Abstract
This chapter revisits three instances of controversial stand-up comedy on US network television in the 1990s: Andrew Dice Clay and Martin Lawrence’s Saturday Night Live hosting gigs (1990 and 1993, respectively) and Bill Hicks’s 1993 Late Show with David Letterman appearance, all of which were censored or regulated in some fashion. Two historical contexts, one cultural and the other industrial, help to frame the cultural significance of these moments. The first: the political and social battles over art, free speech, and political correctness usually characterized as the ‘culture wars’. The second: US network television during the ‘multichannel transition’. These performances characterize the uneasy presence of stand-up on US TV during a moment that shaped public discourses about comedy and offense. They also reveal a deeper history of debates over humor and political correctness—a history worth examining at a time when these topics are so central to discourse about American comedy.
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Elkins, E. (2016). Excessive Stand-Up, the Culture Wars, and ’90s TV. In: Bucaria, C., Barra, L. (eds) Taboo Comedy. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59338-2_8
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