Laugh Tracks: The Return of the Comedy Album

WSJ contributor Don Steinberg laughs it up with Evan Newmark over what he sees as the return of the comedy album. photo: Getty Images.

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Bob Newhart on 'The Ed Sullivan Show,' in 1961.

At the Bowery Poetry Club in lower Manhattan, Lee Camp swaggers onto the stage and launches into an hourlong set of flame-throwing antiestablishment comedy. In the back of the room, an audio technician watches sound waves dance on a Mac laptop screen. Mr. Camp is recording a comedy album tonight, a CD to be titled "Pepper Spray the Tears Away."

That's right: a comedy album.

They were rendered obsolete, but never killed off entirely, by the rise of cable TV and home video in the 1980s, when it became easy to watch comedy, not just listen to it. Now they're multiplying again, even in the age of YouTube and podcasts and video-on-demand. Definitive numbers are hard to come by, but more than 100 comedy albums were released in the U.S. in 2011, even more than in the format's golden era, the 1960s and 1970s. Then, 1961 was the year with the most releases, at about 60.

Classic Comedy Albums

Watch video clips from some classic albums and vote for your favorite.

Comedy Central Records, a Viacom spinoff that since 2002 has helped revive the format, released 27 comedy albums last year, its most ever. Those included "Hilarious" by Louis C.K., which won the Grammy Award for comedy (yes, the Recording Academy still presents that), as well as Grammy-nominated "Finest Hour" by Patton Oswalt and CDs by "Daily Show" comics Lewis Black and Wyatt Cenac. Other comedians with albums in 2011 included Kathy Griffin, Denis Leary, Whitney Cummings, Norm MacDonald, Daniel Tosh, Brian Regan, Lisa Lampanelli, Marc Maron, and, at age 85, Jonathan Winters. Jimmy Fallon plans to release a comedy album this June, his first since 2002.

Mike Nichols and Elaine May made classic comedy albums.

Even if the number of comedy LP releases is rising, sales are another story. The 200 best-selling comedy albums of 2011 sold just over two million units combined, led by Lonely Island's "Turtleneck & Chain" at about 215,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. By contrast, Steve Martin's second album, 1978's "A Wild and Crazy Guy," topped 2.5 million all by itself.

But the comedy album lives on, in part because comedians still consider the album a career milestone.

Pete Holmes does Comedy Central specials and live shows around the country, writes for sitcoms, does a podcast and voices the baby in E*Trade commercials. But he considers his 2011 debut album, "Impregnated With Wonder," to be his entry into the comedy pantheon.

Steve Martin made classic comedy albums in the 1980s.

"Richard Pryor had albums. Carlin, Cosby, Martin," he says. "It's one of the few remaining things from their time that we've clung to. We can't do Carson anymore, but at least we can put our big dumb faces on a CD. I mean, you can't hang a Conan set on your wall."

"Comedians have just an emotional attachment to the concept," says Dana Gould, a stand-up performer and longtime writer for "The Simpsons." "When I was a kid, my brother came back from basic training in the Army, and he had George Carlin's 'FM and AM,' Carlin's 'Class Clown,' the first Cheech & Chong album, Steve Martin's 'Let's Get Small.' I know them specifically because I memorized them."

Ironically, the same advance of media technology that sent vinyl records to the cutout bin has aided the comedy album's persistence. Some, though not most, of the latest comedy albums are released only as digital downloads rather than on CD. Even albums available on CD in some cases do most of their sales by download. That keeps distribution costs down and numbers in the black for labels.

"The company can make money on not-blockbuster numbers," says Jack Vaughn, president of Comedy Central Records, which also has the benefit of taking audio from its TV specials and turning it into albums, often as part of development deals with performers. Smaller, indie labels tend to offer no advance payments to comedians; they record a performer's act at a club or college, and revenues are shared.

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Patton Oswalt had a Grammy-nominated album last year.

Another reason to record your comedy routine: content-hungry digital audio services including Sirius satellite radio, which has four comedy channels, and Internet services like Pandora and Spotify. In 2011, Pandora added about 15,000 tracks from 1,000 comedians to its service, which customizes playlists for listeners based on individual tastes. As with its music offering, the company built a "genome" dissecting more than 100 characteristics of comedy (boastful, deadpan, use of wordplay, misdirection, etc.). Performers receive royalties.

"It's a whole new revenue stream for them," says Pandora CEO Tim Westergren. "And there's an opportunity for exposure. For a lot of these folks, it's the first time they've ever been on radio."

The Bowery club where Lee Camp recorded his new album—a hip hole-in-the-wall where a jazz singer performed the night's first show and where they serve a beatnik-homage drink called the Pukowski—was an appropriate wayback machine for the recording of a comedy album. In 1958, Mort Sahl challenged the Eisenhower administration on "The Future Lies Ahead," the first stand-up album recorded live in a nightclub, San Francisco's hungry i.

Comedy albums soon would be a mass medium that routinely sold millions of copies, gave audiences access to performers they might not see or hear otherwise, and kick-started careers.

"Because of my album I got a variety show in 1961, I was offered so many Ed Sullivan shows and movies," says Bob Newhart, who at age 82 continues to perform live.

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Jimmy Fallon has a comedy album coming out in June.

Mr. Newhart was a Chicago accountant who had never performed in a nightclub when a disc-jockey friend got Warner Bros. Records to hear tapes of Mr. Newhart's routines. The bits included imaginary phone calls between Abe Lincoln and his agent ("You're thinking of shaving it off?") and Abner Doubleday pitching baseball to a game company ("Why four balls, Mr. Doubleday? (pause) Nobody's ever asked you before, huh?") Warner arranged for Mr. Newhart to record "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart" at the Tidelands in Houston, a motel nightclub. Within months, thanks to radio airplay, the album became No. 1 in the country, and its follow-up simultaneously became No. 2. Mr. Newhart was told later that no artist equaled that 1-2 mark until Guns N' Roses did it in 1991.

"I always say you hate to lose a record, but at least it went to a friend," he jokes.

Mr. Newhart's debut also beat Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Brahms to win the album-of-the-year Grammy in 1961.

Vaughn Meader was another unknown before his gentle parody of the Kennedys, "The First Family," was released in November 1962 and sold as many as 7.5 million copies, for a while selling at a pace of 100,000 per day, according to Billboard. That makes it probably America's all-time best-selling comedy album, even though both it and a quick sequel were pulled from the market upon the president's assassination a year after its release.

Comedy Central

Whitney Cummings released a comedy album last year.

The "Mad Men" era was a golden age for comedy LPs. Jazz label Verve released early albums by Mr. Sahl, Shelley Berman, Jackie Mason, Mr. Winters and Phyllis Diller. The cover portrait of "An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May" (1961) was shot by Richard Avedon.

Bill Cosby carried the rest of the 1960s with six platinum albums and six consecutive Grammys. There have been a handful of million-sellers since, including discs by Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Steve Martin, and Eddie Murphy. Sketch comedy sold well, too, on albums from Firesign Theater, Monty Python, and Cheech and Chong.

Then came a lull. Jay Leno and David Letterman never made albums. Jerry Seinfeld didn't have one until after his TV show ended. Adam Sandler, Jeff Foxworthy and Dane Cook have hit the charts more recently. Mr. Foxworthy in all has sold 10 million comedy albums, probably more than anybody.

Today, digital may be where the money's at. But for many comedians the ultimate mark they can leave on the world, and the purest form of validation, is to have an album released on old-fashioned vinyl. It can still happen. While CD sales have nose-dived, vinyl has made a bit of a hipster comeback, and some labels are doing limited runs of 12-inch albums for performers they consider to be worthy of wax. Dan Schlissel, founder and owner of Stand Up! Records, procured vinyl rights to several albums, including Patton Oswalt's " Werewolves and Lollipops" and Dana Gould's "Funhouse."

"It's a very hip thing to have your album on vinyl," says Anthony Jeselnik, who has a 2012 album planned on the Comedy Central label. "All comics want to be rock stars anyway, and it's as close as you're gonna get to Led Zeppelin."