Make 'Em Laugh, page 20
Vaudeville was more a matter of style than of material. It was not so much what the two- and three-a-day favorites said and did as how they said it and how they did it. For fifty years, vaudeville’s minstrels found their way into all lands, preaching their gospel of merriment and song, and rousing the rest of the world to laughter and to tears. —Fred Allen
Vaudeville was tough on anyone working their way up the ladder; the pay was poor, the conditions were terrible, the billing was never big enough. Still, performers kept at it—what, and leave show business?—even if they had little to offer. The young George Burns, né Nathan Birnbaum, was so lousy that “after playing a theater, I would have to change my name. The booker who booked me would never give me another job if he knew who I was. It never crossed my mind that there was any reason to change the act, so I changed my name instead.” Among Burns’s more than two dozen noms de guerre were Jimmy Ferguson, Jimmy Delight, even a member of the team of Links and Burns—although he was Links. Go figure.
Vaudeville also gave rise to a variety of performance styles that still exist to this day: genial hosts with witty banter (Frank Fay, Milton Berle), double-acts (Smith and Dale, Burns and Allen), triple acts (Durante, Clayton, and Jackson; the Three Stooges), even quadruple acts (the Marx Brothers). Even the impressionist act—extremely popular up until the early 1980s—was created in vaudeville. What comedians really had to learn was economy, speed, personality, and variety—it often helped if, like Eddie Cantor or Jimmy Durante, you could tell jokes, sing, dance, and play a musical instrument. “I got a million of ’em!” rasped Durante about his jokes—and he wasn’t exaggerating, either.
Much has been made about the sudden death of vaudeville after 1927. It wasn’t all that sudden. The Broadway revue siphoned off stars, as did radio, by the mid-1920s. Once vaudeville turned into a stepping-stone for other, more lucrative and more relaxing professions, its days were numbered. Sound film provided the final resting place for vaudeville; many historians claim May 7, 1932, as the funeral date, when the Palace, New York’s most prestigious vaudeville house, switched from two-a-day shows to the lower rent four-a-day shows, interspersed with short films. A few months later, they began to screen feature films exclusively; ironically, the first one was The Kid from Spain, starring Eddie Cantor, one of the Palace’s greatest headliners.
Perhaps, at least at the beginning of vaudeville’s demise, Broadway inflicted more wounds than did motion pictures. Broadway revues were becoming increasingly sophisticated after World War I, and more competitive with each other. One way for a revue producer, such as Florenz Ziegfeld, to rise above the crowd was to import a vaudeville superstar or, even better (and cheaper), to create a Broadway superstar from the rank and file. But tastes changed somewhat in the mid-1920s, and audiences demanded narrative shows, and thus, the musical comedy was born: a trifle, to be sure, but at least a trifle with the pretensions of a plot. This proved to be a boon for a successful comedian—the first “crossover” in popular entertainment. A comedian could now go from touring in vaudeville, to being one of several bananas in a Broadway revue, to holding down an entire musical comedy vehicle that showcased his talents exclusively. Eddie Cantor was the most successful of these crossover comedians, but Fanny Brice, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Willie and Eugene Howard, Ed Wynn, Clark and McCullough, Bert Lahr, and Bob Hope eventually followed suit and created brand-new audiences for themselves along the Great White Way.
At the same time, nonmusical Broadway comedies were beginning to find their own unique voices, with or without crossover comedians. Before the 1920s, native comedies were skimpy and formulaic: scrappy boy meets scrappy girl, he loses her, he gets her, and they live scrappily ever after. That soon changed with the emergence of playwright George S. Kaufman who, along with collaborators such as Marc Connelly and Edna Ferber, created the first full-fledged American satires, such as the silent-film spoof Merton of the Movies and the show business comedy of manners The Royal Family. With the Gershwin brothers, Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind were the first playwrights to poke fun at American government and the presidency in book musicals like Of Thee I Sing. Following in Kaufman’s rat-a-tat-tat, wisecracking satirical style were other gifted playwrights like Moss Hart (a frequent Kaufman collaborator), George Abbott, Mae West, Philip Barry (more genteel), and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, whose blissfully anarchic The Front Page and Twentieth Century would both go on to have major Hollywood legacies.
This golden age of American stage comedy would be eventually diluted by the advent of sound film as many idiosyncratic stage comedians and Broadway writers went west to Hollywood. With the exception of the zany, freewheeling Hellzapoppin’ in 1938 and a few classics, such as Kaufman and Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, the take no prisoners style of 1930s comic anarchy no longer seemed appropriate as America entered the Second World War; the successful comedies of the 1940s, such as Harvey and Arsenic and Old Lace, were comparatively benign. In the 1950s, stage comedies were forced to compete with television and did so with the most effective weapon available to them: mild doses of suggestive sexuality. Typical were George Axelrod’s The Seven Year Itch (a more interesting play than movie, despite the appearance of Marilyn Monroe), and Never Too Late by Sumner Arthur Long, in which a man in his fifties discovers that he has impregnated his wife.
Into the limelight: (Previous pages) Comic trio Eddie Jackson, Jimmy Durante, and Lou Clayton; genial host Frank Fay; (below) a quartet of old-timers: John Carradine, Jack Gilford, David Burns, and Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
Ironically, just as sound films gave vaudeville stars a new immortality by capturing their work forever, a generation of talent forged by television reinvigorated Broadway comedy in the 1960s, especially musical comedy. Five veterans of the writing staff of Your Show of Shows turned their hands to writing successful musical comedy librettos: Larry Gelbart (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), Neil Simon (Little Me; Promises, Promises), Michael Stewart (Bye Bye Birdie; Hello, Dolly!), Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), and Mel Brooks (actually, his 1960s musicals were flops—but wait until The Producers). They were joined by such veterans as Abe Burrows and Betty Comden and Adolph Green in creating a new era of joyously silly musical comedies—shows for the proverbial tired businessman. Simon was practically a one-man cottage industry for successful comedies—Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, and more, many of which were turned into movies.
Invigorating the proceedings was almost a new generation of Broadway clowns all of whom originally started on the stage but had developed into television stars eager to spread their wings, bring their comic talents to a starring role in a narrative musical, and, not coincidentally, grab a huge percentage of the weekly gross. They included Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, and Carol Burnett. Among the buoyant musical comedies of the time, pride of place must be given to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), written by Gelbart, Burt Shevelove, and Stephen Sondheim, a homage to burlesque reset in ancient Rome. Forum maintains its low comic genius and, over the years, in revivals, tours, and a film version, has provided a happy home for such varied comics as Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, Mickey Rooney, Buster Keaton, Nathan Lane, and Whoopi Goldberg.
The last three decades have not been kind to stage comedy, a victim of television and movies, but Broadway has recently seen a rebirth of the musical comedy, after about a two-decade preponderance of ponderous pop-operas. Led largely by Mel Brooks’s The Producers in 2001, there has been a march of shows conceived almost exclusively to tickle the funny bone in song and dance: Hairspray, Avenue Q, Monty Python’s Spamalot, Xanadu, and Young Frankenstein. The theater has always embraced certain stars as their own, comedians who both ennoble and energize a live event with their presence: Beatrice Lillie, Bert Lahr, Carol Channing, Sam Levene, Robert Morse, Zero Mostel, and Nathan Lane. Alas, these comedians were not always able to make successful transitions into film or television—something about them being larger-than-life.
But larger-than-life is exactly what a theatrical audience demands, whether it knows it or not. Vaudeville and Broadway have given center stage to a special kind of performer who can connect with a spectator across the foot-lights all the way to the back row in the balcony. When you bought a ticket to see them in person, cavorting around a stage, playing to that night’s crowd, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event; it was the stuff of legend.
Kingfish: Would you believe me if I told you I’m trying to keep Andy outta jail?
Amos: No.
Kingfish: Well, when I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.
“EXCUSE ME FOR PERTRUDIN’”
TIM (THE KINGFISH) MOORE
About face: Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the original Amos and Andy; with Alvin Childress, Spencer Williams, and Tim Moore for the TV incarnation.
On the immensely popular radio show Amos ’n’ Andy, the Kingfish was always trying to bamboozle the title characters. The actor playing the Kingfish, Freeman Gosden, was already putting one over on the radio audience—he was playing both Andy and the Kingfish, two black characters; even more audaciously, Gosden was white.
Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll were white musicians and comedians who began a brief radio serial, Sam ’n’ Henry, about a pair of small-time black pals, in 1926. Borrowing liberally from the minstrel tradition, the show moved to Chicago’s WMAQ in 1928 and was transformed into Amos ’n’ Andy. By 1930, the fifteen-minute daily radio serial was expanded to a weekly half-hour program, and the antics of Amos and Andy enthralled the country. The great composer Eubie Blake recalled that “no matter what movie house you attended, the show would come to a sudden stop at seven o’clock and loudspeakers would bring to the audience the fifteen-minute Amos ’n’ Andy spot.”
Amos Jones and Andy Brown represented the entire package of management and labor at the Fresh Air Cab Company in Harlem (so-called because there was no windshield). As the show expanded, so did their universe. New characters filled out the stories, often performed by black actors, but none caught the audience’s fancy more than George Stevens—“the Kingfish” of the local lodge, the Mystic Knights of the Sea. According to cultural historian Mel Watkins, “Through the voice of Freeman Gosden, the Kingfish would emerge as one of the electronic media’s more memorable and outlandish rogues. He was an unscrupulous, conniving dandy, larger than life, more obstreperous, more indefatigable and unrepentant than any con artist (black or white) who had emerged in a radio or TV sitcom.”
Amos ’n’ Andy stayed popular long enough to be attractive to broadcasters in the television age. Gosden and Correll initially thought they might black up for the TV screen, but wiser minds prevailed. A national talent search produced a new ensemble of gifted black comic actors to play the beloved characters in a series that debuted in 1951 on CBS. Stepping into the neatly polished shoes of the Kingfish was Tim Moore, a chitlin circuit veteran of retirement age—in fact, he had just retired to his hometown of Rock Island, Illinois. Throughout his stage career in segregated vaudeville, Moore would demonstrate some of the ingenious survival tactics that the fictional Kingfish flaunted in a more larcenous vein. He had been a boxer, a carnival geek, a medicine show huckster, an alumnus of the Blackbirds revue on Broadway, and a broad comedian in race movies. It was a challenge to become the physical (and racially specific) embodiment of a character that had thrived only in the imaginations of millions of Americans, but Moore pulled off the scam—unlike the Kingfish, whose plans usually crashed and burned by the final credits.
As the adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy evolved from the radio shows of the 1930s to the sitcoms of the 1950s, the Kingfish took over more and more of the weekly plot, which most often centered around one outlandish scheme after the other, usually at the expense of the trusting Andy. Once, he tried to sell Andy a house—only it was a fake front from an abandoned movie set. Cheech Marin remembers watching the Kingfish hatch some harebrained scheme to sell Andy a set of binoculars: “Kingfish looks through them and says, ‘Hmm, there’s an ant crawling up that building. Hmm. Got something in his mouth. Hmm, a crumb of bread. Let’s see—whole wheat.’ Just cracked me up. They just had the most absurd humor, and black humor can be real surreal. Sometimes very abstract. And I had caught on to that early because, you know, I was so hammered by it.”
The Kingfish had a recurring expression—“Holy Mackrel!”—an overbearing wife named Sapphire, and a deep loathing for manual labor:
SAPPHIRE: Well, George, you don’t have to look for a job no more. I got a job for ya at the Superfine Brush Company as a door-to-door salesman.
KINGFISH: You done what! Now look here, Sapphire, you can’t do that. It’s a violation of the Atlantic Charter, the Constitution, the Monroe Doctrine, and not only dat, it’s a violation of one dah four freedoms, de freedom of speech!
SAPPHIRE: Freedom of speech?
KINGFISH: Yeah, you didn’t give me a chance to say no.
From the moment the show debuted on television, the NAACP vehemently protested the image of blacks showcased by Amos ’n’ Andy. With his mangling of the English language and his combination of shiftlessness and shiftiness, the Kingfish was exhibit A. Larry Wilmore recalls that “actually, on Amos ’n’ Andy you didn’t just have those guys—you saw black lawyers on the show, black doctors, a lot of middle-class people that didn’t talk like the Kingfish. But at the time, those characters were so broad and there was a history behind them from the radio. And there was nothing else representing blacks on television.” Ultimately, it was the sponsors’ lack of enthusiasm for a program with a cast of African American characters that spelled the end of Amos ’n’ Andy on network broadcasting in 1953, after more than seventy episodes. The network was about to showcase Moore in a spinoff called The Adventures of the Kingfish, but that went by the wayside as well.
Eternal struggle: Moore with Ernestine Wade, as his wife, Sapphire.
IN THE WORDS OF THAT GREAT AMERICAN POET RALPH WALNUT EMERSON, YOU ALL HAS MY INFERNAL GRATITUDE!
—The Kingfish
Since its banishment, Amos ’n’ Andy has had its admirers and detractors, but no one could gainsay the vibrancy of Moore’s characterization. Redd Foxx said, “I worked with Tim Moore at the Apollo and that man was a true professional, an unforgettable actor. It was comedy, man, it was laughs. Some people would say, ‘Hey, they shouldn’t be doing that,’ but if they look at their mothers and fathers around the house, they’d see the same things happening.” Unlike the outcome of the series itself, the Kingfish triumphed in the end, surviving as a vibrant American prototype, the first transcendent beloved scoundrel from the black tradition.
By the time the 1950s came to a close, Americans were embracing their con men from a more comfortable place, but Tim Moore and the Kingfish had their moment in the limelight. “Excuse me for pertrudin’,” as the Kingfish would often say, but he brought audiences a lot of laughs by pertrudin’ as long as he did.
My ancestors go all the way back. There was Major Horatio Bilko, who sold extra tickets on the boat to Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. That’s why the general couldn’t sit down.
—Phil Silvers as Sgt. Ernie Bilko
PHIL SILVERS “GLADDASEEYA HEYHOWAREYA”
During the out-of-town tryout of Top Banana, his 1951 Broadway vehicle, Phil Silvers was checking into his Philadelphia hotel. “Now, my wife will be joining me between eight and ten tonight,” he confided to the desk clerk, in his inimitably ingratiating hi-how-are-ya style. “But she works in disguise for the FBI, so she might check in as a blond or a brunette–ya never know.”
Cheer up, pal: Silvers (bottom) looks glum in Broadway’s Yokel Boy (1939); perhaps because they cut his scene, above, from Strike Up the Band (1940).
“All ya need is an angle,” Silvers sang in another show, Do Re Mi, and he spent much of his life trying to work an angle onstage and off. His fast-paced geometry began on the edge of Brownsville, a poor Jewish immigrant section of Brooklyn, where Fischl Silverstein was born in 1911. “Since my parents were immigrants, I didn’t have much to talk about with them,” he later wrote. “The only way I could get together with people was by singing. Anywhere. Any time.” He had a pure tenor voice that brought him straight to vaudeville. Like the Marx Brothers before him, Silvers skipped high school to become a star attraction on the circuit and by the time he was bar mitzvahed, he had wowed them at the Palace. When his voice cracked, it spelled curtains for his career as a boy singer, so instead he became a tummler in the Catskills, learning how to do anything for a laugh. It was good training for Silvers’s next career move: burlesque.
For five years, Silvers worked his way up to be a top banana at Minsky’s, where he mastered eight hundred separate bits and sketches. “Burlesque was about the only steady work in 1932,” Silvers said. “The only chance you had for individuality or freshness was your own improvisation. [My innovation] was a recognizable human being in black horn-rim glasses.” A bit part in a Broadway musical called Yokel Boy brought Silvers to the legitimate stage in 1939; when the lead comic left the show out of town, the part was rewritten for Silvers and he was a smash—an MGM contract and a trip to California followed. Ultimately, Silvers’s film career during the war was a big disappointment to him and he chafed under the limitations of his casting, usually playing the hero’s best friend (often Gene Kelly—Cover Girl, Summer Stock), thankless roles so undistinguished and indistinguishable that Silvers referred to them all as “Blinky.” Silvers split his time in Hollywood between gagsters and gangsters. He was a pal of Bugsy Siegel’s—who borrowed gas ration coupons from Silvers—and began a lifelong addiction to gambling.
In 1948, he jumped at the chance to go East and legit again, this time in a period musical called High Button Shoes. Silvers played the supporting part of a bald—and balding—con man named Harrison J. Floy, and the public was beginning to recognize his unique talent. Jason Alexander, who played the character years later in a revival, said, “Phil Silvers built his whole persona on a version of the con man. It was always slick. It was always double-talk, it was always the ability to do one thing and say another or sell it as something else.” Broadway opened new doors for him. Silvers told a reporter, “Sometimes, when I take time out to be grateful, I am grateful for three things—first, I don’t have to go to school today; second, I don’t have to fly today; third, I don’t have to play the Copa.”
