By Frank “Smokin” Truatt
We headed back to the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, New Jersey on Valentine’s Day for something different. After a bunch of musical concerts, this one was destined to put a smile on my face. It was Jay Leno with a sold-out performance at the theater. Jay put on a great show and had the crowd laughing for about an hour and a half. After the concert, I started thinking about the bunch of comedy albums that I have bought over the years. Out of the hundreds of musical albums that I purchased, there are a handful of those comedy albums that I just needed to have at the time. Unlike a music album, once you’ve heard a comedy album, you’re probably not going to play it again for a while.
Believe it or not, my love for the comedy album probably came from my many visits to the dentist’s office when I was a kid. He would always put on a Smother’s Brothers album when I was in the chair getting those cavities taken care of. I guess he thought it would relax his patients, although you didn’t dare laugh while you were in the chair! One of my first comedy albums was a 1968 Bill Cosby album called “200 M.P.H.” with a hilarious story about a car he bought from Carol Shelby years before Bill went to the dark side. In 1973, David Frye released “Richard Nixon: a Fantasy.” David was an impressionist who took us into the White House during Nixon’s Watergate troubles. It was hilarious at the time, although New York radio refused to play commercials promoting the album which they considered may not be in “good taste.” Richard Pryor’s Grammy Award winning 1974 album was great as was George Carlin’s “Class Clown” with those seven words still not used on television today. However, the real heroes of comedy in the 1970’s were Cheech and Chong. I did buy a bunch of their albums as one was funnier than the next.
Of course, humor is up to the listener and what we considered funny then, may not be considered as being that funny today. Cheech and Chong’s humor had a lot to do with marijuana, not legal at the time. I must admit that playing some of these old albums still puts a smile on my face even though I’ve heard them a ton of times. Maybe it’s not the jokes themselves anymore, but the feeling I get from when I first heard them in a more innocent time when I was a teenager getting ready to discover a new world, but knowing that whatever came down the road, we could all take a moment or two to laugh at ourselves and the world around us. Everything was going to be just fine!
