Hattie Noel was a trailblazer of the stand-up comedy form. While the visual archive shows her constrained in the controlling images of Disney’s hippo and Hollywood’s maid, her comedy albums tell a different story of Black representation.
Somewhere between the virtuosic parodies of Frank Zappa and the screwball wit of Monty Python, the Firesign Theatre reinvented the comedy album in the 1960s and ’70s. Jeremy Braddock explores their legacy.