The idea at the center of “Nobody” - laughing at the self-deprecation of an unfortunate schlemiel - was what fueled its tremendous success. That record included the piece he was best known for, “Nobody.” It’s an upbeat tune whose buoyant arrangement runs perpendicular to its melancholy message of isolation and disappointment, a device that’s since become ubiquitous. But his celebrity grew tremendously when he put the songs from his stage show Abyssinia to disc and cylinder. I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time /Īnd until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime /įor nobody, no time”Bert Williams was the most popular black comedic performer in America at the turn of the 20th century. Use the timeline slider to jump to different eras or specific comedians. They are listed below in chronological order, complete with video or audio. Without further ado, here are the 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy. (Fox, Bonanos, Keifer, O’Neal, Czajkowski, Love, McGlynn, Ess, Reilly, Jaffe, Kavner, and Schilling wrote the blurbs.)
The list was put together by Vulture senior editor Jesse David Fox New York senior editor Christopher Bonanos comedians Wayne Federman, Phoebe Robinson, Halle Kiefer, and Rebecca O’Neal comedy historians Yael Kohen (author of We Killed) and Kliph Nesteroff (author of The Comedians) and journalists Elise Czajkowski, Matthew Love, Katla McGlynn, Ramsey Ess, Dan Reilly, Jenny Jaffe, Lucas Kavner, and The Guardian’s Dave Schilling. And fourth, the list doesn’t include comedy that we ultimately felt was bad, harmful, or retrograde. Third, we only included one joke per comedian. Second, with apologies to Monty Python, whose influence on contemporary comedy is tremendous and undeniable, we focused only on American humor. First, we decided early on that these jokes needed to be performed and recorded at some point.
A joke, as defined by this list, is a discrete moment of comedy, whether from stand-up, a sketch, an album, a movie, or a TV show.įor clarity’s sake, we’ve established certain ground rules for inclusion. Pretending to stick a needle in your eye, or pooping in the street while wearing a wedding dress: both jokes.
Yes, a joke can be a one-liner built from a setup and a punch line, but it can also be an act of physical comedy.
It’s just a shame we’ll never know the name of the Sumerian genius to whom we owe Blazing Saddles. But with the rise of comedy as a commercial art form in the 20th century, and with advances in modern bookkeeping, it’s now much easier to assign credit for innovations in joke-telling, which is exactly what Vulture set out to do with this list of the 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy.Ī few notes on our methodology: We’ve defined “joke” pretty broadly here. Yes, it was a fart joke: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Don’t feel bad if you don’t get it - something was definitely lost in time and translation (you have to imagine it was the Mesopotamian equivalent of “Women be shopping”), but not before the joke helped pave the way for almost 4,000 years of toilet humor. The oldest joke on record, a Sumerian proverb, was first told all the way back in 1900 B.C.