It`s intended as a reference work and priced accordingly, at $55. But Ronald L. Smith`s hefty new tome ”Comedy on Record: The Complete Critical Discography” (Garland) is a compulsively readable book, too-an informative and often very amusing trip through the history of recorded American humor.
Amply fulfilling its stated goal, ”Comedy on Record” lists in alphabetical order, rates from zero to four stars and describes, often in considerable detail, virtually every comedy album ever released in this country-beginning with ”Abbott and Costello on Radio” (”an excellent compilation of the boys` silliest word-confusion routines,” the album gets four stars) and concluding, some 730 pages and 2,600 recordings later, with a look at a trio of albums put out by the ”The Zoo,” a pool of ”obnoxious, pseudo-hip” Manhattan disc jockeys.
Editor of ”Rave,” a comedy magazine, and the author of biographies of Bill Cosby and Johnny Carson, the 35-year-old Smith is himself a dedicated collector of comedy records. (”The main reason why this book exists,” he says, ”is that the author always wanted a book like it.”)
As a consumer guide, ”Comedy on Record” has two facets. The star ratings reflect Smith`s estimate of each recording`s artistic, historical and entertainment value, while frequent ”collector`s notes” give his sense of an album`s rarity and its price range in used-record stores. (Most of the albums in ”Comedy on Record” are, unfortunately or not, out-of-print.)
Aware that ”tastes in comedy vary tremendously,” and eager to be as objective as possible, Smith says that his ratings ”are intended for that mythical `average reader.` ”
But Smith`s own solid sense of taste manages to emerge in the book`s extensive critical and descriptive passages. And as all that information begins to accumulate, one realizes that ”Comedy on Record” has become both a useful consumer guide and an informal but detailed history of the field.
Merely by restricting himself to comedy albums, Smith makes an arguable but important historical point: That even though comedy singles of great popularity date back to the 1890s, something changed when the comedy album became a viable proposition in the mid-1950s.
A look at some of the key early figures of the comedy-album era (Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Shelly Berman and Jonathan Winters) suggests that the rise of urban hipness was the chief reason behind the successful marriage of those performers with the phonograph record.
Because Sahl, Lehrer, Bruce and the rest were available to the public in just a few big-city clubs, and intermittently and often in censored form on television, much of the potential audience for their humor could encounter it most easily on record-if, indeed, they could find it anywhere else.
By the same token, this was the time when such overtly ”blue” comics as Belle Barth, Redd Foxx and Rusty Warren began to sell under-the-table albums in carload lots (5 million albums in all for Warren over the years, estimates Smith), because almost nowhere else in the marketplace could sexual and scatological humor readily be found.
The principle was the same in both cases-supplying a type of entertainment that the rest of the mass media was as yet unprepared to handle. And once comedy albums became a familiar item, the next, perhaps inevitable, step was taken in 1959 by Bob Newhart-a Chicago-area accountant whose taped sketches had been aired on a local radio station but who had never performed in front of an audience when he was signed to make his first ”live”
recording at a Houston, Texas, nightclub.
If Newhart was an extreme case of the ”album” comedian, the boom in comedy on disc made album sales a major source of income for the likes of Berman and Sahl-while making a hit album was the goal of most would-be hip young comics.
Packaging a comic`s best material, or just preserving a typical night in a club, was the principle behind most comedy albums at first. And when the comic was as brilliant as Sahl, Berman, Bruce or Winters were, who could complain?
But other heads were at work on what might be called ”album humor”-
comedy that was conceived to be heard, not seen, and that could be crafted only in a recording studio.
In that vein, the druggy, late-1960s counterculture humor of the Firesign Theater is what most people recall-although some 10 years before, another San Francisco figure, Henry Jacobs, had come up with an obscure but no-less spacy album, ”The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein.”
The success of the Firesign Theater was again based in part on the general unavailability of their type of stuff anywhere but on record.
But that principle no longer applied to other kinds of American humor that a few years before had seemed far-out. And in a few years more, the same would be true of the surrealistically elliptical Firesign style-which could be heard, in debased or even in superior form, from a number of young radio personalities.
Smith quite rightly suggests that the era of the comedy album is over, a victim of the videocassette.
After all, who would want to buy a copy of, say, Robin Williams` ”A Night at the Met” album or Emo Phillips` ”Live From the Hasty Pudding Theater” when the same performances of those very visual comics not only are available on video but also can be rented for a dollar or two?
But a vast amount of classic American humor is available only on record-a treasure trove to which Smith`s book is a delightful and enlightening, though not flawless, guide.
Among the few outright errors, both of omission and commission, is the listing, without comment or star rating, of Second City master Severn Darden`s lunatic album ”The Sound of My Own Voice”-and under the name ”Steve Darden” to boot. (The problem there, Smith explained in a phone conversation, was that he had been unable to obtain the album, while the source that informed him of its existence had garbled Darden`s first name.)
Smith`s decision to omit most so-called ”spoken arts” or ”novelty”
records was sound, but his inclusion of S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash albums makes one wish he had found room for the monologues of Ruth Draper-which are wise, funny and beautiful and had a strong influence on Lily Tomlin`s work.
As for Smith`s taste in humor, the only major quarrel I have with him is over the low ratings he gives to ”Vintage Bob and Ray” (a collection of the sketches the team did for the old ”Monitor” radio show) and to an album that preserves four episodes of ”Vic and Sade,” the slice-of-life comedy series that was on the radio from 1932 to 1944.
”Irritatingly slow, inanely repetitious and achingly dull” is Smith`s response to the oblique, gently demented wit of ”Vic and Sade,” which usually reduces this writer to tears-while Smith`s estimate of ”Vintage Bob and Ray” (”to the average listener much of this stuff will seem jokeless and bewildering”) makes me wonder whether, in this case, ”average listener”
isn`t a synonym for ”idiot.”
But Smith`s judgments are on target most of the time, while for anyone who cares about American humor, the wealth of solid (and sometimes bizarre)
information in ”Comedy on Record” is itself worth the price of the book.
Where else, for instance, can one learn that Don Adams lifted two complete routines from Jackie Mason`s brilliant first album, ”I`m the Greatest Comedian in the World, Only Nobody Knows It Yet,” discover who wrote Jackie Vernon and David Frye`s material and find out that a weird Kay Ballard parody of ”Autumn Leaves” was created for her by none other than Lenny Bruce?
