Outrageous

August 21, 2023
Despite the prevailing notion that “you can’t joke about anything anymore,” contemporary TV, film, music, and theater boasts more “freedom of expression than ever,” contends Nesteroff (The Comedians) in this extensive if somewhat one-note effort to “provide context for showbiz controversies” from the 1800s onward. Nesteroff visits the vaudeville age of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which saw the ban of “comedy concerning alcohol” in 1922 during Prohibition, and where “sexuality, immorality, and vulgarity” scandalized audiences and critics (the Moline Dispatch in Illinois lamented “the vulgar comedian,” who “turns loose brothel jokes” on suffering audiences, while in Detroit, bare knees were banned from the stage). After television was popularized in the 1940s, complaints “poured in” about such small-screen scandals as Lucille Ball appearing on I Love Lucy while pregnant in 1952. Later uproars were incited by everything from “gay subject matter” in movies to the “evils of modern music.” Nesteroff’s main takeaway is that audiences are no more sensitive today than in the past—only now their vitriol is splashed across social media rather than contained in letters to the editor curated by newspaper staff. While the point is well taken, the argument never progresses much beyond its origins; readers are bombarded with endless historical examples that, while often fascinating, generally fail to elicit more far-reaching analysis. Still, readers seeking evidence to rebut criticism of today’s “snowflakes” will have plenty to choose from here.

October 15, 2023
Comedy historian Nesteroff tackles the tangled story of how the performing arts have long been "dragged into the Culture War and used as a scapegoat." Put someone on stage or screen and let them speak a line or two, and someone is going to be offended. Take the much embattled Smothers Brothers, whose TV show often drew letters such as one that read, "I for one am fed up with looking at [N-word]s, [N-word]-lovers and long-haired fruits on your and every other show on TV." Thus, it has always been: Vaudeville shows were hounded for presumed violations of Jim Crow segregation and obscenity; books of every sort were suppressed by the likes of Anthony J. Comstock, who believed that reading "breeds lust"; drag performers since time immemorial, not least the comedian Milton Berle, were censored and suppressed. If all this sounds depressingly familiar, it's because the campaign has never really lifted. Right-wing leaders are busily hounding targets, but now, too, so is the left, a process that began in the 1990s. "Just as Democrat Tipper Gore had demonized heavy metal," writes the author, "Republican politicians like Oliver North and Dan Quayle demonized rap music as part of a greater political strategy." Nesteroff paints a broad picture, and his narrative is often little more than a shallow recitation of incidents: The Girl Scouts are tarred as Soviet stooges, the Dixie Chicks are pilloried for denouncing George W. Bush, and so forth. There's also a lot of repetition, especially of the complaint, voiced by Groucho Marx half a century ago and reiterated by Sam Kinison, Dave Chappelle, and even the anodyne Jerry Seinfeld, that comedy is impossible in the face of all the delicate sensibilities arrayed against it. The parts are better than the whole, but the message is clear: Loosen up and enjoy the show.

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November 1, 2023

Nesteroff (We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy) shows that heightened sensitivities to offensive material are long-standing phenomena in the U.S. and the UK. Contending that past attempts at censorship can inform the present, he concentrates on controversies from the 19th-century minstrel shows up to the social media age. He extensively utilizes letters to the editors and other expressions of indignation as representative of the zeitgeist. In citing criticism of aspects of culture such as increasing explicitness in music, dancing, film, and TV programs, the book uses cultural touchstones such as Amos 'n' Andy, Gone with the Wind, Milton Berle in drag, plus Elvis Presley, Paul Robeson, Nat King Cole, the John Birch Society, the Moral Majority, and Norman Lear's comedies. General readers will learn that champions of free speech such as Mae West, Billy Wilder, and Mort Sahl were later less accepting of newer cultural expressions, and the Television Code that debuted in 1952 was similar to the earlier Hays Code for films. VERDICT A comprehensive, meticulously researched, generally left-of-center work about how industries intended to entertain were and remain cultural battlefields.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.

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