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Comedians become unfunny as they age. Young people delight at discovering life's absurdities, but when you're middle-aged, you lose your edge. Absurdity is no longer new or funny, it's just a pain in the fucking ass that you have to deal with day after day, with no end in sight. Like everyone else, and maybe even moreso, comedians have relationships that break up, kids who take up their time and patience, more relationships that break up, alimony, agents... they get jaded. And they get rich. After a decade or so of being rich, life isn't the same as it was when you were a young, edgy person trying to kill at comedy clubs.
I remember watching comedians who'd been funny to my parents generation. Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Milton Berle. These guys had clearly seen better days. I went "Wha?" when I was expected to laugh. When I saw some early sketches of Steve Allen's on a retrospective, I was surprised at how funny they were, since I had only known Steve Allen as an utter bore who was glued to a piano seat behind his strangely flame-haired wife. It must have been a John-Yoko kind of relationship because Jane Meadows was as talented as a hatrack and nothing her once-famous husband said or did made either one of them memorable as anything other than an obnoxiously self-involved couple. Sid Caesar was another comedian who seemed funny in his old clips, but I was most familiar with him in his incarnation as a deadly unfunny pontificator on the philosophy of humor. There's nothing less funny than a comedian who starts going around defining what's funny.
It happens to all of us. Life gets predictable, we start taking the path of least resistance. To famous comedians, the least resistant path is picking up a huge paycheck for very little effort. Hey, at least they get the huge paycheck. Most of us who age out have nothing at the end of our path but Social Security. It happens to songwriters, too. Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder... great pop songwriters of yore who continue to churn out musical glop thirty years after their last decent song saw the light of day. It's always noted that Irving Berlin wrote tons of songs, but never mentioned how godawful those songs were after he reached a certain age. And directors.. Alfred Hitchcock put horse-drawn carts in "Frenzy" in the 1970s.
The songwriters continue to get recording contracts and the comedians continue to get movie backing because the entertainment industry knows these guys have a long-time audience who will buy anything of theirs, no matter how crappy it is.
Honestly, when was the last time a brilliantly funny 60 year old comedian was discovered? Rodney Dangerfield is the oldest "newly discovered" comedian I can think of and he was in his 40s when he achieved fame.
The 50s are a comedy killer.
