08/21/2023
Despite the prevailing notion that “you can’t joke about anything anymore,” contemporary TV, film, music, and theater boasts more “freedom of expression than ever,” contends Nesteroff (The Comedians ) in this extensive if somewhat one-note effort to “provide context for showbiz controversies” from the 1800s onward. Nesteroff visits the vaudeville age of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which saw the ban of “comedy concerning alcohol” in 1922 during Prohibition, and where “sexuality, immorality, and vulgarity” scandalized audiences and critics (the Moline Dispatch in Illinois lamented “the vulgar comedian,” who “turns loose brothel jokes” on suffering audiences, while in Detroit, bare knees were banned from the stage). After television was popularized in the 1940s, complaints “poured in” about such small-screen scandals as Lucille Ball appearing on I Love Lucy while pregnant in 1952. Later uproars were incited by everything from “gay subject matter” in movies to the “evils of modern music.” Nesteroff’s main takeaway is that audiences are no more sensitive today than in the past—only now their vitriol is splashed across social media rather than contained in letters to the editor curated by newspaper staff. While the point is well taken, the argument never progresses much beyond its origins; readers are bombarded with endless historical examples that, while often fascinating, generally fail to elicit more far-reaching analysis. Still, readers seeking evidence to rebut criticism of today’s “snowflakes” will have plenty to choose from here. (Nov.)
If you’re worried about the future of funny free speech, Outrageous will both assuage and fuel your fears.
Nesteroff, who proved he’s a premier historian of American comedy in The Comedians and We Had a Little Real Estate Problem hunts bigger game in this book—cataloguing the battle over entertainment content, from backlashes against racial and ethnic stereotyping from the 1830s to today’s weaponized, heavily bankrolled fights against ‘political correctness.’
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Outrageous is required reading. An essential book of the social history of the United States—with laughs.
Outrageous is required reading. An essential book of the social history of the United States—with laughs.”—Steve Martin Outrageous is an enlightening and entertaining, detailed, and wide-ranging (and fun!) overview of the never-ending war between censorship and comic voices in showbiz going all the way back into the 1800s. Kliph Nesteroff is an expert unparalleled on the history of comedy, and this couldn’t be a more perfect book for our times. I loved it.”—Bob Odenkirk Outrageous is thought-provoking and often hilarious. I was only offended eight times.”—Judd Apatow Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker Washington Post
"Fact packed... Outrageous, the product of herculean research, has a wider purview than just comedy. ... In no-frills prose, Nesteroff races through some two centuries of expression and backlash."
—The New York Times Book Review Glen Weldon, NPR Outrageous will both assuage and fuel your fears.”—Cracked The Comedians and We Had a Little Real Estate Problem hunts bigger game in this book—cataloguing the battle over entertainment content, from backlashes against racial and ethnic stereotyping from the 1830s to today’s weaponized, heavily bankrolled fights against ‘political correctness.’”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Library Journal
11/01/2023
Nesteroff (We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy ) shows that heightened sensitivities to offensive material are long-standing phenomena in the U.S. and the UK. Contending that past attempts at censorship can inform the present, he concentrates on controversies from the 19th-century minstrel shows up to the social media age. He extensively utilizes letters to the editors and other expressions of indignation as representative of the zeitgeist. In citing criticism of aspects of culture such as increasing explicitness in music, dancing, film, and TV programs, the book uses cultural touchstones such as Amos 'n' Andy , Gone with the Wind , Milton Berle in drag, plus Elvis Presley, Paul Robeson, Nat King Cole, the John Birch Society, the Moral Majority, and Norman Lear's comedies. General readers will learn that champions of free speech such as Mae West, Billy Wilder, and Mort Sahl were later less accepting of newer cultural expressions, and the Television Code that debuted in 1952 was similar to the earlier Hays Code for films. VERDICT A comprehensive, meticulously researched, generally left-of-center work about how industries intended to entertain were and remain cultural battlefields.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.
2023-09-22
Put someone on stage or screen and let them speak a line or two, and someone is going to be offended. Take the much embattled Smothers Brothers, whose TV show often drew letters such as one that read, “I for one am fed up with looking at [N-word]s, [N-word]-lovers and long-haired fruits on your and every other show on TV.” Thus, it has always been: Vaudeville shows were hounded for presumed violations of Jim Crow segregation and obscenity; books of every sort were suppressed by the likes of Anthony J. Comstock, who believed that reading “breeds lust”; drag performers since time immemorial, not least the comedian Milton Berle, were censored and suppressed. If all this sounds depressingly familiar, it’s because the campaign has never really lifted. Right-wing leaders are busily hounding targets, but now, too, so is the left, a process that began in the 1990s. “Just as Democrat Tipper Gore had demonized heavy metal,” writes the author, “Republican politicians like Oliver North and Dan Quayle demonized rap music as part of a greater political strategy.” Nesteroff paints a broad picture, and his narrative is often little more than a shallow recitation of incidents: The Girl Scouts are tarred as Soviet stooges, the Dixie Chicks are pilloried for denouncing George W. Bush, and so forth. There’s also a lot of repetition, especially of the complaint, voiced by Groucho Marx half a century ago and reiterated by Sam Kinison, Dave Chappelle, and even the anodyne Jerry Seinfeld, that comedy is impossible in the face of all the delicate sensibilities arrayed against it.
The parts are better than the whole, but the message is clear: Loosen up and enjoy the show.
"Fact packed... Outrageous, the product of herculean research, has a wider purview than just comedy. ... In no-frills prose, Nesteroff races through some two centuries of expression and backlash."
The New York Times Book Review
Kliph Nesteroff is the Doris Kearns Goodwin of comedy. Outrageous is thought-provoking and often hilarious. I was only offended eight times.
This fascinating cultural history examines the relationship between entertainment and suppression by looking at the cycles of success and censorship that plagued Elvis Presley, Mae West, Carol Burnett and others.
Nesteroff’s meticulously researched book chronicles the many battles that have been waged on that front in the culture wars since the birth of show business. It expertly provides the one thing lacking in too many discussions of popular culture: deep, substantive, meaningful context.
"A history of American censorship of all kinds of popular culture ... Nesteroff describes American attempts to censor theatre and vaudeville and burlesque which date almost to the beginning of the Republic, along with all the misbegotten efforts to purge 'vulgarity' from popular entertainment, ... [and] provides a useful reminder that censorship and censoriousness are significantly different things."
The New Yorker Adam Gopnik
Outrageous is an enlightening and entertaining, detailed, and wide-ranging (and fun!) overview of the never-ending war between censorship and comic voices in showbiz going all the way back into the 1800s. Kliph Nesteroff is an expert unparalleled on the history of comedy, and this couldn’t be a more perfect book for our times. I loved it.
