Half of this grid comes in pairs
LAUREL and HARDY, MORECAMBE and WISE, FRENCH and SAUNDERS. The double act is a specific piece of machinery: one performer is wrong about the world and the other has to live with them, and almost every laugh comes from the gap between the two. The straight man is usually the harder job and almost never gets the credit.
At its peak the form was enormous. The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show was watched by something like 28 million people in Britain — over half the population, in an era with three channels and no way to watch it later. No comedy programme has come close since, and none can, because the audience will never again all be in the same room at the same time.
Buster Keaton broke his neck and carried on filming
During *Sherlock Jr.* in 1924, KEATON took a fall from a water tower with the water released on top of him and landed neck-first on a rail. He finished the day. Years later a doctor examining an X-ray for something unrelated asked when he had fractured a vertebra, and he had no idea.
He is also the man who stood still while a two-tonne house front fell on him, saved by an open attic window passing over his body with a few inches to spare on either side. The crew reportedly could not watch. He did his own stunts because the gag only worked if the audience could see it was really him, which is the same reason it still works a century later.
Stand-up is younger than it looks
A single person on a bare stage with a microphone, talking about their own life, is essentially a post-war invention. Before that a comic on a variety bill did gags — interchangeable material, often bought from writers, in front of a band waiting to come back on.
CARLIN and PRYOR are the usual turning point. Both started out in suits doing conventional routines, both abandoned it in the early seventies, and both rebuilt the job around the idea that the material should be specific to you and true. Pryor in particular made his own worst experiences the act. Everything since — the hour-long special, the confessional set, the tour — descends from that decision.
The most perishable art form there is
Comedy ages faster than anything else in this category of famous people. A joke depends on shared assumptions about what is normal and what is shocking, and both move. Films and songs survive the decades far better than the routines that filled theatres alongside them, and a great deal of once-celebrated material is now unwatchable for reasons its audience would not have understood.
The grid holds people still working and people gone: CLEESE, CONNOLLY, ATKINSON, GERVAIS, IZZARD and the pioneering Eric SYKES; ROCK, MURPHY, MARTIN, SCHUMER, TOMLIN, Victoria WOOD and Joan RIVERS, who was still touring in her eighties. Working out which of them will still be funny in fifty years is impossible, and the safest bet is usually the one doing something physical rather than topical. A silent film from 1924 still gets a laugh.