Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor, an American stand-up comedian and creator of The Richard Pryor Show, had a rather unusual childhood. Being the son of a boxer and a girl of easy virtue, he was raised by his grandmother, a brothel owner. He is undoubtedly one of the great American stand-up comedians who influenced the genre of comedy a lot.
He began his career in the late 1950s as a fairly traditional comedian for white audiences, but by the late 1960s, he realized the impasse and changed the way he played onstage. Like most American comedians, Richard based his performances on autobiographical material, which he had in abundance because of his extremely insane lifestyle. Already being an internationally recognized genius, Pryor was once doused with rum from head to toe, and as a result of the whole performance, he caught fire and ran for a long time down the street. His family still thinks it was a particularly convoluted suicide attempt, but this story was not the comedian’s last act, and like all his best stories, it was both wildly funny and touching.
George Carlin
George Carlin was a role model for all American standup movement members, as he laid many foundations for the genre and changed it to the form we know it today. Most of Carlin’s jokes, a specialist in black humor, were somehow a form of sharp, ironic social criticism – whether he was talking about trivialities or global phenomena.
Carlin is firmly associated with the early years of HBO, as he was a leader of the movement toward pushing the boundaries of what is allowed on television. His “Seven Words You Never Say on Television” became the center of a scandal, led to a lawsuit, and became a milestone in censorship history. As with Pryor, Carlin’s intonations and themes can be seen in almost every performance of today’s comedians.
Louis C.K.
Among the many heirs of the grumpy George Carlin style, С.K. is the most successful, versatile and hilarious. He began his career in the 1990s as a writer of jokes for Letterman’s, O’Brien, and other late-night shows. Louis didn’t stand out until the mid-1990s when he stumbled upon his gold mine of a flabby man’s mid-life crisis in a failed marriage and with small children.
C.K.’s stage persona is an irritated brute pissed off by everything around him, from his own kids to hipsters and deers. Louis is almost the only worthy competitor to Ricky Gervais among the hyper-popular comedians on the subject of political incorrectness. Even though he expresses ruthlessness to the world and calls his children badasses and wishes his friends were dead, you can feel in every joke that besides a fat belly, Louis also has a big heart. Since 2010, he’s been writing, filming, and directing the television sitcom “Louie,” one of the best things to happen to American television over the years.
Bill Hicks
Bill Hicks is an alternative version of George Carlin: even more cynical, toxic, and angry. Intelligent and misanthropic, he looks like a comedian whose destiny was to spend his life in obscurity in small clubs, slowly fading from illicit substance abuse.
Staying loyal to the latter, he nevertheless achieved considerable fame, though mostly scandalous – Hicks never tried to please everyone and was not afraid to offend his fans. If Carlin tried to rid America of unnecessary bigotry, Hicks instead taught everyone to think a little more about humor than usual and that jokes about genocide are okay if they make any sense at all. In 1994, his life full of drug abuse was over as he died from cancer at the age of thirty-two.
Andy Kaufman
Being probably the most mysterious person in the history of standup, Kaufman cannot be called a standup artist or a comedian in general (he denied that definition of himself). By today’s standards, Kaufman is the progenitor of trolling: Andy either didn’t want to or never knew how to joke traditionally.
His stage persona was assembled from various fictional characters: a Polish immigrant, a bad crooner, and an Elvis impersonator. Many people still seem to believe that the real and normal Andy didn’t exist at all. Kaufman, who joked for years that he wanted to fake his death, died in 1984 of lung cancer – many still don’t believe him. In the late 1990s movie Man on the Moon by Milos Forman, Jim Carrey played Andy, and R.E.M. wrote a song about him by the same name.
Ricky Gervais
While regular comedians usually work their way up from stand-up to their own comedy or television show, Gervais has it backward. He first came up with the successful series “The Office” and went on stage as a superstar, though he started as the lead singer of an unknown new-wave band called Seona Dancing in the 1980s.
Of course, Gervais is somewhat behind his colleagues in professionalism. Nevertheless, his lack of experience pays off with his charm and lack of boundaries regarding political correctness. Ricky makes fun of fat people, gays, midgets, and all the people around him, but the audience loves it anyway. In Gervais’s standups, you can often meet discussions on serious topics such as science, fame, and politics.
