Through the Eyes of a Critic

Gerald Nachman was entertainment columnist and theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993, where he also reviewed films, cabaret and comedy. He has also written for, among other publications, Esquire, Newsweek, Travel & Leisure, GQ, TV Guide, Cosmopolitan, and the Sunday New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Nachman won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for his series of columns on Broadway lyricists, as well as a New York Newspaper Guild Page One Award for humor writing. In 1979, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize selection jury for drama. He is the co-author of three musical revues: Quirks, Aftershocks and New Wrinkles, a show about the comic ravages of middle age that has had some twenty productions in the United States and Canada. He wrote the sketches for all three revues.

His book on radio's golden age, Raised on Radio, was published by Pantheon in 1998, with a paperback edition published by University of California Press in 2000. It was named by the Wall Street Journal in 2008 one of the five best books ever written about radio and that same year by NPR as one of three best books on radio. Nachman's book, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, was published by Pantheon in 2003, the first book to focus on a unique, remarkable and revolutionary golden age in American comedy and satire. The book received positive reviews in The New Yorker (a three-page piece by Adam Gopnik), Playboy, the New York Times Daily and Sunday Book Reviews, The Weekly Standard, the New York Observer, The Washington Post, Boston Globe and scores of other newspapers. A paperback edition was published in 2004 by Back Stage Books.

Seriously Funny covers the careers of Mort Sahl, Woody Allen, Shelley Berman, Steve Allen, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mel Brooks, Jonathan Winters, Tom Lehrer, Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Bob Newhart, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Alan Sherman, Stan Freberg, Jean Shepherd, Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs, and other groundbreaking comedians. Nachman co-curated a retrospective exhibit on Enrico Banducci's hungry i nightclub, inspired by his book, which ran for six months at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum in 2007. In 2009, he wrote the liner notes for a new box set of the five Mel Brooks-Carl Reiner 2000 Year Old Man albums.