Kliph NesteroffCritiques

This is a valuable recitation of the cultural scandals and outrages of the 1940s up through the time before the internet arrived. It's disturbing to find out how everything new is old again, but notably, how for seventy years, the libertarian branch of the Republican Party has turned towards MAGA fascism, and the author exposes the party's descent into evil, beginning with the villains Koch and the Birchers in the '50s. There's not enough meat on the bones, but it offers some great quotes.

Quotes: "A leading California Republican officeholder said that the John Birch Society was "the closest thing to a totalitarian party in this country. Their aim is to get control of the Republican Party. I do not believe the Republican Party can survive this kind of thing."

"In 1968, Republican senator Mark Hatfield worried that the Paul Weyrichs of the world would one day seize his Republican Party. The Far Right has been successfully united by a well-designed, well-financed, and persistent campaign of fear. The continual fanning of this fear shows that they can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality."

George Carlin on Andrew Dice Clay, 1990: "His targets are underdogs. Comedy has traditionally picked on people in power, people who abuse their power. Women, gays, and immigrants are, to my way of thinking, underdogs. I think his core audience is young white males who aren't sure of their manhood. Women who assert themselves and are competent are a threat to these men."

President Harry Truman, 1960: "I feel if our constitutional system fails, it will be because people got scared and turned hysterical and someone in power will demagogue them right into a police state of some kind."

Frank Zappa, 1984: "With all these fundamentalist organizations gathering up millions of dollars, you're looking at a whole nation of potential mutants who could be very harmful."½

Glad I made it all the way through. My interest in comedy history only goes so far and the high level of detail made this tedious at times. Nesteroff does an admirable job of providing context by discussing the role of places (specific clubs, Vegas), changes in media, cultural shifts (the Counterculture), etc. I wasn’t aware how much advertising controlled content in radio pre-television. Another interesting theme is vaudeville’s influence on early comedy. If you’re not a “comedy nerd,” the book is still well worth reading because it provides excellent pop culture history.

What a fascinating read.

This is non-fiction and chronicles the almost non-existant history of Native American comedians. It also showcases up and comers.

Yet, it is so, so much more. I am an IOTA Menominee and thought I "understood" the Indian culture to a point. After all, my family regularly went to the Rez when I was a kid. I have been to pow wows. I am proud of my heritage.

Well, I quickly learned how ignorant and blinded I truly am.

It's a real eye opener. A history lesson; a Current Events lesson; and great, funny stories all rolled into an extremely well written book.

Its a great blend of history and could be a gift for folks who are in comedy

Was my copy the only copy that didn't have any references to women in comedy?

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
---
WHAT'S WE HAD A LITTLE REAL ESTATE PROBLEM ABOUT?
This book sketches a broad history—roughly from the end of the 19th Century to the present—of Native Americans in comedy. He starts with things like wild west shows and circuses—where people like P. T. Barnum presented "authentic Indian" practices, but would define what was authentic for the people who'd do the performing, and would punish them if they did anything actually authentic. So right away, you know this is going to be a feel-good story.

In the early days of Movies and TV, it's not much better for most—Indians were stereotyped and usually played by Whites. Sure, you'd get occasional people like Will Rogers as the exception. Nesteroff chronicles the struggles for representation from then up to "Iron Eyes" Cody (and beyond, I'm sure).

Then he sketches out the bright spots for Native Americans in the contemporary comedy scene, from stand-up to theater to TV writing. Nesteroff spent a lot of time on Charlie Hill's life, career, and legacy—who made a lot of the contemporary advances possible. Frankly, he could've spent more time on it and kept me interested (although what he gave was sufficient). His interactions with Richard Pryor was fascinating.

Interspersed with the history are brief profiles of individual comedians/teams and their careers. So it's not just a history of the industry, but we get spotlights on individuals, too. They were definitely the highlights of the book for me.

HOW FUNNY WAS IT?
Nesteroff kept the narration restrained—he's a stand-up, so I'm sure his instincts were to perform (at least) a bit more than he did. But he read it the same way you'd read a book about productivity. I'd think that would be particularly difficult when he read a transcript or script from a comedy piece/interview. But even then—the material shone through and I found myself audibly chuckling frequently. Funny stuff is funny (would've been funnier in the original, I'm sure, but getting permissions necessary to do that would've made this audiobook too expensive to produce).

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT WE HAD A LITTLE REAL ESTATE PROBLEM?
I heard Marc Maron talk about this book a little on his podcast (but I haven't gotten around to any of the episodes with the author), and it seemed like it'd be up my alley. I love hearing about the business of comedy and the people that are behind it. Focusing on this one story? Sounded like a great idea. And I think Nesteroff pulled it off.

I guess I would think as a history, it's probably incomplete—but I'm not sure how you can do a comprehensive history of something like this.

I think the central premise of this—media depictions of Native Americans makes them conform too much to a stolid, serious, stoic type—or a tragic one. It's hard to believe that encompasses any culture—much less the great number of Native American cultures in North America. To promote understanding between cultures in the US and Canada, we ought to see all aspects of them.

The profiles—either brief or extended (like Charlie Hill and Will Rogers)—were interesting enough to make me go check out samples (and sometimes more) of the work. The overall narrative was interesting and optimistic.

I think the book worked—if you're at all interested in the behind-the-scenes of comedy, about those who make the movies/shows/stand-up you enjoy, you'll probably think so, too.

While I enjoyed this book, I found it overly long. And, I have to admit, I didn’t recognize 40% of the comedians mentioned by Nesteroff. Being 72-years-old, I was most interested in the early comics and the early history of comedy. That was both educational and entertaining. I would think that anyone doing any research on the history of comedy would find this book a gold standard source.

Who knew? Which is what made this an interesting book. But I found it difficult to focus and concentrate on the book. In fact, while reading it, I found my mind wandering, thinking "I'd rather be re-reading 'The Inconvenient Indian.'"

Best for:
Those with an interest in the history of comedy; those interested in the ways that US and Canadian popular culture have excluded groups, specifically Native Americans / Indigenous people.

In a nutshell:
Author Neteroff provides a comprehensive history of Native American comedy interspersed with vignettes about modern-day Native American comedians.

Why I chose it:
A cannonballer reviewed it and it sounded so interesting.

Review:
I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. I think it might be one of the few cases where reading it as an audio book might have harmed it - for example, I didn’t realize until maybe 1/4 of the way through that the chapters were set up as sort of an alternating straight time line of the history of comedy and chapters about modern comedians. It felt super disjointed and a bit hard to follow until that clicked.

That said, the information in this book is interesting and pretty much all of it was new to me. The racism and lack of opportunities is not surprising, but I’ve been completely ignorant of the plight of Native American comedians - I’m not really ‘in’ to stand-up comedy, though I am a fan a few comedians (Hannah Gadsby springs to mind). I’m not totally unaware of the challenges that people who are not white men (or white women, to a lesser extent) face when seeking out their careers in places like Saturday Night Live, but I appreciate how the Native American experience is unique in this area.

I do wish this were written by a Native American writer or comedian, as I think they would be able to provide even more cultural context, though Neteroff clearly has done loads of research.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
If it weren’t an audio book I’d donate it.

This history of of Native American comedians stretches from Buffalo Bill's wild west show through vaudeville, radio, and network television all the way up to YouTube videos by the 1491s and other contemporary acts. Traditional biographical profiles of pioneers Will Rogers and Charlie Hill are broken up over several chapters and interspersed between oral histories from lesser known figures from the 20th century through today.

For being about comedy, the first half of the book is actually a little dry and humorless though still fascinating, but things pick up with the introduction of Hill, the many people he inspired, and the jokes they were telling. Be prepared to rush to YouTube to search for routines from the many people mentioned and interviewed.

This was a really cool book; I wasn't sure what I was expecting at first and I think I was thrown off that Nesteroff is non-Native but he leaves plenty of space for Indigenous people to tell their own history, and I think this is a really really accessible way to approach Indigenous history, especially if you are already interested in histories of comedy but don't know much about Indigenous history after Wounded Knee (the first one.)

It's a great blend of that history and also telling the stories of contemporary Native comedians, both more visible ones like the 1491s and Joey Clift, and comedians who are not as famous (or at least were not as immediately familiar to me, a non-Native person.) I think it could be a really great gift for folks who are into comedy, and I honestly might use some of it in teaching; the parts about Will Rogers in particular I learned quite a bit about just how political his actual comedy was. Definitely recommend!½

As the title suggests, the history of comedians is the story of a profession fraught with hardship and challenges as they navigated the ever-changing mediums of the times. The writing itself reads as more academic than comedic, and thus a little dry given the subject, but there are one or two true stories that are so shockingly funny that it seems like it could've only happened to a comedian. Here's an example:

"Harvey died at sea [working on a cruise ship], and at the time he and his wife were estranged. The cruise ship called and said, 'Your husband, Harvey, died. We have the body on ice. Should we hold it or should we fly it back to New York?' Harvey's wife wasn't too thrilled and said, 'Oh, well, few people knew this, but Harvey always wanted to be buried at sea.' She got rid of him that way! Here's a Jew from Detroit who never saw a boat in his life. They dumped him in the ocean. And that was the end of Harvey Stone."

Great introduction to the world of comedy and the early comics. Definitely got me interested in reading more about it. However, I feel like the book was a little too light once it got to the 1970's and beyond. There's so much that happened and people that the book didn't cover.

I read this book because Kliph Nesteroff showed up on WTF with Marc Maron and talked about putting together a book on the history of American comedy. If you're looking for an in-depth history you've come to the right place. On the other hand, if you're expecting a balanced treatment, you won't find that in these pages. Envy might top the list of sins associated with being a comedian. Mr. Nesteroff was a comedian himself for quite a few years, and that gives him an insight into the comedy world that few outside journalists would understand. It's a ridiculously difficult life and few practitioners would seem to be happy, if indeed that was your goal in the first place. I enjoyed it quite a lot, but then I am a comedy nerd, so your mileage may vary.

Stories about comics. Many were Drunks, Thieves, etc but some were the biting voice of their generation.
The book jumps around, sort of like an uncle, on the edge of doddering, who tell you story after story. But interesting ones. You find out who were the real assholes , the junkies, the clever, and the screwed over.
A nice for a break from heavy reads.

This is a very well documented (dozens of pages of end notes citing sources) history of the American comedy business. Note that I said, "comedy business". Despite its title, this isn't really a book that focuses on the comedians themselves, although there is lots of good history, along with revealing anecdotes, and the author throws in a few of their jokes along the way. The real story here is the rise and fall (and rise and fall, etc.) of comedy for the past 150 years or so. It is a pretty fascinating story, but it gets more and more detailed (and less compelling) as it comes up to the present day. While the mobsters who used to run most comedy venues across the country (and owned Las Vegas) were quite generous to comedians if they played along, the latter day club owners expected comedians to perform without any pay at all. And the rise of extreme drug use (mostly cocaine) takes its toll as well. One could conclude that you have to be high to do standup after reading the latter part of this book.

So, overall, this is a very informative, worthwhile read. It just isn't the entertaining story of American comedy it started out to be. Nesteroff writes well, however. He also isn't afraid of trashing everything and everybody through the use of devastating quotes about various comedians by their contemporaries. Some of this isn't for the fainthearted.

This was a Christmas gift to my husband, who is a true lover of comedy and all sorts of comedians. He read it in a matter of days and thoroughly enjoyed it. Based on this alone, I recommend it to anyone who is a lover of comedy and the lives of those who make so many laugh.

The Dramatic, Definitive Study

The difference between Kliph Nesteroff’s The Comedians and the hundreds of other collections on comedians is that this is an order of magnitude above all the rest combined. While others collapse lives into three paragraphs, listing achievements quickly for a template, The Comedians is a narrative of eras. The chapters are on vaudeville, radio, nightclubs, television. The eras are populated and propelled by comedians making their way in the world, paying their dues, and sometimes risking their lives. The constraints of the medium, the politics and the time throw their careers into high relief. There is far more excitement, far more intrigue, far more curiosity in how they pulled it off than in any other such book. And I have about 200 of them right here beside me. This is by far the best.

The trek is all about change. How the eras changed the approach, how young comics fought the establishment, how differently the audience approaches comedy. It provides endless insight without dwelling too long on the accomplishments or famous lines of anyone. Most of the stories are (thankfully) not the standard, trademarked tales everyone’s heard, but other, more purposeful ones we likely have not encountered before. This too keeps the reader locked in. The transitions Nesterhoff employs – from radio to tv, late night to internet – are so integral they are elisions, seamless segués. The overall effect is pure pleasure for anyone interested in how the who’s who got that way, interacted, and how their era defined them. The evolution is markedly clear and relentless. The takeaways are endless.

We even learn about the use of cigars by a certain generation (Burns, Benny, King, Youngman, Berle, Levenson, Leonard…), to let jokes set in or to stall for time while they switched gears when one failed. We learn that untold numbers of comics changed their names to Jack/Jackie and Joey/Joe E. For some reason, this rated as enormously professional in the first half of the last century. The finest insight comes from Tommy Smothers, who didn’t hire writers so much as musicians, confounding, as he constantly did, the powers that employed him, if not the whole industry: “People in music are used to expressing themselves; they have more rhythm, better pacing,” he said, proving himself a far superior observer once again.

Of course, not every comic is profiled or even mentioned. Missing entirely is the man who started it all, Mark Twain. At a time when there was nothing like it, Twain would entertain alone on a bare stage (with cigar). People laughed so hard their sides ached all the next day and no one could remember a single thing he said. I know of only two others who could do the same, any time, with no preparation whatsoever and for endless hours without a break: Jonathan Winters and Peter Cook.

Wondering how Nesteroff could possibly wrap it all up, he concludes simply with poignant words from Robin Williams about how comedy owned him. It was actually said better by Cocoa Brown: “Comedy is a jealous boyfriend I like to call Ike 'cause it beats the hell out of you every day, but I love it just the same.”

David Wineberg