Stand-Up Comedy Pt I

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Josh (0:11)

Waka Waka, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and I just made sure to kick this two-part episode on Stand-Up Comedy off in the worst way possible.

Chuck (0:24)

You know what, this one has some COAs, unfortunately.

Josh (0:30)

Well, yeah, I mean, we're talking about genuine Stand-Up Comedy, and you know, they're edgy. They push the envelope.

Chuck (0:35)

Yeah, I mean, we're going to, there are people throughout this, peppered throughout this episode, that some of them, they're like bad people. Some of them have done bad things.

But you can't talk about the history of Stand-Up Comedy without talking about some bad people as it turns out.

Josh (0:50)

Are you talking about Frank Fay?

Chuck (0:53)

I mean, there's a bunch of people throughout here.

Josh (0:55)

Oh, okay. Well, I'm not familiar with a lot of the badness here, so let's just avoid it.

Chuck (1:02)

That and, you know, this is a thing on Stand-Up Comedy, so we're seeing our own A, because like you can't do Justice even in a two-parter. Like after we got all this together, I was like, oh, well, we're not even talking about truly weird stand-up, like Andy Kaufman and Zach Galifianakis, and we're not talking about this and this, and you just have to stop at a certain point and realize you can't cover something completely that's so deep and vast like this, you know?

Josh (1:33)

For sure. Every once in a while, we record an episode, and then like the next day, I'm like, oh, I should have said this. I think that's going to happen 15 or 20 times.

Chuck (1:42)

Yeah, but we got to let ourselves up, because I know we're going to get emails. How could you not talk about blank? It's just the deal, it's too much to cover.

Josh (1:51)

No, but shoot us those emails, especially ones we didn't bring up, because we might not have heard of them, and not only name check them, send us your favorite joke of theirs too.

Chuck (2:01)

And I pledge to do a full episode on Andy Kaufman.

Josh (2:04)

Okay.

All right. Okay. Well, I pledge to do a full episode on Zach Galifianakis then.

Chuck (2:11)

Hey, I do one on Zach in a second.

Josh (2:13)

And one other COA too, just to throw in. Some of these jokes are maybe slightly edgier than stuff we would normally say, but that's, we're covering Stand-Up Comedy, which is inherently edgier than what we normally do.

All right. You ready?

Chuck (2:28)

I'm ready.

Josh (2:29)

We're talking about Stand-Up Comedy, as we've said.

And Livia helped us with this, and she points out that basically, if you're talking about being funny in front of an audience, Stand-Up Comedy is pretty much as old as humans are, as long as old as human speeches, I would guess. Yeah. Well, you could have made gestures that were funny. But to really just kind of shore it up, you want to just zero in on vaudeville.

Chuck (2:55)

Yeah. I mean, a lot of this stuff we've covered in other episodes, it's funny, this is another one of those we've danced around. Like we've done shows on specific comedians, the science of funny, and like two or three other ones, and then of course vaudeville.

But here we are with Stand-Up, but you have to start at vaudeville, because vaudeville had a lot of skits and stuff like that, but it wasn't too long before there were people, all of a sudden, whether they were hosting the night or something, did something that resembled stand-up. And Charlie Case is one of those people that people say like, hey, maybe he was the first person doing this.

Josh (3:35)

Yeah, he was the son of a free-born black man and an Irish mother, and he was educated and became a lawyer and a salesman, but he also was known as a great storyteller. And so starting in, I think, actually, 1880, he joined vaudeville. And being a vaudeville performer of any race, he, whenever he talked about black culture, it was in a mocking way. He had to wear blackface, all that stuff. And eventually he was like, I'm not really down with this. This is trite.

So he moved on around 1900 to doing, essentially, what's a stand-up act.

Chuck (4:10)

Yeah, he, you know, tried and true thing. He talked about his family a lot. And I found this part hysterical. At one point, his performance was on the billing, was billed as the man who talks about his father.