Talk:Sick comedy

Daniele Luttazzi was born in 1961, he is not witness, his quote paraphrases the TIME articles. ````

Books were published with titles containing the phrase Sick Jokes

This clucking one's tongue at the establishment's disdain for incivility or political opposition is not what I remember. I don't remember the title of the book my school chums got it from, but two truly sick jokes that were burned into my memory are : "What's red and sits in a crib?" "A baby teething on a razor blade." and "What's blue and sits in a crib?" "A baby exploring thie inside of a plastic bag." (There must have been only transparent plastic bags at that time.) Neither is the slightest bit 'progressive'. 4.154.254.226 (talk) 16:26, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

• Maybe I missed it, but I don't see a discussion of sick jokes per se in the article (nor could I find an entry on sick jokes). Sick jokes such as the ones 4.154.254.226 gave were a fad in the late fifties/early sixties independent of stage sick humor, although they might have come from professional comedians. Kdammers (talk) 00:31, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
• I'm not sure what you mean by *sick jokes*, but as (User talk:4.154.254.226 mentions, I remember "dead baby jokies" and similar gross-out from other kids on the playground, 1970s. The hatnote linking Off-color humor is supposed to take care of that, but it is now redirected to Black humor, which misses the subject of "sick jokes". It doesn't belong in this article, about the so-called "Sick comics", but I don't see it under the articles Shock humour, Shock humour, or Low comedy. There surely exist academic sources. Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Here, have one:

* Herzog, Thomas R.; Bush, Beverly A. (July 17, 1979). "The Dead Baby Joke Cycle; The prediction of preference for sick humor". Western Folklore. 38 (3): 145–157. doi:10.2307/1499238. Retrieved December 26, 2021.

Now all we need is an article to put this in. Sick jokes is currently empty. The new page could be added to the disambiguation page Sick joke (singular), and maybe re-claming the redirect article Sick humor ? / edg ☺ ☭ 16:40, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Re-write needed

This article is framed largely as an objection to the term "sick" as an unfair pejorative imposed by the mainstream culture. Be that as it may, this group of comedians were commonly referred to as the "sick comedians". Some references:

• Thompson, Ethan (11 May 2011). Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture. Routledge.
• Christgau, Robert (11 March 1973). "The Comedy Album Crop". Newsday. Contrasts Allan Sherman, Vaughn Meader and Bob Newhart to the "sick comics", whom Xgau enumerates as Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Shelly Berman
• DeMott, Benjamin (1962). "An Unprofessional Eye: The New Irony: Sickniks and Others". The American Scholar. 31 (1): 108–119.
• The Time link included in this article, while seeming (in retrospect) to largely miss the point (and pushing the term sicnics), also uses the word sick as a group identity.

By Christgau's accounting, the term strictly defined would include Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman (misspelled "Shelly"), but more loosely can be applied to "jazz audience" comics of the time whose styles had broken from the "stand up one liner" style that preceeded them.

While the term can be annoyingly ambiguous because of vernacular usages of sick to mean off-color humor — I remember children using the term sick jokes to classify dead baby jokes (which doesn't belong in this article) and similar gross-out — this is the term that ended up being used to distinguish this new style of comedy from that which preceeded it. A hat note linking to Off-color humor should be sufficient to address that. / edg ☺ ☭ 20:47, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Copyedited, fixed some citations, and swapped in new tags for old. Someone more knowledgeable could expand this article considerably. Currently it leans excessively on two sources: Daniele Luttazzi (partially in unseen, offline material) and Lenny Bruce performances. I imagine other sources have history and critical analysis to contribute. / edg ☺ ☭ 17:56, 24 September 2014 (UTC)