The Best of the Stan Freberg Shows

Okay, I bought this record for 50¢ so I didn’t have much to lose. Truly, I’d never heard of Stan Freberg before but now I know that he was an important, influential comedian back in the old days. Back then, radio was more then the same 20 songs playing all day long, it was a real medium that had real people and real listeners. Nowadays it’s all that newfangled digital web crap that the kids are into I guess, no personality whatsoever. Blah.

This record features excerpts from some typical Stan Freberg shows. There is nothing particularly side-splitting about any of the jokes but for the budding comedian, there are lessons here to be learned. For example, every other word need not be a vulgarity. This alone puts it ahead of most comedy today; Stan Freberg did not have to constantly swear to make his point. Beginning comics can also learn a sense of irony, timing, and how to play it straight and still get the occasional guffaw. So nothing too crazy funny but a few laughs here and there.

So should you give it a chance? I think if you can find it for 50¢ too, hell, why not? It’s a good way to kill half an hour and it wouldn’t hurt you to have some good, old-fashioned radio humour in your collection.