When I performed standup comedy decades ago, working for drinks and coffee and taking a mic anywhere that would put up with me for 20 minutes, comedy was different. At minimum, it was rough-around-the-edges but at full-bore it was an all-out attack on the audience, who for the most part, showed up just for that. Don Rickles popularized attack comedy and made a name for himself when, allegedly, Frank Sinatra walked into his act in a Vegas lounge and Rickles remarked, “Frank Sinatra, make yourself at home, punch somebody”. Watching him on the old Sullivan show, he became my distant mentor.

In all, comedy was club-specific and viral: The Comedy Cellar, Dangerfield’s, The Comic Strip and The Comedy Store spawned thousands of laugh-venues across the country, from Bananas in Hackensack to The Tickle Room in Omaha to someone’s kitchen in their mom’s house. The material, in those first years when freedom of speech was an open court challenge to be the raunchiest and foulest, was no-limit verbal assault. There were some who went in an opposite direction, and many people today will be surprised to know that in his early years, Bill Cosby was the cleanest, funniest and most thoughtful storyteller in America, the inheritor of the the jazz-story riffs of Lord Buckley in the 1950s. Ellen DeGeneres came out of that tradition as well (a female Bob Newhart) and Carlin, Pryor and Cheech and Chong, while totally scatalogical, were also fully immersed in deep socio-political analysis as the roots of their art. But the overall theme was that comedy was prejudiced against everyone and by being so, it represented a street-level democracy, a “realness”.

Of course, the reality of it was white-male dominated and the targets were mostly women – “take my wife…please”- and gays, both of whom were coming into their own as a political force as news of the ERA, birth control and gay pride were in the headlines daily to challenge their 2nd class status. And most comics, in their effort to be the relevant savants of the public consciousness, used that news as the grist to ferment their deepest-felt eccentricities and insecurities. So the “realness” was self-realized and one-sided, but since we were playing to “our own”, we created an echo chamber. The social order was being upended for the first time in 2 generations and comics, the Grand Fools of the working class, were there to comment on its follies, but in doing so, inadvertently exposed our own “in-the-bubble” prejudices.

There seemed to be an almost universal ban on taking on Jews (unless you were one), maybe because we inherited our craft from the scores of Catskill comics who were the ‘godfathers’ of modern comedy; and black people were equally off-limits because of the vaunted respect for Pryor, Cosby, Dick Gregory, Redd Foxx and Pigmeat Markham, but mostly due to the commonly held notion that comedy heals and most everyone out there with a few years under their belt was in tune with the social inequalities that were present every day. But in the envelope of our privelege, we still managed to pop off at least one or two thinly veiled comments and oblique stereotypes. In our minds, we thought we were being “with it”. We weren’t, unless we were Andrew “Dice” Clay, who for some bizarre warp in in the fabric of time, became an international star by being a dick.

The bad news about this democritization of humor is that suddenly, everyone’s a comedian, and that’s when it started to go off the rails. That’s when a lot of the assholes showed up and without respecting any type of tradition, their sets filled with a set of preconceived expectations and a sense of entitlement of their opinions. That’s when the creeping sense of “me” started to take over and with it, I heard vile racism, sexism and homophobia being spewed as “a sense of humor” regularly. There were still funny men (and now, more women) coming to the mic stand, but the vast majority were just plain awful, unfunny and perhaps, sociopathic. I remember playing a coffee-house outside of Houston and one white comic was so over-the-top racist that I had to walk out. Standing in the parking lot chain-smoking Merits, I ran through my entire act in my head, squeegeeing out as many racial references in my set as possible. I bombed that night because I had knocked the rhythm out of the set (all you need to do sometimes is change one word) and I was faced with the daunting challenge of reconstructing what I thought was funny. It is not fun to suddenly realize that what you thought was funny is indeed not funny.

The second change that happened to comedy was HBO. As the first premium cable channel it needed content to fill a 24 hour hungry maw (much like Netflix and Amazon today) and hit on the magic formula of standup comedy as an inexpensive funnel-system-to-stardom with “Live at the Comic Strip” and other comedy specials. Comedians and TV have been walking hand-in-hand since the early days of the tube, but suddenly, you really didn’t have to pay any dues to get booked on TV. No multiple appearances on Carson’s “Tonight Show” or other late-night TV; no years of touring the shit-hole Ramada Inns, dive bars and vacuous suburban clubs honing your act. You could now “fit the profile” of what the bookers felt was in the zeitgeist and you could be off to a new career in no time. The change it brought to comedy was real: it became homogenized. You had breakouts like Roseanne, Seinfeld, Paul Reiser and a few others that bucked the trend, but the acts were now constructed to fit the national spectrum of humor and I knew a lot of guys who hired themselves out as “comedy coaches” to help newbies create the perfect set: 8 minutes of well-constructed, easy-to-consume material. It was a dark time.

Thank god people like Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and Lisa Lampanelli brought back the edge, setting the stage for the immense variety of feminist, gay, transgender and POanyC comics that abound now. They’re not all funny, some of them are more agenda driven than others, but there’s a variety like never before.

So that’s why its fulfilling to see a guy like Dave Attell still out there in the trenches, who worked through the decades of change at the club level and while adapting, kept the old-school vibe. The best thing that this article says about him is that the jokes are so good, not needing verbal nuance, that they read as funny on paper as they do coming out of his mouth. That’s comedy.