Items15The creator’s order
  1. 1Jean CarrollJean CarrollBorn 7 Jan 1911Long 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,…0
  2. 2Moms MableyMoms MableyJackie "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…0
  3. 3Lord BuckleyLord BuckleyLord 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,…0
  4. 4Redd FoxxRedd FoxxYears 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…0
  5. 5Mort SahlMort SahlMort 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…0
  6. 6Phyllis DillerPhyllis DillerPhyllis 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…0
  7. 7Shelley BermanShelley BermanBorn 3 Feb 1925Shelley 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.…0
  8. 8Lenny BruceLenny BruceBorn 13 Oct 1925Lenny 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…0
  9. 9Jonathan WintersJonathan WintersBorn 11 Nov 1925Jonathan 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…0
  10. 10Bob NewhartBob NewhartBorn 5 Sept 1929Bob 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…0