Because I am a big fan of the podcast “Doug Loves Movies,” I listen to it religiously. They can be hit-or-miss, but are most often a source for good comedy. Recently, host Doug Benson had a show that was a exceptionally funny, a hoot from start to finish. The reason? An all-woman panel consisting of Sarah Silverman, Tig Notaro, Amy Schumer and Nikki Glaser. Just brilliant.

That recollection kept coming back to me as I read We Killed, an oral history about the women in American comedy. The book (through countless interviews with both female and male comics, managers, bookers, writers, directors, etc.) goes to great lengths to show the reader that women weren’t always included in the history of comedy. Yael Kohen tacitly poses the question, “Why the hell not?”

Set up with a who’s who “cast of characters” in the beginning of the book instead of at the back, you immediately become familiar with the many women who having been struggling to change the scenario for decades. It begins with pioneers like Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Elaine May struggling in the clubs. It then goes through the television years with innovators like Carol Burnett, Rosanne Barr and the women of SNL. Finally, it finishes up with the current scene, where a large number of women are thriving in the comedy scene, selling out arenas and large venues.

The book is a terrific overview of both comedy and society. In a country where women still struggle to make equal wages, the author shows that the tentacles of that discrepancy are far-reaching, but not in a preachy way. Kohen lets the people who were there do the talking, with thumbnail intros that set the stage for time, place and cultural climate. She includes pretty much everyone who has something to say. The reader would be hard-pressed to think of any exclusions.

The book is also great fun. There are stories, reminiscences, recollections and, of course,  jokes. It’s a quick read from cover to cover.

But do what I did. When you get to the end, flip it over and read it again. It’s worth the ride. In the end, the book definitely kills.

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Kevin Pollak’s debut book How I Slept My Way to The Middle adds “bestselling author” to his  already impressive list of achievements. Pollak is a comedian (performing on seemingly non-stop tours in comedy clubs throughout the country), an impressionist (his Christopher Walken and Peter Falk are spot on and hysterical), an actor, (his debut was in George Lucas’s Tolkien-esque Willow and he gave an outstanding performance in the ensemble thriller The Usual Suspects), as well as the host of a successful podcast. And though I haven’t heard him sing (I have watched him play poker) – Kevin Pollak seemingly does it all.

How I Slept My Way to The Middle is his story of how he made it in show business. An interestingly enough tale – from listening to his first Bill Cosby album at age ten, to the golden moment of his first appearance on the The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, to the surprise on stage meeting with Bill Clinton at Carnegie Hall. (How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Practice. Practice.)

It’s great stuff. It’s always great stuff – sitting with the folks, making them laugh, getting that first taste of performing (in this case with Rich Little) and then it’s on to stardom. We love it. We always love it. It’s who we want to be and we’ve read it again and again and again. The names change, the venues change, the story never does.

(Cue the record scratch – if any of you remembers vinyl?)

Not this time. Pollak has packed his book with not only amazing stories from his life (and there are many) but with enough celebrity anecdotes that this could almost be shelved with the quotation books.

This is great stuff.  On his first The Tonight Show appearance with Johnny Carson, Pollak does his killer Peter Falk impression complete with his “wandering” eye. (Peter Falk had one glass eye which Pollak could imitate.) Carson loved it so much that on his second appearance he has Pollak teach him how to do it – on the show. He would go on and do it for Pollak every time he appeared as a guest. The great follow up to that is when Pollak meets Peter Falk, Falk asks him how he does it. Falk says I know how I do it, but how do you do it?

And the Zellig-like Pollak is everywhere with everybody and lives to write about it – listening to Marty Scorsese’s incessant obscure film references on the set of Casino, having his mom hit on Jack Nicholson while filming A Few Good Men, standing on an apple crate to kiss Darryl Hannah in a scene from Grumpy Old Men with her then boyfriend John F. Kennedy Jr. on set.

This is a very funny, real insider look at the “business.”

How I Slept My Way to The Middle has two forewords (Pollak apparently couldn’t keep people from wanting to be part of this book.)  The first is by Penn Jillette, the second by Billy Bob Thornton (who at one point confuses him with film director Sydney Pollack).

Entrepreneur and EarthLink founder Sky Dayton writes, “I’ve founded companies worth billions of dollars, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish I was Kevin Pollak.”

You and me both.

Larry Dorfman is the author of  “The Snark Handbook” series. Follow him on Twitter @SnarkHandBook and on Facebook here.

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Jack Carter was a hoot. His patter was rapid-fire and pointed. Coming up in the school of insult comics he held his own with Don Rickles and the rest. And while he was deserving of it he never really attained that headliner status, which is quite a shame.

Born Jack Chakrin, he changed his name early on. For Jewish comics in those days if you wanted to “fit in,” if you didn’t want to sound “too ethnic,” if you wanted to work, you changed your name. And Carter worked a lot.

Named by many as one of the most prolific stand-ups of his time, Carter started performing at age 19 and has never really stopped since. Even today he remains viable and in the spotlight with a small role on the Showtime series Shameless.

Trying to make a name for oneself in comedy during the time of such luminaries as Milton Berle and Sid Caesar couldn’t have been an easy task. Carter however had a shtick that was fresh and memorable and distinguished him from other comedians.

Like many of those contemporaries he started out doing stand-up in Vaudeville and Burlesque shows. He later went on the famous radio talent show “Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour” and won twice.

He then found local success on a small-scale variety show called Cavalcade of Stars but was soon lured away by NBC to star on his own show, aptly called The Jack Carter Show. It was the beginning days of television and there was plenty of opportunity. It was on right before Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and was a major success.

That led to other bookings. Fred Allen featured him on his radio show. Ed Sullivan (who really loved comics) was a huge fan and Carter made a number of appearances.

However he loved playing Vegas most of all, describing his act as “incomparable”. Other comics tried to duplicate (or steal) his style to little success. He was a spot-on mimic and known throughout town as a “comic’s comic”.  He was also one of the biggest lounge acts there along with Jan Murray and Shecky Greene.

A few years ago he was in a terrible car accident and lost his wife. He also sustained injuries that plague him today. However his mind is still sharp and his sense of humor as keen as it’s ever been.

 Visit our AmericasComedy.Com Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!

They called him “Brash.” “Off the Wall.” “One-of-a-Kind.”  Not words or phrases that get used much anymore but in the 1950s and 60s, that combination of social satire, dance, and pantomime and an unusual but “hip” delivery earned you those labels…provided, of course, you were funny. And Dick Shawn was, more often than not, a minor riot.

Born Richard Schulefand in upstate New York, he grew up in a steel-mining town near Buffalo. Four people in a single room in the back of the family clothing store, selling to mine workers. He wanted out, so he pursued a dream of playing major league baseball. He was good and soon got a contract from the Chicago White Sox.  But shortly after, he was drafted into the service and his baseball career ended abruptly.

In the service, he tried out for the USO. He had always been funny and they let him in to entertain the troops. He loved it and decided he might pursue a career in comedy.

After a short time at the U. of Miami on the GI bill, he realized that stand-up was his true calling and left school for New York City. He followed the path. He tried out for anything that came up. He did as many live shows as possible. Then finally, a successful audition for Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts” got him booked to compete on the show. He sat down and wrote a slew of material and changed his last name to Shawn, thinking it would be easier to remember. He didn’t win but, over the course of the show, he’d written enough material to have what he felt was “a real act.”

Over the next few years, he worked the nightclub scene feverishly. He got noticed and soon did the Ed Sullivan Show. Ed loved him and called him back seven more times. That attention led to getting key stage roles, including a part replacing Zero Mostel in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” And while he was great on the small screen and the stage, he began to long for the big screen.

He auditioned and got parts in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “The Producers.”

But the wanderlust got to him and he wanted the immediacy of live comedy. He wrote a one-man show called “The Second Greatest Entertainer in the World,” a weird amalgam of songs, sketches, satire, philosophy and pantomime… a show that pushed the envelope of the day with great force….a strange mix that was part “Waiting for Godot,” part Salvatore Dali and a big part vaudeville. He liked to challenge his audience and the show was different and exciting. It got rave reviews and won a number of awards.

And then, in 1987, while performing it at a college in California, he suddenly fell forward on the stage during a particularly dark bit about the Holocaust. The audience, thinking it was a part of his act, started to yell things, all the while laughing uproariously… until someone finally realized it was real and that he had suffered a fatal heart attack.

But Schulenfand would have liked that. It would have made him chuckle.

Larry Dorfman is the author of  “The Snark Handbook” series. Follow him on Twitter @SnarkHandBook and on Facebook here.

Vaudeville: Defined as a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the U.S. and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Incorporating musicians, dancers, trained animals, magicians, female impersonators, acrobats, jugglers…you name it…but  most of all, comedians.

When you look at the early days of comedy, you run into so many names that got their start in vaudeville.  Abbott and Costello. Jack Benny. Milton Berle. The Marx Brothers. All the greats.

Then came the rise of broadcast radio. Then came the Great Depression. Then came talking pictures. And vaudeville soon went away.

Many of the comics that made their livelihood in vaudeville had a tough time. Some went on the road. Some found a home on radio. And many went upstate to work in the Catskill Mountains, The Borscht Belt.

The “Catskills,” about 100 miles north of New York City, and nestled in the area of the same name, were made up by a group of resorts that were made popular by Jewish vacationers, mostly from New York, New Jersey and New England.  In their heyday, they were something else.

Grossingers.  Brickman’s.  Browns and Kutsher’s Hotel (the resort that inspired the film “Dirty Dancing)  each offered all-inclusive vacations with meals and a host of activities. And many of those activities included a “Who’s Who” of comedians.  Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Don Rickles, Lenny Bruce; all got their start playing these resorts.

You had to be good to play them more than once. It was a very picky audience. They were there to eat, to sun…and to laugh. And you had to be funny or you were wouldn’t last a season.

Jan Murray was no exception.  Born in the Bronx as Murray Janofsky, he loved comedy and began during childhood, acting out comedy routines he’d seen at the local theatre for his bedridden mother. He was good at it.

At 18, he headed up to the Catskills and honed his craft. He was well-liked and was placed as a “Tummler,” a kind of social director with a sense of humor.  He was a huge hit. Like many of the greats, he was considered a comic’s comic. Many of the bigger names would end their shows and go over to where he was playing to catch his sets.  He worked that circuit for 15 years.

In the late 40’s, Vegas beckoned. By this time he’d earned a reputation as a “marquee” performer and took that reputation to Nevada, playing the biggest hotels that were reserved for the biggest stars. Sinatra loved him. Dean Martin loved him. Sammy Davis Jr. loved him. And through Ed Sullivan and the Tonight Show, much of America loved him.

He saw that the real money was in television and he soon made his way out to L.A., where he started a new chapter in his career as a game show host, the first established comedian to do so.  Starting in the mid-50s, he hosted Blind Date, Dollar a Second, Treasure Hunt, The Jan Murray Show and Chain Letter and gained a huge audience. Later, he was a regular on The Hollywood Squares and even made a few forays into film. But stand-up remained his first love and he did it until he retired in 2000 at age 83.  He passed away six years later.

His was a story that’s been told many times, about the beginning of stand-up comedy… and one that deserves to be remembered.

Larry Dorfman is the author of “The Snark Handbook” series. Follow him on Twitter @SnarkHandBook and on Facebook here.

Doing stand-up in the 1950s was a tough gig. You had to play dive bars, strip joints, union meetings and Veterans of Foreign Wars halls. You had to put up with bad food, bad equipment and even worse attitudes.  And you had to have skin made out of leather as well as an iron-clad ego to boot.

Born in New York, Jackie Vernon was a gentle man. He was low-key. His stock in trade was a self-deprecating humor with an underbelly of social satire and caustic wit.  ”The King of Deadpan,” as he was known. A precursor to the comedy that Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg became famous doing.  A round peg in a square hole.  He knew what he liked to do: make people laugh…but man, did he have a tough time of it.

After kicking around the country for years, playing the aforementioned venues, he finally headed back to New York. Once there, he began to hang around other comics, people like Don Rickles, Jackie Gleason and Pat Cooper. He got an agent and went up whenever an opportunity arose. Soon, he began to get somewhat better jobs outside of New York and would travel frequently to work. While in a club in Winslow, Ontario, Steve Allen saw him and persuaded him to try out for his show Celebrity Talent Scouts. His career began to take off.  And it was just in time, he said in later interviews, as he was about to quit show business for good.

He put out recordings. He got a gig opening for Judy Garland.  He appeared a number of times on the Ed Sullivan Show, all throughout the 60s. He was a favored guest on The Merv Griffin Show. In the 70’s, he was always available to be on the dais for the latest Celebrity Roast, a fixture for television in those days. But he never really achieved the fame he deserved. Ironically, his biggest “successes” came from doing the voices for Christmas specials, most notably Frosty the Snowman and Frosty’s Winter Wonderland.

His was comedy that was ahead of its time, brilliant and occasionally caustic. There was a bit about turning a watermelon into a house pet. Another bit about traveling a great distance to see the Grand Canyon, only to find it closed. One of his best routines (shown in the video below) was called “The Vacation Slides,” which involved a “clicker” with which he gave a fake presentation of a slide show, making surreal comments the whole time. Audiences would roar.

His more famous quotes include: “When I was born my father spent three weeks trying to find a loophole in my birth certificate,” “I was so unpopular as a kid, Dale Carnegie once hit me in the mouth” and “I called Dial-a-Prayer and they hung up on me.”

You sensed he never really felt comfortable up there. He developed an affectation of carrying a cornet with him as a prop during his stand-up, like Henny Youngman did with his violin. Most times, he worked to the band or the club employees, who all thought he was a riot. Vernon was a comic’s comic before it became a way-too-common and overused phrase.

His is the story of many of the comics of the time…very, very funny but never really given his full due. After a while, he began playing Vegas, went the blue route, ended up opening for Rickles and many of his other cronies whose stars had risen faster and further than his.

Even his personal life was tumultuous. He was married a number of times, possibly eight or nine. Money was always an issue.  And through it all, there was a sadness there…. it made sense that he identified very heavily with Charlie Chaplin.  And when he finally died from a heart attack at age 63, the first lines from Chaplin’s most famous song resonated: Smile, Tho’ your heart is aching; Smile, Even tho’ it’s breaking…

(Larry Dorfman is the author of “The Snark Handbook” series. Follow him on Twitter @SnarkHandBook and on Facebook here. For more comedy news and exclusive interviews visit our AmericasComedy.com Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!)

Monday, April 23: A Chinese manufacturing company has come under severe criticism after unveiling a line of sunglasses they’ve tastefully dubbed… the Helen Keller collection. And if the name wasn’t bad enough, their ad slogan capped it: “Perfect for any blind date!”

Tuesday, April 24:  Residents of the Austrian berg of Fucking will be voting on whether to change the town’s name. They’re tired of the crank calls and practical jokes. One local suggested just making the “F” into an “S”, saying it would be easy to paint over all the signs and besides, it’s a somewhat safer practice…around the world.

Wednesday, April 25: Think Like a Man handily beat out The Lucky One at the box office last weekend…with most men thinking, “I AM definitely the lucky one for not having to sit through another crappy weep-fest from Nicholas Sparks.”

Thursday, April 26: Details on the Secret Service scandal continue to come out. The latest is that the lead agent assumed the cost was $47 when, in actuality, the hooker wanted $800…serves ‘em right for bringing on agents that used to protect the congressmen working on the budget committee.

Friday, April 27: A new study finds that more Mexicans are now leaving the U.S. than entering, reversing a four-decade wave of immigration. Given the economy, the job situation, and the tough laws that have been coming from the Border States, it makes sense. So basically, the wealthy will now have to raise their kids themselves.

(Larry Dorfman is the author of “The Snark Handbook” series. Follow him on Twitter @SnarkHandBook and on Facebook here. For more comedy news and exclusive interviews visit our AmericasComedy.com Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!)

(Larry Dorfman is the author of “The Snark Handbook” series. Follow him on Twitter @SnarkHandBook and on Facebook here. For more comedy news and exclusive interviews visit our AmericasComedy.com Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!)

Monday, April 16: CBS News reported that a new poll says 21% of Americans would give up sex for a year to keep Internet access. For many Americans (mostly men) those two things aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Hey, relax.. Japan came in at 56%… (Or didn’t, as the case may be).

Tuesday, April 17: Newt Gingrich was bitten by a penguin at the St. Louis Zoo. Must have been protecting his little ones from what probably looked to him like a giant seal.

Wednesday, April 18: An appearance of a hologram of Tupac Shakur amazed and/or freaked out the crowd at the Coachella Music Festival this past weekend…although the effect was quickly ruined when it began exchanging gunfire with a hologram of Biggie Smalls. No one was hurt but it’s a good bet that most of the 100K kids attending crapped their lowrider jeans.

Thursday, April 19: Looking to one-up Arizona’s newest abortion law that says life begins at the start of a woman’s last period, rather than at fertilization, Oklahoma announced today a new law that states that conception begins after the 2nd Cosmopolitan or the 3rd Pinot Grigio.

Friday, April 20: John Edwards, once ridiculed for getting $400 haircuts in his pre-scandal days, has been seen going to Supercuts for the $12.95 special. Well, he’s had to find ways to cut costs on all his luxuries. Word is he just put in an application for the Secret Service.

(Larry Dorfman is the author of “The Snark Handbook” series. Follow him on Twitter @SnarkHandBook and on Facebook here. For more comedy news and exclusive interviews visit our AmericasComedy.com Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!)