The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics

by Phil Berger

Book Overview

The Last Laugh is the first and only book to take readers deep into the bizarre universe of the standup comic, from the classic years of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Shecky Greene, to today's comedy superstars. Phil Berger shows how styles and trends in standup have changed over the past fifty years, but how taking the stage in a comedy club is as tough as it's always been. Performers profiled in the book include Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, George...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815410964
• ISBN13: 9780815410966
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Cooper Square Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Great History of Stand-Up

Very possible the best book ever written about the history of stand-up comedy. Better on the 1960s than the more modern chapters, but a great read all around.

Compulsive Jokers

A strange, nervous little book that I picked up at a bus station to have something to read on the journey and found myself engrossed by. The device is simple - Berger starts with the career of one obscure comic and follows it, weaving in and around it the careers of endless other comics - an initially obscure Lenny Bruce among them - and the book just goes on in one long series of anecdotes and bits and gags to tell the history of the business from mid-century or so and towards the present day. The book has a slightly antiquated, out of date feel to it - it's definitely about the era that preceded today's comics and the people they watched on TV - but it does capture something of the DRIVE of these people and their compulsiveness. Not a book to browse, a book to listen to like a long, long monologue. Full of the sweat of comics long ago shut down and gone to Florida to sell aluminium siding. Yes - that's one of the good things about this book - it's not a glam bio and tells it like it usually was - long, and difficult and here and there quite funny as well as painful.