The Sickniks

They joked about father and Freud, about mother and masochism, about sister and sadism. They delightedly told of airline pilots' throwing out a few passengers to lighten the load, of a graduate school for dope addicts, of parents so loving that they always "got upset if anyone else made me cry." They attacked motherhood, childhood, adulthood, sainthood. And in perhaps a dozen nightclubs across the country--from Manhattan's Den to Chicago's Mr. Kelly's to San Francisco's hungry i--audiences paid stiff prices to soak it up. For the "sick" comedians, life's complexion has never looked so green.

Mort Sahl, 32, the original sicknik, now makes $300,000 a year, but still manages to see the worm in the golden apple. Right alongside Sahl in the hierarchy of disease is Jonathan Winters, 33, a roly-poly brainy-zany who has spent most of the past two months as a patient in his favorite subject for humor: the funny farm. While these two once seemed more or less alone in their strange specialty, it is now clear that the virus has spread. Perhaps a dozen other sickniks--some newcomers, some oldtimers with brand-new syndromes--are cleaning up not only in nightclubs but regularly shudder onto the TV screen, and are even invading the record field; Inside Shelley Berman has been near the top of the LP bestseller list for two months, a remarkable feat for a nonmusical disk. And sociologists, both professional and amateur, see in the sick comedians a symptom of the 20th century's own sickness. Says one: "It's like the last days of Rome--all this horror and mayhem in humor."

Close to Horror. What the sickniks dispense is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world. No one's flesh crawled when Jack Benny carried on a running gag about a bear named Carmichael that he kept in the cellar and that had eaten the gasman when he came to read the meter. The novelty and jolt of the sickniks is that their gags ("I hit one of those things in the street--what do you call it, a kid?") come so close to real horror and brutality that audiences wince even as they laugh.

The sicknik mood and method range all the way from the wistful social desperation of Elaine May and Mike Nichols, who are barely sick at all--just an occasional mild symptom--to the usually vicious barrage of Lenny Bruce. Where Elaine and Mike meditate on the problem of a stranded motorist who has lost his last dime, or a boss quietly trying to drink a secretary into submission. Newcomer Bruce, 33, likes to defend Leopold and Loeb: ''Bobby Franks was snotty."

Wars of the World. Perhaps the most successful of the newer sickniks, Bruce somehow recalls the kid in Saroyan's The Time of Your Life who keeps thinking that he is a comedian but succeeds only in spouting his miseries. Although audiences unquestionably laugh at Bruce, much of the time he merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the way of the world (on religious leaders: "They have missed the boat. 'Thou shall no kill.' they say, and then one of them walks comfortingly to the death chamber with Caryl Chessman.''). Some of the material springs from his own checkered life (the son of divorced parents, he ran away from home at twelve). His political routines recall Of Thee I Sing with some venom added, as when Ike says to Sherman Adams: "All right, Sherm, you can level with me, baby. What else did you take? . . . Delaware? How could you do a thing like that!''

In one of his weirder routines, Bruce imagines Evangelist Oral Roberts putting in a long-distance call to the Vatican: "Hello, John, what's shaking, baby? Say, that puff of white smoke was genius. By the way, Billy Graham wants to know if you can get him a deal on those Eyetalian sports cars." Appearing at San Francisco's hungry i last week (at $2,500 a week), Bruce seemed to amuse most of the customers, outraged many, and quickly got into a feud with the San Francisco Chronicle's celebrated columnist Herb Caen, who called Bruce a bore. Lenny retaliated by announcing elaborately during his act that Herb Caen "is not a transvestite, not a Commie, does not tint his hair."

Threatening Sanity. Short of Bruce's extremes are a host of other comedians displaying varying degrees of sickness or satire. Among them: P: Tom Lehrer, 31, onetime Harvard mathematics instructor and still the college boy's delight. Lehrer is that rare amateur who turned professional and who did so successfully; in his last engagement he threatened the sanity of S.R.O. crowds at London's Royal Festival Hall. Sample Lehrer lyric:

I ache for the touch of your lips, dear, But much more for the touch of your

whips, dear. You can raise welts Like nobody else As we dance the masochism tango.

P: Don Adams. 32, who started as a burlesque comedian with a clean act ("They almost murdered me''), jumped into the big time when he won a Godfrey Talent Scouts show in 1954. Since then he has done guest shots with Steve Allen, Garry Moore, is an odd bird among comedians in that he will write material for other comedians. He also seems detached enough to satirize other sick comedians. Adams does a take-off on a sicknik who is telling jokes about a plane crash and suddenly looks out into the audience: "Sitting over there I see Mr. Thompson. He lost his wife and two children in the crash. Stand up and take a bow, Mr. Thompson. Let's give him a nice hand . . . No tears now. Just take your bow and sit down." P: Shelley Berman, 33. is a Chicago-born onetime Arthur Murray dance instructor with a face like a hastily sculpted meatball. More than any of the others, Berman derives his humor from spelunking in his psyche, takes much of his material from his childhood home life ("Have you ever, when you were out playing, had to listen to your mother's voice calling 'Sheldon'?"). Pretending to talk to his sister on the telephone, he will say thoughtfully: "Marge, tell my nephew he's a boy--he doesn't know. Don't wait until he grows up and makes an arbitrary decision."

Comedy of Chaos. The success of the sick comics has given amateur analysts and sociologists a field day. Says Novelist Nelson (The Man with the Golden Arm] Algren: "This is an age of genocide. Falling on a banana peel used to be funny, but now it takes more to shock us. And there is no more fun in the old comedians. People nowadays would rather be hurt than bored." Says Irwin ("Professor'') Corey, who, at 45, is said by fans to have been a sick comedian before some of the others had their first case of measles or mother fixation: "The future seems so precarious, people are willing to abandon themselves to chaos. The new comics reflect this."

But a lot of hardheaded show-business types refuse to accept such apocalyptic views. Says old-style Comic Joey Bishop: "If I hear one more of those guys say to some customer, 'Get out of here, you rat.' I'll scream. Sure I'd like to say it myself, but I wouldn't. Those guys tried their hardest to make it our way; when they couldn't, they switched." Says Comic Joey Adams: "They all act like big nonconformists, but they're all aiming to get on the Ed Sullivan or Steve Allen show."

What is really funny and fresh about the sickniks may be around for a long time, and possibly reinvigorate U.S. humor; what is really sick is bound to evaporate. As veteran Manhattan Nightclub Operator Julius (Upstairs at the Downstairs) Monk puts it: "It's one thing to puncture a balloon; it's quite another thing to send people to the guillotine."

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