Review: The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy

The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an extraordinary book. I bought it on impulse at an airport bookstore and, for the next five months, read in it when I could. Every time I picked it up again I felt it’s pull, felt the big picture of what Nesteroff is doing here. It’s a perfect by-the-bedside book, something you can read for long stretches or pick up and get in a meaningful five minutes.

In essence, Nesteroff accomplishes three things simultaneously.

First, this is a book that will make you laugh. That’s probably obvious since it’s a history of American comedy, but I’ve seen people be decidedly unfunny when they discuss humor. Nesteroff doesn’t try to be funny himself, he just curates some of the best and most pointed humor out there.

Second, this is a comprehensive history. I’m not aware of any book like it. This starts with Vaudeville and ends with Marc Maron’s podcast, and I – despite trying – I can’t think of a significant element he’s left out. This is loaded with footnotes, but they’re unobtrusive. It succeeds as a reference work to comedy, certainly the best I know of, and I am considering parts of it for a class that might deal with Lenny Bruce. It is, in other words, ambitious enough to be academic at the same time as it’s a flat-out pleasure to read.

Third, and most subtly, this is an argument. American comedy, as Nesteroff sees it, is a single story. It may have multiple chapters, but its practitioners have always understood themselves as influenced by their predecessors. As remarkable as Lenny Bruce was, he didn’t invent anything. He just inflected the tradition a little bit, taking from the Marx Brothers and Jack Benny before him, and influencing George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and the whole stand-up comedy boom of the 1980s.

What Nesteroff accomplishes, with an ambition I can hardly imagine, is to fit together different pieces of comedy history into chapters that comprise a whole. This could work as a textbook, but I say that hesitatingly because it implies a coldness or seriousness to the project that, page-by-page, it never seems to have.

If you don’t know the history of comedy, I can’t imagine a better place to get it. If you think you do know it, you’ll like this all the more for allowing you to connect dots that – until now – seemed detached from each other.


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