Whose punchline is it anyway?

You had to be there.

It was just that kind of a scene. Me, waiting alone in an airport at 12 midnight, laughing my ass off, surrounded by strangers who were casting me suspicious glances.

I wasn’t on medication and I wasn’t talking to an imaginary friend. I was, however, listening to a CD – Robin Williams, A Night at the Met, recorded during his 1986 performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Listening to him describe how his sweet bride has turned into a very pregnant, screaming whale in the operating room is enough to send somebody rolling on the floor even without the benefit of images.

You’re there with her, breathing, because you have this myth that you’re sharing the birth experience. I don’t think so. Nope. Unless you’re passing a bowling ball, I don’t think so. Unless you’re gonna circumcise yourself with a chainsaw, I don’t think so. Unless you’re opening an umbrella up your ass, I don’t think so. And you’re there breathing, huff-huff-huff, you’re hyperventilating and she’s looking at you like, "What the fuck are you doing? Why don’t you knock me out, you asshole? "

I am writing about this now because there is a Filipino-American doing live stand-up comedy and is currently the talk of the town. I am writing about this because I am so frustrated for not being able to watch his two shows (work – what a bitch) and whoever is producing Rex Navarete’s shows should consider doing a month-long outing. I am writing about this because last week our dog Freeway somehow got hold of my my copy of George Carlin’s Class Clown and thought the disc looked good enough for fetch. My husband had consigned my collection of stand-up comedy CDs to the bottom of the rack and I was forced to gather them up and put them some place else.

Looking at the CDs and VHS tapes threw me back to the 1980s when as a teenage girl I was hooked on FEN (the channel to watch before cable came to town for those too young to remember). It had shows that featured almost-famous stand-up comedians that would later make headlines for one reason or another: Ellen DeGeneres, Chris Rock, Paul Reiser, Jeff Foxworthy, Paula Poundstone, Paul Rodriguez, Richard Lewis and Jim Carrey. Then I got hold of two Betamax tapes, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious and Raw , and on a trip to Angeles City, bought a copy of a seemingly stoned Richard Pryor doing a live show in New Orleans. A few years later came Andrew Dice Clay’s The Diceman Cometh, that foul-mouthed, leather-jacketed gigolo-wannabe who picked on everyone from Little Miss Muppet to the Japanese. These acts shook me out of my The Huxtables kind of comedy. (Hey, at the time, The Simpsons was considered groundbreaking!) Apparently a family member found these tapes offensive and threw them away.

Too late. I was hooked.

It’s remarkable how comedy can be such a barometer of the times, a social commentary on a culture, a race, gender politics, governments and the world. Attitudes about sex often date a comedic act. In the late ’80s, when people were just starting to understand AIDS, all comedians had something to say about wearing a condom during sex. ("We fucking hate rubbeeeers!" screamed Sam Kinison in a 1988 concert.)

In the 1970s, a black-haired, banjo-playing (like the goddamned "Shakey’s guy") Steve Martin poked fun at people who still thought smoking was okay. In the 1980s, Robin Wlliams fixated on the Ayatollah, Khadafi and Ronald Reagan; Gary Shandling on cholesterol levels; Richard Lewis on shrinks; Arsenio Hall on fake breasts and La Toya Jackson. In the Jerry Seinfeld decade of the 1990s, Seinfeld put clean back onto the stage, picking on the Ginzu knife, airlines and McDonald’s.

In the 2000’s, which is starting to look like a Ray Romano decade (he’s just written a book, voiced over a movie and stars in a highly rated TV show), Middle East terrorists have been the flavor of the past year. If David Letterman’s shedding a tear on his first live show in New York after 9/11 is any indication, tragedy of this magnitude is off-limits – for a few days. Comedians, after all, are comedians. They live for material like, yeah, a famine for example. ("We went to an Ethiopian restaurant. Oh, this will be a quick meal." – Billy Crystal.)

The western comedy stage is also very much about politics. Politicians are fair game. If they’re caught with their pants down, they’ll be kicked from North America to Europe to Australia where there is a huge market for stand-up comedy. And you won’t find a single pikon politician threatening to sue or an overweight actress crying foul because people are commenting on her weight. (Hello? That’s the tradeoff?)

You wonder if Aristotle ever cracked jokes at the Lyceum in Athens, like: A guy goes into a bar, orders a drink, takes a swig, and loudly proclaims, "All lawyers are assholes." A drunk at the other end of the bar says, "Wait a minute, sir, I take umbrage at that remark." The drinker replies, "Why, are you a lawyer?" The inebriated says, "No, I’m an asshole."

Richard Pryor was one of those whose comedy was a retelling of the experience of belonging to a minority culture. In his New Orleans show, he said something like "For a white man and a black man, the siren on a police car means two different things." He wasn’t saying anything new, but he did his comedy with such depth and range that to simply remember him as a foul-mouthed comedian (the way Andrew Dice Clay is dismissed by many) is missing the entire point of his work.

Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock have both said that Richard Pryor, now afflicted with Parkinsons, was a major influence in their craft. Their language certainly shows this. Eddie Murphy has that acute sense for situation comedy – the same way Ellen DeGeneres has. In The Beginning, the already-out-by-then Degeneres tells a long-winded story that seems to go nowhere but eventually lands right where it should be, tying her act’s end to the beginning. DeGeneres has the storyteller’s touch, whether she’s talking about God (a woman, naturally) or bringing up Gloria Estefan’s hairstyle to deal with forgetting people’s names. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans for her Beacon Theater concert, the comedian says: You don’t want some outfit that someone can have the exact same thing when you show up at a party. It’s happened to me twice – and both times it was William Shatner.

Unfortunately, Chris Rock in his Roll with New (1997) and Bigger and Blacker (1999) is just, er, lost. Issues that have the potential to be funny he chose to be a pig about – all but blaming working women for the decline of western civilization. Between comedy taking the wrong stand on serious issues and comedy that ridicules people – forgive me, but I would rather have the latter. At least you can roll with it.

Of course, anger has a lot to do with comedy. You can’t have one without the other. Some of the best comedians are angry comedians. Even Jerry Seinfeld, I suppose, hates people. In I’m Telling You for the Last Time, he takes on the New York City cabbie: So what’s with the cab drivers and the B.O.? How long are these shifts? Do they ever stop or do they just get in the cab and just drive until they’re dead? That’s what it smells like. Oh, man. Then they have that cherry stuff , so you get the cherry B.O. , which is supposed to be some sort of improvement, though I can’t imagine fruit going that long without showering.

One of my favorite stand-ups is the late comic genius Sam Kinison, the Screamer (he also had this giggle.) He made an impact long before Dice Clay began deconstructing Mother Goose rhymes to include four-letter words or Robert Schimmel talking about his, er, quality time with inflatable love dolls. Kinison’s trademark scream, oh-oh-auuuuuuuughhhh! has been described by many as the real deal. Real pain, real anger, real comedy.

Chris Rock said of Kinison in GQ: "Look at me. There’s no me without Pryor, Murphy, Cosby, Sam, a lot of other people. But Sam – I don’t even know who he sounds like. He was such an original."

In his 1988 album Have You Seen Me Lately, Kinison doesn’t spare anybody or anything: Drugs (What are they talking about, Rock Against Drugs? It’s like Christians against Christ. Rock created drugs.); women (My idea of a perfect date is take them out, take them home, [have sex with them], steal $30 out of their purse, crawl out of the window and never call them again); lesbians and gays (suffice it to say that a lot of the material is about oral sex); and the Pope (Yeah, I thought the bullet-proof glass was a real statement. We know God protects the holy father, but just in case…) .

"Not a good role model for impressionable youths," he admits with a giggle at the start of the show.

When a comedian’s anger at the world turns into anger at a particular bitch or bastard who left him for somebody else, it’s like skating on thin ice. Most comedians have two wives, they like to say: the ugly/lazy/fat one they make fun of and the real one they come home to. Sam Kinison, on the other hand, seemed to have just one wife: The one who left him, the one he screamed about onstage. When he sang Wild Thing during a show, he changed the lyrics to: Wild Thing, you took everything. You’re a lying, untrustable, unfaithful tramp and I think I love you. I’ll never forgive you. How do you live with yourself? You never loved me. You used meeee! Why didn’t you tell me you were a demon from hell? And finally, I hope you slide under a gas truck and taste your own fucking blood. Die! Die! Die!

Steven Wright has written jokes where I just marvel at the construction," said Dennis Miller, himself a smarmy political observer. (Miller’s trademark: obscure allusions.)

Wright is a one-liner kind of comedian. He’s a comic’s comic writer. He performs with a deadpan face and a hello-are-you-alive voice. He’s the exact opposite of Robin Williams, who goes to the audiences when performing. Steven Wright stays put. If there were a hurricane in the room, he’s the guy to hold on to. His jokes elicit laughter at split-second intervals: People who get it right away, people who get it a second later, two second later, and those who don’t get it at all.

Some of my favorite Steven Wright lines:

All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.

I just bought a decaffeinated coffee table. You can’t even tell the difference.

I went to a cafe that had the sign "We serve breakfast at any time." So I went in and ordered French toast during the revolution.

What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

For Sale: Parachute. Only used once, never opened, small stain.

Wright’s topics are the classics. They don’t date his act. They don’t antagonize living things and they stay on. His performance in 1989’s Comic Relief 3 is still being talked about (Well, Robin Williams’ performance too, where he suggests that porn flicks should use classically-trained Shakespearean actors).

In that gig, Wright said: Whenever I pick up someone hitchhiking, I always wait a few minutes before I say anything…Then I say, sooooo.... how far do you think you’re going? Put your seatbelt on, I wanna try something. I saw it in a cartoon, but I’m pretty sure I can do it.

And ended with: I don’t have a child now, but when I do have a child, I’m gonna buy one of those strollers for twins. I’m gonna tell him he was a twin, too. "You were a twin and your brother didn’t listen to me…"

I still laugh when I hear these CDs again and again. Laughing, after all, is like farting. To quote Richard Pryor, "If you don’t fart, you blow your brains out."

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E-mail the author at crazyquilt@antisocial.com. But she’s really not – antisocial, we mean.