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“Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America” By Richard Zoglin Bloomsbury, $24.95

Stand-up comedy is one of the most underappreciated art forms in America, for good reason. For every Robin Williams or Steve Martin who emerges from the pack, there lurks a Dane Cook or Larry the Cable Guy just waiting to ruin the party. But stand-up had a brief run of relevance in the ’70s, when comedians exposed bitter truths and defied expectations of what constituted “comedy.”

“Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America” is Richard Zoglin’s attempt to afford the stand-up profession and some of its best practitioners the respect they deserve. Lenny Bruce saw his career ruined by obscenity charges, but his banner of free speech taken up by worthy successors. George Carlin and Richard Pryor went from safe, middle-of-the-road Vegas performers to counterculture heroes who used language as a weapon against the repressions of Nixon’s America. Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman exhausted and exasperated their audiences. And the future kings of late night (Leno and Letterman) earned their dues by working the seedy comedy club circuit of the era. In the end, Jerry Seinfeld was left to restore stand-up not as a means to an end (sitcom stardom, movie roles, endorsements) but as the reward itself, after nine years of headlining America’s most popular show about nothing.

Zoglin structures his book around the various personalities who populated the world of stand-up, starting with Carlin and Pryor. Before both men threw away their conventional success for uncharted waters, stand-up was all about punchlines and playing to the crowd. Carlin and Pryor, working independently of one another, opened the door for more edgy, daring commentary on America. And the comedians who followed set the standard for the following decades.

Aside from the heavy hitters, Zoglin also profiles those comedians who had to wait for their time in the spotlight. Albert Brooks abandoned stand-up to become a unique voice in cinema, Robert Klein suffered from being a trailblazer whose style was imitated by lesser lights for more success, and Andy Kaufman ended up as the spiritual inspiration for Tom Green and MTV’s “Jackass” series. Women made inroads in the primarily male stand-up world in the ’70s, but they had to struggle to be heard in spite of (or perhaps because of) the women’s liberation movement. The comedy club owners provided showcases for their favorite comics, but not paying showcases. And in the wake of the singular success of the ’70s comics, every class clown or wannabe star took to the stage on open-mic nights, diluting the product with overkill.

But Zoglin isn’t a cranky old-timer; he simply points out that the era itself was unique for comedy, a time when the fates aligned to provide many with a chance to make their weird and wonderful humor heard. “Comedy at the Edge” is like a great line-up at a comedy club, where the best around get their chance to tell their stories unfiltered and uncensored. That’s nothing to laugh about.