Download Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America AudioBook Free
What Peter Biskind performed for filmmaking, Time journal critic Richard Zoglin will for funny in this meticulously investigated and hilariously readable profile of stand-up funny in the 1970s.
In the rock-and-roll 1970s, a new breed of comic, encouraged by the fearless Lenny Bruce, made revealing to jokes an art form. Progressive comedians like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Robert Klein, and, later, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, Robin Williams, and Andy Kaufman, tore through the country and became as large as rock stars in an age when Sunday Nighttime Live was the apotheosis of cool and the Improv, Get a Rising Star, and the Funny Store were the hottest clubs around. In Funny at the Advantage, Richard Zoglin provides backstage view of that time period, when a band of amazing, iconoclastic comedians ruled the world―and potentially altered it, too. Based on considerable interviews with membership owners, agents, producers―and with unprecedented and endless access to the players themselves―Funny at the Advantage is a no-holdsbarred, behind-the-scenes take a look at one of the very most important and tumultuous ages in American popular culture.
