Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…It was so funny. I mean, he just eviscerated everybody. I don’t know if that’s because he felt more latitude because he’s not from this country — he’s British — whatever it is. It seemed different than an American comic would have done. It was different than the way Michelle Wolf tried to do the same thing for their correspondents’ dinner. If I think of the earlier history of comedy, I see a lot of comedy double acts. Laurel and Hardy, George and Gracie, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen— those have mostly vanished. What happened? Is the straight man or woman out of fashion? Is it too slow when you have two people, and we need the higher information density of comedy? I don’t know. Those acts came up not in comedy rooms, as you say. Usually, they’d be part of a bill, sometimes one of them sang, or they would do radio plays, so they had to be able to do a plot. I’m trying to think of reasons why it would be that. We’ve had some comedy duos over the years at the Comedy Cellar. Very few. Some of them were very funny, but they eventually went their separate ways from each other. I think the vehicles that are being used now are just not conducive to a comedy team like they once were.…

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