Quote:
Originally Posted by bigrun
My fav comedians back then hard to seperate..
Pryor
Carlin
Richard Lewis
Still have vcr tapes of HBO shows on all three...I liked Dennis Miller's stand-up back then but dropped him when he showed up on Fox politics.  |
Carlin's work is also some I've grown to love more and more the older I get.
I think the problem with Dennis Miller is so much of his schtick became about using totally obscure references as punchlines. Which I found funny for awhile, but it gets old. And then to make the hard tack to the right when the GOP was very much in control of gov't- where's the funny? You're the guy cheering on the guys in power and putting down the guys not in power. Which is anathema to what good comedy is, which is poking fun at the status quo. It was a really weird career choice, and I don't think he'll ever fully come back from it.
Not a comic, but someone whose appeal, for me, anyway, depended on his personal life was Howard Stern. I really liked him in the 1990's- I listened to his show every time my bosses were out of the office and really thought he was hilarious. But a lot of it was because I knew he was married. The humor came from this guy fantasizing about these things he couldn't actually do anything about in real life- it made, I think, for a connection with his audience, who also went home to their spouses, who might frequently bore and annoy them, but who they loved enough not to want to screw up their relationship with.
Once he split up with his wife and was basically free to do all the things he talked about, then he just sounded like another overprivileged rich guy who could get whatever he wanted because he had a lot of money.
Comics need to be able to connect to their audience on a personal level. I think Louis CK's stuff is hilarious, but what's especially funny is his stuff on how boring parenting is. In some ways, for all the cussing, though, he's less edgy than Bill Cosby's parenting routines in the 1980s which, now that I hear them today, are still hilarious, but REALLY edgy in that some times I wasn't sure he liked his kids. Cosby gets kind of written off as a cuddly comic, thanks to his sitcom, but his best stuff came from a really dark place, I think.