On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957–1973

402 Pages·2017·7.96 MB·English

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Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center
9-2016
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David Michael McCarthy
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
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ON THE APPEARANCE OF THE COMEDY LP, 1957–1973
by
DAVID MICHAEL McCARTHY
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Music in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York
2016
ii
© 2016
DAVID MICHAEL McCARTHY
All rights reserved.
iii
On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957–1973
by
David Michael McCarthy
This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Music in satisfaction of
the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
___________________ __________________________________________
Date Amy Herzog
Chair of Examining Committee
___________________ __________________________________________
Date Norman Carey
Executive Officer
Supervisory Committee:
Jane Sugarman, Advisor
Anne Stone, First Reader
Sumanth Gopinath
Amy Herzog
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
iv
ABSTRACT
On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957–1973
by
David Michael McCarthy
Advisor: Dr. Jane Sugarman
Many observers of contemporary comedy in the United States during the 1960s referred
to musical aspects of extra-musical performances. Comedy LP records furnish important artifacts
for the study of the musical appearances these observers produced for themselves. Where
contemporaries described appearances characterized by printable words and polemics as
“satirical,” the musical appearances discussed in this dissertation can instead be described as
“comic”: instead of mocking persons or ideas, they show people and things becoming involved
with one another in absurdly triumphant ways. These two different sorts of appearances
correspond to two different uses for comedy in a class society, one consolidating a hegemonic
middle-class “consensus” against ridiculous adversaries, the other exploring surprising potentials
in even the most ridiculous circumstances. A history of antagonistic ways of listening to sixties
comedy can be read as a history of the making of class relations in an advanced capitalist society.
This dissertation discusses four case studies selected with two complementary aims: to
produce an appearance of the comedy LP as a densely varied form and to produce knowledge of
the political stakes involved in historical conflicts over formal appearances. In each study, a
musical appearance becomes involved in the making of class. The jazz critic Nat Hentoff insisted
on musical appearances of the iconic sixties comedian Lenny Bruce over and against what he
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derided as “liberal” readings for printable messages. His chief artifacts were comedy LP records.
Elaine May and Mike Nichols—television stars, dinner club sensations, and luminaries of the
most popularly influential improvisatory theater in the United States—used a tangled musical
texture associated with affluent social circles. By invoking descriptions of the self as she might
have found them in her widely reported readings of Freud, May seems to undermine the ethical
significance of the tangled texture as previously determined by Katharine Hepburn’s films. The
“blue record” or “party record” produced by and for black Americans in the 1970s was
advertised in middle-class periodicals as a genre characterized by “dirty words.” But Tramp Time
Volume 1 (La Val LVP 901, 1967), a purportedly early example of the party record featuring an
itinerant Midwestern performer named Jimmy “Mr. Motion” Lynch, instead seems characterized
most importantly by features of blues music. The Firesign Theatre, a Californian comedy troupe
popular with the “dormitory debauchee set,” performed a peculiar involvement in history using a
quasi-musical style based upon the characteristics of radio as a broadcast medium. This
radiophonic style places observers “inside” history after the perceived closures of 1968.
Art-critical, archival, and philological methods shape this dissertation’s argument.
Formalistic descriptions based upon vocabularies critically adapted from modern and
contemporary writings produce “abstract” appearances. Artifacts collected through archival
research ground these abstract appearances as “historically possible appearances.” As a
formalism, this historical method uses its thickening self-referential vocabulary to invent its own
critical universe. As a historical method, this formalism produces knowledge of appearances
which, because they are grounded in activities, leave no self-contained artifacts.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The librarians and archivists responsible for the collections I consulted while preparing
this dissertation were invariably the model of generosity. Thank you to Brian DeShazor, Mark
Torres, Mariana Berkovich, Shawn Dellis, Edgar Toledo, Jolene Beiser, and Joseph Gallucci at
Radio Pacifica for welcoming me into their workspace. At Stanford University’s Archive of
Recorded Sound, thank you to Jonathan Manton. Wendy Shay of the National Museum of
American History (Smithsonian) was my enthusiastic guide to sixties comedy and the collections
I needed to study it. Thank you, Wendy. Michael Henry of the University of Maryland (College
Park) pointed me in the direction of collections I would otherwise have overlooked. Lesley
Ruthven at Goldsmiths (University of London) saw that the little time I had in London was used
efficiently. Thank you to the cheerful trio in the subterranean lair at Brandeis: Sarah Shoemaker,
Max Goldberg, and Anne Woodrum. Thank you to Kitty Bruce and her representative Tracy
Demarzo for helping me gain access to a collection which was in the process of being moved.
And the warmest thanks to Vincent Taylor for opening his home and his private collection to me
and for sharing his recollections of a brilliant family.
This dissertation has been shaped by the training I received from the faculty at the
Graduate Center (CUNY) and the University of Minnesota. I am grateful to the faculties of both
institutions. Special thanks is due to the members of my dissertation committee—Sumanth
Gopinath, Amy Herzog, Anne Stone, and Jane Sugarman—who read and provided important
feedback on drafts of this dissertation. My mentor Marshall Berman (1940–2013) passed away
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during the early stages of this project. I have had many occasions to think of him as I completed
it. To his loved ones I say, as he often said to me, shalom.
I had the good fortune of preparing this dissertation while Norman Carey was the Acting
Executive Officer of the GC music department. Thank you once again for all you did. Along with
everything else produced by my department, this project would not have been possible without
the quiet labor of Tonisha Alexander and Jacqueline Martelle. I never could have said it enough,
thank you both.
Thank you to the family and friends who allowed me to live with them, some of them for
long periods of time, as I traveled across the country for work: my grandmother Patricia Francis,
my aunt Jeanne Loomer, John and Janke Elliott, Glenda Goodman and Ben Ullery, Anna Schultz
and Mark Nye, Joseph and Charlie Wojtysiak, Michael Lupo and Lindsey Eckenroth, You Nakai
and Lindsey Drury, and Benigno Ayala and Ashleigh Doop. I think of our conversations often. I
am sincerely sorry if I ever ate your leftover chicken when I shouldn’t have.
Thank you to all of my beautiful friends, especially those who helped me learn how to
write about comedy LP records musically, including Elise Bonner, Georgina Chinchilla, Lars
Christensen, Jake Cohen, Stephanie Jackson, Dani Kuntz, Jessica Narum, Jeremy Orosz,
Catherine Provenzano, Daniel Sadowsky, Brian Schmidt, Joshan and Steve Soma, and María
Zuazu. I look forward to celebrating the completion of this dissertation next winter with James
Fusik, Pat Harris and Ashleigh Wisser, and the Terreri-Teager family, Mike, Kristen, and Hudson.
Thank you to César Potes and Marcie Ray for helping me get plugged into a musical and
intellectual network in Lansing, where the better part of this dissertation was written.
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Thank you also to John Nichol and Gary Clavette. I could not imagine pursuing a career
in music without your early guidance.
Much appreciation goes to Devora Geller and Heather Hancock for sharing their
knowledge of Yiddish and German with me.
An earlier version of chapter two appears as “Textured Voices and the Performance of
Ethical Life in the Case of the Laff Box (1966),” Twentieth Century Music 13, no. 1 (Spring
2016): 109–137. Substantial portions of this article have been reproduced here with the
permission of Cambridge University Press.
Above all, I thank my family. I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, my first teacher,
Catherine Rose McCarthy.
It is an old saying but a wise one: this dissertation’s faults are my own, but for its merits,
I owe a debt to all of you.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES and TABLES......................................................................................... xii
ARCHIVES, COLLECTIONS, and ABBREVIATIONS...................................................... xiv
NEWSPAPERS...................................................................................................................... xv
Introduction The Musical Appearance of the Sixties Comedy LP........................................ 1
Chapter 1 Lenny Bruce’s Sound and the Making of a Jewishness for a
Classless Society............................................................................................ 26
1.1 Editing Lenny Bruce and making a desired “vernacular”.................................. 35
1.2 Bruce’s Jewishness as a “new sensibility” for a “new culture”.......................... 41
1.3 Making a sensibility............................................................................................ 46
1.3.1 “Exposure”........................................................................................... 48
1.3.2 Exposure mediated by a shape of the political..................................... 55
1.3.3 Exposure mediated by a musical shape of the political....................... 61
1.4 The ideological function of Bruce’s sound......................................................... 73
Conclusion................................................................................................................. 80
Chapter 2 Texture, the Performance of Ethical Life, the Proletarian Middle
Class, and the Illustrated Laff Box (1966)..................................................... 87
2.1 Texture, surface, and depth................................................................................. 90
2.2 Textural listening and the proletarian middle class............................................. 99