Introduction

This chapter provides critical context to the relationship between comedy and sociology. First, the chapter explores Peter Berger’s Redeeming Laughter (2014). In particular the chapter examines Berger’s comparison of Mort Sahl and Talcott Parsons, facilitating an exploration of the history of stand-up comedy alongside the experiences of the Jewish diaspora. The chapter goes on to explore stand-up’s relation to New Left politics, before outlining the book’s argument with a summary of the following chapters.

What's so Funny about Richard Nixon? Vonnegut's Jailbird and the Limits of Comedy

This essay explores the questionable potency of satire in the light of Richard Nixon's political rehabilitation. Following a discussion of satirical treatments from the 1940s to the 1980s by, among others, the cartoonists Herbert Block (‘Herblock’) and Garry Trudeau, the comedians Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, and writers including Philip Roth and Robert Coover, I examine one work extensively – Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird (1979) – as a disquisition on satiric impotence, setting that novel in the context of the comedic firepower that had been directed at Nixon since the dawn of his political career and which, in the end, could not prevent his rehabilitation.