Make 'Em Laugh, page 41
It was an effective and relatively inexpensive way to entertain an audience, and very much in contrast to vaudeville, it was constructed to appeal exclusively to the male population. Borrowing the touring structure of vaudeville, the first burlesque circuit (or “wheel”) was created in 1905. There was nothing subtle about burlesque—it was low gags and tall gals. Initially, the spotlight of the burlesque show was on the comic. Burlesque comedians had to plug into the stock conventions that preceded them—even the scenery they joked in front of was just that: curtains or drops pulled from stock.
Convention, not innovation, was the founding principle of burlesque comedy. The ritual was immutable. A fat comic did not bend over simply to tie his shoelace. He bent over to provide a target for the straight man’s toe. … If none of these things were done, it was not ritual, and people who paid to see burlesque were gypped and would ask for their money back.
—Rowland Barber, The Night They Raided Minsky’s
Top bananas: (previous) Phil Silvers in full burlesque mode; Jackie Gleason, with a spritz from his past; (opposite) the end of Minsky’s Burlesque, 1937, thanks to Mayor La Guardia, crusader against vice.
At the center of burlesque comedy was the double-act borrowed from the minstrel show—the straight man and the stooge, otherwise known as the first and second banana. The stock situations included doctor’s offices where incompetent physicians bullied credulous patients or hotel rooms where assignations were routed by intransigent hotel clerks or courtrooms where a percussive judge would bring down his gavel—usually on someone’s head—at the least provocation, or simply a street corner where some poor boob was harassed, beaten, or robbed while asking the directions to Floogle Street, the mythical destination of every third burlesque sketch. To separate the sketches, there were the lightning-fast bits in front of the curtain: the blackout. And in all cases, sex was the not-so-submerged undercurrent; a double entendre would have been considered too much work for the men in the audience; a single one would do. Even the classroom was not immune from burlesque’s salacious touch:
TEACHER: Where’s little Mickey?
TOP BANANA: Here I am. I’m sorry I’m late, but mother was late packing my lunch. Here it is. (Shows bag.)
TEACHER: Do you have nuts?
TOP BANANA: No.
TEACHER: Do you have dates?
TOP BANANA: If I had nuts, I’d have dates.
There were a thousand different routines out there, and to survive, a comic had to pick up a cue and launch into one at a moment’s notice. As the critic Leonard Maltin said, ‘Burlesque, like vaudeville, was very demanding work because you didn’t just do one performance a day, you did many. So performing the same routines over and over and over again was crucial to any comedian’s development. There were old standby routines that every burlesque comic knew and you could just refer to them by the shorthand descriptions and everybody knew what you meant.”
As the 1920s began, and there was more competition from vaudeville and motion pictures, burlesque had a more difficult time holding on to the exclusively male audience who would shuffle into the theaters for the two to four daily shows. And so, not for the first time in American culture and certainly not for the last, they resorted to sex. Shows got “bluer,” first by putting the girls in the spotlight and having them display more of their pulchritude and, second, by pushing the comics’ material further and further to the edge.
TEACHER: All right, Jimmy, you’re so smart. Use the words honor and offer in a sentence.
COMIC: That’s easy. She offered her honor. He honored her offer. And all night long, he was on her and off her.
When the Depression hit, the strippers took center stage from the comics—which upended (as it were) the whole comic premise of burlesque. Whereas before, the comic could make antic hay out of playing bits with, or off, a pretty girl, the pretty girl was now the main attraction, with the comics filling the time between G-string changes. As Phil Silvers remembered, “Burlesque was about the only steady work in 1932. To seize the attention of the predominantly male audience, a comedian had to make his presence felt. And fast. The management was not interested in how funny you were. Just how often you were funny.”
Just as burlesque was getting racier, it bought itself a higher profile—and it was a mixed blessing. After operating several burlesque houses in New York City, the Minsky family decided to invade the citadel of the Theater District and open for business in the Republic Theater on West Forty-second Street in 1931. The Minskys banked on the hopes that their swanky surroundings might make their product seem classier, but they did little to alter the content of their shows. It was hard to know what was worse—the content of the shows or their leering titles, such as “Eileen Dover from Aiken.” Whatever other emotions Minsky’s burlesque roused in the city’s male populace, it roused the ire of the new mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, who shut down burlesque by 1937. It was about time to bring down the ragged curtain on burlesque anyway; the jokes were getting as old as the scenery.
Still, burlesque limped along as an American institution. It was a profitable training ground for comedians like Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Jack Albertson, Jackie Gleason, Abbott and Costello, and Phil Silvers. Nothing in American humor could be more childish, more cheap, more smutty than burlesque—but nothing could give more simple, unadorned pleasure, either. It cast a very long shadow. Whenever Johnny Carson arched an eyebrow at the buxom Carol Wayne during “The Mighty Carson Art Players,” or whenever Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza tied themselves into linguistic pretzels, the sweet sounds of the seltzer bottle could be heard spritzing in the distance.
“I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT”
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO
LA GUARDIA TO COSTELLO: What are you doing here?
COSTELLO: Here’s your pass for tonight’s rally.
LA GUARDIA: Do you mean to say I need a ticket to get into my own park? Does your wife know you’re on tour?
COSTELLO: I think she does.
LA GUARDIA: Well, she must be having a good time.
(Costello begins to doff his jacket to sock him one.)
LA GUARDIA: Who do you think you are—a City Councilman?
When New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia engaged in some horseplay with Lou Costello for the newsreel cameras on the steps of City Hall on August 26, 1942, both men could afford to be good natured. La Guardia was coming to the end of his pioneering tenure as mayor, having, among many other civic initiatives, effectively eradicated burlesque from New York’s stages in 1937. Costello, who began his comedy career with partner Bud Abbott on those very burlesque stages a year earlier, was now half of Hollywood’s most successful comedy team.
They had made eight full-length features in the previous two years, nearly all of them hits. Abbott and Costello were on their way to earning a $1-million-a-year paycheck, a far cry from the $150 a week they were making playing in burlesque only five years earlier. But as the saying might go, you could take the boys out of burlesque, but no one ever really took the burlesque out of Abbott and Costello.
Lou Costello was born in a working-class New Jersey neighborhood in 1906. A natural athlete and a boxer, he kicked around Hollywood as a stuntman before returning to the East Coast just as the 1930s began, to try his hand as a burlesque comic. William Alexander “Bud” Abbott grew up—literally—on the Coney Island boardwalk and began his burlesque career as a ticket taker. He moved up to producing his own show and became an efficient jack-of-all-trades. One night, Abbott fired the straight man at one of his shows and took over himself, saying, “Why am I paying this guy fifty dollars a week when I can do the same thing myself?”
The origins of Abbott and Costello’s actual partnership are shrouded in the mists of showbiz legend, rendered even murkier by the fact that, when they got together, no one really noticed. Both men had been playing the Manhattan burlesque circuit along West Forty-second Street with other partners; perhaps one of Costello’s partners tanked or fell sick one afternoon and Abbott filled in. Perhaps, admiring each other’s work from the wings, they decided to walk out onstage together for one show. Every comedian knew all the routines anyway, and no one in the audience was going to object if the headliner didn’t show up. And so, Abbott and Costello glided out of the wings one matinee, clicked, and became headliners themselves.
That’s what I’m tryin’ to find out! Abbott and Costello as stage stars in The Streets of Paris (1939); film debuts in One Night in the Tropics.
They soon found themselves starring in Life Begins at Minsky’s at the Republic Theater on the other end of Forty-second Street. Apparently, Abbott and Costello worked “clean”—which makes sense, considering they partnered up in the heyday of La Guardia’s crackdown—but whether or not Costello was, as he liked to shriek, “a b-a-a-a-a-d boy” in burlesque, the handwriting was on the wall. As Lou’s daughter, Chris Costello, maintained, “To most audiences in New York at the time, they were clearly known as burlesque comedians and, in order for their careers to continue, they had to clean up their act or get out of burlesque completely, or both. And both is exactly what they did.” Bud and Lou needed to break into another venue. On February 3, 1938, Abbott and Costello appeared on The Kate Smith Radio Hour to no great acclaim (although the show’s producer asked Costello to raise the pitch of his voice so that audiences could distinguish between the two partners—that was a good idea). On March 24, Abbott and Costello vexed the producer by performing their favorite burlesque routine on the air; he didn’t think it was very funny, but everyone else did. “Who’s on First?” made its debut in front of a national audience, and the switchboards lit up. No one can claim the exact provenance of “Who’s on First?” either. Such wordplay stretched all the way back to the minstrel show, but it hardly matters; the effortlessness of such back-and-forth was in Abbott and Costello’s genes and, as film historian Leonard Maltin put it, “Nobody made of that material what they did, and nobody scored such a tremendous impact with the public as they did with that variation on this stock idea.”
Abbott and Costello kept performing on Smith’s program, stole the show in a 1939 Broadway revue called The Streets of Paris, and made their film debuts as supporting comedians in a patchwork quilt of a musical called One Night in the Tropics in 1940, where they shoehorn in five of their burlesque sketches. That movie didn’t make a huge impression, but Abbott and Costello’s timing, always impeccable, couldn’t have been better, when, the next year, they made one of the first “service” comedies of the 1940s: Buck Privates, a spoof of life in an enlistment center. The movie was released just months after the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 and struck a nerve across the country. Abbott and Costello’s slapstick byplay, such as a drill instructor sequence borrowed from their burlesque days, turned the low-rent comedy into one of the biggest hits of 1941: made for $20,000, Buck Privates earned $4.7 million.
Throughout their more than three dozen features, fifty television show episodes, and innumerable personal, radio, and variety appearances, Abbott and Costello worked only the slightest variations on their essential burlesque personas. As Maltin puts it, “Lou was sort of the childlike patsy and Bud was the slickster, the con man, always getting the better of Lou. They never sat down and analyzed it. I don’t think they could if you begged them.” Their lives off-camera were not all laughs; Bud Abbott suffered from debilitating bouts of epilepsy, often while in the middle of a routine. Lou Costello fought a bout of rheumatic fever at the height of their careers, only to lose his infant son in an accidental swimming pool drowning months after.
Home run: Reprising their famous bit in The Naughty Nineties (1945).
LOU: Tomorrow throws the ball and the guy gets up and bunts the ball.
BUD: Yes.
LOU: So when he bunts the ball, me being a good catcher, I want to throw the guy out at first base, so I pick up the ball and throw it to who.
BUD: Now that’s the first thing you’ve said right!
LOU: I don’t even know what I’m talking about!
Abbott and Costello clowned through the inevitable feuds, breakups, and rapprochements over a twenty-year partnership. Their film producers, usually Universal, picked them up and dropped them down in every possible genre picture or situation: haunted houses, safaris, tropical islands, the Wild West—even the American Revolution. You could wind Abbott and Costello up and watch ’em go. When their stock dipped a bit after World War II, some genius at Universal thought of teaming them up with the studio’s stock of monsters. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein proved a lightning bolt to their careers in 1948, and soon they were teamed with mummies, invisible men, mad doctors, and berserk swamis. Perhaps their most imaginative turn was on their weekly sitcom from the early fifties, The Abbott and Costello Show, where they vaguely impersonated two out-of-work actors named Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Comedians who grew up in the 1950s, such as Robert Klein and Jerry Seinfeld, fondly remember the disjointed make-believe aspect of the show, where Bud and Lou reprised their old routines once again, only now in a concentrated form that superseded anything as irrelevant as narrative. They even adopted a chimp—as their son.
It didn’t end with as many laughs as it had begun. They fought more and more often with each other, Costello wanting to expand or go solo while Abbott wanted to hold on to the same shtick. According to film historian Stephen Cox:
Unfortunately, they were heavy gamblers and they put their financial affairs in other people’s hands. A lot of bad decisions were made over a period of time and at the end of their careers, the IRS came and kind of swallowed them whole, really. It was very sad because both of them died broke, for the most part. It was kind of the American dream gone sour.
In hot water: Raking in the dough; with Glenn Strange in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).
The intelligentsia never loved Abbott and Costello; only audiences did. They kept one of America’s great comedy traditions alive for decades beyond its demise; lost in a desert, a harem, or a haunted house, you could be assured that Abbott and Costello would carry a burlesque routine along in their supply kit. Most significantly, they met their mainstream audience at exactly the right time. They were a new team just when some of older teams and comedians of the 1930s had waned, and, best of all, they could be relied upon to distract an anxious wartime public. As Shelley Berman put it, “They gave us wonderful nonsense, utter nonsense! And they came in World War Two, and they gave us such laughter, because they were such nonsense, they had nothing to do with reality.”
THEY GAVE US WONDERFUL NONSENSE,
UTTER NONSENSE!
Fifty percent of what I write ends up in the toilet … practically everything is taboo and we end up with ersatz subject matter and ditto humor.
—Fred Allen
“HELL OR THE COLUMBIA BROADCASTING SYSTEM”
FRED ALLEN
In the Golden Age of Radio, whoever paid the pipeline really called the tune. These were the days before programming was parceled out by network ad executives to an abundance of advertisers. Radio had sponsors, corporate commercial entities who paid for the entire hour or half-hour program, hoping to create audience identification with their companies, rather than a specific product. Therefore, it was of the greatest importance that a sponsor liked the performer who hosted their show—it was the sponsor, not the network, who wrote the checks. With a comedy show, it was especially crucial to have an amiable personality hawking the product. Comedians became nearly synonymous with their sponsors: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy with Chase and Sanborn; Bob Hope with Pepsodent (“This is Bob ‘Pepsodent’ Hope, saying that if you brush your teeth with Pepsodent you’ll have a smile so fair that even Crosby will tip his hair!”); Jack Benny with Jell-O. But the golden rule was that you could be funny around the product, but you could never make fun of the product.
Probably no one on radio was less disposed to respecting his sponsor than Fred Allen. Allen thought the whole obsequious relationship between comic and sponsor was ridiculous, and in a world “fraught with politeness,” he was the only one who stuck up for the truth. “The vice president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference,” he once said. Allen came by his saturnine cynicism honestly. He had toiled in vaudeville for years, where he was billed as “The World’s Worst Juggler.” Like W. C. Fields, he left a broken home and an alcoholic father to rise through the ranks and made a name for himself in a series of comic revues on Broadway. He started his own radio career in 1932 and wound up hosting seven different shows for five major sponsors, including The Linit Batch Club Revue, named for a bathing lotion, and The Salad Bowl Revue, sponsored by Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Allen also wrote most of each hour-long comedy show—an impressive feat then, as it would be now—and once claimed that he was “the only man who has written more than he could lift.” He had a great gift for parody and created a sequence specifically for that purpose called “The Mighty Allen Art Players,” which was appropriated years later by Johnny Carson. Frequently his humor hinged on a mind-boggling pun or turn of phrase. Playing a Charlie Chan clone called One Long Pan, Allen solved the murder of a circus contortionist shot while twisted into the letter R; his wife shot him, Allen/Pan concluded, because she didn’t want him to make an S out of himself.
The sap is in Hollywood: Fred Allen trading barbs with his good friend, miser jack Benny.
The various sponsors seemed scared to death that Allen’s humor, which was blissfully over the heads of the lowest common denominator, would somehow sneak in something dirty or insulting. The censors forced him to delete words like saffron, a woman’s lavaliere, Rabelaisian, and titillate. Allen wasn’t paranoid; sponsors could wield a heavy cudgel. One of Allen’s shows was The Sal Hepatica Revue (The Hour of Smiles), promoting a laxative made by Bristol Myers, and when Allen once made a pejorative reference to Scottish frugality, several hundred Scotsmen from the Pittsburgh area sent a letter threatening never again to use the sponsor’s product. Allen made a grudging apology: “The prospect that they will go through life constipated so frightened the agency that they made me apologize.”
