I am just a bit too young to recall Nichols & May in their performing days, but I have heard about them for decades, and seen their later works: Mike Nichols as a director, and Elaine May as writer-director-performer. Here, looking at this TV documentary which relies on copies of their routines as seen on television, I can see their brilliance Yet I wonder how meaningful it will be to younger people.
Understanding the era in which they arose, the 1950s, it's easy to understand the repression, but not the reasons why. The truth is that America had risen from isolation to one of the world's two great superpowers in ten short years, and as a nation we were freaking out, uncertain of what to do, and wishing for a return to what we viewed as normality. And so we pretended.... and Nichols and May told us it was pretense. They did not do it with the extravagant anger of comics like Lenny Bruce or mort Sahl, who went to jail. Instead they did it with surgical precision, showing us precisely how all the nice people actually behaved, from funeral directors gouging the bereaved, to horny teenagers trying to have sex.
And so they gave no purchase to those who fought back. They may not have seemed as revolutionary as Bruce, but he went to jail, and they won. Isn't that the purpose of revolution?