Call it the Gang Theory of history: the idea that a number of charismatic revolutionaries coalesce and together grab power and attention, overturn orthodoxies and remake their time. It’s an alluring idea, and well suited to describing the dynamics of scenes and subcultures of, say, cooks or comedians. The best Gang Theorists focus not just on iconic figures but on the connections between them. For every telegenic chef there are a thousand anonymous immigrant cooks chopping alone, sweating the onions, changing everything; for every lauded late-night comedian, a thousand funnymen of the night shift, scratching by the hours with a ballpoint pen and a spiral-bound notebook, cracking up the security guard. Capturing this breadth, revealing the crummy details before the Gang gets its due, is what makes a lasting work of Gang Theory; it’s not just the number of characters that matters, but the depth and quality of the time spent with them, and the subtleties and candor of the stories they tell.

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Associated Press

Richard Pryor in action, 1977.

COMEDY AT THE EDGE

How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America.

By Richard Zoglin.

Illustrated. 247 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.95.

Related

First Chapter: ?Comedy at the Edge? (March 16, 2008)

That is why books like Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential,” Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s “Please Kill Me” and Michael Azerrad’s “Our Band Could Be Your Life” are so convincing and such a pleasure to read. The writers may be heroes or bystanders, and their books may be narrative or oral history or personal memoir or some combination. But all of them capture the grips and roadies, the hours after the kitchen closes and the days between gigs. Azerrad, for example, in addition to painting indelible portraits of a dozen indie rock bands of the 1980s and early 1990s, revealed what he called the “sprawling cooperative of fanzines, underground and college radio stations, local cable access shows, mom-and-pop record stores, independent distributors and record labels, tip sheets, nightclubs and alternative venues, booking agents ... and fans that had been thriving for more than a decade before the mainstream took notice.”

Richard Zoglin’s “Comedy at the Edge” is a work of Gang Theory that isn’t, alas, in their league. Through profiles of a dozen leading comedians, including George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman and Jerry Seinfeld, Zoglin seeks to portray the rich stand-up subculture that flourished in the 1970s. But he ropes together a cast of characters united only in their having been born more or less between 1940 and 1955, in having chosen to pursue a profession that involves standing on stage and trying to make an audience laugh, and in having achieved a degree of success in doing so.

Still, Zoglin is a clear and informative writer and a good synthesizer. (In these qualities he is the very definition of what he is: a Time man.) His book starts with Lenny Bruce, but once the floodgates for free speech in public are open, Bruce comes across as less imitated than admired. George Carlin and Richard Pryor, by contrast, stand out as the crucial influences on the others. Zoglin hails Carlin as “the indispensable role model” in carrying on Bruce’s “crusade against hypocrisy, cant and social injustice. ... His early takeoffs of D.J.’s and TV commercials set a gold standard for scores of media satirists to follow, and his jokey newscasts provided the template for news parodies from ‘Saturday Night Live’s’ ‘Weekend Update’ to Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show.’ His riffs on schoolroom pranks and bodily functions and the little absurdities of language showed the next crop of ‘observational’ comics that nothing was too trivial or mundane — or tasteless — to become fodder for smart comedy.” And Pryor’s out-of-control persona, his self-destructive appetites, his ambivalence — even animosity — toward the audience, his obsession with selling out, and his crossover success in concert albums and comic and serious film roles became a touchstone for a whole generation of comedians. It is strange, though, that Zoglin doesn’t rate Woody Allen, a virtual contemporary of Carlin and Pryor, in their company. The schlemiel as hero, the rapid neurotic delivery, the mix of philosophy and pop culture, the angst over emotional, career and relationship success, the shift in the ’70s from stand-up to writing, acting and directing — is any comedian of the period more influential?

Zoglin is good at describing the appeal of the white Everymen: Albert Brooks, Steve Martin, Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman. Their styles may have varied from manic to comatose, cerebral to brainless, but they shared similar suburban backgrounds, and they brought a studied irony into the comedy mainstream. He recounts how Williams thrived when the mike went dead at the Laff Stop in Orange County in 1976, and how appealing was his “deconstruction of our overstimulated, media-dominated culture.” Kaufman was so original he was the only person Lorne Michaels deemed not cuttable from the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” in 1975.

Together, Zoglin declares, “Martin and Brooks ... inaugurated the age of irony.” That may be so, but something larger seemed to be going on: the triumph of deadpan, the joke with no punch line, the audience as prop, extreme solipsism. Surely such developments, good or bad, weren’t simply the result of a handful of inspired comedians blazing a new trail? Zoglin skips the opportunity to place their innovations and achievements in the broader cultural context of minimalist art and music, the rise of performance art and experimental film, the heyday of metafiction. He also dodges the issue of just how and why these comedians turned so soon to apolitical comedy. As Steve Martin put it, his “second-biggest decision” in the mid-1970s (after realizing he could tell a joke with no punch line) was “to drop the politics, to go very solipsistic.” He wasn’t alone.

Zoglin’s best chapter chronicles the competition between the new comedy clubs that sprang up in the 1960s and ’70s: the Improvisation (known as the Improv), Catch a Rising Star and Comic Strip in New York, and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. They thrived on cheap cover charges and plenty of sets — an arrangement made possible by not paying the comedians, who nevertheless performed in order to have their chance at the holy grail of comedy: a slot on “The Tonight Show.” Though Zoglin doesn’t capture enough of the gritty details to convey the everyday experience in those clubs for both performers and audience members, his account nevertheless recounts some of the drama of those days. In 1979, for example, comedians at the Comedy Store went on a six-week strike over the lack of payment. Most of the 150 stand-ups who worked there took part; according to Zoglin, Jay Leno was an activist, and David Letterman walked the picket line. The strike won them $25 a set.

“Comedy at the Edge” is genial and good fun, and there’s no sense in hanging a book by its subtitle. But it hardly shows “how stand-up in the ’70s changed America.” Even in Zoglin’s enthusiastic telling, the ’70s comedy scene seems never to have been more than a handful of nightclubs, a few dozen comedians, and bags and bags of cocaine. The drugs are a big part of the story but a pretty boring one. Zoglin quotes the actor Richard Belzer, who was a leading stand-up and an M.C. at Catch a Rising Star, as saying: “Cocaine makes you talk. Comedians talk. Cocaine gives you more chances you’ll say something funny.”

No doubt every reader will regret the absence of his or her own personal favorite comedian, and no author could satisfy every fan’s wish. Still, Zoglin ought to be heckled for leaving Don Novello without even a footnote. Novello appeared on the Smothers Brothers show in the 1960s and in San Francisco comedy clubs in the ’70s, and later, as Lazlo Toth, he sent corporations and celebrities what must have been the unlikeliest letters in their mailbox. He maintained a regular correspondence with Vice President Spiro Agnew, declaring himself to be Agnew’s biggest fan; he complained to Howard Johnson’s that on being offered “two eggs any style,” he was denied when he requested “one scrambled and one poached.” But he was most brilliant as Father Guido Sarducci, who made more appearances on Saturday Night Live than any other recurring character. Among the comic tokens that littered my childhood — an “SNL” conehead, Bill Cosby’s “Fat Albert” record, Groucho Marx nose-and-glasses, Steven Wright’s “I Have a Pony” record, Steve Martin’s arrow-through-the-head tiara — the one I miss most is a recording of Don Novello’s stand-up act recorded live at the University of Notre Dame in 1985 and released the next year.

It’s gone, but thanks to the wonder of the Internet, I’ve found the track list for the first side. Nothing any of the comedians say in “Comedy at the Edge” still makes me laugh as much as this: “Father Sarducci is welcomed to the University of Notre Dame and recalls the early years of the institution. Doo Dah history, folklore and myth. The pros and cons of singing about beer on buses are examined. How singing the short version of ‘Happy Birthday’ can add six to seven minutes to your life, the candles on the cake, and a look at Ronald Reagan’s neck. Central American policy is discussed and arguments are made to bomb Canada.”

School tests are making children mentally ill, warns teachers' leader

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The Government's excessive regime of school tests is making children mentally ill, a teachers' leader warned today.

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, condemned the current testing regime, in which 1.2 million pupils sit formal assessments in English, maths and science every year.

"Children suffer stress and anxiety as the test looms and the rise in children's mental health problems cannot be divorced from their status as the most tested in the world," she told the union's annual conference.

"The tests label young people as failures, and this leads to one of the lowest rates for staying on post-16 of any industrialised country.

"We also know that the tests are not reliable - over 25 per cent of children will be given the wrong level," she said.

"The whole edifice on which the test regime has been built has crumbled. They are not accurate, they are not valid."

But plans to replace so-called "Sats" tests with a new system could make matters worse, according to Dr Bousted.

Ministers want to abandon Sats and set up a new system in which pupils are entered for less pressurised tests when their teachers think they are ready.

"Much as I would welcome the end of our current testing system, I have to tell you that I fear there are as many problems with single level tests as there are with Sats," she said.

"The Government must be commended for looking for alternatives to the current arrangements, but we have to be absolutely on guard that what does replace Sats does not make things worse."

She said it was "unfair" of ministers to expect every pupil to progress by two national curriculum levels in each key stage.

"Obviously, lower-achieving students make less progress at each key stage - that's why they are lower-achieving," she said.

"So the danger is that schools with disadvantaged intakes will continue to be penalised because their students will not make the same progress as the students at those schools with more advantaged intakes.

"I think this is an unreasonable and unfair measurement of progress."

She said there was "every danger" that the new system could degenerate into "assessment for covering the teacher's back".

This could see "reams and reams of recording of levels with very little focus on the individual student's understanding", she said.