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Jean Carroll
Born
Long before the "housewife comic" became a type, Jean Carroll stood alone at the microphone with no song or dance to fall back on, telling stories about her husband, her daughter and her own vanity. She first appeared on Ed Sullivan's programme in 1948, when it was still called Toast of the Town, and was invited back more than 20 times; Joan Rivers and Lily Tomlin grew up watching her.
Recommended recording: Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, her 1960 Columbia album, which now survives mainly as second-hand vinyl. The Jewish Women's Archive hosts clips of her 1960 and 1964 Sullivan sets, the quickest way to hear her timing.
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Moms Mabley
Jackie "Moms" Mabley spent decades on the Black theatre circuit before network television let her in. Widely credited as the first woman comedian to play Harlem's Apollo, she worked in a housecoat and floppy hat as a cheeky old woman with a taste for young men, and slipped pointed remarks about race and politics in between the double entendres. Her first national television appearance is usually dated to A Time for Laughter, Harry Belafonte's 1967 ABC showcase.
Recommended recording: Moms Mabley at the Playboy Club (1961), from her run of live albums for Chess, which streams on Apple Music alongside her Geneva Conference set. Her better-known At the "UN" album is harder to find outside vinyl.
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Lord Buckley
Lord Buckley was a monologist rather than a joke teller. He retold Shakespeare, Poe and the Gospels in the slang of jazz musicians, delivered with the airs of a British lord, so that on his 1955 RCA Victor album Mark Antony's funeral speech opens "Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin' daddies, knock me your lobes." Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg all acknowledged the debt, and he showed that a comic monologue could be a piece of performance art.
Recommended recording: start with The Nazz, his hip retelling of the life of Jesus, then hear a whole show on So You Thought Hip Was New, a recording of his February 1959 Ivar concert that streams on Apple Music.
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Redd Foxx
Years before Sanford and Son made him a television star, Redd Foxx was the king of the "party record", the adults-only comedy LP that radio would not play and that was passed around at home instead. Laff of the Party, released in 1956 by Dootone, the small Los Angeles label later renamed Dooto, is generally regarded as the first of them, and one account counts 14 Foxx albums between 1956 and 1958. His loose, blue, conversational nightclub style is the bridge between the Black theatre circuit and Richard Pryor.
Recommended recording: Laff of the Party, Vol. 1, included complete on the 2022 set Classic Stand-up: The Early Years Collection 1946-60. Single volumes come and go on streaming services, so look for the collection first.
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Mort Sahl
Mort Sahl walked on in a sweater, carrying a rolled-up newspaper, and talked about the actual news. When he started at San Francisco's hungry i in December 1953, nightclub comics mostly traded set-up-and-punchline gags; Sahl riffed on Eisenhower-era politics like a sharp graduate student, and in August 1960 Time put him on its cover as the patriarch of a new school of comedians. Every political comic since works in a room he opened.
Recommended recording: The Future Lies Ahead (Verve, 1958), often called the first modern comedy album, which streams on Apple Music. Completists can also look for At Sunset, taped at a jazz club in 1955 without his knowledge and released later.
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Phyllis Diller
Phyllis Diller made her stand-up debut at San Francisco's Purple Onion on 7 March 1955, a few months short of her 38th birthday, and was held over for well over a year. Her weapon was the self-mocking one-liner fired at speed: the fright wig, the cackle and the long-suffering husband she called Fang turned domestic misery into a headline act, and showed that a woman could carry a club bill on volume of jokes alone.
Recommended recording: Wet Toe in a Hot Socket!, her 1959 debut, recorded live at New York's Bon Soir and now mostly found on second-hand vinyl. For something easier to hear, her 1969 Ed Sullivan Show set has been issued digitally as Stand-up About Her Looks.
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Shelley Berman
Born
Shelley Berman insisted he was not a stand-up at all: he worked sitting on a stool, miming one side of a telephone call and letting the audience fill in the other. Those anxious, escalating conversations turned everyday embarrassment into the material, a template observational comedy still follows. They also sold: his debut became the first comedy album to go gold and the first non-musical recording to win a Grammy, and spent weeks at number two on the Billboard album chart.
Recommended recording: Inside Shelley Berman (Verve, 1959), which streams on Apple Music along with its follow-ups Outside Shelley Berman and The Edge of Shelley Berman.
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Lenny Bruce
Born
Lenny Bruce treated the stage as a place to say what he really thought about religion, race, sex and hypocrisy, in the words people really used, and he paid for it. Arrested repeatedly for obscenity, he was convicted in New York in 1964 after undercover police attended his shows at the Cafe Au Go Go. Governor George Pataki pardoned him in December 2003, the first posthumous pardon in the state's history. Every comic who has argued about free speech on stage is quoting his case.
Recommended recording: The Carnegie Hall Concert, taped at a midnight show on 4 February 1961 during a blizzard, and issued complete in 1972. It catches him loose and brilliant before the trials consumed him, and streams on Apple Music.
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Jonathan Winters
Born
Jonathan Winters built an act out of people who did not exist. Instead of jokes he offered a cast of characters, voices and sound effects, from the salty old lady Maude Frickert to the rustic Elwood P. Suggins, and he could jump between them faster than an audience could follow. It is the line that runs to Robin Williams and every comic who treats the stage as a one-person sketch show.
Recommended recording: The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters (Verve, 1960), drawn from his nightclub act, which he opens by talking about a recent stay in a sanitarium. Tracks such as Used Pet Shop and Hip Robin Hood show the range, and the album streams on Apple Music.
More about Jonathan Winters10
Bob Newhart
Born
Bob Newhart proved that the quietest man in the room could be the funniest. His stammering, deadpan delivery and one-sided phone calls, in which a nervous professional tries to stay polite in an absurd situation, made understatement a stand-up style of its own. The record that launched him became the first comedy album to win Album of the Year, at the 1961 Grammys, and he took Best New Artist the same night.
Recommended recording: The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, taped at the Tidelands Club in Houston in February 1960. Driving Instructor is the routine to play a newcomer, and the whole album streams on Apple Music.
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Dick Gregory
Born
Dick Gregory talked about segregation to white audiences, coolly and topically, and made them laugh at the system rather than at him. His break came in January 1961, when Chicago's Playboy Club booked him as a one-night replacement and kept him for six weeks. Then Jack Paar invited him to sit on the Tonight Show couch after his set, an invitation no Black comic had been given before; Gregory later said his pay jumped from $250 for a seven-day week to $5,000 a night. Within a few years he had turned much of his energy to the civil rights movement.
Recommended recording: In Living Black and White (Colpix, 1961), his debut album, which streams on Apple Music.
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Joan Rivers
Born
Joan Rivers made herself the target. She talked as herself about dating, her looks and her own failings, in a fast, intimate rush that a Variety reviewer in 1965 noted won the room at once, and the confessional tone she set is still the default for stand-up today. Her career turned on 17 February 1965, when Johnny Carson told her on The Tonight Show, as she later recalled, "You're gonna be a star."
Recommended recording: The Next to Last Joan Rivers Album, her late-1960s stand-up record for Buddah, which Stand Up! Records issued on CD for the first time for Record Store Day 2015. Her 1965 Warner Bros. debut, built around a hairdresser she called Mr. Phyllis, is harder to find.
More about Joan Rivers13
George Carlin
Born
Before the beard, the seven words and the counterculture, George Carlin was a clean-cut television comic with a gift for parody, and that earlier Carlin is worth hearing on his own terms. His 1960s act took apart the language of broadcasting itself: newscasts, commercials and disc jockeys, with every verbal tic exact. The obsession with words that drove his later, angrier work is already fully formed.
Recommended recording: Take-Offs and Put-Ons, his first solo album, taped at the Roostertail in Detroit in November 1966 and released by RCA Victor in 1967. It was nominated for a Grammy, losing to Bill Cosby's Revenge, and streams on Apple Music.
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Don Rickles
Born
Don Rickles turned the heckler problem inside out: instead of fending off the audience, he made the audience the act. His crowd-work insults, aimed at everyone from front-row strangers to Frank Sinatra, were so evenly spread that being picked on became a badge of honour, and every comic who riffs with the front row today is using his tools.
Recommended recording: Hello Dummy!, taped at the Sahara in Las Vegas and released by Warner Bros. in 1968 as a single continuous track of about 35 minutes. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2025, and it streams on Apple Music.
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Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor belongs here because of the turn he made in the late 1960s. He began as a safe, middle-of-the-road television comic, then walked away from that act and started telling the truth about the people and streets he grew up with, in their own voices. The storytelling that made his 1970s albums famous starts in this period, and nearly every stand-up who mixes character work with confession owes him something.
Recommended recording: Richard Pryor, his 1968 debut on Dove/Reprise, taped live at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Omnivore's expanded edition of February 2021 adds a second disc of early material and is available digitally as well as on CD.
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