NIGHTCLUBS: The Sickniks

They joked about father and Freud, about mother and masochism, about sister and sadism. They delightedly told of airline pilots' throwing out a few passengers to lighten the load, of a graduate school for dope addicts, of parents so loving that they always "got upset if anyone else made me cry." They attacked motherhood, childhood, adulthood, sainthood. And in perhaps a dozen nightclubs across the country—from Manhattan's Den to Chicago's Mr. Kelly's to San Francisco's hungry i—audiences paid stiff prices to soak it up. For the "sick" comedians, life's complexion has never...