Hello, everyone. It's your old friend Will here with another one of our periodic solo episodes.

It's a truism, or perhaps a cliche, to say that comedy ages faster than other art forms,

but I think this is only partially true. I've been lucky enough to see films by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton with present-day audiences.

The complexity, ingenuity, and sheer athleticism of their physical and visual comedy

set a standard that has been difficult to maintain, and it's heartening to hear audiences

laugh at the exact same moments as the first audiences a century ago. It feels a bit like communing with the past.

I've also heard audiences respond the same as they ever have to the slow burn comedy of Laurel and

Hardy, or the base elemental slapstick of the Three Stooges. If there's one thing everybody

understands across time and space, it's getting hit in the head with a wrench.

But it's true that a lot of comedy does grow obsolete very quickly. So much of comedy is informed by the

ambient taboos and anxieties of the day, not to mention topical circumstances, and when that

context disappears, so too do the laughs.

Lenny Bruce probably was very funny in the context of a smoky Greenwich Village nightclub in the

1950s, and Mort Saul reading the newspaper on stage and sticking it to those clowns in Washington

probably had a very intense charge back when those references to Lyndon Johnson were current.

Not everything has to stand the test of time.

Even so, I like spending time in the past, especially with comedy, because sometimes I like to put myself in the mind of an earlier audience and try to hear the joke the way

they did. It feels a little like time travel. I'm also interested in the specific pleasures offered by

certain of my forgotten guys. Just because the rest of the world has moved on doesn't necessarily

mean the past, doesn't have things to enjoy.

All of this is to say that our subject today requires more than the usual amount of introduction. In his day, he was one of the most famous entertainers in America.

In 1947, the year that his radio show was number one in the ratings, his face graced

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