Bert Williams and Stepin Fetchit, performers who, to maintain their show-business careers in the early 20th Century, were forced to lean on racial stereotypes in their performances. The stakes are unusually high for a book about comedy and the outcome is stirring.