The oldest joke on record, a Sumerian proverb, was first told all the way back in 1900 B.C. Yes, it was a fart joke: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Don’t feel bad if you don’t get it — something was definitely lost in time and translation (you have to imagine it was the Mesopotamian equivalent of “Women be shopping”), but not before the joke helped pave the way for almost 4,000 years of toilet humor. It’s just a shame we’ll never know the name of the Sumerian genius to whom we owe Blazing Saddles. But with the rise of comedy as a commercial art form in the 20th century, and with advances in modern bookkeeping, it’s now much easier to assign credit for innovations in joke-telling, which is exactly what Vulture set out to do with this list of the 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy.

A few notes on our methodology: We’ve defined “joke” pretty broadly here. Yes, a joke can be a one-liner built from a setup and a punch line, but it can also be an act of physical comedy. Pretending to stick a needle in your eye, or pooping in the street while wearing a wedding dress: both jokes. A joke, as defined by this list, is a discrete moment of comedy, whether from stand-up, a sketch, an album, a movie, or a TV show.

For clarity’s sake, we’ve established certain ground rules for inclusion. First, we decided early on that these jokes needed to be performed and recorded at some point. Second, with apologies to Monty Python, whose influence on contemporary comedy is tremendous and undeniable, we focused only on American humor. Third, we only included one joke per comedian. And fourth, the list doesn’t include comedy that we ultimately felt was bad, harmful, or retrograde.

The list was put together by Vulture senior editor Jesse David Fox; New York senior editor Christopher Bonanos; comedians Wayne Federman, Phoebe Robinson, Halle Kiefer, and Rebecca O’Neal; comedy historians Yael Kohen (author of We Killed) and Kliph Nesteroff (author of The Comedians); and journalists Elise Czajkowski, Matthew Love, Katla McGlynn, Ramsey Ess, Dan Reilly, Jenny Jaffe, Lucas Kavner, and The Guardian’s Dave Schilling. (Fox, Bonanos, Keifer, O’Neal, Czajkowski, Love, McGlynn, Ess, Reilly, Jaffe, Kavner, and Schilling wrote the blurbs.)

Without further ado, here are the 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy. They are listed below in chronological order, complete with video or audio. Use the timeline slider to jump to different eras or specific comedians.

1906 2015 1930 1950 1970 1990 1906 Bert Williams, Alex Rogers, “Nobody” 1913 George L. Thompson, Monroe Silver, Joe Hayman, “Cohen on the Telephone” 1925 Charlie Chaplin, The Gold Rush 1927 Buster Keaton, The General 1929 Burns and Allen, “Lambchops” 1931 Will Rogers, “Bacon, Beans and Limousines” 1932 Laurel and Hardy, Hal Roach, James Parrott, H. M. Walker, The Music Box 1933 The Marx Brothers, Leo McCarey, Duck Soup Mae West, I’m No Angel 1934 Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Frank Capra, Robert Riskin, It Happened One Night 1936 Fred Allen, Jack Benny, The Feud c. 1937 Henny Youngman, ‘Take My Wife … Please.’ 1938 Abbott & Costello, Who’s on First 1941 W.C. Fields, Edward F. Cline, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break 1948 Jack Benny, The Jack Benny Program Milton Berle, Texaco Star Theatre c. 1950 Jean Carroll on Her Husband’s Pride Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance, I Love Lucy 1952 Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Your Show of Shows 1953 Mort Sahl, Joe McCarthy Jacket c. 1956 Redd Foxx, Laff of the Party 1957 Chuck Jones, Michael Maltese, Mel Blanc, Arthur Q. Bryan, Looney Tunes 1959 Billy Wilder, Joe E. Brown, Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot Nichols and May, Improvisations to Music 1960 Bob Newhart, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart 1961 Dick Gregory, In Living Black & White Lenny Bruce, American 1962 Vaughn Meader, The First Family c. 1963 Steve Allen, The Steve Allen Show 1964 Stanley Kubrick, Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Jonathan Winters, The Tonight Show c. 1964 Moms Mabley, The Hip Cucko 1965 Tom Lehrer, The Vatican Rag Johnny Carson, Ed Ames, The Tonight Show 1967 Don Rickles, The Dean Martin Show 1968 Bob Hope, the Academy Awards Mel Brooks, The Producers 1969 Phyllis Diller, The Ed Sullivan Show 1970 Mary Tyler Moore, Ed Asner, James L. Brooks, Allan Burns, The Mary Tyler Moore Show 1971 Lily Tomlin, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In Cheech and Chong, Cheech & Chong David Brenner, The Tonight Show c. 1972 Rodney Dangerfield, ‘I Get No Respect.’ 1972 Norman Lear, Carroll O'Connor, Sammy Davis Jr., Bill Dana, All in the Family 1973 Albert Brooks, Comedy Minus One 1975 Paul Mooney, Chevy Chase, Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live 1976 Michael O’Donoghue, Saturday Night Live Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence, The Carol Burnett Show Elayne Boosler on Male Sexual Hypocrisy 1977 Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall George Carlin, George Carlin at USC Steve Martin, Let's Get Small 1979 Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert 1980 Leslie Nielsen, Robert Hays, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Airplane! Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Brian Doyle-Murray, Douglas Kenney, Caddyshack 1982 Robin Williams, An Evening With Robin Williams 1983 Bill Cosby, Himself Andy Kaufman, David Letterman, Late Night With David Letterman 1984 Christopher Guest, Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, This Is Spinal Tap 1985 Steven Wright, I Have a Pony Whoopi Goldberg, Direct From Broadway 1986 Joan Rivers, Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show 1988 Roseanne Barr, John Goodman, Roseanne Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, John Landis, Clint Smith, Coming to America 1989 Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal, Nora Ephron, Rob Reiner, Estelle Reiner, When Harry Met Sally... 1990 Paula Poundstone, Cats, Cops and Stuff Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, Sam Simon, Jay Kogen, Wallace Wolodarsky, Dan Castellaneta, The Simpsons 1992 Kim Wayans, In Living Color Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Larry David, Seinfeld Bernie Mac, Def Comedy Jam 1993 Jeff Foxworthy, You Might Be a Redneck If ... Bill Hicks, Revelations 1994 Jim Carrey,Tom Shadyac, Jack Bernstein, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective Margaret Cho, HBO Comedy Half-Hour 1995 Janeane Garofalo, HBO Comedy Half-Hour Chris Tucker, Ice Cube, F. Gary Gray, DJ Pooh, Friday 1996 Chris Rock, Bring the Pain 1998 Garry Shandling, David Duchovny, The Larry Sanders Show David Cross, Bob Odenkirk, Jay Johnston, Jill Talley, Mr. Show With Bob and David Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Darren Star, Michael Patrick King, Sex and the City The Farrelly Brothers, Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, There's Something About Mary 2001 Gilbert Gottfried, The Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner 2002 Dave Willis, Matt Maiellaro, Aqua Teen Hunger Force 2003 Dave Chappelle, Neal Brennan, Chappelle's Show Jon Stewart, The Daily Show 2004 Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy 2005 Steve Carell, Judd Apatow, Miki Mia, Seth Rogen, Romany Malco, and Paul Rudd, The 40-Year-Old Virgin Sarah Silverman, Jesus Is Magic Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, Chris Parnell, Saturday Night Live 2006 Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents’ Dinner 2007 Louis C.K., Shameless 2010 Marc Maron, Robin Williams, “WTF” 2011 Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Jessica St. Clair, Ellie Kemper, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Annie Mumolo, Paul Feig, Judd Apatow, Bridesmaids 2012 Lena Dunham, Girls Tig Notaro, Live 2013 Maria Bamford, Ask Me About My New God! Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, the 70th Golden Globe Awards 2014 Hannibal Buress on Bill Cosby 2015 Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, The Tonight Show Amy Schumer, Jessi Klein, Daniel Powell, Ryan McFaul, Inside Amy Schumer

1906

NobodyBert

Williams, Alex Rogers

“ I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody /

I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time /

And until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime /

I’ll never do nothin’

for nobody, no time”Bert Williams was the most popular black comedic performer in America at the turn of the 20th century. But his celebrity grew tremendously when he put the songs from his stage show Abyssinia to disc and cylinder. That record included the piece he was best known for, “Nobody.” It’s an upbeat tune whose buoyant arrangement runs perpendicular to its melancholy message of isolation and disappointment, a device that’s since become ubiquitous. The idea at the center of “Nobody” — laughing at the self-deprecation of an unfortunate schlemiel — was what fueled its tremendous success. And having a black man as the song’s tragic protagonist added to its novelty and ultimate comedic longevity, spawning a comic genre where vulnerability and ennui weren’t taboo, but welcome subjects. Released at a time when cylinder recordings were at their apex, Williams became widely known for the song, and he was forced to sing it at essentially every appearance he made, for the rest of his life.

1913

Cohen on the TelephoneGeorge L. Thompson, Monroe Silver, Joe Hayman

“Are you dere? Last night de vind came unt blew down de shutter outside mine house, and I vant you to send a car-pen-ter — a carp. Oh, never mind, I'll have it fixed myself.”

.

Though it began as a stage routine, “Cohen on the Telephone” is noteworthy for embracing two emerging technologies: the telephone and the phonograph. Developed in England by Joe Hayman, the definitive Jewish vaudeville monologue became bigger than any one comedian as it grew into a sensation stateside when American comedians like Barney Bernard, George L. Thompson, and most notably Monroe Silver took on the character of Cohen and recorded covers of the routine. Built on a classic misunderstanding-an-accent premise, it popularized the comedic device of hearing one half of a phone conversation. It was an undeniable influence on comedy legends Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart.

1925

Dinner Roll DanceCharlie Chaplin, The Gold Rush

When The Gold Rush debuted in theaters, Charlie Chaplin was already the biggest star in pictures, but this film, which Variety called “the greatest and most elaborate comedy ever filmed,” cemented his place in the industry. Legend has it that this sequence, in which Chaplin’s character dreams about entertaining Georgia, the dance-hall girl, with a couple of forks and dinner rolls charmed audiences so much that in some cases they shut down the screening and made the projectionist respool the film so they could watch it again. This bit was something different for comedy at the time. It wasn’t just another cheap laugh; it showed that you could create a hilarious sequence that also propelled the plot forward. Because this scene was so joyful, it makes reality all the more depressing when the Tramp gets stood up for his dinner date. By being among the first on the silver screen to add a little tragedy to his comedy, Chaplin raised the bar for the art of jokes.

1927

Buster Keaton and the TrainBuster Keaton, The General [As he sits on the front of a train, Johnnie Gray spots a railroad tie on the tracks in front of him; he grabs another railroad tie and, with perfect timing, clonks one into the other, causing one to flip out of the way and the other to fall aside.]

Athletic is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot when talking about silent films, but Keaton’s really deserve it: He was highly agile, performing all his physical stunts — many of them genuinely dangerous — without cuts, often in one take. The resultant films are true action comedies, precursors to The Blues Brothers or the movies of Jackie Chan. They are also, partly because of his filmmaking ambition and partly because he was successful enough to justify decent budgets, simply bigger and better-looking than most silent films. Whereas Chaplin made intimate poetic miniatures that are admirable but can sometimes cloy, Keaton made broad, bright murals that do not require much adjustment of your mind-set. The General still works as a movie comedy, and it’s going on 90 years old.

1929

Lambchops

Burns and Allen

Burns: Do you like to love?Allen: No.Burns: Like to kiss?Allen: No.Burns: What do you like?Allen: Lamb chops.Burns: Lamb chops. Could you eat two big lamb chops alone?Allen: Alone? Oh, no, not alone. With potatoes I could.

Many early-20th-century vaudeville stars left the stage to help power the burgeoning media of radio and TV, but few were bigger or brighter than George Burns and Gracie Allen. Their signature routine, “Lampchops,” carries with it the true vaudevillian spirit in that it joyfully delivers a little bit of everything: Wit, wordplay, bits of physical business, and a diverting ditty about love, complete with soft shoe. In this eight-minute version recorded as a Vitaphone short, the savvy and dryly sarcastic Burns sidles up to the guileless Allen, who floats on her own cloud while defending her smarts and the reason why she’s more than one woman (“My mother has a picture of me when I was 2”). In addition to encapsulating the duo’s deceptively easy chemistry, “Lambchops” makes abundantly clear why the plucky Allen was a yardstick by which future “dizzy” dames — e.g. Chrissy from Three’s Company or Phoebe from Friends — would be measured.

1931

Bacon, Beans, and Limousines

Will Rogers

“Well, because ’32 is an election year, see, and the Republicans always see that everything looks good on election year, see? They give us three good years and one bad one — no, three bad ones and one good one.”

When Jon Stewart was hosting The Daily Show, there were many times when you could feel Stewart was truly bothered by the social injustice or the bonehead media figure he was talking about, and even though Stewart was speaking from the heart, he could still make you laugh. That was what Will Rogers pioneered in the 1930s. With a down-home, backwoods charm, Rogers became a national figure by discussing the government and his humorous, logical approach to what was wrong with it. In the midst of the Great Depression, Hoover introduced a plan designed to encourage local groups to help with unemployment, and he asked Rogers to appear on the radio to help promote this plan. What he got were these jokes. Every generation needs a Colbert to present the truth in an entertaining way, and Will Rogers was one of the first we had.

1932

Laurel and Hardy vs. a Piano

Laurel and Hardy, Hal Roach, James Parrott, H. M. Walker, The Music Box

Ollie: That’s the house up there. Right on top of the stoop.

Laurel and Hardy are hired to deliver a piano to a house in Los Angeles, and discover on their arrival that the door is at the top of a very steep, very narrow flight of steps. That’s it. The bare-bones premise allows it to become a pure physical-comedy experiment: How many possible variations can they ring on “Piano goes partway up; piano goes back down”? It’s like a Bach fugue, with a theme and variations and then variations on the variations, although Bach’s keyboard ended up in better shape than this battered instrument does.

1933

We’re Going to War

The Marx Brothers, Leo McCarey, Duck Soup

“They got guns /

We got guns /

All God’s chillun got guns”

There are a lot of different ways to express how you’re feeling about the state of the world. The Marx Brothers used insanity. In Duck Soup, Groucho is appointed the leader of the small country of Freedonia, but when the neighboring country of Sylvania attempts to annex it, Freedonia goes to war. The final ten minutes of the movie begin with the song “The Country’s Going to War,” in which the people of Freedonia excitedly sing about the coming conflict, but it slowly devolves into a minstrel show in which the brothers sing “All God’s Chillun Got Guns.” The final battle is a rapid-fire attack of jokes, similar to the Tommy gun Groucho uses to accidentally shoot his own soldiers. This section of Duck Soup appears briefly in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, when Allen’s character, in the midst of an existential crisis, has an epiphany that, rather than trying to understand everything about life, we should just enjoy it. The Marx Brothers may not have been able to do anything about the coming war, but they certainly gave us something to laugh about.

‘When I’m Good I’m Very Good … But When I’m Bad, I’m Better’

Mae West, I'm No Angel

It’s almost a crime to pick just one of Mae West’s brilliant, bawdy quips, but it’s hard to say there’s a joke that more perfectly sums up West’s pithy, punchy power quite so well. A playwright who was once arrested for her risqué material, West wrote her best lines herself, including this one, from her hit film I’m No Angel, which provoked such shock and outrage with audiences that it helped contribute to the institution of the restrictive Hays Code in Hollywood. Before that, she was an early subject of FCC censorship. She was also an early advocate of LGBT rights and sexual freedom, and in the 1930s she reportedly bought the upscale apartment building she was living in to force it to desegregate. At once a renegade, a box-office sensation, and an unlikely sex symbol, she reshaped the very rules of comedy. When she was good she was very good, but when she was bad, she was an absolute badass.

1934

Lessons in Hitchhiking

Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Frank Capra, Robert Riskin, It Happened One Night

Ellie: I’ll stop a car and I won’t use my thumb.

Peter: What are you going to do?

Ellie: A system all my own …

One of the earliest examples of the Depression-era screwball comedy, Frank Capra’s charming road-trip film created an enduring template for escapist romantic fictions featuring temperamentally mismatched leads, with a touch of slapstick humor and motormouthed banter worth reciting. Gable’s cocky newspaperman Peter Warne finds a story and a love interest in Colbert’s Ellie Andrews, a headstrong heiress on the run from the iron fist of her rich father. The film’s signature bit is a visual gag in which Peter teaches Ellie how to hitchhike; after a half-dozen cars zoom by in rapid succession, Ellie steps up, hikes up her skirt to reveal a little leg, and the next driver immediately skids to a halt. The tactic betters Ellie’s chauvinistic counterpart, and firms up the ideal of the sassy, brassy woman whose sex appeal is a tool subservient to the machinations of her clever mind. In the context of this modern Taming of the Shrew, the smart, sexy sensibility of this bit influenced a host of other lightly bawdy screwballs, and has been handed down to argumentative would-be paramours, from Moonlighting’s David and Maddie to Archer and Lana from Archer.

1936

The Feud

Fred Allen, Jack Benny

Allen: A certain alleged violinist should hold his head in shame.

This was the joke, which Fred Allen quipped in response to a child violinist who performed on his show, that was the start of the legendary “feud” between Allen and Jack Benny. Creating a fake rivalry to get attention was nothing new when the wry, clever Allen started taking shots at his longtime friend Benny on the air, but their commitment to the gag was. The two volleyed insults back-and-forth on their shows and made occasional appearances on each other’s programs, they ran a “Why I Can’t Stand Jack Benny” contest, and a three-round boxing match between Allen and Benny was advertised (though it would never come to fruition). The pair kept the sideshow going for a decade. This blurring of the line between what is reality and what is comedy would happen again and again thereafter, with great moments such as Andy Kaufman’s foray into wrestling, various comedians’ presidential runs, and, to some extent, the comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen. Allen never made the leap to television, which, sadly, leaves him in the shadows of that era’s comedic greats, but when it came to smart comedy that rewarded the audience for paying attention, nobody did it better than Fred Allen.

C. 1937

‘Take My Wife … Please.’

Henny Youngman

It’s hard to say with authority exactly who invented the one-liner, but Borscht Belt comedian Henny Youngman (the man Walter Winchell called “the King of the One-Liners”) is arguably responsible for the most famous one ever. Just like how Groucho’s moustache, eyebrows, nose, and glasses became synonymous with “comedian,” “Take my wife … please” is the Platonic ideal of a joke. The format is one that is still mimicked to this day: using a familiar phrase to draw people in, then taking a sharp left turn. And though the joke is seen as shticky and hacky at this point, structurally it is deceptively elegant, as the setup is hiding inside what seems like a transition. Despite writing tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of jokes in his life, legend has it that Youngman’s most famous one was the result of an accident. When he first started working on the The Kate Smith Show, Youngman’s beloved wife, Sadie, brought a bunch of her friends backstage with her. Annoyed, Youngman brought his wife to the stagehand and said, “Take my wife, please.” The rest is history.

1938

Who’s on First

Abbott & Costello

Abbott: Who is on first.

Costello: I’m asking you who’s on first.

Abbott: That’s the man’s name

.Costello: That’s who’s name?

Abbott: Yes.

No single sketch has imprinted itself on the American psyche in the last century more acutely than “Who’s on First.” This impeccably structured scene of baseball monikers and prickly pronouns was both the germ of Abbott and Costello’s incredible career and its crown jewel. The sketch itself endures for a number of reasons: Its simple premise delivering myriad laugh lines, the clear schlemiel-schlimazel dynamic between performers, the room it provides for embellishment, and the rat-a-tat delivery make it feel like a ramshackle Ford Model T gathering speed as it barrels toward the edge of a cliff. As the calm and collected Abbott painstakingly explains his baseball team’s lineup — “Who’s on first, What’s on second, I-Don’t-Know’s on third” — Costello tumbles headlong into a misunderstanding made funnier by his infuriated and impotent yaps. Loving tributes to Abbott and Costello’s rhythms and antagonistic banter can be found in countless buddy movies, as well as current projects by fans such as Quentin Tarantino and Jerry Seinfeld. The sketch’s history also tells us something about the American relationship with ownership of comedic material; while the act was drawn from similar vaudeville acts of the day, Abbott and Costello copyrighted “Who’s on First” in 1944.

1941

W.C. Fields in Love

W.C. Fields, Edward F. Cline, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

Fields: I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. That's the one thing I’m so indebted to her for.

The portly, hard-drinking comic spoke that line in his last starring role in a career marred by alcoholism. Off-screen problems aside, Fields found a way to make audiences laugh at and root for a character who hated children as much as he loved liquor and thumbing his red nose at societal norms. Generations later, we’d get Archie Bunker, Larry David, and dozens of other semi-lovable misanthropes, all indebted to Fields.

1948

‘Your Money or Your Life …’

Jack Benny, The Jack Benny Program

Criminal: Your money or your life …Benny: [Pause.]Criminal: Look, bud. I said your money or your life.Benny: I’m thinking it over

This joke is reputed to have had the longest sustained laughs in radio history. Though that might be an exaggeration, what it did do was create the perfect joke to represent the medium’s biggest comedic star. Jack Benny had a lot of recurring jokes associated with his character: no matter how old he got, he always insisted he was 39; he was terrible at the violin; and he was very cheap. So when Benny’s character is walking home and is given the ultimatum “Your money or your life,” the studio audience is already dying when Jack takes a pause. When Benny finally says, “I’m thinking it over,” the audience explodes. It’s a joke that can only be told by this character, when the audience is already anticipating how he’d react. This is the hard-to-write type of joke that long-running series like The Simpsons or recurring characters on Saturday Night Live need to constantly invent in order to surprise the audience. A joke that is perfect for the character, but is still surprising to an audience — nobody nailed it like Benny.

Milton Berle in Drag

Milton Berle, Texaco Star Theatre

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, introducing America’s No. 1 television star, your June bride, Mildred Berle ...”

It was 1948, a year into commercial-television broadcasting, and literally nobody had figured out what TV comedy would or could be. Berle had worked a million stages, starting in vaudeville, and had a clue: The ten-inch, black-and-white screen meant that almost nothing could overwhelm, and the broader the performance the better. Unsubtle shtick, ridiculous costumes, patter, a frantic, frenetic pace — it all turned out to be right for the smudgy image on a ten-inch, black-and-white screen. Within a few years, TV grew slightly more sophisticated (and screens got bigger), and Berle’s career started to run out of gas, but you can still spot his comedic DNA in any club where a comic is capably humiliating a heckler in the back of the room.

C. 1950

Jean Carroll on Her Husband’s Pride

Jean Carroll

“I’ll never forget the first time I saw him, standing up on a hill, his hair blowing in the breeze — and he too proud to run and get it.”

While there were other female comedy performers — in TV and movies, or as a part of double acts — Jean Carroll was the first to break through by standing alone onstage. Though called the “female Milton Berle” and the “female Bob Hope” (she had to be compared to men, because there were no female comedians to compare her to), you watch her stand-up now and you see a style uniquely her own. Her rapid-fire delivery that sneaks in punch lines as she blitzes her way through a monologue, like in the joke above, feels arrestingly contemporary, and might remind you of Amy Schumer or the way Jim Gaffigan delivers his punch lines in falsetto under his breath. She moved so quickly and was so ahead of her time, she literally tells the audience to catch up. Ed Sullivan got it, though, asking her to appear on the show over 20 times. Watching those appearances was a young Lily Tomlin, who dressed up like Carroll as a kid.

1952

A Streetcar Named???

Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Your Show of Shows

Blanche: Well, when I left the plantation, I went to New Orleans. And there I met a very wealthy gentleman who wants to marry me … [Stanley eats chicken as she continues to speak.]

Sid Caesar’s first TV show was so successful that its sponsor couldn’t produce enough to meet audience demand and had to cancel the show. His second show was so popular that it was cancelled so the network could break it into two different shows. Milton Berle figured out how to do comedy on TV; Sid Caesar perfected it. Your Show of Shows was basically SNL before there was SNL: A guest host would perform sketches with Sid, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and the rest of the players, and a song or two would be performed. There had been parodies on television before YSoS, but this program was among the first to write parodies that capitalized on the specific strengths of its performers. Watch how in “A Streetcar Named” Sid, one of the greatest physical comedians who has ever lived, is given a number of physical jokes to perform, which don’t necessarily have anything to do with the original film. Yet he is able to boil down all of Marlon Brando’s legendary performance into 30 seconds of eating sloppily. Without Sid, there’s probably no Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carol Burnett, Mad magazine, or SNL.

Chocolate Conveyor Belt

Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance, I Love Lucy

Lucy: Here she comes. [Lucy stuffs chocolates in her mouth, hat, and down her shirt. Puts hat on her head.]

As if being arguably the greatest American sitcom star of the 20th century weren’t an impressive enough achievement, Lucille Ball also broke huge barriers both on and off-screen. She was the first woman to run her own production company, the reason CBS changed its mind about allowing multiethnic couples on television, and quite possibly the only reason Star Trek exists (no, seriously). Though I Love Lucy may seem almost obscenely wholesome now, at the time, story lines like that of “Job Switching” — Lucy and Ethel get jobs while Ricky and Fred act as their housewives — were pretty envelope-pushing, not to mention the fact that it pioneered the three-camera, live audience setup, without which we wouldn’t have Cheers or Seinfeld or Friends or The Big Bang Theory. But what Lucille Ball (and Vivian Vance as Ethel) did in scenes like the forever-parodied chocolate-conveyer-belt scene was pave the way for generations of comedians to be unabashedly funny, fearless, and no-holds-barred silly, all while writing their own rules.

1953

Joe McCarthy Jacket

Mort Sahl

“Have you seen the Joe McCarthy jacket? It's like an Eisenhower jacket, only it's got an extra flap that fits over the mouth.”

In 1950s San Francisco, when audiences expected performers to grace the stage in jacket and tie, Mort Sahl shuffled into the spotlight in a disarming bright-red sweater and freshly pressed khakis, ever-present newspaper in hand. He was often mistaken for a student at the trendy hungry i club, and that unassuming appearance came in handy, as his biting topical humor was known to split the room. No topic was off-limits, no target was taboo, not even the communist witch hunts of McCarthy-era America. But Sahl made it palatable by speaking to his audiences in their own language, with unprecedented conversationalism and intellectualism. In the joke that helped him develop a cult following, for example, he invoked the then-popular Eisenhower jacket, in an accessible metaphor about oppressive government fear-mongering. Before The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, there was Mort Sahl, who besides being a tremendous influence on Woody Allen, was the progenitor of the challenging political comedy we know today.

C. 1956

Pickpockets vs. Peeping Toms

Redd Foxx, Laff of the Party

“What’s the difference between a pickpocket and peeping tom? A pickpocket snatches watches.”

The incredibly prolific “King of the Party Records” was a revolutionary figure in his day, trading in bawdy one-liners and long-winded yarns that transfixed black clubs on the Chitlin’ Circuit, as well as white crowds on the Vegas strip. Before he starred in Sanford and Son, Foxx found his voice telling the sort of off-color jokes one might expect from a tipsy uncle letting loose after Thanksgiving dinner; audiences in early recordings of his multivolume Laff of the Party albums laugh with such unbridled enthusiasm, it’s easy to make out the kind of release he provided to otherwise polite ’50s audiences. The pickpocket joke is certainly just one of thousands Foxx had in his pocket, but it represents two things he loved most in a joke: wordplay and sex. Foxx’s taboo-busting frank talk earned him many admirers, though his most obvious descendants are cheerfully filthy storytellers such as Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.

1957

‘What’s Opera, Doc?’

Chuck Jones, Michael Maltese, Mel Blanc, Arthur Q. Bryan, Looney Tunes

Elmer Fudd [to the tune of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”]: “Kill the Wabbit”

There’s a reason that, in 1994, 1,000 animation professionals named Chuck Jones’s masterpiece “What’s Opera, Doc?” the greatest cartoon of all time. It’s astounding how much story and comedy they cover in such a short time. Parodying Richard Wagner’s operas (not to mention Disney’s Fantasia and arguably Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd’s whole thing), it essentially tells all of “Ring Cycle” in less than seven minutes. Its density influenced, and will continue to influence, all cartoons that came after it.

What’s Opera Doc by MistyIsland1

1959

‘Nobody’s Perfect.’

Billy Wilder, Joe E. Brown, Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot

Jerry: I’m a man!

Osgood: Well, nobody’s perfect.

Two jazz musicians accidentally witness a gang murder and go on the run, disguised as women. The plot seems pretty innocuous today, but in the 1950s the Hays Code required films to be “moral” and “wholesome,” so Some LIke it Hot, with it’s cross-dressing and hints at homosexuality had to be made without the approval of the Motion Picture Production Code. Banned in Kansas and condemned by the Vatican, the film’s last line is just perfection, sharply capping off 120 minutes of subversive zaniness while at the same time subtly hinting at the idea that people should love whomever they want to love. The joke is hilarious yet oddly touching, subversive yet romantic, all while essentially summarizing the whole movie; it’s no surprise that the film tops almost every list of best comedy films of all time.

Bach to Bach

Nichols and May, Improvisations to Music

May: Too many people think of Adler as a man who made mice neurotic. He was more, much more.

Nichols: Much more.

May: Much more.

Nichols: Much more ... Can you move over a little? I’m falling off the bed.

May: I'm sorry.

Nichols: A great deal more.

hough An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May was the duo’s biggest critical and commercial hit, it’s even easier to see how revolutionary they were with their rawer debut, Improvisations to Music. There is just so much in this joke. There is the natural banter and subtle heightening of improvised dialogue; the duo met earlier in the decade as members of the Compass Players, the seminal improv group that also included Alan Alda, Ed Asner, Shelley Berman, and Del Close, whose members, in the same year as this record came out, founded the Second City. Beyond that, the joke is remarkable for how well it captured how mid-century, high-brow people talked. Nichols and May affectionately parodied beat trends and intellectual pretensions, in which pillow talk becomes a game of who-can-drop-the-impressively-most-obscure-literary-reference. (Their back-and-forth sounds like an Annie Hall outtake, and it came out 18 years prior.) After Nichols and May, and some of their peers, comedy would no longer be primarily defined by a man in a tuxedo telling jokes in a nightclub. Still, what’s most enjoyable about the piece is hearing Nichols and May enjoy each other: They were their own audience and above all they made each other laugh. It’s an influence you still see today, as comedy has become more insular, reliant on increasingly obscure references. The idea of making comedy for yourself, your friends, and people who think and experience the world the way you do was uncommon before Nichols and May, and fundamental to comedy after.

1960

Driving Instructor

Bob Newhart, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart

“Turn right here? [Pause.] Well, now that was my fault again. You see I meant the next street. Not this man’s lawn.”

In the age of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, of social satire and the “subversive” comic, it was a wonder that a former accountant who looked like your dad’s best friend could put out best-selling comedy albums and become his own unique comedy institution. Bob Newhart always sounded like he was making up his act as he went along, which not only made him relatable, but exciting. In “The Driving Instructor,” his signature style is on display: a one-sided monologue in which you only hear the instructor’s befuddled responses, rather than the more unhinged student driver on the other side. Most of his bits followed this sort of “straight person, crazy person” structure, and this one is no exception. You also get a good sense of his expert timing; not many people could live inside a befuddled pause like Bob Newhart, and he went on to become one of the most-beloved comics of all time, influencing every understated comic who came after.

1961

Dick Gregory on Segregated Restaurants

Dick Gregory, In Living Black & White

“I walked into a restaurant, which was the wrong restaurant, in Mississippi … I sit down, the blonde waitress walked over to me and I said, ‘I’d like two cheeseburgers.’ She said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here,’ and I said, ‘I don’t eat colored people nowhere!’”

There’s a head-scratcher at the center of comic Dick Gregory’s career: Is he a comedian drawn to politics or the nation’s funniest politician? Early in his career, it was much more clear which side of the fence he was on. After getting out of the military, Gregory told jokes in black and white rooms, got a leg up from admirer Hugh Hefner, and worked on TV appearances to provoke thought and motivate action through comedy. Though his early shows had punchy one-liners about everything from space travel to drinking booze, his clear-eyed look at black life in the segregated South will be his legacy. This restaurant joke was one of the first to undercut segregation and discrimination in a public setting with bold intelligence and humility. Whether he had it in mind to deliver a spoonful of sugar to help audiences take the medicine or simply channeled anger into laughs, it’s hard to say, but seminal jokes like the one above never betray a hint of bitterness. This contemporary of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, who still performs occasionally at the age of 84, has touched thinkers irascible, e.g. Paul Mooney, and genial, e.g. Bill Maher.

How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties

Lenny Bruce, American

“Uh, did you have anything to eat yet? I don't know if there’s any watermelon left, fried chicken or dice or razors. We’ll see if we can fix you up with something.”

The idea of white guilt as a punch line feels like nothing new today, when publicly calling out people and organizations for racial microaggressions using the most up-to-date social-justice buzzwords is a viable path to online celebrity. But in 1961, when ally status wasn’t assumed or expected, Lenny Bruce’s “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties” boldly indicted and lampooned his target audience, and said something important and new. The speaker in this bit clearly has the best intentions, yet still manages to speak almost exclusively in stereotypes or compliments steeped in unconfirmed generalizations. For example, in the above joke, he pokes fun not at the malicious racists, but the ignorant who mean well. It’s a line in the sand no one before Bruce had drawn. The joke also captures the fearlessness of Bruce’s comedy, unafraid to offend or paint himself as a villain for the sake of mocking injustice (see also: this bit). Though his comedy is of-a-time, this is ultimately why he continues to be held in such high regard. It’s not hard to see his influence in George Carlin, Bill Hicks, and all political comedians of the last half-century.

1962

The Kennedy Impression

Vaughn Meader, The First Family

President Kennedy: I’ve got an important conference in 15 minutes, so I must be dressed in ten minutes, which means I shall have to ahead toward our bedroom with great vig-ah.

It’s now a given that any sketch or late-night show worth its salt will have someone who can impersonate the president, but there was a time when the practice was unthinkable. Then came Vaughn Meader, with his dropped r’s and Harvard–New England accent. After honing his President Kennedy impression at nightclubs, Meader released The First Family, a record of JFK sketches. Despite its lighthearted tone, James Hagerty, President Eisenhower’s former press secretary and a top executive at ABC, called it “degrading to the president.” The American public didn’t agree, however, as the album was a sensation, becoming the fastest-selling record at the time. People nationwide were quoting the above joke. President Kennedy himself addressed the record, saying at a press conference, “Vaughn Meader was busy tonight, so I came myself.” Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford, Dana Carvey’s George Bush, Jordan Peele’s Barack Obama: Comedy has a history of helping to shape public perception of a president — and it all started here.

C.1963

The Human Tea Bag

Steve Allen, The Steve Allen Show

[Wearing a suit festooned with teabags, Allen is slowly lowered into a vat of hot water, after which stagehands toss in lemon slices and sugar; the audience then comes up with teacups.]

There’s no way you get to David Letterman without Steve Allen, whose early TV career — including the first iteration of The Tonight Show, plus several other series — was practically anarchic for network TV. He (and Ernie Kovacs, who’d be all over this list had he not died young in a car accident) just tried anything: camera tricks, man-on-the-street interviews real and mock, phone calls to random strangers that went off in weird directions. Letterman paid homage to Allen (and credited him) often and openly: His Alka-Seltzer suit explicitly mimics the teabag stunt, and he, too, drew on the endless comedy fountain that comes from watching street weirdos.

1964

The War Room

Stanley Kubrick, Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

President Merkin Muffley: Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!

The wheelchair-bound titular character gets the most laughs with his uncontrollable right arm and occasional outbursts that reveal his loyalty to Adolf Hitler. But the best line of the film belongs to President Merkin Muffley, another of the three characters Sellers portrayed. The delivery is so forceful, so serious, that it takes a few seconds to realize how absurd the line is, as the world faces assured destruction. Civilization doesn’t fear nukes like it used to, but the sentiment of “Well, everything is fucked so we might as well laugh” makes this a timeless treasure and a peak of political satire.

The Stick

Jonathan Winters, Jack Paar, The Jack Paar Program

“Send in those big cats! [Pause.] Uh, send in the smaller ones.”

In the early days of TV, networks had room to experiment, play, and occasionally fail — and without this freedom, the country may never have learned about the warm and antic improvisational comic Jonathan Winters. After some early appearances on shows such as Omnibus, he found a home on The Tonight Show during Jack Paar’s five-year stint as host. Occasionally, the audience would get a taste of his established characters, such as saucy old lady Maude Frickert; other times, Winters would be handed a prop or two and then be encouraged to let loose. One of Winters’s most famous appearances with Paar was on The Jack Paar Program, where he found himself with a stick in his hand, stretching his rubber mug, and impulsively creating a series of scenarios in rapid succession. As the comedian goes fishing, fights bulls, and reports to superior officers about seeing giant beetles, he often finds rich characters as well as crisp punch lines. With the mental agility and physicality on display here, it’s easy to understand why successive generations of comics, Robin Williams in particular, emulated Winters in every way they could.

C. 1964

The Hip Cucko

Moms Mabley

“They waited ten minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half-hour, 45 minutes. Finally, the cucko, you know, oozed out. Had his dark glasses on. Looked at him and said, ‘Man, what time is it?’”

At a time when most comedians of color were relegated to finding success only on the Chitlin’ Circuit, thanks to killer appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, mainstream audiences welcomed a “dirty old lady” stand-up named Moms Mabley into their homes with open arms. It’s unclear whether Mabley’s cuckoo-clock bit preceded her as a stock joke that she made her own or whether she originated the joke that would later be covered by comedy greats such as George Kirby and Redd Foxx, but Moms was the one to put the joke on the map. Mabley’s unmistakable cadence and uniquely gravelly timbre took a piece of unquestionably hilarious writing on a subject (successfully hiding marijuana in a cuckoo clock during a police raid, after which time the cuckoo gets high and forgets or neglects to coo for hours) that at the time would have been considered indelicate at best, and elevated it from just a solid joke to something that wouldn’t be out of place performed on the bluest comedy show you could find.

1965

The Vatican Rag

Tom Lehrer

“First you get down on your knees /

Fiddle with your rosaries /

Bow your head with great respect /

And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect …”

A Harvard mathematics professor starts writing funny Cole Porter–inspired songs, self-releases an album, and before long is performing those songs every week on national television. “The Vatican Rag” is Lehrer’s satirical look at the Second Vatican Council, which attempted to update the Catholic Church by getting rid of the hymns and bringing in some popular music. With jokes like the one above, Lehrer doesn’t just poke fun at a sacred cow, he slaughters it. “Weird Al” Yankovic cites Lehrer as one of his greatest musical influences, and it’s very easy to see the connection.

The Tomahawk

Johnny Carson, Ed Ames, The Tonight Show

[Ed Ames throws a tomahawk, trying not to hit the chalk outline of a cowboy. He hits the cowboy right between his legs.] Carson: I didn’t even know you were Jewish.

When people look back on Johnny Carson’s career, a lot of the focus is on monologue jokes and the comedians he introduced to national audiences. The fact that Johnny was a natural performer who was quick on his feet is frequently forgotten. After Ed Ames, a co-star on TV’s Daniel Boone, ended up striking the chalk cowboy with a tomahawk, right between the legs, the audience exploded. Johnny waited for his moment, even going as far as to prevent Ames from retrieving the tomahawk before dropping an ad-lib that would live on in a million blooper specials for years to come. Johnny was quick on his feet, he was risqué without saying anything dirty, and he knew how to spin a mistake into classic television.

1967

Don Rickles on Pat Boone

Don Rickles, The Dean Martin Show

“Pat Boone, one of our great stars, right? Has a daytime show. He’s marvelous, the way he comes out — ‘Hi, I’m Pat Boone!’ — what do you want, a cookie? You’re making a fool of yourself and going nowhere, pal, and I’m a friend.”

While Don Rickles, a.k.a. “Mr. Warmth,” was making a name for himself in mob-run Las Vegas casinos along with the likes of Shecky Greene, other comedians were getting tight fives together for The Ed Sullivan Show. Unlike those of his peers, Rickles’s act required time and space to explore, and most important, a high-profile audience to relentlessly mock. The Dean Martin Show provided a national television stage for his celebrity-insult act by putting him in his element and re-creating a Vegas showroom, complete with stars of the day, such as Boone. Rickles is a model jester when mocking the powerful — even presidents — so the fact that Boone happened to be drinking milk during his act was basically like a layup. The key to the joke might be “and I’m a friend,” as Rickles’s shtick worked, like the best roasters since, because he insulted out of love. His fearlessly subversive act ended up making him a TV regular on The Tonight Show, a star of roasts, and an inspiration for future generations of insult comics. Simply put, Chris Rock wasn’t the first person to offer someone a cookie.

1968

Bob Hope’s Oscar Monologue

Bob Hope, the Academy Awards

“Welcome to the Academy Awards, or, as it’s known at my house, Passover.”

It’s hard to pick a single joke of Bob Hope’s because he had a million of them. Well, maybe not a million, but he did have an 85,000-page “Joke File” which was scanned by the Library of Congress. Hope hosted the Oscars 19 times, and despite being one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, he was never even nominated for an Academy Award himself. Hosting the show in 1968, he opened with one of his most famous jokes: “Welcome to the Academy Awards, or, as it’s known at my house, Passover.” With this one succinct joke, in his influential, unmistakable cadence, not only do we get a funny, self-deprecating quip playing off his long career in show business, but he also hints at how Hollywood views comedy. Sure, we all love to laugh, but is it art? Hope was America’s comedic embassador, and as part of his duties he inspired (and employed) countless comedians over the span of his very long career. But that didn’t mean he was going to get an Oscar nomination (He did get 5 Honorary Awards, though).

Springtime for HitlerMel Brooks, The Producers“Springtime for Hitler, and Germany /

Deutschland is happy and gay /

We're marching to a faster pace /

Look out, here comes the master race”

Ah, irreverence! We take you for granted these days, as you are seemingly everywhere, but let’s not forget the pioneers. In The Producers, Mel Brooks set out to touch the untouchable: Holocaust jokes. To have the climax of your film be an ironic song-and-dance number about the glory of Hitler and the Nazi Party was risky at the time, to say the least, and many studios and distributors wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. The film received wildly mixed reviews and it was an initial box-office flop. But apparently the world soon came to their senses, as Brooks nabbed an Oscar for his screenplay, while The Producers went on to become one of the most-beloved comedies of all time, eventually spurring a wildly successful Broadway musical of the same name. Vulgar, satirical, and filled with ethnic jokes, Brooks’s early work would go on to inspire everyone from the Zucker Brothers to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, whose Book of Mormon wouldn’t have existed without The Producers as a precursor.

1969

‘I Will Never Give Up. I'm in My 14th Year of a Ten-Day Beauty Plan.’

Phyllis Diller, The Ed Sullivan Show

Nobody self-deprecated like Phyllis Diller, a true pioneer in the art of making fun of oneself. She discovered that it helps a comic to not only have something “wrong” with themselves, but to also play it up, especially when introducing yourself. One of the first jokes a comedian writes is usually some form of “I know what you’re thinking,” followed by a self-administered pot shot to disarm the audience. For Diller, this manifested itself in wearing outlandish bag dresses and exaggerated hair and makeup, wanting the crowd to only focus on her jokes. (Note: She had many TV appearances in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but as you can see from her look, she was made for the late-’60s boom in color televisions.) For that, every comedian, male and female, owes something to Diller. Most immediately Joan Rivers, who honed her act by taking herself down a peg with one-liners about being an unmarried Jewish woman. Rivers wore cuter dresses, however.

1970

Mary’s Interview

Mary Tyler Moore, Ed Asner, James L. Brooks, Allan Burns, The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Lou: You know what, you've got spunk!

Mary: Well, yes …

Lou: I hate spunk.

These three words — “I hate spunk” — uttered by Ed Asner as Mary’s soon-to-be boss, during the pilot’s job-interview scene, trenchantly captured exactly what it was like to be a single woman trying to enter the workforce in the early ’70s and the fundamental (proto–Leslie Knope vs. Ron Swanson) dynamic that would propel the show through seven critically acclaimed seasons. And not only that, but it was being directed toward Mary Tyler Moore, an actress America fell in love with as Laura Petrie, the fictional wife of Dick Van Dyke. Incredibly poignant at the time, it also set a template for a charming yet awkward female protagonist trying to have it all (see: Liz Lemon).

1971

Ernestine Talks to Mr. Veedle

Lily Tomlin, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In“

We are the phone company, Mr. Veedle. We are omnipotent. That’s potent with an omni in front of it.”

Tomlin’s Ernestine exploded after her appearances on Laugh-In. The phone operator was as big as a fictional character gets, appearing on countless other late-night shows and in Tomlin’s own comedy projects, even interviewing Cher at one point (Cher!). Ernestine was insistent, with a mildly sinister snorting laugh, and she pretended to be your friend, which is what made her dangerous. This joke in particular hit the hardest, as the aforementioned “Mr. Veedle” was supposed to be Gore Vidal. The whole enterprise was subversive at the time, commenting on major telephone companies’ tendency to extort money and information from customers. Initially, Ma Bell tried to stop the bit from ever happening, though they later played nice and offered her a “community service award.” Tomlin is rarely given enough credit for her trailblazer status, crushing it as a “woman in comedy” and as a Generally Hilarious Human Person before SNL was even a thing. Her influence reached every sketch and character performer who came after her, from Gilda Radner to Mike Myers to Kristen Wiig.

DaveCheech and Chong, Cheech & Chong

“It’s, it’s Dave, man, will you open up? I got the stuff with me.”

“Who?”

“Dave, man. Open up.”

“Dave?”

“Ya, Dave, c’mon, man, open up, I think the cops saw me.”

“Dave’s not here.”

A Mexican-American from L.A. dodges the draft and meets a half-white, half-Asian guy in Canada. They form a comedy duo. The source of their material? Marijuana. One sketch about a deal gone wrong due to a brain-dead smoker becomes a hit, leading to more hilarious albums about weed and music and race, then eventually a film franchise. It’s hard to call Cheech and Chong’s comedy “sophisticated,” but there is something singular about “Dave,” which is essentially a stoner “Who’s on First.” There’s a humanity in this short sketch, especially in Chong’s confused character. Stoner comedy is still going strong today – if not more so today, as weed becomes more socially acceptable – and it can be traced back to this three-word punch line. Big Lebowski, Friday, Pineapple Express, Half Baked, Broad City, etc.: All of it.

David Brenner on Gas-Station Attendants

David Brenner, The Tonight Show

“Did you ever notice you go into a gasoline station, the attendant’s directions always start the same way: ‘Now look buddy, pull out of the station.’ No, I want to drive the pumps for nine hours; I don’t want to pull out of the station.”

Did you ever notice: Four words that would go on to define a generation of comedians, and Brenner was one of the first stand-ups associated with it. He used the phrase to start the above joke in his first Tonight Show set, and it would be used in many more Tonight Show sets as his style became de rigueur during the ensuing comedy boom. Before Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld, there was Brenner, who, as Richard Lewis put it, was the king of observational comedy.

C. 1972

‘I Get No Respect.’

Rodney Dangerfield

“I get no respect: I played hide and seek; they wouldn’t even look for me.”

This is the joke that started it all. Dangerfield had the second half, but, as he told an interviewer in 1986, he needed to put something “in front of it: I was so poor, I was so dumb, so this, so that.” It was 1972, the year The Godfather came out. “All I heard was the word ‘respect,”’ he told the New York Times. “’You’ve got to give me respect,’ or ‘Respect him.’ I thought to myself: It sounds like a funny image — a guy who gets no respect.” It was a game-changer for Dangerfield, who struggled for years under the name Jack Roy. With a new image and catchphrase, he became a comedy star, building on the work of Henny Youngman and Don Rickles to create one-liners that were darker, grittier, more specific. Comedians have an ideal age for their comedy, and it seems Dangerfield needed to be a little older and a lot more grizzled before America wanted to hear from him. By the time he really hit it big, in the ’80s, Dangerfield was already in his 60s. Old, but not too old to push stand-up forward.

1972

Archie Bunker Meets Sammy Davis Jr.

Norman Lear, Carroll O’Connor, Sammy Davis Jr., Bill Dana, All in the Family

Archie: Now, no prejudice intended, but, you know, I always check with the Bible on these here things. I think that, I mean if God had meant for us to be together, he’d-a put us together. But look what he done. He put you over in Africa, and put the rest of us in all the white countries.

Sammy Davis Jr.: Well, he must’ve told ’em where we were, because somebody came and got us.

It’s difficult to describe, at this distance, the shock waves that All in the Family radiated out into the network-TV pond. Most late-’60s sitcoms were the palest of pap, in the Munsters and Gilligan’s Island vein; unless you count the young-and-single status of the Marlo Thomas character on That Girl, it was tough to find even a hint of the social dynamics riving the country. Suddenly, a family in Queens with a racist dad and a lefty son-in-law was arguing — really vigorously! — over the Vietnam War and the dynamics of race, dealing with crime and hypocrisy and, in one episode, a very close call with a rapist. The series almost never slid over into treacly Very Special Episode territory, either; the issue-oriented stuff was baked into its premise, and it usually stayed funny. The Sammy Davis Jr. episode upped the stakes with a celebrity cameo, and what an ideal celebrity for Archie to meet: black, Jewish, one-eyed, and wildly charismatic.

1973

Comedy Minus One

Albert Brooks, Comedy Minus OneAudio

Albert: Thank you, thank you, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Albert.

[Pause.]

Albert: Wait a minute, how could you be me?

[Pause.]

Script Included With Record

Albert: Thank you, thank you, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Albert.

You: And I’m You.

Albert: Wait a minute, how could you be me?

You: I didn’t say I was you. I said I was me.

Early in his career, the L.A.-based comic, actor, and director Brooks longed to cheerfully destabilize the staid realms of comedy with which he’d come into contact. As he appeared on TV variety shows in the late ’60s and beyond, Brooks breathed new life into the old tropes of comedy by making the usual subterfuge involved in particular kinds of acts abundantly obvious. To wit, one of his earliest bits, on the Flip Wilson Show, featured him deconstructing ventriloquism by telling stock jokes and moving his mouth in an obvious way; while it doesn’t seem funny on paper, Brooks’s knowing script and chipper delivery made it shine. On his first album, Comedy Minus One, he even invited you — yes, you — to get involved in the act. The title track, a routine about a trip to the garage, leaves empty spaces for lines read aloud at home from a script, which was included on the inside of the album cover. Over the course of the scene, you — yes, you — essentially grift Brooks (and guest comic Georgie Jessel) while picking up all the laugh lines. Though, if you are just listening, which presumably most are, you’ll only hear Brooks and Jessel talking to no one. The smarts behind the experiment, and the verve with which it’s delivered, make the jokes irresistible. It’s the sort of anti-comedy experiment that doubtless had an effect on Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin, not to mention essentially every alternative comedian of the last 20 years.

1975

Word Association

Paul Mooney, Chevy Chase, Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live

Interviewer: Jungle bunny!

Mr. Wilson: Honky!

Interviewer: Spade!

Mr. Wilson: Honky honky!I

nterviewer: Nigger!

Mr. Wilson: Dead honky.

“Word Association” was not even written by one of the show’s writers, as Pryor insisted the show hire Paul Mooney for the week. Mooney is one of the all-time greatest comic minds on the subject of race, and this sketch showed just that. That “Nigger” –“Dead honkey” climax still feels dangerous and revelatory, partly because of how direct and simple it is. Mooney wrote in his memoir it was the easiest thing he ever wrote, as all he had to do was write what it was like to interview with NBC executives earlier in the week to work on the show. As a piece of comedy, it demanded attention. It’s a role that comedy unfortunately has continued to play ever since: forcing people who like to believe that racism doesn’t exist anymore to confront that it does, and ideally laugh at how oblivious they were being. It’s arguably the most important sketch about race ever written, and all comedy about race — whether by Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, or Key & Peele — follows in its path.

1976

The King of Impressionists

Michael O’Donoghue, Saturday Night Live

“There’s one thing I think everybody agrees on, and that’s who the nicest guy in show business is. And, of course, I’m talking about Mr. Mike Douglas. Yeah! Yeah, come on! You know, I was home the other day and I happened to catch Mike’s show, and a funny thought occurred to me. I wondered: What if someone took very large steel needles, say 15, 18 inches long, large steel needles with real sharp points, and plunged them into Mike’s eyes. What would his reaction be, huh? I think it might go something like this.” [O’Donoghue turns his back to the camera to prepare his impression. He turns back around, puts his hands to his eyes, and screams maniacally.]

SNL’s inaugural season left viewing audiences reeling for many reasons, not least among them the show’s penchant for raw, rough humor, and the cast’s irreverence toward the popular culture they were raised on. The grim prince behind much of the darkness was Michael O’Donoghue, a performer and writer famous for not only contributing to National Lampoon but creating pitch-black satires such as “The Vietnamese Baby Book.” In addition to teaching John Belushi’s eager foreign man to speak English phrases such as “I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines,” O’Donoghue made himself known in SNL’s first year as an impersonator of sorts. Buck Henry came to the stage and informed the crowd that the “king of impressionists” was on his way. O’Donoghue, dressed in Vegas-standard jacket and tie, amiably wondered what it would look like if Mike Douglas had steel needles shoved in his eyes. The aggressive screaming and flailing that followed was a shock, and O’Donoghue’s wild commitment sold it as comedy. (Henry capped off the bit by asking genially, “Uncanny, isn’t it?”) The violent, gross-out gag was a gauntlet thrown down to its audience, a test to see how far they were willing to go, and the reverberations of the gesture can be felt in generations of black-comedy acolytes.

Went With the Wind!

Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence, The Carol Burnett Show

Ratt: “That gown is gorgeous.”

Starlet: “Thank you, I saw it in the window and just couldn’t resist it.”

One of the silliest and sweetest family entertainments ever to air on network TV, The Carol Burnett Show knew exactly how to please its audience. While Burnett and her supporting cast of inveterate gigglers were known for their recurring characters, big performances, and breaking one another onstage, they also committed to opulent, crowd-pleasing movie parodies. The show took on many classics, including Double Indemnity and From Here to Eternity, but it was their parody of antebellum Southern landmark Gone With the Wind — and one visual gag in particular — that stuck in fans’ minds. Like Scarlett herself, Carol Burnett’s Starlet tears down and transforms her drapery into a makeshift gown when she looks to seduce Harvey Korman’s Ratt Butler. But when Starlet sashays down the long flight of stairs, draped in her drapes, it’s clear she has overlooked one simple aspect of the alteration: the curtain rod, which sticks out two feet on either side of her shoulders. This sort of impeccable detail helped push the movie parody to new heights, and a ripple of its influence was not only felt not only in burgeoning shows like SCTV and SNL, but in masterful visuals crafted by the likes of Key & Peele.

Elayne Boosler on Male Sexual Hypocrisy

Elayne Boosler“

[Men] want you to scream ‘You’re the best’ while swearing you’ve never done this with anyone before.”

When Elayne Boosler arrived on the comedy scene in the 1970s, she broke ground for female comics with her brash, pro-sex material. A 1979 New York Times article highlighted her unapologetic approach to stand-up — she wasn’t self-deprecating, she wasn’t that interested in losing weight, and she wasn’t filled with shame about being a woman. In this joke, she’s giving voice to the woman’s perspective in dating and casual sex, at a time when female comics were few and far between. It was another decade before she became the first woman to have her own hour-long TV special (she had to self-finance it, however), and while she never became quite the mainstream-success story of her peers, like Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman, she paved the way for every subsequent female comedian who wasn’t afraid to go up against the boys.

1977

Annie Hall’s Intro

Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall

“There’s an old joke: Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions.’ Well, that's essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”

Allen’s masterpiece Annie Hall is jam-packed with jokes and moments that irrevocably changed comedy, but it’s the film’s famous fourth-wall-breaking intro that warrants mention, as it basically sums up Allen’s career in one joke. In it, the writer-director-star literally builds on the work of his comedic predecessors, taking jokey-jokes and making them more introspective, neurotic, existential, and cerebral. Annie Hall was the last true comedy to win the Best Picture Oscar, beating Star Wars in the process. That’s fitting: The history of sci-fi cinema can be divided into before and after Star Wars; the same can be said of Annie Hall and comedy.

7 Words You Can Never Say on Television

George Carlin, George Carlin at USC

“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.”

While Carlin may have had routines more philosophical than the one about the seven curse words one can’t say on television, there’s no denying this juggernaut of censorship and linguistic glee. Carlin was present at Lenny Bruce’s infamous obscenity arrest, and was arrested under similar circumstances himself, so his evolving examination of the nation’s selective prudishness was fueled by very real experiences. The routine encapsulates Carlin’s insatiable drive to examine hypocrisy in our culture — be that hypocrisy in the realm of religion, language, or politics — and his determination to open his audience’s eyes about the rites and rituals holding society back. Even as Carlin punctuates his speech with a rhythmic, recurring loop of the seven words, his erudition and incisiveness make the bit the most intelligent dissection of swear words to date. Carlin revisited the routine for the better part of the decade. It was first heard on his 1972 record Class Clown, but it’s most iconic performance might’ve been when he finally performed it on television, in his 1977 HBO special, which provided a warning before he went into it. Of course, comics can say almost anything they want on TV these days. The relaxing of our national morals may have a lot to do with it, but surely Carlin’s crusading had some sway. The bit’s impact can also be felt with profane, brainy boundary-pushers like Bill Hicks and Patrice O’Neal, and shows like Inside Amy Schumer.

‘Excuuuuuuuuuse Meeeeeeeee!’

Steve Martin, Let’s Get Small

Taken from his 1977 debut album, Let’s Get Small, Steve Martin’s “excuse me” bit is an incredibly layered moment of comedy. He starts off playing the banjo, tells the audience he’s going to make a bit of a departure from his normal routine, asks for mood lighting, and then goes into a seemingly off-script diatribe about how the backstage crew isn’t meeting his standards, leaving the crowd wondering if this is part of the show or just a comedian being a bit of a diva. Then he finally gets to the punch line, two simple, drawn-out, overly exaggerated words: “Excuse me!” And then he just goes back to playing his banjo, seemingly letting the audience know that it was all just a brilliantly crafted dumb joke. It’s the purest articulation of anti-comedy you’ll find: It’s a comedy show, so people are expecting something funny to happen, what would be really surprising (and thus really funny) is if something unfunny happened. (Yes, explaining the humor dries it up a little. Sorry.) This joke exists as a sort of patient zero for which so much comedy can be traced that it’s almost silly to make a list. Even so: The Simpsons, Mr. Show, Wet Hot American Summer, Norm Macdonald, Tim and Eric, and oh so many other alternative comedians, past and present, followed in Martin’s footsteps. The fact that the joke created a national catchphrase and made Martin an unprecedented stand-up megastar is a testament to how revolutionary it was.

1979

Richard Pryor on His Heart Attack

Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert“

Thinking about dying, ain’t ya? Didn’t think about it when you was eating all of that pork!”

The man an overwhelming number of comedians and comedy fans will espouse as the best of all time, Pryor was at his loopy, confessional, raucous, and blue best in the live setting. It follows that Pryor’s filmed performances, Live on the Sunset Strip and Live in Concert in particular, are indisputable powerhouses. The latter sees Pryor sweating through his shirt and twitching behind his mustache, sticking and weaving as he moves from topic to topic, not unlike the fighters in his bit about boxing. As usual, Pryor makes stray observations about race as readily as he delves into drug addiction, and reveals his vulnerabilities as quickly as he gets political. He also depicts a lot of strange things, the most memorable of which is a heart attack. It’s a scary and delicate subject Pryor lays plain without hesitation, twisting his body on the floor as he remembers some great force stopping his breath and even scolding him, “You know black people have high blood pressure, anyway, don’t you? Watch your diet!” It’s an unfettered and beautiful bit that has inspired a horde of comics, including Chris Rock and Louis CK.

1980

‘I Am Serious ... and Don't Call Me Shirley’

Leslie Nielsen, Robert Hays, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Airplane!

Rumack: Can you fly this plane, and land it?

Ted: Surely you can’t be serious.

Rumack: I am serious ... and don’t call me Shirley.

Airplane! is arguably the quintessential cinematic example of brilliantly stupid humor, and this joke may be the stupidest — and therefore, the best. The 1980 classic abounds with quotable one-liners and layered jokes that improve with time, but no one steals the show more than the straight-faced Leslie Nielsen imploring Robert Hays to land their out-of-control plane. It’s been named one of the American Film Institute’s “Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time,” and its genius is in its homophonic simplicity: It’s funny, I can say from experience, to both a small child and a professional comedy critic. It’s the kind of quip that thousands of screenwriters have attempted to mimic — how could Austin Powers, Zoolander, or countless Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy characters exist without this one line?

The Dalai Lama Story

Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Brian Doyle-Murray, Douglas Kenney, Caddyshack

Carl: So we finish the 18th and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, ‘Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.’ And he says, ‘Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’ So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, improv theater Second City’s influence on American comedy was ever-present, and you didn’t have to look much further than Saturday Night Live, with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Dan Aykroyd all cutting their teeth on the show. And then there was Bill Murray, the man Second City alum Harold Ramis frequently called the best verbal improviser he’s ever seen. So when Ramis had a chance to direct the improv-heavy Caddyshack, he let Murray off the leash. The Dalai Lama scene is a hilarious testament to improv training and the ingenuity of the human brain, influencing essentially all comic performers that came after it. Now, every actor in a comedy is asked if they got to improvise lines on set — this joke is why. And then there is the sarcastic tag – “So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice” — which set the tone for many comedic protagonists thereafter. Vince Vaughn’s entire career is basically that line.

1982

‘Cocaine Is God’s Way of Saying That You’re Making Too Much Money.’

Robin Williams, An Evening With Robin Williams

Coming, like all Williams’s jokes, in a tornado of riffs, this is the defining joke of the 1980s Comedy Boom, a time in which too many comedians made too much money and spent it on too much cocaine. Williams, with his struggles with abuse and his manic stage persona, embodied this better than anyone (though he said he never performed high). Seven months before he taped the HBO special in which the joke appears, Williams was out with his friend John Belushi; the next morning Belushi would be found dead of a drug overdose. Williams was never known for being the most confessional comedian, if only because he never stayed on a topic long enough, but there is a powerful truth to his most famous joke.

1983

Bill Cosby on Raising a Football Player

Bill Cosby, Himself

“Hi, Mom!”

Okay, we need to compartmentalize here and consider Cosby, difficult as it has become, exclusively on the merits of his stand-up career — because those merits are staggering. Time was, his material about life and family bridged racial gaps and explored the role of modern fatherhood in a way that gave rise to such comics as Ray Romano, Louis C.K., and Jim Gaffigan. “Hi, Mom!” was the perfect distillation of his comedy sharply articulating the unique frustrations and thanklessness of being a parent — specifically, in this case, the overlooked one. It was such a simple, evergreen bit that Carlos Mencia would be accused of nabbing it decades years later. Himself would also encourage NBC executives to give Cosby, who already had a few failed TV shows under his belt, another try on the small screen. The resulting effort, The Cosby Show, was groundbreaking and beloved, until it could be no longer.

Andy Kaufman’s Adopted Children

Andy Kaufman, David Letterman, Late Night With David Letterman

Letterman [screaming backstage]: Andy! Andy, are you close to doing this?

Kaufman [from backstage]: In a minute. I’ll be ready in a minute

.Letterman [to the “adopted children”]: Okay, umm, well, this will be nice when Andy comes out here.

Kaufman and Letterman are, of course, two comedy legends, each with many bits that could have a place on this list. But there is something nice about putting them together, as they were kindred spirits in expanding the meaning of comedy and entertainment. Kaufman was a frequent guest on Letterman’s Late Night, with each appearance pushing comedy forward, or at least sideways. The joke here, which plays out over 12 hilarious, awkward minutes, is that Kaufman has adopted three children; however, instead of babies, they’re three grown black men, Herb, George and Tony (a.k.a. Tino). What could have been a one-off sight gag turns into an even longer bit as Letterman interviews them, with Andy disappearing for a stretch and returning to do his dead-on Elvis impersonation. This appearance isn’t as famous as when he was fake-assaulted by wrestler Jerry Lawler in 1982, but it is most indicative of what these two brought to comedy. Kaufman, at his best, pushed the buttons of comedy with a childlike innocence; Letterman did so with a bemused irony. Kaufman would pass away less than nine months after this appearance; it’s trite to say, but it’s very true: Comedy was never the same.

1984

Goes to 11

Christopher Guest, Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, This Is Spinal Tap

Marty: Why don’t you just make 10 louder? And make 10 be the top number and make that a little louder?

[Pause]

Nigel: These go to 11.

While it certainly owes something to the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and Albert Brooks’s reality-TV predictor Real Life, This Is Spinal Tap advanced the substance and style of the mockumentary and defined its future. The film follows the tumultuous comeback of vapid, leopard-printed rock trio Spinal Tap, played by Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean. This scene between Guest’s idiotic Nigel Tufnel and blandly accepting documentarian Marty DiBergi, played by Rob Reiner, perfectly illustrates the combination of structure and play that makes the movie its own sort of comedic Stonehenge. While the clueless Nigel insists that the big numbers on the dials of the band’s amps make them special, Guest & Co. perfectly skewer the pretensions of pop musicians with a conjunction of character, improvisational wit, and comic timing. Without subtle but seminal moments like this one, there would be no fourth-wall-busting comedy such as The Office — not to mention Guest’s latter-day treats Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.

1985

Steven Wright’s Burglar

Steven Wright, I Have a Pony

“I came home the other day and everything in my apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica. I couldn’t believe it. I said to my roommate, ‘Look at this stuff, it’s all an exact replica.’ He said, ‘Do I know you?’”

One-liners are as old as comedy itself, but few comics have mastered them as fully as Steven Wright, whose 1985 album I Have a Pony is brimming with smart, tight jokes. Everything about Wright’s manner — his stoicism, his precise wording, his refusal to interact with the audience — made him a superstar during the ’80s boom, and his ability to identify banal aspects of life and spin them into absurd ideas remains unmatched. Of all his jokes, this one about exact replicas stands out for its imagery and many layers — it tells a little story with extreme brevity. It’s obvious why and how Wright inspired legions of other comics, most notably the late, great Mitch Hedberg — he of “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too” — but also the likes of Demetri Martin, Myq Kaplan, and Zach Galifianakis.

Surfer Chick

Whoopi Goldberg, Direct From Broadway

“So I go home and I go, ‘Mom,’ and she goes, ‘What?’ And I go, like, ‘I’m like totally PG.’ And she goes, ‘Oh, you’re in a movie.’ And like finally I got it, you know. And it’s like, ‘No, I’m not in a movie. I’m, like, totally with child, like Mary was with Jesus, except I know who the father was.”

Before she was an EGOT winner, Whoopi Goldberg, more than any comedian of her generation, made stand-up more theatrical. Getting her start as an actress, she was given opportunities at stand-up clubs like the Belly Room at L.A.’s Comedy Store, which, unlike the famed Original Room, was more open to experimentation and, more notably, women. There, without a late-night set in her sights, she was free to do a show that would run well over an hour. Eventually, with the help of director Mike Nichols, she brought her show to Broadway. Filmed for HBO as Direct From Broadway, the above joke was told by Goldberg in character as a California surfer girl (not Valley girl) who gets pregnant by accident. The comedy comes from how specific and well-drawn the character is. Along with the likes of Sandra Bernhard, Goldberg’s blurring of stand-up and storytelling one-man shows changed the game, with John Leguizamo in the ’90s and the Mike Birbiglias of the world today following in her footsteps.

1986

‘No Man Has Ever Put His Hand Up a Woman’s Dress Looking for a Library Card.’

Joan Rivers, Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show

It’s no easy feat to fight in heels, but Joan Rivers made a career out of it. She had moxy, smarts, and stamina, and she never apologized for her jokes. After finding her voice at Second City in early ’60s Chicago, Rivers invaded the downtown New York boys’ club at the Bitter End and the Gaslight Cafe, playing alongside Woody Allen and Bill Cosby. She made a strong connection with Johnny Carson and, from there, she took off — writing, hosting shows, touring, and exhibiting the work ethic of a carpenter ant until the end of her life. Like many other comics with a vast catalogue of one-liners (and in Rivers’s case, a physical card catalogue), Rivers reused material when it suited her. This joke was one Rivers had used for years, but used here in reference to Christie Brinkley, represents a midpoint between Rivers’s downtown years and the red-carpet years yet to come. Though she was often catty and brutal, Rivers’s best stuff weighed in on the life of women in America — their struggles with romance, their bodies, and with the patriarchy in general. This line completely sums up Rivers’s understanding of what a woman is up against despite lip service from men. There are some gossipy comics, e.g. Kathy Griffin, who owe their careers to Rivers, while others like Whitney Cummings and Chris Rock just took a cue from her ability to craft a pointed zinger.

1988

Roseanne on Working Mothers

Roseanne Barr, John Goodman, Roseanne

Dan: Fixing the sink is a husband’s job, and I am the husband.

Roseanne: And I’m the wife, so it’s my job to do everything else.

Dan: Oh, don’t give me that.

Roseanne: Oh, well, it must be true. I put in eight hours a day at the factory and then I come home and put in another eight hours. I’m running around like a maniac, taking back —

Darlene: Mom, where’s the tape?

Roseanne: In the bathroom, third drawer.

It’s almost shocking to look back on Roseanne’s pilot through the lens of today’s network comedies. The pilot is messy, the jokes aren’t rapid-fire or referential or filled with snark, and the characters are unwieldy and normal-looking, without a Token Hot Person in the bunch. They yell at each other and over each other, and don’t seem to care that anyone can hear them. Even the studio audience feels more real, like they’re genuinely enjoying themselves and haven’t been neutered by machines. The show was revolutionary in its honesty and in its portrayal of a lower-middle-class leading woman as a working mother, something previously unseen on network TV. This joke captured Roseanne’s character perfectly, as she can’t even make a point about how hard it is to be a working mother without being interrupted by one of her kids. The show’s success — it was one of the five highest-rated TV shows during its first five years on the air — sparked at least a few subsequent comedies, like Grace Under Fire and Reba, though nothing on air since has captured Roseanne’s tone in quite the same way.

The Barbershop Scene

Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, John Landis, Clint Smith, Coming to America

﻿Saul: What about Rocky Marciano?

Clarence: Oh, there they go. There they go, every time I start talkin’ ’bout boxing, a white man got to pull Rocky Marciano out they ass. That’s their one, that’s their one. Rocky Marciano! Rocky Marciano! Let me tell you something, once and for all-Rocky Marciano was good; but compared to Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano ain’t shit.

Saul: He beat Joe Louis’s ass.

Morris: That’s right, he did whoop Joe Louis’s ass.

Clarence: Joe Louis was 75 years old when they fought.

The spirited back-and-forth in this scene from Eddie Murphy’s prime is impressive even before you consider the fact that Murphy is playing both Saul and Clarence. This was the first, and arguably best, time we saw Murphy pull off what would become his signature multicharacter act. It was a perfect setting: Depicting barbershop culture that was never before seen on the big screen, it allowed Murphy to do what he did better than anyone — talk shit and embody very specific characters. The big payoff comes at the end, but everything Murphy says leading up to it is equally hilarious. Even if you watch today, it’s still incredible how much of a comedy powerhouse Eddie Murphy was. Murphy was the biggest comedy star of the second half of the century, bringing a vitality and sense of now to comedy. It’s hard to compare his stardom to any one comedian; the closest approximation might be that he was like the entirety of the original cast of Saturday Night Live’s influence condensed into one person.

1989

‘I’ll Have What She’s Having.’

Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal, Nora Ephron, Rob Reiner, Estelle Reiner, When Harry Met Sally ...

When Harry Met Sally… was the launching pad for a seemingly endless string of romantic comedies, all of which tried to replicate the magic of this perfectly crafted scene. Meg Ryan, with a brilliant idea and a perfect performance, blew up the conventions of flirty dialogue, pushing the classic rom-com tension to never-before-seen heights. And then director Rob Reiner cuts to his mom, Estelle, who delivers the most-repeated line from the most famous scene in the history of romantic comedy. (We dare you to think of a more oft-quoted moment in a rom-com. What are you gonna say, “You had me at hello”? Child’s play!) It’s a jokey-joke, almost Catskillian in its delivery and Jewishness (Estelle met Rob’s father, Carl, when she was a set designer in the Catskills), which, in a way, connects the joke to those days. It’s a direct line: Woody Allen updates the Borscht Belt, and When Harry Met Sally updates his update.

1990

Paula Poundstone on Pop-Tarts

Paula Poundstone, Cats, Cops and Stuff

“I actually eat a box of Pop-Tarts a day. I’m not proud of that.”

Everything about this 1990 bit from Paula Poundstone’s HBO special Cats, Cops and Stuff feels somehow joyous. It was spurred by a couple in the front row handing her a box of Pop-Tarts — “So you’ve been reading Tiger Beat?” she asks when they confess that they knew they’d brought her favorite flavor — but evolves into a meditation on her long-standing relationships with the pastry. It has the everyday feel of the observational comedy of the 1980s, but it hints at the alternative scene that would soon spring up — the bit started with her simply reading the box onstage to fill time. Unlike many female comedians of that time, Poundstone’s material had little to do with her gender, instead opting for relatable silliness for anyone. She would go on to be so associated with the brand that she produced a special video for them. It would’ve been hard to guess at the time, but the bit foreshadowed a lot of food-based humor to come: Jim Gaffigan on Hot Pockets, Patton Oswalt on KFC Famous Bowls, Paul F. Tompkins on cake vs. pie, Brian Regan on Pop-Tarts, and, oddly enough, an older Jerry Seinfeld on Pop-Tarts.

Homer Jumps the Gorge

Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, Sam Simon, Jay Kogen, Wallace Wolodarsky, Dan Castellaneta, The Simpsons

When “Bart the Daredevil” aired in 1990, The Simpsons wasn’t yet the greatest sitcom on television — but the episode helped the show take a giant leap in that direction. That a sweet scene of good parenting and father-son bonding between Homer and Bart would lead to this string of perfect stupidity is an example of the show at its finest — a first-rate comedy with heart. But once Homer takes off on the skateboard, the relentlessness of the gag — the endless brutality, the stupid repetition — opened the show up to new levels of absurdism that would become its trademark. It wasn’t long after that we saw the emergence of the early 1990s alternative comedy scene, one that relished in silly, ridiculous, and often pointless comedy. It was a rejection of the more traditional stand-up that dominated in the ‘80s, and The Simpsons’ offbeat influence could be seen in shows like Late Night With Conan O’Brien, Mr. Show With Bob and David, The State, The Ben Stiller Show, The Upright Citizens Brigade, Family Guy, and South Park, to say nothing of an entire generation of comedians.

1992

Benita Butrell

Kim Wayans, In Living Color

Benita Butrell: [To police officer] Don’t you say nothing bad about Ms. Jenkins. She’s a fine woman, fine woman. Wouldn’t take nothing from nobody. That’s a fine woman, honey. Don’t you talk about Ms. Jenkins, or I'll turn into Ice-T on your ass. Don’t talk about Ms. Jenkins. She’s a fine woman, fine woman. [To camera] Just don’t turn your back on her. Woman’s fingers are stickier than a booger in a jar of honey. I ain’t one to gossip, so you didn’t hear that from me.

Before In Living Color, you couldn’t find a comedy show where blackness was the default setting. On an episode of “WTF,” Chris Rock explained his desire to be on In Living Color instead of SNL: “I wanted to be in an environment where I didn’t have to translate the comedy I wanted to do.” It was the environment in which Kim Wayans was able to play Benita Butrell, an older, black neighborhood gossip, whose comic hook was not based on her being black nor female. This joke, which is set during the L.A. riots, ends with her famous catchphrase, and still crackles with a specificity of language and character. Even if the dearth of commonality of experiences, references, and cultural tropes created a chasm between what In Living Color was doing and what mainstream sketch-comedy audiences had come to expect, the show’s tenure and popularity narrowed the gap enough for creators of color to make art that is now, rightfully, considered universal.

A Show About Nothing

Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Larry David, Seinfeld

Jerry: So we go into NBC, and we say we have an idea for a show about nothing?

George: Exactly.

Jerry: They say, “What's your show about?” I say, “Nothing.”

George: There you go.

Jerry: I think you may have something here.

In classic Seinfeld fashion, this joke is from the season-four episode “The Pitch,” which is built around a quotable line. Despite it being used to define the show within the show, “a show about nothing” went on to define Seinfeld too. Yes, Seinfeld was about “nothing,” in that it focused on the minutiae of everyday, not unlike Seinfeld did in his stand-up. But Seinfeld was also about nothingness, it was about meaninglessness. As Larry David famously put it, “No hugging, no learning.” It’s cynical comic tone, which was unlike anything at the time, went on to dominate much of the television comedy that would come after it.

‘I Ain’t Scared of You Motherfuckers.’

Bernie Mac, Def Comedy Jam

Like some other examples on this list, the story of this joke has become a sort of legend shared among comedians. When Russell Simmons created Def Comedy Jam, black comics who’d spent as much as decades toiling in obscurity knew they could be very publicly made or broken. Backstage tensions were understandably high. And during this taping of the show, the audience was rough, booing the comedian who went on before Mac. Bill Bellamy warned Mac before his set, “Be careful out there — this audience is tough.” To which Mac replied, “I’ve been going at this too long — I’ve worked too hard — I ain’t scared of ‘em!” What did Mac do? He goes onstage, picks up the mic, and tells the audience exactly that. Instantly, the audience explodes in laughter. The moment captured so much about what was exciting about black comedy at the time. There was this urgency, this bravado, a bigness that demanded attention. Zoom out from this joke, and you get Martin Lawrence; you get the rest of the Original Kings of Comedy, Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, and Cedric the Entertainer, who, along with Mac, released a tremendously popular Spike Lee–directed stand-up feature film in 2000 (and the subsequently released Queens of Comedy, featuring Laura Hayes, Adele Givens, Sommore, and Mo’Nique); you get BET’s Comic View, of which Kevin Hart was the host of in 2008 — you get the entire ’90s black comedy boom. There’s a reason over 3 million have watched the clip on YouTube.

1993

‘You Might Be a Redneck.’

Jeff Foxworthy, You Might Be a Redneck If ...

“If you go to the family reunion to meet women, you might be a redneck.”

This is one of many jokes that ends with the same punch line — “you might be a redneck” — on Jeff Foxworthy’s giant debut record, entitled You Might Be a Redneck If … The joke, like all the jokes, is a perfect, weightless object — a comedic disco ball that looks great but is totally hollow inside. The economy of language and the vividness of the pictures Foxworthy paints are quite astounding. Other examples from the same record include, “If you’ve ever been too drunk to fish, you might be a redneck,” and, “If your dad walks you to school because you’re in the same grade, you might be a redneck.” Foxworthy plays with the same rural-Southerner stereotypes, but to an audience of rural Southerners, it’s not satire but an opportunity to laugh at oneself. This one joke broke Foxworthy into the mainstream, launched a merchandising bonanza, and spawned the Blue Collar Comedy Tour – not to mention the chicken-fried, low-brow comedic aesthetic associated with the troupe. In fact, culturally homogenous stand-up tours blossomed thanks to Foxworthy. You might equate this with a kind of Gulf of Tonkin incident for comedy, but just like a corny pop song, this joke can never be dislodged from our consciousness.

‘By the Way, If Anyone Here Is in Advertising or Marketing … Kill Yourself.’Bill Hicks, Revelations

In his 1993 special Revelations, released not long before his tragically early death, Bill Hicks had a lot to get off his chest. Having spent 15 years looking for an audience, he had found some success in Britain, decrying the evils of American culture to a receptive audience. And the subjects of his current bugaboo were advertisers and marketers. With his constant assurances that “there’s no joke here,” Hicks’s bit is pure, calm loathing, slowly building into an expression of impotent rage at the state of the world. It’s a great bit that hints at all the brilliant ideas he could have explored if he had lived; for one, his Über-liberal politics and disdain for the traditional stand-up could have placed him well in the alternative comedy scene that was just developing. His most direct comedic descendant is probably Doug Stanhope, but his attitude of fury inspired a generation of satirists of all stripes.

1994

Ace Ventura Butt Detective

Jim Carrey,Tom Shadyac, Jack Bernstein, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Ace Ventura [turned around, bent over, and holding his butt cheeks]: Excuse me, I’d like to ass you a few questions.

In one of many gleefully dismissive reviews of Jim Carrey’s first wildly successful star vehicle, Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Carrey suggests an escaped mental patient impersonating a game-show host — and, what’s worse, his hyperbolically obnoxious shtick is the whole damned show.” The next decade of studio comedies, however, came to be defined by this particular brand of outrageously broad, lunatic lead character whom you either loved unconditionally or deeply despised (see: Tommy Boy, Austin Powers, Zoolander, basically every Adam Sandler movie). These movies were also noteworthy for being PG-13, an MPAA film rating that studios really started figuring out how to take advantage of in the ’90s. Talking out of your butt isn’t edgy to the adults who reviewed the film (or films like it), but it was exhilarating for the teens who went to these movies in droves, thanks to their PG-13 rating.

Ass Master

Margaret Cho, HBO Comedy Half-Hour

“My parents are very conservative, but surprisingly gay-positive. In the late ’70s we owned a bookstore in San Francisco on Polk Street, which then was a huge gay mecca. And my mother, for some reason, was in charge of the gay pornography section. So every day she’d walk over there: ’I don’t know why we have this book! Moran, what is an ‘ass master?’’ ‘Mom, I have no idea what an ass master is. Is it like a Thigh Master?’ ‘I don’t know, is it a master of the ass? What is it? What is ass master?’”

After opening for Seinfeld, appearing on The Arsenio Hall Show, and developing All-American Girl for ABC, Margaret Cho was riding high when she recorded her HBO comedy half-hour in 1994. All-American Girl would subsequently flop, in part due to the network’s mishandling of its Asian and Asian-American characters, but in retrospect it’s amazing to think a network tried to package Cho’s comedy into a traditional sitcom at all. In both her early sets and her later, edgier material, Cho explores a cross-section of life (being a child of immigrants, Asians’ and Asian-Americans’ lives, racism, LGBTQ issues, women’s rights, and a ton of sex) no one else was serving up at the time (if ever), and definitely not with Cho’s signature honesty. Listening to her special over 20 years later, Cho’s voice is both genuine and outrageous, and confessional without feeling self-deprecating — a mix that feels novel even in today’s comedy world, and one that explains her huge following in the late ’90s into the 2000s. The calling card of Cho’s earlier work? A joke entitled “Ass Master,” in which her Korean-American mother asks questions about the gay porn sold at their family’s San Francisco bookshop. In this one joke, Cho includes confessional storytelling, impressions, queer life, family, and sex. This ability to be all things within one bit, now common in the post-alternative comedy scene with stand-ups like Chelsea Peretti, James Adomian, and Kyle Kinane, was Cho’s mark on the early ‘90s.

1995

Janeane Garofalo’s NotesJaneane

Garofalo, HBO Comedy Half-Hour

“I have a piece of paper, don't mind me. I am a professional, but I have a lot of Nutrasweet in my system and I don’t have a good short-term memory. I have, you know, a lot of things I want to discuss with you and I don’t even remember what they are. I have them on a piece of paper. Don’t mind me. If I glance over, it’s not because I don’t care, it’s because I can't remember anything.”

Before 1995, thanks to appearances on The Ben Stiller Show and the movie Reality Bites, Janeane Garofalo was already an alternative-comedy staple. But with her HBO special, for which she brought notes onstage with her, she was responsible for delivering alternative comedy to the masses. It was the move that swiftly removed the showbiz-ness from stand-up and whatever residual Las Vegas glamour it once had. Stand-up was free to be messy, loose, and, most important, honest. Thanks to Garofalo (and some of her peers, like Marc Maron) truth — not stage presence or sharp writing — became stand-up’s most prized asset. Comedy changed, and in turn comedy audiences changed. No longer did people want to see a polished act; they wanted to see whatever’s new, whatever’s currently happening in the comedian’s life. Whom did she influence? Everyone.

‘I’m Gonna Get You High Today’

Chris Tucker, Ice Cube, F. Gary Gray, DJ Pooh, Friday

Smokey: I know you don’t smoke weed, I know this, but I’m gonna get you high today, ’cause it's Friday, you ain’t got no job, and you ain’t got shit to do.

That line, said by Chris Tucker’s Smokey, and Ice Cube’s character Craig getting fired on his day off set the stage for the events that take place in Friday. On the surface, it’s one of many weed jokes made throughout the movie (most of which was filmed on the street where director F. Gary Gray grew up, with actors told not to wear red clothing like Bloods gang members because this was Crips territory), but it also reveals more about these two best friends living in South Central L.A. It’s the sort of joke people make when they can’t talk honestly about how hard they have it. That’s what makes Friday so singular: Not only did it find a way of communicating what life was like in the neighborhood while keeping things fun, it paved the way for a certain tone