What is hip?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 2nd, 2008

A question bandied about long before Tower of Power weighed in on the issue. And, quite honestly, a question we’re tired of. It might be said that there has been far too much emphasis placed on hipness over the last half-century. That there are far too many people who are desperate to appear hip, to have their product deemed hip, to be involved in activities that have been blessed with the label. And that all that caring and jockeying and marketing has caused irreparable harm to the culture, pop and otherwise.

Of course, one caveat has it that anyone who is (or appears to be) desperate to appear hip has already forfeited any claim to the status. So, it takes an awful lot of finessing and a mighty amount of acting as if you just don’t care to eventually attain hipness.

But we don’t heed the warnings. We’ll say it now– Standup comedy has always been hip… at least since the middle of the century or so.

While rooting around on the WWW last week, we came across this odd Wikipedia entry, “List of people in Playboy 1960-1969,” which offers a grid that lists all the cover models, the centerfold models, the objects of the many pictorials and, of most interest to us, the interview subjects.

Now, if you’ll grant us that Hugh Hefner and his publication were, for at least the twenty years from 1960 to 1980, arbiters of hip in North America, it is fascinating to note just how many comedians were featured in the coveted main interview slot over the period of ’62 to ’69.

In one 12-month period, from November of 1968 to October of 1969, there were no fewer than four comedy acts profiled. There, amid the chats with Eldridge Cleaver and Ramsey Clark and Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal were Rickles, Mort Sahl, Cosby and Rowan & Martin. And Jackie Gleason, Johnny Carson and Woody Allen also were probed in previous years.

In fact, for the entire first year and change– the first 14 issues– there was no big interview. And who did they quiz in the March 1961 Playboy? Who was the inaugural Big Interview in Playboy? Not a person, but a body of persons, entitled, “Panel on Hip Comics and the New Humor.”

The word “hip” actually appears right there in the title of the panel!

Do we need further proof? No. And, to be honest, standup is still hip (by any definition of the word) and has never ceased being so.

Of course, we don’t care about such things… because caring about such things would make us… unhip.

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