Coming to Comedy, Part One: Invasion of the Vaudeville Sketchers

Comedy Tonight

“Something familiar, 

Something peculiar, 

Something for everyone: A comedy tonight!” 

(Stephen Sondheim, “Comedy Tonight,” the opening song of the 1962 Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum)

Steve Allen offered the following observations in The Atlantic in 1957 as part of “The Vanishing Comedian,” his essay reflecting on the state of comedy in the United States nearly a decade into the advent of television as a mass medium:

“The world has known no other time when the mass mind was so completely humor-washed. Traditionally comedy has been something of a rare treat, an aesthetic delicacy, and even though radio made it a relative commonplace, it remained for television — with its brain-numbing, hypnotic attraction — to offer comedy during almost every hour of the day, every day of the week.

“The result has been that the man on the street first of all spends less time than ever on the street and secondly that he has developed an over-awareness of comedy, a lack of respect for its omnipresent practitioners, and a cynically critical attitude toward its performance.

“In plain words it has gotten so that every grocery clerk, who would never have dreamed of offering a critical appraisal of a Charlie Chaplin movie or a Jack Benny broadcast of 1938 now feels fully qualified — nay, in duty bound — to express himself in vituperative detail as to the merits of last night’s Bob Hope show. In this regard he has, of course, been led by his published representatives, the television critics.”

We can only imagine the late Mr. Allen’s chagrin in response to today’s social media maelstrom providing every “grocery clerk” with a laptop, easy access to the “like” button, and 24/7 opportunities to judge (in comments sections, on blogs, on Substack or X) not only comic performances but everything else in real time with few constraints (“vituperative detail,” make way for publicly-vented venom without end). 

In 1957, though, what provides Steve Allen the standing to deliver this assessment on comedy and its consumption, then?  The Atlantic editors describe his ethos this way in the note preceding the essay: “One of the most durable entertainers in TV comedy, Steve Allen speaks with authority when he assesses supply and demand in a field all too precarious for those who enter it. Are today’s comedians a healthy continuation of the breed, or are they the last of their species?”  We can assure those long-departed editors that comics remain with us in ways they likely couldn’t predict.

1957.  Let’s dwell for a moment or two on thoughts of the decade, a time we can revisit in the 21st century as the setting for the early seasons of a noir-adjacent, booze-soaked critique of the advertising game, Mad Men, as well as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a domestic sitcom/show biz dramedy about stand-up as a rising form in clubs and on television, women’s friendships and rivalries–the show comes from the creator of Gilmore Girls, after all–and driving, life-shaping ambition. (I’ll engage with the latter at length in a future installment in this series.) 

Television had occupied living rooms for less than a decade by the year Allen described its “brain-numbing, hypnotic attraction.” He made a nice living as a television mainstay for most of his adult life, not only on the commercial networks but on PBS with his research-based Meeting of the Minds series featuring Great Books-flavored conversations involving canonical historical figures played by actors; the editors already call Allen a “durable entertainer” in the youthful medium still defining itself in large part via the genres that stay with us more than seventy years after the first boxy sets captured eyes in store windows and homes.  In the fifties, though, we can watch as television transforms the entertainment industry (and the consumption of entertainment) and the domestic environment along with childhood and youth, discussed in the previous series as the invention of “youth culture” through popular music—in this series we’ll spend more time, at least at first, with comedy as part of mass culture for adults, people without bedtimes who can stay up to watch late night television. 

A Son of Vaudeville

Some biographical detail to locate Allen in entertainment history—in line with several of the singer-songwriters considered in "Coming to Genre," Allen inherited a show business legacy.  Born in New York City in 1921 to the husband-and-wife vaudeville team Billy Allen and Belle Montrose (both stage names, though their only child Steve kept his father Billy’s stage surname throughout his career), he grew up in Chicago after his father’s death when Steve was an infant, raised by his mother’s large family while she kept working in vaudeville.  Though Wikipedia doesn’t cite a source, the entry on Allen reports that Milton Berle considered Belle Montrose “the funniest woman in vaudeville.”  He ran away at sixteen and lived as something of a vagabond before enrolling briefly at Arizona State Teachers College, originally known as Tempe Normal School and now Arizona State University.  He served in the Army infantry during WWII without overseas deployment and then began a career as a radio announcer and ultimately host of two popular Los Angeles comedy/music/talk shows, preparing him to make the jump to television as the scrambling, scrounging medium sought out suitable on-screen talent in its fledgling days, often drawing on people with experience in radio as cinema in its early days drew on vaudevillians and stage actors.  As the talk show genre developed primarily in New York, not LA, Allen moved back to where he was born to play his role in the invention of the variety and late night genres.

In the early fifties, Allen worked at all three major networks, CBS (making a name for himself as a substitute host on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts), ABC, and ultimately NBC, which in 1954 made him the original host of Tonight Starring Steve Allen; the network kept the show, renamed The Tonight Show, still a late night anchor 70 years later with a roster of hosts from Jack Paar and Johnny Carson to Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon—Joan Rivers had the requisite first initial, “J,” to join the anointed but only made it as far as guest host; we’ll consider how her career inspired both The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Hacks in a future installment.  Allen originally created the show as The Steve Allen Show for the local NBC affiliate in New York.  Consider the genre features Allen introduced—the announcer, Gene Rayburn, later host of The Match Game; the bandleader, Skitch Henderson; the opening monologue engaging with current events; celebrity guests touting their latest projects; and comic set pieces involving recurrent characters or audience members.  To some degree Allen fell victim to his own success in the late night slot, leading the network to enlist him to host a Sunday primetime variety show to take the battle to ratings-juggernaut The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS.  By 1957, Steve Allen had left the show he had founded.  After experimenting with different formats, NBC returned to the formula with Jack Paar, who hosted for five years before giving way to Johnny Carson.

Now back to the opening article excerpt and its assertions about the state of comedy. The Atlantic had 250,000 subscribers in 1957, with another 50,000 copies sold at newsstands, compared to 49 million households reporting owning a television set in 1958, with all of these sets potentially presenting viewers everyday access to comedy shows, leading to Allen’s description of the “mass mind” as “humor-washed” (catchy term there). The Elvis Presley appearance in July 1956 on Allen’s show attracted its largest audience, estimated at 40 million viewers; let’s say that a normal-size Allen Show audience numbered a tenth of that, something around four million viewers.  Allen, a savvy veteran of many media forms, likely knows quite well that he’s writing to a small audience in comparison to the mammoth audience watching his show (or the Sullivan Show during the three years they aired in direct opposition on Sunday nights); when he hosted The Tonight Show and later hosted syndicated versions of his own show, he had smaller audiences but even those dwarfed the number of readers of The Atlantic.  What does the smaller reading audience (likely with some education beyond high school) give Allen room to do? 

For one thing, he can create some distance from his parents’ vaudeville past, though he followed their footsteps into show business.  While vaudeville likely didn’t get called a “rare treat” or “aesthetic delicacy” in its heyday, Allen has a point that people had to plan to visit a vaudeville venue, particularly high-end venues in big cities.  They could find such places in most urban centers and in many smaller towns; as Wikipedia summarizes in its entry on vaudeville:

“At its height, vaudeville played across multiple strata of economic class and auditorium size. On the vaudeville circuit, it was said that if an act would succeed in Peoria, Illinois, it would work anywhere. The question ‘Will it play in Peoria?’ has now become a metaphor for whether something appeals to the American mainstream public. The three most common levels were the ‘small time’ (lower-paying contracts for more frequent performances in rougher, often converted theatres), the ‘medium time’ (moderate wages for two performances each day in purpose-built theatres), and the ‘big time’ (possible remuneration of several thousand dollars per week in large, urban theatres largely patronized by the middle and upper-middle classes). As performers rose in renown and established regional and national followings, they worked their way into the less arduous working conditions and better pay of the big time.”

While we can think of Allen as aspiring to the nascent “big time” in television, symbolized by the network pitting him against Sullivan, let’s consider as additional context how pop culture memorialized vaudeville as it was during its last dominant decade, the Roaring Twenties, as the high point described above gave way to radio, film, and television.

Gotta Dance.  And Sing.  And Mug.

 This montage from the opening scene of Singin’ in the Rain (1952) provides a quick history of both vaudeville (Gene Kelly/Don Lockwood and Donald O’Connor/Cosmo Brown sing and dance on a low-end vaudeville stage to “Fit as a Fiddle”) and how early movie-making needed vaudevillians for the new medium: Don and Cosmo start as musicians playing background music for actors performing scenes, with Don by happy accident becoming a stunt double, then an actor.  The sequence as a whole provides a master class in a kind of compressed irony made possible by film editing, contrasting the “live” studio-endorsed version of Lockwood’s upper-class pedigree he offers to the interviewer (training in conservatories and the motto “always dignity”) with the (via flashback) hardscrabble reality of his actual life path to Hollywood though the vaudeville circuit.  As part of the “Broadway Melody” sequence toward the end of the film, another very quick montage shows a dancer’s rise through the levels of vaudeville, as Kelly’s goofy hoofer’s “gotta dance,” moving from burlesque houses to the heights of the Ziegfeld Follies.  Another Hollywood borrowing from vaudeville: the need for performers to have at least some training as singers, dancers, and actors; when sound arrived, acting came to include oratory, as we see in this clip of Lockwood and Brown taking elocution lessons they transform into the antic “Moses Supposes.”

Note the subversive takeover of a class that begins with a textbook and lesson plan, as Don and Cosmo turn the tongue-twister about Moses into a tour de force of comic song-and-dance.  Their range of talents (including a talent for spontaneous invention) cannot be contained by studio-sanctioned “training” as they transform the classroom space into a performance space allowing them to use voice, body, and transformative imagination.  They certainly earn the “A” they award themselves at song’s end.  I label this at core a comedy bit because of how they recreate the space, giving life to an alternate world through dancing not only on the floor but on the desk and individual chairs and by turning things like the drapes into costumes.  An exercise in unfettered invention as disruption of norms.

Donald O’Connor as Cosmo Brown sings and dances in praise of comedy, making a claim that “low-end” hijinks will please an audience more than quotations from an elite figure like Shakespeare (we can think of Cole Porter’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in his fifties musical Kiss Me Kate as in conversation with this song).  Legend has it that O’Connor had to spend time in the hospital after damaging himself performing the acrobatics of the number.  The performance includes a range of vaudeville mini-sketches, again celebrating the “lowbrow” aspects of Don and Cosmo’s vaudeville roots.  As in the earlier number, Cosmo creates his own comic world, commandeering whatever’s around as props for his newly-formed preferred reality—we see the risk involved when he crashes through a prop.

I imagine Steve Allen watching this movie in 1952, comparing this Hollywood version of vaudeville to his memories of his parents and what he knew of their careers–I imagine he had complicated emotional responses to the film’s glossy Technicolor narrative, given his father’s early death and his mother’s decision to leave him with her family in order to continue her career.  Recall that Allen didn’t want to book Elvis Presley, and he generally didn’t approve of rock and roll, which we can equate with low vaudeville.  As noted, he likely craved entry to the “big time” vaudeville equivalent on television, conveying entertainment with some refinement and good taste, though he likely also understood that a mass medium had to incorporate all three levels to draw in a mass audience.  His slap at the “grocery clerk” feeling “fully qualified — nay, in duty bound — to express himself in vituperative detail as to the merits of last night’s Bob Hope show” suggests a level of offense that anybody can offer judgment on the art of comedy, his family inheritance.  The slap extends to the new breed of “television critics” who also presume to have and deliver critical opinions on what they watch.  Allen’s brow appeal had to aim high, middle, and low, but his target audience is clear.  We can follow the conversation about levels of comedy performance and standards of taste from that point on, played out across genres and time slots as the medium continued to expand in ubiquity and influence.

Pedagogy Break: Teaching isn’t vaudeville, though we can likely agree that teaching includes performance.  When you plan for class, how might you think about the parallels to vaudeville’s high, middle, and low registers in relation to the language you use and the relationships you aim to develop with students?  You don’t want to come across as the elocution professor from “Moses Supposes” who himself becomes a prop for the comic song and dance number; you also likely don’t want to turn your classroom into the scene of chaos that closes the number, with nothing left in its accustomed place serving its accustomed purpose.  If you want to “make ‘em laugh,” following Cosmo’s exhortation, you likely establish boundaries for your use of comedy and try not to crash through a painted paper wall attempting a bravura back-flip.  How do you vary your tone to appeal to students?  How do you invite students into various kinds of performance and response through your performing choices?

Stretch-a-Sketch

Let’s jump back in time to 1950, when “only” five million US households reported having television sets.  Early network executives and programmers certainly had a mass audience in mind, though nothing close in scope to the tenfold increase in households the industry would colonize over the next ten years.

I’ve mentioned in a previous article on television sitcoms the all-star assembly of writers for Your Show of Shows in describing the premise of The Dick Van Dyke Show created by Carl Reiner.  Again, the writers included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon (Neil and Danny were brothers), Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Selma Diamond, Joseph Stein, Michael Stewart, Tony Webster, and Carl Reiner.  Reiner also served as a member of the performing cast led by Sid Caesar, ably supported by Imogene Coca and Howard Morris.  A bit of biography about each of them:

Isaac Sidney Caesar was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1922 to Polish immigrants Ida Raphael and Max Ziser (the change from Ziser to Caesar remains a mystery, at least to Wikipedia, though Caesar biographers likely have theories and perhaps testimony).  Young Isaac Sidney started comedy work early in his parents’ 24-hour luncheonette, demonstrating a precocious talent for mimicking the speech patterns and idioms of the diverse customers.  He and his older brother David performed comic sketches for the family based on popular movies of the day. A saxophonist, Caesar played in bands at Catskills resorts as a teenager (where he first encountered a very young Melvin Kaminsky, later known as Mel Brooks), also performing in comic sketches at Borscht Belt hotels.  He served in the Coast Guard during WWII, stationed in Brooklyn.  As part of his military service, Caesar worked in Palm Beach, Florida developing a musical and comedy revue called Tars and Spars (made into a movie after the war).  He used his old military contacts to make the move to television back in New York, first in the Admiral Broadway Revue (which ended when the sponsor couldn’t make televisions fast enough to meet demand) and then, from 1950-54, in Your Show of Shows, initially a variety show that he and his comic co-stars increasingly dominated.  The show morphed into The Caesar Hour later.

Emogeane Coca, born in Philadelphia in 1908, had show biz parents, father Joseph Coca (originally Joseph Fernandez y Copa), a vaudeville orchestra conductor who also played violin, and mother Sarah “Sadie” Brady, a magician’s assistant and dancer.  Training as a dancer from an early age, Emogeane became Imogene and made it into a Broadway chorus by the age of 16 and then became a Manhattan nightclub headliner in her twenties and thirties before beginning to work with Caesar on the Admiral Broadway Revue in 1948.    

Howard Jerome Morris, born in the Bronx, New York in 1919, attended New York University on a dramatic arts scholarship (no show biz parents providing home/show biz schooling).  He served in the Army in WWII, entertaining the troops throughout the Pacific in a unit commanded by English actor Maurice Evans that included Werner Klemperer (later Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes) and Carl Reiner. 

Carl Reiner, born in the Bronx, New York in 1922 (same year as Caesar, same borough as Morris), participated in a free drama workshop provided by the Works Progress Administration as a teenager (his older brother Charles suggested it).  During WWII, he trained as a radio operator and French language interpreter before auditioning for Maurice Evans, who added him to his entertainment squad touring the Pacific.  Max Liebman, the “Ziegfeld of TV” who “discovered” Caesar, selected Reiner to join Your Show of Shows as both writer and performer.  

Before we view some key Your Show of Show sketches essential to the development of the genre on television, I want to share clips from two earlier periods, vaudeville in the twenties and screwball comedies in the films of the thirties.  In both contexts the clips involve couples in relationships playing out power and gender dynamics for comic effect, sometimes in collaboration and sometimes to thwart each other.

First, let’s spend some time with Burns and Allen, whose long partnership (and marriage) spanned vaudeville, film, radio, and television.  (Long parenthetical alert: Sort of sorry but not really sorry for all the time jumps—part of my intent has to do with a kind of infinite regression to illustrate that very little, if anything, doesn’t evolve from something that came before and lingers on, leaving traces.  I also want to convey a feeling of simultaneity, with all of these comic performers in conversation with each other.  Yes, we live bound to chronology, to what novelist E.M. Forster calls the “ticking clock” always present in fiction, reminding us of mortality, but our minds don’t accept that bondage, always putting things together without buckling under to the brute imperatives of linear time—in our minds we can stage what I’ll call scripts of “all-at-onceness” bringing together whatever and whoever we want.)

Nathan Birnbaum lived 100 years and two months, born in New York in 1896 and passing away in Beverly Hills in 1996.  You likely know him better as George Burns, the professional stage name he adopted in his early twenties as a vaudeville singer, dancer, and patter comic, usually working with a female partner.  Some readers might know him mostly from his career resurgence in his seventies, when he had starring roles in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, playing opposite Walter Matthau as the retired vaudeville team Lewis and Clark, and Oh, God, playing opposite country boy John Denver as the deity. He met Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen, born in San Francisco in 1895 (her birth year has been a subject of some debate), in 1922, when both had already established themselves as vaudeville performers.  She first performed on stage at age three, and by 1909 was part of an Irish folk dance act with her sisters, called “The Four Colleens” (giving some credence to the 1895 birth date).  As Burns would later put it in describing how they came to work together, “’And all of a sudden the audience realized I had a talent. They were right. I did have a talent—and I was married to her for 38 years.’"  In their early act, Burns delivered the jokes, but he realized that the audience laughed more at Allen’s “straight” lines, so he flipped their roles, with him becoming the “straight man.”  His joke about the act: "All I had to do was say, 'Gracie, how's your brother?' and she talked for 38 years. And sometimes I didn't even have to remember to say 'Gracie, how's your brother?'" They married in 1926, remaining together till her death in Los Angeles in 1964.

George Burns and Gracie Allen perform their “Lambchops” sketch in 1929 in a Vitaphone film short.  They enter what looks like a “drawing room,” apparently looking for something: the audience.  George kicks off the interaction by calling Gracie’s attention to the camera: “There they are, right there,” he says.  Note the vaudeville cadences in the rapid pace of jokes and the focus on verbal humor through plays on words (often substituting literal and figurative levels for each other) and disruptions to the expected progression or “logic” of everyday conversations about what I’ll call the “known world” the team shares with the audience, as in the crossword puzzle exchange.  At one point George tries to get Gracie to play the straight role, a reference to how they started as a team—no dice.  We get a quick segue into a soft-patter, soft-shoe love song after the parachute joke (George gets the occasional punchline).  Note Gracie’s reference to cooking “gefilte fish or Irish stew” in the lyrics, a glancing reference to their ethnic backgrounds (this might have been more pronounced as a theme in the vaudeville context, as ethnic stereotypes provided much grist for the vaudeville mill).  The mother-in-law verse from Gracie, drawing on an enthymeme about how a mother-in-law can become an unwelcome semi-permanent houseguest, provides the transition to a dance interlude sprinkled with jokes.  They break the fourth wall again in trying to figure out how to get off the “stage,” as the camera stays with them after the song ends, locking them in the audience’s view till they saunter away.    

George Burns and Gracie Allen perform a similar vaudeville routine, “Dizzy,”  in London in 1930, released by Columbia as a record.  As this kind of interaction serves as the core of their standard act, you’ll hear many of the same jokes and some that didn’t make it into the Vitaphone film version.

Bonus clip.  First an introduction to Benjamin Kubelsky, born in Chicago in 1894 to immigrant parents Meyer and Naomi.  Young Ben took violin lessons from the age of six and began his career as a musician in vaudeville, changing his name to Ben  K. Benny to placate a better-known violinist named Kubelik, who didn’t want the upstart to benefit from the similar surnames.  He changed his name again under pressure from “patter-and-fiddle” vaudevillian Ben Bernie, becoming Jack Benny (during his brief stint in the Navy he’d picked up Jack as a nickname).  Like Burns’s, his act featured a woman performer with whom he had a long marriage, Mary Livingstone, born Sadie Marks—Benny and Sadie first met at a Passover Seder in Vancouver that Zeppo Marx took Benny to, as Benny had befriended the Marx Brothers and their mother Minnie while playing the same vaudeville theater around 1911.  They were in Vancouver for the same reason that Groucho shot an elephant in his pajamas—we’ll likely never know.

George Burns and Jack Benny maintained a close friendship for decades as they (and Gracie Allen and Mary Livingstone, also great friends) pursued their parallel careers through radio, film, and television (side note: Benny was set to play one of the vaudevillians in the film version of The Sunshine Boys, though he had to withdraw due to declining health, clearing the way for his friend’s career resurgence—Benny died in Los Angeles in 1974).  This 1954 episode of The Jack Benny Show grows out of a live performance from 1952 in which Jack stands in for the missing Gracie.  The episode provides a frame for a television version of the vaudeville performance, with Gracie missing and Jack persuaded by George to play her part—we get a little dancing (at least stepping to a beat–these guys are nearly sixty) and a lot of bits and a virtuosic encore in which they talk over each other for about a minute.  Gracie turns up at the end of the episode to provide an explanation for her disappearance involving a “Denver sandwich” and a bus that breaks down in Bakersfield. Benny-as-Gracie begins at the 8:50 mark and runs around nine minutes.  The rest of the episode offers us a range of what became sitcom genre staples derived from vaudeville, including the concept of a workplace family and an easily-resolved misunderstanding on which to hang the advance of the plot.  We can also discern in the overall setting—the business of putting on a television show—a root source of series including Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show and to some degree Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, which often weaves in show biz motifs and plotlines, as in the season in which David takes a lead role in a revival of the stage version of The Producers or the season of the Seinfeld reunion.

George and Gracie in their vaudeville act performed courtship and later marriage and thus could play off of audience expectations about those stages of life, although with the distinct spin provided by Gracie’s way of understanding the world and expressing her experience, which turned the duo’s banter into an Alice-in-Wonderland adventure, with the befuddled, exasperated, but ultimately loving George prompting/tagging along, occasionally making a futile attempt to make Gracie adhere to conversational conventions and everyday logic.  Across the range of his reactions, George carries a degree of (suppressed) appreciation for Gracie’s talent and something close to awe before her inexhaustible gift for epistemic comic invention.  While their relationship doesn’t dominate their act, the act couldn’t work without the audience accepting them as a couple, which establishes the foundational context for the comedy.  Think of them as a template for all the television couples to follow, primarily on sitcoms (all the way from I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners to Cheers and Mad About You to the multiple couplings of Friends and on to recent examples ranging from the multi-generational pairings of Modern Family to the workplace romances of Ted Lasso, Shrinking, and Abbott Elementary) but also in other television genres that incorporate romantic/marital/domestic/workplace relationships (e.g. McMillan and Wife, Hart to Hart, and Moonlighting and more recently Eureka, Warehouse 13, and Bones).  Vaudeville traces everywhere.

Screwball Sketch

Now let’s consider three short “improvised” sketches embedded in the scripted narratives of several classic screwball comedies of the 1930’s—we’re still on the runway leading to a domestic-setting sketch featuring the Hickenloopers, the married couple often played by Caesar and Coca, on the wife’s birthday.  In each of the three sketches note how the screwball characters draw on presumed assumptions (enthymemes) about “lower-class” people and how such couples act in their relationships; they aim to fool the other characters in the scene (sometimes law enforcement, sometimes upper-class snobs), impress each other with their situational ingenuity (part of courtship), and make the audience laugh by making them party to the joke (that also functions as an ethical appeal about the worthiness of the characters and why the audience should root for them).

Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable as Ellie Andrews and Peter Warne in It Happened One Night (1934), enacting a domestic squabble to throw detectives off of Ellie’s trail.  Ellie has run away from her wealthy father in order to marry a man of whom he doesn’t approve, a social climber interested mostly in her money and class status.  Peter recognizes her when they both board a bus in Florida bound for New York and decides to help her reach her destination in order to write a story that will win him favor with his newspaper editor.  By this scene, they remain wary of each other—the night before he hung a blanket on a clothesline in the motel room to create the “walls of Jericho” to keep them chaste.  Now the detectives hired by Ellie’s father knock at the door.  Note how Gable begins the improvisation, inventing them as a married couple; Colbert quickly catches on and starts to answer as a wife—both characters display the improvisational smarts and enthymeme-knowledge about marriage to cast themselves as types that play against their “true” identities as spoiled child of wealth and cynical newspaper reporter.  As the scene and tempers escalate, the assumptions they activate in their audience pile up, convincing the detectives that the wife is not the runaway child of privilege they seek.  Colbert and Gable’s shared laughter after their charade succeeds marks a significant milestone in their screwball courtship.  They play at (lower or middle-class) marriage, trying out the roles.  At the end of the movie they return to a similar modest roadside motel, married, and the walls of Jericho come down.

Katharine Hepburn as Susan Vance playacting Swinging Door Susie in Bringing Up Baby (1937), posing as Cary Grant/Professor David Huxley’s jilted lover to escape her jail cell.  By this scene, David’s quiet life as a staid paleontologist painstakingly assembling a massive dinosaur skeleton has been blown up by Susan, who, she admits at movie’s end, has been doing whatever she can think of to keep him near her.  Screwball as an exercise in infatuation-fueled invention.  David refuses to participate, warning the doltish sheriff that she’s making up the character from movies she’s seen.  True enough, but the ruse gets her out of the cell and out the window of the jail at the end of the clip.  David may protest, but her improvisation serves the purpose of pulling him toward her emotionally—he can’t help but fall in love with her inventiveness and relentless/reckless spirit.  At the end of the movie she literally brings the dinosaur skeleton crashing down back at his lab, leaving them on a scaffolding platform declaring their love for each other.  He confesses, like Mr. Spock at the end of the original Star Trek series episode “This Side of Paradise,” that his rollercoaster-ride time with Susan away from the lab allowed him to have fun for the first time in his life.

Irene Dunne as Lucy Warriner in The Awful Truth (1937), posing as Cary Grant/Jerry Warriner’s wayward sister Lola to get her husband away from his prospective next wife.  The movie’s plot exemplifies what Stanley Cavell calls the “comedy of remarriage” in Pursuits of Happiness, his book about the genre.  Comic invention (prerequisite to joy, prerequisite to a life worth living) has seeped out of the Warriner marriage and must be restored before they mate with others.  If that requires the wife to play the sister, so be it.  Note that Lucy/Lola refers to her brother/husband as “Jerry the Nipper,” referencing what Susan calls David in the previous bit from Bringing Up Baby (screwball scripts in conversation).  Lola/Lucy undermines what Jerry’s replacement wife and her family expect from a “high-class” suitor aiming to join the family, deflating Jerry’s story about his/their father as a student at Princeton (Lola recasts him as a groundskeeper), asking for hard liquor (and hinting at her brother’s drinking problem), and insisting on performing a risqué musical number drawn from “low” vaudeville.  Note how Jerry gradually moves from dismay to appreciation of Lola/Lucy’s performance, eventually smiling widely, back in love with his wife as they leave the house of wealth and propriety to return to their marriage.

Pedagogy Break: Again, teaching isn’t screwball comedy, but how do you incorporate a sense of play and adventure into your writing courses?  We might agree that the practice of playacting always has a place in classrooms.  We learn to act appropriately as students, sometimes with rapt or robotic attention but as we advance through the system as wise-people-in-training or smart-people-on-display.  We learn later to act as teachers, sometimes as fountains of information but (at least as the teacher-as-hero narrative in pop culture presents the vocation) also as wise-people-imparting-knowledge or sages-on-display (progressive educators prefer the roles of co-learner or guide).  Do you speak openly about the component of play in all of this acting, whether as student or teacher?  What can play add to the serious business of completing the requirements for a Stanford degree?  We can consider models such as the scenes, games, or contests offered in such constructs as the Burkean Parlor, the formulas-to-mimic offered by Birkenstein and Graff in They Say, I Say, the staged dialectic of the Socratic Method, and any other pedagogical model that invites students to perform specific types of intelligence and/or skill in response to the teacher’s pedagogical prompts or cues—none of these stand out for their comic component (though all provide prime targets for caricature).  What do you add to the mix to get students to fall (back) in love with learning?  With writing?  With research?  With revision?

Caesar and Company (Finally)

Enough already with the historical context.  On with Your Show of Shows, sketches that look back to vaudeville and blaze a trail forward toward the evolution of comedy on television:

The "Birthday Present" sketch from Your Show of Shows featuring Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar as the Hickenloopers, their recurring married couple.  The opening phone call with wife Coca talking with her unseen/unheard mother sets up the premise of a long-married couple long past courtship; Coca at first tries to minimize the importance of receiving a birthday gift from her husband but eventually boils over about the state of their marriage—an appropriate gift from the “rat” or else, she tells her mother.  In Part Four of the previous series I wrote about enthymemes about (usually young) love in pop songs.  In this series we’ve already begun to expand to consider enthymemes about love for the long haul—what sustains it, what threatens it, what people must do to keep love alive once the dopamine rush of starry-eyed discovery gives way to the quotidian status quo.  In this sketch we encounter enthymemes about marital love becoming a habit emptied of the synched vibration of infatuation.  Returning from a day at work, Caesar falls asleep, like a robot unplugged, more than once, on the couch.  When pressed to sing “Happy Birthday,” he performs with spite and aggression (though he performs with some improvised verve).  While he admits to being a “rat,” he undercuts his confession by calling his spouse “nuts” when she demands romance and sobs on the couch (note the substitution of her crying for him sleeping on that couch, a visual dramatization of the enthymeme of the distant husband and emotional wife).  We can think of the writers playing each note of an enthymeme scale about married life in this sketch, trusting the performers to move with agility through the wide range of emotions underlying the discordant melody of the domestic duet.  How do we get to marital peace restored once Coca orders Caesar to leave after he’s revealed that the gift box (already thrown out the window) contained a robe he bought for himself (even a rat wants comfort)?  Well, one enthymeme on this particular scale relies on the premise that the mundane elements of marriage don’t mean the spouses don’t love each other despite all.  Love may hibernate during the winter of the daily grind—it doesn’t die.  The sketch provides its own version of “remarriage” through the revelation of the gift the wife desired, glimpsed in a jewelry store window, which Caesar finally shares; the anger doesn’t disappear—savor the perfection of Coca’s delivery of the line “They’re beautiful.”  Earrings ex machina.  Let’s have dinner now.

A word about looking through windows and domestic sketches as essays: Hitchcock’s long career hit a high point in the fifties with a series of movies about marriage and remarriage disguised as thrillers, from Dial M for Murder and Rear Window in 1954 through To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, and North by Northwest later in the decade.  The window in the Hickenlooper sketch above put me in mind of the premise of Rear Window, which posits recuperating action photographer L.B. (Jeff) Jefferies, played by Jimmy Stewart, confined to his New York apartment, his leg in a thigh-to-foot cast from a recent work injury (struck by debris from a race car crash he photographed).  He spends his time looking out his window into a courtyard that offers views into the windows of neighboring apartment buildings.  After many viewings, I’ve come to think of the film as an essay on the various stages of romantic relationships, with every window Jeff peers into offering a perspective on what he might live through if he marries Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), the socialite intent on marrying/domesticating him.  The perspectives range from the marital murder that fuels the plot to a dancer awaiting the return of her boyfriend serving in the military, newlyweds, a long-married couple with a dog, and a lonely single woman and lonely single man, a composer, who come together at movie’s end through his music (she could hear him playing his piano through her window).  Jefferies looking through the Hickenloopers’ window at their opera bouffe spat would fit neatly into the film’s essay.

The full troupe in Continental Express in 1953.  Note how the writers draw from a range of film sources including Shanghai Express (Coca does an approximation of Marlene Dietrich) and a number of Hitchcock spy thrillers of the thirties such The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, with Coca, Reiner, and Morris relying on tropes from the stock villains of the genre.  The sketch also offers, in Caesar’s portrayal of an affable dolt clearly unsuited for the mission, an early version of Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, the bumbling spy who works for Control in Get Smart, the sixties comedy series co-created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.  The sketch offers one of many movie parodies the writers wrote and the troupe performed, bringing familiar popular media into conversation with the new medium of television.  The sketch ends with a brief scene of domestic contentment, with Coca knitting, as if the entire narrative represents the couple’s fantasized adventure.  Note the playful “special effect” of the train repeatedly going through a tunnel—the screen goes black to allow for some comic payoff, e.g. Caesar losing his pants along with the secret documents.

Another movie parody, Le Grande Amour, delivered by Caesar, Coca, and Reiner in a pastiche of French, English, and gibberish.  The sketch begins with Caesar saving Coca from throwing herself into the river (“It’s cold,” he says) and offering her a job at his nearby patisserie as a “pretzel-bender.”  Once there, she and baker Reiner fall prey to their great love, to Caesar’s consternation.  The sketch begins in a style blending neo-realism and French New Wave and then springs into vaudeville antics at the bakery, with the flour imprints of the baker’s hands appearing first on Coca’s and then on Caesar’s back after they visit the back room with Reiner.  The length of the sketches on this show give the writers room for the gradual development and escalation of comic concepts as well as genre-jumping.

“This Is Your Story” parody of the popular fifties television show This Is Your Life from the troupe (minus Coca, who left the cast to host her own show).  Along with the movie parodies above, note the early parodies of television shows going all the way back to the early years of the medium, a sketch genre without which SNL and SCTV (and Monty Python’s Flying Circus on BBC) could not have existed (more to come about those shows’ parody sketches in a future installment).  Elements to note in this iconic sketch: Caesar at first wants nothing to do with his selection as the subject whose life will be grist for the show’s mill, doing his best to escape only to encounter reverse-bouncers who drag him to the stage; once there, he gets into the spirit of the show, greeting the people from his past with a crescendo of heightened emotion; Howard Morris as Uncle Goopy soars way over the top to the delight of the studio audience—one gets the sense that some of the physical bits were improvised, as it’s difficult to imagine a rehearsal of the sketch, and sometimes the actors (even the unflappable Reiner) seem a bit surprised by the persistence of the family mayhem.

The Hickenloopers again, this time with Caesar and Coca visiting a health food restaurant in New York City at Coca’s insistence (another enthymeme, with one member of a couple wanting to try new things with the other preferring the familiar).  We might describe this sketch genre as topical, drawing on a concept the television audience would recognize, though I don’t generally think of NYC in the fifties as known for health food restaurants.  I offer this sketch, which I don’t believe reaches the heights of the birthday sketch or the parodies, as an example of a concept sketch—once you get the premise, you can predict how the sketch will unfold via escalation and hyperbole, in this case first by the reveal of the ages of the unseen couple at the other table (supernaturally young-looking because they eat healthy) and finally by the delivery of what looks like miniature gardens as the entrees.  A risk in the sketch genre—once the audience gets the concept, the writing needs to find a way to move beyond what the audience will then expect to happen as the logical development of the concept.  After a lifetime watching sketches on television, my internal “concept checker” sounds the alarm regularly, often when I watch SNL, which reached its 50th season this year—certainly a weekly show well into old age by television standards has high risk to contend with in producing several sketches of high quality.  From my perspective, too many of the sketches in the show offer the concept after the exordium and sputter and wheeze into predictability.  

Pedagogy Break: let’s think about the thesis of an essay as equivalent to the concept of a comedy sketch, with parallel risks.  If the reader gets the thesis and can predict with near-certainty what the writer will do to argue the thesis, interest and attention likely flag.  A reader doesn’t require entertainment, but a reader has a right to the essayistic version of entertainment—call it a sustained invitation to intellectual engagement, perhaps.  How do you teach that management of the reader’s engagement?  When teaching arrangement (roadmaps, signposting, section headings), how do you layer in arrangement-as-engagement-beyond-clear-organization?  How do you teach students to blend what’s expected with what surprises?  How do you bring invention into conversation with the central argument in working with students on the arc of the essay?

One last clip from the gang: The Haircuts (Caesar, Reiner, and Morris) perform “You Are So Rare,” their hit record that sold five million copies in one day.  Another concept sketch, this time a parody of a certain kind of “rock” music group, certainly not Elvis or Jerry Lee, Chuck or Little Richard.  This sketch doesn’t entirely land for me, though I appreciate the dancing turn each Haircut gets—reminds me of how Kelly and O’Connor alternate solo bits in “Moses Supposes.”

Kvetch-a-Sketch

Melvin James Kaminsky, born in NYC in 1926, lost his father Max Kaminsky to tuberculosis when he was two.  He said later, as a comedy legend feted on an HBO special, "There's an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems—like a punch in the face."   He knew early that he wanted to go into show business; by fourteen he worked as a “tummler” (Yiddish for entertainer) at a Borscht Belt resort where he met a slightly older teenager, Sid Caesar.  He changed his name to Melvin Brooks, borrowing from his mother’s maiden name, Brookman, to avoid being confused with jazz trumpeter Max Kaminsky (eerily, his father’s name).  After high school he was drafted into the Army, training as a radio operator and serving in Europe as a forward artillery observer.  As a combat engineer, he participated in the Battle of the Bulge.  He said of his war experience, “Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.”  While he transferred to Special Services to carry on as an entertainer after the end of the war in Europe, I detail his battle experience to provide a contrast with some of the figures discussed earlier, who served only in entertainment units, though they all experienced a world at war.  

As noted above, Brooks joined the writers room at Your Show of Shows (after nagging his old Borscht Belt buddy Caesar for work) in 1950, beginning a long friendship and comic collaboration with Carl Reiner.  I like to think this story, as recounted by Reiner in a New York Times interview, really happened exactly as described:

“I remember the first question I asked him. It was because I had seen a program called We the People Speak, early television. [He puts on an announcer voice] ‘We the People Speak. Here’s a man who was in Stalin’s toilet, heard Stalin say, 'I’m going to blow up the world.' I came in, I said this is good for a sketch. No one else thought so, but I turned to Mel and I said, ‘Here's a man who was actually seen at the crucifixion 2,000 years ago,’ and his first words were, ‘Oh, boy.’ We all fell over laughing. I said, ‘You knew Jesus?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘Thin lad, wore sandals, long hair, walked around with 11 other guys. Always came into the store, never bought anything. Always asked for water.’ Those were the first words, and then for the next hour or two I kept asking him questions, and he never stopped killing us.”

George Burns encouraged the two to record the routine, which they performed for friends at parties (recall the clip from The Dick Van Dyke Show with the writers performing at Alan Brady’s party); ultimately Steve Allen persuaded them to make recordings.  More from Reiner: 

“When we made the album, the album came out, we weren't sure yet whether everybody was going to like it. And it was Cary Grant, who was my neighbor at Universal Studios, he came over and I gave him a record and I said the new record came out, you may like this. And he came back a week later, said, Can I have two dozen? I said, What are you going to do with them? He said, I'm going to take them to England. I said, You'll take these to England? He said, Yeah, they speak English there. Anyway, he came back and said, She loved it. I said who?  The Queen Mother. I said, You played this in Buckingham Palace? He said yes. And then Mel says, Well, if the biggest shiksa in the world loves it, we're home free.”

It's worth noting that Cary Grant invented himself (birth name Archie Leach), coming from humble origins and starting his career as an acrobat in British vaudeville before finding a new name and film stardom in Hollywood.  He would get the shtick.  As for the Queen Mother, your guess is as good as mine.

"2000 Year Old Man" sketch from 1961 with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.  They discuss the benefits of the exercise of praying and a suit that’s still new after one hundred years (the tag offers written proof of the suit’s longevity).  As often happens in these sketches, we learn something about famous people from the past, in this case Shakespeare and his one flop Queen Alexandra and Murray. 

"2000 Year Old Man" sketch from 1966 episode of Hollywood Palace.  They joke at the start about how often Reiner has repeated the same questions during their many interviews—apparently the questions provide the scaffolding for improvisation by Brooks.  Reiner observed that the key to the sketch’s success had to do with him putting his old friend, and his old friend’s genius, into a state of panic.  In this performance we can sense that Brooks has some lines ready to go (he’s “perfect” at polygamy) while at other times he seems to work without a script (or a net).  Brooks relies on marriage enthymemes, as they work just as well with having seven wives as one.  His first answer to the question of the difference between infatuation and love takes us back to Burns and Allen’s linguistic jokes (“infatuation” is longer than “love”).  “Love is a many-splintered thing” (they made love in trees) takes us to “Siggy” Freud, as Brooks was his first patient, never allowed on the couch because he thought he was a dog.  That’s kin to the old joke about the man who thought he was a chicken; his family doesn’t do anything to help him, as they “needed the eggs.”

"2000 Year Old Man" sketch, introduced by Dick Shawn, from the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1967.  Here we learn the origin of the word “cheese” and how people came to applaud by clapping their hands together upon seeing a “wonderment.”

Another sketch from Hollywood Palace, introduced by David Janssen, featuring Reiner in his usual straight man role and Brooks as tax expert Phillip Heinker.  Note the throughline of how to pronounce the surname, which provides a scaffolding for the Brooks character to revisit several ceremonial moments from his life amounting to a biographical montage of a con man. 

Not Mel Brooks as the "2000 Year Old Man," but as Melvin Kaminsky from Brooklyn telling his Cary Grant story to Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon on the last Carson-hosted episode of The Tonight Show in 1992.  I could write about this story for pages and pages.  I won’t.  Just a few things: Carson asks him to tell the Cary Grant story as if it’s a song he wants Brooks to play, so it doesn’t matter that Brooks told the story the last time he appeared on the show; in about four and a half minutes, Brooks creates a world, including a passable Cary Grant impression, Hollywood bungalows, sly evocations of cultural differences (the hard-boiled egg contrasting with first the tuna fish and then the corned beef sandwich, with a casual swipe at LA ignorance of how to eat corned beef); and a headlong rush from the starry-eyed Brooklyn kid meeting an other-worldly matinee idol to the bored veteran writer working on a movie script who doesn’t have time for Archie Leach (“I’m not in”).  A better quality clip from that appearance, though you have to skip to the Cary Grant story. This longer clip begins with some riffing on the "2000 Year Old Man" and includes some autobiography—well worth watching.

Improv-a-Sketch

Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, born in 1931 in Berlin, Germany, came to the United States at the age of seven with his younger brother Robert to live with their father Pavel Nikolaevech Peschkowsky, a physician who had emigrated a few months earlier—the boys’ mother Brigitte Landauer joined them soon after.  The family settled in New York with the surname Nichols, derived from Pavel’s patronymic.  Thus Mike Nichols came to be.  He briefly attended NYU but then headed to the University of Chicago to focus on pre-med courses.  Theater called, though, and he started acting in campus productions.  Wikipedia offers this about how he met his future performing partner (another story I want to believe happened this way): 

“Nichols first saw Elaine May when she was sitting in the front row while he was playing the lead in a Chicago production of Miss Julie, and they made eye contact.  Weeks later he ran into her in a train station where he started a conversation in an assumed accent, pretending to be a spy, and she played along, using another accent.  They hit it off immediately, which led to a brief romance. Later in his career, he said ‘Elaine was very important to me from the moment I saw her.’"  

Think of that scene in the train station in relation to both the excerpts from the screwball comedies and the Continental Express sketch included earlier.  We have accents, we have improv, we have kindred souls recognizing each other through collaborative play.

Elaine Iva Berlin, born in Philadelphia in 1932, took to the stage early, acting in her father Jack Berlin’s traveling Yiddish theater company from the age of three, eventually settling into the role of a little boy named Benny (no evidence that Jack Benny inspired the name).  Life as a touring actor meant that young Elaine attended many schools as a child; after her father died when she was eleven, her mother moved with her to Los Angeles, where Elaine attended Hollywood High, dropping out at fourteen.  After she married an engineer named Marvin May (leading to her professional surname and the birth of a daughter, actor and screenwriter Jeanne Berlin, when she was not yet twenty), she moved to Chicago, having heard that the University of Chicago admitted students without high school diplomas.  I’d need to dig deeper into May biographies to know what happened to husband Marvin and daughter Jeanne during the Chicago years; what Wikipedia does report is that she met Nichols in the early fifties, changing the course of comedy in the US through their partnership, a heady (and brainy) blend of improv and sketch.

Together they comprised what Dick Cavett later called “one of the comic meteors in the sky.”  Historian of comedy Gerald Nachman writes this about their legacy: “Nichols and May are perhaps the most ardently missed of all the satirical comedians of their era. When Nichols and May split up, they left no imitators, no descendants, no blueprints or footprints to follow. No one could touch them.”  That’s quite a claim, given the great influence they had on generations of comic performers to follow.  Through this series I invite you to judge for yourself the quality of their comedy heirs; for now, let’s watch Nichols and May in action as they streak through mass media.  They dominated US comedy from roughly 1958-61, moving from the Compass Players and Second City in Chicago (more on those early improv groups in a later installment), where they first worked together, to television and Broadway, where they parted, going their separate ways into scriptwriting and directing.

Elaine May introduces Mike Nichols as Lyle Glass at the 1959 Emmy Awards as the first recipient of the Total Mediocrity Award.  (Could the last name here allude to J.D. Salinger’s Glass family, featured prominently in his fiction in the fifties–parents Les and Bessie were in vaudeville, and several of their seven children become actors, with son Zooey and daughter Franny ill at ease with show biz phoniness, while this Glass unabashedly sees himself as full to the brim.) He begins, “This is the proudest moment of my life” before going on to lampoon the television practices that ensure mediocrity, e.g. “No matter what suggestions the sponsors make, I take them” and “I disregard talent to only hire swell guys.”  Finally, “I have tried to offend no one anywhere on earth,” a sly comment on the risks of working in a mass medium.  65 years later, the bit still surprises, as the audience seems delighted with the satire.  If you watch Take Two, the documentary linked below, you’ll hear how much Steve Martin and Robin Williams admired this sketch, with Martin wondering if enough time has passed for him to steal the sketch for himself and Williams imagining an audience member not laughing anymore after realizing that they’re the target of the satire.

Nichols and May, introduced by Hollywood icon Henry Fonda, at the water cooler in a CBS retrospective called The Fabulous Fifties aired in January 1960.  The co-workers discuss the Van Doren quiz show scandal and wind their way toward the question of whether politicians/presidents write their own speeches.  Nichols and May practice a form of observational comedy in developing premises rooted in everyday life; sometimes, as in this sketch, they sharpen their observational strategy to offer pointed critique, sometimes quite obliquely (blink and you can miss it).  The first example here is May’s reference to seeing the picture “in the newspaper of the little girl going into court with her manager” to answer questions about the quiz show scandal (the focus of Robert Redford’s Quiz Show in 1994)—what flashes by fleetingly here has to do with an observation that highlights and disrupts an enthymeme about the innocence of childhood; specifically, what nine-year-old girl should have a manager (she shouldn’t).  Their invoking and exploding of enthymemes about childhood continues with imagining the crooked quiz show producers saying “Kid, do you want to make some money?”; this portrays the nine-year-old as equivalent to an adult, prey to the same temptations of greed and fame.  The sketch indicts these water cooler denizens as well, as they admit that they couldn’t pay attention even to a war breaking out due to their fixation on a television scandal.  They reach a comic height in May’s response to Nichols’s assertion that they’re discussing a “moral issue”: “That’s it exactly.  To me that’s always more interesting than a real issue.”  Allen described the “brain-numbing, hypnotic” effect of television in his essay; here we encounter two willing victims who revel in their immersion in the medium.

In describing sketches earlier, I called attention to the enthymemes providing the context for the comic observations, often about married life (below we’ll encounter a set of enthymemes about mother-son relationships).  Nichols and May work in that realm of life and others, but they introduce another realm ripe for comic commentary.  Specifically, Nichols and May likely encountered many intellectuals during their time at the University of Chicago.  They and their Second City colleagues integrated their understanding of (and likely participation in) intellectual snobbery and pretensions into their sketches (the more education, the more snobbery?).  Nichols and May took the local Chicago critique to a national audience.  As for the political context and the discussion of politicians and their speeches, when this show aired Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office, Nixon served as vice president, and that year’s federal election would see the first televised presidential debates between Kennedy and Nixon.  May ties herself in knots trying to answer Nichols’s question about whether politicians should have to reveal (like dentists in a television ad) that they’re actors who didn’t write their script.  This interlude hints at the blurring of the line between entertainment and politics that begins in the fifties with political ads on television and picks up steam with the televised debates and increasing use of political ads.

Elaine May and Mike Nichols perform their mother-son sketch.  Both had some anxiety about offending their own mothers with this sketch, concerned their mothers would recognize themselves in the May portrayal.  Fortunately, both mothers concluded that the character was based on the other’s mother.  Some memorable moments from the mother’s account of her visit to the doctor, playing off enthymemes related to the expertise of and respect due to physicians (as well as the fretful nature of this mom type): “You see, doctor, I have this son.”  “When I said this to him, this man turned pale.”  “And that man is a doctor.”  And the splendor of “They’ll x-ray my nerves.”  Other favorite lines from the sketch, first when the mother looks forward to her son having children, “and when you do, I only pray that they’ll make you suffer the way you’re making me suffer,” along with, after Arthur/Nichols says he feels awful, “Oh, honey, if I could believe that, I’d be the happiest mother on earth.”  Enthymoms galore.

An English drawing room comedy set in a dentist’s office.  We can see both the parodic impulse and the transpositional impulse at work here.  On the parody side, I think of Noel Coward’s melodrama 1945 Brief Encounter, directed by David Lean, a story about star-crossed lovers played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, who must part; on the transposition side, I note the weaving of the stages of the love affair with language about teeth and dental hygiene.

Nichols and May offer a comedic take on Jessica Mitford’s timely (at the time) journalistic account exposing chicanery in the funeral industry.  Note the use of the magic three in the options for each component of the funeral and how the bereaved Nichols character along with the audience learns the structure of the sketch and anticipates the pattern repeating itself.

Nichols and May perform their telephone operator (and supervisor) (and managing supervisor) sketch in which Nichols tries to get back his last dime, stolen by Bell Telephone.  May plays three different characters in the sketch as Nichols becomes more and more desperate, at one point describing himself as “broken.”  Trivia note: the person Nichols tries to call, George Kaplan, shares the name of the made-up government agent for whom Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill is mistaken in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest from a few years before.  Coincidence?  May’s first operator seems to provide a direct ancestor of Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine, also an operator.

Nichols and May appear as guests on the Kraft Music Hall hosted by Perry Como in 1961.  Janet Blair serves as a second singer in this uncomfortable hybrid of musical medley and improv (this premise generally works to great effect in the “Greatest Hits” segments of the long-running improv sketch show Whose Line Is It Anyway?).  Almost certainly the writers established the song cues in advance so the orchestra would know what to play; difficult to know with certainty, though, whether Nichols and May actually improvise based on the word prompts fed to them by Como and Blair.  May comes close to laughing at one point, suggesting that some improvisation might be part of this.  One lesson I take from this appearance: television will do what’s necessary to absorb and assimilate whatever sells, in this case defanging the potential for satire from the irreverent comedy team by seating them next to two bland, middle-brow, offend-no-one performers. 

I provide here the link to Take Two, a documentary about Nichols and May featuring some history of their several years of fame, some well-known later comics talking about their influence, and many of the essential sketches for those who want to spend an hour with the team.

Sketch as Cultural Conversation

In the previous series on popular music I emphasized emotional appeal as primary in the cultural conversation about love and its challenges—virtually all listeners have direct lived experience involving love and romantic relationships, and most have accepted the cultural enthymemes placing love in a prominent position in the pursuit of happiness.  When we discuss comedy, in assaying the rhetorical terrain of this opening installment focused on sketch, we might explore the central role of the logical appeal, the role of intellectual processing in both the writer/performer’s production and the audience consumption of comedic rhetoric. 

Let’s lay out, to start, some elements of a rhetorical theory of comic appeals.  How does the logical appeal work in comedy?  Through analysis (sometimes instinctual, sometimes fully conscious) of shared knowledge and understanding, the comedian crafts appeals relying on audience familiarity with the unstated and/or contingent premises of enthymemes current in the cultural moment.  Then the comic can choose to develop the appeal in several ways.  Most basic, perhaps, a joke can aim only to elicit recognition of the shared cultural premise—examples from this installment include premises such as “marriages get stale over time” (Caesar falls asleep on the couch) or “mothers demand attention from adult children and make them feel guilty if they don’t get attention” (May reduces her rocket scientist son to blubbering).  Adding complexity, the comic can layer in association, which invites the audience to make a cognitive leap with the comic to connect something familiar in the enthymeme to something adjacent though somewhat unexpected—examples include the miniature garden served in the health food restaurant or the uncle unrestrained by decorum clinging to his nephew’s leg; this strategy generally uses exaggeration or caricature to make the premise bigger, larger than everyday life, demonstrating a kind of comic logic imagining the consequences of untrammeled premises getting out of control.  (We can think of those first two types in relation to the opening words of Sondheim’s “Comedy Tonight”: “something familiar, something peculiar.”)  

Even more complex conceptually, the comic can work through transposition, a more extreme version of association that involves creating a new context and conceptual frame for something familiar; this strategy allows the audience to feel smart, providing the intellectual pleasure of recognizing the transposition and leaping with the comic into the newly-constructed reality.  With this comic appeal the comic takes greater risk but can glean greater reward, as the audience can feel intellectual connection to the comic (look at us, such smart people) once they lock in on the new conceptual frame and appreciate the new reality the comic offers.  Examples include the Nichols and May dentist sketch creating a British melodrama during a routine dental hygiene exam and Caesar’s amiable dolt cast as a secret agent on a dangerous mission.

Considering that brief sketch of a theory, we can venture that comic rhetoric requires an amalgam of critical thinking (formal and informal logic, problem-solving, inquiry) and creative thinking (associative leaps, imaginative world-building) to create comic thinking—all serve as components of essayistic sketch invention to offer an invitation to the audience to recognize a shared world and often to move beyond the known into the unfamiliar.  To belabor this a bit, comic thinking works across two levels, drawing on a common range of reference (the audience needs to recognize the reference, whether a movie genre or an everyday situation like a phone call) and catalyzing the cognitive processing the audience must pursue to connect the elements of the set-up and punchline to get the comic appeal.

Pedagogy Break: Let’s consider that rudimentary theory about comic rhetoric in relation to the writing process.  How does one use writing to develop a shared world with the reader, establishing what both writer and reader accept as “true” about the world as a foundation for building from that foundation?  Drawing from the sketch examples in this installment, we might consider how Carl Reiner establishes this shared foundation by asking the 2000 Year Old Man to comment on historical figures.  If the audience doesn’t know something about Shakespeare, or Robin Hood, or Genghis Khan, the sketch has nothing to build on.  If the audience doesn’t know something about the quiz show scandal and politicians making speeches, the Nichols and May water cooler sketch has nothing to build on.  We can think of the opening section of an essay as the setting for staking out the common ground shared by writer and reader, without which the essay cannot proceed with world-building.  We generally talk about opening strategies including personal anecdotes, vignettes or scenes related to the topic, arresting facts or statistics, hooks of various kinds, and background or context.  Can we develop an activity for analyzing and ultimately writing opening sections from the premise of establishing foundation (something familiar) and layering in complication (something peculiar)? Of course one kind of hook reverses the order, claiming attention with something vividly arresting and then stepping back to locate the reader in a recognizable world.  With this model we can work with writers on how they initially engage with and invite the reader into collaborative exploration. 

Comedy After Vaudeville

In “The Vanishing Comedian,” the 1957 essay with which we began, Allen characterizes the comics who made the transition from the vaudeville stage to movies and television in this way (he mentions women in the article, notably Imogene Coca, Martha Raye, and of course Gracie Allen, but mostly portrays the profession as one populated only by men):

 “The old-line comics were generally uneducated (although many of them were men of superior intelligence), calloused by rough-and-tumble experience, made shrewd by poverty, and brought to worldly-wiseness by travel, a wide range of social contact, and adventurous activity. Today’s comedian, in the main, is cushioned by the economic, social, medical, and philosophical changes and/or improvements that have taken place in our society during the past quarter of a century.” 

 In relation to his contemporaries, he doesn’t mention WWII, which certainly helped shape many of the comics we’ve considered in this installment.  In relation to the post-war era, he doesn’t mention education beyond high school as one major change (with the GI Bill as one catalyst), but certainly he and his Atlantic readers mentally register the increase in college enrollment after WWII.  What he doesn’t predict is how colleges and college environments such as the University of Chicago, which provided the founding actors and improvisational performers of Second City, including Nichols and May, would provide opportunities he described as unavailable, as in this assessment of the options available to young comics in 1957: 

“They are helpless victims of a predicament in which the profession presently finds itself; namely, that there is practically no opportunity for the new funnyman to polish his art in the wide amphitheater of experience. The comedy giants of old labored many years to perfect themselves and their routines. Today’s young comic, as soon as his basic talent manifests itself, is rushed to the front lines before he is ready, because, maddeningly enough, there is no place for him to get ready.” 

There soon would be: the improv groups and comedy clubs (not night clubs) became the minor leagues, crowded and competitive “amphitheaters of experience,” the parallel to the lowest rung of the old vaudeville circuit.

The development of those venues provokes a bemused grin (at least from me) at Allen’s proposed solution in 1957:

 “A solution of more general application is to make radio and television itself a comedy training ground.  This may produce comedians who can do something else, who can serve an apprenticeship as announcers or singers or actors or masters of ceremonies, gradually adding more comedy to their routine. This method has developed such comedians as Johnny Carson, Garry Moore, Jack Paar, Robert Q. Lewis, Henry Morgan, Ernie Kovacs, and your recalcitrant servant, all of whom came to TV from radio.”  

That model had its day, delivering several hosts of The Tonight Show (Allen, Paar, Carson) from radio to their late night desks (and later David Letterman would begin his career on radio), but the improv groups and comedy clubs expanded exponentially, supplying many if not most of the comics who came to fame in the decades after Allen made this suggestion.

Allen ventures this about the new type he represents, the “sit-down comedian”: 

“Fred Allen once predicted that the eventual important comedy star of television would be a fellow who would just sit down in a chair and talk as if he were speaking with you in your home.  Fred contrasted this method of approach to the Milton Berle or vaudeville manner, which he deplored. It would seem that his prediction has been validated in the general sense that, while no one star has shone noticeably brighter than his fellows, the sit-down comedian begins to seem, over the long pull, more comfortably suited to television than the stand-up variety.” 

He adds this about the appeal of this category of comic:

 “We are apt to be more admired by the college student than the cab driver, appreciated more by the egghead than the Neanderthal.  It isn’t a cut and dried relationship, of course; the most sophisticated of us have our following of dear little old ladies from Philadelphia, but one can nevertheless determine the direction of the wind.”  

All these decades later we still have “sit-down comedians,” from Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon to the kindred satirical news-oriented types from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert through Larry Wilborn, Samantha Bee (she tended to stand on her show), and John Oliver.

One more time: what Allen didn’t see coming in 1957 included the resonating success of the Second City improv group in Chicago, now an entrenched improv training ground/national treasure that has nurtured countless comics who later became major figures in the next generations that Allen worried would not have anywhere to develop their craft.  Neither did he imagine the rise of comedy clubs, a different kind of venue than the nightclubs of Allen’s time, closer to the coffeehouse venues and small clubs like The Troubadour that provided professional launching pads for singers and songwriters.  In the next installment I’ll develop further the parallel development of the singer-songwriter as a category coming of age in the clubs and the young stand-up comics (let’s call their category Neurotics Unanimous) taking over from the vaudevillian joke-meisters that Allen saluted as a generation (and tradition) flickering out.  Allen may have heard the rumbling of these changes, but his article doesn’t predict the future that barreled in just a few years later.

Coming Next Quarter: Coming to Comedy, Part Two: Stand-Up and Delivery