Vaudeville on the Air

     Just as movies had first borrowed from the format of the proscenium stage-and later, television borrowed from radio-radio itself also initially borrowed from a preceding medium, vaudeville. As the Depression deepened in the early 1930s, people had less money for live entertainment, and vaudeville performers found themselves increasingly out of work. Fortunately for them, radio was proving to have a voracious appetite for talent, and although it was a major contributor to vaudeville's demise-again, along with movies-it was also something of a savior for many of its performers. Nearly all of radio's first stars came from vaudeville: Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and many more.

     Probably radio's earliest paid entertainers were Bill Jones and Ernie Hare, a song-and-comedy-patter duo. First appearing in 1921, they were known by various names depending on their sponsors: The Happiness Boys (a candy company), The Interwoven Pair (socks), The Best Food Boys (mayonnaise), or The Taystee Loafers (bread).

     Not only did radio comedy get its performers from vaudeville, radio adopted vaudeville's form as well. A missing component was the audience itself. Initially, broadcasting executives thought that the sound of laughter might be a distraction to listeners, so members of the technical crew or other visitors to the studio were under strict orders to remain absolutely silent during the performance. This practice didn't last very long: comedians gauge their timing and modulate their acts based on audience reaction. Eddie Cantor was the first to insist that audience members not only be allowed to laugh, but encouraged to do so. Although there was some criticism there­ after that occasionally comedians played too much to the studio audience at the expense of listeners at home, for the most part the radio audience accepted and even came to expect a live audience's reactions.

     Another missing element was, of course, sight. Whereas a comedian on stage could engage in all manner of leers, sight gags, takes and double takes, even dropping his pants if things got really desperate, all this was lost on radio. Ed Wynn, "The Perfect Fool," would dress up in costume for his radio shows, saying he thought if he looked and felt funny, he'd sound funny. Yet much of his appeal depended on the broad, physical comedy of the stage, and his radio career was only moderately successful. But once comedians and comedy writers adjusted to this limitation, they learned to exploit it, frequently using it as a magician uses misdirection. For example, in a scene from The Jack Benny Program, a nervous Jack is riding in his vintage Maxwell auto, nagging Rochester to watch where he's going. "But Boss," protests Rochester, "you're driving!"

     Because it soon became apparent that lengthy monologue grew tiresome to home listeners, a second voice in the form of a foil or "stooge" came into vogue. Frequently it was the announcer who, after introducing the star, would stick around for a few minutes to engage in comedic dialog, usually as the straight man. Graham McNamee bantered with Ed Wynn, Jimmy Wallington with Eddie Cantor, Harry Von Zell and later Kenny Delmar with Fred Allen, and, for more than 30 years, Don Wilson sparred gently with Jack Benny. Sometimes other characters filled this role, often in dialect. Eddie Cantor played straight man to Bert Gordon's "the Mad Russian" whose frenzied opening line, "How do you doooo," never failed to get a laugh. Several comedians called upon their wives. Fred Allen's wife, Portland Hoffa, always entered off­ mike screeching, "Mister Aaaallen! Mister Aaaallen!," before launching into a description of Momma's latest letter from home. Mary Livingston was always around to puncture husband Jack Benny's latest pomposity. And George Burns was the quintessential straight man to wife Gracie Allen's scatterbrained humor.

     J. Fred MacDonald (1979) writes that this device allowed the comedian to better delineate his own personality. Without Mary, Jack Benny's foibles were less "real" and therefore less funny. Fred Allen-one of radio's all time great wits-needed someone to react to, establishing a kind of almost detached bemusement that was the basis for much of his observational humor.

     During the 1930s, the big, expensive, star-driven comedy­ variety shows were the most popular form of entertainment on the air. All had several elements in common: they usually opened with a musical number, followed by a monolog (or dialog), then more music, one or more comedy skits, usually featuring guest stars from other shows or the movies, still more music, and a short closing bit with the guest star before saying good night. This formula, with nominal variations, satisfied listeners for more than twenty years.

Ethnicity and Race

     And what did audiences laugh about? Frequently they laughed at ethnicity. To the modern ear, much of the humor of that era can seem insensitive, sometimes even bordering on cruel. But this was an America still in the process of digesting the second great wave of immigration, predominantly from Southern and Eastern Europe. While immigrants themselves often listened to the radio to discover their place in the new culture, native-born Americans were tuning in to hear caricatures and stereotypes of the recent arrivals. The Irish were usually portrayed as police officers, if not as drunks. Asians-usually Chinese­ were either obsequious launderers or mysterious and inscrutable villains. Mexicans were lazy, the French were great lovers, the British insufferable prigs. These and other stereotypes were commonly understood by audiences and formed the basis for numerous jokes and comedic situations.

     For example, Minerva Pious portrayed the "typical" urban Jewish housewife, Mrs. Nussbaum, who was constantly "Yid­ dishizing" recognizable names, such as Emperor Shapiro-Hito (for Hirohito), Cecil B. Schlemiel (DeMille), Weinstein Churchill, and Heimie Wadsworth Longfellow. Other ethnic characters who would pop up on various shows were Jack Pearl's German Baron von Munchausen, Harry Einstein's Greek Parkyakarkus, and Mel Blanc's lazy Mexican known only as Si (pronounced sigh).

     But in many ways, the ultimate ethnic stereotype was reserved for African-Americans. Just as movie audiences were accustomed to shiftless, superstitious, and subservient black characters like Stepin Fetchit, so were radio audiences offered a succession of black maids, handymen, and janitors whose foibles and frailties were often played for laughs.

     But while movies at least provided employment for black actors, radio usually did not. The popular character Beulah, of The Beulah Show, was portrayed by a white man, Marlin ​​Hurt. Part of the studio presentation involved Hurt's standing among other actors with his back to the audience, turning around only to bellow his opening line in falsetto "colored" dialect, "Somebody bawl fo' Beulah?" Radio listeners could only wonder at the studio audience's astonished reaction.

     The most popular, and longest running, black-imperson­ation act was the phenomenally successful Amos 'n' Andy. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, both white men, had come out of the minstrel tradition and they teamed up to create two black characters whose adventures spanned the entire life of radio's so-called "Golden Era." Their format eventually spawned the soap opera and the situation comedy. Another­ and perhaps more revolutionary-innovation of Amos 'n' Andy was to create in listeners' minds a rich and varied black subculture filled with bankers, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals along with the more stereotypical scoundrels, braggarts, and ne'er-do-wells-all played by Gosden and Correll. In fact, take away the dialect, and one would be hard pressed to identify much that was particularly "black" about any of the program's plot lines or characterizations. Indeed, were it merely a minstrel show on radio, Amos 'n' Andy could hardly have riveted the nation's attention as it did. Listeners may have tuned in for the laughs, but they returned because of the fully developed characters and stories.

     Amos 'n' Andy also influenced the creation of other pro­grams, similar in form, if not in content. Lum 'n' Abner was a variation on the ethnic comedy known as the "rube" show. It featured two bumpkins who presided over the Jot 'em Down Store in the then-fictitious town of Pine Ridge, Arkansas. (In 1936, the town of Waters changed its name to Pine Ridge.) Creators Chester Lauck and Norris Goff played the title characters and everyone else who happened to come into the store, such as Grandpappy Peabody, Snake Hogan, Doc Miller, and Squire Skimp. (Laureen Tuttle added female voices in 1937.) Sometimes the stories were complete in a single episode. Sometimes they could extend for weeks. When a woman asked Lum to watch her baby for a few moments, then disappeared, the story went on for 40 episodes.

     The town of Cooper, Illinois, "40 miles from Peoria," was the setting for Vic and Sade. The Gooks were a so-called typi­ cal American couple who lived with their adopted son Rush "in a little house halfway up the next block." John Dunning calls the program an American original, in a category of its own making. Though it was a daily, daytime show, it was in no way a soap opera. In fact, it was not even a serial, but rather presented 10-minute sketches that individually stood on their own. In one episode, for example, Uncle Fletcher drops by the Gooks' house to make a long distance call to a family relative. But the then-complex process of getting a long distance line, coupled with the rest of the family's disputes on the proper telephone protocol, finally sends Fletcher home without ever making the call. Its creator, Paul Rhymer, populated the series with such goofy characters as Dottie Brainfeeble, Smelly Clark, Ruthie Stembottom, and Vic's cousin lshigan Fishigan who hailed from Sishigan, Michigan, most of whom were only referred to but never heard. It was an understated show that eschewed big laughs in favor of smiles punctuated by occasional chuckles.

     Ethnic humor became considerably toned down once World War II was underway and Hitler's racist policy of Jewish extermination became more widely understood. Suddenly it was no longer quite as funny to single out a person's racial or national origins as the basis for laughs. For example, one notices a distinct difference between the prewar and postwar portrayals of Jack Benny's black valet, Rochester (Eddie Anderson). Before the war, Rochester was a razor-carrying, craps-shooting womanizer. After the war, those attributes had all but disappeared. When, in 1945, The Abbott and Costello Show aired a sketch involving a Jewish loan shark who wanted two quarts of Lou's blood for collateral, the public criticism was immediate and emphatic.

Character and Cliche

      Early radio comedy had been based-as in vaudeville-on jokes or gags. From The Joe Penner Show came this exchange. Penner: "Waiter, I must say, this is not very good goulash." Waiter: "I can't understand it. I used a pair of your best gou­ lashes." But within a very few years, radio writers' extensively cross-indexed joke reference files had been exhausted. In 1934 Eddie Cantor called for an end to gag-style comedy, saying the public was no longer fooled by dressing up the old jokes and calling them new. Eventually the gags were subordinated to comedy based on characterization. And no one was more adept at that than Jack Benny.

     Benny's on-air personality developed slowly over the years. In his radio debut in 1932, he is a suave, somewhat self-deprecating host, serving up jokes and quips between musical numbers. By 1940 his character is fully realized: stingy and vain, he supposedly plays the violin badly and never admits to being older than 39. One of the most celebrated episodes of the series is particularly instructive if one listens to the audience reaction. Jack is being held up, and the pistol-wielding thief growls the immortal line, "Your money or your life." Jack's cheapness is so well understood by this time that the studio audience begins to laugh immediately, even before he can deliver the intended laugh line, "I'm thinking it over!"-and that only after a very long pause allowing the laughter to build.

     Another comedy program that depended heavily on characterization was The Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Show. But the character in question wasn't even really a person-except in the minds of audiences-but rather a ventriloquist's dummy. Charlie McCarthy was depicted as a mischievous and sometimes lascivious 10-12 year old boy, with Edgar Bergen playing ​​a sort of ambiguous parent figure. Probably because he was a dummy, audiences accepted Charlie's sometimes lecherous come-ons to glamorous female guest stars. Had he actually been a child, this could have been highly objectionable.

     Related to comedy based on character were the running gags or comedic cliches. These were situations or routines that became funnier by the very fact of their repetition. Audiences came to welcome each new variation on the familiar theme. Two of the most famous were the Benny-Allen feud and Fibber McGee's closet.

     On one episode of his program in 1937, Fred Allen, following a dazzling guest performance by a ten-year-old violinist, ad-libbed, "Jack Benny should be ashamed of himself." Fortunately, Benny was listening and thought it was funny, so on his next program he reacted by defending his own prowess on the violin, making some disparaging remarks about Allen in the process, and the "feud" was on. The two programs played the supposed conflict for laughs until Allen finally left the air in 1949·

     Fibber McGee and Molly was one of radio's longest run­ning situation comedies. As played by real-life married couple Marian and Jim Jordan, Fibber was a lovable windbag and Molly his patient wife. This program may have had more running gags than any other, the most famous being a hall closet so stuffed full of junk that every time the door was opened everything would come crashing down in a nearly epic cacophony of sound. Listeners at home could either laugh at the closet of their imaginations or at the sound effects wizardry that went into its creation. At the end of the last clink, Fibber would inevitably say, "I've gotta clean out that closet one of these days."

War and Controversy

     During World War II, radio comedy played its part in keeping homefront morale high. Most programs integrated war-related themes into their plotlines or sketches. The 1944 New Year's Jack Benny Program contains a sketch in which a metaphorical World Series baseball game is played between the Axis Polecats and the Allied All-Stars. Various military campaigns are transformed into hits, sacrifice flies, and walks. As the program ends, General Eisenhower is about to come to bat. Later in 1944, on Fibber McGee and Molly, Fibber thinks he has a brilliant idea that will revolutionize postwar travel, but he must travel from his home in Wistful Vista in order to pitch it to some government official. The trains are filled with servicemen either returning from or going on leave. No matter how hard he tries, Fibber can't get a ticket and is berated by everyone he meets for trying to take up valuable space that could be used by a soldier to get home. At the end of the program, the Jordans step out of character and appeal directly to the audience not to travel unless absolutely necessary. Comedy shows also addressed other top-ics like scrap drives, War Bonds, victory gardens, the rubber shortage and anything else that helped out "our boys."

     The war had another effect on radio comedy. During the 1930s, comedians and writers had avoided potentially controversial topics such as politics in their plots or sketches. The only notable exception to this rule was humorist Will Rogers, whose rural-flavored, good-natured ribbing made his jibes palatable. ("I don't belong to an organized political party," he would say. "I'm a Democrat.") But when Rogers was killed in a plane crash in 1935, radio comedy became essentially a controversy-free zone. For example, at one point in 1940, Fibber McGee apologized for inadvertently saying "china" on the air when he meant dishes, acknowledging that "we can't say anything controversial."

     Once America was in the war in late 1941, however, radio comedy took a turn for the political: references to national and world events, governmental leaders, and current issues were woven into scripts. Among the most bitingly satirical of the newer generation of comedians was Henry Morgan, whose program, Here's Morgan, began on a local station in New York before getting a spot on the Mutual Network. He once "interviewed" a businessman in a mythical southern state who said the new governor of Georgia-formerly associated with the KKK-was great for his business, manufacturing bed sheets. On another show, in the postwar era when housing was tight, he presented a dialog between two landlords, one of whom expressed dismay that the eighth floor of his tenement had caved in. When asked if anyone was hurt, the landlord replied, "No, just tenants." He wasn't particularly kind to business institutions, either. "You know," he said, "most people think of banks as cold, heartless, large institutions. And they're wrong. There are small ones, too." This kind of humor on radio would have been almost unthinkable only a few years earlier.

Situation Comedy

     The postwar era also saw the rise of the situation comedy. Aside from its pictures, the format of the modern-day TV sitcom is virtually indistinguishable from that of its radio progenitor of the 1940s. The American family was the central location for many of them-The Great Gildersleeve, The Ald­rich Family, Father Knows Best, Blondie-but sitcoms also found comedy in high school (Our Miss Brooks), in the blue collar workplace (The Life of Riley), a restaurant (Meet Me at Parky's), and even a bar (Duffy's Tavern).

     One of the most popular was The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, in which Jack Benny's band leader and his wife, a popular singer and film actress, played fictionalized versions of themselves. The versatile actor-director Elliot Lewis played Frankie Remley, an actual member of Harris' band. The program grew out of the many wisecracks from the Benny show about the band's supposed incompetence (though it was obviously first rate), Harris' presumed inability to read (words or music), and Remley's purported drinking. These characteristics were extended and enlarged in the sitcom, and placed within the context of the zany Harris-Faye home life and Phil and Frankie's misadventures.

     MacDonald calls these shows middle-class morality tales with the family portrayed as the vital American institution. Plots tended to revolve around insignificant misunderstandings that were resolved by the show's end. Such core values as trust, love, honesty, and tolerance always triumphed. Of the top 10 programs in the 1947 season chosen by Protestant churches as those most faithfully portraying American life, five were situation comedies.

Television Takes Charge

     But by the end of the 1940s, the end of an era was drawing near. After having been postponed first by war, and then by technical problems, television was now ready to take its place as the center of family home entertainment. Radio fought its upstart competitor with, among other things, a weekly, 90-minute comedy-variety extravaganza on NBC called The Big Show, hosted by the Broadway and film star Tallulah Bank­ head and featuring numerous guest stars from all points on the entertainment compass. But it was too much and too late. Though lavish and expensive, it only lasted two seasons.

     Other comedians and sitcoms were rapidly jumping ship to try out the new medium. Most of the old line vaudevillians were unable to make the transition, except for occasional guest appearances on TV variety shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour. A few did well, however. Jack Benny first appeared on the small screen in 1950 but continued to do the radio program concurrently with television until 1955. Bob Hope also ended his radio series in 19 5 5 and continued to perform on television for more than 30 years. Red Skelton was even more successful on television than on radio because so much of his humor was visual. His weekly television series ran from 1951 to 1971 and was usually among the highest-rated shows on the air. But the most spectacular transition from radio to television was made by Milton Berle. His radio career had been indifferent at best, but his broad, visual form of comedy was perfect for the tube. What Amos 'n' Andy had done for radio 20 years earlier, Berle did for television: create excitement about the new medium and sell receiving sets.

     On the other hand, Fred Allen had retired from radio in 1949, a victim of falling ratings and his own poor health. He did guest spots on television but never seemed really comfortable there. Allen was a "word" man in a visual medium. His last job on the air was as a panelist on the TV game show, What's My Line?

     One of radio's lasting legacies was the situation comedy for­ mat. Although the sitcom found success on radio, it has flourished on television for even longer. Making their way to television from radio were, among others, The Life of Riley, Father Knows Best, Burns and Allen, The Goldbergs, December Bride, and a reworked form of Lucille Ball's radio series My Favorite Husband, retitled I Love Lucy.

Wit, Satire, and Shock

     Although radio comedy on a national scale dwindled during the 1950s, replaced by local disc jockeys and personalities, there was still room for innovative young comics with a satirical edge to their humor. Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, more familiarly known as Bob and Ray, had started their radio career in Boston, joining the NBC network for a daily 15-minute slot in 1951. Eventually they were heard on all the commercial networks at various times until 1960 and even did several limited series on National Public Radio in the 1980s. Their straight­ faced, understated routines were frequently hilarious. They generally used no script, sometimes improvising absurd mock interviews as conducted by ace reporter Wally Ballou ('"winner of seven international diction awards"), other times spoofing soap operas with scenes from One Feller's Family (a dig at the long-running One Man's Family) or Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife. The detective series, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons became Mr. Trace, Keener Than Most Persons. They offered numerous ersatz premiums, such as the Bob and Ray Home Surgery Kit or membership in Heightwatcher's International ("six ample servings of low vitamins and nutrients in artificial colorings"). With parody, verbal nonsense, non sequitur, and wit they created what has been described as a surrealistic Dickensian repertory company, all of it clean, subtle and gentle.

     Jean Shepherd's rambling, discursive, free-form style was a lineal audio descendant of that of Henry Morgan. Shepherd's program, Night People, was broadcast on New York's WOR from 1956 to 1977 and heard in 27 states, parts of Canada and as far south as Bermuda. He was a comic anthropologist, offering mock commentary on social and cultural trends and behavior. A radio raconteur, he would launch into a rambling chat with a central story in mind, often digressing wildly, sometimes playing "The Sheik of Araby" on the kazoo while rhythmically thumping his knuckles on his head, usually wandering back to his main point just as time was running out on his show. His extemporaneous storytelling has been compared to making pizza in the window of a restaurant.

     When broadcasting was largely deregulated in the 1980s, standards for acceptable content were liberalized. This made way for so-called "shock jocks" like Morton Downey, Jr., Don Imus, and Andrew Dice Clay, radio personalities whose routine references to sex and use of crude language resulted in endless controversy, occasional fines from the FCC, and laments that the end of civilization was at hand. None have generated more notoriety than Howard Stern, self-styled King ​​of All Media (AKA Fartman), who parlayed a local show in New York into one of the highest-rated programs in national syndication. Stern's clownish, flamboyant brand of humor is the lowest of low brow. He frequently describes his own sexual fantasies, engages in personal attacks, and serves up his own bizarre take on current events (he once wondered how necrophiliac Jeffrey Dahmer could get a fair trial unless there were more guys on the jury who wanted to have sex with dead men). He is rude, crude, and, to fans, often very funny.

     At the other end of the spectrum, both figuratively and literally (being at the bottom of the FM dial) is humor served up by public radio. Car Talk features Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers (Tom and Ray Magliozzi), dispensing car advice between self-deprecating jokes, funny letters from listeners, puzzlers, and features like "Stump the Chumps," in which call­ers are asked if advice they got from Click and Clack some time previous was any good (frequently it wasn't, but nobody really seems to mind). Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know? is a two-hour comedy/quiz on which audience members and callers compete for whimsical prizes. Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me plays the week's news for laughs and offers callers who correctly answer questions the highly coveted prize of veteran newscaster Carl Castle's voice on their answering machine. Rewind also lampoons the news through comic skits and extemporaneous commentary from guest comedians.

     The one real throwback to an earlier era is Garrison Keil­lor's Prairie Home Companion, which, ironically, has been on the air longer than any of the original comedy-variety shows. Broadcast live before a large theater audience, its form-if not its content-is somewhat reminiscent of The Fred Allen Show, circa 1940. Host Keillor banters with guests, introduces musical acts (and often sings himself), and performs with his troupe in various comedy sketches and fake commercials for "sponsors" like Powdermilk Bisqµits and the Catsup Advisory Board. The centerpiece is a weekly 20-minute monologue, "News from Lake Wobegon," in which Keillor tells stories and ruminates on life in his mythical Minnesota home town.

     Although radio has certainly not abandoned comedy, it has yielded to television its place as America's primary purveyor of laughter. Mostly gone, then, is a form of humor that depends on listeners' active participation through imagination. Susan Douglas calls this "dimensional listening." For example, Jack Benny's money vault was never as funny on television as it had been on radio, when listeners conjured up their own visions of moats, chains, gates, and a bearded guard who had not seen the light of day since the Civil War. This was radio's contribution to comedy and has since passed into aural history.