Show Business: Comedy's Post-Funny School

A new wave of "humorists "assaults accepted ideas of clowning

This is show business? A mime so inept he must describe his gestures to the audience. A grinning, phosphorescent-suited fellow who plays with funny balloon animals. A comic with a bag over his head who does a ventriloquist routine featuring a hand puppet that has a paper bag over its head. A talk-show host who is all smarm and insult jokes. A Carnegie Hall entertainer who shows cartoons, leads sing-alongs and wrestles with women volunteers from the audience. A female comic in Wayne Newton drag who unbuttons her shirt to reveal a forest of chest hair.

Hey now, is this stuff funny—or what?To a lot of people the routines are crashingly unfunny. But to others they represent a new permanent wave in the history of popular humor: an assault on the accepted notions of show-business clowning.

The new comics have jettisoned the topical satire of the '60s for a less political, more radical examination of the comic's relation to the society he entertains. The traditional comedian kept searching for the definitive belly laugh; the new humorist looks at the jokes, and the pursuit of them, with the icy disinterest of a social critic. As the subject of modern art is art, so the subject of the new comedy is comedy—the good, the bad, the unintentionally ugly. Call it the Post-Funny School of Comedy.

What began as a defiant form of anti-shtik has become a dominant mode in the funny-peculiar '80s. It is saturating the big screen with the films of Albert Brooks (the mime), Steve Martin (funny balloon animals), Murray Langston (the paper-bagged Unknown Comic), Martin Mull (the Fernwood 2-Night talk-show host), Andy Kaufman (heterosexual wrestling), Lily Tomlin (Wayne Newton) and the now-ready-for-prime-time cutups of NBC's Saturday Night Live. It took over TV years ago—in 1975, when S.N.L. hit the air and became a focal point for the new comedy. With success came healthy midnight ratings for NBC, and with the ratings came the inevitable imitation, ABC's Fridays. S.N.L. Alumnus Harry Shearer calls Fridays "the Cloneheads"; but when the show was in direct competition with the Tonight Show, it frequently drew more viewers than Johnny Carson and forced NBC to produce its own late-Friday comedy series, SCTV Network/90, featuring the cast of yet another spoof show, the syndicated SCTV. Somebody out there must be laughing —maybe the networks and movie studios, all the way to the post-funny bank.

So what do these comics do? Start by saying what they do not do. They do not spin whimsical stories of urban childhoods, like Bill Cosby and George Carlin. They do not deal in analysis and self-hatred, like Woody Allen and Rodney Dangerfield. They do not refract their rage in race-and-reefer jokes, like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. They do not tell topical or political jokes, like Johnny Carson. Indeed, they rarely tell jokes or stories at all. They do not talk about their mothers, their wives, their egos. Their past is a mystery; their presence is perplexing. They may be the first generation of comics to forgo the funnyman's implicit plea: love me by laughing at me. The post-funny comics can do without both.