When the first version of Strike Up the Band closed in Philadelphia in less than a week, its author George S. Kaufman famously quipped, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”  But what is satire, anyway? Join host John McWhorter and celebrated New Yorker cartoonist and editor Bob Mankoff as they trace the arc of satire from Aristophanes to Jon Stewart, and ponder its eternal attempt to rid us of our (equally eternal) human foibles. 

Also discussed:

• vaudeville, and other important stops on the comic development train.

• are the Marx Brothers still funny?

• humor is its own reason for existence, like music.

• when did “sense of humor” become a thing?

• John does a mean Mrs. Draper!

ARTIST BIOS

JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, and has written a weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

 BOB MANKOFF has been the driving force of comedy and satire at some of the most honored publications in America, including Esquire and The New Yorker, where he was Cartoon Editor for 20 years. He has devoted his life to discovering just what makes us laugh. He founded Cartoon Collections, parent company to CartoonStock.com, a new spin on the Cartoon Bank, the world’s most successful cartoon licensing platform that he founded in 1992. His life at the magazine was the focus of the 2015 HBO documentary Very Semi-Serious. Mankoff is currently the cartoon editor at the weekly online newsletter Air Mail.  bobmankoff.com

SHOW NOTES/REFERENCES

• Buy tickets to MasterVoices' Strike Up the Band at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday October 29, 2024 
• What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic by Henry Jenkins
• Video footage of George Gershwin in rehearsal for Strike Up the Band, bantering with vaudeville comedians Clark and McCullough.
• Library of America’s Kaufman & Co.
• By George: A Kaufman Collection

The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (previously The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.

Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.