Golden Age (1945 - 1977) Comedy Clips

I spend more time that you might imagine watching comedy, what with being semi-retired and all, especially the old stuff. It was more clever, more subtle, less PC, less sardonic, and less sad, like it is more nowadays. I think some successful purveyors of fiction are able to transmute their despair and rage into humor.

Certainly Mark Twain most famously did in the American context. A raging atheist and anti-imperialist, Twain cut his teeth helming a steamboat on the Mississippi under the nom du travaile, Samuel Clemens. Ambrose Bierce, also, of course. And the other guy, Mencken too, but another auther like Bierce, eh, y'all know who I mean. Bret Harte. The frontier produced something other than genocide, leftist.

George Bernard Shaw wrote about this also, the getting away with humor thing. Saying things with a modicum of subtlety that which would ordinarily get ya lynched. And getting paid handsomely to insult your fellow citizens right to their fat faces. They're to busy laughing at "the jokes" to notice. Twain had pieces he delayed until decades after his death. There too was a man who knew what he was kinda early on.

As a German-type, achieving humor is well neigh impossible. We're too harsh. And too honest. It's sort of farcical knowing you should try to be funnier and always forgetting. Every. Single. Time. I make strangers laugh all the time. Maybe this is something I could improve upon. The Word versus propaganda of the deed.

One attracts more flies with honey than vinegar, my late great Aunt Mary used to advise. She didn't even go to college, though. So, I'm skeptical.

Her husbands wrote her checks for her. She never learned to drive. She did like to criticize my father for his misbegotten method of teaching me to drive, as always, from childhood on, from the back seat. 'He doesn't want to stop, Fred', she would say as I was coming up on a stop sign way too fast at a mature 16 years 7 months.

Bender women are experts at secret paths to chaos. They marry rich guys and they've never been from anywhere other than jerkwater towns. It's really funny. La Jolla. Other places too. They'll tell you every fucking thing you do that they can't do how to do it.

The're utterly out of their minds with their Besserwisserei. And I'm talking about the Americans! The Germans are Even Worse! They cannot stop because they are just that much smarter than you intrinsically and eternally, according to words they think, but couldn't ever verbalize, at least not in polite company.

I'll give her that. She never hesitated to criticize him, because he was younger and ever so annoying. Still is today. In fact, he's bad as ever. I just ignore him now and tell him to pipe down and mow the lawn. Aunt Mary had his number. A pity so few subsequently did.

She used to lay into him with that maternalistic patronizing tone (she, herself was barren, or Uncle Paul shot blanks; probably couldn't maintain an erection, much less climax. Fun couple.) Fought down in the South Pacific; stopped going to church after V-J Day. Said when your times up, it's up. I'll deal with my PTSD with Schmidts and Pall Malls, thank you very much. No head-shrinker for me. For me either.

They couldn't take my brother and me at the same time. So, my parents couldn't go out and have fun. The poor hippie dears. It was almost negative babysitting, if you think about it. They'd be stuck with ignoring just one of us, sending us to bed without dinner, unplugging the television and laughing because we were too stupid to figure it out. It was a barrel of laughs, I tells ya.

And if we talked back, which we did often, my father would go on one of his jags about how he's 'going to disown this family one day soon' and so on and so forth. We starting laughing at him, very early on. He threatened me with military school one time after he surveilled my phone conversation with a friend in 7th grade, where I bragged about helping a kid cheat. Military School! Sucka, that costs money, and you ain't spending it on anything other than world travel. You know it and I know it.

I don't know if this boring bullshit amounts to David Sedaris type stuff. He's rich off of making fun of his family. His sister too, I think. Just off the top of my head, tap tap tap.

Dad's greatest starring line – his Gloria Swanson Cecil B. DeMille moment – though was at Glacier National Park. The fool tried to hammer plastic tent pegs into stony ground and everyone in the family thought not only that that was stupid, but he was setting up the tent in the morning in a not that scenic place. But he persisted in perspiring and getting mad at us for being a moron, and finally my Mom just laid it on the line to him how dumb he is. This was after my brother and I had been jeering him (you should read how sardonic His reflections are on my father, volumes of trash talking diaries, much, much more harsh than me, ha! My diaries, as a 19 year old were factual, cool, detached and journalistic; his were sarcastic and contemptuous, at age 12.) for a good five-ten minutes.

German run-on sentence. Unreadable, but grammatically correct?

So finally he picks up the hatchet with a hammer at the other end and menaces my mother with this: 'Woman, don't nag me when I have an axe in my hand'. Then he hissed at us in rage, and hurled it (the hatchet) into the forest. We told him to go get it again, because it'd be 3 against 1 and he sucked at sports and had a hernia and a gut on him already at 47.

We have laughed at him for this ever since later that day in July of 1987. We're all 'this way'. My brother's even worse. Anyway, on to the comedy videos. I'll just do them chronologically. Or not.

I agree with the Duke. I don't know what the hell to do either. They're just trying to wreck our goddamn country. People are afraid. And that never ends well. Shout out, Columbia University 'and the other Mother Colleges'. He calls for vigilante violence. Well, I can think of a few people I'd gladly tar and feather!