Americans take their humor seriously. Although vaudeville, film and radio had embraced comedy as a sure-fire way to attract an audience, the postSecond World War comedian often takes on the role of the cultural commentator. The audience expects comics to “pattern their comic material close to everyday reality, making obvious behavioral patterns explicit and tacit operating knowledge and other insights about American society objects of conscious reflection” (Koziski 1984:57). In humor, the audience seeks both an explanation of and a rebellion against the incongruities of the social order.

In the politically repressive 1950s, stand-up comedian Mort Sahl and cartoonists Walt Kelly and Herb Block obliquely commented on the terror generated by Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunts for communists. After a blustering politician commands Kelly’s swamp animals to look for communists, the opossum “Pogo” famously declared, “We have met the enemy and they is Us.” In the late 1950s and early 1960s, stand-up comic Lenny Bruce crashed through society’s norms on discourse and taste, while Mike Nichols and Elaine May, in a more sophisticated fashion, eviscerated conventional manners.

Mathematics professor Tom Lehrer joked in his satirical songs about the nation’s fear of atomic annihilation, sentiments which presaged the film Dr Strangelove (1962) in their attack on the absurd logic of nuclear warfare. Starting in 1952, MAD magazine mocked social conventions, as well as spoofing the decade’s Cold War mentality in the cartoon feature Spy versus Spy. In 1958 Paul Krassner, who had worked for MAD and for Lenny Bruce, began the magazine The Realist, which became the progenitor of media satire for the next several decades. The Realist influenced National Lampoon and Spy magazines, the comic strip Doonesbury and the television series Laugh-In (Boskin 1997:73).

Starting in 1960, comedian and political activist Dick Gregory became the first black stand-up comedian to address race issues with predominantly white audiences. Unlike black political activists, black humorists, like Gregory Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, Godfrey Cambridge and Flip Wilson, were welcomed into mainstream media venues, including television. Traditionally humor on television has been tamer than humor on the comedy club circuit. From the 1950s through the 1970s, prime-time television had to be acceptable for the youngest, most impressionable audiences. Humor often pushes social boundaries, and, in the late 1960s, Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers provided the prime-time audience with irreverent, sexy skits and jokes. In 1970, however, network executives canceled The Smothers Brothers because the show’s jibes against tobacco advertisers and the Vietnam War irritated conservatives and the Nixon administration (Boskin 1997:103).

In the confusing 1970s, Steve Martin engaged in anarchic behaviors which mocked people’s selfabsorbed seriousness. Like other successful comedians, Martin’s humor translated to other media, including records, television and film. Joan Rivers, Bob Newhart, Richard Pryor, Chevy Chase, Roseanne, Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Bill Cosby and a host of other comedians moved from successful stand-up careers into other entertainment fields. Since 1975, NBC’s Saturday Nïght Live, which airs after prime-time hours, has often used a dark-humored skit comedy to address social issues. The program has also offered a showcase for young comedians, like Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Julia LouisDreyfus. Ironically, comedy clubs, the traditional breeding ground for new comics, have suffered in recent years because of the success of television programs devoted to showing stand-up routines.

Although American standup comedy films and television programs have gingerly and unevenly approached political humor in the past, in 1996 Comedy Central successfully launched a satiric news show, The Daily Show, which humorously covered politics, the media and religion. Unlike The Smothers Brothers, The Daily Show and late-night talkshow hosts, Jay Leno and David Letterman have not faced censure or censorship for their increasingly pointed remarks on the president and other authority figures. Indeed, the boundaries of appropriate commentary on public figures have been stretched most vigorously by radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who leavens his bombastic political views with satires targeting liberals, women and democratic political figures.

“Shock jocks” like Don Imus and Howard Stern have used their radio shows to push the limits of humorous free speech in their jokes about people and institutions. In turn, candidates for political office have sought the power of the witty riposte in response to political attacks. Candidate John Kennedy diffused the public’s concerns about his wealth by reading aloud to audiences a fake telegram from his powerful father declaring that the senior Kennedy “will not buy one more vote for Jack than is necessary to win the election.” In 1968 candidate Richard Nixon tried to improve his public image by appearing on Laugh-In, where he uncomfortably recited one of the show’s signature joke lines, “Sock it to Me.” Throughout the past five decades, Americans created jokes about the incongruities inherent in a democratic system. Minorities point out their struggles to achieve full American citizenship while members of the white majority somewhat nervously poke fun at their seeming imperfections, particularly those of new immigrants. As women gain more political and social power, comedians like Andrew Dice Clay build careers on denigrating them. Although America promises freedom, progress and equality the social system invariably fails to create this promised world. Disasters, like the Exxon Valdez collision and the NASA space ship Challenger explosion, and bizarre criminal behavior, such as the murders by Jeffrey Dahmer and the marital problems of Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt, quickly become fodder for jokes. Interestingly the seemingly bland, family-oriented 1950s spawned a series of sick “dead-baby” jokes. Humor in various ages, therefore, “frequently serves as a warning system of emerging social issues. Society is vastly informed and enlivened by (humor’s) prodding presence, spontaneous refraction of events and issues, criss-crossing within and between classes and ethnic groups and its notable resilience” (Boskin 1997:204).