If you accept the equation that the Seventies are just the Fifties in drag, then you'd expect this decade—with its flaccid, zonked-out narcissism practically demanding the satirist's blow—to be a great one for laughs. Think about the Fifties. Some of the best comedy this country ever produced—the work of men like Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs, and magazines like the old Mad—came out of the arch conventionality of the Eisenhower years. Even Lenny Bruce, widely considered the prototypical Sixties comedian, was a total creation of the Fifties—so much so that, shortly before his death, he looked upon the emerging youth culture with both suspicion and bewilderment.

Well, the new age has arrived. But outside of (maybe) Woody Allen or Lily Tomlin, I don't think the Seventies have provided a single comic genius. Of the acts discussed here, two—Cheech and Chong and Richard Pryor—smack of Sixties counterculture, while the third, Steve Martin, has yet to prove he's a great, funny man.

Martin isn't a talent anymore, he's a commodity. His first album, Let's Get Small, went platinum, winning a Grammy and several important cover stories in the process. The new LP, A Wild and Crazy Guy, promises to do a lot better. Yet it's a slovenly piece of work, slackly performed and miserably edited. The routines don't build—they're not even routines, in any real sense of the word. Instead, the comedian simply meanders from one random one-liner to the next, and he's not in a terrific hurry to get there either. (There must be more dead air on this live record than heavy breathing in Emmanuelle.) But from the sales and audience response, it's clear that his fans don't care. To them, Steve Martin can do no wrong, and they're buying whatever's offered just to hear their hero mouth the title line.

All the set pieces are already familiar: "A Wild and Crazy Guy" (has anyone ever traveled so far on one routine?) from Saturday Night Live, "King Tut" from the single of the same name. Though the latter is basically a one-shot joke, it's probably the best thing Martin's ever done. The song's point may be obvious, but at least there is one. And next to almost everything else on the album, "King Tut" gleams like gold.

Most of the new material sounds puerile and secondhand. Martin gags his way through a chorus of "I'm in the Mood for Love" and announces: "Some people have a way with words; other people, uh...." (This jape, with slight variations, is repeated throughout the LP. It does not age well.) What's truly ironic is that Steve Martin, apart from a handful of brilliant catch phrases, really doesn't have much feel for language. With his distinguished/silly white hair and dapper/sappy white suit, he's a mod Everyman gone wrong in a singles bar—i.e., funnier to look at or think about than to listen to. His mind seemingly short-circuited by the complexity of available connections, he just babbles on. But he's hopelessly incapable of the kind of pointed, speed-freak rapping that, say, Robin Williams excels at. At its worst, Martin's is a desperation humor so obvious and threadbare he even has to resort to dirty-word punch lines (à la Mel Brooks) to rescue some of his hoariest chestnuts from the fire.

Hailed as a throwback to the "clean" comedians of the Fifties, Martin has very little in common with great subversives like Caesar and Kovacs (though his funny-voices bits are quite derivative of both men—especially of Caesar's comic Germans). Clean, apolitical comedy is one thing, while cartoonish mediocrity that wholeheartedly supports a decade's social clichés instead of deflating them is another. Childishness can be charming, but when you calculate it as closely as Martin does, it simply becomes hard to take.

The Fifties joker that Martin does remind me of is Milton Berle. Indeed, the former's aren't-I-funny balloons and the arrows through his head are a perfect Seventies equivalent of the latter's pink tutus. There's a smug, emasculated quality—a rancid, show-biz condescension—in Martin's humor that's very reminiscent of Uncle Miltie's pushy, anything-for-a-laugh excess. And, like Berle, Martin owes his vast popularity to the fact that you can laugh at him without feeling at all threatened. He's hip in an era when being hip means being safe. Liking Steve Martin is now blue-chip security in every high-school clique in America.

Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke isn't even a comedy record per se, but a movie soundtrack. Though some of the film's dialogue is preserved, the album is mostly music: Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin singing five songs (the title tune is a terrible rip-off of John Prine's "Illegal Smile"), a ton of filler from a band of Los Angeles sessionmen calling themselves Yesca. Musically, the only good cut is War's "Low Rider."

Up in Smoke's dialogue consists almost entirely of the sound of dope being ingested and various people saying "man" a lot. Anyone who hadn't seen the picture would find these routines incomprehensible. The real lesson to be learned here is how middle class and conventional the whole drug culture has become—it's no surprise that Lou Adler, the ur-hippie capitalist, is listed as the movie's co-producer/director. In 1968, Up in Smoke might have meant something; in 1978, it's just mass-culture titillation. But kids who think Dean Martin square for making a career out of drunk jokes will continue to believe that Cheech and Chong are iconoclastic and funny. Tommy Chong was recently quoted, in this magazine, as saying: "We want to become the Bob Hopes of the doper generation." Doesn't that tell you enough?

Richard Pryor is as much a product of the Sixties as are Cheech and Chong, but, unlike them—unlike most of the black comedians of the last decade, for that matter—he's managed to remain as outrageous as ever. Bill Cosby may rent his smile to Ford while Dick Gregory retreats into sanctimonious oblivion, but Pryor is still a defiant, freakily incorrigible survivor—someone who's far too strung out on his own funky, rage-filled wavelength to even consider going respectable. His new, live double set, Wanted (a reference to the legal and personal hassles that practically put him out of action last year), shows him to be top banana.

Though Pryor's raps are as unstructured as Steve Martin's, his high-flying, cheerfully scabrous style keeps the listener moving too fast to notice. Some introductory remarks to the audience segue into a routine on white obscenity versus black obscenity—Pryor's impersonations of white voices are deadly accurate, absolutely hilarious—that then turns into a skit about Andrew Young walking into the Oval Office with his cock in his hand ("'Scuse me, Mrs. Carter...." "Oh, that's all right."). This comic speeds almost effortlessly from sports to sex to life in the ghetto, his fast-paced spiel the only link between topics. In Richard Pryor's world, animals, inanimate objects and even the various parts of his body all have their own voices, which are locked in constant argument—each of them both threatening and scared to death at the same time.

Pryor's bias toward his black fans (which comes through more clearly here than on his studio LPs) is hardly something one can complain about, but I do think it sometimes limits him: a bit on Muhammad Ali, for instance, evolves into another Us versus Them confrontation instead of assaulting the white-liberal infatuation with Ali that this white reviewer sees as its natural, more telling target. Wanted's humor, however, is political for the same reason that the rock & roll of the Clash is political—not out of dogma, but as an inevitable reflection of the circumstances of the artist's life. Pryor's blunt, no-bullshit manner keeps his anger from ever turning into mere counterculture piety, and he's often so good he transcends the boundaries of his own satire. A routine about being beaten by his grandmother climaxes with a line that could have come from Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man: "Don't you run from me, don't you ever run from me—as long as you're black, don't you run from me."

As fine as it is, this record has a few problems. Some of the comedy (especially toward the end) is lost because it depends too heavily on visual impact. And even ideas as excellent as Pryor's, stretched over four sides, get somewhat repetitive. But these are minor flaws. Wanted is a first-rate document and one of the real finds of any year. At a time when everyone else is struggling to be accepted, it's heartening to note that Richard Pryor is still alive—and running too fast to ever be in or out of fashion. (RS 285)

TOM CARSON