LAUGHING FROM THE OUTSIDE

211 Pages·2017·1.27 MB·English

LAUGHING FROM THE OUTSIDE: HIPSTERS AND
AMERICAN STAND-UP COMEDY

By
CHRISTOPHER PERKINS
Bachelor of Arts in English
Texas State University
San Marcos, Texas
2006

Master of Arts in English
Texas State University
San Marcos, Texas
2008

Submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate College of the
Oklahoma State University
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
May, 2017
LAUGHING FROM THE OUTSIDE: HIPSTERS AND
AMERICAN STAND-UP COMEDY

Dissertation Approved:

Dr. Elizabeth Grubgeld
Dissertation Adviser
Dr. Jeffrey Walker

Dr. Richard Frohock

Dr. Perry Gethner
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was made possible through the support of the faculty in the English
department at Oklahoma State University, the careful critique of my advisory committee,
and the thoughtful guidance of my advisor Dr. Elizabeth Grubgeld. I am also eternally
grateful to my family for their love and support throughout the years. Finally, Dr.
Jennifer Edwards has remained by my side throughout the process of composing this
dissertation, and her love, patience, and criticism have played an essential role in its
completion.
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Acknowledgements reflect the views of the author and are not endorsed by committee
members or Oklahoma State University.
Name: CHRISTOPHER PERKINS

Date of Degree: MAY, 2017

Title of Study: LAUGHING FROM THE OUTSIDE: HIPSTERS AND AMERICAN
STAND-UP COMEDY

Major Field: ENGLISH

Abstract: In recent years, stand-up comedy has enjoyed increased attention from both
popular and scholarly audiences for its potential as a forum for public intellectualism.
This study traces this rise in prominence to the hipster as both a cultural figure in post-
war America and a comic persona in the years that followed. Through identification and
analysis of the hipster and its aesthetic traits, I attempt to follow this persona and the type
of comedy it performs from its origins to its current examples in order to understand what
role this persona may play in both stand-up’s popularity and in society at large. The
hipster is a stand-up persona that utilizes a hip sensibility and satiric perspective both to
produce itself and to critique the modes of production and consumption with which it
interacts through constant and evolving use of technology and new media as a conduit for
personal, existential, and social play. I begin with Lenny Bruce’s hipster and, using the
development of technology as my organizing principle, follow the footprints of hip
through Bruce to Richard Pryor and then to twenty-first-century comedians Bo Burnham
and Aziz Ansari. This study reveals the comic and intellectual sensibility of the hipster
persona in its various iterations and examines that persona’s role in the development of
comedy as an intellectual forum in American society in the last half-century.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

PREFACE: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT STAND-UP
COMEDY ................................................................................................................1

I. WHAT IS A HIPSTER? .............................................................................................6

Footprints: Tracing the Hipster ................................................................................7
Hip Performance ....................................................................................................14
Hip Humor: A Beginning.......................................................................................23
Hip Satirists and Satiric Hipsters ...........................................................................26
Hip Conduit: Hipsters and Media, a Shape for this Study .....................................33

II. COMEDY ALBUMS: VERBAL AND VISUAL PERSONA ON FANTASY
RECORDS’ LENNY BRUCE ALBUMS 1959-1961 ...........................................40

Autobiography and Confessional Poetry ...............................................................44
Lenny Bruce and Hipster Comedian ......................................................................51
Visual Rhetoric/Visual Persona: The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce (1959) ............57
Who Wore it Best?: Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Jewish Masculinity ................62
What’s so Sick about Peace, Love, and Understanding? .......................................68
The Humor of The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce ....................................................72
Audaciously Paradoxical: I am Not a Nut, Elect Me! (1960) ................................80
American (1961) ....................................................................................................90

III. HIPSTERS ON FILM: LENNY BRUCE, RICHARD PRYOR, AND STAND-UP’S
NEXT MEDIUM ...................................................................................................96

People v. Hipster: Lenny’s “Blah Blah Blah” .......................................................99
Old v. Aging Hipsters: Performance Films and Rhizomatice Persona ................105
Exit Bruce. Enter Richard Pryor: A Portrait of the Hipster on Film....................115
Wattstax, Documentary Film, and the Signifying Hipster ...................................119
Hip Interpreter: Richard Pryor Live in Concert ..................................................123
The Hipster’s Evolution: Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip .......................130
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................140
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Chapter Page

IV. NEW AND CONVERGENT MEDIA: POST-HIPSTERS BO BURNHAM AND
AZIZ ANSARI.....................................................................................................142

Becoming Bo Burnham........................................................................................146
The Postmodern Self as Comic Subject ...............................................................148
what. Who: Beckett and Burnham and Postmodern Comedy..............................152
what. Why: Burnham and Bruce and the Post-Hipster ........................................158
what. Who: The Remix ........................................................................................161
Aziz Ansari: The Brown White Negro ................................................................164
The Sitcom Hipster: Aziz as Tom Haverford, or, Satirizing Superficial Hip ......166
Love and Marriage and Hipsters ..........................................................................172
Love, Empathy, and the Hip Nightmare: Superficial Reflections on Rude Shitty
People ..................................................................................................................179

CONCLUSION: HIP TODAY AND TOMORROW: AZIZ ANSARI ON SATURDAY
NIGHT LIVE, JANUARY 21, 2017 ....................................................................184

REFERENCES ..........................................................................................................192

APPENDIX ................................................................................................................202
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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1: The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce ...........................................................................63
2: Mort Sahl’s Sweaters ............................................................................................64
3: I am Not a Nut, Elect Me! .....................................................................................84
4: Lenny Bruce--American ........................................................................................92
5: Bo Burnham: Postmodern Rock Star ..................................................................163
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PREFACE

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT STAND-UP COMEDY

Comedy is all the rage these days. In popular media, critics like The Atlantic’s
Megan Garber seek to understand “How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals” (May
2015). Beginning February 2017, CNN aired its eight-part documentary The History of
Comedy exploring “what makes people laugh and how comedy has affected the social
and political landscape throughout history.” In academic circles, the 2016 MLA
Convention included its first-ever panel on stand-up, seeking “to provide a forum for
serious consideration of the cultural and rhetorical work of stand-up comedy”
(Rhetoricomedia). And, at the recent conference on Lenny Bruce’s legacy held at
Brandeis University in October 2016, comedian Lewis Black jokingly accused
conference participants of “legitimizing” comedy.
Taken together, these examples indicate a growing awareness that, at this moment
in American history, comedy seems particularly capable of capturing the public’s
imagination and inspiring critical thought. To explore this phenomenon, I suggest a
literary approach to the examination of American stand-up comedy’s rise in popularity
and continued social importance by focusing my attention on the development of the
1
trickster figure as a stand-up persona. In the postwar years, a new type of trickster came
onto the scene and altered the course of stand-up comedy and, I will argue, America’s
relation to it. The trickster—well known and theorized in discussions of comedy,
folklore, and American culture—becomes a popular and visible figure in stand-up
comedy through the hipster persona of Lenny Bruce and then in the various hipsters that
have taken the stage in the half-century since Bruce’s death.1 Recognizing that the label
“hipster” is fraught with multiple, contradictory, and often negative connotations today, I
want to employ it here as the subject of my study for three reasons. First, labeling the
comedians under study here “hipsters” rather than simply “tricksters” points to an
important point of separation between stand-up comedians and literary characters: unlike
the rogues and clowns of novels or the tricksters of folklore, hipster comedians share a
coterminous body with an actual living human being that is essential both to their humor
and to that humor’s satiric potential as I will define and explore it in the coming chapters.
Second, the contradictory and competing connotations of the hipster label lend

1 For a theoretical introduction to the comic and European literary origins of the trickster,
see Bakhtin’s “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” in which Bakhtin theorizes
the functions of Rogues, Clowns, and Fools as character types that exist as outsiders and
subject humanity to parodic laughter; Bakhtin’s theories are taken up by Kathleen
Rowe’s study of female comedians in The Unruly Woman in which Rowe argues for the
disruptive force of the female trickster as a regenerative satirical trope. Mel Watkins’s
history of African American humor from slavery to Chris Rock, On the Real Side,
follows similar lines of thought specifically associating African American comedy with
the tricksters of African and African American folklore, particularly Brer Rabbit and his
human counterpart the cunning slave “John (sometimes Jack, Golias, Pompey, or
Nehemiah)” (75). Watkins importantly recognizes the trickster as a figure that exists in
many folklores, but whose African American iterations have played a crucial role in both
the development of African American humor and the development of American society
in the twentieth-century—a development which is also of interest to this study—because
of their ability to enact social critique through ironic double-consciousness. John
Leland’s Hip: the History places the trickster at the center of his discussion of hip’s
history as America’s history when he argues that “tricksters are hip’s animating agents”
(162).
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themselves to this study because comedy deals precisely in these things: paradox, irony,
and incongruity underlie all major theories of comedy and laughter from ancient Greece
to the present day.2 Like comedy, which becomes increasingly difficult to define or
explain the more scrutiny one gives it, hipness and its extreme embodiment in the hipster
defy easy explanation and by their very nature subvert attempts at stable definition, a
point that will become increasingly important to this study and help to establish this
figure’s role within and without American society. Finally, the hipster label as I will
define it in the first chapter offers a more fitting umbrella under which to place the
comedians studied here because its evolution from the early twentieth-century to the early
twenty-first is intertwined with the intellectual, comic, economic, and technological
evolutions of American society during that time in a way that “trickster” is not. The
hipster as a stand-up persona is closely related to the hipster as a social phenomenon and
is thus linked to society’s development in the late twentieth and early twenty-first-
centuries. This interconnectedness of the hipster figure to its contemporary society
heavily informs my analysis of early hipster comedians Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor
and contemporary hipster comedians Bo Burnham and Aziz Ansari. Through this

2 For a detailed exploration of traditional theories of laughter and humor including
primary materials and secondary commentary, see John Morreall’s The Philosophy of
Laughter and Humor. Morreall provides the foundational texts of the three major theories
of comedy in Western thought: the Superiority Theory, the Relief Theory, and the
Incongruity Theory. While each of these theories and their various particular iterations
succeeds in explaining some instances of comedy, none is capable of encapsulating all
humor and the student of comedy is better served thinking of comedy for its inability to
be succinctly defined than under the umbrella of any one theory. Contemporary thinkers
like Simon Critchley and Michael North offer theories of humor as an intellectual stance
in which humorist and audience alike express, through comedy, awareness of the
ineffable multiplicity of all life and all attempts to define it in clean and easy terms.
These latter arguments will form much of the basis of my work here as it develops in the
following pages, but for now they suggest that humor, like hipness as I will define it in
the next chapter, becomes less clearly identifiable the closer one looks at it.
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