Before Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields, American comedy was innocent. After they left their hilarious smudges on the genre, comedy was anything but. Here in a captivating book comparing and contrasting these two premier American comics is the history of how flimflam came to prevail as a major comic form. These two comic geniuses excelled at a new brand of shtick, antiheroic humor that killed off the tame demeanor of their many predecessors in...