Kliph Nesteroff

This is a valuable recitation of the cultural scandals and outrages of the 1940s up through the time before the internet arrived. It's disturbing to find out how everything new is old again, but notably, how for seventy years, the libertarian branch of the Republican Party has turned towards MAGA fascism, and the author exposes the party's descent into evil, beginning with the villains Koch and the Birchers in the '50s. There's not enough meat on the bones, but it offers some great show more quotes.

Quotes: "A leading California Republican officeholder said that the John Birch Society was "the closest thing to a totalitarian party in this country. Their aim is to get control of the Republican Party. I do not believe the Republican Party can survive this kind of thing."

"In 1968, Republican senator Mark Hatfield worried that the Paul Weyrichs of the world would one day seize his Republican Party. The Far Right has been successfully united by a well-designed, well-financed, and persistent campaign of fear. The continual fanning of this fear shows that they can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality."

George Carlin on Andrew Dice Clay, 1990: "His targets are underdogs. Comedy has traditionally picked on people in power, people who abuse their power. Women, gays, and immigrants are, to my way of thinking, underdogs. I think his core audience is young white males who aren't sure of their manhood. Women who assert themselves and are competent are a threat to these men."

President Harry Truman, 1960: "I feel if our constitutional system fails, it will be because people got scared and turned hysterical and someone in power will demagogue them right into a police state of some kind."

Frank Zappa, 1984: "With all these fundamentalist organizations gathering up millions of dollars, you're looking at a whole nation of potential mutants who could be very harmful." show less

This is a very well documented (dozens of pages of end notes citing sources) history of the American comedy business. Note that I said, "comedy business". Despite its title, this isn't really a book that focuses on the comedians themselves, although there is lots of good history, along with revealing anecdotes, and the author throws in a few of their jokes along the way. The real story here is the rise and fall (and rise and fall, etc.) of comedy for the past 150 years or so. It is a pretty show more fascinating story, but it gets more and more detailed (and less compelling) as it comes up to the present day. While the mobsters who used to run most comedy venues across the country (and owned Las Vegas) were quite generous to comedians if they played along, the latter day club owners expected comedians to perform without any pay at all. And the rise of extreme drug use (mostly cocaine) takes its toll as well. One could conclude that you have to be high to do standup after reading the latter part of this book.

So, overall, this is a very informative, worthwhile read. It just isn't the entertaining story of American comedy it started out to be. Nesteroff writes well, however. He also isn't afraid of trashing everything and everybody through the use of devastating quotes about various comedians by their contemporaries. Some of this isn't for the fainthearted. show less

This was a really cool book; I wasn't sure what I was expecting at first and I think I was thrown off that Nesteroff is non-Native but he leaves plenty of space for Indigenous people to tell their own history, and I think this is a really really accessible way to approach Indigenous history, especially if you are already interested in histories of comedy but don't know much about Indigenous history after Wounded Knee (the first one.)

It's a great blend of that history and also telling the show more stories of contemporary Native comedians, both more visible ones like the 1491s and Joey Clift, and comedians who are not as famous (or at least were not as immediately familiar to me, a non-Native person.) I think it could be a really great gift for folks who are into comedy, and I honestly might use some of it in teaching; the parts about Will Rogers in particular I learned quite a bit about just how political his actual comedy was. Definitely recommend! show less

Best for:
Those with an interest in the history of comedy; those interested in the ways that US and Canadian popular culture have excluded groups, specifically Native Americans / Indigenous people.

In a nutshell:
Author Neteroff provides a comprehensive history of Native American comedy interspersed with vignettes about modern-day Native American comedians.

Why I chose it:
A cannonballer reviewed it and it sounded so interesting.

Review:
I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. I think it might show more be one of the few cases where reading it as an audio book might have harmed it - for example, I didn’t realize until maybe 1/4 of the way through that the chapters were set up as sort of an alternating straight time line of the history of comedy and chapters about modern comedians. It felt super disjointed and a bit hard to follow until that clicked.

That said, the information in this book is interesting and pretty much all of it was new to me. The racism and lack of opportunities is not surprising, but I’ve been completely ignorant of the plight of Native American comedians - I’m not really ‘in’ to stand-up comedy, though I am a fan a few comedians (Hannah Gadsby springs to mind). I’m not totally unaware of the challenges that people who are not white men (or white women, to a lesser extent) face when seeking out their careers in places like Saturday Night Live, but I appreciate how the Native American experience is unique in this area.

I do wish this were written by a Native American writer or comedian, as I think they would be able to provide even more cultural context, though Neteroff clearly has done loads of research.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
If it weren’t an audio book I’d donate it. show less