The Comic Offense makes a compelling argument for the enduring legacy of vaudeville in American comedy. It follows generations of comedians who have engaged its aesthetics, adapted its form to new media, and transformed its content to confront institutionalized stereotyping, sexism and racism. For Rick DesRochers, vaudeville comedy constitutes a seminal platform for social satire, a mode with a ‘vital and complex history in American popular entertainment’ (p. xiii). He traces vaudeville's evolution from stage to radio and television, all the way to the Internet. DesRochers investigates how contemporary comedians build on the vaudeville legacy of ‘comic offense’ even as they contest notions of ethnicity, gender, class and race.

While his study focuses on the four titular comedians (David, Fey, Colbert and Chappelle), DesRochers nevertheless compresses an extensive register of performers and cultural texts spanning over ‘one hundred and twenty-five years of comedy history’ (p. xiii). This wide range of sources does not merely serve as a ‘compare-and-contrast’ exercise. It also inextricably links generations of comics to each other and to the various media through which they perform. DesRochers contends that vaudeville's continuous influence on comedy points to social issues that not only existed at the height of vaudeville's popularity in the late nineteenth century, but which persist today despite shifts in meaning and medium. They therefore demand a similar offensive aesthetic, which confronts the status quo with brutal honesty in order to dispel institutional myths through humour.

Chapter 1 tracks vaudeville comedy's transition from the stage to radio, and later television. While vaudeville theatre died as its performers flocked to new media, its aesthetic lived on in their acts, albeit in an adapted form. The subsequent chapters pair vaudevillian stage actors with contemporary comedians, and connect them with what DesRochers calls ‘bridge performers’ from the 1940s through the 1980s in order to emphasize vaudeville's continuity in American comedy (p. 17). From Groucho Marx to Larry David, Mae West to Tina Fey, Will Rogers to Stephen Colbert, Bert Williams to Dave Chappelle: these comedians share a vaudevillian tendency to question, disrupt and challenge the status quo of American mores and values.

Although DesRochers shows how vaudevillian comedy exposes racial, gender and ethnic stereotypes as ‘patently false’, he does not offer a complex investigation of how its offensive aesthetic also ‘gets at the truth’ (p. 136). To expose something as false does not always entail exposing the truth, as if ‘truth’ can be demarcated clearly and without contention. Some of DesRochers's claims seem to be written with blinders on, such as this simplified notion of truth, and they demand a deeper inquiry. That said, The Comic Offense offers a comprehensive overview of the vaudeville aesthetic and a convincing account of its lasting influence on American comedy, while revealing ongoing tendencies toward stereotyping in American institutions.