"Mommy, why does Eddie Murphy need a shoehorn?"

I've always found in interesting the different types of roles comedians can play in their careers. It brings up interesting questions about persona to view a comedian's whole collection of work.

While watching Delirious, I found myself wondering how Eddie Murphy ended up in the roles he's most popular for today: Shrek, Dr. Doolittle, The Nutty Professor. Comparing the vulgarity of his early stand-up to the family-friendly image of his present work is a bit shocking. I mean, this man made Daddy Day Care for crying out loud; he can't talk about the faces 18-year-olds make during sex! I wonder how many children have stumbled upon Delirious playing on HBO only to have their jaws drop.

The same sort of incongruous message was obvious to me when I watched Bob Saget. I associate Bob Saget with Full House: a well-mannered, fun-loving guy who just wants to take care of his kids. This image made him perfect as a host on America's Funniest Home Videos. I obviously knew that the image was a persona, but it wasn't until I saw The Aristocrats that I really started to pick that persona apart.

For those of you who haven't seen it, The Aristocrats is a weird meta-joke about comedians telling what is apparently a famous inside joke among comedians. It is shock humor through and through. The basic premise is a man goes to an agent and says he has a family act to pitch. He then pitches the most vulgar, obsence, and disturbing thing you can think of. The agent asks, "And what do you call yourselves?" and the man responds with "the Aristocrats."

The two images are impossible to reconcile if you believe either of them to be the "real" Bob Saget. But comedians' personas are difficult to deal with; we expect them to be themselves, or at least somewhat hyperbolic versions of themselves. In the book I am reading for my book review, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, the author notes that

"comedians are not allowed to be either natural or artifical. (Are they
themselves or acting? Are they in costume?) Reality keeps returning to stand-up
performance, but the deepest deisre of stand-ups is to be, with respect to their
lives, unencumbered"

Obviously, in the examples I've given, I'm comparing two very different genres: stand-up and movies. In movies, there is no question that the actor is playing a role, a very specific, characterized role. However, the success of a movie largely depends on the viewers' ability to suspend disbelief and pretend that the actor is actually in that role. If we have an image of a comedian from watching stand-up performances (one that we think of as "true" because of the blurred lines of stand-up) is it harder to set that image aside when watching that comedian in a movie role?