The Neoshamans of Standup Comedy
And the heroism that prompts us to laugh at absurd facts
The standup comedian is a fascinating amalgam of therapist, court jester, and the raving prophetic madman whom Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian” depicted as haranguing passersby in ancient marketplaces.
This makes the standup comedian a neoshamanic figure.
Just picture the scene: a crowd pays to walk into a theater and sit down to listen to someone rant and rave.
Before Lenny Bruce, American comedy was a more scripted affair in the burlesque or vaudeville style. You’d have had the wit of the Marx Brothers, the slapstick of the Three Stooges, and the complicated skits of Abbott and Costello, such as “Who’s on first?”
But with the more conversational, levelling tone, derived perhaps from the Beat poets and the Hippies who channeled European existentialism and revelatory psychedelics, American comedy became more countercultural in the 1960s to suit the revolutionary moment.
Rather than performing skits, a standup comedian is supposed to bare his or her personality or soul, to tell you what’s really going on according to this comedian’s perspective. And when the audience laughs, this is usually a sign that a taboo has been broken.
