Stock Lines, Boat-Acts, and Dickjokes: A Brief Annotated Glossary of Standup Comedy Jargon

Abstract

H AVING WORKED AS EMCEE AND MANAGER of a standup comedy nightclub for four years, I have necessarily acquired some of the specialized vocabulary of comedians. Much of it is common to the entertainment industry as a whole-gig, headliner, and act, for example-but there are compounds and uses of common terms which seem to be peculiar to comics. The term standup itself is well documented in the general dictionaries consulted for this article, although Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (W9) gives the year 1966 as its first cited appearance, while the Tamony citation files show that the word was used in print at least as early as 1955 and appear to indicate much earlier use, as these references are often to comedians such asJack Benny and George Burns, whose careers began on the vaudeville stage in the early part of this century (San Francisco Examiner, 25 Feb. 1955 and 5 Jan. 1965).' The advent of broadcasting and motion pictures and the concurrent demise of touring variety shows saw the defection of many popular vaudeville comedians to the new media; the 1930s, '40s, and '50s appear to have been very difficult times for comics launching new careers. These decades were almost bereft of club gigs which would pay an unknown comedian more than five dollars a night, according to standup comedy historian Phil Berger (1985, 4). The social unrest of the late 1950s and early 1960s produced a new breed of socially aware comedians-Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl, and others-who were considered by much of mainstream society to be avant garde at best, probably due at least in part to the fact that many of their venues were coffeehouses or stripjoints (Berger 1985, 89-90, 100-01, 134, 137-38). In turn, the nature of the venues at least allowed and quite likely encouraged pejoration in the language and subject matter of the monologues performed there, which would certainly not have enhanced comedians' reputations or gig opportunities in the mainstream arena. This downward spiral culminated in the early 1970s when even these jobs all but disappeared (except, not surprisingly, in Las Vegas) .2 Meanwhile, mass-marketed comedy records by artists such as Richard Pryor, Cheech and Chong, and George Carlin were selling millions of