The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics

by Phil Berger

Book Overview

The first and only book to take readers fully into the bizarre universe of the stand-up comic, from its earliest origins in the antics of Milton Berle and Sid Caesar to today's hottest acts.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815410964
• ISBN13: 9780815410966
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Cooper Square Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 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 The book has a slightly antiquated, out of date feel to it - it's definitely about the era that preceded today's comics and the people they watched on TV - but it does capture something of the DRIVE of these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.