By Dave Riley
The rise of fascism in Germany and then the war produced the first major break in European cabaret tradition since its beginnings in the years after the 1871 Paris Commune.
While some cabarets were formed by exile German communities in London and New York, the postwar environment failed to nourish the transplants. The strict realism and didactic stance adopted by artistic radicals aligned with the postwar Communist parties were a long way from the crudity and spontaneous roughness of the prewar Kabarett.
Seemingly lost forever in the horrible reprogramming of the Third Reich, some elements of cabaret were to reappear in the '50s and '60s.
In France Edith Piaf revived the chanson with sentimental story ballads that enlivened French music. Actor and singer Yves Montand — a member of the French Communist Party and much influenced by Piaf — marched the chanson against war in Algeria and sang it in praise of daily labour.
Jacques Brel, George Brasson and North American Tom Lehrer honed the satirical song in time for Bob Dylan and the East German Wolf Biermann to reform it into the protest of a whole generation.
In the United States Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce ushered in a satire boom not seen since 18th century Britain. Much influenced by the Beat generation and the music of jazz, these hip monologists and stand-up comics recalled the conferenciers of Kabarett.
Mort Sahl was the first of these political satirists to win a following. Sahl worked the club scene during the height of the McCarthyite witch-hunts. "Every-time", he joked, "the Russians throw an American in jail, the Un-American Activities Committee retaliates by throwing an American in jail too".
These performers differed from the traditional nightclub star. They wrote their own routines and adopted a casual manner in performance, as though the stage did not exist. Each of them spoke directly to the audience in a half intimate, half hostile delivery, telling sick, outrageous jokes in a language mixing that of the ghetto, hip, jazz and Yiddish.
Dick Gregory was the first black comedian to "cross over" to a level of popularity with white audiences, establishing the
path later followed by Richard Pryor. Always immensely political and opinionated in performance, Gregory was renowned as much for his activities against US policy in Vietnam as for his stage work.
The intensity of practitioners like Lenny Bruce — "America's famous vomic", he called himself — reached that of a crusade against bigotry and hypocrisy. Something of a latter-day martyr against censorship, he was harassed and jailed in his own country, denied a visa to enter Britain and later deported from Australia during a short tour here.
Bruce exemplifies how skilful monologue can be taken to the level of satirical art. His passionate intimacy and the strength of his beliefs still impress even from the transcripts of his routines.
In Britain the Beyond the Fringe team of Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennet, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore toured their mildly satirical revue in cabaret style. By the mid-'60s, Fringe had established the British campuses as the satirical reserve for the comic movement that was to follow.
However, its easy cooption into television and the collapse of the radical movement that imbued it, soon led it from smart repartee to the nihilistic emptiness of groupings like Monty Python. It has been only in Thatcherite Britain that the "new comedy" movement, honing a social critique, has gained momentum with the likes of Ben Elton and Lenny Henry.
The hungry i in San Francisco, which fostered Bruce and Sahl, also encouraged the growth of performance poetry. The intermingling of poetry and jazz led poets Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to reproduce some of the experimental fusions that so fascinated the early Dadaists.
It wasn't long before purely visual artists took up the same preoccupations and high energy performance art entered places other than museums.
The social movements that reshaped the world in the '60s bore with them a new theatre. Many fringe theatres adopted the intimacy of cabaret, its audience provocation tactics and its improvisational flair. This was especially the case in Australia.
[Third of a series on the history of cabaret.]