At last this ageless, exhilarating form of frivolity and fun has become a respectable, even revered phase of America's grand entertainment scene.

From Alaska to Hawaii, California to Maine, Americans have developed what appears to be an insatiable appetite for laughter. Television sitcoms abound, TV variety shows spotlighting "new" comics are viewed almost nightly, two separate cable channels broadcast funniness 24 hours a day, and night clubs featuring comics of all types, shapes and sizes have mushroomed across the nation.

Some sociologists believe this may be a phenomenon of our times but there is ample evidence that the love of laughter was inherent in most cultures of early history. In ancient times belly laughs were extracted by buffoons, commonly referred to as "fools." The term "fool" was used to describe persons whose absurd and sometimes imbecilic behavior provided entertainment for royalty and the nobility. These professional fools or jesters were far from being imbeciles. Most made their living with clever remarks by ridiculing the pompous and arrogant. Many gained an enduring reputation for cleverness and wit and won the affection of their masters.

Today's laughmakers are the direct descendants of those harlequins, clowns and court jesters. And like their historic counterparts the current crop of comics is irreverent, inventive and uncommonly gifted. They are blessed with stiletto-sharp insight as well as the colossal courage to joke about people, places and events that most persons hold sacred.

Historic tradition aside, it wasn't until the vaudeville era that standup comedians as we know them today gained their exalted position of show business royalty. Vaudeville offered the public a variety of acts but every show included performers hired for the express intention of making the audience laugh. Usually there was a comedy duo (Harrigan and Hart, Van and Schenk, Gallagher and Sheen) and a monologist (Frank Fay, James J. Thornton, Julius Tannen.) A typical bill consisted of the headliner, a musical act, a song and dance team, a dramatic sketch, dancers, a comedy duo and a monologist.

As this form of family entertainment slowly disappeared, nightclubs began to emerge in the 1930's and 40's. The nightclub show featured a production number (usually a line of chorus girls),and a dance team. The star was often a singer (Harry Richman, Sophie Tucker, Tony Martin et al) and the supporting act was most always a comic, unless Milton Berle, Clayton, Jackson (and Jimmy) Durante or The Ritz Brothers were the headliners.

As major supper clubs across America slipped into obscurity during the 50's and 60's, Las Vegas with its glamorous hotel showrooms became the entertainment capital of America. Each hotel featured lavish production numbers with gorgeous chorus and show girls. Every major comedy performer appeared on the fabulous Strip. Martin and Lewis, Benny, Burns, Berle, Buster Keaton, Danny Thomas, Morey Amsterdam, Steve Allen, George Gobel, Carol Burnett, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, and the Smothers Brothers.

When budgets tightened, shows in the main room were pared down to just two acts. Elvis Presley, Ann-Margret, Debbie Reynolds, Barbra Streisand, Wayne Newton, Dean Martin and other singing stars were supported by a coterie of erstwhile young comics like Pat Henry, Jerry Van Dyke, Rip Taylor, Corbett Monica, Morty Gunty, Dick Capri, Jackie Kahane, Dave Barry, Sammy Shore and Larry Wilde (sic).

The early 1970's saw an amazing turn of events. Clubs that featured ONLY comedians began to spring up around the country. Budd Friedman's Improv in Manhattan and Mitzi Shore's Comedy Store in Hollywood paved the way in spotlighting new and untried talent. Suddenly, would-be comics came out of the woodwork to display their wares as audiences lined up to witness the birth of a new generation of comedy performers.

New York producer Lorne Michaels created Saturday Night Live and television viewers across the nation were exposed to satire that was at once biting and irreverent. Cable TV began to skyrocket and Michael Fuchs, an innovative executive at Home Box Office, produced one hour specials featuring comedians. Robert Klein, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Martin Mull, Alan King, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Bill Cosby, were a few of the early comedy stars that added to the furor of fun that was to sweep into the 1980's.

Suddenly laughter was hot and comedy clubs proliferated. Hotel lounges, restaurants, bars, empty stores opened and as the decade ended there were an estimated 350 locations around the country that spotlighted comedians. Never before in the history of show business had there been such an extraordinary demand for the services of laughmakers.

At last! Comedy was king!

Academia joined the American fascination for humor. Soon psychologists, sociologists and researchers became engrossed in finding out more about these modern day court jesters.

How did they evoke laughter?

What motivated them to want to make an audience laugh?

Was this ability something anyone could learn or is it a talent one was born with?

W.C. Fields, Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, have left their comic genius on film. But they revealed very few secrets of their craft. There is hardly any documentation of how they went about making people laugh.

Did the hysterically funny pieces of business they created come about by accident?

Were they meticulously written, planned and polished to perfection?

How much of what they did was really adlib?

Humor scholars offer their opinions, but the originators are not here to tell us exactly how they went about making people laugh.

The Great Comedian Talk About Comedy provides enlightenment from some of America's favorite comedians, those recognized for their supreme skill at what is considered to be the most difficult of all arts. Great comedians are unique. They are special humans born with acutely sharpened senses. A few, like Robert Klein, have the skill to verbalize what they do in eloquent fashion. Many are incapable of articulating just what it is that allows them to see the funny side of life. Some are even reluctant to express their comedic views. Jay Leno, one of the brightest and most talented of the new comedians, declined to be interviewed. "I just don't feel comfortable talking about comedy," he pleaded. "I'd hate people to think that I'm some sort of guru or master of how to get laughs."

Those who enter professional comedy do so for one or several of the following reasons:

1) They come from poverty-stricken circumstances;

2) are members of a minority;

3) did not receive enough love as a child.

Unlike most business people, most comedy performers are not propelled by desire for financial rewards. They strive for recognition. Their need is for the love only a laughing audience can provide.

Phyllis Diller, Red Buttons and Jack Paar, all in their eighties, continue to practice the ancient art of storytelling. Bob Hope and Milton Berle (in their nineties) still make personal appearances and lend support to worthwhile charitable causes. George Burns, in his late nineties, puttered through the Hill crest Country Club (Los Angeles) dining room, stopping at each table to tell diners the latest joke.

Comedians don't retire.

As long as they can stand in front of an audience and make them laugh they will do it. It is their life and without it there is no life.

A comedian is addicted to his need for approval.

No matter how well the audience responds it has to be unanimous. Everybody in the crowd must laugh. Nobody is exempt. One person sitting there without a smile of approval has been known to send some comics into a desperate fit of depression

Here's how some funny men feel about their work:

A young comedian came offstage and went back to his dressing room. A beautiful blonde wearing a full length mink coat knocked on the door and entered. "You were absolutely marvelous," she gushed. "The best I've ever seen. I want to make all of your sexual fantasies come true." She dropped the coat and stood before him stark naked. The comic said, "Which show did you see? The first or the second?"

Neurotic? Overly sensitive? Manic depressive?

Perhaps all of the above. But whoever claimed that comedy performers were normal, average people?

The uncertainty of audience reaction, lack of job security, the insatiable need for approval all tend to mitigate against the comedy performer's stability.

The unquenchable craving for affection may well be the rationale for the comedians' reputations as womanizers. Chaplin's conquests have been frequently documented. Groucho collected female scalps by the hundreds. Jimmy Durante was noted for his philandering. Maurice Chevalier, the great French star who began his career as a baggy pants comedian, reputedly had a voracious sexual appetite. The same tag has been hung on Jerry Lewis, Bill Cosby, Danny Thomas and Redd Foxx.

In Pretend The World Is Funny and Forever, an in-depth psychological analysis of comedians, the authors (Seymour and Rhoda L. Fisher) point out that "there are multiple motives that energize the comics' behavior. Being funny probably serves to vent hostility, but in a fashion that conceals intent and even implies 'I am nice and good rather than angry or threatening. Being funny is intended to soothe and 'heal' people and perhaps win them over. To appear as the comedian is to deprecate oneself and yet to occupy a unique status with special powers."

Hearing the comedians talk about their craft you quickly comprehend that there is considerably more to making people laugh than skill in telling jokes.

Jack Benny pointed out that simply evoking laughter was not enough. "There has to be something more than just getting laughs. Laughs are not everything. People can scream at a comedian and yet can't remember anything afterwards to talk about. [For you] to become real successful, they must like you very much...they must have a feeling, like, 'Gee, I wish he was a friend of mine. I wish he was a relative.'"

Milton Berle emphasized that "you gotta know who you are before you know what you are before you do what you do."

Woody Allen's view on achieving stardom is that "it isn't the jokes...it's the individual himself. It's the funny-character emergence that does it. The best material in the world in the hands of a guy who is a hack or doesn't know how to deliver jokes is not going to mean anything."

Danny Thomas put it another way: "For the younger people coming up...it's what you say and how you say it that gets you to where you become a who ...and when you become a who your material doesn't have to be as good."

Although each comedian interviewed represents a different area of the comedy spectrum they all shared certain basic common characteristics: endless enthusiasm, enormous energy and extraordinary self-awareness.

In assessing the success of these comedy performers, it is somewhat possible to pin down and analyze the unique qualities that made them stars: talent, creativity, perseverance, mastery of the craft. But one quickly realizes that there is in the soul of each comedian an extra something that is intangible. Call it magnetism, charisma -- a magic which is the indefinable essence of that particular person's uncommon calling to communicate with crowds.

Making people laugh is the most specialized and respected talent in the arts. It matters not how successful or famous or rich a comic becomes -- each time he faces an audience he has got to be funny. That agonizing, persistent pressure, that constant challenge keeps the comedian honest -- for there is no let-up. This book is an attempt to shed some light on the serious business of making people laugh; an effort to comprehend the inscrutable; an endeavor to gain some insight into the mechanics and craft of comedy.

As you will see, each comedian has an opinion on how to approach the creating and selection of comedy material, deal with difficult audiences, as well as the myriad techniques necessary to be a professional funny man.

What may come as a surprise to the reader is the enormous intelligence, remarkable sensitivity and astonishing demand for perfectionism exhibited by those interviewed.

Comedy is king!

You are about to enter the royal palace of merriment to embrace the court jesters of modern times, unmasked, sans makeup, costume or cap and bells.

May your discoveries bring you joy and delight.

--Larry Wilde

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Companion Program: The Gift of Laughter - Dialogues with the Great Comedians- Now on CD! The enjoyment, appreciation and art of performance humor, is now available as a CD album and features Larry's conversations with the great comedians. This album is great companion piece to Great Comedians Talk About Comedy.

Purchase the I Want to Be Funny Value Pack and save, learn, enjoy and laugh!