When Tocqueville visited America, he wasn’t impressed with our humor, claiming that “people who spend every day in the week making money, and the Sunday in going to Church, have nothing to invite the muse of Comedy.” Reviewing John Beckman’s American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt, Ben Schwarz thinks that’s not the whole story:
The country’s true comic muse, [Beckman] suggests, has always resided in rebellious, unacceptable humor and entertainment. He begins this chronicle with the forgotten hedonist pilgrim Thomas Morton and his lively seventeenth-century settlement, Merry Mount. The name alone was a pornographic joke to the locals. In his satirical poetry, Morton referred to Puritan leader Myles Standish as “Captain Shrimpe,” and at Merry Mount he encouraged forbidden Maypole dancing, refused to recognize bonded service, embraced Native American culture aesthetically, and Native American women literally. Within a year, Standish’s and Morton’s followers negotiated at gunpoint for Morton’s expulsion from the New World, after which Standish had the pilgrim playboy’s Maypole chopped down. From there, Beckman offers a narrative history touching on the revolutionary bonhomie of Samuel Adams’s taverns (a barroom insurgency that led, in turn, to the rowdy, whooping Boston Tea Party), the subversive revelry of plantation slave culture, Western prank journalism, P. T. Barnum, jazzmen, flappers, merry pranksters, and riot grrrls. In American Fun, humor and music catalyze cultural subversion, breaking out spontaneously in response to intolerant majority rule.
Above is a 1993 standup routine from Bill Hicks that Letterman initially refused to air. Update from a reader:
The whole interview with Bill Hicks’ mom is priceless:
In addition to being sugar-sweet and tack-sharp, Mrs. Hicks offers some fascinating background on her son. He wasn’t an easy comic for a parent to watch, and her pain at his loss remains palpable. The whole visit was an unusual move by a talk show host, but it was as close as Letterman could come to correcting the mistake … especially since he used the opportunity to go ahead and show the original routine in full.
The Dish 