Eleanor Crowder reviews Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph Nesteroff (Abrams Press, New York, NY, 2023), 312 pages.
Kliph Nesteroff would make a great dinner guest. He’s a stand-up comedian himself, and I find myself listening for the punch line in his paragraphs. His third book, Outrageous, often reads as if spoken aloud. I wonder, did he record in audio before the work of tracking quotes and listing footnotes was appended? The acerbic voice of his jaded comedian asks for a cymbal ding as the pages progress. His accumulated wealth of detail threatens to sink him for me until I find a jaunty patter voice in my head and come to enjoy his structure, letting comic delivery build his point. This is very much a professional comic’s book for lovers of American film and television culture of the last 50 years.
Outrageous: A history of showbiz and the culture wars. I was intrigued by both aspects of that subtitle. Then progressively mystified as I read. Despite his Canadian origins, Nesteroff’s work is completely focused on America. And on American business-oriented film and network television. His sources are newspapers and industry journals from across the continent, TV and radio interviews and recordings. Late night hosts, shock jocks, editorials, letters to editors: his exhaustive research mines print archives since the 1910s, and recordings of radio and TV commentary and patter, with a heavy emphasis on material from the late 1960s through 70s. Nesteroff’s “showbiz” translates most often to anecdotes from stand-up comedy and quotes from Variety magazine about the music industry. This is cultural history from within the bubble. His book assumes a reader’s deep knowledge of American political discourse and an habitual viewer’s recognition of the broadcast patterns of American television from 1950 to 1985. His history is delivered in tessellation, detail piled on detail.
I picked up the book expecting a clarification of the term “culture wars.” But Nesteroff’s use of Culture War is singular and always capitalized, not the looser term of the title page now frequently heard. As I encounter it currently, it can mean any public conversation where strongly entrenched points of view cannot meet. What is The Culture War to Nesteroff? His first chapters led me to think, ah, he means anti-black racism in America. Then, no, he is talking of xenophobia directed at incoming waves of immigrants. But no, next his examples document continuing swings of new forms of censorship, followed by comedians who react with appeals to free speech. Then lawmakers and industry executives impose more restrictive guidelines. No sex jokes. No swearing. No xenophobic jokes. No gay jokes. No political jokes. It’s 80 pages in before I find the skeleton underlying all these examples of stand-up comics or musicians pilloried or beaten, of letters published to protest their material, of small victories on stage.
In fact, Nesteroff defines The Culture War right off the top (page 2) but with no fanfare. He says it is a simplistic philosophy: “We are good. They are evil.” He draws from Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965):
‘The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence, set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life… And what is felt to be needed is an all-out crusade. The paranoid spokesman constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.’
Show business was dragged into the culture war and used as a scapegoat. Jazz music, rock music, hip hop. The tango, the jitterbug, the twist. Radio comedy, stand-up comedy, television comedy. All have been blamed for the downfall of America at one time or another, and all have been subject to censorship and suppression as a result. The end is near, we are warned, unless we do something to stop the madness right now.
I return to that introductory essay several times as I read, to orient myself. Understated. Overloaded with stories of unknown personalities. But it does add up to outrageous information. The battle cry of Nesteroff’s title implies a strong statement, but the author’s tone belies it. Chains of examples make his points. Nowhere does the title seem to land in his text. While his chapter on film includes a reveal of the segregationist money behind D.W. Griffiths production of “The Birth of a Nation,” and then parallel detailed analysis of the funding for “Gone with the Wind,” Nesteroff is more usually offhand. He lands his points by implication. He himself seems to have taken on the role of “paranoid spokesman.”
His central point is that profit-taking interests (in the person of the sponsors, the funders of film, the owners of radio and television networks) have warred with artists’ expressive freedom throughout the last century and half. And that the creation of think tanks and multiple foundations by a very few very rich men in the 1950s now plays into America’s current political landscape in a very large way.
Nesteroff traces a line from fear of communism and any form of collectivism to formation of the John Birch Society in 1958 by Robert Welch, then head of the National Association of Manufacturers, and Fred Koch, oil tycoon, who had made his fortune building oil extraction facilities for both the Soviets and for Nazi Germany. Too far right for the Republican Party of the time, Birchers advocated to “save our Christian-style society from destruction.” They saw the Civil Rights movement as “a Commie conspiracy that would lead to a tyrannical dictatorship” (p. 85) and they took direct action against TV personalities with threats and bombings, and more often, letter-writing campaigns. Despite little sympathy for their views, sponsors were easily persuaded to withdraw programming to protect their business interests.
As the John Birch Society fades in support a decade later, the same men transfer their resources to think tanks — the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, The Christian Coalition. Paul Weyrich, Young Republican, letter writer, talk-show host, attracts the money and support of Joseph Coors (beer) and Richard Mellon Scaife to the Heritage Foundation. His plan to restore America underlies today’s MAGA agenda. Weyrich becomes the architect of a plan to bring the untapped voting power of the Evangelical Christian constituency to the New Right agenda. Working with Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant, they create The Moral Majority as a voice of “family values” and then a political force.
Nesteroff continues to trace the offshoots of these foundations as they work to censor school books, block access to abortion, limit the subjects of television and film — White Citizens Council, Stop Immorality on Television, Morality in Media, the Council for National Policy. Quotes from the pamphlets of these organizations, commentary from politicians of the 1970s, editorials, letters: detail brings these voices alive. It’s a terrific feat of research, lively and cumulatively powerful.
His study ends in the early 2000s, when internet use changes the tactics needed to manipulate media.
His Epilogue is a wry account of a Baltimore policeman whose commitment to performing in blackface through the 1970s and 80s, first cost him his job and then became the theme of a bar he operated successfully till 1998. In 2015, “he was back in the news. Now a senior citizen, he resurrected his old blackface act one more time, at a fundraiser for the five police officers implicated in the death of Freddie Gray.” (p. 251)
It took me a second pass to register this as more than a comment on racism in America. Nesteroff writes of the brutality of American police and military forces towards black entertainers earlier in the book but his Epilogue underlines his warning, that large parts of American society remain segregationist, remain misogynist, remain patriarchal, remain violent and ready to use force. Published in 2023, the book is indirect in its analysis, continually smothering stronger points about who pays the bills for “fake news” with his stories of nightclubs and jokes gone flat.
It is entirely possible that Nesteroff’s oddly disjointed book is a product of the times, of the climate of paranoia of which he writes. Of the real danger of speaking more directly. His points are made mostly in the gaps of this book. Which brings me back to my first point: Kliph Nesteroff would be a most entertaining dinner guest. In a world where Trump will be inaugurated without the need for half-naked rioters wearing horns, I’d like to hear what he might really say.
Kliph Nesteroff was a stand-up comedian for eight years (1998-2006) before he became the chronicler of the history of comedy in America, or as he says in a Globe and Mail opinion piece, “a comedy historian – a job that I quite literally made up and then fulfilled.” His much-praised book, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy (Grove Atlantic, 2016), was followed by We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy (Simon and Schuster, 2022). *Born in Canada, from South Slocan, B.C., Nesteroff left high school for a sitcom writing class in Toronto, which led to the stand-up, then writing for the CBC. Nesteroff hosted the Classic Showbiz Talk Show, a live series in Los Angeles that welcomed such comedians as Mel Brooks, Fred Willard, and Laugh-In creator George Schlatter, and for two seasons wrote for television (“The History of Comedy,” CNN). While working on the five-part documentary, “Funny How?”, Nesteroff was based in Hollywood.
Playwright, performer, director, producer: Eleanor Crowder creates productions ranging from experiments in intimate staging to large scale musicals. Her focus is feminist, ecological, forensic. She has worked with actors and audiences from Sioux Lookout to the Sudan to stage shows in caves, rivers, parks, arts centres and most recently at The Gladstone, an Ottawa indie theatre space.
Throughout her career she has trained professional actors, and brought her inclusive practice to community settings, working with children, college and university students, workers, and in healthcare. Her writing includes 18 produced scripts, and commentary for Theatrum and Canadian Theatre Review. Current productions: “The Children” by Lucy Kirkwood, for Bear and Company, and “Mary Poppins” for GNAG Theatre.
Further
- *Sources for Nesteroff’s biographical note include: Abrams Books; Grove Atlantic; “Comedy Historian Kliph Nesteroff Talks Viceland Series ‘Funny How’ by Vish Khanna for Exclaim! (July 9, 2017); and Kliph Nesteroff, “Is ‘cancel culture’ really killing comedy?” in The Globe and Mail (April 12, 2024).
- Is Nesteroff of Doukhobor heritage? Wikipedia
- Chris Yogerst’s review of Outrageous, Los Angeles Review of Books (December 1, 2023).
- Review of Nesteroff’s We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, CBC Books (November 17, 2021).
- Vish Khanna comments on Nesteroff’s The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy, The Next Chapter CBC (December 29, 2017).
- Nesteroff talks about Outrageous with Marc Maron (WTF podcast) at New York Public Library on YouTube (November 29, 2023).
- An excerpt from Outrageous is available at Lithub, the section on whether Life of Brian is comedy or blasphemy.
