To a particular subset of junior comedy nerds, of which I was an unapologetic member, 1976 was a watershed year, for a reason only tangentially connected to the official Bicentennial celebration that faced Americans down at every turn.

At a time when the vinyl record remained the primary means of owning recorded music (cassettes were coming into vogue, as were, briefly eight-tracks), the comedy sections of record stores were relatively low on product. Without access to a really good used record store, it was particularly hard to find vintage comedy recordings, and by vintage at age 14, that meant anything older than 10 years. Cosby and Carlin filled the racks, but beyond them it was luck of the draw. Believe me, I looked.

So when the essential Barry Hansen, aka Dr. Demento, began “serializing” Stan Freberg’s 1961 album “Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America Volume One: The Early Years,” it was nothing less than a revelation. Conceived as the cast recording of a Broadway musical that never was, with Freberg writing, composing and performing many of the vocal chores, “America” was, to my mind a masterpiece, and I was thrilled when, in the wake of its showcase on Dr. Demento’s show, it was rereleased by Capitol Records, so I could listen to it again and again (which I did, and still do).

As Freberg’s witty, wise-guy approach to everything from the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Battle of Yorktown proved subtler than Mad Magazine, not as raw as the National Lampoon, and as tuneful any classic cast album, I was hooked. I even went so far as to write down to the lyrics to every song (some in two and three part counterpoint), which involved constantly lifting the needle and dropping it back again, so that I could truly commit the songs to memory, where they remain.

Freberg’s voice, as it happened, was plenty familiar, as he had been a cartoon voice artist for years, but as I grew older, I learned more about his work.

• That he was part one of television’s earliest children’s shows, Time For Beany, whose most popular character, performed by Freberg, was Cecil, seasick sea serpent (initially a live puppet show, it was much later made into an animated cartoon).

• That he had been a charting recording artist, who broke out with a record called “John and Marsha,” which consisted of nothing but some romantic string music and a male and female voices saying “John” and “Marsha” in a way that charted a relationship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkfwmB8jeSU

• That he obviously found the Jack Webb TV procedural Dragnet an endless source of amusement, as he parodied it often (with Webb’s support).

• That he had one of the last network radio comedy shows, having filled the gap left when Jack Benny shifted to television (a favorite target of Freberg’s). And, most startlingly, that by the time I discovered him, he had largely left the comedy business in order to bring humor into advertising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY2VAIIQAj4

• That he wrote the longest radio commercial ever, which became so popular that it was recorded and released commercially.

I raise all of this because today would have been Stan Freberg’s 90^th birthday. Unfortunately he passed away at the age of 88 early last year. I regret never having sent him a fan letter, never having made an attempt to meet him on one of my irregular forays to Los Angeles.

Listening to 50+ year old comedy can be a mixed bag, but when I came to Freberg’s work, it was only 15 to 20 years old, so the majority of the comedic references were sufficiently current for me. Today, his parodies of Mitch Miller and Arthur Godfrey don’t resonate as they would have in Freberg’s heyday; his cutting satires of everything from the commercialization of Christmas to the McCarthy hearings can be appreciated for their virtuosity, but they don’t necessarily elicit laughs. That said, Freberg’s riff on censorship and “political correctness” from 1957 holds up very well.

And because his humor was – like that of my other comedic heroes from the same era,  Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman and Bob and Ray – entirely aural, there aren’t copious videos to show Freberg at work. YouTube reveals page after page of Freberg routines, but the images are often of static record labels, of montages of photos.

Because he was more prolific than Lehrer and, even truncated, his comedy career was longer than Sherman’s, I have more Stan Freberg discs on my shelves than those two artists put together – included the complete boxed set of his radio shows (well, it was canceled after only four months of weekly airings). But just as I play Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons In The Park” every year on the first day of spring, and play Bob and Ray’s “Komodo Dragon Expert” every time I want to demonstrate what truly inept interviewing and moderating skills sound like, Freberg gets a spin at least once a year, on the Fourth of July, when his masterwork “The United States of America” underlines and undermines every patriotic expression of the day.

Happy birthday, Stan Freberg. I knew you, but oh, how I wish I’d known you.

My memory of the moment is quite vivid, if inevitably inexact. It happened 41 years ago, in the early afternoon, in Mrs. Winkler’s seventh grade science class at Amity Junior High School, as we were doing a “unit” on Ecology. In order to brighten our study of the physical environment, Mrs. Winkler announced one day at the start of class that she wanted to play us a song, and proceeded to put a black vinyl disc on the industrial weight turntable, the cover of which doubled as a speaker. The song she played was a savagely funny cri de coeur about how America’s cities and resources had been ruined by the scourge of pollution, from the perspective of a someone warning a foreign visitor about coming to America.

That was the day I first heard, and heard of, Tom Lehrer.

Not long thereafter, at a garage sale, I would discover a 10 inch, 33 rpm record, “Songs by Tom Lehrer” (on Lehrer Records), which I immediately seized and paid, I imagine, 25 cents to possess. Lehrer joined Allan Sherman and Stan Freberg among the small coterie of singing comedians to whom I became devoted, committing their songs to memory and happily singing them acapella for friends who had no earthly idea where I’d found these strange but funny tunes. After all, Sherman died in 1973, Freberg had shifted from comedy into advertising, and Lehrer’s U.S. fame had peaked on That Was The Week That Was, a short-lived TV precursor to The Daily Show back in 1964 (where he once took on the decimal system on the original British version of the show).

While Lehrer was a genuinely formative influence, who is rarely far from my mind, I think of him specially today because April 9, 2016 marks his 88^th birthday. With Sherman gone for than 40 years and Freberg having passed just last year, Lehrer is the last surviving member of my own sung comedy superteam, and while it’s quite clear that there is nothing Lehrer would like less than to be celebrated for work he largely stopped doing 50 years ago (this BuzzFeed piece from two years ago explains), and even further back, it’s hard to restrain oneself.

This, of course, is the challenge of being a Tom Lehrer fan. While much of the work is evergreen, the majority of it was written in the 1950s and first half of the 60s, and Lehrer largely stopped performing by the time 1970s rolled around. Some have written that Lehrer’s withdrawal from performance was because he is – as a mathematician by training and primary trade – a perfectionist, and that he took no pleasure from concerts because he was determined to reproduce his recordings. Others have suggested that what was daring and ribald in the 50s ran smack against the counterculture of the late 60s, which Lehrer didn’t care for.

In any event, to the dismay of fans of funny, topical songs, Lehrer refocused himself on teaching. The result for comedy geeks was that he became, almost, our J.D. Salinger. Although he hid in plain sight, his students knew better than to discuss his performing fame; though almost no new work appeared, it was clear that he had not shunned his piano and verbal repartee, as the occasional song slipped out, or the odd public appearance. He gave a rare interview to National Public Radio in 1979; he spoke with The New York Times in 2000. Perhaps his last burst of general public fame came when the producer Cameron Mackintosh brought the musical revue Tomfoolery, comprised of Lehrer’s songs, to the stage in London and later New York. But that was in the early 1980s, almost two generations ago now, so Lehrer fans can even be nostalgic for that moment of nostalgia.

Not all of Lehrer’s material still plays today: in this era when space exploration has been minimized, a song about early rocket scientist Werner von Braun is hardly a source of laughter; post-Cold War, a cowboy crooning about the Atomic Energy Commission is perhaps too obscure. But a jazzy pop tune about Oedipus Rex can still crack up the college crowd, and anyone old enough to know of masochism is sure to find humor in a tango celebrating sexual gratification through pain. On the first day of spring each year, the idea of ridding our cities of the overpopulation of pigeons can still resonate. The NRA probably still doesn’t care for a hunting song about an inept marksman. Sexually transmitted diseases, sad to say, are perennial. And while National Brotherhood Week may be gone, a song about that effort to heal cultural rifts still stings.

It may be the very last thing he wants, but today I’ll place a candle in a cupcake and wish for the continued health of Tom Lehrer, hoping, as I do every day, that he might one day be revealed to have been writing songs all this time, and shares them with us, even if not in performance, then at least as sheet music, the better to celebrate him with. Even if he doesn’t want us to do so.

P.S. Did I mention that Lehrer went to summer camp with Stephen Sondheim? Just wanted to toss that in. The verbal dexterity on the swim team that summer must have been quite something.

*   *   *

Whether you’re a Lehrer devotee or newly curious, I recommend watching this mid-60s live show from Copenhagen, in which he performs many of his best known songs for a relatively reserved college crowd.

While the Copenhagen concert has yielded an array of YouTube clips, much lesser seen is a short performance Lehrer gave for one of his teaching colleagues, stocked with an array of unrecorded songs, heavy on mathematics humor.

Strictly for the fans, here’s a decidedly odd industrial clip of Lehrer singing the praises of a new Dodge car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3htMuJhz5Y

If you’d like to introduce younger kids to Lehrer, paving the way for them to discover his more transgressive work when they get older, here’s a bit of educational material from TV’s The Electric Company.

While “cover” versions of Tom Lehrer tunes are rare, here’s the late British comic Marty Feldman having his way with “The Vatican Rag.”

Of course, there’s also Daniel Radcliffe singing “The Element Song.”

I’ll wrap this up with what may be one of Lehrer’s last released songs to date, which is simply the best Hannukah song ever written.

The achievements of Lin-Manuel’s Hamilton are significant and expansive, so much so that I need not add to the proliferation of reviews, essays, parodies, think pieces and so on engendered by his landmark work. However, I feel that, in light of my increasingly senior status and the years of theatre history stashed in my head, I must point out that Lin was not the first to merge rap and American politics on the New York stage.

Travel back with me over 30 years, to an Off-Broadway venue in Greenwich Village known as The Village Gate. A cabaret theatre, it was home a number of acclaimed revues in its day including Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris in the 1960s, National Lampoon’s Lemmings (with Chevy Chase and John Belushi) in the 1970s and Tomfoolery in the 1980s. Closed in 1994, today the building that housed The Village Gate is, last I noticed, a CVS pharmacy.*

“Rap Master Ronnie” on vinyl

But for a very short time in 1984, thanks to composer Elizabeth Swados and lyricist Garry Trudeau (yes, of Doonesbury fame) then-President Ronald Reagan could be found on stage rapping away, while he was simultaneously in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The opus that provided this platform? An hour-long revue called Rap Master Ronnie, with actor Reathel Bean in the title role.

An off-shoot of the Broadway Doonesbury musical that Trudeau and Swados had created just the year before, in truth Rap Master Ronnie had only a single rap number, the title tune (which then-Times critic Frank Rich cited as a high point). But while its musical styling wasn’t really beatbox-based overall, the show did interrogate Reagan’s presidency pointedly and musically in the weeks leading up to the 1984 election (which would ultimately see Reagan win a second term).

Speaking to Stephen Holden in The New York Times, when the revue began performances, Trudeau talked about the impetus for his theatrical advocacy, four years before his HBO series Tanner 88 and decades before his Amazon series Alpha House:

”I don’t know if there’s anything artistic being done about this election – it is either being ignored or given up on,” Mr. Trudeau observed. ”It didn’t seem right to me to let it go without trying to say something. The piece is enormously challenging because, as everybody knows, Reagan has proven unusually resistant to frontal assault. That’s a very difficult target to take aim at.”

It’s an interesting statement to read in an election year 32 years later, no?

I digress. I also admit to making the Hamilton link in perhaps my BuzzFeed-iest ploy for attention, just to lure you in to learn of largely forgotten bit of theatrical agitprop, that has nevertheless left one wonderful artifact: the music video version of the title track of Rap Master Ronnie. So I apologize for making you wade through everything up until now, and invite you to see a rapping political figure from days gone by – when everyone’s friend and role model Lin-Manuel was but two years old.

More trivia: Rap Master Ronnie’s limited run at The Village Gate was succeeded by another musical about a politican, Mayor, which portrayed then-NYC mayor Ed Koch in a decidedly more lighthearted lampoon. It was created by composer and lyricist Charles Strouse and marked the first significant credit for a young writer named Warren Leight, who would go on to win a Tony for Side Man and has been steering the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit franchise for several years. But again, I digress.

* Update: I am informed by reader Rafael Gallegos that the one-time Village Gate is now the nightclub Le Poisson Rouge. I swear it was a pharmacy for a time, but this shows you the last time I sought either medication or entertainment on Bleecker Street.

If you’re like me, someone deeply committed to the arts – in practice, in education, in media coverage, in every aspect of life – you’ve probably had the same fantasy I’ve had over the years. What, I often wonder, would the scenario for the arts be like if they had the same attention and resources as those afforded to sports, especially in high schools and colleges?

That scenario can be played out with serious thought, especially as we watch school arts programs being cut – just last week the Atlanta school system cut music teachers at the elementary level. But it can also lead to some laugh-worthy imaginings  – performance enhancing drugs for actors, anyone?

In the most sustained flight of fantasy I’ve seen surrounding this daydream, comedian Owen Weber has just released a video imagining The “thESPiaN” Network, covering theatre as if it was sports television. It’s executed with striking verisimilitude and real professionalism. That’s right, guys in suits at a desk saying things like, “You can’t blow opening night – the critics don’t give redos,” mentioning that a drama program gave up a “sixth round Fortinbras,” and declaring, “We’re getting wild now – Oscar Wilde!” I’m very amused.

Remarkably, Weber has released the video in four and eight minute version, and the it’s the long version that has my favorite sight gag, regarding a production of the Scottish play.

There are a couple of small things that bothered me as I watched the videos. Now I don’t know Weber’s other work (though clearly I’ll be checking it out), so I have no idea whether these are characteristic or anomalies. One is very likely intentional, and it’s a moment when an actress being discussed is briefly, fleetingly objectified not for her talent but for her looks. It’s very likely that this was meant to emphasize the “bro” culture of sports, even though, let’s face it, even ESPN has female sportscasters who would be very quick to shut down that sort of conversation about a female athlete.

My second observation is that the video is completely cast with Caucasians, and while everyone may have worked for nothing and Weber’s friends who were available for the shoot on any given day may have left him few options, I do wish that a video that will surely be making the rounds of theatre programs and theatre offices everywhere – and I’m contributing to that dissemination – better represented the diversity and inclusiveness of the arts. Quoting Jeanine Tesori at the Tony Awards, though she was speaking specifically to women at that moment, “You have to see it to be it.” Look, I know: comedy is no fun when it’s picked apart, but I can’t share these without mentioning that.

I wouldn’t be sharing these videos if they weren’t well-executed, consistently clever and at a few moments, laugh out loud funny. And the bottom line is, if there was a “Stage Center” on TV every night, I’d be watching it. And maybe some new ways of talking about the arts wouldn’t be such a bad idea at all.

A couple of years ago, in conversation with a childhood friend on Facebook, we began recalling the hours spent in my basement listening to the early comedy records of Bill Cosby. Suddenly, a business associate from my adult life joined in, demanding to know how we could reminisce about this, given the many allegations made against Cosby, and the one out-of-court settlement, regarding his sexual assaults on women. Because the dialogue was focused on fond memories, not Cosby himself per se, and because this associate wouldn’t let it go, I unfriended him. I did so despite the fact that I knew of the charges, believed them, and had already ceased to enjoy Cosby’s new work. At that moment, however, I just wanted reverie.

I did not then, nor do I now, countenance any of the actions with which Cosby is charged. I abhor them. I feel deeply sympathetic towards, and supportive of, any woman who may have been harassed, drugged or assaulted by him. I wish that he could stand trial for what he’s been accused of, so that he could be tried in the judicial system and not solely in the media. This is a case in which justice will likely never be done, in which there will always be unanswered questions – especially from Cosby himself, whose silence, as they say, speaks volumes.

But I can’t deny how much Cosby’s comedy meant to me in my youth. Long-unseen friends recall it readily at a distance of 40 years. The only time my brother and I came together peacefully as kids was to listen to comedy recordings, which we committed to memory. Later, when I lived with my parents for a year post-college, my family gathered in the room in our house where my godmother spent the final year of her life, promptly at 8 pm on Thursday, to watch The Cosby Show.

So what do I do with treasured recollections in which an alleged predator played a central role? How can I even remember the work with warmth – work which in and of itself seems timeless in much of the material – even as I disavow its creator?

Audiences in England faced these same questions when the pedophilia scandal at the BBC arose, first over the late Jimmy Savile and a bit later over Rolf Harris. I followed those stories in horror and disbelief, though it was Harris whose work I actually knew: his novelty hit “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport” was a staple on the Dr. Demento radio show, another touchstone for me. In the case of Harris, who also became known as an artist, communities began removing his paintings and eradicating his murals. This is akin to what TV Land has just done by removing The Cosby Show from their line-up, to dissociate themselves from the now irrevocably tarnished brand and likely because no advertiser would accept the association. But in each case, those who were entertained, unknowing, must reconsider their relationship, to the men, and to the work. Let’s not forget that Stephen Collins, who portrayed the father on the popular family drama 7th Heaven, is under scrutiny for what appears to be self-admitted incidents of child abuse, surfaced during his contentious divorce proceedings.

In the cases of Savile, Harris, Collins and Cosby, the issue is criminal actions against others. Unconscionable. As an aside, it’s worth recalling that Paul Reubens was immediately shunned two decades ago following his arrest for masturbating in a porn theatre – a crime, at odds with his role as a Saturday morning children’s performer, but in that case a victimless one. Though he managed to secure acting roles intermittently, it’s only in the past few years that his Pee Wee Herman persona has been publicly embraced once again. I wonder whether his resurrection would have been possible had his transgression occurred in the era of social media – or whether he might have been rescued by it. Certainly it is social media which has allowed the long-standing allegations against Cosby to engage the public consciousness at last.

I could go underground with my appreciation of Cosby’s work, but that feels hypocritical. I cannot rewrite my past, even as it is – and should be – impossible to reconcile it with what has reemerged in the past few weeks, with greater traction than ever before. Given the enormous influence of The Cosby Show, I’m certainly far from the only person in this confused state; I suspect my affinity for the comedy recordings may be somewhat more rarified, especially among those younger than I am. No doubt I Spy and Fat Albert fans are experiencing profound dissonance as well. In fact, I hope they are.

I normally write because I have something very specific I want to say. In this case, I write because I’m grappling with deeply conflicted feelings. What do we all do when our childhood heroes are alleged, or revealed, to be profoundly different from the work and personae for which they became famous? How do we stand with victims, and against all such crimes, yet harbor genuinely warm memories created by the same artist? I can rethink my feelings about Cosby the man, and I have, but I don’t know that I can rethink my childhood, and the role he played in it. Should I? Can you? And if we truly can’t, where does that leave us? Are we hypocrites, or dupes, or forever divided as truth intrudes, maybe forcing us to even rewrite our own memories.

Addendum, 5 pm, November 20: As I discuss this post on Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, another corollary presents itself, though its not as clearcut. Phil Spector was convicted of murder, yet no one seems to shun the classic records he made as a producer. Is it because he’s not the named artist, and so the line is less clear? But let’s remember, whatever Cosby has done, his alleged crimes aren’t Phylicia Rashad’s, or Lisa Bonet’s, or Robert Culp’s, and so on. Must their work be excised and shunned because of their co-star’s actions? For that matter, have people stopped watching the Police Squad movies because of O.J. Simpson? It may be difficult not to view them through the prism of true-life revelations, but there seem to be no correct or consistent actions or reactions.

This post has been updated, and a story that began as an account of censorship has become one of, dare I say it, resurrection. Here’s the tale.

Three days ago, the town council of Newtownabbey in Northern Ireland shut down a planned engagement of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged) on the grounds that it was sacrilegious and anti-Christian. In doing so, they overrode the prior decision by the town’s Artistic Council to allow the show to go forward in a town-financed facility. I abhor this action in no uncertain terms, and anything I write would simply be variations on that theme. So rather than embroider my own thoughts, I offer you – consistent with the practices of my friends at Reduced – a relatively brief compendium of what has occurred since the first announcement, all via local coverage from Ireland (links to each complete story are contained in the name of each press outlet), as well as select comments from Reduced’s chief twit Austin Tichenor. I trust you’ll see this for what it is, censorship, pure and simple.

From the Newtownabbey Times, “Artistic board axes controversial theatre show”:

Newtownabbey Council’s Artistic Board has cancelled a comedy show due to take place at Theatre at The Mill next week, following complaints that the production would be offensive to the borough’s Christian community.

The move to pull ‘The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged)’ comes after councillors and officers received correspondence from individuals and church leaders calling for the “blasphemous” show to be axed.

At Monday night’s Development Committee meeting, several councillors voiced their objection to the Reduced Shakespeare Company production taking place at the council-run venue. And there was significant support for a proposal from DUP councillor Audrey Ball calling for it to be cancelled.

Other members argued against “political censorship” of productions and a decision on the issue was deferred to allow council officers time to look at potential contractual and financial implications arising from stopping the show just days before the scheduled start of its two-night run.

From UTV, “Bible theatre show cancelled after row”:

The party’s Robert Hill told UTV on Thursday that members of the public had approached representatives asking them to “get it stopped” on the grounds that it was offensive.

He said the council was “willing to take a moral stand” and hit back at those who have criticised the decision by claiming it amounts to censorship of the arts.

“Every film in the theatre is censored – that’s why there are age limits on what can be seen and what can’t. And where do you stop? There has to be a limit somewhere,” Mr Hill said.

UUP Mayor Fraser Agnew also told UTV that he felt the right decision had been made regarding the controversial play, adding that a professional facilitator had been brought in to resolve the issue.

“There were a lot of people concerned about the nature of this play, that it was anti-Christian – and we have established indeed it was anti-Christian,” he said.

From the Belfast Telegraph, “Bible spoof play ban makes Northern Ireland a laughing stock”:

The decision by Newtownabbey Borough Council to cancel the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s light-hearted revue of the Bible gives religion a bad name.

It also underlines the backwoods narrow-mindedness of some people in Northern Ireland as it begins to show a more multi-cultural face to the world.

We must ask ourselves where else would this happen, except among the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Surely God must have a sense of humour – how else could he put up with the numpties of Newtownabbey?

From BBC News, “Comedian Jake O’Kane criticizes ‘zealots’ who cancelled play”:

Mr O’Kane said: “I haven’t seen the play, and unfortunately I’ll never be able to see the play because councillors have decided that we will not be allowed to see the play.

“It’s like getting in a time machine and they went back to before the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

“There was £7m spent on this theatre, it opened in 2010, and they may as well close the doors. If they are going to be the moral guardians of what we see and don’t see, that theatre is dead in the water.

“We already have laws, we have hate speech laws, that dictate what the arts can and cannot do. If it is hateful, if it is against minorities, the laws are already there to censor that.

“We don’t need a bunch of unionist councillors in Newtownabbey deciding what we can or cannot go to see.

“They call themselves moral guardians – they weren’t elected to be moral guardians. We elected them to empty our bins, make sure the leisure centres were open – that’s the powers they have.

From the Newtownabbey Times, “Council faces stinging criticism over decision to axe show”:

One Belfast newspaper claimed that the board’s decision had made Northern Ireland “a laughing stock”, while playwright Dan Gordon said it was “staggering that this type of censorship still appears to flourish in the UK.”

Alliance Alderman John Blair said that cancelling the show had “brought us back into the Dark Ages and turned us into a laughing stock”. But Alderman Billy Ball argued that the board had made “the right decision,” while Raymond Stewart, secretary of Reformation Ireland, welcomed the move to axe what he branded “an insult upon our Lord Jesus Christ and His gospel.”

From BBC News, “Banned play: Arts minister ‘saddened’ by council decision”:

In a statement, the arts minister said: “I was disappointed to hear of the decision to cancel the production of The Bible: The complete Word of God (Abridged).

“I know that the play has travelled extensively and been performed on the international stage for the past 20 years.

Arts Minister Carál Ni Chuilín said audiences should be given the opportunity to “judge for themselves”

“I am saddened that audiences here will not be offered the opportunity to see the performance and judge for themselves the virtues of the show,” Ms Ni Chuilín added.

“I fully support the views of the Arts Council that the artist’s right to freedom of expression should always be defended and that the arts have a role in promoting discussion and allowing space for disagreement and debate.”

From the Irish Indpendent, “Cancellation of ‘blasphemous’ play interferes with freedom of speech: Amnesty International”:

Amnesty Northern Ireland director Patrick Corrigan said: “It is well-established in international human rights law that the right to freedom of expression, though not absolute, is a fundamental right which may only be restricted in certain limited circumstances to do with the advocacy of hatred.

“It is quite obvious that those circumstances are not met in the context of this work of comedy and, thus, that the cancelling of the play is utterly unjustified on human rights grounds.

From The Belfast Telegraph, “Bible play goes on in Newtownabbey… but only behind closed doors”:

The company behind the show, Newbury Productions and Reduced, have told this paper that they have already booked flights and accommodation and intend to come to Newtownabbey as planned.

They will take to the stage at the Theatre At The Mill for technical and dress rehearsals ahead of the rest of a UK tour, which takes in more than 40 venues in England, Scotland and Wales.

Last night a spokeswoman for Newtownabbey Borough Council confirmed the public would not be permitted access to watch the rehearsals.

“As is normal practice, dress rehearsals are not open to the public,” she added.

It has cost the council at least £2,000 to cancel the show.

Davey Naylor, general manager of Newbury Productions, told the Belfast Telegraph that tech and dress rehearsals will be taking place at Theatre At The Mill on January 29 and 30 as planned.

He said: “We will be there, we just won’t be able to perform for the public at the theatre.”

From The Irish News, “Comedy company considers other venues for Bible show”:

Last night the show’s producers – who revealed it was the first time in 20 years the production had been cancelled – said they would definitely consider returning at another date.

Davey Naylor said they believed the “good people of Northern Ireland should be free to come and see the show to make up their own minds”.

He added: “Sadly, at this late stage, I think another performance next week is remote, however, our tour goes on until April and there’s no reason we couldn’t come back at some point.”

By sheer coincidence, the website Upworthy happened to feature a video by Monty Python member John Cleese, “On Creativity: Serious vs Solemn,” which seems particularly apt to this situation, billed by Upworthy as, “John Cleese Describes Why Nothing Is ‘Too Serious’ To Be Joked About”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdWKQ36JkwE

I sincerely hope that the Reduced Shakespeare Company does return to play Newtownabbey. I suspect they need a good laugh there just about now.

Update, January 27 8:15 pm

From The Belfast Telegraph, “Newtownabbey Borough Council has reversed the controversial decision to ban comedy play The Bible: The Complete Word Of God (Abridged).”

The Reduced Shakespeare Company production is expected to run as originally scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday this week. Anger had been growing since it was revealed the council’s artistic board – made up of councillors and independent members – had pulled the plug on the show at Newtownabbey’s Theatre At The Mill

DUP members had branded the pay blasphemous and an attack on Christianity, but the decision caused outrage and made international headlines. But on Monday night the artistic board announced it had reversed its decision – an announcement that was backed by the full council.

From the BBC, “Newtownabbey council reverses decision to cancel Bible play”

Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company said: “I’m thrilled that the Newtownabbey community can now come see the show and decide for themselves what kind of a show it is. “My biggest fear is that they’ll come see the show and go ‘this is what all the fuss was about?’. I think people assume we’re coming from a place of hatred and mockery and we’re absolutely not. This is a celebration of the Bible and I think anybody who has seen the show, and many people of all faiths have seen the show, testify to that effect.”

 And, I trust a good time will be had by all.

Update, January 30, 11 am:

My parents were not theatergoers and my youthful memories are not filled with reveries of family trips to New York to see shows. I can remember being taken to the theatre only twice as a youth by my parents, once in 1969 in New Haven (Fiddler on the Roof, national tour) and once in about 1975 on Broadway (The Magic Show). Yet there was something embedded in my DNA which made me interested in performance; I was writing plays (almost all adaptations of existing works) in elementary school with very little frame of reference and undoubtedly even less skill.

I longed to be an actor, and vividly remember my envy of Danny Bonaduce on The Partridge Family, thinking if he could be on TV, so could I. This was a bit odd, because I was a rather socially awkward child who didn’t mix well with most kids in my elementary years; I read constantly and had to be pushed outside into fresh air, where I invariably kept reading. Unlike many drawn to performing, music didn’t have a big role in my childhood, outside of Top 40 AM fare once I had my own little transistor radio. My parents didn’t have a record collection to speak of; I do recall my mother’s beloved two-disc set of Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, and some assorted children’s records, such as the Mary Poppins soundtrack and Danny Kaye’s Mommy, Give Me a Drink Of Water and Tubby the Tuba. Cast recordings, which loom large in the memories of theatre pros, were absent, save for Fiddler on the Roof (culturally imperative, but rarely played) and West Side Story (likewise, but we only listened to “Dear Officer Krupke”).

So I’ve often wondered how I managed to be cast in lead roles in each and every show (save one) that I auditioned for in junior high, high school, community theatre and college, and why being on stage or in speaking in front of large groups has never frightened me. I’ve come to understand that part of the appeal, and the ease, came from the stage offering the exact opposite of day to day life. On stage, I always knew what to say and when to say it, and when I did it right, I was rewarded with laughter and applause. It was a startling contrast from the uncertainty of casual interaction. Where did I learn this skill? Comedy records.

As a tween and teen in the early 70s, in the pre home video era, I was completely entranced by comedy recordings both current and from the relatively recent past.  My brother and I came together primarily over our basement record player and the comedy collection scavenged from yard sales (and Monty Python on PBS). We had a bunch of the earliest Bill Cosby albums, the deeply politically incorrect Jose Jimenez In Orbit, a Smothers Brothers disc and (purchased new, smuggled in) George Carlin’s AM/FM and Class Clown. These are the ones that come to mind; there may have been more.

We listened to these albums over and over as if they were music, and reached the point where we knew entire routines by heart. Not just the words, but the pacing, the inflections, the comics impersonations of other characters and performers. Each routine was a song, and we would recite along with the records. We worked to perfect Carlin’s Spike Jones “hiccup” before we’d ever heard a Spike Jones record. We were mesmerized by them, long after the surprise of the jokes had faded; of course, the contraband Carlin album made us very adventuresome among our peers because of its “dirty” language (we were perhaps 12 or 13 at the time).

I never of thought about these records as scripts, but they were almost sacred texts to us. If we learn to perform first by imitating and later by finding our own style, then we were taking a suburban master class from performers at places like The hungry i in San Francisco before we’d ever been on  an airplane and before we would have been old enough to gain admittance even had we managed the trek. The lessons ran deep: a couple of years ago, a gift set of Carlin CDs accompanied me on a road trip, and my wife was both amused and annoyed by my ability to recall every moment with precision, despite my not having heard the material in many years. Did I ever find a style of my own, moving beyond mimicry? That’s for others to say.

My actual performing years were brief, covering 1977 to 1981, 10 shows in all. I was perhaps the fussiest Oscar Madison in history, since most see me as a Felix; I probably shouted more than any one of the 12 Angry Men as Juror 3; I managed to make the characters of Will Parker and Albert Peterson the most inept dancers in their history. I suspect I was best in roles that called for comedy over movement or voice: the Woody Allen stand-in Axel Magee in Don’t Drink The Water, the meek Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler, and the dirty old man Senex in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (my college’s newspaper noted a distinct Jewish paternalism in my performance at age 19).  Whatever I had, I owed not to the performers from the Golden Age of Theatre, who I would only come to know later, but to the stand-up comedians who were the writers and performers I took close to heart – if for no other reasons than that they were repeatedly accessible on the technology that was available to me.

I do not suggest that aspiring performers should run out and start learning comedy albums by heart, though one could do worse for understanding timing and pace. Of course, now we can watch and not merely listen to comedians and work out their full routines step by step; I wonder whether the visuals would have added to our mimicry or distracted us from the deep concentration on words and delivery that took place as a ritual in our cluttered basement, our nightclub of the mind. But I am sure of one thing: there are many ways to find one’s way to the stage, and mine was through the storytelling and punchlines of some modern masters of the comedy genre.

P.S. My vocal coaches were Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg, and Allan Sherman. But that’s another story.

As a teen in the 1970s, I kept testing a small sociological phenomenon. When visiting a Jewish home, I would peek at the record collection of the adults in residence to see if they had the album “My Son, The Folk Singer.” If the family was Catholic or Protestant, I’d look for “The First Family” featuring Vaughn Meader. To my recollection, I never failed to find the anticipated album in the expected home, even though both records were already at least a decade old before I began my study. While this did not foretell a future career as a social anthropologist, it always gave me a little hit of satisfaction, as if I’d tumbled to some unique cultural signifier.

“The First Family” was a 1962 comedy album that satirized the Kennedy  clan very lightly and it briefly made a star of Meader. Of course, his career as a JFK impersonator was cut short in November 1963, but for one year, his fame was such that reportedly when Lenny Bruce performed for the first time after the president’s assassination, his first words were reportedly some variant of, “Wow, Vaughn Meader’s screwed.”

“My Son, The Folk Singer” was written and performed by a previously all but unknown TV writer and producer named Allan Sherman, who was in his late 30s when the recording debuted in 1962. It was such a phenomenon that it set sales records not simply for comedy records but for the recording industry in general, and demand for Sherman’s Yiddish inflected and overwhelmingly Jewish parodies of folk and later popular songs was such that he released his first three albums (out of eight in his whole career) within a single 12-month period. For a few years he was a huge name – touring night clubs and concert venues, guest hosting for Johnny Carson, appearing in his own TV specials – but he turned out to be a fad, especially as radio formats changed, marginalizing novelty records. When he died of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of 49, his career has already been all but over for several years. I discovered Sherman at roughly the same time, unaware of his passing — I can still sing any number of his parodies at the drop of a hat.

The new biography, Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman by Mark Cohen (Brandeis University Press, $29.95) is a comprehensive look at the career of the man best remembered today, if at all (outside of older Jews and comedy buffs), for his tale of a summer camp sojourn gone awry, “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.” As might be expected of a book that is part of the publishing house’s “Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life,” Sensation views Sherman through a Semitic lens, arguing for his role in popular acceptance of Jews in American culture. While Jewish comedians (and writers, performers, and so on) had flourished for decades, Cohen posits that Sherman’s success was a key crossover point that freed Jewish artists to speak openly of their race, and indeed Jewish identity was central to Sherman’s earliest work. That he was welcomed at The White House is touted as a symbol of Sherman’s cross-cultural barrier breaking, as is his popular success throughout the country.

Because of its concentration on this thesis, the book seems to give somewhat short shrift to other Jews breaking into popular consciousness and in some cases into the mainstream at about the same time; the fertile environment for recorded comedy, at its height in the early 60s, is likewise diminished. Stan Freberg (The History of The United States of America) and Tom Lehrer (“Poisoning Pigeons in the Park“) merit nary a mention (despite writing both words and music to their melodic satires before Sherman came on the scene; the latter Jewish, the former not); non-singing Jewish comics like Shelley Berman and Brooks & Reiner (The 2,000 Year Old Man) are given little attention.  That’s not to say Sherman wasn’t important, but he didn’t exist in a vacuum. He burned brighter for a short time, and had a verbal dexterity admired even by Richard Rodgers, but it’s Lehrer and Freberg’s work that is often cited for its brilliance by comedians and composers a half-century later. Reiner, Brooks and Woody Allen (“The Moose“) may have started slower, but were surely more influential Jewish voices in the long run.

Sherman’s story plays out like the script of a thorough, culturally oriented “Behind The Music” episode, with a bit of Jewish motherdom thrown in for good measure. Cohen breaks down the comedian’s life as: he came from a terrible, broken family (such a shondeh) as a result of which he never grew up; he was a parodic genius (we’re kvelling); and already predisposed to poor health by his weight, he was done in by the trappings of success even as it left him (he’s always shicker, and cavorting with shiksas). There’s more than a hint of posthumous guilt being levied on Sherman for his various appetites (both gustatory and carnal) and shortcomings, while the enthusiasm for his culturally specific parodic work is unstinting. But the book’s research and complete lifetime overview makes it a vastly better reference document than Sherman’s autobiography, A Gift of Laughter, published in 1965 just as his career began to wane – and, according to Sensation, largely ghost-written and intermittently dishonest.

Coming from an academic press into a world that has largely forgotten him, Overweight Sensation is unlikely to spark a Sherman renaissance, but it does thoroughly memorialize the career of a man whose comedy prefigured that of other singing parodists, notably Al Yankovic, with whom he shared on obsessions with songs about food and weight (i.e. Sherman’s “Grow Mrs. Goldfarb” and “Hail To Thee, Fat Person“; Weird Al’s “Fat” and “Eat It“).  It also has the bonus of an appendix featuring lyrics Sherman wrote and never released commercially; based on familiar songs, readers can easily sing them for themselves. And if he was not the sole trailblazer for Jewish life and language assimilating into mainstream culture, he certainly played a key role that is deserving of acknowledgement and remembrance, as do some of his parodies, which can still bring laughs 50 years on.

The advent of mp3s has made Sherman’s work readily accessible again after long periods out of print, and YouTube offers the opportunity to sample his oeuvre, beyond the familiarity of the hazard-filled Camp Granada. For a cursory introduction (or reminder), I recommend both the heavily Jewish inventiveness of “Sarah Jackman,” “Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max,” and “My Zelda” and the more secular jauntiness of “Eight Foot Two Solid Blue,” “You Went The Wrong Way Old King Louie,” and (with Sherman on video) “Skin” and “The Painless Dentist Song.”

P.S. No relation.

Though I’ve occasionally written about topics outside of theatre and the performing arts, with this post I’ll be titling them as a distinct series, affording me the opportunity to stray wider in my writing while noting when I’m “off-topic.” So here’s the first “Etcetera.”

If I tell you that I fondly recall coming home from junior high in the mid-1970s and huddling up to my radio for the verbal entertainment found there, I hope you will be struck by the incongruity of the date and the medium of choice. There was a burst of nostalgia for radio comedy and drama in that era; one station that I could receive, if the weather conditions were right, scheduled classic shows like Fibber McGee and Molly and The Shadow weekly; radio veteran Himan Brown launched a new series of radio plays called the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre (archived here), and even the countercultural satirists at the National Lampoon syndicated their Radio Hour, a precursor to their own stage show Lemmings and shortly thereafter, the debut of Saturday Night Live.

I loved them all, but the most intriguing were the evening drive-time broadcasters on New York’s WOR, Bob and Ray. They would chat, do segues to traffic and news reports and intermittently launch into decidedly off-kilter comic sequences. Those I remember best were the serialized “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife” and “Garish Summit.” None of my friends at the time listened to this stuff and it wasn’t until I got to college that I discovered the cult of Bob and Ray, who, as it turned out, were in their final regular radio run as I listened, having started their careers in the late 40s.

In the just-published Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Person (Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, $27.99), David Pollack provides the first biography of the duo, from their fortuitous pairing  in 1946 through Ray’s death in 1990. Though their material has circulated for years, on tape and records (later CDs), in books and now on YouTube, the book offers the opportunity to learn the detail (even minutiae) of their joint career, including their early leap from radio to television in the latter’s earliest days, their role (along with another hero of mine, Stan Freberg) at injecting humor into advertising, and their reluctant foray onto the Broadway stage in 1970.

The book goes out of its way to point out what ordinary guys Bob (Elliott) and Ray (Goulding) were and how much they eschewed the trappings of even minor celebrity. It also repeatedly comments on the lack of conflict between the two, only mentioning Ray’s occasional flashes of anger that were quickly forgotten. There’s no tell-all here, pretty much just the facts, ma’am, and very little drama.

In addition to noting just how much the duo were outside the comedy mainstream (indeed, they didn’t consider themselves comedians at all), Pollack makes one important observation about the pair’s popularity. Because they performed almost exclusively for years in studios – not stages or nightclubs – there were no aural cues as to what was funny and what was not. Their humor thrived on being underplayed, and undersold. But what may have made them truly unique was that without a live audience, fans would feel they were an audience of one, communing directly with the hosts from their car or home, unmediated and deeply personal.

Save for the occasional line of dialogue, Bob and Ray, Keener Than Most Persons reproduces none of the duo’s material and its straightforward, authorized telling makes the assumption that you’re reading the book because you’re already a fan; there’s no effort to drum up new aficionados. While such an effort would have been challenging given that so much of Bob and Ray’s humor emanates from their rapport and timing, it’s hardly impossible to proselytize for comedians of the past; witness Dick Cavett’s superb evocation of the once sui generis improv of Jonathan Winters, which just ran in The New York Times.

So I must urge you to head to YouTube, to listen to my indescribable favorites, “The Komodo Dragon Expert” and “The Slow Talker,” both from their Broadway stand (therefore, with atypical audience laughter). Then just keep searching.

A personal addendum, less than 24 hours old. When the book arrived and landed on my coffee table, my wife’s response was, “Bob and Ray. Who are they?” At the time I didn’t launch into a rhapsody, but last night, having just read the book on an airplane, I began talking about Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, mentioning that I thought Ray might have lived near her family on Long Island. “Goulding?” she said. “I went to school with a Mark Goulding. His dad did something in radio.” I showed her pictures from the book and, indeed, my wife recognized Ray Goulding from school events. He flew under the radar even in his own town.

I, of course, was floored to find that my wife had come so close to one of my heroes, completely unaware. So I played the two pieces mentioned above, and we both laughed until tears came to our eyes. I am happy to report that nearly 70 years after they began working together, I had just recruited a new fan to the cult of Bob and Ray. Join us, won’t you?