11 years into the millennium

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on October 28th, 2011

Entertainment Weekly, whose website has the unfortunate name of EW.com, published a bit of fluff in the guise of a blog post called “Poll: Who’s your favorite stand-up comic of all time?” by Aly Semigran.

As any entertainer will attest, making someone laugh is always harder than making someone cry. It takes an entirely different skill set and taps into an entirely different, and arguably, more complicated psyche….

Then again, having to choose your favorite stand-up comic of all-time might be just as difficult a task.

Some choices are then laid out (tough choices, it says!) and a few clips are offered to get the brain thinking of standup comedy. Then the readers are invited to submit their fave. It’s an attempt to get some of that interactivity going between EW and its readers.

It’s always good to see comics getting their due. Not a harsh word in the entire piece. And the various modes of comedy are actually presented as (possibly) equivalent! And that comedy might be subjective!

It got us to thinking about our “Comic of the Millennium” poll from late 1999 (the first year for SHECKYmagazine.com) We, too, wanted to create some of that sweet interactivity and we got some interesting commentary from our readers. The winners of the poll in order:

  • 1. Richard Pryor
  • 2. George Carlin
  • 3. Lenny Bruce
  • 4. Bill Cosby
  • 5. Henny Youngman
  • 6. Jerry Seinfeld
  • 7. Milton Berle
  • 8. Steven Wright
  • 9. George Burns
  • 10. Shecky Greene

Fascinating.

We also ran some reader comments in which folks nominated such comics as Sam Kinison, Woody Allen, Chris Rock and Lord Buckley. We even received a lengthy argument for Mark Twain as COTM, from none other than A. Whitney Brown (who also nominated Shakespeare and Herodotus)!

We got to thinking about who would make the list if we were to conduct a similar poll in 2011, 12 years later. And we theorize that at least half of 1999’s top ten wouldn’t make it onto the 2011 list. We can’t imagine that our present-day readers– far greater in number than we had back then– would vote in such a way as to place Berle, Youngman, Burns or, sadly, Shecky Greene in the top ten. Indeed, they might even leave out Wright or Seinfeld.

This isn’t so much indicative of a change in the size of our readership or demographics as much as it is indicative of a vast change in the standup landscape over the past decade-plus. In a relatively short time, the standup business has matured and mushroomed and given birth to a couple dozen comedy “stars” that seem to have captured the fancy of a significant numbers of fans and comedians.

Or we could be completely wrong.

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