The Comic Offense: From Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy by Rick DesRochers (review)

The Comic Offense: From Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy examines the complex history of the vaudeville aesthetic from radio to television to the digital age and argues for its irrefutable influence on contemporary American comedy. In the preface, DesRochers establishes a widely recognizable definition of the vaudeville aesthetic at the turn of the twentieth century, which differed from other comic productions inherited from their nineteenth-century predecessors (x). He bases his explication on theorist Henry Jenkins’s tenets of “a different performer-spectator relationship, a fragmented structure, a heterogeneous array of materials, and a reliance upon crude shock to produce emotionally intense responses” (x). DesRochers stresses that while the popularity of the aesthetic may have ebbed and flowed with the technological advancements of the twentieth century, vaudeville, as an atemporal influence, continues to impact generations of comedians as they navigate new media and make comedy out of the sociocultural complications of America.

In the first chapter, “The Vaudeville Aesthetic and the Migration to Radio and Television,” DesRochers efficiently outlines the inception of the vaudeville aesthetic and its necessary adaptation from stage to radio to television in America from the 1880s to the late 1950s. He highlights Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll’s The Amos ’n’ Andy Show (CBS, 1943–1955), Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life (NBC, 1955–1960), and Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1950–1954) as exemplary transitional markers of the evolution of vaudevillian techniques. Following the preface and first chapter, the majority of the book is divided into four case studies tracing the impact of vaudeville by linking contemporary comedians with their earlier influences. Each study highlights how humor provided a subversive social commentary on issues and stereotypes of race, class, and gender in America over the past one hundred and twenty years.

The second chapter, “‘What’s Real Got to Do with What We Do?’ Groucho Marx to Larry David,” examines how the structure and theme of the vaudeville aesthetic heavily influenced the careers of these “social assassins” (22). Marx’s reliance on two techniques, the comic aside and an improvisational structure through the mouth of the unfiltered and straight-talker, aided in his success on stage and on television in such shows as I’ll Say She Is (Johnstone, 1924) and later You Bet Your Life. The truth-telling nature of Marx’s vaudeville characters, specifically the Yiddish tummler, or “one who makes a racket,” greatly influenced comedians such as Phil Silvers and Larry David (22). When interest in vaudeville began to wane, Silvers turned to burlesque in the mid-1930s. On the burlesque stage, Silvers could practice his improv and comic techniques like double entendre and sexual innuendo to a mostly working-class audience. This freedom to try out techniques of the vaudeville aesthetic as “resistance to American middle-class ideals of proper decorum and social conformity” allowed Silvers and others to hone their craft (47). Silvers’s “anti-authoritarian Bilko character” (36), a highlight of his career, illustrated a nontraditional form of comedy that guided the later works of comedian Larry David. David’s use of “verbal and physical gags as depicted in the two-man act format,” coupled with his “nonsense humor,” deconstructed and contested accepted social habits like the Marx Brothers before him (39). Popular television shows such as Seinfeld (NBC, 1989–1998) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000–2011) are descendants of both Marx and Silvers’s earlier successes with vaudeville.

The third chapter, “‘The Girlie Show’ as the New Burlesque: Mae West to Tina Fey,” highlights how women capitalized on the vaudeville aesthetic in their comic routines in various media to differentiate themselves from their male counterparts. These women, subversive on varying scales, worked to fight sociocultural expectations and male censorship through their comedy. They exemplified the “new woman as comedic performer” through “‘wild’ acts of unique singing and dancing” in the hopes of dissociating themselves from social perception (55). By writing, directing, and producing...