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Much credit also goes to his charismatic original host, Martin Lawrence, a cruise missile of a performer who roasted audience members savagely.
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Simmons made stand-up seem flamboyant, confident and cool. The show didn’t just shine a light on brilliant black comics it also left behind the brick-wall observational comedy that dominated the previous decade. What also stood out about the “Def Comedy” style was its relative absence of anxiety or self-deprecation, the meat and potatoes of much comedy. The comic Colin Quinn once described the content to me as “almost gynecological.” There was no such thing as a “Caroline’s Comedy Hour” type, but “Def Comedy Jam” became shorthand for a profane act that swaggered with the bravado of gangsta rap, in which the jokes were acted out as much as told, and the subject matter kept a tight focus on sex.
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“Def Comedy Jam” is the rare, if not only, stand-up series to have a signature aesthetic, a house style. Simmons put this on HBO, white and black audiences watched in huge numbers, turning “Def Comedy Jam” into a platform that made overnight stars. White people were the outsiders or entirely irrelevant. In these rooms, black comedians built bits with different references and assumptions. At a time when the most storied clubs mainly booked white comics, pioneering institutions like the Uptown Comedy Club in Harlem and the Comedy Act Theater in Los Angeles provided an alternative. Far more successfully than rivals like “Comic View,” his “Def Comedy Jam” translated the atmosphere of the black comedy club for a national audience. With the major network talk shows then rarely booking young black comics, particularly those who relied on cursing, the producer Russell Simmons saw an opportunity. Watch these shows now (DVDs are available, but many sets are on YouTube), and you’ll find the density of funny people exceeds anything on television now.
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While critics zeroed in on the show’s vulgarity, which seems tame today, they underplayed the staggering amount of talent, young artists poised for major careers like Chris Tucker, Bernie Mac, Jamie Foxx, Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey, Tracy Morgan, Kevin Hart and J. The show, he argued, “creates the impression that black comics are somehow incapable of performing without using smutty language.” Needless to say, no critic ever drew similar conclusions about Andrew Dice Clay. In a sanctimonious 1994 essay in The New York Times, a critic wrote that the language and attitude of “Def Comedy Jam” was “reprehensible,” barely mentioning the quality of the performers. “Def Comedy Jam,” which is returning for the second time with a new title, “ All Def Comedy,” for one episode on Saturday, also faced the same issues that black comics of the era did: being pigeonholed by critics who single-mindedly focused on the profanity and applied moral standards never used for their white counterparts. Shows filled with stand-up sets get less respect than even soap operas. That this trailblazing showcase for black comedy is routinely overlooked in discussions of the most important television shows is partly because of timing (after the comedy boom went bust, and before television’s new golden age) and genre. Before “Veep,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Sex and the City,” there was “Def Comedy Jam,” one of the first hit comedies on HBO, often beating its network competition in ratings on Friday nights throughout much of the 1990s.