The negatives: what the record does not hold

Searched and printed at true size

The stand-up negative: No South Bend-born or South Bend-raised stand-up comic of national standing appears in the record reached before the modern working comics named in this section. The city's one stand-up of the Carson and Leno circuit era, Jimmy Brogan, was Cleveland-raised and Notre Dame-formed, and is printed at that tie's strength; the record below him is the club scene of the present century. The negative is a statement about the record searched — the national biographical and broadcast record — not about whether anyone funny ever held a microphone in a South Bend bar.

The print negative: No nationally syndicated newspaper humorist came out of the South Bend press. The city's print humor of national reach is exactly the two entries this section carries: Lardner's, an apprenticeship here and national work made elsewhere, and Jerry Scott's comics page. The dialect columnists and local humor writers of the nineteenth-century press, if the Dunkle-era papers held them, are not separately documented in the sources reached, and none is invented to fill the category.

The broadcast negative, and the boundary names: No local radio comedy program is documented in the record reached; the city's comedy broadcast is the television show carried above. The boundary is printed where the claims run: Jim Gaffigan, Indiana's biggest stand-up, was raised in Chesterton and born in Illinois — not this city's. Vivian Vance and Jan Hooks, sometimes loosely attached to this region, have no South Bend tie at all and are dispelled whole in the people record, cross-referenced here in one line. The state's humor map, as the Fort Wayne record also prints it, is fixed by George Ade of Kentland and Kin Hubbard of Indianapolis; South Bend's place on that map is the apprenticeship, the comics page, and the names this section carries — no larger, and no smaller than the record makes it.

Sources

1. The searches as named in this section's note — the national stand-up and broadcast record for South Bend-born and -raised comics; the syndication record for the South Bend press; the station record for local radio comedy.
2. The people record in this history — the Vance and Hooks negatives, dispelled whole.
3. The Gaffigan biographical record — born in Illinois, raised in Chesterton, Indiana.