Our records, if you have a dark sense of humor, were funny, but our records weren't about comedy. They were about protests, fantasy, confrontation and all that.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.
There was a sea of change in comedy in the late 1950s and '60s. We were dealing with vignettes as opposed to jokes. We were more socially aware.
We kept a broad audience, and we didn't make fun of people who had necessarily made mistakes in their life and burned them to the ground. We made fun of a commercial or a movie or ourselves.
My brothers were funny, and there was a lot of shtick and comedy and nastiness and violence and fighting and sports.
The funny thing about history is that we imagine that people didn't laugh in the old days, but of course they did, at stupid things.
It just seems to me that there's no particular reason comedy albums should be dead. There's a lot to laugh at. We have very funny people, still.
When I started, there was no comedy community, no comedy industry; there were comedians.
And regardless of the fact that in this country, certainly in the arts, we treat comedy as a second-class citizen, I've never thought of it that way. I've always thought it to be important. The last time I looked, the Greeks were holding up two masks. I've always thought of it not only as having equal value, but as the craft of it, being funny.
I think that comedy is one of the more serious things that you can do in our day, especially in the world that we're living in.
Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.
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