The Legacy of The Wisecrack

wisecrack Despite the claim of many a Borscht Belt comic that he is a practitioner of "the world's second-oldest profession," stand-up comedy is a young and distinctly American literary form. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century when, enabled by unprecedented prosperity and the right to free expression, that monologists began appearing in American vaudeville halls. Yet even though it has since become