The eMusic Dozen: Comedy

Black's stand-up routines resemble his apoplectic rants on The Daily Show, except they're longer and the naughty words aren't bleeped. Whether admitting the secret universal response to 9/11 -- "Well, that really fucks up my plans" -- or, on the title track, recoiling in awestruck bafflement from a Houston street corner where a Starbucks sits across from another Starbucks, he splutters between disgust and indignation and always seems as though witnessing one more stupid act will burst a blood vessel in his head.

Though best known for his potty mouth and extensively self-celebrated legal troubles, Bruce's legacy is far broader -- he established the comic as wisecracking outsider who rallies enlightened audiences (like you and me) to his side against the forces of ignorance (everyone else). Yet cuts like his 20-minute masterwork "The Palladium," on which he also pays his debts to the post-vaudeville stand-up his looser style would soon supersede, have aged better than (still pretty funny) liberal-baiting skits like "How to Relax Your Coloured Friends at Parties."

Unlike musicians or professional athletes, comics really get down to the nuts and bolts when discussing their craft. Maybe that's because their craft isn't just technical but psychological -- the skilled manipulation of an audience, a feat at which Carson excelled. Not a comedy record per se, this is one of several interviews Larry Wild conducted for his 1968 book Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. In a voice that remains as comfortable as an old sweater to anyone of a certain age, Carson outlines the traits of a successful comic -- chiefly "an empathy with the audience... they have to like him." He could very well have been describing himself.

Before he sanitized his persona for primetime, this man best known as Fred Sanford ended his name with two x's for a reason. He delivered cracks like, "You don't think they's white niggas? Watch Hee Haw," long before Richard Pryor shocked and delighted white audiences with the "n" word. But even when giving advice to overzealous Christians ("You wanna go to heaven? Die, and quit buggin' people") Foxx's gruffness is generally good-humored and irascible rather than angry or offended.

In her housecoat and rollers, Moms Mabley presented herself as the realistic voice of the common woman -- or maybe just a reminder that the common woman is nastier than we generally give her credit for. After a husband confesses to infidelity on his deathbed, for instance, his wife replies, "Yeah, I know. That's the reason I poisoned you." And she's never more trenchant -- or realistic -- than when talking about how miserable things actually were in the "Good Old Days."

You may know Markham's shtick even if you don't know his name, since Sammy Davis, Jr. later popularized his most famous bit, "Here Come Da Judge," on Laugh-In. A comic who continued to work in blackface through the '50s, he works in the broadest minstrel-show traditions -- he follows up a courtroom intro ("The judge is high as a Georgia Pine today. Everybody going to jail today.") by sentencing himself to prison time -- but he puts it over with vivaciousness and an undercurrent of mild satire.

Our notions of obscenity and offensiveness may change over time, but do something gross and creepy about dead bodies and your legacy is assured. The hippest of the pack in his day, the man who wrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove was an ace at interweaving sex and violence, as on "Rimmers (Letter to Michael O'Donoghue)," in which US soldiers have their way with dead Viet Cong, or his most infamous set piece, in which Jackie O approaches her husband's corpse only to discover a "hulking Texan silhouette at the casket" -- LBJ, who's humping Kennedy's head wound.

A good parody gets inside its subject to understand its appeal. Aided by an adept country-rock band that's no joke, Miss Tammy Faye uncovers the latent but undeniable sexual themes of Christianity -- her take on Cheap Trick's "Surrender" ("Get down on your knees and pray") ends in squeals of orgasm as she, um, swallows Jesus down. She also advises gays that, "The only man to kneel down before is the man from Galilee" and climaxes with "Don't You Hear Jerusalem Moan." Which is to say, some of this is as hot as it is funny.