Follow us:. Password Please enter a valid password. Submit Submit. By Bruce Dessau. F rom the moment Jerry Seinfeld bolted onstage and plunged into a crowd-pleasing riff about the drudgery of organising nights out it was clear that this would be a masterclass in comic exasperation.
The First Stand-Up Comedian. Sign Up Sign In. Refining and testing jokes. Humour in philosophy. Henri Bergson, a Fresh philosopher of the late 19th century, was also an author of a famous essay that focused on laughter. Before Bergson, few philosophers had given laughter much thought. Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer argued that comedy stems from a sense of incongruity. Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud suggested comedians give relief from nervous energy and repressed emotions.
The routines were kept lively, fast-paced and punchy. The first person to actually be on stage and do a stand-up act was Charley Case, at the vaudeville theatre, NYC, some time in the s or s.
He fit the quiet, neurotic comedian stereotype, and came across as a tortured, depressed comedian. Even his death was attributed to a revolver accident at an NYC hotel, sparking rumours of suicide. Behind her is his wife. Throughout the hour, he approaches a wide range of modern topics as though nobody has ever covered them before.
Society so thoroughly adjusted so long ago to texting in place of most phone calls that any jokes about the phenomenon of this conversion sound downright Mesopotamian. What is the deal with when those ellipses appear as someone starts to text you but then abruptly stops forever? All of us! The New York Times discovered this in ! If Seinfeld wants to get jokes about modern ephemera on the record, he should try being more prolific than his one-special-per-decade average.
But those comedians had better have an awareness that the red meat of this subject matter has been picked clean already, and dig deep for an original take. Seinfeld, then, is the ultimate product of the pre-social media era: refusing to update his style, adapt to the times, or acknowledge the world outside of his bubble.
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