The comedians of the1950s and 1960s were a totally different breed of relevant,revolutionary performer from any that came before or after, comics whosehumor did much more than pry guffaws out of audiences. Gerald Nachmanpresents the stories of the groundbreaking comedy stars of those years,each one a cultural harbinger:• Mort Sahl, of a new political cynicism• Lenny Bruce, of the sexual, drug, and language revolution• Dick Gregory, of racial unrest• Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge, of racial harmony• Phyllis Diller, of housewifely complaint• Mike Nichols & Elaine May and Woody Allen, of self-analytical angst and a rearrangement of male-female relations•Stan Freberg and Bob Newhart, of encroaching, pervasive pop mediamanipulation and, in the case of Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding, of thebanalities of broadcasting• Mel Brooks, of the Yiddishization of American comedy• Sid Caesar, of a new awareness of the satirical possibilities of television• Joan Rivers, of the obsessive craving for celebrity gossip and of a latent bitchy sensibility•Tom Lehrer, of the inane, hypocritical, mawkishly sentimental nature ofhallowed American folkways and, in the case of the Smothers Brothers,of overly revered folk songs and folklore• Steve Allen, of the late-night talk show as a force in American comedy•David Frye and Vaughn Meader, of the merger of showbiz and politicsand, along with Will Jordan, of stretching the boundaries of mimicry• Shelley Berman, of a generation of obsessively self-confessional humor•Jonathan Winters and Jean Shepherd, of the daring new free-formimprovisational comedy and of a sardonically updated view of Midwesternarchetypes• Ernie Kovacs, of surreal visual effects and the unbounded vistas of video