Hip Wits Disc Hits

"I Make Records because I honestly believe that what I say in the clubs the rest of the country should hear. Y'know, people are very evangelistic about comedy records. They play them for one another, like we take out our best silver for our friends." So says Morton Lyon Sahl, a self-confessed "Night Blooming Serious" and also one of the strong reasons for a humor record sales boom that has set industry executives smiling to the chatter of cash registers being rung up in record shops across the country.

Never before has a hip humor LP – Inside Shelley Berman – occupied a top position for so many months on Billboard's best-seller list. Keeping it close company (as of press time) are The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, Outside Shelley Berman and The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters – proving that witty, penetrating social satire, once heard only in the more avant-garde night spots, is now as commercial as it is chic. Serving up Nichols and May with cocktails, then Mort Sahl on disc for dinner, followed by Lenny Bruce with the cognac, is the latest cachet of social awareness – a sort of do-it-yourself nightclub with a bill of entertainment that no single club in the country can match.

Newest, driest and currently one of the hottest of the group is Bob Newhart, whose debut disc orbited past the 100,000 mark in its first four weeks on the stands and has, to date, sold more than 250,000 copies. His sudden zip to fame is credited specifically to his LP, not his club dates (he had worked only three before the record's release, to pre-test the material to be included on the platter). Thus, Newhart is probably the first of a new breed of comic who came to the public attention through LP rather than personal appearance. Today, he's one of the most in-demand humorists around the country, a situation that was also helped by his smash fill-in performance on the Emmy Awards show in June. Although some of his material is drawn from the oft-used themes of airlines, politics and the advertising dodge, and his style is somewhat reminiscent of Shelley Berman's, his ideas are fresh and, like most of the other new hip comedians, he creates almost all of his mono-logs himself. He satirizes everything from driving schools (second instructor,inquiring after the first, "And just how fast were you going when Mr. Adams jumped from the car?") to a chaotic TV "walkthrough" of Khrushchev's visit to the U.S. ("All right, cue the flower girl... where's the little creep with the flowers? ... all right, hang onto the flower kid . . . she's running up the ramp . . . she's supposed to be at the foot of the ramp . . . all right, let her go ... tell Khrushchev he's going to have to watch the door . . . he's going to bang amp;ndash he banged the kid with the door . . .").

Warner Brothers has been taping Bob's new routines at Freddie's in Minneapolis, the Hungry i in San Francisco and the Crescendo in L.A. and expects to release a second LP in October or November.(Almost all the humorists of the hip school eschew the recording studio, are taped right on stage during their shows, and the best of the material is edited for pressing onto vinyl.)

More frenetic and farther out than Newhart is Jonathan Winters. Winters gets more yuks from an idiot sound effect, a loony twang or a rube chuckle than from anything he actually says. His first Verve LP – The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters – is over the 100,000 figure and one of its salient features is his pet-shop skit (first introduced to playboy readers in November 1955). Jonny gently chides the customer who's just had his finger taken off by a piranha fish: "Heh, heh, heh. You know it's a funny thing that you never have to feed that fish nothin'. There's always some clown like yourself putting his finger in the bowl . . ."

With piston smoothness, he can shift from a nee-noo-nahing kid to Oscar Deever, the m.c. at the amateur show in the American Legion Hall: "I would like to say thanks to Ed Micklechek, Past Commander here. Thanks so much, Chek. Uh, please don't come up – you're a little gassed." Seconds later, he's a Godfrey type who tells one of three singing contestants, Lamar Gum-body, "I knew your dad, Lamar, in Worjd War I. He was a traitor."

In the company of close friends, he may launch into his "dosed circuit sick bits," like his portrayal of Pierre Andre, the Little Orphan Annie announcer: "And the secret word for today, kiddies, is Sandy is a faggot and so is the Asp." But his strong Puritan streak ("I'm an Episcopalian – that's a Catholic who flunked his Latin") rules out blue material on his club circuit and, hence, on his LPs.

In a spidery corner of the hierarchy of the hip is Tom Lehrer, a Harvard graduate and math instructor and modern forerunner of the sick, sick, sick school of satirists (playboy, July 1955). By casting himself as a sort of musical Charles Addams, Lehrer became the comedy darling of the campus, and as the nightclub bosses will testify, he made it professionally on the basis of his first album (which – a rare feat – he recorded and sold himself). Here, he plinks out a ditty on his saw-toothed piano about the Boy Scouts: "Be prepared!/ That's the Boy Scouts' solemn creed./ Be prepared 1/ And be clean in word and deed./ Don't solicit for your sister,/ That's not nice,/ Unless you get a good percentage of her price . . ."

Tom's ghoulish assault on misdirected emotionalism, "recorded in a concert hall, before live corpses," involves just (continued on page 131) Hip wits (continued from page 83) plain folks back home: "I remember Dan,/ The druggist on the corner,/ He was never mean or ornery,/ He was swell./ He killed his mother-in-law/ And ground her up real well/ And sprinkled just a bit/ Over each banana split." And of a different sort of romance: "I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,/ But much more for the touch of your whips, dear./ You can raise welts/ Like nobody else./ As we dance to the Masochism Tango."

The sickest of the sick, however, is Lenny Bruce (Playboy, February 1959), who has enjoyed a hefty sale on his three Fantasy LPs, Interviews of Our Time, The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce and Togetherness, and is without a doubt the most mordantly. venomously funny man of the bunch. He has found his way into some 200,000 hi-fi homes and been hailed by The Village Voice as "the most effective Geiger counter for hypocrisies of any American comedian of this generation . . . operates at an intense level of frustrated truth-seeking."

Lenny's work on a club stage is, like Mort Sail's, largely free-form and never comes out quite the same way twice. Both got their start in San Francisco, but if Mort enjoys milking a sacred cow or two as a part of his political and social commentary, Lenny does everything but sodomize the dumb beasts for his audience and often leaves them (the audiences; there has been no report on the condition of the sacred cows) in a state of near shock. Lenny's language and his caustic comment are a little farther out than anything else you are apt to hear on the stage of a smart supper club this season and some actually consider Bruce a dirty comic, which he is not. His satire grows naturally from its source, and if he sometimes uses words not often heard in polite company, they are used within a context that is correct as well as killing. Lenny is a very intense and sincere young man and if some of his humor seems outrageous, it is largely because it is an outrageous world he is satirizing. The best of Bruce, in the far-out sense, never quite makes it into his albums, but even somewhat edited, Lenny is very outrageous and wonderful stuff. And Lenny's LP record jackets are sick, too, or satirical statements about a sick, society, depending upon your point of view. Sick Humor shows him on a picnic in the middle of a graveyard and Togetherness shows him embracing a colored and an oriental chick in front of a statue of Abraham Lincoln, with the blessings of a group of besheeted Ku Kluxers.

Bruce on poor telephone service: "I don't really dig the phone company. It's a monopoly. Let's face it, if you get too hot with the phone company, you'll be left with a Dixie cup and a thread. Where are you going to go instead?

"When I was younger and less mature, I used to imagine ways of getting back at them. Like the long distance operator would say to me, 'That will be $3.70 for overtime.' 'Lotsa luck!' 'What?' 'Forget the money – you're not getting it.' 'But I don't understand.' 'That's not too hard to understand. You're not getting the money, that's all. You don't need it anyway, right? Don't be a company girl!' 'I'm going to give you the supervisor.' 'I can't wait.' 'Hello, this is the supervisor.' 'Hiya, ya nitwit.' 'Can we have your name, sir?' 'Yes, it's Morl Sahl.' Then Mort gets phone calls every day..."

Bruce on sharks: "They were very bugged with the sharks while I was down in Miami. Well, let's face it, it's a tourist town and the sharks did swing with a few. They didn't even have a chance to check in and they'd got them already. I can certainly understand why the Chamber of Commerce was upset, because it certainly loused up the 'Fly Now – Pay Later' scene..."

Bruce on the new cool cigarettes: "It isn't the tobacco you're addicted to, it's the menthol. You don't realize it yet, but you'll discover the truth some night when you're out of cigarettes and you find yourself staring at the Vicks jar."

On the nervous breakdown of good friend and fellow comedian Jonathan Winters during a performance at the Hungry it: "Everyone seems to be wacking out these days. But if I knew I was about to go, I certainly wouldn't let it happen in a cellar nightclub in San Francisco. I'd bug out on a television spectacular with the Norman Luboff Choir singing in the background.

"Actually, they are coming to get me. Jonathan finked on me. They told him if he turned in two nuts, they'd let him go."

Bruce on an airplane disaster in which the back of the plane blows off and fifteen people fall out: "The pilot is juiced out of his head and he turns around and sees what's happened, and he says turns around and sees what's happened, and he ways to the co-pilot, 'Whoops, are we gonna get yelled at!' 'There go six more!' 'Say, listen – you don't say anything and / won't say anything. Who's to say how many people got on the plane in the first place?' 'There are twenty people left.' 'It's their word against ours. Let's dump 'em.' 'What'sa matter with you, you monster. You can't do that – they're awake!'"

Don Adams has been singled out by Time magazine as one of the best of the "sickniks," but he does not really belong to the sick side of hip humor at all. He works from carefully scripted satirical material written by himself and good friend Bill Dana (a TV writer for Steve Allen who has lately been cutting hip humor records of his own as Jose Jimenez), and depends upon his exceptional delivery, knack for characterization and expert timing to make his Bengal lancers, private detective, courtroom lawyer, baseball umpire and other cleverly conceived creatures of satire come alive on the club stage and LP record. Don's first album, released by Signature, is called quite simply Don Adams, and includes the bumptious football coach giving the big pep talk to his team: "A good end and a good halfback should go hand in hand – but not on the campus." And a series of You Are There -type news commentators covering Stalin's funeral: first there's Charles Collingwood on top of a parapet in Red Square, and "for closer coverage take it away, John Daly," who describes the crowds milling around the tomb, then turns it over to Ed Murrow. "This is Edward R. Murrow. I am inside the casket."

That's about as close as Adams comes to the so-called "sick" comedy, so popular today, though he does have one bit in which he discusses sick humor and suggests that if he really were a sick comedian, he could imagine the ultimate sick situation in which a comic did an amusing sketch about an airplane crash to a club audience that included several close relatives of the victims of the last terrible disaster at La Guardia, then, apologizing for any possible breach in taste, he introduced, "sitting over here. Mr. Thompson, who lost a wife and two children in that terrible disaster ... Mr. Thompson, will you stand up and take a bow? ... Let's give him a nice hand, folks! ... No tears, please. Just take your bows and sit down ... Over here, we have one of the heroes of that disaster – the man who owned the garage where the bodies were stacked. Nice of you, sir, to give up all that garage space for those bodies ... Here we have the son of the captain who was the pilot of the plane. Son, we'd like you to meet the tugboat captain who was instrumental in the rescue operation. He had ahold of your father's coat, but he let it go and he slipped right back down into the water. But that's the way it goes ... Tell me, son, what would you like to be when you grow up? ... A tugboat captain? Uh huh ... Or a garage man. I see."

More typically Adams is his lampoon of the late movies on TV: "Good evening and welcome to the late show ... The late show takes great pleasure tonight in presenting the first New York telecast of the 1938 MGM film classic. Club Trocadero, starring George Brent and Claudette Colbert, with Lynn Bari and Edward Arnold in featured roles ... Here is Part One – ta tum ta ta tum ta ta tum – that was Part One ... Among our cast of players you may have noticed that the waiters were Luther Adler, and a very young-looking Lon Chaney, Jr. The beautician was of course Barbara Stanwyck, and the part of the struggling and idealistic district attorney was played by the

ever-popular Lew Ayres. The men in the dogsled were Jean Hersholt, Chester Morris, Richard Arlen and Keye Luke. That was Gloria Jean dancing with Conrad Nagel. And the orchestra leader of course was Ann Sothern. The part of Abraham Lincoln was played by Xavier Cugat and milling around in the crowds outside the Ford Theatre were Noah Beery, Jr., Harry Carey, Jr., and Sammy Davis, Jr..."

Quite a different slice of satire is served by Mike Nichols and Elaine May, whose quietly debilitating cynicism is a delight to the truly sophisticated. It is from the innermost recesses of their early acting experience (with the same Chicago troupe that produced Shelley Berman) that their rich technique, their telling mannerisms, their superb sense of timing and vocal nuances developed. They have been called the eggheads benedict of TV, but what they do on their Mercury LP, Improvisations to Music, is just the sort of lethal ad-libbing that gets easily hamstrung by TV's taboos. It is also very different from the set routines they take into theatres, clubs and concert halls.

One of the high points of the LP is Second Piano Concerto, Imagine, say, Dr. Noel coward and his patient, Gertrude Lawrence, in a dental office. With baleful; desperation, she tells him: "I haven't eaten at all. May I take my hat off?" . . . "You know you might just try chewing on that side occasionally, not all of the time of course . . . I think it's ready" ... "I think I'll go somewhere and just chew, and chew and (hew. I've wanted to chew, God knows I've wanted to chew, but I – don't you see I didn't dare? ... I though what if it would come out, you know, and it would be naked. Open." "You – you know what's happening, don't you?" . . . "Yes, I think I do" . . . "I – I never meant for it to happen" . . . "No, nor did I" . . . "You know when you first came into my office and said those few sad words about the tiny tooth in the, hack of your mouth that was hurting you, I think I fell something for that tooth I wasn't meant to feel. Do you know what I mean?" . . . "Do you know that when I first came into your office, when I saw you standing there so stern in your white smock I thought, he'll lathe me for having a cavity, It will disgust him, I thought . . . When you looked in my mouth and said, 'It's rotten,' I thought, nothing can happen now. And yet when you looked at me, you didn't look at me as though I were a woman with a rotten tooth. You looked at me as though I were me, and for the first time I knew who I was – ME!"

All of their routines on record are completely improvised. (A second Mike and Elaine disc will be out just about the time you're reading this.) When nightclub audiences ask them to such-and-such from their album, they are forced to say, "We can't – because we can't remember it."

Shelley Berman is one who has to remember it. His audiences & who have bought an unprecedented half million copies of his Inside Shelley Berman, a quarter of a million Outside Shelley Berman, and are rapidly snapping up his latest, The Edge of Shelley Berman – demand it. Shelley, with almost total recall, remembers the details of his childhood, out of which his brilliantly sad-sack, fiercely empathic humor springs. And, like Mike and Elaine, he is a writer and self-styled "improvising for the nuances of everyday speech. He has a John O'Hara ear and he is the best actor of them all. "I am," says Sheldon, "the clown who has played Hamlet," a clown as poignant as he is impious, a "confessor," and a man of many parts.

Most of Berman's routines are by now little classics (phoning a department store to report a woman hanging from a window ledge: "No, operator, you're missing the point. I don't wish to speak to the woman ..." or the hung-over partygoer piecing together a picture of the previous evening in a phone conversation with his host: "Gee, Dave, I can't imagine how I managed to break that window. I don't have any cuts or bruises on my hands ... Oh, I see ... Were you very found of that cat?" [Playboy, July 1958]). Berman was one of the first to skewer the hotshot talent agent or PR type, though, as Lenny Bruce and Bob Newhart demonstrate, it is a ripe, wide-open target for satire. Berman's version involves the colorful, cigar-chomping booking agent in a breezy phone conversation with one of the great, revered figures of all time: "Hallo, Bubbie, how ya doin' kiddo, this is Artie. Fine, fine, I'm glad ta hear it. Tell me, Al, how's Mrs. Schweitzer? Good good good. Listen, doc, I got some very good news for you, docky boy ... You open in Chicago at the Chez Paree ... Al, l was afraid they wouldn't hire you as a straight organ player, so what l did, see, I sold you as a combination organist-comic ... Tell you what you do & you dress up your act with a little patter ... a few African-type gags; they'll go for that & little bits of humor you pick up around the leper colony ..."

Favorite topic of all the new-school humorists seems to be the airplane & or rather the fear of something going wrong way up there in the clouds. And no one has better limned the frustration, tension and uncertainty that grip the airborne passenger than Shelley Berman. In this skit, Berman is the unwitting wit, the classic loser: "The first thing you do ... you strap yourself into the seat ... I say to myself, well, I'm strapping myself into the seat, because if I wasn't strapped into this seat there's a very good chance that I will fall out of this seat, you see, say if the

plane came to a sudden stop – like against a mountain. I visualize myself flying right through the plane and right out through the front, you know, right through the area where the crew and the girls have their parties ..." No wonder the airlines admit that since this Berman bit has become so popular, pilots have been bashful about making any announcements at all, and stewardesses have been loath to ask the passenger whether he wants "Coffee, tea or milk?" whenever mealtime rolls around.

In his last two LPs, Shelley has taken a turn toward more serio-comic routines, like the one in which he plays his own father giving Shelley a hard time for wanting a hundred dollars to go to acting school. Dad finally relents and gives Shelley the money, but not before raising a lump as well as a laugh in the collective throat of his audience. And the poignant phone pleadings made by a poor schlub named Alvin as his girl friend Shirley outlines her seemingly endless list of reasons for giving him the air: "But, gee, Shirley &ndash lots of guys breathe through their mouth." Because Berman appeals to the heart as well as the head of his audience, he reaches a larger audience and will, therefore, probably enjoy a proportionately greater success in the future than any of his fellow cerebral comedians.

Mort Sahl (Playboy, June 1957) – who pioneered social criticism in the clubs and was the first of the hip humorists to do monologs on LP – has five discs going for him, four on Verve (The Future Lies Ahead, 1960, or Look Forward in Anger, A Way of Life and At the Hungry i) and one on Fantasy (At Sunset). Together, they've sold over 125,000 copies and, as Mort says, "gotten a lot of people to come and see me who wouldn't otherwise get near a club. The records are the only thing I have that's not quicksilver. Mine sell like a book – steadily, moderately."

One Problem peculiar to Mort's discs stems from his penchant for blasting away at current events. He is at his bust'em-up best when dwelling on politics, the administration, civic goofs and goof-ups, and headline-grabbing incidents of every sort; hence, a lot of material on his LPs becomes quickly dated. Trying to overcome that difficulty, Verve did a snappy job of getting Mort's comments on the sticky U-2 incident down on vinyl and released to the public a little over a month after the event became a cause celebre:

"So, Powers is up and he's got the button on his seat ...the ejection seat ... and he's got a poison needle and he's to use these ... right? ... and then the Russians caught him in a searchlight and started shooting at him, and he chose a third alternative, I gather: he chose Communism at that point ... Great? ... He's in Russia now ... Then the President said, 'Well, they've

got spies in our country too' . . . and I think if we're lucky maybe they'll steal some of our secrets and then they'll be two years behind . . . We've had two spies in our history . . . Nathan Hale, who said 'I regret that I have but one life to give for my country' . . . and Francis Powers, who was quoted as saying 'This shatters all my plans' . . . right? . . . Onward . . . Listen, wouldn't you like to get up once in the morning and see a proposal by our side? It's really driving me crazy – no initiative . . . Khrushchev says go to the summit, Khrushchev says go home, Khrushchev says disarm – and that really bugs me, because I see the administration in a very passive role . . . in fact, it's almost a female role . . . I have a vision of them in Washington: 'Did he call today? . . . why doesn't he call?'"

Sahl must be regarded as the leader of the image-breakers – part critic, part poet, part comic. And in addition to Sahl and the other balloon-busters mentioned here, we must also include the likes of Stan Freberg, Bob and Ray, Henry Morgan, Shorty Petterstein, Pat Harrington, Jr., Bill Dana, and other social commentators who have not appeared before a nightclub audience but are happily available on LP. Humor has come a long way since the days when dad used to listen to Laughing Records and W. C. Fields' classic Temperance Lecture. The current broad acceptance of the hip breed by the U.S. public bodes well for the future. Onward!

Hip Humor LP Discography

Don Adams Signature 1010

Orson Bean at the Hungry i Fantasy 7009

Inside Shelley Berman Verve MGV-15003

Outside Shelley Berman Verve MGV-15007

The Edge of Shelley Berman Verve MGV-15013

Bob Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular RCA Victor LSP-1773

Bob Ray on a Platter RCA Victor LPM-2131

Lenny Bruce and Shorty Petterstein – Interviews of Our Times Fantasy 7001

The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce Fantasy 7003

Lenny Bruce – Togetherness Fantasy 7007

Lord Buckley – Way Out Humor World Pacific 1279

Del Close – The "Do It Your-self" Psychoanalysis Kit Hanover M-5002

Professor Irwin Corey at Le Ruban Bleu Jubilee 2018

Bill Dana – My Name... Jose Jimenez Signature S.M-1013

Phyllis Diller – Wet Toe in a Hot Socket Mirrosonic SP-6002

Stan Freberg – A Child's Garden of Freberg Capitol T-777

Stan Freberg – Best Shows 2-Capitol WBO-1035

Stan Freberg. With Original Cast Capitol T-1242

Brother Dave Gardner – Rejoice, Dear Hearts! RCA Victor LPM-2083

Andy Griffith – Just for Laughs Capitol T-962

This Here Andy Griffith Capitol T-1215

Pat Harrington, Jr., as Guido Panzini, with Bill Dana Signature SM-1012

Eddie Lawrence – The

Old Philosopher 2-Coral 57103, 57155The Garden of Eddie

Lawrence Signature 1003The Kingdom of Eddie

Lawrence Coral 57203Tom Lehrer – Songs Lehrer TL-101More Tom Lehrer Lehrer TL-102Tom Lehrer – Song

Satires Audio Rarities 230An Evening Wasted with

Tom Lehrer Lehrer TL-202The Best of Henry Morgan Judson 3016Henry Morgan Isobel Robins –

Saint the Sinner Washington 3004Here's Morgan Riverside RLP-8003The Button-Down Mind

of Bob Newhart Warner Bros. W-1379Mike Nichols and Elaine May –

Improvisations to Music Mercury 20376Bob Peck – Moth in a

Gray Flannel Suit Jubilee 1035Mort Sahl at Sunset Fantasy 7005

Mort Sahl – The Future

Lies Ahead Verve MGV-15002Mort Sahl 1960, or Look

Forward in Anger Verve MGV-15004Mort Sahl – A Way

of Life Verve MGV-15006Mort Sahl at the

Hungry i Verve MGV-15012Peter Sellers – The Best of

Sellers Angel 35884Jean Shepherd and Other

Foibles Elektra EKL-172Peter Ustinou – Grand Prix

of Gibraltar Riverside 12-833The Wonderful World of

Jonathan Winters Verve MGV-15009Jonathan Winters – Down

to Earth Verve MGV-15011Woody Woodbury Looks at

Love and Life Stereoddities MW-1Woody Woodbury's Laughing

Room Stereoddities MW-2