Buffoon Men : Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity [1 ed.] 9780814339664, 9780814339657

Citation preview

FILM HISTORY | MASCULINITY STUDIES

—Steve Cohan, author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties and Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical “Buffoon Men is a major contribution to comedian studies, and offers a fascinating perspective on the queered performances by some of the most beloved funnymen of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Scott Balcerzak brings his enormous scholarship and analytical flair to an examination of how these comedians disrupt or neurotically deconstruct ‘traditional’ masculinity.”

—Robert Lang, author of Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film

—Peter Lehman, author of Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body, New Edition (Wayne State University Press, 2007) Scott Balcerzak is assistant professor of film and literature in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University. He is the co-editor of Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture, Vols. 1 and 2.

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series Cover design by Rebecca Lown On cover: Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, and Dorothy Lee in Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) Wayne State University Press Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

BALCERZAK

“By concentrating on less critically acclaimed film comedians of the thirties, Balcerzak makes a far-reaching contribution to film comedy and masculinity studies—smart and original.”

BUFFOON MEN

“Buffoon Men is a smart and perceptive study of the queer masculinities of major comedians of the early sound era. Balcerzak offers insightful readings of their films, paying close attention to the concerns of the comedian-comedy genre while at the same firmly grounding his claims in well-researched social history and gender theory. He convincingly shows how these stars’ queer performances of masculinity sharply and hilariously connect with their onscreen straight cultural counterparts. The result is a fascinating treatment of these famous comics of filmdom that highlights their immediacy for viewers then and now.”

buffoon men

Mae West and W. C. Fields, publicity photo for My Little Chickadee (1940). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

buffoon men Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity

Scott Balcerzak

Wayne State University Press Detroit

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne University of St. Andrews

Frances Gateward California State University, Northridge

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Leitch University of Delaware

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh

© 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 17 16 15 14 13

54321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Balcerzak, Scott. Buffoon men : classic Hollywood comedians and queered masculinity / Scott Balcerzak. pages cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and media series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8143-3965-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8143-3966-4 (ebook) 1. Comedy films—United States—History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures—Social aspects— United States. 3. Masculinity in motion pictures. 4. Queer theory. I. Title. PN1995.9.C55B345 2013 791.43’617’0973—dc23 2013006169 Sections of chapter 5 were published as “Laurel and Hardy Queer the Fraternity: The Comedy Duo and Heterosexual Brotherhood in Sons of the Desert (1935)” in Camera Obscura 25, no. 173 (2010).

For my mother, “From here to insanity.”

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: “Someone Like Me for a Member”: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Buffoonish Masculinity 1 1 “Novelties and Notions”: Mae West Meets W. C. Fields 25 2 Con Men and Henpecked Husbands: W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon 53 3 “Whitefacing” the Nebbish: Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence 79 4 Queered Radio / Queered Cinema: Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice 111 5 Queering the Fraternity: Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood 139 6 Military Disservice: Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army 165 Conclusion: Beyond Classic Hollywood / Beyond Buffoonish Masculinity 191 Notes 201 Bibliography 237 Index 249

vii

Acknowledgments

Like many first books, this work represents a long journey through various universities, libraries, conferences, and classrooms. Foremost, I am indebted to Maureen Turim, who saw early on that my obsession with Classic Hollywood comedians masked possibly a greater obsession with the limitations of gender labels. During my time at the University of Florida, her mentorship was invaluable. I also wish to thank Susan Hegeman, whose notes helped to develop this from a dissertation into a book manuscript, as well as Scott Nygren and Nora Alter, who both championed the project from its earliest stages. Other scholars warrant thanks as well, including Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Vincent Brook, Lynne Joyrich, Sara Levavy, Neil Verma, Michael Dwyer, Steven Carr, Michael Rennett, Lester Friedman, Kyle Stevens, John Nelson, Robin Andersen, and Jason Sperb (who, among other things, accompanied me on a cold March visit to Waukegan, Illinois, to see a statue of Jack Benny). I also wish to thank all those who taught me film over the years—including Turim, Nygren, Alter, Robert Ray, Mark Reid, Leonard Leff, Hugh Manon, and Jeffery Walker (a man even more Jack Benny obsessed than this author). Staffs of the libraries and archives I visited for this project deserve recognition as well, in particular the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in Madison, Wisconsin. I also need to acknowledge Henry Jenkins, whose What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (1992) still proves the gold standard in comedian studies and very much inspired me, and the late Alexander Doty, whose pioneering work in queer studies and cinema laid the foundation for much of this scholarship. I am also very grateful to the academic departments and institutions that provided additional support as I developed this book. The University of Florida’s Alumni Graduate Fellowship funded me as I finished my graduate work and began this project as a dissertation. The Georgia Institute of Technology’s ix

Marion L. Britain Postdoctoral Fellow greatly helped me as I worked on the early revisions. Most importantly, Northern Illinois University’s Department of English provided me support as I expanded Buffoon Men, including funding my visits to conferences as well as libraries and archives. I am grateful to my colleagues at NIU, who have been especially supportive—in particular, Philip Eubanks, Amy Levin, Tim Ryan, and Robert T. Self. I also have special gratitude for the students of two classes that I had the good fortune to teach. During the spring of 2008 at UF, the undergraduates of Classic Hollywood and Comedy were wonderfully enthusiastic about watching old comedians and reading gender theory, which motivated me in developing the foundations of this book. Also, my NIU graduate seminar Comedy: Culture, Theory, and Performance during the fall of 2010 allowed me to partake in enlightening discussions of my research with a talented group of young scholars. Special thanks are in order for Barry Keith Grant, whose interest in the original proposal allowed this book to find a home at Wayne State University Press. Also, his own work in masculinity studies and insights on the manuscript helped to improve my work. Editor Annie Martin was a wonderfully patient guide throughout the publication process. Copyeditor Dawn Hall, design director Maya Whelan, and production manager Kristin Harpster helped immeasurably in the book’s production. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript, whose expertise in gender and queer theory were greatly appreciated during the revision process. Finally, I want to thank my friends and family: in particular, my late father, whose devotion and work ethic still inspire me, and my mother, from whom I inherited my love of Abbott and Costello—along with my love for everything else that matters in life.

x | ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

Introduction “Someone Like Me for a Member” Classic Hollywood Comedians

and

Buffoonish Masculinity

The other important joke for me is one that’s, uh, usually attributed to Groucho Marx but I think it appears originally in Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. And it goes like this—I’m paraphrasing: Uh . . . “I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.” That’s the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women. Alvy Singer (Woody Allen)

After creating a string of successful slapstick comedies, Woody Allen wrote and directed possibly his most acclaimed work with Annie Hall (1977). The film is often celebrated as the first truly postclassical romantic comedy since it moved away from farcical plot into a comically enhanced, stream-of-consciousness meditation on post-sexual-revolution gender relationships.1 Yet the movie, for all its emotional weight and late 1970s neurosis, is also unapologetically something else: a comedian comedy, a cinematic showcase for an established comedic performer. Providing more than just a series of gags, Annie Hall might be the most acclaimed film ever produced in this popular genre, existing as the only comedian-centered movie to win the Oscar for best picture. As stand-up comedian Alvy Singer, Allen’s persona on screen exists as a variation on the same neurotic he employed in numerous broader comedies, onstage, and on television before establishing himself as a filmmaker.2 Embracing the audience’s preexisting awareness of this persona, Allen opens the film with the above direct address to the camera, as if he was still performing one of his stand-up routines. By partly crediting his joke to Groucho Marx, he establishes his historical position as a movie star, his lineage in a long line of cinematic 1

comedians dating back to Classic Hollywood. Marx also directly addresses the audience in comedy films like Animal Crackers (1930), Duck Soup (1933), and A Night at the Opera (1935), a performance technique he established from his years onstage and, later, continued on his popular television quiz show You Bet Your Life (1950–61). In crediting the origin of the joke Allen is incorrect. No variation or even forerunner to the line appears in Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious or any other of his works (though it feels like it could).3 Instead, the joke is the sole creation of Groucho, though its appearance is surprisingly not from any stage, radio, television, or film performance. According to one of Marx’s autobiographies, the line is taken from the great comedian’s private correspondences with the Friars Club in the 1950s.4 Based out of New York City but also with a Beverly Hills version, the social organization has a long history of accepting popular comedians as members. The club also until the mid-1980s had an all-male membership and is still notorious for its jovial atmosphere of nasty put-downs. Despite his on-screen reputation as a razor wit, Marx, who had been pressured to join in the first place, found the club’s atmosphere dismal and decided to quit after another member targeted him with rude jokes. He gave as a polite reason that he did not have time to participate in the organization’s activities. When the Friars lamented losing such a major star, they pressed him to find out the real reason for his resignation. According to Marx, his exact reply via telegraph was “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”5 Even when removed from Allen’s later appropriation, the joke is a fascinating exercise of self-degradation and self-celebration. Richard Raskin’s analysis of Marx’s line suggests that despite its willingness to assume a self-deprecating responsibility, the motivation behind the retort “was also a means for telling them indirectly and unmistakably that they were no match for his [Marx’s] wit.” Raskin continues, “Paradoxically, one of the most striking examples of a self-disparaging joke turns out to have been motivated by a wish on the jokester’s part to disWoody Allen in Annie Hall (1977).

2 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

sociate himself once and for all from a group of people to whom he felt superior.”6 While a valid reading, Raskin dissects only part of the paradox. The most intriguing irony found in the brilliant retort is based in Marx’s complicated history as a performer. On one level, Groucho is the comedic persona we see on screen as a wisecracking and often vicious wit, whom his peers at the Friars mistook as dictating an actual appreciation of insult humor. Conversely, Groucho is also the man behind the persona, finding such an environment unappealing. Most intriguingly, though, Groucho is the combination of both these persons, a Jewish kid born into poverty who found a voice performing the most vocal of wisecracking cinematic instigators.7 With this third incarnation, he exists as a conflicted cultural product born out of the American entertainment industry of the early twentieth century where Julius Marx, the poor child of immigrants, rose to remarkable levels of success as Groucho Marx. In some way, the comic recognized that despite his successes, he remained at least partly a social outcast in both his public and private selves. This is a person that should not really belong to any fraternal club, the quintessential definition of acceptance among men. This misfit position is something Groucho the “snob” wickedly points out as dictating the reasoning behind retracting his membership. Unlike other privileged all male (and all Gentile) social clubs of the era, the Friars was (and is) an organization made up of mostly comedians. This is a group of performers with its origins in tenement slums, dingy vaudeville houses, and populist mediums like radio and B movies. It is this third amalgam of Groucho Marx that is writing the telegram—a conflicted public and private self aware that the comedian as a fully accepted model of maleness is a cultural impossibility. In this sense it is truly ironic that Woody Allen employs the line to open what became one of the most acclaimed comedian comedies of all time, a movie that moved Allen into another stage of his career. Yet even in this appropriation, the comedian is once again playfully admitting his conflicted status within society. The club becomes women or, more precisely, upper-class Gentile women, a definite theme that plays throughout the film with Singer’s relationship with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). Allen thereby appropriates Groucho’s already complicated joke to establish himself as simultaneously part of a popular history of comedians and as a figure navigating the waters of post-sexual-revolution gender relationships. The joke exists as a perfect transitional moment in not only Allen’s filmmaking career but also in the development of the comedian comedy itself as, by the late 1970s, a genre that could tackle postmodern romance in its humor. As both comics employ it, the joke becomes a fitting illustration of the cultural undercurrents defining the comedian as both an on-screen Hollywood i n t ro d u c t i o n | 3

performer and a twentieth-century product of popular culture. As I unravel the deceptively simple joke’s layers of meanings through two generations of on-screen funnymen, its journey highlights a serious question. If one simple gag can reveal so much, what have we as scholars and fans overlooked about the Hollywood comedian? As the joke suggests, narratives of conflicts with (and sometimes exclusion from) established social orders define comedian comedies. Groucho Marx and his famous brothers based their anarchistic humor in crashing high society in Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera. Annie Hall finds Woody Allen as the New York Jew, an outsider in both his girlfriend’s Gentile world and, eventually, the cultural wasteland of Los Angeles. With each variation on the “member” joke, the comedian finds humor through exploiting his conflict with society, his lack of proper definition as a masculine subject. This particular gag might be unusually sophisticated for the genre, but the underlying point is the same as found in cornier humor. When it comes to hegemonic maleness, comedians have a perplexing tangential relationship with its definitions and confines. In total, as a gendered subject, the male comedian rearranges (or, at times, rejects) heteronormative protocols. Both Marx and Allen are challenging their own membership in the club of “traditional” maleness, disrupting or neurotically deconstructing its norms. On this level one can classify their performances as queer, at least within the broadest sense of the term as it appears in many post-1990s usages in popular culture studies. For example, Allen and Marx distort traditionally heroic depictions of straight maleness as a source of their comedy, through, for example, portraying a foolish version of a big game hunter (Marx’s Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers) or a fast-talking coward mistaken for a hero during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (Allen’s Boris Grushenko in Love and Death [1975]). In Making Things Perfectly Queer, Alexander Doty adopts an expansive use of the word queer in his analysis of popular, supposedly, straight texts and their receptions, suggesting that “within cultural production and reception, queer erotics are already part of culture’s erotic center.” It is important to remember that Doty does not open the possibilities for applying the term queer as a way to divorce the word from identification with traditionally marginalized cultures, since he views the “marginal” as both a “   ‘site of resistance’ and a ‘location of radical openness and possibility.’  ”8 His groundbreaking definition in the study of popular culture presents us with an important question. Is it radical to suggest Groucho Marx or Woody Allen as a queered site of resistance to hegemonic definitions of maleness? Since heterosexual pursuits often define their performances within the narrative (Allen pursues Diane Keaton and Marx romances Margaret Dumont in various films), one could dismiss labeling these comedians as queer as political revisionism, a misguided attempt to sexually radicalize nonradical texts. But 4 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

to properly employ the term, the historical lineage of the film comedian must be understood as dictating its use. As Doty clarifies, “Queer reception doesn’t stand outside personal and cultural histories; it is part of the articulation of these histories.”9 As this book shows, when considering gender and sexual identity in a fuller historical context, the categorization of the comedian as straight would be more problematic than labeling him queer. To understand the full potential of a queered masculinity in the comedian, we must rehistoricize him as a figure reacting to the gender history of the twentieth century. In America the comedian greatly defined popular entertainment throughout the history of cinema, making comic characters historical benchmarks in the forms of such instantly recognizable names as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, and numerous others. Each of these figures, to differing degrees, highlights a failure to adopt the hypermasculine bravado of male stars from their own respective periods. They are reactionary in the sense that they adapt to the era’s gendered depictions and shape their comedy to react to its masculine labels. In the broadest of terms, placing Charlie Chaplin into the hypermaleness of a frontier narrative in The Gold Rush (1925) can be viewed as a similar formula for comedy as placing Jim Carrey in the hypermale world of the detective narrative in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994). Each star creates humor through being a misfit who fails to conform to standard depictions of on-screen maleness specific to genre codes and the film’s period of production. The successful formula for a comedian comedy defines itself through its cultural mutability, its capacity to provide comic alternatives to the historical progression of gender protocols. In her groundbreaking Masculinities, sociologist R. W. Connell suggests that the social orders that classify masculinities are based in fundamental binary forces, writing that “two types of relationship—hegemony, domination / subornation and complicity on the one hand, marginalization / authorization on the other—provide a framework in which we can analyze specific masculinities.”10 Yet, significantly, Connell stresses that these classifications should not fall into fixed social definitions: “I emphasize that terms such as ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘marginalized masculinities’ name not fixed character types but configurations of practice generated in particular situations in a changing structure of relationships. Any theory of masculinity worth having must give an account of this process of change.”11 Connell proposes a social mutability for all the binaries of classification gender studies often employs, including the hegemony itself, which she suggests “is a historically mobile relation” with its own “ebb and flow.”12 For example, historical studies by George Chauncey and Jonathan Ned Katz show hetero/homosexual binarism as a rather recent historical creation.13 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, behavior i n t ro d u c t i o n | 5

as opposed to sexual object choice largely designated masculinity. The heterosexual sex act did not necessarily define the sexually normative in American society until the mid-twentieth century—when popular Freud-influenced psychology made sexuality a core identity issue and more visible gay subcultures emerged in urban centers.14 We thereby must recognize most earlier twentieth-century film comedians, who essentially defined the genre, as existing in a moment less dependent on a hetero/homosexual binary to define its gender codes—thus allowing for challenges to masculine idealism to flourish beyond this specific either/or classification. The comedian queers masculine idealism through a wide range of comedic behaviorisms not necessarily related to sexual object choice, ranging from buffoonish physical slapstick (seen with Chaplin and Carrey) to verbal wittiness (with Allen and Marx). By their very position within the text, the male comic is often queered since his purpose is to provide alternatives to romanticized heteroperformances by male stars. As Doty employs the term, queerness is “a quality related to any expression that can be marked as contra-, non-, or anti-straight.”15 This dynamic clearly appears in a performer like Groucho Marx, who in films like A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races (1937) is positioned with his famous brothers as the comic relief to a heteroromantic male lead (in both film’s Allan Jones). In terms of genre, the noncomic narrative is even defined as the straight storyline, the “normal” contrast to the nonnormal queered maleness of the comedians—who in Classic Hollywood would often not have traditional love interests. I do wish to suggest that such performances are not so much an intellectualized critique on the part of the comedian but a logical target for anybody adept in the art of comedy, where personality borders on exaggeration and often ridicules the social order. If Allen or Marx (or Chaplin or Carrey) must be classified as artists, perhaps it is best to suggest them as related to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of the carnivalesque—the Medieval parades of exaggerated bodies and behaviors that, for lower classes, “celebrated liberation from prevailing truth and from the established order” and “marked the suspension of all hierarchal rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”16 Frank Krutnik suggests this cultural reading supports an expansive set of binaries for analyzing comedians, where scholars can focus on “the play between disruption and containment or difference and conformism.” This could open endless possibilities for queer (and other progressive) readings: “Thrown into conflict with the social codification of gender and sexuality, the body and identity, class and ethnicity, comedians inspire a disorderly rewriting of normative protocols.”17 Therefore, this book explores how the disorderly nature of cultural influences presents a logical way to transcend the limited labels of homo/hetero/bi to embrace an expansive queerness in comedy. 6 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

For this study I focus on a period of significant change in the entertainment industry to understand the comedian within his most significant cultural context and during the period of his greatest accession to superstardom. By concentrating on the early sound period, often dubbed “Classic Hollywood,” I relate the comedian to the stage and radio influence upon film, all of which created an industry that was culturally and technologically in flux.18 While previous decades might have set the stage and later decades saw the phenomenon continue to flourish, this period provides us with its most clear and influential incarnation since it cultivated the multimedia entertainment environment of the twentieth century. Beyond this significant industrial moment, the period of the 1930s to the early 1940s is historically fraught with masculine anxieties caused by “affronts” from various social stages. To provide just a rudimentary list, these historical considerations include the following: the sexually transgressive Jazz Age, the financial uncertainty of the Depression, the influence of European immigrant populations, the racial threat from the African American northern migration, the traumatic memories of World War I, the threat of World War II, and other points challenging to the perception of white male straightness as hegemony. The modern comedian’s birth coincides with a period of significant gender resettlement and, as the proceeding chapters illustrate, this correspondence is certainly no coincidence. The comedian’s ability to exploit national anxiety for laughs often defines not only his maleness on screen but also his popularity off screen. While responding to these national anxieties, comedian comedy often emerges as queerly ambiguous in its motives, drifting between different protocols of maleness to expose their comic potential without necessarily a direct criticism. For this reason, in considering if there truly is a “male order’  ” of comedians, I dub this group of performers and their creative output as representing buffoonish masculinity. There are two ways to consider my usage of this phrase and its variants throughout this book. On one level, there are the historical realities of the boys’ club of comedians during the twentieth century, especially in Classic Hollywood, often excluding talented female performers from their ranks and, essentially, defining a popular film genre known as the comedian comedy. In this sense, the “club” exists in correlation to the patriarchal order and the masculine remains a central part of its conception. On another level, the film texts themselves show us something about cultural narratives of masculinity that counter its persuasive myths. As will be seen, they illustrate the comedians’ ability to queer hegemonic maleness through open challenges of its protocols. These performances are usually, though not always, self-deprecating yet defiant to power structures, existing as buffoonish failures (or, in more extreme cases, mockeries) of hegemonic maleness. In this realm we locate underexamined histories of gender related to racial, ethnic, ecoi n t ro d u c t i o n | 7

nomic, and sexual otherness that define moments of great transition in American history. In a sense, just as the “club” had multiple meanings for Woody Allen and Groucho Marx, this label must be understood as having multiple potentials for challenging the social order. Buffoonish masculinity provides us with a wealth of insights into some of cinema’s most popular stars and their cultural significance, both as a historical reality defining a popular cinematic genre and a critical tool for contextualizing the nature of queered gender.

The Classic Hollywood Comedian and Genre With the onset of sound during the late 1920s, Hollywood had to look for new types of movie stars and turned to other mediums already defined by talking. In the realm of comedy, this move proved especially important, creating longlasting effects on popular entertainment. During this period the movie industry promoted performers like W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, Joe E. Brown, Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers, and Bob Hope, all of whom had careers reaching through various mediums of popular entertainment. The 1930s thereby was an era that embraced, along with the mediated image, the mediated voice of celebrity, the vocalization and proliferation of personae fostered by changes in media. As cultural artifacts, the films covered in this book are examples of early sound cinema attempting to define itself by dipping into the talent pools of vaudeville, Broadway, and radio. In his impressive analysis of the period, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, Henry Jenkins labels these comedies as incorporating a vaudevillian aesthetic and, therefore, existing as a type of “anarchistic comedy.”19 He defines these films as anarchistic in two key ways: first, they “press against traditional film practice, moving from the classical Hollywood cinema’s emphasis upon linearity and causality toward a more fragmented and episodic narrative.” Second, they “often celebrate the collapse of social order and the liberation of the creativity and impulsiveness of their protagonist.” Jenkins thus designates these motion pictures as anarchistic in “both form and content.”20 As former vaudevillians, many of these comedians belong, at least partly, to this tradition because they created comedies defined by fragmentation and collapsing social order that served as fitting cinematic venues for an established vaudeville aesthetic consisting of sketches and routines. As a collective group, comedians of the era are figures of transition between mediums and aesthetic classifications. The multimedia challenges of the 1930s ultimately resulted in later generations of comedian comedies as also being defined on screen by conflicting narrative and nonnarrative forces. Steve Seidman writes in his genre analysis Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film that these films are formed by two contradictory impulses: 8 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

(1) the maintenance of the comedian’s position as an already recognizable performer with a clearly defined extrafictional personality (and in the case of comedians from 1930 on, a highly visible extrafictional personality); and (2) the depiction of the comedian as a comic figure who inhabits a fictional universe where certain problems must be confronted and resolved.21

As this dichotomy illustrates, the impulse to showcase the comedian remains central to both the genre’s formal and narrative construction, something heightened by the development of sound cinema and the poaching of performers from other mediums. Studies of more recent comedy also note these conflicted impulses between the established performer and the on-screen fictional world. Geoff King considers Steve Martin’s All of Me (1984), Robin Williams’s Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar (1997) as illustrating “a hybrid form, a mixture of ‘classical’ narrative integration and the performative/ presentational.”22 Even today, if we were to define the identifying marker of the comedian comedy as a genre, it would be that the films are performer-centric. As King continues, “Comic persona is worked into the on-going depictions of events and character, but there are moments or sequences in which it remains more overtly on display . . . a focus on comic performance that can be appreciated for its own sake.”23 These displays might be central to the film’s appeal, like the anarchistic comedy of the Marx Brothers in films organized around a series of vaudevillian-like sketches. Or, as in King’s examples, they can be periodic within a tighter form of storytelling—where Martin, Williams, and Carrey incorporate their established personae into more sophisticated filmic worlds. As such classifications of genre suggest, the comedian can be viewed as of cinema as well as removed from cinema. Not surprisingly, this textual position, defined by “the presentational” as opposed to narrative integrity, results in many readings of comedians stressing them as actors without necessarily an emotionally invested audience, at least not on the same level as dramatic actors. This view is especially apparent in discussions of the silent movie foundations of the genre as slapstick pioneer Mack Sennett and major silent stars like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton defined them.24 Focusing much on the silent era, the first important book-length academic work on film humor, Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, suggests “detachment” grounds our responses to the comedian: That we do not believe in comedy’s reality, that we consciously recognize the imitation as imitation, produces an intellectual-emotional distance i n t ro d u c t i o n | 9

from the work that is the essential comic response. It is this attitude that [Elder] Olsen calls “katastasis”—a relaxed, unconcerned detachment. . . . This detachment . . . allows our intellect to roam over comedy events and characters, enabling us to make connections, see parallels, become aware of ironies, perceived contradictions, consequences, causes and effects.25

Mast’s suggestion is rooted in comedy’s long-standing reputation as essentially an emotionally detached form of pleasure. Classical theories of humor were based in aesthetic classifications seeing comedy as the Aristotelian antithesis of tragedy, with emotional catharsis at tragedy’s core and intellectual fulfillment defining comedy. Thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer discussed humor through the suggestion of an intellectualized exercise of locating connections between despondent ideas, not necessarily through any deeper emotional or psychological processes. Thomas Hobbes and Alexander Bain saw any relationship with comic persons as based mainly in our deriding laughter, in our feelings of superiority over the comic subject.26 Even Henri Bergson, whose 1900 work, Laughter, provides a more modernist view of humor’s complicated role in industrial society, promotes an emotional detachment as defining a comic environment: “Indifference is its [the comic’s] natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.”27 Only with Sigmund Freud, with his direct correlation of joke-work to the subject’s unconscious mind in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905, do we start to see the definite possibility of a deeply rooted investment with on-screen comedians. As the first chapter of this book posits, his theories are instrumental in understanding the cultural apparatuses behind the popular appeals of the male comic. In terms of defining the genre and performer, Mast’s book rightfully gives focus to Chaplin and Keaton, who took active creative roles as filmmakers in developing their on-screen personae as, respectively, the Little Tramp and the “stone face.” As he suggests, Chaplin “was the character who laughed, smiled, and cried, whereas Buster was the one who rarely moved a facial muscle.” Yet both comedians “revealed a soul, a mind, and a brain within the body” that marked a definite difference from the earliest of silent knockabout slapstick Mack Sennett produced, where the director “effected the conversion of people into ‘Bergsonian’ things” or simple props for slapstick.28 Often called the first global film superstar, Chaplin grew in popularity by refining his character from shorts, including The Immigrant (1917), Shoulder Arms (1918), and A Dog’s Life (1918), to features, such as The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936). Keaton, to a lesser extent, also located global stardom by perfecting his persona from shorts like One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), and Cops (1922) to features such as Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), and College (1927). In his 1 0 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

final chapter of Laughter, Bergson turns his attention to the comic within character, relating his general thesis on the automated and mechanical aspects of humor as a social construct to the individual human subject. To Mast, Chaplin and Keaton are essential examples of this conception of humor merging with popular screen personae, turning Bergsonian mechanism into innate character traits as Chaplin “displays a limber flexibility that abhors the mechanical and inelastic” and Keaton “is both machine and man at once.”29 Bergson argues that “all character is comic” since it contains a universal “mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork,” that ready-made human attribute in all of us that “causes us to imitate ourselves.” As he suggests, “Every comic character is a type.”30 Chaplin and Keaton (as well as their many successors) established their popularity through portraying their consistent “types” through various motion pictures. In a way, the film comedian is a twentieth-century reconfiguration of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American comic prototypes from stage and literature designated in Constance Rourke’s landmark American Humor—where she traces the lineage of “the Yankee,” “the backwoodsman,” “the Negro minstrel,” “the strolling actor,” and “the comic poet” through American history.31 Of course, as modern figures of the cinematic era, Chaplin and Keaton had to face technological innovations through the history of cinema, which challenged their “types” on screen. As silent performers, they both had problems adapting their physically dependent personae to sound cinema. Chaplin’s Little Tramp only appeared in one sound film, within a modified form (and overshadowed by the comedian’s much more entertaining spoof of Adolph Hitler) in The Great Dictator (1940). Keaton’s career virtually died after the studio stripped him of his creative power and paired him in a series of sound comedies as straight man to verbal comic Jimmy Durante in The Passionate Plumber (1932), Speak Easily (1932), and What! No Beer? (1933). Viewing the comic figure as a “type” exemplifying (and at times countering) the mechanisms of human behavior drives some of the more scholarly work on the performers who defined the foundations of the comedian genre. Alan Dale’s Comedy Is a Man in Trouble examines slapstick on screen as a genre construction with a heavy focus on comedians such as Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, and (as direct homage to the silent stars) Jerry Lewis. Here he usefully designates the slapstick hero as generally not “having enough definition beyond his physical characteristics for a full dramatic persona but is instead a comic martyr, suffering the compromises of dignity that we’re spared for the duration of our sit in the theater.”32 As this suggests, slapstick comedy is an apparatus that invites serious inspection due to its theoretical and psychological implications, its ability to make us laugh at skewed social mechanisms (such as the embarrassment of slipping on a banana peel), and the potential i n t ro d u c t i o n | 1 1

for something more consequential (the threat of a true loss of human dignity). With such implications, silent comedians like Chaplin and Keaton have been enshrined as emblems of the modern age and representative of humanity’s struggles and conflicts with its social mechanizations. Two works that illuminate upon this viewpoint through a close theoretical deconstruction of classic slapstick are Lisa Trahair’s The Comedy of Philosophy and Michael North’s Machine Age Comedy.33 In the former, Trahair uses the theories of Freud and Georges Bataille to investigate sense and nonsense in the work of such comedians as Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and, drifting into sound, the Marx Brothers, thereby providing a poststructuralist reconsideration of “the nature, terms, and logic of what I call ‘the operation of the comic.’  ”34 In the latter work, employing such thinkers as Bergson and Walter Benjamin to understand slapstick’s role in the age of cinema, North suggests that “the machine age manufactures, along with its other products and pollutions, a means of comic reflection on itself, one that has given form to some of the century’s most significant works of art.”35 In essence, such studies position the comedian as a key component to theoretically contextualizing slapstick as a social mechanism, reflecting comedy’s potential to deconstruct industrial society through its “types.” While helpful in properly theorizing the social mechanisms of humor, suggesting the comedian as only producing an emotionally detached form of pleasure proves culturally problematic since such performers were (and are) movie stars in the strictest sense as designated by Richard Dyer’s landmark Stars, having personae carried over from film to film and obviously beloved by a paying audience.36 The comedian is, after all, significant enough to make audiences want to revisit the same person in film after film, if not week after week on radio or television broadcasts as the century continues. This popular obsession with certain performers characterizes more cinephilic writings that discuss the artistry of Classic Hollywood comedians, such as seen in the prolific Wes D. Gehring’s numerous books.37 In Film Clowns of the Depression, where he celebrates the films of many of the comedians covered in this book (such as Mae West, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, and Laurel and Hardy), Gehring suggests these appealing figures are examples of “personality comedians” who provide comfort to audiences through their consistency of character: “Cinema clown comedy of any age is about resilience, both physical and spiritual—that is, funny characters comfort us in our short lives with their comeback comedy. They are like the mythical bird, the phoenix, which burned on a funeral pyre and rose from the ashes to live through another cycle. They can embrace the cinematic slapstick of a comedy character flattened one moment, only to be totally revived in the next frame.”38 To understand America’s cinephilic love of comedians, something must exist beyond detached intellectual enjoyment and the Bergsonian mechanics of humor. Especially as we move from the pure 1 2 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

slapstick of the 1920s and into the combined verbal and physical comedy of the 1930s, identification inescapably becomes a central component to the comedian’s popularity, suggesting an appeal tied to the audience’s respect of their resilience in relation to their own lives. With this understanding, this book presents comedians as sources of identification for the audience that are rich in social significance. As this study focuses on the early sound era, the comedian comedy provides us with the opportunity to examine populist narratives of maleness often unseen in other films of the same period. Such performers give us an alternative story of Classic Hollywood masculinity, one building off of the genre foundations of the previous decade but forming its own fascinating relationship with the transitional media and cultural realities of the 1930s.

The Classic Hollywood Comedian and Gender Initially, it might seem dismissive to suggest that men largely define our conceptions of the film comedian (as opposed to the comedienne) during the Classic Hollywood period. I need to clarify that this figure is far different from the comedic actor. A cinephile might point to stars like Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, or Irene Dunne as funny women, but these actresses all starred in screwball comedy as opposed to comedienne-centric films. They were not performers coming from Broadway or vaudeville with established comic personae, ones that studios build scripts around. These actresses’ comedies, like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), My Man Godfrey (1936), and The Awful Truth (1937), are all tightly scripted narratives that, in theory, could have cast somebody else if needed.39 Arthur, Lombard, and Dunne also all portrayed dramatic parts during their careers. Grouping them with comediennes would be similar to placing Gary Cooper, William Powell, or Cary Grant beside W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, or Bob Hope as leading men. Setting aside these stars, the comedienne becomes a difficult figure to pinpoint in Classic Hollywood cinema. But there are, of course, notable and important exceptions, especially during the silent era.40 Coming from a music hall background, Flora Finch starred in very early silent slapstick—though her career faded after the death of her frequent on-screen partner, John Bunny, in 1915. Louise Fazenda established herself as a slapstick comedienne with Mack Sennett before moving on to work in dramatic and character parts in the sound era. Most successfully, Mabel Normand was promoted as the “Queen of Comedy” and made successful movies throughout the era. Such figures show a Hollywood more willing to embrace slapstick comediennes alongside their male counterparts during the silent era. Sound film proved a different venue, one that, for whatever reason, was less inclined to embrace above-the-title comediennes. In 1934, Paramount director Norman Taurog shared with Photoplay a list of comic stars who, in i n t ro d u c t i o n | 1 3

well-promoted costarring parts, saved otherwise boring productions.41 In true New Deal fashion, he jokingly calls these performers members of the “CRA” (Comedy Relief Artists). This list includes stars who certainly could be classified as true comediennes: ZaSu Pitts, Edna May Oliver, Mary Boland, Pert Kelton, May Robinson, and Alison Skipworth. Yet few of these names developed the types of stardom associated with male comics of the era.42 Unknowingly, Taurog identified the problem when he offered clarification about his list: “One may well say, ‘Where is W. C. Fields?’ Well that rare droll would be heading the list . . . if it were not for the fact that Paramount is giving him full star billing.”43 Unlike Fields and others, female comics rarely were cast beyond their costarring roles, something seen with other female stars of the period such as Marie Dressler and Charlotte Greenwood.44 That being said, Classic Hollywood found significant exceptions to this trend in the popularity of such figures as Gracie Allen, Martha Raye, and especially Mae West. Also, Hal Roach attempted to provide audiences with a female alternative to his enormously successful pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy with the comedienne duo of Thelma Todd and ZaSu Pitts (and, later, Todd and Patsy Kelly), though the pairing never reached the same level of success.45 But due to the overriding masculine trend, where these exceptions “prove the rule,” it is critical to question what the male comic means as a gendered subject unto himself. The period this book focuses on, roughly 1930 to 1941, shows a film industry that by the decade’s end largely viewed the comic solely as a male figure on screen, a confirmation by Hollywood of the comedian comedy as a phallocentric genre classification. As such, within the narratives of many Classic Hollywood comedian comedies, female characters often adopt problematic or, in more extreme cases, outright sexist roles. As in other productions of the era, the films often feature sexually objectified chorus girls (found, for example, in the Marx Brothers’ early films adapted from Broadway shows, The Coconuts [1929] and Animal Crackers) or a passive female love interest for the straight male lead (for example, Allan Jones romances a pretty but boring Kitty Carlisle in A Night at the Opera). In terms of the female characters who actively engage the comedians, the performances frequently represent more demeaning “types.” Kathleen Rowe usefully designates many of these stock characters in comedian comedies, even beyond Classic Hollywood, as the “repressive, phallic mother,” suggesting: “Her ranks include spinsters, dowagers, prohibitionists, mothers-in-law, librarians, suffragettes, battle axes, career women, ‘women’s libbers,’ and lesbians. Set up as the butt of laughter and occasionally the victim of physical aggression as well, these women may be old and stubbornly resistant or indifferent to male desire, fat or scrawny, shrill and ‘unfeminine.’  ”46 A prototypical example of this stock characterization is found in the performances of Margaret Dumont, represent1 4 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

ing the phallic matriarch of the upper classes who will be ironically romanced (for her money) and ritualistically humiliated by Groucho Marx in such films as Animal Crackers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races. The stereotype appears in various guises throughout this book—ranging from vilification, exposing misogynistic impulses in the humor (as found with W. C. Fields’s shrewish wives covered in chapter 2), to existing as complementary queered performances with their own subversive potential (seen with Laurel and Hardy’s wives in Sons of the Desert [1933], discussed in chapter 5). Ultimately, no matter how queerly transgressive the comedians appear, there exists an undeniable current of misogynistic humor in many of these films based in unsettling traditions of stage and screen comedy. Despite these problematic gender relationships, as suggested earlier, the on-screen depictions of maleness comedians perform are not necessarily phallocentric. Their inability to be classified in traditionally masculine terms is something made apparent by the fact that foundational analyses of cinematic gender often outright dismissed male comedians. In her 1977 book on movie masculinity, Joan Mellen excuses such personalities as useful filmic depictions, contending that while the “Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields contributed a zany tone to thirties life, they were less male images than explorers of the comic absurdity of social institutions.” Such comedians “might be perfunctorily lecherous, but they were not treated as models of male behavior.”47 Despite her inattentive dismissal of comedians, Mellen’s suggestion is a logical assertion. Nobody considers Groucho Marx or W. C. Fields as idealized male figures in the same way as Gary Cooper or Errol Flynn. Yet Mellen’s view is also one indicative of her book’s era of scholarship, as 1970s film studies was just beginning to suggest the depiction of gendered figures on screen as something considerably more complex than just models of behavior. Following the influx of feminist film study after Laura Mulvey’s designation of the “male gaze” in 1975, initial forays into the study of cinematic (white) maleness sometimes felt like an afterthought of the feminist wave, with only a few key articles, such as Pam Cook’s “Masculinity in Crisis” and Steve Neale’s “Masculinity as Spectacle,” making any impact.48 Hence, the stage was set for a declaration of masculinity as the great overlooked “elephant in the room” of gender studies. This was something Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark certainly suggested in their coedited Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, a well-regarded collection that proclaimed that post-Mulveyian gender scholarship had yet to fully define the complexities of male activeness on screen.49 The collection featured early forays into cinematic masculinity by scholars such as Cohan, Gaylyn Studlar, Susan Jeffords, Chris Holmlund, and Peter Lehman, names that would define the issue in the following decades.50

i n t ro d u c t i o n | 1 5

In particular reference to the first fifty years of Hollywood history, a period encompassing the focus of this book, some interesting scholarship has examined how cinema envisioned manhood as a multifaceted cultural construct. Gaylyn Studlar’s This Mad Masquerade contextualizes the Jazz Age stardom of such movie icons as Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, Rudolph Valentino, and Lon Chaney as they reflect “an era in which America felt process-driven and unsure of the meaning of rapid cultural change. . . . American identity was perceived as being thrown into flux. The pressure to find—or reinvent—the self appeared acute.”51 With this in mind, upon approaching the 1930s comedian, we must contend with the stage set by the unstableness (and fragility) of masculine identities coming out of the Jazz Age, itself a continuation of a longer historical lineage of conflicted maleness in popular culture. In Manly Arts, David S. Gerstner analyzes masculinity and nationality in early American cinema by focusing on topics ranging from Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophical impact on silent propaganda films to Vincente Minnelli’s queer commingling with African American culture in Cabin in the Sky (1943). Gerstner declares that such complicated convergences of conflicted masculinity and cinema “enabled the myth of manly America. The effects of these productions were often ironic, successful as much as they were unsuccessful, and, in an instance or two, beautifully queer.”52 Such scholarly assertions generally propose an unstable definition of maleness as it developed as a Hollywood construct, suggesting a more fragile foundation for a phallic order than Cook or Neale originally proposed. As Barry Keith Grant put forward in his ambitious look at masculinity throughout American film history, Shadows of Doubt, “particular genre films and cycles may be seen as reflecting a series of representational crises” and these “offer part of an ongoing dialogue with audiences about the ceaseless challenges to and valorization of heteronormative ideals—what I call ‘negotiations’—in a constantly changing society at specific points in time.”53 Thus looking at any genre or period of cinema through a lens of “masculinity studies” (if there is truly such a field) means understanding the complicated negotiations between the cultural narratives of maleness and the idealizations (and subversions) of how they are depicted on screen. Not surprisingly, this deeper inspection into classifications of masculinity coincides with the rise of queer studies in film as well, with Vito Russo’s popular The Celluloid Closet initiating the concept of an alternative homosexual history of Hollywood.54 Later, queer readings of supposedly “straight” films and, notably, studies of gay cinema found more complex intellectual takes with such scholars as Richard Dyer, Alexander Doty, Robert Lang, and Richard Barrios.55 All of these studies of cinematic masculinity now adopted deeper understandings of gender itself, especially of supposed heterosexual “normalcy” as performance. This conception of queerness owed much to the groundbreaking work 1 6 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in literary studies with Between Men in 1985, which considered male homosocial desire, erotic triangulations, and homosexual panic in works ranging from William Shakespeare’s sonnets to the turn-ofthe-century reception of Walt Whitman.56 Also influential, her viewpoints on the act of “coming out/remaining closeted” were expanded five years later in Epistemology of the Closet through literary and philosophical thinkers ranging from Melville to James to Proust to Nietzsche.57 This awareness of “queerness” as a complex and rich analytical category certainly becomes clear well beyond film and literature within cultural studies, following the publication of Judith Butler’s groundbreaking Gender Trouble and her follow-up Bodies That Matter, which both posit gender as socially conditioned constructs (or “performances”) with, at best, a superficial relationship with biological difference.58 Overall, the work of notable theorists began to provide a richer examination of masculinity that could fall under expansive definitions of queerness, often aligning male gender performance with the limitations of social restrictiveness. In essence, they are the very foundations on which this study builds its examination of the comedian as a queered subject as their definitions challenge the very precepts that there ever existed an actual stable “heteronormative” gender identity. Surprisingly, though, most examinations of comedians that could serve as a paradigm for a gender study sidestep these major advancements to define comics in less ambitious, though still intriguing, ways. In his introduction to the collection Comedy/Cinema/Theory, Andrew S. Horton designates two schools of film comedy by focusing directly on Freudian developmental terms, which must be considered before embarking on a deeper gender analysis of comedians: “Oedipal (accommodation, compromise, social integration) comedy and pre-Oedipal (wish fulfillment, dreams) comedy.”59 Horton specifies comedies dealing with romance and thereby “personal compromise and social integration” as in the Oedipal tradition that is represented in the final marriage act of these types of narratives.60 This comedy includes such romantic figures as Cary Grant but also involves broader comedic actors such as Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin, where an ironic commentary on such romantic resolutions can appear. Pre-Oedipal turns “to those comic filmmakers less involved with the ‘emotional’ realm of Oedipal comedy.” Horton ties this distinction to films “less rooted in the everyday world” and traditionally “labeled ‘farce,’ ‘slapstick,’ and even ‘anarchistic comedy.’  ”61 Included in this category are the childish antics of the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello. Problematically, Horton’s Freudian dichotomy fails to completely work when considering the male comedian as a sexual subject worthy of study. It mirrors too many popular approaches to on-screen comedy with the two cati n t ro d u c t i o n | 1 7

egories running parallel with the aesthetic distinctions of high and low humor. Situations and narrative define the Oedipal comedy of romance, while gags designate the pre-Oedipal humor of slapstick. As these titles suggest, such distinctions signify an unfortunate ranking of the two categories, probably based in the antiquated contention that formal narrative cohesiveness indicates quality. As Lawrence W. Levine argues in Highbrow/Lowbrow, the conception of such categories of “high” and “low” are volatile products of history since “the perimeters of our cultural divisions have been permeable and shifting rather than fixed and immutable.”62 The slapstick antics of comedians like Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy might break down narrative sense in their absurd short films, which could be classifiable as “lowbrow.” Yet a similar breakdown of narrative logic also appears with Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949), which is often considered one of the most important plays of the twentieth century and, thereby, the pinnacle of “highbrow” modernism. As a scholar of comedy, I find classifications of aesthetics of very little interest since the comedians I am analyzing might be lowbrow to some but they are remarkably complex within themselves (so much so that Laurel and Hardy are said to have directly inspired the characters of Vladimir and Estragon).63 As Seidman first observed, many comedian comedies, which privilege the performer over story, are counteractive to the hermetic spaces of classical narrative cinema. But despite this lack of story structure, the character-based qualities of the comedian can still remain within Oedipal and, thereby, definable gender classifications worthy of analysis. After all, no matter how flimsy the narrative world, the comic’s persona remains consistent from film to film, a defining aspect of the genre that welcomes a gender analysis of its central performers. As suggested earlier, Frank Krutnik posits the limitless possibilities of Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnivalesque for analyzing comedians. In specific historical conditions, these carnivals provided a dynamic popular expression that reversed prevailing social hierarchies. In direct relationship to sexuality and other social classifications, Krutnik sees the comic’s body and behavior as defined within this dynamic as s/he “serves as both emissary of and scapegoat for counter-culture impulses.” As such, “casting comedians as eccentric individuals who are in conflict with the demands of living by the rules, the films set up numerous opportunities for them to disrupt conventional procedures regulating activities of work, communication, gender and sexuality.”64 Krutnik proposes a view of the comedian working against social formalities yet also functioning within these classifications as a Bakhtinesque mutation of the “normal.” But as seen in the following chapters, this proposition has its own limitations when applied directly to gender, since hegemonic behaviors (existing beyond the carnival) suggest performance as well. The comedian comedy must contend with various levels of performance, often simultaneously con1 8 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

fronting and conforming to ideologies that define social parameters. As shown in my first chapter, this creates a more complicated conception of queerness as denaturalizing gender protocols as opposed to necessarily disrupting them— something appearing in the performances of Mae West and W. C. Fields. It is within this realm of gender performativity that I position my study of comedians. Judith Butler ends her groundbreaking Gender Trouble with a conclusion titled “From Parody to Politics,” aligning the repetition of supposed “proper” gender behaviors with a form of comedy—the parody: “The parodic repetition of gender exposes as well the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance. As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an ‘act,’ as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status.”65 Unquestionably, comedian comedy as a genre is born out of phallocentric societies where definitions such as Oedipal, pre-Oedipal, and the grotesque still prove viable. Yet, I suggest, as a collective queered performance, the films are more attuned to exposing this underlying “parodic repetition” of gender than other popular American cinema. By examining the Classic Hollywood past of comedian comedy, this book strives to answer crucial unanswered questions driving our cinematic and cultural heritage: What do comedians show us about performances of gender as historically queered constructs? What do they tell us about the historical (sub)narratives that define these performances?

Buffoonish Masculinity and Its (Sub)narratives In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman examines masculinities deviating from the supposed social “norm” within a variety of cultural products, including key cinematic examples ranging from directors William Wyler to Rainer Werner Fassbinder.66 She provides a considerably more thorough theoretical basis for examining masculinity than initially found in the earliest works of Cook and Neale, who theorized erotic maleness on screen as something viewers actively disavowed. In contrast, Silverman proposes the definite potential for a wider conception of masculine subjectivity, one with appeals to various disregarded types of male moviegoers (something that could help situate an expansive understanding of maleness as performance): “The kinds of male subjectivity which will be anatomized here are, moreover, precisely those which open in a variety of ways onto the domain of femininity. To state the case slightly differently, the masculinities which this book will interrogate, and even in certain instances work to eroticize or privilege, are those which not only acknowledge but embrace castration, alterity, and specularity.”67 With Silverman, deeper sociohistorical definitions driving male performance are i n t ro d u c t i o n | 1 9

forced to the forefront, suggesting a more fragile and multifarious foundation for the phallic structures dictating classical cinematic worlds. Recognizing Silverman’s proposition of a cinema with classifications of maleness that embrace “castration, alerity, and specularity,” Buffoon Men proposes a wider analysis of Classic Hollywood comedians as something truly exciting in its possibilities. These performers and their buffoonish masculinity provide a traceable, alternative narrative of queered maleness that explores cultural factors that previous studies have overlooked. While the genre is undoubtedly sexist in its conception because it favors male performers and presents problematic female stereotypes, it proves transgressive in its execution, exposing the fragilities of the phallic structures often defining masculine dominance. As might be clear by the scholarship outlined in this introduction, this book examines the comedian as a convergence of culturally dictated forces, all of which drive the images of comic maleness we see on screen. In this manner we can view buffoonish masculinity in film as a history of gender, traceable through the contradictory paradigms of maleness Gail Bederman defines as “a historical, ideological process,” where “part of the way gender functions is to hide these contradictions and to camouflage the fact that gender is dynamic and always changing.”68 To study comedians’ queering of male idealizations is to thereby study a historical, ideological process subverted (or, in comic terms, mocked). By focusing on the 1930s, as Henry Jenkins suggests, the comedian comedy’s particularly anarchistic nature allows us to see films heavily influenced by vaudeville as well as the Broadway revue and radio. As multiple cinematic examples show, while the comedian became a component of the Hollywood machine, he was not of Hollywood and its driving forces. Coming from a vaudeville tradition performed to appeal to lower classes and immigrant populations, his image was born out of key cultural legacies other forms of popular bourgeois entertainment often disavowed. These include the usually unseen stories of the economically depressed, the ethnically repressed, and, more generally, the queered. Such underlying influences often existed beyond the comedian’s conscious motivations as a performer who was simply out to get a laugh. But from an analytical viewpoint, the comedian says volumes about social definitions of maleness, exposing gender as truly an ideological process. To fully understand buffoonish masculinity as both a genre and gender classification, this book begins not with a focused reading of a key male figure but with a contrasted reading between two comedy legends of different genders. The first chapter positions that great icon of sexual transgression, Mae West, as essential to the study of gender performance as parody, something exemplifying Judith Butler’s conceptions of performativity through the influence of male drag performance upon West’s on-screen persona. This history 2 0 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

will be traced from West’s early work as a playwright with SEX (1926) and The Drag (1927) to her own appropriation of drag performance in her Hollywood films, focusing on She Done Him Wrong (1933). For the purpose of this study, though, her greatest analytical potential is found in her costarring vehicle with another less studied icon, W. C. Fields, in My Little Chickadee (1940). Through a close reading of their only on-screen pairing, Fields emerges as another figure of queered performance who adopts his own version of a “drag” appropriation of gendered traits. By understanding Butler’s expansive definition of drag as not an opposition but a denaturalization of heteronormativity, we see how Fields performs his own unique form of gender parody. His performance thereby provides a foundation for understanding buffoonish masculinity as a denaturalization of idealized masculinities, one exposing the fragilities of heteromale identity. The second chapter builds on this theoretical framework for Fields and moves it onto a wider cultural stage to understand his lineage as a stage performer and its influence upon narratives of maleness specific to his on-screen popularity as a solo act. The purpose here is to explore how his buffoonish maleness exposes the myths grounding the early twentieth-century perception of a supposed crisis of masculinity. Fields has two major variations within his on-screen persona: a confidence man, established in his first Broadway success, Poppy (1923), and a family man, first portrayed onstage in The Comic Supplement (of American Life) (1924). While still buffoonish, Fields’s con man exploits the perceived “crisis” by embodying an individuality rejecting the Industrial Revolution and the supposed feminizing of the American landscape. His husband character, in contrast, embraces the supposedly domesticated modern male, becoming the embodiment of the “marriage joke,” a form of humor that feminizes matrimony. While steeped in misogynistic humor, the development of each “type” in such films as The Old Fashioned Way (1934), It’s a Gift (1934), Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), and Poppy (1936) ultimately exposes the buffoonishness of the symbolic father role. Through all these performances, Fields’s problematized relationships with powerful matriarchs and idealized daughters highlight his conflicted and truly subversive position as a queered signifier. I open this book on Fields as a model for buffoonish masculinity since his films so clearly address issues of hegemonic maleness that theoretically universal definitions can analyze. Moving into a more complicated ethnic and racial history, the third chapter examines Eddie Cantor’s transition from the Broadway stage to Hollywood as it illustrates a complicated national narrative of Jewish assimilation. While he established a queered nebbish stereotype onstage within both his performance of Jewishness and blackface, the transition to cinema shows a “whitefacing” of these traits that ran counter to Cani n t ro d u c t i o n | 2 1

tor’s public persona as a politically active Jewish celebrity. The chapter traces his evolution on screen through his popular series of musical comedies with Samuel Goldwyn in Whoopee! (1930), Palmy Days (1931), The Kid from Spain (1932), Roman Scandals (1933), Kid Millions (1934), and Strike Me Pink (1936). In each film, I explore how Cantor’s “whitefaced” performances demonstrate the most problematic elements of Jewish American assimilation, while, ironically, still performing blackface in key sequences as a marker of ethnic otherness. This inconsistency creates some of the most conflicted versions of onscreen maleness of the period, creating a queerly ambiguous sexual signifier that drifts between racial and ethnic identities. The fourth chapter considers the mediated voice’s role in comedian comedy by examining radio superstar Jack Benny’s on-air queer voice and its only partly successful adaptation to cinematic stardom. The Jack Benny Program (1932–55) can easily be classified as the most popular and influential radio show of the 1930s, redefining broadcast comedy as a more character-based art form. Yet, especially to modern listeners, the show might prove most remarkable in the queered relationships between the nearly all male cast and the feminized performance of Benny himself. The program’s enormous popularity demonstrates the cultural revolution the proliferation of the mediated voice from radio and sound cinema in interwar America created, a phenomenon that allowed for comforting sonic spaces where a popular audience could more warmly embrace queered gender. Beyond his importance to the history of broadcast, Benny also shows how queered voice could manifest differently on radio in contrast to sound cinema. In analyzing two motion pictures in which Benny portrays himself, Buck Benny Rides Again and Love Thy Neighbor (both 1940), I show how the technological revolution of radio during the period objectified his voice in film, not in an erotic sense, but as a familiar comedy object. When adapted to film, these vocal performances are complicated when localized with the body on screen, an image dictated more so by the heteronormativity of the Hollywood system. The final two chapters consider the comedian’s role within homosocial orders of maleness by examining popular comedy duos—pairings of performers that emerge as some of the queerest of on-screen constructs. The fifth chapter focuses on the myths of fraternity and white male brotherhood found in the American institutions of social fraternities and clubs. Such organizations exposed the hegemony’s anxieties over defining homosocial friendship when faced with social challenges found in the increasing visibility of women and homosexuals within the public sphere. These cultural constructs are overtly spoofed by the still existing “appreciation society” for comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy known as the Sons of the Desert, which organizes itself as a mock social fraternity. Focusing on Laurel and Hardy, their unique fan base, 2 2 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

and the film Sons of the Desert (1933), this chapter explores how the comedy team proves the queerest of on-screen duos as they overtly satirize male societies such as the Freemasons, thereby illustrating a comic affront to the parameters of homosocial male brotherhood. Most remarkably, the film takes this subversion even further and also explores the sexualized dynamics of malemale companionship as a more successful pairing than each comedian’s respective heterosexual marriage, challenging core elements of the misogynistic humor that runs throughout much of comedian comedy by adding a queered female pairing to counter the two males. The final chapter continues this discussion of fraternity to examine the comedian’s role in response to two events greatly defining the public narratives of maleness of the 1930s—the world wars. This chapter considers two very different comedy duos in Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey (possibly the most anarchistic comedians covered in the book) and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello (a duo that takes my study into the more politically conservative era of the 1940s), each of whom starred in similarly quickly produced, yet highly profitable, vehicles. By looking at each duo’s popular military comedies, focusing on Wheeler and Woolsey’s Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) and Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates (1941), I will show a queered subtext in each based in the cultural anxieties created by the memories of World War I and the threat of World War II. Ultimately, each film shows the changing views toward the citizen soldier as a public figure, illustrating how comedian comedy transforms in a relatively short period of time to eventually embrace the heteromasculine mythologies the idealization of military service celebrated. It might come as a surprise to some fans of Classic Hollywood comedy that many of the comedians I have selected for analysis are not necessarily those most celebrated by cinephiles. For example, while I open this introduction with a reference to Groucho Marx, the classic films he made with his brothers Chico, Harpo, and sometimes Zeppo do not serve as the basis of further analysis in my book. In short, the movies prove almost too transgressively anarchistic to have the brothers serve as consistent gender identities that speak to cultural (sub)narratives of the period. (Of course, this dynamic is part of what defines their universal appeal in later decades.) Also, by beginning my study in the 1930s, I have largely sidestepped auteur filmmaking comedians like Chaplin and Keaton, who have been celebrated and studied for decades. While all these figures are certainly important to the history of American cinema, to be honest, as a scholar, I find it more important to examine popular figures with less clearly defined artistic credibility. W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Laurel and Hardy, Wheeler and Woolsey, and Abbott and Costello all have varying reputations as “legitimate” and “celebrated” cinematic artists and also had varying degrees of control over their on-screen images. Some of these i n t ro d u c t i o n | 2 3

performers’ films found large numbers of fans in later generations (like W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy), while others’ work is less well known today (like Eddie Cantor and Wheeler and Woolsey). But their legacies or lack thereof did not dictate the reason for my selections. Their true worth in terms of this study is in each comedian’s distinctive analytical potential as transgressive masculine figures, performers useful in analyzing queerness within its own time beyond homo-heterosexual binaries. For this reason, as well as analyzing the films, I often discuss the comedians’ appearances in popular fan and industry publications of the period, illustrating how the studio-promoted image of a performer could reflect and, at times, dictate cultural context. As this book will show, each figure remains in conflict with the hegemonic categories of gender performance that attempt to define the heteronormative order. As such, the Classic Hollywood comedians create their own unofficial “club”—the Order of the Buffoon Men.

2 4 | i n t ro d u c t i o n

1

“Novelties and Notions” Mae West Meets W. C. Fields

OUT WEST—where Mae has room for her “hip-notic” ways! WAY OUT WEST— where mighty Bill Fields can dodge with the best! WAY, WAY OUT WEST—where the funniest twain in hic-history meets and shakes every tepee to its baggy foundation. Daily Variety, February 8, 1940

Throughout the latter half of 1939, Universal Studios’ pairing of Mae West and W. C. Fields in what would eventually become My Little Chickadee (1940) was big news in the industry. After being dropped by Paramount Studios and remaining off screen for two years, West’s contract negotiations were reported as a top story, routinely making the front page of Daily Variety. Her eventual contract signing was reported on July 1, 1939, in a prominently placed byline announcing “Mae West Signs for Pic with Fields at U,” stipulating in the blurb that both stars will receive “a fix sum for their work with a percentage of the profits” as well as equal billing “with West name on left and Fields on right.”1 From that time on, the quirky pairing continued to appear in regular updates as the studio found ways to keep the production newsworthy, often implying the two notoriously difficult stars were playing nice, yet were always on the verge of controversy. Blurbs in the publication suggested, “Mae West and Bill Fields are still pulling their punches, but for how long” (November 13, 1939) and “Grapevine has it that W. C. Fields plants a kiss on the cheek of Mae West every morning . . . Grapevine has no report on whether Mae turns the other blusher” (December 5, 1939).2 In one of the oddest publicity stunts, on August 19, newspapers all over the country picked up the story of Univer25

sal’s arranged meeting between West and Dr. Frank Buchman, the head of the moral re-armament movement. As a supposed proponent of its philosophies (which, among other things, birthed Alcoholics Anonymous), West found time to playfully suggest during the meeting that Buchman also visit Fields since this “moral re-armament is just what Bill needs.”3 As the publicity shows, Universal promoted the meeting of West and Fields, two established provocateurs in Hollywood, as a possibly combustible but financially lucrative combination.4 By the time the film wrapped, the studio took out an elaborate eight-page full-color advertisement in Daily Variety on February 8, 1940, filled with bad cowboy puns asking theater bookers to “ride that showmanship saddle with Universal, pardner!”5 As the quotation opening this chapter conveys, the studio promoted the idea of the pairing as associated with controversial vices—sex and alcohol. West’s curvy sexually aggressive “hip-notic ways” are countered with Fields’s drinking, the “funniest twain in hic-history.”6 The ad shows them as bigheaded cartoon caricatures with a wide-eyed West in a formfitting saloon-gal gown and Fields (red nose half the size of his face) decked out in cowboy gear riding a horse over a mountain of money. Yet by the end of the ad, there is another drawing of the two stars presented in a less cartoonish fashion, suggesting something more realistic and sexualized. The image is a recreation of a titillating publicity photo and features West standing suggestively in a formfitting gown as Fields sits tightening her corset—suggesting the twosome as sexual partners postcopulation. In this manner, the ad exemplifies how the studio had to walk a tightrope when pairing Hollywood’s two most provocative comedy stars. The image of West and Fields as cartoon caricatures opens the ad as a way to nullify the sexual threat, but the final image harkens to something more scandalous. Despite the censorship restrictions of the Breen Office, the screen pairing of West and Fields could still imply something dangerous to society, the sexual union of the king and queen of controversial comedy.7 At the time of the production of My Little Chickadee, West was friendly when discussing her costar to the press, recognizing that they shared a status as provocateurs in Hollywood. In promoting the film, she insisted to the New York Times that she enjoyed working with Fields, and, when it comes to comedy, “Our styles don’t conflict.”8 Such contentions might have been to cover up a notoriously troubled preproduction and shoot, where West feared Fields’s drinking and contractually stipulated that he be removed from the set if he appeared drunk. Also, after some arguments over the screenplay, Fields eventually had to accept her storyline over his own, though the comedian evidently rewrote much of his own dialogue.9 These conflicts are not too surprising, since in 1930s Hollywood, the two stars existed as rare genuine instances of the adage “the actor as auteur.”10 Both Fields and West authored many of their best 2 6 | c ha p t e r 1

W. C. Fields and Mae West, publicity photo for My Little Chickadee (1940).

films, including the final screenplay for My Little Chickadee—which, not surprising, creates a movie with a narrative that feels fragmented and uneven. As a solo, Fields wrote the stories for most of his funniest comedies, often under pseudonyms such as Charles Bogle, Mahatma Kane Jeeves, and Otis Criblecoblis. West also wrote the screenplays for many of her films, though, unlike Fields, never found herself having to use pseudonyms. In later interviews, West never included My Little Chickadee among her favorite films and, basically, lambasted her shared billing with a comedian whose Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 2 7

movies “were B pictures and in the few big films in which he had appeared he only played cameo roles.”11 In a way, West was correct in her assessment of Fields’s career since the majority of his films were lower in budget than hers and his appearances in A pictures often consisted of supporting roles, such as his Micawber in David Copperfield (1935). Despite the fact his most loved films today are his starring vehicles, such as It’s a Gift (1934) and The Bank Dick (1940), he spent much of his career sharing screen time with major stars in such movies as Tillie and Gus (1933) with Alison Skipworth, International House (1933) with George Burns and Gracie Allen, Mississippi (1935) with Bing Crosby, Six of a Kind (1934) with Burns and Allen again, The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) with Bob Hope and Martha Raye, and You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939) with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. In contrast, as seen in her most popular films during her Paramount years, West largely outshines her costars on screen—an impressive feat considering they include such leading men as a young Cary Grant in She Done Him Wrong (1933) and I’m No Angel (1933) and Randolph Scott in Go West, Young Man (1936). Despite any allure of the male costar, such films always exist as West showcases where even the most appealing male seems just one of many men, a trend that continued in such late-in-life camp oddities as Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Sextette (1978). As her last real financial success, though, My Little Chickadee provides West with an equally billed costar where this clearly was not the case. From its very conception, this production was as much a vehicle for Fields. Despite the budgets of Fields’s previous films, looking at Chickadee today we see that Universal’s publicity department recognized something West might have wished to dismiss later in her career. The film was produced as an event more than anything else, capitalizing on the meeting of two representative icons rather than traditional movie stars. Both reached iconic status in a variety of ways—including being caricatured in comic strips, greeting cards, and popular cartoons (as well as, of course, publicity materials for films).12 As this chapter will show, West was a master of parodic gender performance, something rooted in her documented creative inspiration from actual Jazz Age drag queens. Through her use of dialogue and bodily gesture, she challenges the phallic order with both aggressive female sexuality (something I will discuss through foundational feminist film theory) and queered denaturalizations of gender protocols (best understood through Judith Butler’s landmark discussions of gender performance and drag). With these approaches, West remains iconic today in a way that is distinctively different from Fields—especially in the realm of academic studies. Her image as a sexually flamboyant alpha female establishes her as a significant figure in feminist and queer film criticism.13 This position partly emerges out of the control she wielded over her

2 8 | c ha p t e r 1

popular image in the male-centric Hollywood of the 1930s as she established her moneymaking abilities with her first two starring roles at Paramount, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, thus gaining a control over the creative direction of her vehicles to follow. Beyond such a rare historical distinction, her on-screen persona’s aggressive sexual power challenged the very protocols of gender identity. This combination of on-screen and off-screen transgressions turned her into an appealing cultural sign for years after her death. But who is W. C. Fields? What can we make of West’s only truly equal male costar and his allure on screen? In Chickadee, the comedian emerges as a surprising complement to West’s transgressive exploration of queered gender performance. His alcoholic blustering and blowhard nature are curiously fitting counterpoints to West’s sexual aggression, which, admittedly, had been lessened by censors by this point in her career. As a result, Fields presents the need to dissect another icon of sexual identification, one that can best be explored through an analysis of his persona’s masculine identity as a different sort of “drag performance,” one not based in gender bending but in the comic deconstruction of gendered norms. In this manner he is a complex amalgam of the core identity-based issues defining many on-screen depictions of buffoonish masculinity. As outlined in my introduction, with a focus on Classic Hollywood comedians, I propose this gender classification as usefully providing two ways to consider the male comic of the era. On one level there are the historical realities of the boys’ club of comedians during the twentieth century often excluding talented female performers from their ranks and defining a popular film genre known as the comedian comedy. In this sense, there is a gender bias in the genre directly challenged by West’s off- and on-screen presence as a creator of popular comedy. On another level, the films of male comics show us something about cultural narratives of masculinity that counter its persuasive myths. These depictions of manhood illustrate the comedians’ ability to queer hegemonic gender identifiers through open challenges. In embracing Mae West’s iconic role as the transgressively queered “feminine,” I wish to now position Fields as another icon of equal significance in analyzing maleness on screen, one providing a model for buffoonish masculinity. Here the comedian represents a potent failure to perform “normative” gender, thereby exposing the performative nature of masculine behaviorism in total. The best way to understand this revelation is to approach Chickadee as a singular opportunity where two provocateurs challenge and denaturalize gender identity, creating a most appropriate cinematic paradigm to open our discussion of Classic Hollywood’s buffoon men.

Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 2 9

Mae West as Gender Icon: Broadway and She Done Him Wrong Before we consider these two comic icons as relational, West’s established status must be understood as a cultural phenomenon. As will be made clear in my next chapter on W. C. Fields as a solo, Mae West’s history as a writer and performer is more overtly transgressive than her Chickadee costar’s history. Essentially, her position in popular culture provides two notable yet interrelated challenges to the hegemony: (1) It confronts the essential sexist ideology of Hollywood cinema; (2) it provides a queered resettlement of the language of gender itself. Perhaps the best way to understand these two transgressions is to consider her most iconic catchphrase: “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”—a come-on highlighting West’s sexual forthrightness. In cinema, the line was established in She Done Him Wrong (1933) as “Why don’t you come up sometime? See me?” West, though, embraced the public’s misquotation and even performed it late in her career as a song called “Come Up and See Me Sometime.” In the film, West places herself as the sexual aggressor in the form of a nineteenth-century saloon singer, Lady Lou—a name reminiscent of drag performers in its combination of the masculine and the feminine. In contrast, the morally upstanding temperance leaguer Captain Cummings (Cary Grant) takes on the passive position. Commenting on how she “always did like a man in a uniform,” West suggests, “Why don’t you come up sometime? See me? I’m home every evening.” Grant nervously suggests he cannot since he is at temperance meetings every night. West persists with her seduction: “Why don’t you come up sometime, huh? Don’t be afraid. I won’t tell.” As Grant resists, she walks up the stairs and looks the handsome young man over, “Come up and I’ll tell your fortune. Ah, you can be had.” Through the lens of foundational feminist film theory, the sequence challenges the basic tenets of gendered power dynamics, the essential ideological apparatus of cinema. In short, the humor exists as a destabilization of the active and passive characteristics of the male/female binary originally defined by Laura Mulvey as designating the male gaze in Classic Hollywood.14 While still the fetishized object for the camera’s gaze as seen through her tight dress and curvy figure, West as Lou gazes upon Grant in his uniform and presents multiple come-ons typically associated with the heterosexual performance of male seduction toward a virginal female. These include suggesting he “can be had,” as if he is just an untouched body worthy of possession, and the concept that she will protect his reputation, with the line, “I won’t tell.” In the psychoanalytic dynamics of such theory, this reading suggests the humor as aimed at an expansive audience that would include a perceived female spectatorship. In 1982, Mary Ann Doane (adopting terminology from psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s 3 0 | c ha p t e r 1

original observations) suggested with femininity in film, masquerade could “manufacture a distance from the image to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the women.”15 As a result, West serves as a comic commentator on the masquerade, at least in Doane’s appropriation of this term, which suggests Riviere’s reading of gestures of flirtatious feminine behavior as “the masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed.”16 While Doane suggests actress Marlene Dietrich and the femme fatale as key examples of Hollywood most clearly confronting the masquerade, West can be read as presenting a considerably more complicated conflict with this feminine mask. In her book-length analysis of West, Ramona Curry contends that the multiple layers of impersonation found in the comedienne creates something even more challenging to masquerade than seen in Dietrich: “West’s construction and reception as a female female impersonator yields her capacity to reveal both femininity and masculinity as façade, for the implied masculinity behind the feminine masquerade is also only an act.”17 In the above scene from She Done Him Wrong, such an analysis is validated as West mocks feminine masquerade by forcing the role of “virginal” sexual prey onto Grant as opposed to herself, exposing supposed masculine sexual aggression as another mask to be worn. West thus exists as one of the comedic “unruly women” discussed in Kathleen Rowe’s study of comediennes and comedic actresses. She describes these performers as crossing “the boundaries of a variety of social practices and aesthetic forms, appearing most vividly in the genres of laughter, or those that share common structures of liminality and inversion.”18 In relationship to She Done Him Wrong, Rowe suggests West’s societal role as part of a Bakhtinian skewing of social definitions, a rebellious position embracing a release from hegemonic confines, “a comic gender inversion that reduces men to interchangeable sexual objects while acknowledging . . . that men make the rules of the game.”19 West as an active and rebellious sexual aggressor was certainly something Paramount promoted upon her arrival to Hollywood, even to the point of situating her in direct conflict with Dietrich. By December of 1933, West was reported in Photoplay as a challenge to the German actress within some salacious yet largely fabricated stories of the two actresses feuding on the Paramount lot. One reporter characterizes the supposed row like a fight commentator, pinpointing each actress’s sexuality as based in public controversy: “Admittedly ‘no angel,’ Mae’s caustic wit if directed at Marlene could ‘do her wrong.’ On the other hand, that stubborn Teutonic will of Marlene’s, revealed more than once during the recent controversy over her masculine attire, would prove a formidable defense.”20 West arrives in Hollywood as a transgressive figure for public consumption, curvier and even more aggressively sexual than the sleek EuMae West Meets W. C. Fields | 3 1

ropean allure found in figures like Dietrich. That being said, both performers challenged audiences through Jazz Age sexual theatrics, mainly by referencing the stage tradition of drag. Dietrich dressed in male attire in her musical performances, something she developed on the stage in Weimar-era Berlin and most famously seen in her iconic tuxedo and top hat look in Morocco (1930).21 In considering West’s debt to drag culture, I wish to continue to explore epistemology of the line “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime,” which has its roots in homosexual camp and drag performance on the New York stage. Through these origins, it becomes apparent that West’s persona more than just challenges the gender ideology of film. It suggests a queered performance resettling the language of gender itself, denaturalizing the “normative” protocols of sexual identity. Before her move to Hollywood, West gained popularity writing her own shows under the pen name Jan Mast, most notoriously the highly controversial SEX (1926) and its companion piece The Drag (1927). By the time West was developing her voice as a performer and writer on the Broadway stage, she was the cause of some of the most high profile controversies concerning sex found in the popular culture of the era. With SEX, West wrote and starred in the story of Margy Lamont, a prostitute who wants to aspire to “the top of my profession.”22 With this play, as Jill Watts suggests, West began to develop the distinctive elements of her persona as, here, “a genuine woman of ill repute,” but also possessing “a good soul.”23 Reviewers of the period noted her rolling walk, domination of other characters, and her unique timing—all of which, along with the play’s overt sexuality, turned the star into a popular figure for Jazz Age New Yorkers out for a night of scandalous entertainment. West went further to provoke theatergoers of the era than most others, especially with The Drag, where she explored her own fascination with the gay male subcultures of New York City and cast forty cross-dressing Greenwich Villagers to star, opting not to appear in the play herself. The storyline explored the issue of homosexuality further than most products of the “pansy craze” of the era, which focused more on stand-alone drag performance and “pansy” comedic caricatures.24 In her play, West examined something comparatively complex in the loveless marriage between the characters of Clair and her closeted husband, Rolly, who throws an elaborate drag ball that ends in his offstage death.25 With news of The Drag being previewed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the moral authorities struck fast to close down all Mae West productions in New York City. The police raided SEX on February 8, 1927, and sentenced West to ten days in prison for producing a play that the judge condemned as “obscene, immoral, and indecent.”26 Understanding how well her persona was developing in the public consciousness, West would tell a reporter after her sentencing, “I expect it will be the making of me.”27 This was a prophetic statement since 3 2 | c ha p t e r 1

these run-ins with moral authority were a definite precursor to the popular persona we eventually see on screen and its resulting controversies. During the obscenity trial, the attacks on SEX often had less to do with the play’s written content than West’s development into a transgressive performer of gender. The prosecution, led by Deputy District Attorney James Wallace, repeatedly stressed that it was not the play’s content alone but her delivery that made the production indecent, suggesting, “Miss. West’s personality, looks, walk, mannerisms and gestures made the lines and situations suggestive.”28 This ultimately became the censors’ common take on West, with Joseph Breen contending by the mid-1930s that the star’s performance of dialogue often made lines sound dirtier than they seem in print.29 West thereby emerged by the 1930s as a star who had developed her persona as a transgressive figure with the ability to offend conservative moral forces through performance alone no matter the joke’s content (even though the verbal content often did push the limits). As this history suggests, Mae West was very much a product of a tradition of queer camp performances—especially those coming from the world of New York’s gay subculture with its popular drag performers. As Pamela Robertson writes about The Drag and, to a lesser extent, West’s backstage drama The Pleasure Man (1928), “the dialogue attributed to the female impersonators and identified as camping anticipates West’s wisecracks to a degree that most of her theatrical roles do not.”30 While casting and developing The Drag, West embraced a cast of Greenwich Village drag queens, led by two of its leaders, called the Duchess and Mother Superior, who tutored young drag performers in the art of language, dress, and attitude. Essentially, the performers’ ad-libs made them the play’s collaborative authors, especially during the onstage drag ball.31 Here the types of double entendres West would later make famous during her career notably appear. In a catty exchange, drag queen Winnie quips: “I’m the type that men prefer. I can at least go through the Navy Yard without having the flags drop at half mast.” Kate then shoots back: “I’m just the type that men crave. The type that burns ’em up. Why when I walk Tenth Avenue, you can smell the meat sizzling in Hell’s Kitchen.”32 Fascinatingly, in the play, Winnie performs a variation on what would become West’s most well known line. In a smuttier variation on “Come up to see me sometime,” as he departs a scene, Winnie says to an uneasy male character, “So glad to have met you. Come up some time and I’ll bake you a pan of biscuits.”33 While not in an overt seduction scene as found in She Done Him Wrong, the line still highlights Winnie’s sexual forthrightness as in conflict to the rules of polite society and, seemingly, implies anal sex with its reference to “biscuits.”34 Even before Winnie, the origin of this line can be traced to yet another drag performer of the era, Bert Savoy, who is often credited as the first Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 3 3

major drag performer to have his homosexuality be a part of his act and whose signature line was the very similar, “You must come over.” His reputation as a queer performer could be the reason why West initially gives a variation of the line to a homosexual character before adopting it for herself. A major star of the period, Savoy combined two types of female impersonations, the comic dame and the double entendre act, to create a figure that critics of the era noted as a direct influence upon West after his death in 1923.35 George Davis of Vanity Fair declared about West in 1934: “Though my love for you has never been the fleshy one proclaimed by so many of your admirers, it has withstood the test of time. I can pay no greater tribute, dear lady, than to say that it has healed the wound in my heart caused by the death of the one and only Bert Savoy. I love you, Miss West, because YOU are the greatest female impersonator of all time.”36 As Robertson suggests, such proclamations in the press show that elements of the contemporary audiences “could recognize West’s affiliation with the tradition of female impersonation and that aspect of her persona, like her use of burlesque, was developed before she got to Hollywood.”37 Gay camp was thereby essential in the development of her persona as much as her burlesque of female gender roles—something established even earlier in her days as a vaudevillian, where she grew in popularity as a dancer of the risqué shimmy in stage revues. Robertson contends that to 1930s audiences, West’s persona “merged the effects of gay camp with female burlesque to produce a form of feminist camp available to a female as well as a gay camp audience.”38 As suggested by her comparisons to Dietrich in the press, West could also be a desired sex object for a perceived heterosexual male audience. But unlike her German counterpart, she was a comic deconstruction of sexual identity as well, merging a burlesque of gendered masquerades with essentially a queer drag act. But what does it mean to suggest West as, in Davis’s words, “the greatest female impersonator of all time?” What does Mae West mean as a fully realized queer performance? Here we must situate the performer within a conception of drag as not simple theatrics but as a potent form of gender “denaturalization.” In her seminal text, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler established gender characteristics as something neither natural nor innate but as a self-perpetuating social construct that serves individual purposes and institutions. Working primarily from a Foucauldian viewpoint as opposed to the psychoanalytic framework of the previously mentioned feminist film theory, Butler contends gender acts and gestures “are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.”39 In contrast to Doane’s suggestion of a gendered behavior as a feminine masquerade that could be “worn or removed,” Butler’s conception of gender performativity exists as something facilitated in the self-identity of the subject as the “acts and 3 4 | c ha p t e r 1

gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purpose of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.”40 In this manner, West not only challenges a masquerade of femininity (through her burlesque of sex roles) but also destabilizes the essential illusion of a stable gendered identity (through her adoption of male drag conventions). As a female female impersonator, she challenges the very protocols of heteronormative identification. West thus repurposes what Butler suggests as a most powerful form of gender parody through drag performance: “The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. . . . In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. . . . In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanisms of their fabricated unity.”41 West certainly remains a performer who fails to highlight a literal difference between her anatomy and the supposed anatomy of her feminine performance. Despite this distinction from a traditional definition of “drag,” Butler’s point still applies since when we watch West, the movements and manner denaturalize the “heterosexual coherence” found in most Hollywood depictions of sexual identity. With its cultural lineage in drag performance, her appropriation of Savoy’s line in She Done Him Wrong proves a complicated moment on screen, as the joke is not based in a gay male sexuality hidden under a feminine outfit, as is the case with the line’s variation in The Drag. When she asks Grant to come upstairs, she is subverting the joke further by flaunting her own real femininity on screen. By adopting the behaviors and gestures of homosexual male drag performance, she suggests there is a chance she will be the one to actively penetrate during the proposed copulation. She is a queered sexual aggressor, challenging not only the behavioral mannerisms of femininity (the masquerade) but also the anatomical body and its “normative” heterosexual functions (proposing a possibility that she will penetrate as opposed to being penetrated). In essence, she might “bake a pan of biscuits” for Grant. But how do we understand West’s position as a queer figure and as a comic one as well? Without a doubt, such a history of gender play suggests a high camp value to her appeal, especially beyond the 1930s in her late career resurgence with such films as Myra Breckenridge and Sextette, which appeared after the term camp found its way into the wider lexicon through Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” in 1964.42 Robertson suggests West’s late career camp appeal as something decidedly different from her 1930s films, which, while still appealing to camp, can more productively be read through the lens of more Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 3 5

traditional feminist concerns in how they “used the 1890s setting to expose the ideological contradictions of women’s roles in the 1930s.”43 Even as we understand her appeal as a Depression-era sex object, a feminist icon, and a camp figure, for the purpose of this study it is also important to remember that the public viewed West as something else—a comedienne. She was somebody that 1930s audiences responded to with not only fascination but also with laughter in response to her sexualized characterizations and their double entendres. Her comic appeal is seen in the aptly title article, “Look Out! Here’s Mae West!” in early 1933, where Photoplay introduces the Broadway star to its readers less as a sex object and more as a provocative comic stylist, suggesting: “Mae West is going to give us some of the jolliest movie hours we’ve ever spent. . . . Her public life has been just as tinseled, rowdy, and hilarious as the dizzy dames she creates.”44 Through the theoretical paradigms of comedy, it might become tempting to dismiss West as a living caricature, possibly unworthy of any analysis outside of asking what is being mocked. After all, both Henri Bergson in Laughter and Sigmund Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious discuss caricature artists as masters in the art of exaggeration, craftily intensifying physical and, particularly to Freud, personality traits for comic effect. Freud writes, “Caricature, parody and travesty (as well as their practical counterpart, unmasking) are directed against people and objects which lay claim to authority and respect, which are in some sense ‘sublime.’  ”45 As seen through her artistic development on Broadway, some of West’s performances certainly seem defined by an exaggeration that leads to an “unmasking” of male authority, creating a gender parody. Also, by the point in her career when she made My Little Chickadee, she was essentially portraying a simplified version of past performances from successful solo projects. So the film can be classified as an exaggeration of an already established exaggerated persona. In fact, some of the critical response to the film was negative and pointed out the unoriginality of the performances—especially in relation to West, who some viewed as a pathetic caricature of her former self. In a particularly sexist attack noting her weight gain, New York Times critic Frank S. Nugent wrote, “Miss West’s humor, like Miss West herself, appears to be growing broader with the years and begins to turn upon the lady. It’s one thing to burlesque sex and quite another to be burlesqued by it.”46 While caricature would dictate some of West’s appeal, simply defining her as a caricature artist is dangerously dismissive of the gender denaturalization her queered performances present. Freud writes that caricature “brings about degradation by emphasizing in the general impression given by the exalted object a single trait which is comic in itself,” in essence, existing as a potent type of tenacious joke where the figure being exaggerated and what s/he rep3 6 | c ha p t e r 1

resents are the objects of derision.47 Yet while watching the scene between West and Grant, the viewer never feels that West is mocking the sexual rearrangement she represents. In fact, it feels quite the opposite, as her aggression is a unique yet admirably transgressive quality on screen as it denaturalizes gendered protocols to the point of aggressively feminizing Grant. As a result, most critical studies of West consider her as an icon that derides other forms of gender performance, not her own. As Curry writes, “Much of West’s appeal [in the 1930s]—and her capacity to shock—derived from the way her image systematically contradicted the period’s middle-class social ideals of female chastity and feminine modesty.”48 With these contradictions, a better way to consider West through the lens of humor theory is to understand how her female impersonation exists as something less rational and more ambiguous in its appeal—embracing an expansive queered view of gender identity. West embraces the comic, that sometimes-measureless quality in humorous persons that was discussed in Bergson and Freud (though the latter proves more significant here since he deals directly with the behavioral). It is within the social signification of this form of humor that the behavioral challenges of a queered drag performance can flourish. Freud devotes his final chapter of Jokes to “the comic,” yet he usefully summarizes the term as something removed from his intricate theories of jokework, stating that, alternately, the comic is exclusively “found in people—in their movements, forms, actions, and traits of character, originally in all probability only in their physical characteristics but later in their mental ones as well, or as the case may be, in the expression of those characteristics.”49 Within the performances of West, exaggerated physical and mental qualities materialize through her often-caricatured body type (curvy figure), tone of voice (her famed drawl), clothing (her tight-fitting gowns that highlighted her figure), and behaviors (her transgressive sexuality). These are elements of a queered identity often eschewing joke structure to more so embrace the observational and social necessities of “the comic.” While gags as specific examples of Freudian joke-work remain significant components to her double entendre humor, her comic personality defines her appeal to the mass public and her position as a feminist and gay icon. This distinction can be seen in the fact that Mae West, the great female female impersonator, became a staple impersonation in drag performance for years after her death. In such camp appropriations, it is “the comic” (the adoption of her distinctive personality) that becomes the joke within itself, while the performance of well-worn double entendres almost feels secondary. This privileging of “the comic” manages to define the appeal of My Little Chickadee—where West is paired with another strong personality, one that forces us to further question the possibilities of comic performance and its queering of gender protocols. Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 3 7

West Meet Fields: My Little Chickadee In My Little Chickadee (1940), the similar positioning of West and Fields as comic icons must be acknowledged as solely defining the appeal of the film. In the American Old West, Flowerbelle Lee (West) is run out of Little Bend after being caught in a romantic encounter with an outlaw called the Masked Bandit. On the train out of town, she meets alcoholic con man Cuthbert J. Twillie (Fields), whom she mistakenly believes to be rich. With the aid of a phony preacher, she pretends to marry the clueless Twillie for respectability, though the union is never consummated. Arriving in Greasewood City with his supposed bride, Twillie is given the dubious job of sheriff by unscrupulous town boss Jeff Badger (Joseph Calleia), who has designs on Lee. Meanwhile, a misunderstanding results in Twillie being mistakenly arrested as the Masked Bandit, leaving West to brazenly save the day and have her choice of two handsome suitors, neither of whom is Fields. As this narrative suggests, the film allows for performances heavily relying upon established personality traits tied to West’s and Fields’s popular personae: West as the powerful sexual female and Fields as the bumbling drunken con man. Also, both are performers of the early sound era and masters of dialogue; West embraces the suggestive double entendre while Fields performs a bloated version of the antiquated language of the nineteenth century. This dynamic is seen in the final moment of the film as Flowerbelle and Twillie say goodbye to each other. Each performer adopts the other’s famous catchphrase: Fields says, “If you get up around the Grampian Hills, you must come up and see me some time.” West replies in a nearly Fieldsian drawl, “Ah, yeah, yeah. I’ll do that, my little chickadee,” making the line more seductive as she turns and wiggles her way up the stairs. In exchanging the catchphrases, each persona reappropriates its meaning, with Fields removing much of the line’s sexual forthrightness and adding a level of absurdity through the addition of a humorously named location, a favorite trope of the comedian. Upon the first on-screen meeting of West and Fields, the characters’ comic personalities are clearly highlighted. The scene begins with Fields clumsily making his way through a railcar to sit next to the film’s resident gossip, Mrs. Gideon (Margaret Hamilton), a widowed conservative figure who serves as a sexually repressed foil to West. Fields spots West across the railcar and gives a startled, supposedly sexually excited, reaction. He tips his hat in her direction, to which West, filing her nails, simply rolls her eyes and looks out the window. In this exchange, their established behaviors are instantly reinforced, as Fields’s reaction constitutes a misplaced masculine bravado as he attempts to gain her attention. Always in control, West’s lack of response manages to instantly deflate Fields’s pathetic endeavors. Also prevalent here, both figures’ established 3 8 | c ha p t e r 1

physical attributes are highlighted by their telltale wardrobes. Fields is dressed in an eccentric Victorian garb, wrapped in a tightly fitted pin-striped coat with a distinctive white carnation in his buttonhole and, upon his head, a comically large stovepipe hat. After the comedian’s death in 1946, this image persisted in caricatured statues and cartoons that have him dressed in his illustrious attire of the confidence man.50 West’s wardrobe, consisting of an elaborately embroidered dress and feathered hat, also resembles the look of other film roles, such as her performance in the period piece She Done Him Wrong, where her aggressive sexuality is contrasted with Victorian mores. Interestingly, both figures find their potency within their contrasts to this nineteenth-century conservatism, challenging it either as a huckster or as a sexual aggressor. Fields quickly abandons Hamilton and makes his way to the seat across from West, where he once again attempts to gain her attention as he mumbles, “Pardon me.” West provides another annoyed reaction, still nonchalantly filing her nails, as she responds to Fields’s fumbling. He attempts once again to tip his hat, this time looking sternly at her and nodding his head. But she simply skeptically looks him over without much interest. After all this visual play, the film finally rewards us with a verbal exchange between the two icons. Fields tritely observes, “Nice day,” to which West dismisses, “Is it?” Fields, in a pathetic attempt to continue the conversation, concedes, “Of course it is only one man’s opinion.” As the scene carries on, Fields hands West his business card. Upon reading it, Flowerbelle brazenly asks, “   ‘Novelties and Notions?’ What kind of notions you got?” Twillie smirks, “You’d be surprised. Some are old. Some are new.” In such exchanges, West dismisses Fields’s banal attempts at charm since they initially appear to adopt the guises of Victorian formality. Being “unruly,” yet acutely aware of the rules of the game, she understands that these formal gestures mask sexually forward “notions” underneath their polite surfaces. But unlike other characters chided by West’s aggressiveness, Fields contains an underlying absurdity as a clown figure who never allows the rebukes to have much effect. He willfully admits that his gestures have barely veiled carnal aims, which are not really both “old” and “new” but simply the same old sexual advancements West has witnessed since puberty. With the reactions to the card, the scene presents an interesting variation on a common type of verbal humor based in Freudian displacement (as discussed in Jokes and Their Relation), gags containing as their central point a “diversion of a train of thought,” which here can be seen in the different appropriations of the words “novelties,” “notions,” “old,” and “new” by each performer.51 In Freud’s definitions, these are also smutty jokes that bring “into prominence of sexual facts and relations by speech” and create a structure that “is like an exposure of the sexually different person to whom it is directed.”52 Within such humor, this “different person” is usually the sexually frigid female who is often Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 3 9

the mocked object found in his cataloged examples of smutty jokes. As Curry suggests, Mae West transcends this limited view of joke structure in her verbal gags: West’s enunciation of smutty jokes clearly transgress[es] Freud’s model of male narrator, male listener, and female object of the joke. Paradoxically, the usefulness of Freud’s analysis in understanding West’s comedy arises precisely because her films contradict the master’s assumptions about gender. The cultural significance of West’s role as central subject and joke narrator lies, of course, not in its deviation from a psychiatric model, but in its violating the dominant social ideology that the model presumes.53

Similar to her appropriation of Savoy’s original “You must come over” line, West’s humor in this scene also is about the queering of gender performance as she defaces a sexual come-on only to strip it of its polite social guises. By asking Fields “What kind of notions you got?,” the scene turns West into both the narrator and subject of the joke as she rebukes Fields’s weak attempts at flirtation and expose his ultimate motive (the sexual conquest of Mae West) through a clever play with the word “notion.” On this level, this exchange is based in a joke of double meaning or double entendre, since “notions” takes on a naughty connotation, harkening the humor back to the queered entendre-heavy drag performances of Savoy and The Drag. On another level, the humor moves beyond this overt gender play into something more purely comic as West faces a figure unfazed by her transgressions. She appropriates “notions” to suggest sexual thoughts, while Fields moves the term into a much more confused meaning. With the summation of his notions being “old” and “new,” his response is playfully sexual yet foolishly misguided since it is difficult to believe any of his sexual notions would be new to West. Once again, an inversion of the Freudian joke structure appears as Fields now becomes sexually naive (or, at the very least, buffoonish) and the object of his own misplaced smutty joke. But unlike Grant in She Done Him Wrong, the gender inversion is not about the queered prospect of the penetration of the male sexual conquest. Instead, the humor is behavioral as Fields fails to grasp the aggressive manner of West’s humor and still considers himself in control of the situation. He creates humor through his complete misunderstanding of West and her queered gender protocols, as his “notions” highlight his unwavering belief that he holds control as the heterosexual male. This playful dialogue is soon interrupted by an Indian attack on the train, a comedic action sequence that further contrasts the exaggerated personae of Fields and West. Like many moments in this comedy, the scene spoofs the 4 0 | c ha p t e r 1

standard elements of the cowboy narrative tradition (which, sadly, does not mean it spoofs the genre’s racist depictions of Native Americans, seen here as interchangeable yelping savages on horses).54 As such, the sequence becomes a fascinating exercise in cartoonish gender play by comparing the manners in which the foolishly inept Fields and the take-charge West react to the assault. She appears at first bored by the attack and continues to file her nails, only taking an active role in defending the railcar after a passenger is killed. She then shoots the indistinguishable attackers with, at first, a pair of revolvers and, eventually, a variety of other firearms, all the time spouting out such one-liners as “Got ’em right in the canteen” and “There he goes in a shower of feathers.” On the other hand, Fields is relegated to a childlike position as he seeks refuge in a car filled with schoolchildren where he foolishly attempts to defend the train with a child’s slingshot. Pushing the teacher aside, he screams, “Out of my way, mademoiselle, this is a man’s size job!” As this elaborate visual joke illustrates, the film once again creates humor through rearranging and contrasting the two comics’ gender identities, this time in ironically phallic terms. West’s successful use of a variety of phallic firearms (varying in size from pistols to a rifle) has her taking charge within what would be considered a masculinized position in a cowboy narrative. Fields’s feeble attempts with his childish slingshot (significantly, still a weapon but not a very effective one) do not completely demasculinize his role as much as suggest, once again, a lack of sexual maturity. Unlike the other impotent male passengers who cower behind the seats, he still attempts to defend the train. But the slingshot only snaps back into his face, essentially driving home the joke by having his childlike puny phallus prematurely backfire. Following the attack, which West single-handedly defeats, the scene returns to a more intimate exchange between its two stars. For one of the few times in the film, Fields and West are framed in various two shots as a lampoon of romantic courtship transpires, one with layers of irony added due to a strange series of cons that unfold. Upon catching a glimpse of a bag of worthless coupons for sideshow medicine, West mistakenly assumes it to be filled with cash, thus making the buffoonish blowhard into a more desirable target. In an ironic reversal that initiates the plot’s central phony marriage, Flowerbelle becomes conned herself as she attempts to con Twillie. But it is significant to note that Fields as confidence man really only deceives West here by accident, since he remains unaware of her true motives for matrimony. As the scene plays out, West adopts some of the flirty characteristics typically associated with a “gold digger,” which easily fools Fields. When he offers her a worthless ring shaped like two “lonesome hearts,” West uncharacteristically coos, “What a pretty sentiment.”

Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 4 1

While never completely surrendering herself to the buffoonish Fields, her body language relaxes as she leans back in her seat and allows him to repeatedly kiss her hand. These gestures show West conform through her own con to the feminine masquerade. As Doane suggests, “By destabilizing the image, the masquerade confounds this masculine structure of the look. It effects a defamiliarization of female iconography.”55 Here West satirizes the feminine masquerade by adopting such “soft” behavior only minutes after proving herself a sharpshooter, thus highlighting a defamiliarization of femininity through a comic juxtaposition. Despite the fact she is adopting Doane’s conception of a mask of femininity, West’s queerly performative aspects flourish even in this moment, as her adopted behavior is a con within the narrative. Through a point-of-view cutaway to the bag of phony money, the audience is aware of her true motives, showing her “notions” as anything but romantic or carnal. As typical, West plays the rules of the sex game and displays her abilities to manipulate men with great ease. But in being paired with the opposite of a Cary Grant type, West simply reconsiders the gendered roles in another fashion by becoming the active con artist as she faces cinema’s most renowned charlatan. Throughout this sequence, West’s gender performance adapts itself to the presence of another strong comedic voice in the form of Fields. Previous films establish her seductive dialogue with male characters as a queered drag performance of aggressive femininity, denaturalizing the heterosexual coherence of typical Hollywood gender roles. This transgression is seen in her relationship with Grant in She Done Him Wrong, where she positions him into the role of romantic conquest and suggests, “Ah, you can be had.” In Chickadee, as seen in the “novelties and notions” exchange, the power dynamics between the male and female on screen are not inverted as much as ambiguously muddled. The jokes still are often based in West’s queerly provocative gender performance (her appearance, her walk, her double entendres, and her provocative line readings). But when opposite Fields, they do not have the effect seen with Grant (or with any other male costar). Instead, the exchanges become a playful match between two figures where aggressive sexuality is contrasted with buffoonish male absurdity. Such a difference suggests Fields must have strong queered dynamics of his own, even if these might not have the same historical lineage to drag found in his costar. Basically, West is performing her transgressions against a gender signifier who also does not have a “traditional” sexual identity on screen.

4 2 | c ha p t e r 1

W. C. Fields and Queered Masculinity: My Little Chickadee With My Little Chickadee (1940), Fields’s performance can serve as a model for many of the core gender issues that serve as a foundation for understanding the other comedians in this book—including my second chapter, which is a more historically grounded analysis of Fields’s solo films. Chickadee provides a classic example of comedian comedy maleness with an expressed focus upon sexuality in Fields’s on-screen relationship with West, even though much of the film separates the two performers. Jill Watts summarizes that the star pairing “also teamed up two trickster figures. . . . Both characters stand apart from the narrative while propelling the action along. They are weaker figures, Mae as woman and W. C. as silly eccentric. Regardless, they both emerge as victors.”56 Watts is correct in her assertion of both performers’ roles being in the manner of the trickster or, to be more accurate, disruptive to the social order. Yet her summation of Fields as simply a “silly eccentric” lacks a sufficient exploration of his role as male subject. While strong caricatured eccentricities constitute a major part of Twillie, his outsider status relates more to his lack of masculine prowess and, as such, his inability to fulfill a leading man role—that is, a true love interest for West. While Fields might evade execution by the hands of an angry mob, his role within the narrative could hardly be viewed as that of “victor” since various obstacles leave him unable to truly penetrate the hypermasculine order of the Old West (or, equally significant, unable to penetrate Mae West). These hindrances include his alcoholism, unattractive features (Fields’s bulbous nose), and, of course, overall buffoonery as a comic figure. Therefore, how does one truly consider Fields as a gendered subject in relationship to the queerly transgressive performance of his costar? In my analysis of West, I suggested her position in popular culture provides two notable challenges to the hegemony: (1) It confronts the essential sexist ideology of cinema; (2) it provides a queered resettlement of the language of gender. With these two essential challenges, I believe a significant analysis of Fields in Chickadee can be provided as well. Admittedly, such an exercise warrants a reconsideration of each of these points since Fields does not represent the overt gender transgressions found in West’s direct lineage to drag performance. In considering the first point (his challenge to cinema’s gender ideology), Fields’s Twillie is based in a different relationship to gender masquerades, one that deflates masculine bravado and creates a comic mutation of the leading man role found in the western genre. As originally discussed by Mulvey in her analysis of Duel in the Sun (1946), “Here [with the Western hero] two functions emerge, one celebrating integration into society through marriage, the other celebrating resistance to social standards and responsibilities above all those of marMae West Meets W. C. Fields | 4 3

riage and the family, the sphere represented by women.”57 In Chickadee, Fields attempts to integrate himself into society, trying to represent societal law as sheriff and gender law as husband. The humor of the film is based in how this integration is not successful for Fields, in contrast to the take-charge West. But this failure does not suggest active resistance, thus he never develops into an eroticized rebel figure, one that might be appealingly sexualized in the manner of West or her dramatic counterpoint Marlene Dietrich. Instead, the character remains a buffoon—but, as I will show, this buffoonery has its own power to queerly denaturalize the surrounding gendered order. Fields’s lack of masculine prowess is central to Chickadee’s narrative since his character performs multiple failed attempts to consummate his marriage, something that, in his eyes, would establish his masculine dominance. Upon their “honeymoon,” Fields stands outside the locked door of West’s hotel room and asks, “Listen, didn’t you promise to love, honor, and be obedient?” She replies with a dismissive, “Don’t be old fashioned. Be a good boy and run along.” As this exchange illustrates, the relationship first seen in the earlier train sequence (West’s forthrightness and Fields’s inability to fully grasp her nature) has now blossomed to directly confront the issues of Victorian sexual mores. Fields performs a pathetic attempt at masculine domination, suggesting her role as “wife” is to “be obedient,” while West quickly deflates his bravado by not only suggesting his implication is outdated but also treating the comedian as nothing more than a mischievous child within his pursuits of the flesh. This lack of consummation becomes more than just a running gag and serves as a major narrative obstacle that eventually leads to Fields’s near demise. After numerous attempts at picking West’s lock, he disguises himself as the Masked Bandit to gain entry into her bedroom, an action that leads to his arrest and near execution. In the end, the woman who refuses his sexual advances rescues Fields, a comic mutation of typical Hollywood narratives. In Chickadee, this comic resettlement of Hollywood gender roles adopts a darker comedic edge when Fields is no longer countered with West on screen. For example, as Twillie temporarily fills in as a bartender one afternoon, the film cuts to an angry and drunken petite blond (Fay Adler) marching into the barroom and giving off a loud whistle. Meeting her at the far side of the bar, Fields tells her to stop all the noise and asks for her order, to which she slurs, “Bottle of whiskey, straight.” In her slurring speech and overpowering manner, she represents in Fields’s world another form of a dominant female, yet a version much cruder than West.58 The comedian’s reaction is one of annoyance, but, even more tellingly, one of caution as well despite Adler’s tiny physique. He requests, “Go over and take a seat at one of those tables. I can’t serve you here.” Drunkenly leaning over the bar, she ignores his demand and proceeds to gripe about her husband. Fields attempts to assert himself by calling her a “pygmy” 4 4 | c ha p t e r 1

Mae West and W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940).

and threatening to “throw her on her head.” Unimpressed, she slurs, “You and who else?” Her swagger frightens Fields and he finally states that his coworker, “Squawk” Mulligan (Jimmy Conlin), will help him. After the blond leaves the bar, Fields turns to a male patron and proudly tells the story of a time he did physically overpower a woman. He brags about when he knocked the notorious “Chicago Molly” to the ground. Throughout the telling of this story, he is interrupted by “Squawk,” an eyewitness to the event who continually corrects his false and self-serving version of the encounter. “Squawk,” a comically puny Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 4 5

figure, angrily blurts out that he “was the one who knocked her down.” The sequence ends with the patron asking if Molly ever returned, to which Squawk interrupts, “I’ll say she came back. She came back a week later and beat the both of us up.” Fields tries to reclaim some of his dignity by mumbling, “Yeah, but she had another woman with her, an elderly lady with gray hair.”59 Such a moment takes Fields’s established cluelessness even further than found in his interplay with West, fully illustrating his failure to exist as either a conformist or as truly resistant to gender laws. Instead, he is a victim physically assaulted by aggressive women, the opposite of West who is never (successfully) physically or mentally assaulted by anybody. Within the narrative construct of a Hollywood western, such victimization leaves Fields figuratively castrated for comic effect. As the barroom sequence illustrates, Fields remains unique among male comedians not only in his failed attempts at acceptance into society, but also in his boisterous and preposterous contention that he already maintains a powerful role within the phallic order. His bogus story (his actual fantasy) consists of violently dominating empowered women, but these dreams are quickly deflated by Squawk, a character more in touch with his own diminutive masculinity. Tellingly, Fields’s fantasy in this shockingly funny sequence basically is that of the dominant fiction, which is warped here as the fabrication that he actively takes part in the suppression of women. As Gayle Rubin suggests in her influential “The Traffic in Women,” “Kinship rests on a radical difference between the rights of men and women. The Oedipal complex confers male rights upon the boy and forces the girl to accommodate herself to lesser rights.”60 The humor in the barroom story rather darkly derives from Fields’s inability to partake in the most violent incarnation of the laws of kinship, here literally taking the form of physical battery. By the scene’s end, Fields has no choice but to contend to his humiliating lack of prowess as even his reasoning for the defeat (“the elderly lady with gray hair”) only characterizes the true story as more absurd, at least within the definitions of the phallic order. When considering the traditional gender ideology of the western, such a sequence presents a provocative question. If Fields’s inability to repress women is the point of the joke, could his buffoonish persona be suggesting this subjugation as beneficial? If we are to view Fields only through my first point of analysis, a reading solely based in the foundations of feminist film theory (suggesting him as [1] confronting the sexist ideology of Hollywood cinema), this could be a valid if not reductive reading of the sequence. If it failed to have West and Fields in the leads, Chickadee could work as a narrative of a woman’s masquerade as “wife,” an act exemplifying the feminine masquerade on a societal level. Flowerbelle’s domestic disguise could ironically comment upon the very tropes of femininity originally dubbed by Joan Riviere (and, then, 4 6 | c ha p t e r 1

Mary Ann Doane) as masquerades, suggesting Fields’s inability to successfully tame her might imply a “proper” male is up to the job. Yet the two performers’ established personalities negate this reading as they each embrace a more queer conception of gender performance. Therefore, we must also approach the film as something more progressive (a comedy [2] providing a queered resettlement of the language of gender itself). In the manner of her drag queen origins, West openly flirts with other men through a series of bawdy double entendres and, basically, behaves like the always-independent Mae West regardless of the title of “wife.” Fields challenges the phallic order in a different way, exposing masculine performance to be unstable. He thereby embraces the denaturalizing spirit of the drag performance, even if he fails to adopt its gender-bending theatricality. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler stresses the nontheatricality of the behaviors that constitute gender as “performative,” suggesting there had been a misunderstanding in some of the initial responses to Gender Trouble in relationship to drag performers. Butler writes how many in queer studies, upon the work’s publication, misread her point and thought that “by citing drag as an example of performativity” she was suggesting the practice is “exemplary of performativity.” She clarifies that “if drag is performative, that does not mean that all performativity is to be understood as drag.”61 Instead, the conception of drag can suggest a “denaturalization” of gender within heterosexual classifications and its cultural mechanisms, reflecting “the mundane impersonations by which heterosexuality ideal genders are performed and naturalized.” Importantly, this alone does not guarantee “that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion.”62 Here Butler provides a nuanced conception of drag performance, one that proves enlightening in its outcomes as opposed to the dynamics of the theatrical act itself: Hence, it is not that drag opposes heterosexuality, or that the proliferation of drag will bring down heterosexuality; on the contrary, drag tends to be the allegorization of heterosexuality and its constitutive melancholia. As an allegory that works through the hyperbolic, drag brings into relief, what is, after all, determined only in relation to the hyperbolic: the understated, taken-for-granted quality of heterosexual performativity. At its best, then, drag can be read for the way in which hyperbolic norms are dissimulated as the heterosexual mundane.63

Thus, if we view West through this expanded view of a queered drag performance, her effect on screen is less a true subversion of heterosexual norms as much as an exposure of the mundane nature of these classifications. For example, West’s adoption of male drag language in She Done Him Wrong might have Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 4 7

momentarily queered Cary Grant with the prospect of sexual penetration, but this momentary queering did not profoundly subvert the heterosexual sex icon status of the future movie star.64 With Fields, though, she is faced with a different sort of icon who actively queers himself on screen—through, for example, flowery verbose language, brightly checkered flamboyant coats, and his general aversion to the codes of “successful” heteronormative maleness, as seen in his fear of women in the barroom scene. While Fields’s persona does not actually adopt the language of drag performance of the Bert Savoy tradition, this allegorization of heterosexual roles still transpires in some telling ways. His placement within the manly cinematic world of the western proves less subversive (or disruptive) as much as transgressive in exposing the “taken-for-granted quality” of the surrounding performances of heterosexual maleness. Even West embraces some gender stereotypes in the film by becoming enamored of the mysterious Masked Bandit, a hypermasculine figure who woos her with such trite, yet aggressive, lines as “I’ll be the one man in your life if I have to kill everyone else.” In a wonderfully satiric juxtaposition to the Bandit’s theatrical masculinity, Fields attempts to enter West’s bedroom by wearing a similar dark mask and black cape, performing his own drag act by adopting and queering idealized maleness. After she exposes his charade, he still attempts to pursue her with typically Fieldsian talk that satirizes the straight romantic dialogue the Bandit performed in earlier scenes, lines that initially successfully captivated West. Fields declares, “You incinerate me. Your walk. Your talk. The way you wave your little pinkie.” Ever dominant over his pathetic attempts at copulation, West simply replies, “Your line ain’t low enough to trip me.” While the established personae of the two comedians remain intact, Fields’s foolishness here is performed to parody the previous aggressive romanticism of the Bandit. The exchange presents the question of why the Bandit’s lines had been “low enough” to trip West in the first place. Throughout the film, Fields adopts various unsuccessful variations of masculine roles, such as the Masked Bandit, the sheriff, and, most significantly, a new husband. While playing the latter, he aspires to perform the expected masculine “duties” associated with marriage by deflowering his virgin bride, a plan made doubly ironic since West never pretends to be sexually inexperienced around Fields or any man. In one of the film’s most outrageous scenes, West places a goat in her bed to mislead Fields as she dashes off to see her masked lover. With the room darkened and the animal covered by the bedspread, Fields performs the wedding night custom and mistakes the goat’s noises for those of his timid bride. After hearing, “Bah bah,” he laughs to himself and states, “Mama. The sweet little dear is calling for her mama. What sublime innocence.” The foolishness of both his masculine performance and sexual delusion becomes ap4 8 | c ha p t e r 1

parent through an outrageous suggestion of bestiality, a tabooed sex act that would rob Fields of his last shred of sexual dignity. Ultimately, the heterosexual wedding night is denaturalized to highlight the buffoonish nature of his performance of masculinity. Therefore, as West presents a drag performance of female female impersonation, Fields performs as a male male impersonation that similarly denaturalizes gender identity by exposing it as performance. He might emerge as the more absurd of the two performers—but that is only because the mask (phallic dominance itself) he employs for his gender parody is, by its very nature, absurd in its fragile declaration of power. His performance becomes less based in an eroticized center and instead overtly parodies the adoption of supposedly stable gender identities to assert power. Ultimately, Fields queerly challenges the act of heterosexual sex since no female will “come up to see him” despite his buffoonish attempts at dominance.

“No way, baby. Once was enough.” As the remainder of this book illustrates, much of what has been initially suggested theoretically through Fields can be understood through specific historical and cultural paradigms. There is a variety and complexity to the comic queer performativity often defining the comedian that must be understood as specific to a cultural moment and its gender protocols. In my next chapter, I will show how Fields as a solo performer exposes a host of issues defining male identity in the early twentieth century—drifting between different male archetypes and exposing social anxieties as they relate to a changing economic and domestic landscape. It is through such distinctive queering that we must broaden our definition of masculinity beyond idealized males on screen to understand the rich tapestry of cultural anxieties depicted in Classic Hollywood film. In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman suggests men can be marginalized through a variety of culturally dictated “affronts” to their “aspirations to mastery and sufficiency,” including “sexual, economic and racial oppression; and by the traumatically unassimilable nature of certain historic events.”65 She goes on to explore the dramas The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947) as reflecting a larger cultural “male castration” the historically traumatic events of World War II caused. While Silverman’s readings come after the period of comedian comedies explored in my book, her employment of specific historical realities in defining male anxieties does prove enlightening. In truth, Silverman seems most concerned with the intense impact of a clear historical trauma in these dramatic films, though her definition of such an event is intriguingly open-ended: “To state the case more precisely, I mean any historical event, whether socially enMae West Meets W. C. Fields | 4 9

gineered or of natural occurrence, which brings a large group of male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction. Suddenly the latter is radically de-realized, and the social formation finds itself without a mechanism for achieving consensus.”66 Silverman looks specifically at emotionally scarred male characters in the postwar period as being “radically” awakened to recognizing their own lack. Yet I cannot help but wonder how previous filmic depictions of “failed” maleness might illustrate something more subtle. Beyond the monumentally traumatic, as even suggested by Silverman, such factors as economic, racial, and sexual oppression also challenge phallic dominance. It is within these more subtle, though still crucial, cultural undercurrents that many 1930s comedians provide their own telling depictions of maleness. These might not always result in the dominant fiction being “radically de-realized,” but they do provide their own challenges through comically queering the masculine order. They also explore narratives of maleness not always found in other films of the era, as comedy often exposes very real societal discontent that conservative forces wish to dismiss. Such (sub)narratives of gender, of course, appear in Mae West’s performances, as we have seen through her adoption of drag performance and socially volatile debates over sex. Her dovetailing with (and even defining of) such cultural histories is the reason why she proves such a rich object of study within gender analysis. As Curry proposes, West exists “as a social phenomenon that played a central role in the emergence of Hollywood’s internal film censorship and in U.S. cultural politics in the 1930s . . . a site at which we can interrogate and develop critical media theories about sexual representation, notably about the spectacle, excess, and parody that constitute masquerade.”67 With her overt performance of transgressive gender, West is an understandable object of fascination. But I argue that Fields proves a gender icon worthy of similar contemplation as he queers the heteronormative order through a different type of comedic performance. As my next chapter shows, it is a performance that proves illuminating in its depictions of the gendered anxieties and contradictions of the early twentieth century. Both comics, despite taking vastly different approaches to their humor, have undeniably powerful and personal voices that fascinated the moviegoers of the Depression era. Perhaps this shared public fascination explains why West largely disliked My Little Chickadee. Later in her career she seemed to despise the production and the common misperception about the star pairing. By 1970 she is quoted in an interview as saying, “Some people have gotten the quaint idea that I made more than one film with W. C. Fields. No way, baby. Once was enough.”68 In its misunderstanding about the number of costarring 5 0 | c ha p t e r 1

vehicles, perhaps the public views the two stars as the perfect cinematic counterparts of gender performance. After all, both thoroughly convey different challenges to sexual identity, queerly denaturalizing the heterosexual protocols of Hollywood cinema for laughs. Even more significant, both reconsidered gender performance by exploring the subjectivity of these concepts. Perhaps Fields and West could not help but be permanently linked together in our minds as those rare icons who, for a fleeting moment, unmasked the fragility of gender in Classic Hollywood.

Mae West Meets W. C. Fields | 5 1

2

Con Men and Henpecked Husbands W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon

He’s the high-stepping Romeo of Hollywood. The latest and newest of Big Sheik daddies. The complete and total answer to any number of little blondes’ prayers. Only he doesn’t know it and isn’t bothered. That’s W. C. Fields. With that nose, crimson and glaring like a lantern on a detour sign, that funny little walk with the knees popping well out, to say nothing of the stomach, those shrewd little blue eyes that have seen everything everywhere, and the whole ensemble (and, oh, the voice!) topped by straw colored hair—well, here is something! Photoplay, December 1934

The above description of W. C. Fields comes from a peculiar article titled “A Red Nose Romeo,” written as the comedian was establishing himself as a topbilled draw at Paramount Studios. Not as tongue in cheek as one might expect, the piece is the rare occasion of a publicity article overtly sexualizing a male comic. While not suggesting the same levels of sexual icon status as Mae West, author Sara Hamilton characterizes the eccentric comedian as an unlikely object of fascination to the usually glamour obsessed Hollywood. She writes that as the comedian goes “goose-stepping away from the set” the young women “hang from dressing-room and studio office windows calling, ‘Yoo-hoo, Mr. Fields!’  ” Fields is also “the favorite with every man in town, from the biggest producer to the lowliest extra. He’s Hollywood’s man of the hour, I tell you.”1 The joke of the article is that Fields remains blissfully unaffected by all this attention, with him characterized as showing “glorious indifference to the ladies.” This is attributed to Fields being rejected by a “pretty cute number” during his early days as a traveling juggler. This young woman unknowingly laughed one 53

evening, “Oh, Mr. Fields, that is the funniest false nose I’ve ever seen”—the implication being it was just the comic’s real nose.2 Of course, being from a 1930s movie magazine, these stories are not particularly true. At this point in his life, Fields had fathered two estranged children and remained separated from a wife he financially supported. At the time of the article, the fifty-four-year-old comic was far from indifferent to younger women and had started a long relationship with Carlotta Monti, a twenty-something actress and model.3 But this biography has little to do with the public perception of Fields being sold in Photoplay, which highlights the complicated position male comics held during the era. To Paramount, Fields was now an above-the-title star of profitable films, but he is not a leading man in a traditional sense. He is not to be presented as particularly self-aware of his sexuality like Mae West. His physical imperfections, his eccentric behavior, his drinking, and his invented past all contribute to the image of a fascinating sexual icon, yet one queered here in the sense that he lives an asexual existence removed from the “norms” of libidinous Hollywood behavior through his “glorious indifference.” In essence, he is a nonleading man, eschewing idealized manliness to explore something removed from “normal” behavior and, as posited in chapter 1, denaturalizing heterosexual protocols. As theorized in the previous chapter, especially in contrast to his My Little Chickadee costar, Mae West, Fields serves as a fascinating model of buffoonish masculinity in his ability to represent gender denaturalization through his performances of failed male bravado. As Cuthbert J. Twillie in that film, he emerges as a buffoonish male on screen who mockingly reflects the fragility of masculinity in his “drag” appropriations of the roles of sheriff, masked bandit, and newlywed husband. For this chapter, I examine his solo films in detail to add historical specificity to this paradigm to understand the cultural underpinnings defining his queered comedy performances. As the following will show, Fields can be classified as the most dynamic (if not problematic) male comic of the era in that his films so overtly examine issues of heterosexual male angst, the hegemony’s anxieties toward changing industrial and gendered landscapes. When revisiting much of his work today, many viewers might be surprised by how far his comedy takes traditional comedic maleness and pushes it into dark and revelatory territories. With this in mind, this chapter examines some of his most fascinating and personal work: The Old Fashioned Way (1934), It’s a Gift (1934), Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), and Poppy (1936). Through Fields’s relationships with women in all these films, often steeped in misogynistic fantasies, we find two telling feminine archetypes in the phallic matriarch (in the guise of a small town socialite or Fields’s domineering wife) and the sympathetic daughter (who shows a blind devotion to her father despite his flaws). With these relationships, Fields destabilizes and denaturalizes social institu5 4 | c ha p t e r 2

tions like marriage and explores taboos like matricide and incest, thus pushing his gender performance into darker terrains than do his contemporaries. As this chapter’s title suggests, Fields drifted between two variations on his comedic persona during his creative high point in the 1930s. In such films as The Old Fashioned Way, Poppy, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939), and My Little Chickadee, he portrays a bachelor or widowed social outcast—an inept confidence man who indulges in large amounts of double talk as he attempts to intrude upon ordered society. As Wes D. Gehring writes in his celebration of Groucho Marx and Fields as “huckster comedians,” Fields portrays a “trickster” figure and “is in the literary tradition of America’s nineteenth-century confidence-man golden age.”4 Reflecting this historical reading of Fields’s con man, only You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man is not a period picture, yet it still draws heavily upon a nostalgic celebration of circus culture. You’re Telling Me! (1934), It’s a Gift, Man on the Flying Trapeze, and, to a point, The Bank Dick (1940) feature the comedian in the role of family man where he usually is more timid and overpowered by his dominating spouse. None of these films are period pieces and, thus, base his domestic persona in a thoroughly modern world.5 During this creative high point, the comedian exemplifies two different conceptions of failed maleness illustrating, as discussed in chapter 1, his ability to drift between different protocols of gender to examine their comic potential. As a writer and performer, Fields was acutely aware of the two personae, something evident in his shifting performance styles: of the two character types, his acting in the husband roles usually is more subdued and textured, showing the comedian to be a rather skilled film actor. These two character types have their lineage on the Broadway stage, where Fields represented different archetypes of American masculine identity in two noteworthy productions. As his first major success, he played con man Professor Eustace McGargle in Dorothy Donnelly’s Poppy (1923). While still buffoonish, this performance exploits the early twentieth century’s supposed crisis of masculinity, embodying an individualism rejecting the Industrial Revolution and the civilizing (that is, feminizing) of the American landscape. Originated in the comedian’s collaboration with comic strip artist J. P. McEvoy in The Comic Supplement (of American Life) (1924), Fields’s husband character embraces the domesticated modern male. Tellingly, this persona became the embodiment of the “marriage joke,” a form of humor that feminized matrimony in response to masculine anxieties. Despite these two roles’ dissimilarities, Fields drifts between them to expose the buffoonishness of the symbolic father role, failing to assert dominance through either floundered social prominence or familial relationships. With this in mind, we can fully understand the strange characterization of Fields found in Photoplay. To Hollywood, he is a fascinating male subject, yet, unlike other male stars, he cannot really asW. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 5 5

sert a phallic dominance. Despite any Hollywood celebrity or even allure on screen, his popular persona must be maintained as removed from active and “successful” heteronormative sexuality and exist as a continuation of the type of queered “failed” maleness seen in My Little Chickadee. Even as he reached the heights of stardom, W. C. Fields remained a prototypical performer of buffoonish masculinity, queering the social protocols of idealized male identity. Therefore, while the actor might be desexualized as a “leading man” by studio publicity, the leading man performances themselves destabilize heterosexual “norms” by confronting some of their darkest impulses.

Two Variations on the Fieldsian Male: Poppy and The Comic Supplement (of American Life) Of his two personae, W. C. Fields’s con man is the one that most remains in the popular imagination, at least in caricature. The Victorian-era wardrobe already discussed in the My Little Chickadee section is the one most associated with the comic: a tall top hat, poorly fitted jacket with a flower in the lapel, and a cane. This look and characterization has its roots in the comedian’s largest success on Broadway, the role of Professor Eustace McGargle in Dorothy Donnelly’s Poppy (1923). Donnelly was a trailblazer of the American stage, existing as one of the rare women who successfully held just about every noteworthy position the theater had to offer: actress, playwright, producer, director, lyricist, librettist, and benefactor.6 Of particular note are her early forays into the maledominated arena of writing libretti, where her works gave birth to a major revival of operetta with Blossom Time (1921) and The Student Prince (1924). With Poppy, she moved on to a different sort of musical theater influenced by the popular Broadway revues of the time, like Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies and the Shubert Brothers’ The Passing Show—productions that gathered the best traveling vaudevillians and jumbled together dance routines, comedy acts, and new songs written by composers and lyricists who had an eye on selling sheet music. Donnelly’s show told the simple Victorian set story of the orphaned Poppy (Madge Kennedy), adopted by circus drifter McGargle (Fields), who teaches her to be a con artist. While passing through a small town, her surrogate father tries to falsely claim an inheritance by passing Poppy off as an heiress. The story is pure nineteenth-century-style melodrama, with a climax of coincidence as Poppy is discovered to be the rightful benefactor despite McGargle’s initial charade. The play ends with her marrying a wealthy local boy she met at the circus. The sideshow settings allowed for multiple revuelike excursions, such as slapstick, juggling, and musical numbers. Like Ziegfeld, Donnelly made little attempt to relate the music to the plot or characters, ulti-

5 6 | c ha p t e r 2

mately creating two musical hits of the period with “Two Make a Home” and “On Our Honeymoon.”7 Historically, the show is most significant in launching the careers of Madge Kennedy,8 who became a celebrated dramatic comedienne, and Fields, known at the time mainly as a comic pantomime and juggler. Donning a top hat, walking cane, cigar, and checkered pants, Fields owed much to the play’s success in defining his popular image, and the most positive notices singled him out. It was a crowd-pleasing performance that brought together the classic literary type of the American huckster with the vaudevillian theatrics of an old pro. As The Nation wrote in its review, “out of juggling and slap-stick material and burlesque make-up [Poppy] builds up a character worthy of Mark Twain at his best.”9 Always one to embrace the corniest of melodramatic plots, D. W. Griffith bought the property and directed an adaptation, Sally of the Sawdust (1925), which updated the action to modern day with car chases and even an airplane. Again, Fields was cast as McGargle and the film marked his first foray into cinematic features, even though his career in silents never matched his later success in sound. Most importantly, the con man established here became forever linked to the comedian. Onstage in the production, the loose plot allowed Fields to ad-lib the characterization that would appear in later films, even adding a comic poker game that became a staple routine, later altered to appear in My Little Chickadee. The play also gave him a trademark line with, “Never give a sucker an even break,” a phrase that became the title of his final starring motion picture in 1941.10 In particular, throughout his career, this con man characterization served as a foundation for Fields from which he could explore various themes tied to popular archetypes of masculinity. By all accounts, while not formally educated, the comic was an obsessive reader who absorbed much from literature. During his vaudeville days, he traveled with a trunk of books by Thackeray, Shakespeare, Milton, Dreiser, Irving, and others. Of particular influence, not surprisingly, were Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, both of whom the comedian counted among his favorites. From these authors he developed an ear for what sounded funny, which became of particular use in his con man characterizations with their unique Victorian-style wordplays.11 With Dickens, Fields found his greatest literary inspiration through his appreciation of such eccentric characters as Samuel Pickwick from The Pickwick Papers (1837) and Wilkins Micawber from David Copperfield (1850).12 While these Dickensian elements influenced the comedian, we can also see peculiarities in his on-screen performances (especially in films Fields authored) that are all his own: obsessions with money, certain funny-sounding words, alcohol, and numerous other attributes that make him a unique cinematic signifier unto himself. So though there remains a British lineage W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 5 7

W. C. Fields in costume for stage production of Poppy (1923). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

to Fields’s con man, it proves most significant as a quirky American characterization rooted in cultural narratives of masculine individuality (something more related to Twain’s work). Barry Keith Grant’s reading of Fields (in particular, the comedian’s subversively brilliant short The Fatal Glass of Beer [1933]) suggests his persona plays off “the tradition of the comic Yankee” and “backwoodsman” yet in a manner where the archetype is “emasculated and 5 8 | c ha p t e r 2

the backwoodsman is cut down to size.”13 Grant references the comic archetypes Constance Rourke discusses in American Humor, where she explores the colonial Yankee as a comically yet admirably quick-witted figure—appearing first onstage in Royall Tylor’s The Contrast (1787), where the rustic character of Brother Jonathan mocked the American appropriation of British culture. The character type mutated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a variety of texts, with two examples being Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin (1858) and Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). As Rourke summarizes: “Brother Jonathan had in fact turned into Uncle Sam. Half bravado, half cockalorum, this Yankee revealed the traits considered deplorable by the British travelers; He was indefatigably rural, sharp, uncouth, witty. Here were the manner of the Americans! Peddling, swapping, practical joking, might have been national preoccupations.”14 As western expansion occurred in the nineteenth century (and American identity became further removed from England), the figure of the New England Yankee became less popular than the “backwoodsman” or “gamecock of the Wilderness” that Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone exemplified. As Grant posits, Fields adopts and undermines these comic male figures as his “comedy plays off established American comic traditions involving triumphant and heroic comic archetypes of American masculinity that bespeak the self-image of the body politic.”15 The comedian thereby invokes “the tradition of the comic Yankee” as well as subverts the “backwoodsman” archetype (which became the “cowboy” in Hollywood films) by parodying the western genre.16 This sort of appropriation and subversion is seen in My Little Chickadee as con man Fields exemplifies the bravado, cockalorum, and peddling of the Yankee archetype while also ironically attempting (and failing) to be a proper western movie hero. As suggested in chapter 1, the characterization queerly appropriates failed performances of maleness, yet it is important to note these are coming from a long tradition of American masculine archetypes, both comedic and otherwise. While these archetypes certainly work as a lineage to the con man persona, Fields must also be understood as a much more complex transitional compilation of masculine anxieties. The popular appeal of Fields’s huckster can best be understood through changes in perception toward maleness that occurred between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. This is a phenomenon historians often called the crisis of masculinity, a label suggesting that white males felt their phallic power slipping away, thus there existed an overcompensation of manly identities.17 The period produced cultural obsessions celebrating new figures of individualistic American manhood, seen with the popularity of cowboy novels, hunting and fishing, and “he-man” rhetoric— in essence, an attempt at retaining the backwoodsman conception of American maleness. W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 5 9

The epitome of this popular obsession was the Rough Rider hero of the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt, who rose to prominence infusing his speeches with talk of manly duties. Riding a wave of popularity that would put him in the White House in 1901, Roosevelt was an advocate for the “strenuous life” of rough sports, prizefighting, hunting, and “muscularity.”18 In his 1899 address to Chicago’s elite all-male Hamilton Club, he stressed the dangers of the “timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man” and implored those present to be “resolute to do our duty well and manfully.”19 In essence, the “overcivilized” man—the antithesis of the original conceptions of the New England Yankee and the backwoodsman— becomes a marker of “feminization,” a term Ann Douglas links to nineteenthcentury sentimentalism in The Feminization of American Culture.20 Roosevelt and the conception of the “strenuous life” (with all its gendered protocols of fierce individualism and bravado) dictates an influential aesthetic of maleness that influences popular culture—fiction, stage, and, especially, film. In his work on masculinity in early cinema, David A. Gerstner writes, “given Roosevelt’s stature as an icon (if not the icon) of American masculinity in the early twentieth century, the cinema’s wide appeal and vast reception were instrumental in his vision of the virile constitution of a national aesthetic.”21 This national vision ultimately becomes a cinematic aesthetic that mutates throughout the century in various depictions of idealized maleness on screen—from cowboys to detectives to, most prominently, patriotic war films (as is discussed in chapter 6). In truth, the reason for the cultural anxiety over “losing” maleness to overcivilization can historically be linked to social changes that threatened the dominance of white protestant males, gender resettlements directly caused by the Industrial Revolution. As Gail Bederman suggests in Manliness and Civilization, “By the last decades of the nineteenth century, middle-class power and authority were being challenged in a variety of ways which middle-class men interpreted—plausibly—as a challenge to their manhood.”22 Multiple societal factors are thereby responsible for the supposed crisis of masculinity. For example, the rise of corporations modified the meaning of work as a form of self-identification. Increasing numbers of men lost their financial independence when they became salaried employees of other men. The proportion of middle-class males who were self-employed dropped from 67 to 37 percent between the years 1870 to 1910.23 Also, for white males among all classes, workplaces were diversifying as African American and immigrant populations challenged their positions as hirable labor. With the middle class, more and more women began working in office environments and, even though most took on subordinate tasks, their very presence was perceived to diminish a masculine domain. As E. Anthony Rotundo summarizes, “To the extent that 6 0 | c ha p t e r 2

a place in the professions or business served as a badge of manhood, manhood was now being undermined.”24 Beyond the workplace, the general rise in social prominence of women was also perceived as a threat. Primarily, the suffrage movement, demanding a political voice for women at the ballot box, was considered the most direct challenge to male authority. But beyond the vote, many men also considered women as threatening male identity through other social avenues. For men, socialization away from the family was perceived as under threat by organized women’s groups; the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union represented the most popular antialcohol organization of the period, identifying drunkenness as a male vice and attempting to close down saloons and private clubs, while other women’s groups campaigned against such “manly” activities as boxing, wrestling, and prostitution.25 The other variation on the Fields personae (the husband) can be seen as directly born out of such anxieties over industrialization, urbanization, and feminization. The domesticated Fields has a complicated lineage involving another important writer, J. P. McEvoy, who had an eclectic career and—if remembered at all—is best known as the creator of Dixie Dugan, a popular comic strip that ran from 1929 to 1966. Before this, McEvoy found success on the stage with The Potters (1923), a comic portrait of an average American family with Donald Meek and Mary Carroll playing a working-class husband and wife with two bratty children and an ugly apartment. For his follow-up, much like Donnelly, he moved into the lucrative arena of the revue. For Ziegfeld’s The Comic Supplement (of American Life) (1924) the following year, he allowed for showcases of the famous Ziegfeld girls and a more unstructured format with comic sketches featuring another average American family, here called the Joneses.26 In a foreshadowing of McEvoy’s career to follow, as the title suggests, the family featured was inspired by comedy found in the newspapers’ funny pages—then called the comic supplement—as seen in such domestic strips of the period as Bringing Up Father (1913–2000), The Bungle Family (1913–45), and The Grumps (1917–59). McEvoy suggested the show’s expressed goal as “going back to the original idea of caricaturing life” found in the comic strip medium.27 For the casting of Pa Jones, McEvoy was pleased to secure Fields, who was hot off the success of Poppy. Unlike the nostalgia that defined McGargle, Fields in McEvoy’s view was the perfect figure to portray a type of comic despair of the modern man: “He [Fields] is the average American upon whose simple features life has placed a vaguely comic mask. He is the surprised and blinking troll entangled in the details of his day, who fights to get into crowded elevators, who sometimes falls down a flight of steps, who, in short, is forever raising his head out of what the alarmists call the debacle of modern civilization to crack a joke.”28 As this suggests, to the writer, Fields was an average W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 6 1

American only distinguished by the addition of a “vaguely comic mask”—a description in tune with McEvoy’s simplifications of gender, matching the two-dimensional world of the comics page. But this caricature was complicated during the show’s development as Fields fought to make the Jones family into his own personal creation, suggesting a change to the “Fliverton family.” The eccentric Flivertons would round out his character into something purely “comic”—and, as a result, quirky and queering the husband characterization through “nonnormal” behavior—through verbal and pantomime routines befitting the comedian’s background in vaudeville. Due to creative disagreements between McEvoy, Fields, and Ziegfeld, the full extent of these changes never occurred. Unlike Poppy, the show was a flop. Yet variations of the sketches from The Comic Supplement became the basis for Fields’s on-screen husband characterizations with sequences adapted and credited as the source material for Fields’s The Old Army Game (1926) and It’s a Gift.29 Also, Fields’s association with the writer extended to the comedian starring as Pa Potter in the film adaptation of The Potters (1927) and having McEvoy credited as writing the dialogue for You’re Telling Me! The Broadway lineage of the con man and husband characterizations show a development of gender performance steeped in the male anxieties of the period, with Poppy originating as a melodramatic idealization of a preindustrial male existence and The Comic Supplement taking its inspiration for the newspaper comics depicting “feminized” modern married men. As this shows, many social narratives of the period characterized middle-class domesticity as emblematic of civilization and, as such, feminization, something problematic for many males since the rise of the middle class changed familial dynamics. As Rotundo writes: In the 1880s and 1890s, there were some bourgeois men who found themselves with new habits and pursuits that were marked “feminine.” Certain husbands were turning to their wives for intimacy and friendship. Fathers were engaging more often in the lives of their children. . . . Within the governing metaphors of gender, masculine domesticity was a contradiction in terms. It presumed that men could—and should— carry out female tasks for which their male nature did not fit them. If a man was spending more time at home exercising the skills which supposedly belonged to women, what kind of a man was he?30

With this question, Fields’s characterizations create their most profound commentaries on this masculine anxiety. It is in this realm of masculine domesticity that Fields’s two characterizations represent the changing roles of men in ways that touch upon many of the fears of the period, exposing the buffoonish na6 2 | c ha p t e r 2

ture of these anxieties. The con men are characters unencumbered by domesticity or any ties to a stable community. But as will be discussed, this does not spell success or happiness in the course of the narrative, thereby challenging the mythologies of maleness of the period. Steeped in a nostalgic depiction of past Yankee-style craftiness, Fields actively rejects the feminization of civilizing culture and the perceived castration associated with it to live a solitary existence without purpose. While these roles exemplify a type of bittersweet buffoonery, they still problematically provide attacks on empowered women who are depicted as foolish widows, the moralizing and restrictive females so feared by the cult of masculinity. On the other hand, the husband critiques domesticity directly by showing a modern Fields as figuratively castrated, relinquishing his independence in the face of a shrewish wife. Ultimately, this characterization is redeemed through an equally if not more so problematic female figure, an idealized daughter who embraces her father’s lack. In what follows, I give an overview of four films featuring these two characterizations. To clearly understand them as historically valid queered performances, let us start with Fields’s nostalgic depictions of unchained huckster maleness, performances that both celebrate and denaturalize the gendered idealism of the past.

Fields as Con Man: Poppy and The Old Fashioned Way Fields’s Cuthbert J. Twillie in My Little Chickadee is a characterization that exemplifies many of the attributes of the nineteenth-century huckster and, appearing relatively late in the comedian’s career, is in many ways a caricature of past roles. The largest influence upon Twillie can be seen in the sound adaptation of Poppy from 1936, where Fields has star billing and ample screen time. Unlike Griffith’s 1925 adaptation, this film returns the story to a period setting—opening, after the credits, with the title of “1883.” McGargle and Poppy (Rochelle Hudson) are shown as outsiders of the small towns they pass through, sitting on a country road and watching a hayride of happy locals ride by. Fields provides the first words of the film: “What a gorgeous day. . . . What a fulgent sunshine. Yes. It was a day of this sort the McGillicuddy brothers murdered their mother with an ax.” With this darkly comic line (a joke of misdirection, as it starts out as a warm platitude and then veers into horrific violence), Fields establishes his character as untrustworthy by the idyllic communities he swindles. The line shows a fear of the matriarchs such societies promote, households run by a strong mother who supposedly could push sons to murder. On the other hand, Poppy longs for such civilization, pleading to her father, “Why don’t we settle down in one of these little towns?” With this the film quickly establishes two different narrative trajectories as Poppy moves toward domesticity and McGargle confirms his independence and distrust of W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 6 3

such confines. One of the most surprising aspects of this adaptation of Donnelly’s play is how the two characters share relatively little screen time. Poppy’s storyline consists of a romance with Billy Farnsworth (Richard Cromwell) and her struggling to be embraced by the town’s judgmental society women. Luckily for her, she meets Sarah Tucker (Maude Eburne), who is quickly established as a positive motherly influence on Poppy as she gives her home-cooked meals and protects her from the town snobs. While Poppy locates a stable motherly influence to counter her father’s “anticivilizing” lifestyle, Fields’s performance as McGargle remains stubbornly tied to the American individualism of the past. These are the very conceptions of comic maleness rooted in Rourke’s classification of “the Yankee” as “overassertive yet quiet, self-conscious, full of new biases, he talked—this mythical creature: that was the secret to his power.”31 As a con man, McGargle swindles a different sort of matriarchal figure from Sarah Tucker in Countess DePuizzi (Catherine Doucet)—a gabby local widow who, through an overseas marriage, gained a title and respectability, representing a false lineage to the types of aristocracy the Yankee rejects. Dressed in ruffled white gowns and punctuating her singsong voice with an annoying laugh, this foolish yet powerful woman also is the sole beneficiary of the Putnam estate, a fortune McGargle eventually targets by misrepresenting Poppy as the heiress. When Fields first visits the countess, the setting is a highly “feminized” atmosphere, filled with markers of a vain and leisurely existence. Her home is an elaborate columned structure surrounded by well-manicured gardens. As Fields approaches the gates, the countess and a group of female socialites are seen enjoying a game of croquet on the front lawn. When asked about his knowledge of the sport, McGargle at first appears clueless, referring to the mallet as a “hammer.” Then, ever the assertive con man, he suggests he is an expert that “toured the world, giving lessons, and also lecturing” on the subject. His flimsy facade quickly is diminished as he shows no ability as a sportsman, tripping over the hoops and sneering, “What lazy lout left these wires all over the lawn?” With all the women looking on, Fields manages to destroy the mallet, throw out the goal stick, fall over once again, and get attacked by DePuizzi’s small dogs. As she tries to get him into the house for tea, she calls in the same breath: “Come Beasty. Come Pompom. Come Professor.” Fields responds with disgust at being lumped together with her dogs and, through facial expression, makes no secret of his repulsion over the prospect of drinking tea. As part of the nineteenth-century nostalgia of the film, croquet represents class distinction because the game was played mostly within the upper classes at garden parties as it grew in popularity during the 1860s. Notably, it was also one of the rare sports where women took part, which helped to establish its popularity in England, as croquet parties allowed for men and women to 6 4 | c ha p t e r 2

play together.32 Yet in Poppy, it is depicted as solely being played by women, as the type of nonstrenuous sport that would epitomize unmanliness to the cult of masculinity. Fields’s inability to play even this most feminine of games highlights the lack of prowess seen on full display in My Little Chickadee, destabilizing the original assertiveness of the Yankee archetype and its cultural brethren. Defining this buffoonish nature as a gendered contrast, his relationship to the women on the lawn facilitates his disgust and true removal from the feminizing world of DePuizzi—a name Fields happily mispronounces as “De Pussy,” thus vulgarly associating the character with the female anatomy.33 It is important to note that DePuizzi constitutes an annoyance to Fields, yet her role does not take on the queerly subversive status of a Mae West. Instead, her ridiculous nature adopts a position closer to the moralizing and restrictive females the cult of masculinity feared. To Fields, her world represents all that is feminizing, from the sport of croquet to the condemnation of alcohol, which is seen through her insistence of serving Fields the dreaded tea. Throughout the film, McGargle remains a comical preindustrial figure who rejects civilizing influences, something evident in his lack of respect toward the social order of the small town. His rejection of its confines, though, does not lead to a successful outcome for the con man, a different fate than found in the crafty American individualists Rourke’s “Yankee” or “backwoodsman” represent. In the bittersweet conclusion of the film, Poppy informs her surrogate father that she is truly the heiress, which allows them both to now “settle down” in a “beautiful home.” After Poppy leaves the room, Fields simply walks out of the house to wander the countryside once again, no longer with his beloved “daughter” and completely isolated from the changing American landscape of the late nineteenth century. Two years before this adaption of his largest stage success, Fields authored and starred in his most interesting variation on the con man in The Old Fashioned Way (1934). Here, he wrote a story inspired by his early vaudeville experiences that follows a lead character once again largely attempting to push cons in a storyline resembling Poppy. During the turn of the twentieth century, The Great McGonigle (Fields) and his traveling repertory company perform a one-night engagement of William H. Smith’s temperance play The Drunkard in the small town of Bellefontaine. McGonigle stays just one step ahead of the law and woos the insipid rich widow Cleopatra Pepperday (Jan Duggan) in order to secure money for continuing his show. During this time, he learns that his daughter, Betty (Judith Allen), wishes to marry outside her class and that the remainder of his tour has been canceled. To save face and secure his daughter’s happiness, McGonigle makes a hasty exit by falsely claiming to have a prestigious engagement in New York City. Interestingly, the film highlights Fields as simultaneously an actor and con man, thereby playing off another of Rourke’s W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 6 5

classifications for American comic character—the “Strollers,” traveling troupes of American actors during the nineteenth century who proved comical within themselves as free spirits wandering small towns on the frontier. As she writes, “Off stage the actors maintained an air of urban elegance, highly keyed, with coats of a light blue, green or smaller than was the custom. . . . The companies were small. Everybody doubled. Everyone had precarious adventures.”34 As a result of adopting this comic type in the film, a fascinating parallel emerges between Fields’s queering of a tradition of masculine protocols and the theatrical performance of hypermasculine roles. Such correspondences unfold even in scenes not set in a theatrical venue. For example, McGonigle performs the ceremonies of courtship with the annoying Cleopatra to only foolish results. In a direct reference to more passionate romances, McGonigle tells Cleopatra to call him “Mark Anthony. Mark for short.” She responds by giving him the childlike nickname of “Markie,” thus deflating his claim of a theatrically masculine figure and its romantic attributes. Fields encounters other obstacles to establishing his inflated bravado in The Old Fashioned Way. One of the most prominent appears in the form of Baby Leroy, who plays Pepperday’s precocious toddler, Albert, and essentially moves the threat to Fields’s pride away from the image of the moralizing woman to a more generalized threat of the domestic sphere. Dining with the theater troupe at the boardinghouse, Fields and the widow are framed in a two shot as they sit next to each other. Then the small head of Albert slips into the frame between the two actors and Fields gives one of his trademark startles. As this moment illustrates, the pairing of Fields and Duggan as an ironic romantic couple is quickly punctured by the image of a child who visually turns the three actors into a family unit. The child at one point mistakenly calls Fields “dada,” which makes the other dinner guests burst with laughter and Fields respond with another startled reaction: “Boy, you got me wrong.” Despite this dismissal, he does attempt some semblance of this role by placing Albert into his high chair, an act he fumbles so much that the toddler cries loudly. Throughout the dinner, while Fields attempts to charm Pepperday, the small child throws food and dunks Fields’s watch in molasses, all of which the widow simply considers to be “cute.” Viewing even a toddler as a threat to his masculinity, Fields automatically dislikes Albert and whispers to his own daughter that he is “a brat!” Fields’s aggression toward the child builds throughout the sequence and, when alone with Baby Leroy, he eventually exacts revenge by swiftly kicking him in the rear. As his progressive frustration with the toddler illustrates, Fields’s con man persona finds the domestic sphere in general as threatening as the empowered female. While his fantasies can include hoodwinking Pepperday or DePuizzi, Fields ultimately must remain a free spirit and see the confines of family as a threat. It makes sense that Poppy 6 6 | c ha p t e r 2

and Betty are introduced as fully grown in these narratives, since Fields’s fatherly duties do not extend beyond simply morally supporting his daughters. As will be illustrated later, when Fields fully adopts the father/husband role, his persona takes on much more emotional substance and denaturalizes wholly different elements of masculine identity. Poppy and The Old Fashioned Way are too submerged in the preindustrial ideal of the uncivilized male as a type of freedom from domestic confinement to provide any real deconstruction of the family unit. One of The Old Fashioned Way’s most memorable scenes records the act that initially made Fields famous in vaudeville as a juggler, a talent suggesting a power and control that usually does not coordinate with other aspects of his on-screen persona.35 Typical of his usual assertive self-promotion, McGonigle is introduced as a performer who has “entertained and mystified the crowned heads of Europe.” For the first half of the routine, Fields, donned in a tight shirt adorned with sequins, impressively dominates the stage through juggling multiple balls and a long stick by bouncing them off his elbow, his feet, the ground, and even one of the onstage extras. But typical to the comedian, this does not last long. When he brings out his cigar boxes, the Fields persona materializes as his command over the objects humorously gets away from him. At one point, while he balances a large stack, an audience member hurtles fruit that knocks the boxes to the ground. As he attempts to restack them, he angrily fumbles to save face while they rhythmically attain a life of their own. By the end of the routine, he gives up and throws down the final box. While the comedian takes a tired, yet proud, theatrical pose to accept the applause, toddler Albert once again throws food directly at his face and strips away the final shred of dignity remaining in his performance. Bitter over this loss, Fields looks toward the child and mutters once more, “brat!” At first glance, this turn of events seems similar to the physical relationship with inanimate objects of many silent film comedians, like Buster Keaton, which suggests a comical examination of modern man’s place in industrial society. As Tom Gunning writes, “Keaton’s characters contend with a modern world in which nothing is stable and in which the rhythms of large machines . . . seem to rule.”36 Based within a smaller scale, Fields often deals with modest objects in motion, such as misplaced canes and hats. But the juggling routine illustrates how Fields differentiates himself from silent comics like Keaton or Chaplin since even the purest of physical pantomimes adopts an aggressive tone as he loses more and more dignity, an act exemplifying his queering of masculine performance. Filled with frustration and a lack of completion, Fields’s physicality hovers between a twentieth-century confinement and preindustrial independence, suggesting a lack of cohesion that exemplifies the queered ambiguity of his comedy (its ability to drift between different sets of W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 6 7

male anxieties). A figure like Keaton might, as Gunning contends, possess “an athlete’s applied knowledge of the laws of physics” along with his victimhood, thus allowing for “a Horatio Alger story of acquired maturity and achievement” in his films.37 Middle-aged and bitter, Fields rarely adopts the most persuasive of American masculine myths of success within his con man roles, thereby never truly confirming the idealism of a preindustrial American past. As is evident in the bittersweet endings of both Poppy and The Old Fashioned Way, his con man cannot exist as the empowering Alger figure. As seen in the epilogue of the latter, he simply moves from performing masculine prowess onstage to becoming a complete con man in the form of a sideshow medicine peddler, essentially morphing McGonigle into McGargle. As the con man, there can be no narrative outcome of success, the ultimate endgame of the masculine ideologies of the period. Ironically, fantasies of attainment play much more of a role in his domestic comedies.

Fields as Husband: It’s a Gift and Man on the Flying Trapeze W. C. Fields’s marriage comedies during the sound era all contain a similar scenario. Fields plays a browbeaten husband married to an overpowering woman who actively tries to destroy his dreams of success. Set in the modern world away from the nomadic fantasies of the circus and vaudeville, the films unfold like the nightmare scenarios of domestic life that Fields’s con men work to avoid. As Henry Jenkins writes in reference to It’s a Gift (1934), these films show a narrative convention of “marital combat”—a long tradition of popular American humor where the domestic sphere is presented “as a moral battleground between the woman aggressively protecting the purity of the home and the husband eagerly pursuing bodily pleasure in the face of his wife’s prohibitions.”38 These comedic variations on figurative male castration by the hands of an overbearing spouse originally began appearing as a response to a sentimentalization of marriage in the nineteenth century within such works as Frances M. Whitcher’s The Widow Bedott Papers (1846–59) and Robert Barnwell Roosevelt’s Progressive Petticoats; or, Dressed to Death: An Autobiography of a Married Man (1874). This sort of comic marriage inverts traditional gender protocols with now the wife “masculinized” (the active one in the relationship) and the husband “feminized” (passive) for comic effect. The humor also transferred easily to the vaudeville houses filled with working-class audiences and mutated throughout the twentieth century in popular works ranging from comic strips to television sitcoms. Comically defining marriage as a feminine institution began at a telling period in America as a response to many of the social changes that shaped 6 8 | c ha p t e r 2

the supposed masculinity crisis. Roosevelt’s and Whitcher’s comic novels were published at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when the growth of capitalism caused old social orders marriage defined (such as the convergences of families/wealth/land) to disappear. Thus proposing wedlock as a sanctity never to be threatened for legal reasons became less of a social necessity. By the twentieth century, onetime social taboos like divorce became increasingly more common, with one in six marriages legally splitting by the end of the 1920s.39 David R. Shumway suggests this transition illustrates a considerable shift in how society viewed marriage from social contract to now symbolizing an individualized search for personal happiness, a move that led to its own form of vast disappointment due to romance’s ambiguity as a concept: “The new version of romantic marriage engendered expectations that many marriages did not fulfill, in part because romance offered no vision of how marriage might fulfill them.”40 It is not surprising that the marriage joke, told by males mainly for a male audience, rose in popularity during this time when the institution itself was changing. By 1905, as Sigmund Freud was writing his catalog of jokes, he recognized humor about marriage as a textbook example of “cynical jokes” that attack social conventions that limited male independence. To Freud, marriage, which is “strictly guarded by moral regulations,” invites attack since it is socially based in suppressing the sexual freedom of the male subject.41 In It’s a Gift, the spirit of Freud’s cynical jokes drives the narrative, where the institutions of marriage and family are obviously the targets for humor. Upon inheriting money through his uncle’s death, small-town grocer Harold Bissonette (Fields) closes his store and uproots his family to pursue his dream of buying, sight unseen, an orange grove in California. His overbearing wife, Amelia (Kathleen Howard), and his daughter, (Jean Rouverol), disapprove of the plan, while his young son, Norman (Tommy Bupp), is accepting even though he finds various other ways of annoying his father. After assorted misadventures on the motor trip west, most of which characterize Fields’s husband/father as inept, the family arrives at the ranch to find barren land and a rundown shack. Ultimately, through sheer luck, the land is found to be valuable and Harold sells it for a great sum, proving himself at least momentarily to be a worthwhile provider. The primary conflicts of the narrative appear within the relationship between Harold and Amelia, where she usually verbally dominates her husband. Throughout much of the film, Fields remains a contradiction commonly seen in narratives of marital combat, as he is very passive in the face of his wife’s browbeating yet rebels against her orders behind her back. Early in the film, he tells his daughter, angry over her father’s plan to move to California, “What you don’t seem to understand is that I am the master of this household.” In a typical comic undercutting, he says this line in a paranoid whisper, careful that his wife does not overhear. W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 6 9

The gender dynamic in the household makes this action understandable, since Amelia constantly lectures Harold and attempts to secure dominance, chiding her husband with such nagging commands as “Don’t smoke at the table” and “Don’t throw matches on the floor,” to which Fields passively complies. She also keeps a close eye on him as a sexual object by being overly suspicious of any possible philandering. In one instance, Fields returns to their single beds after receiving a late night phone call. Upon hearing his explanation that it was a wrong number, Amelia suspiciously believes it to be proof of her husband’s philandering. As moments like these illustrate, Kathleen Howard’s performance adopts all the stereotypical nagging wife clichés—providing a deriding representation of that common female archetype in comedian comedies, the phallic matriarch whose sole purpose is as an obstacle in the way of bachelor bliss. As Kathleen Rowe suggests, “Comedian comedy often compounds its erasure of the bride by directing its corrective laughter onto the matriarch, displacing the hostility it is licensed to level at the father onto the repressive, phallic mother.” Such a performance represents “a dreaded domesticity and propriety, a fearful symbol of a ‘community’ that includes women.”42 As a prototypical example of sexist comedy, such a figure is the embodiment of the progressive womanhood the cult of masculinity feared—now caricatured as a haggish shrew, controlling and moralizing against the male’s behaviors. Significantly, Amelia seeks to control the family’s finances and, upon news of the possible inheritance, yells, “If any money comes into this family, I am going to handle it.” This disputation over money proves central to the narrative and suggests It’s a Gift as characteristically a Depression-era text, something showing the cynicism toward marriage that began in the nineteenth century as heightened by the economic hardships of the 1930s. As Jenkins proposes: “Fields’ speedy rise from humiliation at the hands of a ‘petticoat tyrant’ to command over a greatly enriched kingdom allowed male spectators to laugh at their own fears, sexual humiliations, and economic defeats. These feelings were apt to be complexly intertwined in the Depression era because of husbands’ increasing dependence upon their wives to provide additional or even primary income for the family.”43 Since the major narrative dilemma is the buying of the possibly worthless orange grove, the film’s plot revolves around questioning and then reaffirming Fields’s role as a financial provider, an indicator of masculine success basically unmet by millions during this period of widespread unemployment. But this is far from just an idealized fantasy or catharsis for economically castrated males. Fields’s adoption of the husband archetype is a blatantly degraded and beaten buffoon throughout most the film, something denaturalizing the husband’s claim to authority. In the end, the comedian plays less a populist hero than a Depression-era sad sack, defending his decreasing

7 0 | c ha p t e r 2

role in society and representing the simple wish fulfillment of financial independence sought by millions of males. In a rare scene heavily relying on pathos, Fields finally arrives at his orange grove to find it nothing more than a barren stretch with a decrepit shack. With his wife outraged, Fields misguidedly attempts to play the role of provider by dispensing trite positive reactions only to have them deflated by the cold reality of the situation. After we follow him to the rotting porch, Fields turns to his wife and smiles as he points to a horseshoe nailed above the door: “Look a horseshoe. They say it’s lucky to walk under a horseshoe.” Immediately following this statement, Fields steps on the porch, only to have one of the boards spring up and slam against his body. Amelia has finally had enough and deserts her husband, calling for the children to follow. Norman approaches his father and offers him a pathetically tiny piece of fruit found on the property, almost a symbol of Fields’s withered phallic power. This gesture becomes the final straw for the comedian’s crippled dignity. His performance illustrates the contradictory roles that aggression and acceptance play within his domestic persona. In a close medium shot, his reaction is conflicted in that it first seems to be angry as he gestures to throw the fruit and then accepting as he woefully places it in his pocket. In one final comic humiliation, he mournfully sits on the family car only to have it collapse under him. Defeated, he walks over to the porch and traces a stick in the sand, mumbling to himself, “Everything goes at once.” Deserted by his family, his dog finally comes and gives him a supportive nuzzle on the neck, which Fields acknowledges with a small hug. This image is an embodiment of buffoonish masculinity, a comedian wallowing in his failure to perform the phallic order’s narrative of economic success—here epitomized by the setting of the deserted Dust Bowl–like farm. In many ways, this turn toward pathos, where Fields’s husband/father expresses true lament over his failures, can be read as a continuation of some of the comedian’s obsessions with nineteenth-century classifications of maleness, especially of the literary variety. As Valerie Sanders writes about the work of the comedian’s favorite author, Charles Dickens, the father figure often appears as a “mixture of melodrama and theatrical comedy . . . the outward, deceptive face of a shambolic family . . . connected to his [Dickens’s] lifelong sense of the father’s role as essentially performative and theatrical.”44 Similar to Fields’s performance as Wilkins Micawber in MGM’s adaptation of David Copperfield (1935), the adoption of pathos in It’s a Gift addresses the tensions between the theatrical father (performing the role of the provider) and the “shambolic” (exposing his inability to financially provide for his family). Yet this tension does not last for long as his neighbor (and deus ex machina) quickly arrives and informs Fields of a racetrack owner’s willingness to pay anything for the property. Fueled with this insider information and swigs from his flask, Fields W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 7 1

adopts a newfound confidence when the buyer arrives. During Harold’s bargaining with the racetrack owner, Amelia interrupts what she, unknowing of the true worth of the property, rightfully perceives as her husband’s foolish demands. Understanding her spouse’s history of irrational behavior and problems with the bottle, she yells, “Harold, are you drunk or crazy?” Performing an aggressive patriarchal role for one of the few times in the film, Fields walks his wife away from the negotiations and sits her down by the collapsed automobile. Eventually, he convinces the buyer to pay an enormous amount for the land and purchase a flourishing orange grove for the Bissonette family. Despite Fields’s momentary aggressiveness, Amelia never completely compliments her triumphant husband, only fainting in shock. Upon being revived, she concedes to Harold that “you’re an old idiot, but I can’t help loving you.” As this suggests, while certainly a narrative of eventual masculine success, the film never shows Amelia as anything but a phallic matriarch and instead leaves the power differentials of the relationship ambiguously open. This now unclear marital dynamic continues into the epilogue, which never shows Fields as dominating his wife as much as simply being freed from her presence, living the type of fantasy bachelor existence he embodies in his con man roles. As he sits on his prosperous ranch, mixing a cocktail with orange juice, the film cuts to the remainder of the Bissonette clan pouring into a luxury car and then cuts back to Fields keenly focused on his own task of mixing his drink. In the film’s final image, he remains alone with his dog, relaxed and happy as his family drives away, though, most likely, not for good. This ultimate success consists of Fields being left alone on his orange ranch, which is an image presented as an ironic counterpoint to the earlier poignant desertion by his family. This time the desertion is on, supposedly, Fields’s own terms and once again he sits only with his loyal dog, now given a place of prominence across from him at the table. Nowhere does the conflict with the phallic matriarch become more prominent than in Fields’s most personal film, Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), which easily contains the most sympathetic yet problematic variation on Fields’s persona. Even though it incorporates elements found in his other domestic comedies, this film remains the one that most aggressively subjugates Fields into the role of victim. As most biographers recount, while writing the story Fields drew inspiration from members of his own family. The comedian patterns the two most unsympathetic characters, the shrewish disapproving mother-in-law and her unemployable mama’s boy of a son after his own estranged wife and grown son, whom he financially supported but had not seen in nearly twenty years.45 The story consists of one hellish day in the life of professional memory expert Ambrose Wolfinger (Fields), a remarried widower with a loving grown daughter, Hope (Mary Brian), from his first marriage. His 7 2 | c ha p t e r 2

second wife, Leona (once again Kathleen Howard), is stereotypically shrewish and domineering. Also living in the household are his prudish mother-in-law, Mrs. Nesselrode (Vera Lewis), and her pampered son, Claude (Grady Sutton), a lazy and dishonest loudmouth. Throughout the course of the day, Fields finds himself unfairly arrested, given multiple parking tickets, having a professional wrestler thrown at him, fired from his job, mocked by his family, and, ultimately, falsely accused of public drunkenness and philandering by Claude. No longer able to take the abuse, Fields snaps during the climax, physically attacks his brother-in-law, and nearly goes after the rest of his second family before the sympathetic Hope stops him. As a resolution, the conclusion shows Ambrose regaining his job at a higher salary and Leona, having a change of heart, defending her husband to the rest of her family. Man on the Flying Trapeze deviates from Fields’s other domestic comedies since he draws a definite line between his wife’s repulsive family and the child of a previous and apparently happier union. This family dynamic accentuates a supporting character that emerges in both the con man and husband films—the sympathetic daughter. Beginning with his stage success in Poppy, Fields’s films often included a daughter or surrogate daughter who empathizes with his character. This figure appears in The Old Fashioned Way, where Fields ultimately sacrifices his own happiness for the understanding Betty. In You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, his daughter, Victoria (Constance Moore), fulfills this role by lovingly embracing her father, while her brother, Phineas (John Arledge), seems largely disapproving. The character also appears in You’re Telling Me! and his final starring film, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). The latter is a curious metanarrative where the comedian plays himself as a Hollywood outsider with only his sympathetic niece (Gloria Jean) for companionship.46 In Man on the Flying Trapeze, the appropriately named Hope is the quintessential example of this characterization, having a nearly blind devotion toward her often-hopeless father. In a telling exchange, Ambrose and Hope discuss their living situation as they drive to town. Hope complains about Claude’s deceitfulness: “I despise him, Dad. The lazy, good for nothing, fat overfed monkey.” Ambrose provides a weak defense of his brother-in-law, “He isn’t too fat.” Once again, the timid nature of the domestic Fields is on display, as he refuses to criticize Claude. Yet in typical Fieldsian fashion, his lack of a proper defense speaks volumes about his underlying yet unvocalized frustration toward this surrogate son, a deriding representation of the soft mama’s boy that so disgusted the cult of masculinity. Hope then adopts a guilty look on her face and says: “Dad, I know that you would’ve never married again after mother died if it wasn’t for me.” Fields looks disturbed by this implication and asks, “What are you talking about?” Hope discloses a childhood memory of overhearing her father argue with a W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 7 3

friend, stating that “you said you would’ve never married again, if it wasn’t that you wanted to see that Hope had a mother.” Unsettled, Fields responds with a demand, “Now listen honey, I want you to promise me one thing. Never mention that again as long as you live.” He then pauses and tries to dismiss the memory, stating, “I must’ve been drinking.” Hope exposes this lie and says, “No dad. You weren’t drinking.” This exchange illustrates how Man on the Flying Trapeze takes a particularly different approach to marriage than other films by Fields. Here, the comedian scrutinizes the darker side of matrimony by having his narrative examine remarriage, the replacement of familial roles after a spouse dies. Within the relationship between Ambrose and Hope, the need for a mother figure to continue a familial order dooms Fields to be gravely unhappy, thus creating an intensely conflicted family unit.47 In the context of the narrative, Hope performs an important role in Trapeze as a type of surrogate mistress for Fields, as she emotionally fulfills the function usually supplied by an extramarital affair in a story of marital unhappiness. Throughout the film the bond between father and biological daughter remains idealized and substantially more intimate than the marital relationship; Hope bails him out of prison, drives to work with him, and, basically, exists as his singular ally against his second family and the world itself. Another telling indicator of this position appears in how

W.C. Fields and Mary Brian, publicity photo for Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935).

7 4 | c ha p t e r 2

Hope has no suitor in the film, something usually given to the daughter in the other domestic comedies. With Man on the Flying Trapeze, the character has no purpose but to provide comfort to her weary father. Examining post–World War II Hollywood cinema, Kaja Silverman writes on the appearance of “the ‘ideal’ female subject” who refuses “to recognize male lack, and that disavowal and fetishism provide important mechanisms for effecting this refusal.”48 In this comedy, Hope represents a familial version of the “   ‘ideal’ female subject” by dismissing her father’s lack, epitomized by his heavy drinking and timid nature. Fields finds idealized sympathy through a tabooed incestuous fantasy, a blindly devoted and virginal daughter. Fittingly, after being expelled from his own house, the film shows Fields living in a cozy domestic setting with his daughter, now fully adopting the role of caretaker/ wife as she works in the kitchen. Much like the orange grove in It’s a Gift, this is another fantasy space away from the phallic matriarch that is, once again, ambiguous and fleeting. Despite this, within the heterosexual matrix of Hollywood film, this moment represents a denaturalization—here skewing the very marital and familial orders defined by Sigmund Freud through the incest taboo in Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and Totem and Taboo (1913). As Freud writes in the latter, the “marriage-classes” in human history developed to guarantee “the prevention of natural and group incest and to forbid marriage between still more distant groups of relatives,” essentially defining the very primordial origins of patriarchal domination.49 Within his fantasy “violations,” Fields comically stresses the subjectivity of these societal protocols, exposing mutability in the foundational familial prohibitions that define heterosexual law. By exploring a paramount taboo of incestuous bliss, Fields denaturalizes the husband and father roles by illustrating their subjectivity and core fragility. Since Fields is challenging the limits of familial order so aggressively in Man on the Flying Trapeze, the climactic sequence where he “snaps” proves much more unsettling and violent than the pathos-driven climax of It’s a Gift. Returning home after his absurdly difficult day, a disheveled Fields finds himself confronted by his second family and accused of various untruths including infidelity with his secretary, whom Claude had seen comforting an injured Fields. The mama’s boy accuses him: “You were drunk. And you were laying in the gutter. And you did take your secretary.” The ever-supportive Hope reprimands him, “You keep quiet and let my father tell his story in his own way.” Raising his hand to Hope, Claude sneers, “Don’t you yell at me or I’ll slap you in the mouth.” Only then does Fields lash out against his second family, knocking Claude unconscious and then chasing his wife and mother-in-law, who eventually hide in the next room. From behind the closed door, Leona demands, “Leave this house and never cross the threshold again. And take your W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 7 5

ungrateful minx of a daughter with you.” Upon hearing this, the scene cuts to Fields lunging at the door only to have Hope pull him back. He mumbles, “I’ll exterminate the three of them.” As seen here, Fields’s timid buffoon masks a decidedly more intense fantasy of not only incestuous bliss but also violent retribution. We see this in the otherwise timid Ambrose’s only overtly deceitful act in the film. Attempting to take his first afternoon off in twenty-five years to see a wrestling match, he lies to his boss that he is attending the funeral of his “poor dear mother-in-law, Mrs. Nesselrode.” Upon hearing the news, Ambrose’s secretary offers condolences by saying, “It must be hard to lose your mother-in-law.” Fields responds, “Yes it is. It’s very hard. It’s almost imposs . . . It’s hard to . . .” Of course, the joke consists of Ambrose basically catching himself in the middle of a Freudian slip, revealing his tabooed murder fantasy. As such moments illustrate, Fields’s husband exposes a wish to violently dominate the matriarch within even the most sheepish modern male.

“Gritty, grim, basically antisocial”: W. C. Fields and Buffoonish Masculinity While W. C. Fields’s film performances drift between the con man and husband, I wish to stress that the public reconciled these two roles into a singular popular image. Partly, the reason for this view was his occasional roles outside these two variations, such as in the farcical Million Dollar Legs (1932), which features him as the president of the mythical country Klopstokia, and International House (1933), which casts him as Professor Quail, a world-famous adventurer. In general, his persona had consistencies from film to film, especially found in his voice and use of language—something the public also embraced through his radio appearances.50 As James Curtis writes, “Linguistically, he showed the patterns of the Philadelphia dialect, though his private speech was devoid of the volume and flourish that made him one of the most imitated of personalities.”51 With his behavior and voice, Fields was a unified icon for the public, where his peculiarity often defined his massive appeal. In his last two starring roles, both authored by Fields, the line between the con man and family man blur and, perhaps not coincidently, gender relationships are not so much of a concern in the storylines as both films cover a heavily caricatured and self-referential territory of comedy.52 The Bank Dick, while certainly classifiable as a domestic farce, features the family man persona as less timid than in It’s a Gift and Man on the Flying Trapeze, as large portions of the narrative take Fields away from his family, where he partakes in various shenanigans more befitting his con man persona. The Bank Dick also contains very cartoonish characters and an odd narrative structure that results in a fantasy-like scenario for its conclusion that tends to be more silly than 7 6 | c ha p t e r 2

poignant, featuring his character now wealthy and living the stifling life of the upper class. Supposedly now the patriarch, he sits at the head of the table in a room of a large mansion, with his family, and acts uncharacteristically refined. But this image is quickly undercut when he is shown sneaking off to the local tavern. As such a deceptive ending shows, the con man and family man have merged as he remains within the domestic sphere yet manages to live an irresponsible fantasy double life befitting a bachelor. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break features Fields playing himself pitching a rambling screenplay, which we see unfold on screen, to a frustrated producer (Franklin Pangborn). Structurally, this film is truly imaginative and pushes the concept of self-reference into innovative directions. Despite this turn, Fields exists as a fatigued variation of his con man persona, a tired has-been struggling to push a con inside yet another ordered society, the studio system, ultimately having to leave Hollywood due to his continual failure. Through all these variations on his on-screen persona, we are left with some essential questions in relationship to Fields’s purpose within this book. How do we classify a comedian like Fields, whose humor revels in the fictions of the patriarchy, most specifically the myths the supposed crisis of masculinity perpetuated? Of all the comedians of the era, why do I present him as a model of buffoonish masculinity, which, by definition, queers heteromaleness? In many ways Fields serves as a fitting comedian to open upon as he is not the most obviously queered performer this book covers. Others, such as Eddie Cantor and Jack Benny (the subjects of the next two chapters) provide more overt queer characterizations. Yet Fields’s humor is significant in its ability “to queer” by subverting male mythologies through a direct and often antisocial stance, showing buffoonish masculinity as having a truly transgressive nature. Writing seventeen years after their unsuccessful collaboration on Broadway, J. P. McEvoy reflected: “Bill [Fields’s] comedy is gritty, grim, basically antisocial. The character he plays is an old rogue and a rascal; always drinking, never drunk, always sinning, never saved.”53 In this world of incomplete moral codes and uncertain gendered positions, Fields emerges unrelentingly as a creative artist. He is possibly the most problematic, yet profound, male comic of the era, exposing the weaknesses of American heteromanhood through the most unencumbered and universal of gender performances. In contrast, the performers in the next chapters expose (sub)narratives of ethnic diversity and queer identity that the phallic order actively tried to disavow. Even though all the comedians display buffoonish masculinity, those covered in the rest of this book are different from Fields in that they often “embody” queerness in addition to actively “queering” heteromale idealism. As such, to consider Fields as a model of buffoonish masculinity is to acknowledge him as a perpetually conflicted gendered signifier. He is an W. C. Fields as Masculine Icon | 7 7

amalgam of male anxieties, best understood through the cult of masculinity of the early twentieth century as his films address the powerful modern woman, lament a perceived loss of independence, and struggle to establish the Depression-era husband as a worthwhile provider. Undoubtedly, as the con man, Fields represents disconnect from communities defined by a civilizing femininity, a bittersweet lament of a preindustrialized world. As the family man, he becomes a supposed “victim” of such confines, timid and castrated in his role as henpecked husband, but never too sentimental. Yet both of these characterizations, as shown, also foster a queering of the perception of heteromasculine autonomy as ideal. Many of Fields’s films, while often based in misogynistic stereotypes of scatterbrained widows, shrewish wives, and idealized daughters, do not allow the comedian to emerge as a successful figure or, equally significant, to emerge as a victim of really anything outside of his own stubborn self-perceptions. His con men in Poppy and The Old Fashioned Way ultimately wander the changing American landscape alone and penniless, deciding they are unfit to be present in the lives of their idealized daughters. The fathers of It’s a Gift and Man on the Flying Trapeze might appear to find some contentment by being removed from their family, at least temporarily. But this privileging of independence over modern domesticity disrupts the family unit as the supposed axis of heterosexual identity, even to the point of suggesting incest fantasies as preferable to its fictions. As this chapter shows, in McEvoy’s words, Fields’s humor is not afraid to embrace the “gritty, grim, basically antisocial”—with the “social,” of course, defining the parameters of “successful” heteromaleness.

7 8 | c ha p t e r 2

3

“Whitefacing” the Nebbish Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence

To define a nebech simply as an unlucky man is to miss the many nuances, from pity to contempt, the word affords. Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish

In the joke-filled dictionary The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten provides a definition of nebech (as he suggests the primary spelling) that contains some decidedly telling connotations. He writes it suggests, as a noun, an “innocuous, ineffectual, weak, helpless or hapless unfortunate. A Sad Sack. A ‘loser’ . . . 3. A nonentity; ‘a nothing of a person.’  ”1 He provides nebbish as a word that transcends the Jewish stereotype even within its Yiddish origins, with the ability to describe a “universal character type.”2 Probably the most popular American comedian that comes to mind when thinking of the nebbish is Woody Allen, who is coded as Jewish in his roles—yet is also small of stature, physically weak, nervous, jittery, and humorously self-deprecating. The stereotype especially appears early in his career when he was identified more as a comedian than a filmmaker in such movies as Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973), and Love and Death (1975). But even as his career veered into more serious territory after his Oscar-winning Annie Hall (1977) (which, as suggested in the introduction, is still very much a comedian comedy) he continued to play the nebbish, though he certainly complicated the persona with human depth and, often, moral ambiguity in films like Manhattan (1979), Husbands and Wives (1992), and Deconstructing Harry (1997).3 79

It is important to note that Allen is far from a singular Jewish nebbish figure positioned in a strictly later twentieth-century context. Instead, he comes from a long tradition of comedian comedies that began with cinema’s transition to sound and the establishment of verbal humor from the Broadway stage and, later, radio. As Allen often suggested, the clearest influence on his performance style is radio and film comedian Bob Hope, whose 1930s through 1950s film roles were often as a witty and unmasculine loser who lapses into nervous under-the-breath asides in his Road to films with Bing Crosby (1940–62) as well as solo projects such as My Favorite Blonde (1942), The Princess and the Pirate (1944), My Favorite Brunette (1947), The Paleface (1948), and Casanova’s Big Night (1954).4 In a 2005 interview, Allen reflected: “I’ve always been a passive comedian, in the mould of Bob Hope or something that’s victimized. A coward, a failure with women, a loser and I’d love to sometime try a picture where I was a winner and I would like that just for the fun of it.”5 Given the distinctly hegemonic American identity found in his commitment as a USO performer, Anglo comedian Hope feels like an odd component in tracing the history of the nebbish on screen. But this lineage, as Allen himself noted, is based in Hope’s “passive” characteristics in films, a generalized failure to live up to phallic ideals within cinematic narratives as opposed to anything linked to ethnicity. As such, Bob Hope’s movie persona confirms that, as Rosten suggests, the nebbish can be a universal character type. But this universality does not mean the nebbish is something Gentile or, even more limiting in definition, ethnically neutral. Through all its variations, this characterization is born out of a Jewish comedic tradition even as it has grown to be applicable to a broader gendered characterization that transcends ethnicity. To see how the nebbish moves from a Jewish stereotype to a universalized comedic type, we only need to look at the highly influential career of Eddie Cantor, who was one of the top American stars, comedic or otherwise, during the first half of the twentieth century.6 As biographer Herbert G. Goldman suggests, Cantor’s significance particularly appears in his role in the history of stardom since “he, singlehandedly and consciously, changed the very nature of stardom.”7 Through Cantor’s massive popularity on stage, film, radio, and, eventually, television “the line between ‘celebrity’ and ‘actor’ became gradually blurred, and stars were finally perceived not as simply top-of-the-line actors but as public figures.”8 His appeal crossed between the highest levels of popular entertainment: as the toast of the Broadway stage to performing weekly as radio’s biggest pre–Jack Benny star to recording hit records such as “Making Whoopee” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” During these triumphs, he also starred in a series of high-budget A pictures for Samuel Goldwyn at United Artists featuring elaborate musical numbers with the famed Goldwyn Girls: Whoopee! (1930), Palmy Days (1931), The Kid from Spain (1932), Roman 8 0 | c ha p t e r 3

Scandals (1933), Kid Millions (1934), and Strike Me Pink (1936).9 While many of his fellow comedians appeared in smaller-budget B features and shorts during the 1930s, Cantor quickly developed into a heavily promoted personality who was a precursor to the huge popularity of later comedians ranging from Bob Hope to Danny Kaye to Jerry Lewis to Woody Allen to numerous others. Yet his most lasting impact might be in the development of his on-screen persona as a decidedly Jewish variation on queered maleness, something that established him as popular culture’s first movie star nebbish. As noted in Sander Gilman’s studies, the popular perception of the “soft” or unmanly Jewish male arose in the nineteenth century through both nationalist and scientific discourses in the Gentile world.10 These characterizations also are related to an autonomous performance of gender within the historical Jewish male subject. Daniel Boyarin, in his significant study Unheroic Conduct, suggests an active rejection of Gentile heteromasculinity by many male Jews as “it was through this mode of conscious alternative gendering that Jewish culture frequently asserted its identity over-against its surroundings.”11 Due to these appropriations, the male Jew in particular has often been allegorized historically as a type of queer figure, removed from a Gentile (or “normative”) community in Europe or America and eschewing the hegemony’s hypermale gendering. As a recontextualization, this analogizing of Jewish gender performance and queerness, as Janet R. Jakobsen writes, provides “a different and more open meaning for queers and Jews.” In positioning the two classifications side by side as alternatives to “straight” and “Gentile” maleness, “we understand both ‘queer’ and ‘Jewishness’ as something that we do in complicated relation to the historical possibilities of who we are.”12 The nebbish as a comedic type thereby opens the possibilities of tracing a link between queered Hollywood comedians and a complicated history of male Jewish self-identity. With this understanding, Cantor exists as an ideal figure to question ethnic identity in relation to the evolution of buffoonish masculinity on screen. Furthermore, while it is correct to assert the root of the nebbish performances as a Jewish identity, the development of Cantor’s variation was influenced by non-Jewish practices as well—thereby suggesting a national narrative of cultural assimilation as defining this queered persona. For example, onstage Cantor found his initial success as a blackface artist, but even this role was an untraditional take on the originally southern-defined aspects of the racial stereotype. In his autobiography, Cantor writes of his early stage blackface persona: “I brought my negro friend up north . . . add[ing] an intellectual touch to the old-fashioned darkery of the minstrel shows” and actually made a trademark character out of “the cultured, pansy-like negro with spectacles.”13 This emasculated and overtly queered (“pansy-like”) version of the minstrel stereotype could be seen as not only neutralizing a supposed sexual threat of an Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 8 1

intellectual black male, but also as adding a timid sexual uncertainty to the persona, one that might be read as adapting the nebbish into the minstrel performance. Cantor’s roots as a stage performer thus relate directly to the complicated and often contradictory history of assimilation through minstrel blackface

Eddie Cantor in blackface (circa 1917). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

8 2 | c ha p t e r 3

outlined by Michael Rogin’s groundbreaking Blackface, White Noise, which analyzes the racial performance of popular Jewish blackface performers, including Cantor and Al Jolson. As Rogin summarizes: “Blackface provided the new country [America] with a distinctive national identity in the age of slavery and presided over melting-pot culture in the period of mass European immigration. . . . Minstrelsy claimed to speak for both races through the blackening up of one. Jolson’s blackface ‘My Mammy,’ in the service of Americanizing immigrants, pretended to the absence of conflict between black and white.”14 In understanding the development of the on-screen nebbish as a queered figure, it is necessary to view it through this lens of cultural assimilation for Jews and its relationship with theatrical racial performance. As Rogin notes, Cantor proves one of the most contradictory figures within this phenomenon, as he portrayed the nebbish in his early stage work in a manner that allowed the comedian to gain “power over his ethnicity by performing it,” essentially, “playing with the stereotype rather than challenging it . . . a sign of the narrow constraints within he was able to assert his ethnic identity” through racial and gendered role playing.15 In essence, to understand Cantor’s influence as the first major cinematic nebbish is to also have to contend with a multifaceted history of racial and ethnic (and queered) performance. This chapter examines key scenes from Cantor’s Goldwyn series, a collection of musical extravaganzas that prove fascinating due to their conflicted depictions of masculinity as ethnically, racially, and queerly denaturalized. As his film career continued beyond Whoopee!, an adaptation of his popular stage show, certain cultural myths such as a Jewish male “lack” remained on the surface of his film persona, while a clear ethnic identity was submerged to appeal to a wider audience. But this on-screen persona conflicts with Cantor’s public self, since he openly and proudly embraced his Jewishness off screen to the point of promoting then-controversial political stances against Gentile policies. In an attempt to reconcile this complicated public and cinematic contradiction, I believe the removal of an overt ethnic identity on screen can best be read as a type of “whiteface” performance meant to assimilate to the apparatus of Hollywood cinema—an adoption of yet another racial mask by a performer who had, as noted above, a very complex history of ethnic and racial performances onstage. Notably, though, this adoption of “whiteface” does not negate the queerness of the nebbish performance but creates a more ambiguous sexual signifier in Cantor as he drifts between racial, ethnic, and gendered identities. By examining Cantor’s follow-ups to Whoopee!—Palmy Days and The Kid from Spain—this chapter shows how Goldwyn progressively erased Cantor’s Jewishness while he also retained a queered appropriation of the nebbish qualities he established onstage. This universalization of Cantor’s persona Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 8 3

helped to establish him as an “every nebbish” on screen, a type of populist underdog for Depression-era audiences who embraced him as he developed into a pre-Oedipal innocent caricature in Roman Scandals and Kid Millions. This “whitefacing” of the Jewish comedian becomes particularly complicated when positioning it within Cantor’s history as a blackface performer. With this problematic stage trope, he exists as, possibly, the most modernist blackface artist among his Jewish contemporaries of Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson by providing a variation on the minstrel stereotype that took on its own nebbish and queered qualities. By examining the blackface performances in Scandals and Millions, this chapter illustrates how Hollywood negotiated between different conceptions of queered maleness to reconcile a submerged Jewish identity with a theatrical minstrel mask. Through all these complex negotiations of race and ethnicity, Cantor’s comedic persona had a definite influence upon the development of a more cohesive image of the male comedian, even if this transition was never well defined in his own film career (something I will touch on briefly in his final two 1930s films, Strike Me Pink and, after leaving Goldwyn, 20th Century Fox’s Ali Baba Goes to Town [1937]). As this lineage reveals, the true implications of Cantor’s Depression-era comedies provide an assimilation narrative for Jewish entertainers in Classic Hollywood filled with paradoxes as performers had to adopt a variety of racial and ethnically queered performances.

Assimilation and Resistance: Whoopee!, Palmy Days, and The Kid from Spain One thing that must be acknowledge before discussing Eddie Cantor in terms of racial and ethnic masks is that off screen he remained openly and proudly Jewish for all of his career. Born Edward Israel Iskowitz on New York City’s Lower East Side, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Cantor gained popularity on the vaudeville stage and eventually moved his act to Broadway with great success in the mid-1910s in a series of Florenz Ziegfeld revues, sharing the stage with such stars as W. C. Fields, Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, and Bert Williams.16 His performances onstage were marked by his real world ethnic identity. Robert Benchley noted in a review of 1922’s Make It Snappy, “In the first place, he [Cantor] is in white-face most of the time and has a solemn Jewish manner which is all his own.”17 Such a performance (anything but “solemn”) is captured on an early sound test movie from 1923 called “A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor: Star of Kid Boots”—which shows the lively young comedian performing songs and a series of jokes, many of them Jewish, even at one point adopting a dialect to imitate a “gentleman of Hebraic faith.”18 Offstage, Cantor’s Jewishness was something commonly reported in the popular 8 4 | c ha p t e r 3

press as well, including his involvement in the Jewish theater community. Here, he openly addressed religious discrimination, as covered in a December 17, 1925, New York Times article, where he reportedly joked to a collected meeting of the Catholic and Jewish Theater Leagues that those present “would be a great opportunity for the Ku Klux Klan.”19 By the time Cantor wrote his first autobiography in 1928, he was happily providing details of his upbringing on Hester Street and quoting from the Talmud on the first page, a solidification of his popular persona as Jewish.20 Despite this ethnic pride, Cantor’s transition to the screen proved a more complicated prospect, something seen in his first three starring motion pictures—the adaptation of Whoopee!, followed by Palmy Days and The Kid from Spain, both of which were based on original screenplays. Similar to another huge stage success of the period, George and Ira Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (1930), Whoopee! contained a comically simple “fish out of water” plot placing a Jewish character into a Wild West setting, where he lacked the brawn needed to survive yet found his way through sheer nervous wit. The play and resulting film adaptation casts Cantor as Henry Williams, who, despite the decidedly Gentile name, clearly is coded as Jewish through various ethnic jokes. A comical hypochondriac, the character is a classic example of the stereotypical nervous Jewish nebbish. Here the comedian delivers multiple jokes originated on the Broadway stage that are pointed at his behind-the-greasepaint reputation as Jewish—including nearly giving his real name to a group of Indians as “Big Chief Izzy Horowitz.” When the film’s aggressive comic love interest, Nurse Custer (Ethel Shutta), accuses his character of being a hypochondriac, Cantor offers to pull down his pants to show her his “operation,” as proof he is really sickly. Throughout the film, he continually offers to show his operation by suggesting characters look down his pants until, upon finally agreeing to marry Custer, Cantor sings that “she enjoys my operation.” As Andrea Most concludes in her analysis of the stage show, “What sort of operation might affect Henry’s sexuality and be evident from a glance inside his pants? Clearly, it was circumcision.”21 Whoopee!’s stage pedigree was initially tied to the comedian’s Jewishness in a barrage of studio promotion. One press book advertisement promised “laughs, giggles, gurgles, roars run riot when Eddie Cantor starts to cut up as a Jewish Indian in the funniest mirthfest ever flashed on the talking screen.”22 Advertisements also sold Cantor as a “Jewish Cowboy,” attempting to carry over the witty ethnic and urban outsider dynamic of it and Girl Crazy’s stage popularity to the new medium of talking pictures.23 As Henry Jenkins outlines, the movie met with much “regional resistance” and turned only a modest profit through strong showings in selected northern cities and only mild success elsewhere, failing to excite interest in the “sticks.”24 In a successful atEddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 8 5

tempt to expand Cantor’s popularity, the studio shifted publicity away from the comedian’s Jewishness when producing and selling his follow-up vehicle Palmy Days. Jenkins suggests, adopting Irving Howe’s terminology, this move illustrates a “de-Semitization” in the comedian’s film persona, a rejection of the traditional marks of Jewishness, basically “a strenuous effort at cultural assimilation, among performers appearing outside the safe confines of Broadway.”25 In Palmy Days, Cantor plays Eddie Simpson, the former assistant to a phony psychic who is mistaken as a memory expert and put in charge of a large spectacular bakery, where fantastical musical numbers and gag sequences transpire. In this new presentation of his persona, a definite de-Semitization occurs as he is no longer implied to be Jewish.26 As a result of this film’s success, Goldwyn continued to remove overt ethnic identification in an effort to assimilate the comedian. But with Cantor’s established nebbish characteristics still being played out on screen and his Jewishness firmly established in the press, important questions remain. Could a total de-Semitization actually occur? More importantly, what elements of the nebbish stereotype were truly being assimilated and how did these affect the evolution of the male comedian in Hollywood? Goldwyn’s attempts at removing an overt Jewish identity in Cantor’s characters prove ironic since, in real life, the comedian remained celebrated within the Yiddish press and supported many Jewish causes the mainstream press covered well after his move to Hollywood. In fact, as the decade went on, he was attacking celebrated conservative business and religious leaders for their anti-Semitic leanings. In 1938, the New York Times reported him denouncing Henry Ford’s acceptance of an award from the German government, with him blazingly suggesting that “I don’t think he [Ford] is a real American or a good Christian.”27 His pointed attacks of popular (and anti-Semitic) radio commentator Father Charles E. Coughlin found him suggesting the political force and demagogue as “not only an enemy of Jews, but all Americans” at the Café Tel Aviv at the Jewish Palestine Pavilion of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. These comments and a resulting public backlash against his radio show were largely responsible for him being pulled off the air for an entire year.28 Cantor thus existed not only as openly Jewish in the culture but also, essentially, as a Jewish activist promoting causes that were counter to many conservative politics of the era. While on-screen de-Semitization feels counter to Cantor’s off-screen life, it proves enlightening in understanding Hollywood’s approach to adapting Jewish performers to a perceived wider Gentile culture. Cantor was a first-generation Jewish American, born out of an era from 1880 to 1920 that brought more than two million Jews from Europe to the United States.29 On a purely historical basis, this had a major influence on American popular culture, es8 6 | c ha p t e r 3

pecially on the vaudeville stage where such figures as Cantor, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, George Burns, Ed Wynn, the Three Stooges, the Ritz Brothers, Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers, and others shaped the direction of popular film and broadcast comedy. All these comedians, as they reached a wider movie and/ or broadcast audience, were less inclined to portray their ethnicity as part of their act and rarely portrayed characters identified as Jewish on screen, which speaks more to the economically driven pressures to conform than to the performers’ proclivities. As such, with a performer like Cantor, who was very identifiable as Jewish off screen, his de-Semitization on screen must be viewed as something decidedly market driven, an attempt to have him appeal to as many people as possible. The point was less to hide his true identity in the public sphere than neutralize his characters to gain a larger national audience for his films. This history of cinematic assimilation suggests some complicated dynamics found in Jewish adaptation to Gentile culture in early twentieth-century America.30 For example, the drive to assimilate the Jewish stage comedian in Hollywood appeals to an acknowledged visual similarity to Christian whiteness within the Jew. Undoubtedly, there has been a long tradition of exaggerating bodily difference in stereotyped representations of Jewishness, including focusing on skin color, eyes, hair, and the shapes of noses and foreheads.31 Despite these stereotypes, unlike other ethnic minorities, many European Jews had a tendency to be visually adaptive to surrounding Gentiles, which was something noted by other persuasive cultural narratives in Europe by the late nineteenth century. As Sander Gilman notes, many European scientists suggested Jews were “the adaptive people par excellence,” as the “   ‘reality’ of the physical difference of the Jew as a central marker of race had come more and more into question.”32 By the twentieth century, immigrant Jews themselves were commenting on their perceived ability to assimilate among Gentile populations in America, noting, as Gilman writes, it “is not merely that secondand third-generation descendants of Eastern European immigrants do not ‘look’ like their grandparents; but they ‘look’ American.”33 Given Hollywood’s belief that simply not mentioning Jewish identity turned such performers into Gentiles or, more accurately, ethnically neutral, de-Semitization promotes a stern belief in the Jew’s visual closeness to white as opposed to promoting the Jew’s otherness in a physical sense. Of course, an irony arises in that this particular assimilation process still suggests Jewish identification on a blood level as something “other” to be erased or, in Cantor’s case, downplayed for Gentile audiences. Even on the most superficial of levels, it still promotes a disavowing of Jewishness as opposed to a promotion of otherness within Hollywood narratives. In White, Richard Dyer

Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 8 7

suggests that the Jew’s closeness to whiteness has long been an untrustworthy proposition for the Western hegemony: It is a closeness that has only sometimes worked to the Jews’ advantage. Adaptability could easily be viewed as the capacity to infiltrate, passing for Gentile as a kind of corruption of whiteness. The uncertainty of colour means that at different times Jews may be fully assigned to one or other side of the black:white divide. In Nazi Germany, Jews were regarded as black; in contemporary New York, most would be surprised to find themselves so categorised.34

With this adaptability in mind, Cantor’s long history as a well-known Jewish performer presented complications in presenting him as “white” on screen as his popular persona eschews many of the protocols of hegemonic Gentile maleness. The “whiteness” of Eddie Cantor’s eventual film persona is only partly assimilated, since a total emersion into a Gentile mask could suggest a “corruption” of Christian whiteness. Cantor instead could never fully be allowed to portray hegemonic whiteness (which, one might argue, never could occur anyway since he was a comedian, a performer who traditionally portrays figures only, at best, marginally adaptive to the phallic order). Therefore, a total de-Semitization never occurs. But that was not the goal of Hollywood’s ethnic whitewashing since Cantor’s persona had to retain the nebbish qualities that made him famous in order to remain appealing to audiences. This partial de-Semitization becomes apparent in a telling moment in Palmy Days. As typical in many of his Goldwyn films, Cantor is the target of affection for a sexually overbearing woman, here taking the form of the gym instructor Helen Martin (Charlotte Greenwood). Seeing her imposing frame, the small-framed Cantor tries to escape from her gymnasium. But she pulls him into a tight embrace and bullies the comedian over to a sofa where she aggressively wraps her arms around his body. Cantor wails out: “No, no, no, no. I am not the kind of a man for this kind of a job!” As she bear hugs the squirming comedian, she unfavorably compares his masculinity to a matinee idol, suggesting, “Oh, I don’t know why I should love you. You’re no Ronald Colman.” Offended, Cantor pushes himself away and cracks, “Say, you’re no Marlene Dietrich, yourself.” Helen, proving her womanhood, suggests, “Dietrich has got nothing that I haven’t got!” and lifts her skirt to show her leg as she burst into a brief rendition of “Falling in Love Again.” Here, to accentuate the lampoon of straight love scenes, the film equates each comic figure with dramatic stars who, as sexual subjects, actually crossed boundaries. Both these figures are distinctly foreign and sexually exotic to the American audience: Colman, the Brit, and Dietrich, the German.35 In a distinctly pre–Production 8 8 | c ha p t e r 3

Code fashion, Helen proceeds to make a smutty sexual pass, a thinly veiled reference to Cantor’s phallus by purring, “Oh baby, you’re the key to my ignition.” The scene then cuts to a reaction shot, with Cantor’s large expressive eyes shooting a skeptical look toward Helen as if unsure how he would sexually please such a powerful woman. He cracks, “Well, then you better start your engine and keep moving.” Watching this scene might remind some Cantor fans of the memorable reoccurring gag suggesting circumcision as “my operation” from Whoopee!. With each of these films’ phallic jokes (or to use popular modern vernacular, dick jokes) the humor is based in a suggested male lack, yet one of a decidedly complicated ethnic nature. Whoopee! shows a definite playfulness on Cantor’s part with an anti-Semitic cultural myth, since circumcision became the bodily marker in many circles of a feminine state for male Jews. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud himself contended in an extended footnote that circumcision exists as a label of masculine disempowerment, resignation to a powerful father figure, writing that the “primeval custom of circumcision, another symbolic substitution for castration, can only be understood as an expression of submission to the father’s will.”36 To Freud, the circumcision custom was innately tied to neurosis and, in essence, to masturbation as a compulsion born out of the anxiety of castration. As Sander Gilman summarizes, to Freud, circumcision culturally “was seen as a ‘cure’ for the sexual diseases associated with masturbation; it was also seen as a sign of the sexual disease of the Jewish male.”37 So Cantor’s suggestion that the religious ceremony was an “operation” mocks circumcision (the ultimate bodily signifier of a male Jew’s ethnic identity) as being “a physical lack,” a supposed surgical removal of manhood. Historically, the concept of a feminized masculinity equated with the Jewish male was very much in the public consciousness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as “intellectualized” observations on Jewish masculinity, including Freud’s work, entered the popular discourse. This was especially evident in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903)—which continued many hegemonic myths of sexual and ethnic inferiority by identifying women as physically and mentally inadequate along with suggesting the Jewish male shared these characteristics.38 Gilman notes that Weininger’s views were wildly popular and were not really an innovation but a summation of long-standing myths of a weak and female-like Jewish masculinity, dating back to medieval ethnic distinctions. As Gilman suggests, unlike Weininger, “Freud accepts the difference of the Jewish body, as he does the difference of the Jewish mind, but sees the response of the Aryan as a kind of pathology.”39 While to Freud a Jewish male still suffers from the castration complex, in response to circumcision, the Aryan male can undergo “a double displacement of his anxiety,” since “he Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 8 9

becomes anxious, fearing he will become a Jew himself,” fearing he too will lose part of his penis.40 Removing the overt reference to ethnicity in Palmy Days allowed filmmakers to sidestep the more potent ramifications of the Aryan castration anxiety as Freud suggested. With his ethnicity downplayed, Cantor suggests phallic lack in the sequence with Helen Martin—yet he can no longer explicitly suggest circumcision (“my operation”) as the reason for his lack. Instead, he emerges in his post-Palmy films as a more ambiguously queered buffoon, something seen in Helen’s satiric comparison of the nebbish to Ronald Colman, an Anglo figure of unconventional witty masculinity. The humor of the sequence relates to an ambiguous lessening of phallic power in Cantor that denaturalizes Hollywood versions of masculinity rather than overtly referencing a distinctly Jewish body. In short, the joke does not wish to complicate the comedy with a mental image of an ethnic other’s severed phallus, something that Gentile males of the period could reject. Almost paradoxically, though, even as overt Jewish identification was removed, Cantor was often aggressively queered through his characters’ failed attempts at assimilation into narratives promoting heroic and heteronormative masculine protocols. This certainly is the case with his next film, The Kid from Spain, where Cantor is directly countered to romanticized male figures and forced to prove his manhood through violent rituals. Cantor plays Eddie Williams, a wide-eyed innocent who is expelled from college with his friend Ricardo (Robert Young). After being forced by gunpoint to drive a car for an escaping gang of robbers, Eddie runs off to Mexico and hides from an investigating detective by pretending to be a great bullfighter, Don Sebastian II. The film opens on a typically sexually charged Busby Berkeley sequence of the Goldwyn Girls as college coeds awaking in a dormitory. After frolicking through a musical number, they are chastised by the housemother, who tells one of them to “say ‘I’m a naughty girl’ twenty times.” Soon Eddie is found hiding under some bedcovers (placed there as a victim of one of Ricardo’s pranks) and he nervously repeats a similar mantra, “I’m a naughty girl. I’m a naughty girl.” Due to this prank, both Eddie and Ricardo are expelled from college, though, as typical of his persona, the passive Cantor is not angry with his best friend. Instead, the film confirms a close homosocial bond between the two students as they pack their bags to leave college without their degrees on the day of graduation.41 As a queered bond, Cantor is quickly set up as the more passive and “feminine” of the pair—as Ricardo notes Eddie is crying and sits down beside him on the bed, placing his hand on his shoulder to say, “I’m going to miss you, Eddie.” Cantor places his hand on Ricardo’s knee, pushing the homosocial relationship closer to the homoerotic, and emotionally sug-

9 0 | c ha p t e r 3

gests, “I’ll be thinking about you too, Ricky.” Both men then look at each other uncomfortably and gather themselves before changing the subject. As such moments show, Cantor is now being queered through his ability to denaturalize the heteronormative protocols of the Goldwyn production, yet in a manner adopting many of his established nebbish characteristics. While his sudden appearance in the girls dormitory might at first suggest an impish heterosexual aggression, his placement there as the victim of a prank and

Eddie Cantor in The Kid From Spain (1932).

Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 9 1

his nervous reaction of “I’m a naughty girl” position him more in a passive and feminized role. Quickly, typical of the nebbish, his neurotic nature is confirmed when the housemother takes him to her office for psychoanalysis and confirms he has a nervous condition where he reacts irrationally to the sound of whistles. His friendship with Ricardo moves his feminized nebbish into decidedly queerer territory through a homosocial bond with a more virile and active masculine figure, a relationship that Eddie’s passivity only makes more pseudo-romantic. By the time Cantor ends up in Mexico and is forced to prove his masculine prowess in the guise of Don Sebastian II, the queered humor gets all the more overt. In discussing an impending bullfight with Alonzo Gomez (Noah Berry), Cantor is shown the mounted head of the bull that killed his “father,” Don Sebastian I. Upon seeing the suit his “father” wore during his fatal last fight, Cantor asks if the bull “pierced him through the heart.” Alonzo corrects him to show a hole on the backside of the pants. Ultimately, the targeting of Eddie’s own anus becomes a running gag throughout the finale of the film when his character has to step inside the bullring. Upon nervously entering in the guise of Sebastian, he is embarrassed to learn that he has forgotten to wear pants, donned in only boxers from the waist down. After Cantor is quickly dressed, many of the sight gags of the comic bullfight revolve around the near penetration of his anus. At one point, the bull gets behind Cantor and continually bumps his backside with its forehead. Another time, Eddie hides behind a barrier painted with a large target, only to crouch down and knock it over—thus positioning his protruding backside in the same location as the bull’s-eye. Much like the “dick jokes” from Whoopee! and Palmy Days, anatomical references are once again employed to suggest Cantor’s gendered body as a source of comedy. Here, though, the humor is more aggressively queered as the joke is based in consistent references to (and the threat of) anal penetration. These jokes exemplify Eddie’s nebbish passivity in ways directly tied to heterosexual perceptions of the male anus as a disavowed bodily zone of erotic pleasure. As Raz Yosef writes in reference to Israeli cinema, though it certainly could apply to American society as well, “the heterosexual national subjectivity emerges through a disavowed identification with anal penetration. In this sense, anality takes a reputed constitutive part in heterosexual masculinity.”42 With this national subjectivity, heterosexual males promote penetrating (as opposed to being penetrated) as an act of empowerment, thereby “in the act of anal sex, homosexuals embrace castration and passivity that is antithetical to fantasies of male phallic mastery and authority.”43 If the “dick jokes” of Whoopee! and Palmy Days each suggest a phallic lack in Eddie’s nebbish, The Kid From Spain take it further to queerly position the comedian into the role of a passive object to be penetrated. In this context, Cantor no longer just possesses a lack of 9 2 | c ha p t e r 3

phallic power (a circumcised penis or lackluster “key”) but now fully embraces the passivity of the nebbish as a pseudo-homosexual figure, comically adopting the sexual act that homophobia finds most threatening. While the ethnic implication of the phallic humor might now be removed, Hollywood still positioned Cantor as a very passive and queered comedic figure.

Cantor as “Every Nebbish”: Roman Scandals and Kid Millions With such transgressive moments, it is not surprising that some scholars have suggested Cantor’s persona exemplifies a Jewish male’s cultural disempowerment. As Goldman writes, especially onstage with Ziegfeld, Cantor played “the weakling, a role he sometimes carried to extremes by playing an extremely effeminate character that suggested, sometimes bordered, on homosexuality while leaving little doubt that he was ‘playing’ at the part.”44 In other words, while queered through effeminate behaviors, his performances onstage would still suggest heterosexual inclinations through one-liners and, of course, his rolling “banjo eyes.” Andrea Most, Michael Rogin, and Ted Merwin all essentially suggest that Cantor plays with the idea of a Jewish masculinity as a cultural impossibility, at least through Western definitions of a heterosexual identity.45 As Merwin summarizes, “It was Cantor’s lack of virility that, as much as anything, made him the object of ridicule.”46 As shown by the variation on the “dick jokes” outlined above, such a phallic lack appears central to his persona regardless of how Semitized or de-Semitized the character remains. In the end, as Merwin suggests, even though “he never played an evil or hostile character, Cantor’s performance of Jewishness still suggested that Jewish men were lacking in essential components of masculinity.”47 But should these queered performances be read as degradation or, possibly, something more transgressive? One of the more intriguing takes on the stereotype of the feminized Jewish male appears in the work of Daniel Boyarin, who provocatively claims that the definition of oneself as “unmasculine” could exist as a defiant act against the hegemony: “There is something correct—although seriously misvalued—in the persistent European representation of the Jewish man as a sort of woman. More than just an anti-Semitic stereotype, the Jewish ideal male as countertype to “manliness” is a historical product of Jewish culture. . . . Jewish society needed an image against which to define itself and produced the ‘goy’—the hypermale—as its countertype, as a reverse of its social norm.”48 To Boyarin, these gendered images are not simply cultural myths, but are based in perennial performative elements of male Jews in the public sphere, figures who resisted Gentile masculine ideals (represented by the “goy”) as a form of rebellion. Such points invite a reading of something Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 9 3

like Cantor’s nebbish cowboy in the stage show Whoopee! as a form of cultural resistance. Employing Boyarin in her reading of Cantor and Willie Howard (the star of Girl Crazy), Andrea Most argues for a form of defiance through performing such stereotypical characters, suggesting that “Cantor and Howard reject the macho image of the cowboy . . . and instead adopt a feminized persona that allows them literally to dance circles around the ‘real’ cowboys with whom they share the stage.”49 While proposing Cantor as a rebellion against the hypermasculine “goy” has its appeals when discussing the Broadway stage, it runs into complications in understanding him on screen, where new dynamics caused by assimilation and de-Semitization arise. As discussed in this chapter’s introduction, the development of Cantor’s persona was influenced by a complex amalgam of ethnic and racial (and queered) performances, as his most famous blackface stage persona was, as the comedian characterized it, a “cultured, pansy-like negro with spectacles.”50 Fascinatingly, African American Bert Williams might have influenced this variation in Cantor’s original blackface performances. Cantor performed with him multiple times during the early 1920s and often regarded him as a type of mentor, writing in 1958 for Ebony magazine that Williams was not only his friend “but my teacher, the best teacher I ever had.”51 While expressing resentment offstage about only performing in blackface, Williams employed it to innovative and expressive degrees, including developing “mournful looks” through make-up and manner when portraying a meeker comedic character.52 Some of these influences upon Cantor’s blackface characters manifest in the “whitefaced” nebbish who would eventually appear later in his Goldwyn films, a characterization prone to his own “mournful looks” through Cantor’s famous “banjo eyes.” While it might be tempting to define Cantor’s nebbish as a figure of Jewish rebellion, more akin to his off-screen position as an outspoken supporter for Jewish causes, such a reading is too simplistic when considering his complicated assimilative history. Oddly enough, though, this history does allow for his film persona to develop into a type of populist figure in New Deal–era America, one that could stand in for a variety of displaced populations regardless of race or ethnicity. In the two films he made after The Kid from Spain, Eddie Cantor becomes a type of American “every nebbish,” the little guy without a clear ethnic background who could represent an economically depressed population. Roman Scandals tells the story of Eddie (Cantor), a small town bumpkin who is an amateur authority on ancient history. After corrupt city officials throw him out of his American hometown of West Rome, he fantasizes himself in ancient Rome. Sold as a slave, he soon is mixed up in palace intrigue involving the corrupt Emperor Valerius (Edward Arnold), who is as crooked as the politicians in Eddie’s hometown. In Kid Millions, Cantor is Ed9 4 | c ha p t e r 3

die Wilson Jr., a simpleton from Brooklyn who inherits a fortune from his dead father, an archaeologist who looted ancient treasures. In order to claim the inheritance, Eddie takes an ocean voyage to Egypt and meets various suspicious characters who wish to steal the money. Upon arrival in Egypt, Eddie and the crooks become entangled with the dangerous Sheik Mulhulla (Paul Harvey), who claims rightful ownership of the treasure. In both these films, much like The Kid from Spain, the narratives deal more overtly with genre identification, placing the comedian in familiar filmic settings and allowing much of the humor to emerge from his queer inability to mesh with these hypermasculine surroundings. Roman Scandals opens rather typically for a comedian comedy, establishing Cantor as a harmlessly quirky social outcast in a small town, whimpering to the powerful town boss Warren Cooper (Willard Robertson). This diminutive characterization is soon dispelled as the film launches into an elaborate musical number that positions Cantor as a performer for the populace and suggests his growing popularity off screen as a Depression-era celebrity. The comedian comes across a large crowd of dispossessed townsfolk who have been thrown out of their homes by Cooper and now sit in the street surrounded by their furniture and other possessions. He asks what has happened, only to be told that “the city’s taking away our home.” Now Cantor speaks for the proletariat as he suggests that in a show of protest the dispossessed refuse to leave the street. He tells them, “Look, the city put you here. Well, you stay here until the city puts you somewhere else.” With this advice, he launches into the elaborate musical number, “Build a Little Home,” where he sings “it’s not a palace or a poor house / But the rent is absolutely free” and “this is my house but this is your house / if you come and live with me.” As the song progresses, Cantor makes his way around the crowd, their furniture, and household items—eventually walking triumphantly on a long dinner table surrounded by the singing townsfolk. But Cooper finally interrupts this spectacle of the dispossessed when he angrily stops the dancing. As a result, he receives a reprieve by Cantor, who states, “You think you’re a great man. But look what you do!” Not surprisingly, Cooper has had enough and banishes Eddie from the city limits. In these early moments, Cantor is still the comedian and queered, as is evident from his various sight gags and relevant place as town outcast, but the film is now capitalizing on his nationwide popularity by making him a champion to the lower classes. His identification as a populist spokesman also appears in his follow-up to Roman Scandals, the more broadly absurd Kid Millions. This film firmly assigns Cantor to the role of a nebbish New Yorker, though this position is never ethnically identified as Jewish. Instead, he is orphaned and lives on a barge on the East River with his abusive adopted family, an old stevedore and his three sons who all feel vaguely Irish. The film introduces Cantor with some Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 9 5

of the populist dynamics seen in the “Build a Little Home” number. This time he is embraced by a racially diverse group of children that he conducts as a sort of makeshift shipyard band. Dressed in a ripped shirt and baggy pants held up by a rope belt, Cantor begins the band’s rehearsal on the deck of a barge as the sounds of blowing horns are heard in the background. He then breaks into the song “When My Ship Comes In,” which contains lyrics describing a type of utopia for the poverty stricken. Accompanied by the children, Cantor sings of a day when he can buy “every ice cream factory so all the kids can come and get in free.” An economically fruitful plot point interrupts this Depression-era dreaming of wealth when news comes of his estranged father’s fortune. Cantor is once again aligned with the populace as he dreams of sharing wealth and, in typical Hollywood fashion, a madcap narrative unfolds that will make this dream come true, even resulting in him opening his ice cream factory during an elaborate closing musical number shot, unlike the rest of the film, in dazzling Technicolor. One way Goldwyn reconciled Cantor’s ethnic otherness with his populist appeal was to move his performances away from any signs of sexual aggressiveness, often presenting him as a childish innocent as opposed to the neurotic adult originally seen in Whoopee!. For example, in Roman Scandals, through a misunderstanding over his distinctly modern name, Eddie is dubbed by the ancient Romans Eddie-Pus (pronounced closely to Oedipus)—a wordplay gag highlighting his character’s idle sexual development. This new name adds an overtly classical and, in a modernist sense, Freudian dynamic to the comedy, which is especially apparent when Cantor finds himself an unwilling participant in a plot to assassinate the emperor. As seen in his earlier films, the comedian is once again at the mercy of a sexually aggressive woman, Empress Agrippa (Verree Teasdale), who highlights his comparatively passive sexuality as she, at first, tries to seduce then simply threaten Cantor into helping her murder her husband. Eddie-Pus, dressed in a comically short toga, is led into Agrippa’s extravagant bedroom, where she lies suggestively on a pillow-covered mattress. As she tries to call him over, Cantor shyly prances away, burying his head in the corner of the room like a bashful child. She calls out again, “Eddie-Pus” and finally persuades the shy Cantor to come to her bedside. When the empress asks to hold his hand, Cantor cracks, “No. No. You’ll start out by holding my hand and pretty soon you’ll want to shuffle the whole deck.” In essence, the sequence plays out as a spoof of the Oedipal narrative, with innocent Eddie-Pus being driven to kill the emperor (the father), while being invited to sleep with the alluring empress (the mother). The film thereby positions Cantor in the role of the pre-Oedipal subject— stammering and sexually pure as opposed to consciously unsure and neurotic due to a sexual lack, a childish position that makes his performance an overt 9 6 | c ha p t e r 3

spoof of the Oedipal narrative. Cantor’s role in Kid Millions even more absurdly defines his persona as a similar sexually undeveloped nebbish. The supporting parts in this film include a young Ethel Merman as Dot paired with her dim-witted gangster sidekick Louie (Warren Hymer)—a formidable duo of scene-stealing comic heavies out to claim the fortune through Dot’s commonlaw-wife relationship with Eddie’s dead father.53 It is within Cantor’s relationship with Merman that we find a shocking variation of the Oedipal seduction scene originally spoofed in Roman Scandals. After learning of Eddie’s rightful claim to the money, Dot shows up at his cabin dressed in black like a grieving widow in order to fool him into signing a document transferring his inheritance. In a spoof of melodramatic family dramas, Dot tearfully exclaims, “My boy. My boy. My little boy. Don’t you know me?” Cantor innocently states, “No ma’am.” Dot replies, “I’m your mother.” Cantor gets caught up in the emotional display and cries, “Mama!” They embrace and Dot motherly suggests, “Kiss me, darling.” Cantor puckers his lips expecting an innocent peck only to be met with an inappropriate lip lock when Merman bends him over in a romantic embrace. Confused, Cantor stammers, “Now I know what killed father.” Once again, Cantor is part of a seduction spoof, but this time it consists of role-playing the male as child and the seductress as literal mother, which brazenly establishes Cantor as pre-Oedipal (essentially de-eroticized) in the presence of an eroticized matriarch. As they sit down, the confusion continues as Eddie, gently holding Dot’s hand, begins to sensitively ask questions of his “mother.” When learning that she is six years younger than he, Cantor suggests, “Maybe I am your mother.” Dot continues her strange maternal seduction of Eddie by having him sit on her lap as she “reminisces” about his childhood with her and the father. She then convinces Cantor, now completely reverted back into a childlike state, to play leapfrog on the floor. This results in her wrestling him to the ground, in hopes of getting the contract out of his pocket. Just then, romantic straight woman Joan Larrabee (Ann Sothern) enters to witness the strange and sexually charged scene. Cantor stops wrestling and excitedly states, “Hello, I want you to meet my mother.” Joan looks suspiciously at the young woman and cracks, “Well, somebody should tell your father.” As seen in this variation of the seduction spoof, the film turns the comedian infantile through accentuating his pursuit of motherly affection that, throughout the film, proves stronger than any other desire shown in the character. The seductress/mother is now, in Eddie’s eyes, literal mother, and he responds in childlike glee as his sexual lack, here in the form of pre-Oedipal immaturity, is performed to absurd degrees. Therefore, as his persona develops into a more populist “every nebbish” in Roman Scandals and Kid Millions, his sexual identity becomes regressively childish and less threatening. But while this desexualization exists within the “whiteface” performance, ironically, the Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 9 7

addition of another racial mask challenges the sexuality of Cantor’s persona in some surprisingly transgressive ways, allowing him to queerly drift between different sexual signifiers.

Blackface and the Whiteface Nebbish: Roman Scandals and Kid Millions As a stage tradition, blackface must be understood as having its own long and precarious relationship with white male anxieties, especially in relationship to perceptions toward the African American male. The complete minstrel show, with all the actors in blackface performing songs and skits in southern black dialects, rose to popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, only to grow exponentially after the Civil War through the 1890s.54 Born out of regional histories of segregation and violent repression, American blackface of the Jim Crow variety was made up of performances that, on a fundamental level, presented the black male subject as buffoonish.55 Including the “negro minstrel” among her comic archetypes in American Humor, Constance Rourke suggests blackface as initially born from a simplistic comic instinct, suggesting it “has long been considered a travesty in which the Negro was only a comic medium. To the primitive comic sense, to be black is to be funny, and many minstrels made the most of the simple circumstance.”56 It can therefore be easily argued that the stage tradition was bred from a fear in white males of not only violent rebellion within the repressed black populations but also of racial miscegenation. Racial caricature is often viewed as one of the most potent forms of offsetting a supposedly threatening sexuality within the “other.” As Eric Lott writes, by having white males performing comic black caricatures, “The black mask offered a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threatening—and male—Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them.”57 This reading of blackface suggests the tradition conceals the deluded pathology of the white male, allowing him to perform through his fears of a degraded “other” by demeaning this symbolic figure. While this response to racial caricature has a solid cultural basis, it has been complicated by studies more interested in tracing the phenomenon’s history beyond a black/white cultural binary.58 Susan Gubar writes that there is no “single effect, no simple ideology can be said to emanate from a trope [blackface] that embodies the slipperiness of metamorphosis in its adoptions and adaptations as well as in its historical evolution.”59 This approach to the tradition begins to view such racial role-playing as not only an act of degradation of the racial other but also as the product of a multifarious national pathology based within a wide range of racial and ethnic influences.

9 8 | c ha p t e r 3

With this in mind, a better way to consider Cantor as a blackface artist is through W. T. Lhamon Jr.’s positioning of the trope as a “lore cycle,” a phenomenon that, unlike folklore, can be further removed from its original cultural source as “groups that are not embedded in traditional, oral cultures also use it.”60 Blackface thus can be viewed as a culturally fluid and, essentially, modernist conception since the “economy of modernity requires that radically different social, ethnic, and class cohorts fit together.”61 As Lhamon explains, this fluidity is based in some notable societal contradictions: The tricky thing about modern society’s capacity to hold together substantial differences is that it begins by declaring them “other”; then it frequently sets up cultural patterns that license crossing the barriers to join the others. Modern society builds in these contradictions that define groups both as pariahs and as charismatic attractors—attractive because pariah, and vice versa. Such entities as a “folk” are often doubly signified, shunned, and commercialized. The blackface lore cycle is surely one of the earliest sustained cycles that go through this transformation from folk to pop and commercial gesturing.62

This formulation, bridging the racial caricature between “pariah” and “charismatic attractor,” offers a way to reconcile some of the contradictions found within the history of the practice. For example, one of the most problematic complications arises in the African American’s use of blackface throughout its history and its popularity with some black audiences.63 When understanding the popularity of Bert Williams, who wore blackface when he performed despite the fact he was of black heritage, we can see his celebrity more based in this modernist conception of the trope as opposed to the original “folk” conception. On the Broadway stage, Williams’s performances in the make-up appealed to whites and blacks as a “charismatic attractor” as opposed to an othered “pariah.” Cantor himself thereby felt compelled to emulate the performer to gain similar levels of popularity. Along with the influence of African American performers, the blackface tradition as a “lore cycle” was also undeniably complicated due to Jewish immigrant populations. After the death of Williams in 1922, three of the most famous blackface performers of the Broadway stage were all well-known Jews—Cantor, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker.64 As the most famous blackface performer of the era, Jolson has been credited with reviving the popularity of the trope that, by 1908, was largely considered a hackneyed style common to dime museums and raunchy burlesque houses; Jolson essentially brought the tradition to the upper-class venues of vaudeville and the Broadway stage.65 On one level, his performances promoted nostalgia for a romanticized American Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 9 9

South, popularizing the Back-to-Dixie and Mammy song styles with such hits as “Swanee” and, of course, “My Mammy.” His performances often relied on a cultural memory of nineteenth-century minstrel shows, a “folklore” southern whites perpetuated that helped to define the quaintly patronizing “darkie” of Jolson’s stage persona. But born Asa Yoelson, Jolson came to America from Lithuania as a child and adopted blackface more as a “lore” removed from his specific experience as a Jewish immigrant. In this context, his nostalgic blackface performances were also influenced by his ethnicity—promoting a supposed identification with the struggles of African Americans. Michael Alexander proposes this as a major component of Jolson’s popularity as many Jews of the era “believed they saw their own history reenacted before them in the form of African-American culture, and longed to participate in that culture.” Jolson, in response, embraced formulations of “imagined blackness,” which while “exceedingly stereotypical,” were also attempts to understand the Jew’s place in American culture by reviving a black American past—“a tale of final return to more familiar times of being a separate, marginal culture.”66 We thereby must position Eddie Cantor as a blackface artist within this complicated historical moment, a performer influenced by some of the trope’s most conflicted cultural underpinnings. In truth, Cantor emerges as a very different performer than Jolson and, essentially, could be classified as even more modernist. As the two key male blackface performers of the era, Jolson and Cantor appealed to different aspects of the racial divides in America: nineteenth-century nostalgia for Jolson and Jazz Age masquerades for Cantor. As Andrea Most writes, somebody like Jolson’s “brand of racialized Jewish entertainment was rooted in forms of the past—minstrelsy, ragtime, and melodrama.”67 Cantor, on the other hand, transformed into “a modern jazz entertainer” by abandoning older forms of minstrelsy to become a type of “quick change artist,” adopting ethnic stereotypes “the way a jazz trumpeter might improvise a solo.” Basically, the performances, while certainly still steeped in racist caricature, reimagined these stage stereotypes “as a radically modern theatrical mode,” more a product of distinctly complicated Jazz Age racial divides than nineteenth-century forms of minstrelsy.68 Discussed earlier as an influence on his later queered “whiteface” performances, this more modernist form of the trope appears in the description Cantor gives for his blackface stage caricature as a “cultured, pansy-like negro with spectacles.”69 As this suggests, Cantor’s particular use of the make-up feels configured with the Jewish nebbish caricature itself along with homosexual “pansy” humor, a far cry from the minstrel shows of the old South or even Jolson’s nostalgic appropriation of those tropes. Even though Jewish performers adopted African American masks for a variety of complicated reasons, the commingling of these cultures was not 1 0 0 | c ha p t e r 3

necessarily on an equal basis. In other words, the history of Jewish performers in Classic Hollywood suggests assimilation, but this drive does not characterize the African American experience. While analyzing The Jazz Singer (1927)— Al Jolson’s celebrated first synchronized sound production, which tells the dramatic story of a rabbi’s son who dreams of becoming a blackface singer— Michael Rogin gives an illuminating assessment of the transitional role of Jews in the entertainment industry during the period. While finding celebrity by appropriating elements of Jazz Age culture, the Jewish entertainer in the film still illustrates a potent distancing from marginalized black populations: “The Jazz Singer blacks out the non-Jewish group behind the blackface mask. . . . Blackface carries The Jazz Singer both backward to the origins of mass entertainment and forward to American acceptance [of Jews]. The sign of what has been left behind appears not in collective Jewish identity but in the instrument of the jazz singer’s individual success, the pasteboard that points to another American pariah group, African Americans.”70 In these early sound productions, while the use of blackface points backward, the trope also points forward to define popular entertainment as one separating the Jewish performer from African American culture. Rogin proposes this as a movement toward cultural acceptance. Yet, especially in Cantor’s case, it is also a movement toward assimilation and the downplaying of Jewish identification in his Goldwyn performances. For this reason, unlike on the stage, cinematic blackface challenges the consistency of Cantor as a sexual subject. While watching them today, the blackface scenes often stand out as extratextual peculiarities in his films—not only an illustration of what has been left behind but also what fails to integrate on screen with the now “whitefaced” comedian. As a big-budget A picture, Roman Scandals proves fascinating in its integration of blackface into Hollywood spectacle. To set up its blackface sequence, Eddie-pus is shown outrunning a guard and wandering into the ladies bathhouse, where men are forbidden. After some comic misunderstandings, he ends up completely covered in dark mud. Another beautician then mistakes him to be the “Ethiopian beauty specialist” and Cantor plays along, breaking into the song “Keep Young and Beautiful.” During the number, the camera follows Cantor as he walks through essentially a heterosexual male fantasy space, filled with all blond Goldwyn Girls being rubbed down and pampered by smiling black slave girls, who are also attractive and scantily clad. The sequence is a virtual playhouse of female flesh common to the Goldwyn musicals of the decade, but this time with racially different bodies serving as the central fetishization. The Goldwyn Girls are adorned in long blond wigs, which highlight their Caucasian complexions. The black females are depicted in servitude and seen, for the first half of the scene, rubbing and manipulating the feminine

Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 1 0 1

white flesh. Despite this obvious racial divide, the sequence is still fetishizing both races since they are all sexualized and objectified. Finally prepared, the white Goldwyn Girls emerge from revolving mirrors and dance onto a large floor. The camera pans across the room, where the slave girls emerge from similar revolving mirrors and do a jazzier dance down some steps. The film pans back and forth between the different racial groups, separated by a series of revolving mirrors, to reveal the darkened Cantor dancing with the slave girls. Holding up his toga while tap dancing, Eddie’s whiteness is discovered when one of the African dancers notices his pale thighs, also indicating that this supposed eunuch has a phallus hanging slightly above this area. As he nervously drifts over to the other side of the set, a white dancer notices the pale skin too, which results in both races of chorus girls chasing Eddie through the elaborate set’s revolving mirrors. He finally hides in the steaming section of the bathhouse, where increased heat causes him to shrink into a small dwarf version of himself, still blackfaced, who now sings in a child’s voice. He then is chased into the pool, which restores his normal size and washes most of the dark make-up away. William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson suggest that Cantor’s racial masquerade in the scene illustrates how at “the same time that he puts on his

Eddie Cantor in blackface for Roman Scandals (1934), with Verree Teasdale.

1 0 2 | c ha p t e r 3

blackness, Eddie is also taking off his physical masculinity. He has become a sexually neutral and racially hysterical sign, if you will.”71 While this “neutral” mask defines his masquerade to the fictional women within the narrative space, Routt and Thompson overlook the obvious appearance of Eddie’s sexual drives throughout the entire scene. The adoption of blackface results in the comedian being more sexually charged than seen in the rest of the film. The racial disguise makes Cantor hypersexual, with visual sexual excitement barely contained underneath his blackface make-up (his eyes roll consistently as he looks at the nearly nude Goldwyn Girls). Moving between the racial divide, he even manages to pat a slave girl on the behind as the number begins. The song ends with Cantor joyfully singing “Oh death, where is thy sting? / I don’t care, ’cause I’ve seen everything”—as if his being chased into the pool was some kind of orgasmic release. As Arthur Knight notes, Roman Scandals was the only time for Cantor that “blackface and black performers [were] linked erotically, though not romantically.”72 Therefore, this sequence and the blackface make-up distance Cantor from his filmic persona as the queered, pre-Oedipal Eddie-Pus. Such a sexualization through blackface firmly places the scene back in the trope’s nineteenth-century minstrel roots, which could add an aggressive heterolibido to the caricature. As Mark Reid writes about the history of minstrelsy: “From the viewpoint of an assimilative gaze, blackface minstrelsy allows whites to take pleasure in the ‘hostile or sexual aggressiveness’ of blacks while the white race escapes the harm that such dramas assign to the African-American community.”73 While this viewpoint generally brings us back to suggesting blackface as exposing a limited white pathology removed from other influences, Reid’s summary of the practice does help to explain the change in the “whiteface” persona occurring as Cantor adopts the black mask within the hegemonic confines of the Hollywood film. The nebbish was assimilated as a safe form of Jewish sexuality, yet he was also whitewashed and desexualized in order to downplay ethnic identity. One of the clearest illustrations of this assimilation is thereby found in Cantor’s performance as a “white man in blackface” as opposed to a “Jazz Age Jew in blackface.” In another variation on this assimilation, Kid Millions makes direct reference to blackface as a nostalgic stage construct, as something distinctly southern and ragtime more aligned with Jolson’s use of the trope. The extended musical sequence starts with an actual black performer, the young Harold Nicholas (of the Nicholas Brothers), dressed in a white tuxedo and standing before a curtain. To a jazzy tune, he sings, “I want to be a minstrel man.” After Nicholas sings and dances around a few white Goldwyn Girls, the film moves to the female chorus and a nonmusical introduction of the cast members. Later, the blackfaced Eddie appears and adopts a heavy southern minstrel dialect as Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 1 0 3

he partakes in a traditional patter routine with Jerry Lane (George Murphy). As apparent from the performative nature of this scene, the film contextualizes blackface as a nostalgic stage tradition, even incorporating old-fashioned patter and a stage design where the performers sit in a line of chairs, as was common to the nineteenth-century minstrel stage. As the scene progresses, Cantor and the cast sing “Mandy,” a popular song from the period written by Irving Berlin. The sequence then takes a romantic turn as Cantor and Ethel Merman disappear as Murphy and Ann Sothern launch into their duet “Your Head on My Shoulder,” which is set on a nineteenth-century riverboat. The Goldwyn Girls are now dressed like southern belles and accompanied by formally dressed white beaus. Here the entire minstrel show is associated with the Deep South, thus suggesting a mournful nostalgic perspective to the jazzier minstrel number that came before. Later in the sequence, the blackfaced Cantor dances alone with both of the Nicholas Brothers (Harold and his brother, Fayard), who launch into their full-body form of tap dancing.74 In a comical display, each African American brother takes turns showing his dance prowess to Cantor, who has no choice but to stand motionless since he cannot match their moves. He finally pathetically backs offstage with his hands waving in rhythm, allowing the duo to finish the routine on their own. As with the different dancing styles of the chorus girls in Roman Scandals, the point of this exchange is to highlight the supposed dissimilarities in white and black dancing. The humor is based in there being an acknowledgment of Cantor’s racial mask as phony, since his “white” dancing is understood to counter the genuine “black” dancing of the Nicholas Brothers. Once again, there is a racially mixed performance within the minstrel number. But while the scene might integrate some black performers, it is important to acknowledge that they are not adults and, as such, are a “safe” depiction of supposedly presexual black maleness. Proving significantly different from “Keep Young and Beautiful,” Cantor is also established as nonsexual in the sequence. Despite the surrounding Goldwyn Girls, he is aligned with the safe nonmaturity of the Nicholas Brothers. Unlike Roman Scandals, the film does not attempt to make the sequence part of the narrative, instead allowing Cantor the stage minstrel and Cantor the cinematic comedian to exist as two separate performers. The stage minstrel is now “harmless” and appealing to the historical roots of the minstrel show, thus confirming Cantor’s place as connected to American nostalgia as opposed to his modern immigrant relationship with the stage trope. Now a desexualized “whiteface” behind the racial mask, he is no longer a relatively recent Jewish addition to the blackface phenomenon.

1 0 4 | c ha p t e r 3

Assimilation and Beyond: Strike Me Pink and Ali Baba Goes to Town As such conflicted racial, ethnic, and gender performances might suggest, Cantor’s journey as a major movie star during the 1930s is not neatly assimilative. On one level, the comedian was, as Henry Jenkins suggests, de-Semitized. Yet while an adoption of “whiteness” might suggest a kind of hegemonic social ideal, what actually occurred was something less conforming and still ethnically (and queerly) complex. This conflicted position can be seen in Cantor’s other two films of the decade, his final comedy with Goldwyn, Strike Me Pink (1936) and his only film with 20th Century Fox, Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937), each of which takes a different approach to presenting his persona to the public.75 Of the two, Strike Me Pink provides the clearest attempt yet to assimilate Cantor into a comic leading-man role. As Eddie Pink, the comedian is a nebbish proprietor of a tailor and shoe repair shop, who dreams of romancing nightclub singer Joyce Lennox (Ethel Merman) and is routinely roughed up by a gang of bullies from the nearby college. While tough guy college senior Butch (Gordon Jones) often protects him, Eddie takes matters into his own hands by listening to a self-help record titled Man or Mouse, which inspires him to stand up for himself. When Ma Carson (Helen Lowell) and her pretty blond assistant, Clarabelle (Sally Eilers), come to bring Butch back home to run the family amusement park, Ma mistakes Eddie’s newfound self-help mantras for leadership skills. Along with Butch, she brings back the milquetoast Pink to run the business as a “hard fighting manager,” somebody to stand up against the local gangsters pressuring her to equip the park with rigged slot machines. While this narrative at first sets up a common comedic plot, with Eddie as Butch’s queered sidekick, the film surprises the audience by removing Butch early as he joins the navy. Strike Me Pink then positions Eddie as the leading man who (despite being comically seduced by Merman, the gangster’s moll) eventually wins the affections of the Gentile and blond leading lady, Helen Lowell. If there is anything close to a queered comedic pairing, it is between Cantor and his costar from radio Parkyakarkus (Harry Einstein, a.k.a. Harry Parke), who grew to fame performing a broadly accented caricature of a Greek immigrant. Playing a bodyguard, Parke’s relationship with Cantor paints Pink as a more ethnically neutral straight man in contrast to an ethnic other. For example, Parkyakarkus gives his qualifications as a bodyguard, “I’m a G-man.” Eddie asks, “A G-man? You mean a government man?” “No, a Greek,” he cracks. As these moments show, while still a definite nebbish, Cantor’s persona now embraces various elements to assimilate him into a traditional (Gentile) Hollywood narrative—primarily, by now having an ethnic sidekick and a shiksa love interest.76 More remarkably, almost as if Goldwyn decided to ignore CanEddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 1 0 5

Eddie Cantor with the Goldwyn Girls (date unknown). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

tor’s stage history, the comedian is given only two songs (one a duet with Merman) and does not take part in the major musical numbers with the Goldwyn Girls. No longer integrating him into the musical spectacle, Strike Me Pink also proves distinctive in that unlike his other Goldwyn productions he never appears in blackface. As almost a rejection of this cinematic assimilation, upon leaving Goldwyn for 20th Century Fox, Cantor made Ali Baba Goes to Town, which exists as a more broadly comical and transgressive throwback to his earlier comedies. As Aloysius Babson, Cantor portrays an autographed-crazed movie fan riding across the country in a boxcar, where he sings the song “Laugh Your Way through Life.” After falling off a train, he wanders onto a movie location for 20th Century Fox’s Ali Baba and ends up securing a job as an extra, only to fall asleep on the job, where he dreams of ancient Baghdad (in other words, a time traveling premise similar to Roman Scandals). After his modern name of Al Babson is mistaken to mean he is Ali Baba’s son, Cantor finds himself wrapped up in palace intrigue once again, as he meets Princess Miriam (June Lange), her father, Sultan Abdullah (Roland Young), and the villainous Prince Musah (Douglass Dumbrille), who hopes to marry the princess. Babson also befriends Yosuf (Tony Martin), a leader for the starving populace of Baghdad. 1 0 6 | c ha p t e r 3

Using the modern progressive politics of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Cantor again is presented as a populist hero, convincing the sultan to tax the rich to help the poor as a form of government relief and going as far as to help convert the society into a true democracy. At one point, Ali tells the sultan, “You can be a president, like in America.” “Does he rule the country?” the sultan asks, to which Cantor replies, “Does he rule the country? Ask the Republicans.” Eventually, Babson awakes from his dream to attend the premiere of Ali Baba, where he sees a bevy of stars, including Douglas Fairbanks, the Ritz Brothers, Sonja Henie, Tyrone Power, and Shirley Temple. Inventively, the film ends with Aloysius seeing “Eddie Cantor” arrive, who breaks into song, once again “Laugh Your Way through Life,” before going into the theater. Babson is not impressed and, rolling his eyes, sneers, “What’s he got that I haven’t got?” As this self-reflexive comedy suggests, Ali Baba Goes to Town in many ways deconstructs the Cantor persona by placing him into a variety of ironic positions. The film starts with him as an obsessive movie fan, a queered outsider to the glamorous world of Hollywood as he ventures and then disrupts the location shoot for the fictional film within the film. Then, upon entering the dream world of Baghdad, he emerges once again as the populist hero of his earlier Goldwyn productions. But this time the references to New Deal politics place the commentary into the realm of satire as they are directly applied to a fictional kingdom. Finally, upon having Aloysius see the real “Eddie Cantor,” the film acknowledges that thanks to radio and the stage there is a separate public “Cantor” removed from his nebbish film performances. As such, the comedy is notable in that it refuses to assimilate the comedian into a cohesive Hollywood story with easily separated “whiteness” and ethnic otherness. This conflicted role is especially found in the movie’s blackface performance, which could be classified as one of the most transgressive employments of the trope in 1930s cinema, using the racial mask as an overt celebration of black culture (yet, of course, through the lens of a white camera). Upon seeing a group of African musicians in a Baghdad square (dressed in traditional tribal feathers and loin cloths), Babson is informed that nobody understands them since “they talk a strange tongue.” Cantor attempts to speak to them in French, Spanish, Italian, and even Yiddish before excitedly connecting to the tribe with popular African American bandleader Cab Calloway’s famous call of “Hi De Hi De Ho!”77 With this, the Africans respond with joy and, after applying his blackface, Cantor sings the song “Swing Is Here to Sway,” which informs the tribe that “you set the tempo the world wants to dance to a thousand years from today.” As the Africans join in with their “primitive” instruments resembling a variety of modern musical instruments, Cantor goes on to suggest that in a thousand years their culture will create “a Harlem” along with popular dances like truckin’, peckin’, and the Susie Q. As the sequence continues, the PeEddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 1 0 7

ters Sisters, African American singers, show up and sing, all of which inspires the townsfolk and royalty of Baghdad to try to emulate the “tribal” jazz dance moves. As such a moment shows, Cantor as a performer was willing to test the boundaries of his ethnic identity and, even more shockingly, the racial politics of the era. By opening the scene with trying to communicate with the Africans through Yiddish, the comedian affirms Jewish culture’s identification with the black culture of the Jazz Age, a respect he substantiates through informing them (actually, informing the audience) of the musicians’ direct impact on the popular culture of the period. In this context, Cantor reaffirms his original place as a blackface artist on the New York stage of the 1920s as, in Andrea Most’s words, “a radically modern theatrical mode,” removed from the nostalgic nineteenth-century minstrel posturing seen in Kid Millions.78 He places his racial mask into a context of modern jazz and relates it to a history of African American struggles. In the scene, Cantor rejects the “whitefaced” blackface of his past performances, yet this innovation did not necessarily help his film career. After Ali Baba Goes to Town did not perform to the studio’s expectations, the comedian found himself bored with the nebbish screen persona he had helped to develop and, upon being assigned a script fittingly enough called Mr. Average Man, he walked away from 20th Century Fox. In a prepared statement, Cantor gave as his reasoning: “It is important at this time to make a big musical, where I can play ‘Eddie Cantor’ for a change. I want to sing, and I want to play something else beside an insipid character the audience does not believe.”79 Unhappy with the parts offered, Cantor became more selective, only periodically returning to the screen between stage and radio work in some interesting variations on his persona. In Forty Little Mothers (1940), he plays a relatively straight role in a dramatic comedy that proved to be a box-office disappointment. Thank Your Lucky Stars (1942) features Cantor in an amusing double role, as a good-natured bus driver named Joe Simpson and, in a humorously self-deprecating move, a fictional version of himself as an egotistical radio star. His final starring roles built off his established reputation as a stage performer, playing a vaudevillian in the nostalgic Show Business (1944) and a stage entertainer turned inn owner in the more broadly comic If You Knew Susie (1948), the title of which refers to one of the star’s most popular recorded hits (1925). Despite his boredom with the “insipid character” found in his Goldwyn films, Cantor’s influence as a major film comedian did establish a true archetype of American comedy. Ultimately, he set the stage for comedians to play similar nervous nebbishes, something found in the careers of Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, and Ben Stiller. Gerald Mast draws a signifi1 0 8 | c ha p t e r 3

cant comparison between Woody Allen’s and Eddie Cantor’s screen personae, writing that the “anti-heroic, anti-romantic Cantor, whose tiny body made him the perfect comic foil for all the physical menaces of life” was a precursor to Allen’s latter explorations of the unmasculine. In his comparison of Cantor’s witty nervousness with Allen’s, Mast concludes that by the mid-1930s, Cantor’s persona was “still small, weak, cowardly, and clumsy, but not at all Jewish”80 But, as I showed in this chapter, Cantor’s on-screen nebbish was more Jewish than Mast and others want to acknowledge, even if his development into a universal nebbish directly influenced Gentile film comics as well. Ironically, the comedic history of the nebbish goes full circle here. Cantor had to downplay the overt references to his Jewish identity, yet he remained a diminutive nebbish on screen, something often heightening the ambiguity of his queered gender performance through desexualization and conflicted racial role-playing. These performances set the stage for the Anglo Bob Hope to adapt the nebbish character into his own comedic style, which, in turn, influences Woody Allen, who reestablishes the Jewishness within the caricature and influences popular Jewish screen comedians such as Albert Brooks and Ben Stiller. In the end, the ethnic origins of the nebbish were simply under the surface waiting to be uncovered as the century progressed, remaining queerly transgressive yet also realigning the performance to its original ethnic roots.

Eddie Cantor’s Assimilation and Influence | 1 0 9

4

Queered Radio / Queered Cinema Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice

The radio audience totaled approximately thirty million, but it really consisted of small family groups. I felt that now I understood the medium. I would play to those small family groups and get them to know me and my family [the cast] as real people with real problems. Exaggerated people, yes, but fundamentally honest and true to life. Jack Benny, from his autobiography

Unlike the other Classic Hollywood stars this book covers, Jack Benny can be unquestionably classified as a radio comedian, a new type of celebrity that emerged in popular culture during the 1930s.1 While Eddie Cantor found major success on the air with The Chase and Sanborn Hour, his celebrity was fostered on the Broadway stage and expanded through his motion pictures in the years before starting his popular program. Benny’s celebrity took a different route that exemplifies his position as an early example of a broadcast star, a figure who was a forerunner to the television comedians of today. Born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago, Benny had worked his way through the ranks of small vaudeville theaters and grew in reputation as a monologist.2 While he had found some initial success on the stage, he never proved the headlining star, as is the case with other figures like Cantor or W. C. Fields. It would be on radio where Benny found his largest audience, establishing a voice and distinctive style as a performer to become one of the largest stars of the period in any medium. The Jack Benny Program (1932–55) can easily be categorized as the most popular and influential radio show of the 1930s, since it redefined 111

many of the classifications of broadcast comedy, privileging character humor over broader gags. This shift in sensibilities dictated approaches to radio and television comedy that came later, directly or indirectly influencing comedy programs ranging from those of Fred Allen to Phil Silvers to Dick Van Dyke to Bob Newhart to Jerry Seinfeld to Tina Fey.3

Eddie Cantor and Jack Benny (1935). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

1 1 2 | c ha p t e r 4

As the opening quotation suggests, Benny proves most significant in the history of broadcasting in that he rethought the very nature of entertainment to fit a changing media environment. Recognizing the move from theater audiences to “small family groups” that radio embraced, the comedian’s show was the first to fully recognize that comedy and characterization needed to take a more intimate approach. As his popular contemporary, Fred Allen, correctly asserted: “Practically all comedy shows on radio owe their structure to Benny’s conceptions. He was the first to recognize that the listener is not in a theater with a thousand other people, but is in a small circle at home.”4 As historian Edward D. Berkowitz suggests, this enriched the broadcast comedy format: “Over time, the program [Benny’s show] became less of a conventional variety show and more of a situation comedy with variety elements. . . . The writers developed distinctive personalities for each of the permanent cast, changing the nature of the jokes.”5 This new direction moved away from vaudevillian clownishness toward something more subtlety personality based. Benny and his writers created a show structure with a cast of regular characters who interacted in ways exemplifying, in Benny’s own words, “exaggerated” yet “fundamentally honest and true to life” personalities. As David Marc summarizes, the Benny show “was a place that a listener could visit rather than attend. If a stage comic’s job had been to dazzle the audience with something rare, the radio comic would depend on a recognizable persona moving through endless variations of habitual themes.”6 Thus far, this book has focused on the well-documented influence of the popular stage, seen within the film comedian’s journey from vaudeville to Broadway to the screen. But what of the influence from the other major competing media of the era—radio? By the 1930s, Broadway revue style shows stayed restricted to major urban centers, such as New York City. Its forerunner, vaudeville, was now a dying stage tradition, replaced not only by a cinema that converted the theaters themselves into movie houses but also the widespread popularity of radio that allowed audiences to hear musical and comedy entertainment at home for free. The period covered in this book represents an entertainment industry in flux and grappling with two major technological revolutions in the forms of radio and sound film.7 The 1930s was an era that embraced the mediated voice, the vocalization and proliferation of celebrity fostered by these changes in media. But unlike other (sub)narratives dictating the history of buffoonish masculinity on screen, the mediated voice as a technological configuration requires us to rethink the comedian as an entity unto himself. True to the medium of radio, it welcomes a reading of the male comic as something ethereal—a vocal performance detached from the body. By examining Benny’s voice as a text unto itself, we can begin to comprehend how the comedian of the era endured as pure personality, a comiJack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 1 3

cally queered body adaptable to multiple mediums. With this freedom, sound technologies facilitated buffoonish masculinity as a representational vision of maleness both of and beyond the screen. Benny’s radio persona became a queered figure, yet one with the ability to serve as a point of identification, even as he performed attributes such as vanity and cheapness meant to be mocked. In short, he is a clear illustration of the comedian as a masochistic performer. Yet unlike the performers discussed thus far, this is a position encouraged by the broadcast medium itself, where the bodiless radio voice could exist within more transcendent and comforting spaces than found in sound cinema. In what follows, I examine The Jack Benny Program on radio as it challenged the boundaries of sexual identification—providing a mocking reflection of “deco dandyism,” an urbane fantasy existence during the Depression era where maleness could now be idealized (and heterosexualized) through behaviors and styles previously identified as queer. In this radio world, such an existence was populated by a lovable variety of male characters othered by race, religion, age, ethnicity, weight, and alcoholism. Such an all-encompassing universe of queered subjectivity on the air creates a more pervasively denaturalized gendered environment than seen on the screen. Benny’s forays into film, where the formal protocols are more rigidly defined as heteronormative, become of particular interest when considering media technologies and buffoonish masculinity. Thus I will also examine two motion pictures where Benny portrays himself (or his radio version of self), Buck Benny Rides Again and Love Thy Neighbor (both 1940), each of which are, to a degree, film adaptations of his popular radio program. Through all these mediums, the voice of Jack Benny exists as a queered text unto itself, floating between the worlds of cinema and radio. It is a voice that illustrates how the auditory and the visual provide different yet entwined venues for the sexual body of the comedian. Queerly selfdeprecating and witty, Benny has an undeniable influence on other comedians as a sexual construct, yet his body is not really the privileged object when defining his cultural significance. Freed from the confines of strictly visual representation, his voice pushes the sexual boundaries of comedy further than did many of his screen contemporaries.

Jack Benny and the Rise of the Mediated Voice In 1934, as his radio show was just starting to successfully experiment with character comedy, Benny discussed his views about the changing nature of popular humor in an interview: “Few may realize it but comedy is going through great changes. The radio and screen have been the primary cause. . . . the comedian has to be on the alert for new material, and as a result, his position is very uncertain.”8 On radio, Benny’s understanding of the need for in1 1 4 | c ha p t e r 4

novation was not always appreciated by the confused financial backers and he moved quickly through various sponsors in a few years in search of an audience, going from Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Chevrolet, General Tire, and, in a last ditch effort, a then little known dessert product called Jell-O. With this final sponsor during the 1934–35 season his popularity soared, climbing from a rating of 22.9 to 35.3 million in a matter of months, ending the decade as the undisputed top-ranked radio star.9 In terms of his roles in sound cinema, before his radio stardom, he starred as a lovable sideshow barker in the low budget The Medicine Man (1931).10 More notably, Benny carried over his reputation as a vaudevillian monologist into the role of master of ceremonies for the plotless The Hollywood Revue of 1929 for MGM, the studio that had the comedian briefly under contract but had difficulty finding vehicles for his talents. Through most of the 1930s after the success of the radio program, his periodic appearances in films were primarily building off this broadcast celebrity, such as his starring role in The Big Broadcast of 1937, an entry in the Paramount film series that showcased popular radio performers. Despite a supporting part in Broadway Melody of 1936 and appearances in other revue format productions, attempting to sell Benny as a bankable leading man was not aggressively pursued until the later part of the decade, with such films for Paramount as Artists and Models (1937), Artists and Models Abroad (1938), and Man About Town (1939). Hollywood obviously took Benny seriously only after his radio persona had been established and the consistently high ratings cemented his popularity. By the end of the decade, producers were approaching him to make cinematic adaptations of his radio program with Buck Benny Rides Again and Love Thy Neighbor, paving the way for him to eventually foray into more prestigious comedy films like To Be or Not to Be and George Washington Slept Here (both 1942). In many ways, this career trajectory mirrors the rise of the mediated voice itself in Hollywood, as Benny began with minor film roles defining his “uncertain position,” only to be embraced later as a new kind of sound performer to be integrated into narrative comedies. Film’s transition to sound during the late 1920s to the early ’30s represents a historical landscape defined by multiple technological, economic, and social factors that moved Hollywood toward an even more cohesive capitalist system. While some have often viewed the transition to talking pictures as a period of uncertainty for the studios, the transition also showed how Hollywood was impressively adaptive to the desires of the consumer. As Donald Crafton suggests in his detailed history of the transition: “Eager customers were shouting for a new item, and the vendors were having difficulty keeping up with demand. The crowd clamored for some articles (for example, the filmed revue) but quickly changed its mind, leaving the supplier overstocked. . . . Hollywood, like the canniest and most prosperous merchant Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 1 5

in the bazaar, tried to hedge by covering all the positions, anticipating future demand, and trying to satisfy everyone (thus offering a great diversity of films and genres during the transition).”11 With Benny’s initial foray into sound cinema as the master of ceremonies in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, we see how one of the industry’s earliest inclinations to adapt to the new technology was to turn to the Broadway stage for inspiration, making revue-like productions or adaptations of shows like Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927) and Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee! (1930). Beyond the search for source material, the initial demand for sound cinema also generally promoted stage performers over many established silent stars. This was something recognized in an April 1930 Photoplay article that boldly proclaimed, “With the [silent] stars dead on their feet, the talkies lashed out. And horrible was their slaughter. Hundreds of young stage stars came whooping in.”12 Benny’s assertion of the “uncertain position” for comedians makes sense as stage performers working from established and repeatable routines found the screen world now promoting and asking them to consistently produce new and profitable entertainment. But this is not to suggest that the transition to sound cinema was something Hollywood truly misunderstood or mishandled. Even if they struggled early on to find new types of talking genres, as an economic venture the transition proved relatively fluid (occurring within a matter of a few years) and economically fruitful. Growth in profits were phenomenal with, from 1928 through 1929, such studios as Paramount profits growing 78 percent, Fox 59 percent, and (the first to fully embrace sound) Warner Bros. growing a remarkable 609 percent.13 In short, as Douglas Gomery suggests, “Profits skyrocketed and the motion picture monopoly capitalists expanded, absorbed other firms, and concentrated and centralized power into four large units.”14 Hollywood as a capitalist model grew and centralized due to sound technology, making the production machine well oiled. In terms of aesthetics, this move also solidified what now is classified as the Classic Hollywood style. In The Classic Hollywood Cinema, David Bordwell argues that the transition did little to change visual storytelling techniques than simply confirm it through “adjustments in film style” by adding sound technologies to an established model.15 As Alan Williams contends, adding to Bordwell’s assertion, “If sync sound did not fundamentally change the textuality of Hollywood films, it arguably did make the system stronger and more normative.”16 Sync sound’s ability to strengthen a “normative” storytelling structure can be seen in the history of the comedian comedy as a genre during the decade. In the early 1930s, with productions like Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee! and Palmy Days (1931), uncertainty over sound had studios embrace revue-inspired productions from Broadway that were, in Henry Jenkins’s phrasing, “anarchistic” in structure.17 But as will be seen in later chapters, this impulse does not routinely define the narrative worlds of 1 1 6 | c ha p t e r 4

comedian films as the decade continued. Studios systematically found ways to quickly produce B-level comedian movies, which were marked by standard genre-spoofing story structures. Benny’s career does not exactly take this route, since he is less classifiable as a sound-era movie comedian than a radio comedian who sometimes made motion pictures. With radio, the spread of the mediated voice was something distinctly different from sound cinema. While the talking picture was a profound change in American media, radio’s rise was something much more monumental and, initially, mysterious. After all, cinema is historically identifiable as a replacement for vaudeville stage performances, but never had such performances been beamed directly into homes before. As Michele Hilmes writes, the invention with its ethereal voices was initially embraced as “a mysterious technology, a wonder machine calling up voices from the void, [which] allowed technological bedazzlement to overshadow potential social and economic implications.”18 That being said, by the 1930s, the industrial implications of radio would forever alter the American landscape. Bruce Lenthall’s study of radio during the Depression suggests this media revolution helped to define our modern conception of mass culture, opening up the world to listeners within their homes. The radio boom began in the early 1920s, with enormous growth in sales ending with 40 percent of families having a set by 1930. By 1940, nearly 90 percent of families had radios, a more common product than cars or telephones. And much like the movie industry was centralizing its means of production, so was radio with listeners preferring programs on national networks to local ones by a ratio of nearly nine to one.19 Even while cinema dealt more explicitly with releasing specific films to regional markets, millions of listeners heard the same program on the same day in multiple markets, a revolution of media that is arguably more profound. While radio was opening new worlds for listeners, Jack Benny’s observation on the medium proves correct. This embracement of mass culture was approached as something intimate by the public through their “small family units” or by themselves. The intimacy of the medium is what truly differentiates it from any prior technology, allowing on-air personalities to “visit” the public on a weekly or daily basis. As Jason Loviglio suggests, historically, radio emerged as “an apparatus that dissolved and then reconstituted the distinctions between public and private and fractured these vague terms into their often overlapping, contradictory parts.”20 The “space” the broadcast medium created was public in its expansiveness but redefining the private in its engagement with the individual listener, usually through a vocal standardization a known celebrity established. The most famous example of this phenomenon would be Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appeals to the American public on an individualized basis to explain complicated public policy, an approach he innovatively tackJack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 1 7

led through his “fireside chat” radio broadcasts. As Bruce Lenthall writes, “In forging connections with radio voices, many listeners blurred the line between the public and the private in their lives, enabling them to find in the public mass medium of radio the same types of support they once might have found in face-to-face communities.” Lenthall’s examples of these connections appeal to forms of authority, suggesting that “with relationships on the air, listeners found information, personal advice, connections to far-off authorities, and expert guidance.”21 But Benny’s vocal standardization as a broadcaster represents something different in his relationship with the audience. His personalized connections often proved relatable through embracing common human flaws, exposing disruptions with authority as opposed to providing a truly authoritative voice. Coming from a background as a vaudevillian monologist, his comedy continued a tradition of verbal humor (quick and filled with wordplay) that existed as a form of “linguistic slapstick.” Designated as key to understanding the transition between popular stage and radio comedy, Susan J. Douglas characterizes this humor as speaking “especially to working-class men, to their frustrated ambitions and wounded pride, their respect and need for quick-wittedness.” While established on the stage, the technological innovation of radio “ensured that wordplay would be enshrined as a central cultural feature of American life at midcentury.”22 In a variation on this phenomenon, along with his own verbal humor, one of the most consistent elements of Benny’s persona is the continual deflation of ego. Even if he was the “star” (and representative “authority” figure) on his own show, the comedian often placed himself as the butt of “linguistic slapstick,” wicked barbs about everything ranging from his age to his looks to his cheapness to his sentimentality to his lack of education to his sexual inadequacy. As Michele Hilmes suggests, “Benny’s persona developed and remained consistent as the transgressive, but seemingly unassailable authority figure. Jack comically violated all the norms of American masculinity.”23 In fact, it is difficult to think of an entertainer who more actively set himself up to public degradation for comedy, something noted as a comedic motif of the show even by the reviewers of the era. An October 8, 1941, Weekly Variety review complains about the program’s increasing tendency to “represent the star unattractively” as it pushes the limits of taste and the reviewer’s patience: “the program has made sport of his [Benny’s] supposed stinginess and his fancied prowess as a lady killer.” Yet even as this exasperated reviewer notes, regardless of his persona on the air as “a fool or has-been,” Benny created a “dividends-producing characterization” that appealed to the popular masses.24 While this might seem inexplicable, Benny understood that through being a degraded figure, the au-

1 1 8 | c ha p t e r 4

dience only formed a stronger relationship with him by identifying their own faults. In his autobiography, Benny tells of the pinnacle of this comic victimization in the form of a write-in contest on his show, pitched by the youngest member of his writing staff, George Balzer. The contest had listeners write on the topic of “I Can’t Stand Jack Benny Because . . . ” The comedian first showed a very brief reluctance to the idea: “I knew if we went through with this idea it would be the most extreme limit to which I had ever carried the masochism bit.” Despite these reservations, Benny ultimately said the “hell with public relations and images” and the contest went on as planned.25 Ironically, this masochism bit proved nothing more than how much the audience adored the comedian. The show expected “at the most there would be twenty thousand letters,” but instead, the network had to hire a staff of twelve women to sort out the staggering 277,000 letters they received in just six weeks. The best illustration of what Benny’s popularity meant to a wider audience appears in the winning essay for the contest, by Mr. Carroll P. Craig Sr.: He fills the air with boasts and brags And obsolete obnoxious gags. The way he plays his violin Is music’s most obnoxious sin. His cowardice alone, indeed, Is matched by his obnoxious greed. In all the things that he portrays He shows up my own obnoxious ways.26

Craig’s words provide insight into the only reasonable explanation for the ritual-like devotion by millions of male fans. Benny’s supposedly lacking character traits were meant to define him as an accessible representative male subject. For the male population, he could “show-up” their own “obnoxious ways,” their failures to live up to masculine ideals. Benny was thereby right to define his humor as the masochism bit—characterizing his persona as a real point of possibly painful identification for many male listeners. This identification was different from the appeal of his sound cinema contemporaries in that his mediated voice was based in a bodiless medium. At the height of radio’s popularity in 1936, Rudolf Arnheim suggested that an ideal broadcast personality was a type of “bodiless” voice, where “certain expressive voices do not strike the naive listener as ‘the voice of somebody one doesn’t see’ and whose appearance can be speculated on, but rather the experience of an absolutely complete personality.”27 While this view of a completely ethereal vocal performer feels aligned with the mystic connotations of early radio Hilmes Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 1 9

discusses, it proves antithetical to the appeal of many radio comedies, where imagining the physicality—the body size, sex, ethnicity, and race—of performers became crucial for many of the jokes to make sense. As Benny explains, “In radio we used to have what I once coined a good phrase for, namely, ‘picture jokes.’  ”28 These were gags dependent upon the listener imagining a physical body attached to the voice or having the humor based in the referenced bodies within an imagined space. In both these approaches, the humor plays upon the ridiculousness of the visual image created in the listener’s mind. Benny provides a good example of this technique with the appearance of regular guest stars Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume and a gag revolving around the show’s band. The couple is dining and Colman asks, “Benita, have you ever happened to notice Phil Harris’s musicians?” She responds, “Please Ronnie, not while I am eating.”29 As Benny writes, “This crack got one of the loudest and longest laughs from our studio audience and yet it wasn’t the cleverness of the joke that did it. . . . As soon as Benita Hume spoke her line, the audience called up in their minds’ eye the image of a crowd of unshaven, badly dressed, unshowered, stinking, drunken saxophone players and trumpeters.” To Benny, “this was the best picture joke we ever did,” since it was based on years of establishing the imagined bodies of the musicians as slovenly and disgusting, a reoccurring joke on the program.30 Benny’s example proves most fascinating in that it relates to the response of the studio audience that saw before them at the broadcast the actual band whose appearance was usually in well-tailored suits and, generally, neat. But by this point of the program’s run, the imagined bodies of the musicians had gained such importance that the physical reality of them in the studio meant little to the show’s fans. Benny’s program excelled in multiple examples of this sort of comedy that developed over years of cultivating not only the personalities of characters but their unseen bodies as well. These ranged from references to Benny’s supposed toupee, age, and unmasculine body to other cast members’ distinctive physical characteristics. Despite basing much of his radio humor in such picture jokes, Benny’s popularity definitely relates to Arnheim’s contention that the ideal radio voice was “an absolute complete personality.”31 Portraying, by all accounts, a Gentile or, at the very least, ethnically neutral man on radio, the Jewish-born Benny is an example of the assimilative “whitefaced” performances already seen with Eddie Cantor in the previous chapter. Although this assimilative drive is much less, since Benny never was famous for portraying his ethnicity onstage. While his ethnic background was as identifiably immigrant as Cantor, with Benny’s father fleeing the Russian anti-Jewish pogroms as a small boy, his family’s history was a more adaptive American success story. The Kubelskys opened their own business in the Chicago-area town of Waukegan, Illinois.32 To a listening pub1 2 0 | c ha p t e r 4

lic, Benny’s manner and, more important, speaking voice never was too easily identifiable as Jewish, accented more by an American midwestern twang as opposed to the New York dialect of many of his contemporaries. While it might be tempting to read Benny’s two most famous character traits—his cheapness and poor violin playing—as anti-Semitic caricatures, his immigrant roots were rarely, if ever, mentioned on the radio show or any other medium.33 Instead, his upbringing in Waukegan was usually referenced as something, more-or-less, all-American, a comedy-filled and ethnically neutral childhood.34 The Benny voice thereby remained an ambiguous conception, one that audiences could imagine in different terms than the clearly ethnic comedians of the era, a quality implying queer potentials. His vocal performance was something listeners met without necessarily a complete picture of his physical body in mind, since he began to only regularly appear in films at the decade’s end. For most of the 1930s, his mediated voice, a detached entity unto itself, was the celebrity.35 This lack of bodily attachment at least partly defined his popularity. Michel Chion discusses the pleasure of voice when removed from the image of the body in cinema in decisively maternal terms. Expanding from Denis Vasse’s theories of the mother’s voice, Chion suggests that “the voice could imaginarily take up the role of an umbilical cord as a nurturing connection. . . . Clearly when the voice is heard separate from the body—i.e., in a regressive situation—it can play this role most easily.”36 Beyond the representative, the broadcast voice has the ability to suggest the familial and comfortable, something embodied by the warm midwestern tones of Benny’s speech patterns. The concept of a bodiless voice as regressive is something Amy Lawrence also explores; she suggests the recorded or broadcast voice as closing a gap between the listener and the gendered other: “Sound, especially as discussed here in reference to recordings and radio, can provide the illusion of repairing the split by reincorporating the other.”37 In this sense, radio broadcast can exist in terms of representative space, suggesting an illusionary comfortable location for listeners. Within this bodiless world, Benny’s radio show allowed for a distance from the bodily image of the queer performer since such an image was stigmatized by the social order. The major difference between the rise of the mediated voice on screen and on the air can therefore be characterized as the difference between the “voiced body” in film and the “embodied voice” on radio. Hollywood evolved its classical structure to adapt to sound, a technological and economically savvy addition that moved the industry toward a more cohesive and streamlined production model—a history that can be characterized as “adding voice to body.” In contrast, the spread of radio celebrity is more relatable to Roland Barthes’s reading of the “grain” of a voice, which he famously relates to a nearly indecipherable significance found in effective singing. Barthes’s definition can Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 2 1

move beyond music because it characterizes an individualized embodied element of voice found in vocal performance. In a direct reference to the bodily, he writes that the “   ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.”38 Such a distinction leaves us with a puzzling question when considering Jack Benny, a performer representative of radio’s larger influence upon buffoonish masculinity on screen. What happens when we introduce a broadcast (or purely vocal) celebrity into this history? As Rick Altman contends, “In order to understand Hollywood’s conversion to sound we must grasp the many ways in which Hollywood attempted to model cinema sound on other existing uses of sound.”39 Outside of the popular stage, the rise of radio as mass media was central in defining a new type of verbal performer, a position Benny exemplified. To understand how Hollywood adapted radio voices to fit its own structures, let us first examine the (bodiless) radio world of Benny as it challenged gendered and sexual classifications.

Jack Benny and His Queered Radio World: The Jack Benny Program Throughout the early years of his radio show, Jack Benny was most innovative in the way he fostered a supporting cast that would eventually define the structure of the program for the remainder of its run. In 1932, when his wife, Sadie Marks, proved popular in a guest appearance as the character Mary Livingstone, she was added as a permanent cast member playing the wisecracking platonic friend to the comedian and later legally adopted the name. In 1934, Don Wilson found popularity as his announcer, who often served as a straight man, but later developed as an oversensitive (and overweight) slave to the sponsor. In 1936, Phil Harris joined as bandleader and became one of the show’s most popular characters, a hard-drinking and oversexed lush with a boisterous disposition that conflicted with Benny’s easily aggravated personality. Later, replacing singer Kenny Baker, Irish tenor Dennis Day joined the ensemble as an innocent, yet dim-witted mama’s boy. After a popular guest appearance as a train porter, Eddie Anderson was added as Rochester Van Jones, Benny’s African American valet. At the center of this universe was Benny, whose persona evolved into one of the most complex of comedic creations as he adopted a variety of supposedly “unlikable” characteristics over the years, such as cheapness, effeminacy, vanity, bitterness, and sexual inadequacy. There were also regular appearances by recurring characters encompassing different gendered and ethnic types, including being coded as Frenchmen, Jews, homosexuals, and the working classes. Despite this colorful world of characters, the radio show is not a situation comedy in the same sense that the genre would later develop into as the sitcom on television. Instead, the program’s dynamics 1 2 2 | c ha p t e r 4

among the members of the radio cast ultimately existed as part of a strange metavariety show with Benny as the star. There were songs and sketches, but the program’s actual popularity grew out of the repartee of the cast members between such increasingly minor diversions.40 With its diverse collection of characters from various racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, the series served as a comic exploration of multiple national anxieties of the era. As an undeniably profound popular culture product of its time, the question remains what such diversity meant to a listening audience. Margaret McFadden suggests the following in her article on the show: By presenting a group of unrelated people as an unspoken family, the show allowed for the safe and humorous exploration of issues of family life, particularly ones raised by changes in economics and gender roles. The show represented financial fears of listeners and modeled responses that reassured the audience. . . . Similarly, the show portrayed a variety of forms of masculinity in a positive light and thereby shored up the selfesteem of men whose family authority was shaken by the widespread economic distress.41

In this reading, the status quo is reaffirmed through the program since it presented an idealized “managed” social order among its diverse cast. In short, in Rochester’s own phrasing, Benny as a white male was “boss” to the rest of the characters. McFadden presents a variety of comic depictions from the show based in Depression- and World War II–era economic and family-based anxieties, explaining how the broadcasts had to seem “polysemic” in order to appeal to a diverse audience of various classes and ethnicities. While “messages supporting white male dominance and consumerism were always present,” these meanings were not always “received intact by the ‘negotiating’ audience.”42 McFadden essentially suggests the show as a hegemonic cultural product, even if its popular reception allowed for more selective audience responses that considered its ambiguous ethnic, class, and gender messages in their own ways. While audience subjectivity is undeniable when considering any piece of popular culture, The Jack Benny Program has also been read as something much less “polysemic”—existing, instead, as textually more single-minded in its queered representations of maleness. Alexander Doty suggests Jack Benny and, more specifically, the interactions of the cast as nonconformist, making the show the focus of a chapter in his groundbreaking Making Things Perfectly Queer. Not surprisingly, there is a radical stance in Doty’s reading of the radio show as anything but status quo, writing that “Jack Benny was actually America’s favorite fag,” since “patriarchal cultures can’t comfortably support for very Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 2 3

long the paradox of a straight male with mannerisms traditionally coded as feminine.”43 This contextualization of Benny as homosexualized has much to do with the cast dynamics of his radio show, which to modern listeners often sounds surprising in its nonconventional gendered and sexual dynamics. The program can easily be read as queered within its quirky exchanges between its mostly male cast members—all of whom eschew idealized “straight” masculinity in significant ways, especially Benny with his vanity, haughtiness, and lack of masculine prowess. Phil Harris’s hypersexualized lush with a “feminine” obsession with appearance, Dennis Day’s attachment to his mother, and Don Wilson’s oversensitivity also help to feed a queer reading of the show. Most significantly, Eddie Anderson, as Benny’s caretaker, had the strongest of domestic bonds to his “boss” as a type of protowife. Even with the inclusion of the perpetually single Mary, this all-male atmosphere, filled with catty remarks, only heightens the perceived homoeroticism of the show in later years. As Doty suggests, by “the mid-1940s, many of Benny’s radio programs begin to sound like early versions of [Mart Crowley’s] The Boys in the Band, with Mary Livingstone as the token witty ‘fag hag.’  ”44 In a sense, McFadden’s and Doty’s readings both have merit in that Benny’s show is an example of queerness reacting to the particular popular culture landscape of the period. When understanding it as a reaction to Depressionera fantasies of attainment, the program emerges as undeniably queer as well as a reaction to something mainstream. Providing an alternative to the hypermasculinity found in gangster and other “tough guy” genres, many 1930s films supported different depictions of maleness through their urbane fantasies of wealth and sophistication. While certainly not defining all movies in the genres, the musical and screwball comedy often exemplify Richard Dyer’s influential “utopian” reading of the musical as a response to “specific inadequacies of society,” providing “the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide.”45 Within such films, upper-class sophistication was a desirable trait in many popular stars, a rejection of the tougher male myths the “cult of masculinity” perpetuated earlier in the century. Dubbing these figures “deco dandies,” Drew Todd explores this modernist reconfiguration of the Victorian fop as an “emblem of the modern age, he preferred the ballroom, nightclub, and penthouse to the jungle, desert, or office; cocktails and champagne to beer; lovers to wives.”46 The cinema’s first sound decade found such dandies, with their verbal wit, an appealing way to highlight now hearing the movie star with figures like William Powell, Leslie Howard, Ronald Coleman, Bing Crosby, and Fred Astaire. Such 1930s figures are also an example of sound cinema continuing the complex integrations of modern and preindustrial masculinities that were already under way during the silent era. As Gaylyn Studlar shows in This Mad 1 2 4 | c ha p t e r 4

Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone (1937).

Masquerade, the 1920s found cinema creating complex interplays between earlier rugged depictions of maleness (such as found with action star Douglas Fairbanks) and eroticized matinee idols (seen in such sex symbols as John Barrymore and Rudolph Valentino).47 These negotiations were the result of a noted change in attendance as “the screen’s structuring of male sexuality in the 1920s for a cultish female film audience involved a complex transformative adaptation of existing cultural discourses on the male body dating from the nineteenth century,” essentially continuing the reaffirmations of male aggresJack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 2 5

siveness of the previous generations. As seen particularly with the heavy sexualization of Valentino, the decade also challenged gendered protocols “in ways that changed as they incorporated newly emergent discourses on women’s sexuality and its effect on gender relations in the Jazz Age.”48 Along with Studlar’s examples, these cinematic negotiations appealed to issues beyond feminine sexuality by the decade’s end as on-screen masculinity also incorporated queered personae by conveying an urbane Jazz Age wit. This certainly was the case with William “Billy” Haines. While his open homosexuality eventually ended his acting career, his on-screen persona (before being let go by MGM) appropriated witty queered maleness in such silent films as Spring Fever (1927), West Point (1928), The Smart Set (1928), and Show People (1928) before transitioning to sound with Alias Jimmy Valentine (1928). As biographer William J. Mann suggests, Haines’s persona was not only as a romantic lead but also as the urbane “wisecracker”—“his own (and the media’s) cute code word for queer.”49 As such Jazz Age figures show, the period was challenging masculine sexuality on all fronts on screen, transgressions that set the stage for the sound era’s embracement of the (vocally) witty deco dandy. Despite representing a queered alternative to other masculine depictions, by the 1930s, the deco dandy was often aggressively heterosexualized in movies to offset his “soft” or “unmanly” character traits, since his wit and obsession with a well-dressed appearance could be read as homosexual. Todd suggests that as Hollywood cinema “became the epitome of mainstream culture, the reinforcement of normative values has been standard practice,” therefore the characters were often shown to be hyperheterosexual in their pursuit of women.50 On The Jack Benny Program, the weekly activities of a vain though witty wealthy celebrity living in Beverly Hills certainly had its escapist appeals to the Depression-era audiences in the same manner as the urbane Powell or Colman. But if we are to adhere to Todd’s classifications, Benny’s radio persona and the supporting cast are not really deco dandies. Benny’s persona can be read as an “unsuccessful” deco dandy, whose attempts at wit and sophistication are never counterbalanced by “getting the girl.” Existing in the bodiless medium of radio, his dandy often pushes the boundaries of sexual identity further than his film counterparts. He never disavows queerness through the heterosexually aggressive behavior seen in on-screen dandies. In other words, the on-air Benny was continually unsuccessful sexually, something the comedian writes about rather cryptically in his autobiography: “I [his fictional self] didn’t dare make a pass at a beautiful woman. Oh, I made believe I was Don Juan.”51 This lack of success often results in Benny trying to heterosexualize himself as a great lover only to be dismissed by his cast, often in very queer terms. For example, on a November 27, 1938, broadcast, both Phil and Mary mock Benny’s boasts that he might star in a production of 1 2 6 | c ha p t e r 4

Romeo and Juliet. Harris cracks, “You couldn’t be a flower pot on the balcony.” Mary adds, “With my nightgown, you could be Juliet.” Often, Benny’s physical appearance was characterized through “picture jokes” as a lesser male specimen. On a May 10, 1942, broadcast, Phil says of a shirtless Jack, “Get a load of that chest! It’s the only skin hammock I ever saw!” The on-air Benny was also extremely jealous of Phil, who would often have multiple dates in one evening and frequent phone calls from beautiful women. Doty suggests, despite the aggressive heterosexualizing of Harris, the radio program cast him as “female” and “Jack’s most overtly gay compatriot and rival” through numerous jokes about his obsessions with personal appearance.52 In truth, Harris resembles the deco dandy as Todd classified, whose queerness was overtly offset by aggressive heterosexualization. As dandies, both characters made numerous jokes based on their obsessions over physical appearance, but Benny’s lack of womanly contact implies a definite queerer contrast since he fails to “legitimize” the urbane dandy as properly straight. Ultimately, the male/male pairing on the show that warrants the most attention is the Benny and Rochester relationship. In his autobiography, Benny addresses some of the racist origins of the character, stating that Rochester “conformed to many of the traits of the stock Negro stereotype,” such as playing craps and drinking gin.53 After World War II and the news of Nazi Germany’s horrific genocides, the Jewish-born Benny supposedly viewed ethnic and racial humor as more damaging than in previous decades. As he recounts, the show “would no longer allow Rochester to say or do anything that an audience would consider degrading to the dignity of a modern Afro-American.”54 Despite such noble sentiments and some definite challenges to the popular stereotypes of the day, it is difficult to read Rochester as a truly equal character, as he still reflects problematic racial hierarchies. He is always associated with domestic duties as opposed to being integrated with the white cast. But as Benny correctly writes, “even in the days when he played the most negative stereotyped minstrel character, Rochester was never a servile, supplicating Stepin Fetchit. I was as much the fall guy for Rochester as I was for Phil Harris or Mary Livingstone.”55 In this manner, the development of the character on the show is (at least partly) something more akin to black humor for black audiences through its comic targeting of the white employer. As Lawrence W. Levine writes in Black Culture and Black Consciousness, the employment of stereotypes in this vein at times could be effective “in exposing the absurdity of the American racial system and in releasing pent-up black aggression toward it.”56 But even with Eddie Anderson throwing wisecracks at Benny, unlike the relationship with the rest of the cast, the most fascinating aspect of Rochester remains his closeness to his employer both on and beyond the show. As Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 2 7

Thomas Cripps suggests, this pairing illustrates the economic fate of many black performers who were inevitably tied to famous white performers like Lincoln Perry as Stepin Fetchit with Will Rogers and, most notably, Bill Robinson with Shirley Temple. Rochester’s link to Benny was something even more profound, since “Eddie Anderson seemed so centered in Jack Benny’s act as to seem the cause of Benny’s success.”57 While this is debatable, at the very least, the perceived closeness certainly helped to greatly facilitate Benny’s popularity, so much so that Anderson was made a regular on the program and costarred in multiple films with his radio employer. The most common reading of Benny and Rochester has suggested them as a queered domestic partnership, though to what degree is often disagreed upon. In Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester, Joseph Boskin devotes a considerable amount of attention to the relationship, positing it as a classic “odd male couple” who existed as “surrogate spouses,” yet managed to evolve during their radio and television run to “become a racially liberated, aging couple who also managed to avoid the stigma of gayness.”58 To Doty, this reading is dismissive, since by the mid1940s, the Rochester and Benny relationship had developed into something much more overtly marriage-like as it “worked itself out within the complicated comic and dramatic narrative tensions . . . combined elements of domestic sitcom parody, or combined with moments of interracial male erotic tenderness,” as Rochester tended to Jack when sick, put him to bed, drew his bath, laid out his clothes, and often served as his giggling confidant.59 The queerness of Benny and Rochester’s relationship significantly served as a central component queering Benny himself in the public’s mind. If the comedian proves an unsuccessful deco dandy, his lack of heterosexualization can best be seen in the domestication that Rochester came to represent. As McFadden suggests, the two characters “construct a satisfying homelife without women.”60 The humor of the relationship was often based on how it allowed Benny to live without a woman in his life, while Rochester had multiple girlfriends away from work. Benny thereby domesticated the racial hierarchies represented in the white employer / black employee relationship to the extent of erasing the need for women within his own household. As Rochester once complained on a May 3, 1942, broadcast, “Boss, anyone whose contract reads, ‘Till Death do us part’ fits that category [wife].” In this manner, the racial hierarchy is positioned to reflect (and subvert) the heterosexual definition of marriage—the “dominant” white as husband and the “subservient” black as female. The program might position the African American as protowife, yet, notably, Rochester is also the more heterosexualized of the pairing, thus the relationship can be read as queering the white protohusband by mocking his inability to domesticate in a “traditional” fashion.

1 2 8 | c ha p t e r 4

As all these interactions suggest, Benny’s comedy pushes the boundaries of sexual identity further than does many of his on-screen contemporaries, going beyond simply denaturalizing masculine protocols to promote a real emotional bond between Jack and Rochester. Yet it must be acknowledged that his and his cast’s existence as mediated voices had much to do with them being comparatively transgressive. Within the bodiless yet comfortingly intimate spaces of radio, such gender performances could exist without the need of narrative resolution. In contrast, sound cinema perpetuated the Classic Hollywood story structure that usually progressed toward heterosexual domestication (i.e., marriage or, at the very least, a male character “getting the girl”). Its deco dandies could not be as queered as Jack Benny on the air, something that becomes problematic when Hollywood finally decides to make the comedian an above-the-title movie star. In 1940, during the height of his show’s popularity, Benny starred in two well-publicized productions that were essentially film versions of his program. In April, Paramount released Buck Benny Rides Again, which featured much of his cast in an adaptation of a popular reoccurring sketch from the show featuring Benny as an ineffectual cowboy. A few months later, the same studio released Love Thy Neighbor, a film inspired by his popular on-air feud with comedian Fred Allen. Significantly, Benny played himself in both these productions—or, to be more accurate, the persona established on the radio as “Jack Benny.” Conceptually, the two films are examples of cinema being created as an addition to preexisting vocal characterizations, providing a clear illustration of buffoonish masculinity as a media convergence with radio.

Queered Radio on Film: Buck Benny Rides Again and Love Thy Neighbor Buck Benny Rides Again (1940) depicts Benny making fictitious boasts on his broadcasts about “roughing it” as a real cowboy he-man. While romantically pursuing an attractive singer, Joan Cameron (Ellen Drew), the comedian gets wrapped up in his own web of lies, which results in him having to spend his summer at a Nevada ranch in a ruse to prove himself as a rough and manly cowboy. The film costars much of his radio cast, including Eddie Anderson, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, frequent guest star Andy Devine, and, briefly, Don Wilson. It opens by asserting a definite radio-influenced aesthetic. Immediately after the Paramount logo, the film dissolves into a tight medium shot of announcer Wilson standing behind a radio microphone and declaring: “And now ladies and gentlemen, we bring you that rugged hero of the great outdoors, that strong silent sphinx of the prairie, that man among men where men are men.” The film then dissolves into a traditional title card, which Wilson reads for the audience over the soundtrack: “Jack Benny in Buck Benny Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 2 9

Rides Again.” When it cuts back to Wilson with a radio script in hand, Benny stands beside him, dressed in a similar snazzy tux and a large-rimmed cowboy hat. With a smug look of false modesty, he says, “Oh Don, please.” Wilson goes on to read the content of the next title card, which lists the supporting cast, excitedly exclaiming at the end, “And Rochester!” To which, upon cutting back to the two shot, Benny cracks, “You don’t have to shout it, Don.” Wilson looks squarely into the camera and proclaims, without the cut to a title card, “Together with the radio voices of Mary Livingstone, yours truly, Don Wilson, and Fred Allen.” Playing off the popular radio feud, Benny peevishly turns to Wilson and exclaims, “Fred Allen!” Then, turning to the camera as he exits, Benny sneers, “So long, folks.” The point of such an innovative and truly cross-media opening is to have the audience recognize the film as a continuation of the radio show, even to the point of crediting the “radio voices” as embodied costars. It establishes this connection by having as the first screen image radio announcer Wilson, who is a celebrity based almost solely in the effect of his voice. In the manner of the radio show, Wilson proceeds to introduce Benny through an ironic listing of manly characteristics typical to the cowboy hero, basically using the words “man” and “men” in a repetitive rhythm to comically establish the image of the overdressed Benny in his ridiculous cowboy hat. The point of the opening is to add a comical queered body to the preexisting mediated voice of Benny, which the audience preacknowledges as not representative of these descriptions. The comedian then continues to confirm many of the traits typical of him on the radio by performing jokes similarly heard in broadcasts, mainly referencing his “feminine” false modesty, his diva-like jealousy of other cast members, and his dislike of radio rival Allen. These are not for the audience to necessarily judge—since such traits do not come as a surprise to fans—but for them to embrace as some kind of familiar and comfortable (queer) old friend. All of this establishes how the film conforms to a radio-influenced aesthetic that becomes most evident in the introduction of popular radio regulars. For example, a shot of a high-dollar dandyish apartment with nobody present is accompanied by the off-screen voice of Rochester as he washes Carmichael (Benny’s pet polar bear, an established gag from his radio program). We hear a nervous Rochester joke, in a witty and then very timely gag, “Let go of me. Remember, we got a nonaggression pact!” The film finally cuts to inside the bathroom with the “polar bear” sitting within an ice-filled bathtub as the scene introduces the bodies as accompanying the established voice of Rochester and even the familiar growl of Carmichael. The introduction of another regular highlights the queered masculinity of the radio show, if only in a watered-down version for the motion picture audience. The first appearance of Phil Harris continues some very typically 1 3 0 | c ha p t e r 4

dandyish characterizations. Once again, the scene finds another crafty way to introduce the body image of Harris as Rochester answers the door and addresses the unseen body positioned out of frame with, “Hello, Mr. Harris.” Phil, ever the aggressor of the radio show, marches into the frame and places his hat into Rochester’s hand. The camera swiftly follows his body as he walks across the room and exclaims, “Hiya Roch. Hiya Jackson. How’s the boy?” Surprisingly, the film quickly goes into what, on radio, would have existed as a “picture joke.” Jack says, “Hello Philsy. Say, how do you keep that gorgeous marcel in this weather?” Phil cracks, “I use a washboard for a pillow.” Jack says, “Oh. You ought to keep your face off it.” Unlike on radio, Harris’s hair exists to visually punctuate the joke, with its humor based on numerous references to the bandleader’s obsessions with grooming that were established on the air. A more perplexing employment of radio aesthetics appears in, to use Don Wilson’s words, “the radio voices” of Livingstone and Allen. Fred Allen’s voice emerges primarily to continue the popular radio feud and further attack Benny’s claims of being a western he-man. We see Benny angrily pacing before his radio, listening to the voice of his rival as it sneers: “That’s what they tell me. Jack Benny’s going out west and roughing it . . . Benny’s idea of roughing it is to go two days without a manicure.” The film then cuts to Joan Cameron and her friends listening to Benny’s program. We hear Jack, Don, and Mary discuss Allen’s attacks toward Benny’s masculinity. Mockingly positioning Benny into a feminine role, as she often did on radio, Mary suggests that Jack has bought “a sidesaddle” for his trip out west. The film adds the visual apparatus of a radio set within the frame in these scenes, a reference to the intimacy afforded by the medium now added as a type of buffer within the diegetic space. Tellingly, the most feminized aspersions to Benny’s weak masculinity appear in this buffered venue. Unlike other verbal gags in the film, which are not nearly as gender specific, the viewer hears accusations of Benny having his nails done and riding a woman’s saddle. Adapting such feminine characteristics into visual gags would have been too aggressively gender defying for a Breen-era studio production. But through the buffer of radio, the film could present the provocatively queered humor as purely verbal jokes safely distanced from the bodily image. As this cross-media influence suggests, Benny’s voice feels not necessarily related to the apparatus of cinema but to the radio medium where fantasy spaces cushion his program’s queerer characteristics. When Benny’s body is used as a point of localization for his voice on screen, it often accompanies an awkward textual position as a type of posed comedy object. This occurs as Benny disguises himself as a cowboy on “real cowboy” Andy Devine’s ranch in Nevada.61 In one scene, Devine rides his horse up to the ranch house, yelling upon his arrival, “Hey Buck! Hey Buck!”—his standard radio nickname for Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 3 1

Benny and, at the time, a catchphrase closely associated with the character actor’s scratchy voice. The film cuts to a shot of the open ranch door, where Benny swaggers out wearing a queered cowboy outfit consisting of a large brimmed cowboy hat, a leather vest, and chaps, both of which are extravagantly embroidered with metal studs in the patterns of stars. Benny looks up to the offcamera Devine and, adopting a deep manly bravado, asks, “Well, Andy, How do I look?” The scene cuts to Devine erupting into his distinctively scratchy laugh. As Devine gets off the horse, Benny explains, “You know, Andy, I thought since I am supposed to be owner of this ranch, I might as well dress the part.” Later in the scene, the off-screen voice of Rochester is heard singing, “I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande. And my legs ain’t bowed and my cheeks ain’t tanned. I am a cowboy who ain’t never seen a cow.” As Rochester sings, the film cuts to the ranch house door again; Eddie Anderson emerges wearing a large hat, a shiny shirt, and a vest with a black and white design resembling a Holstein cow. As the camera follows him into a three shot with Benny and Devine, Andy erupts into his distinctive laughter once again. As Devine exits the scene uncontrollably laughing, Benny looks over to his manservant with a slight look of contentment as if happy to not be the only foolish one on screen. This introduction of “Buck” Benny adorned in theatrical queered cowboy attire shows a fascinating relationship between voice and body, one that exemplifies how buffoonish masculinity, when defined by a preexisting mediated voice, can reposition the standard gender dynamics of Classic Hollywood. On one level, the comical reveals of Benny and Rochester are based in degradation since the subjects are made foolish as comic spectacles for the gaze of the audience and Devine, which makes them doubly framed. Benny is positioned under the gaze of Devine who reacts much like the audience is supposed to react, by erupting into an ego-deflating laughter. While the Benny and Rochester reveals position them as others, queered cowboys, it also positions them as familiar others thanks to their radio voices. The deeper manly voice Benny adopted in his asking, “How do I look?” was a standard vocal lampoon performed on the radio anytime the comedian adopted his “Buck” Benny persona. Here the picture of his body adorned in a queer outfit accompanies the established vocal spoof as the realization of a “picture joke.” More tellingly, Rochester arrives onto the scene to present another body for the doubly framed gaze, yet one that is also telling in how the film aligns him next to Benny. Carrying over his racially complex role from the radio show with all his wifely characteristics, Anderson is presented as an unmasculine buffoon as well. He is subjugated as demasculinized, but, tellingly, also positioned next to his white employer as an equal figure of degradation. The representative audience in the sequence, Devine, helps to keep the objectification light and less an act of judgment than

1 3 2 | c ha p t e r 4

Jack Benny in Buck Benny Rides Again (1940).

familiarity—since Andy, with his then familiar scratchy voice and heavy frame, was anything but an idealized masculine figure. As another appeal to established radio celebrity, Love Thy Neighbor (1940) continues the popular radio feud between Benny and Fred Allen that, throughout the runs of both comedians’ programs, escalated and cooled at various times.62 At the height of popularity, the feud greatly increased the ratings of both shows. As Benny explains, it was another example of crafty audience maJack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 3 3

nipulation by the writers: “Forty million listeners were caught up in our feud and followed it with bated breath, week by week. And I don’t know how many millions thought we really hated each other’s guts. Of course, Allen and I never hated each other. . . . Allen admired me. . . . And I admired Allen.”63 The verbal attacks largely occurred between the two on their respective programs, which smartly encouraged listeners to tune in to each comedian’s show to hear the responses. The two also made periodic appearances on each other’s shows, which usually garnered large ratings. The feud allowed the writers and comedians to shine in the realm of verbal gags and genuinely catty insults. Despite the constant threat of violence between the two comics, the only realization of a physical brawl occurred with a misguided charity boxing match. Benny explains this row was declared “a draw” since neither comedian “had the strength or technical skill to knock-out a bee.”64 Instead, the feud was a largely verbal affair and showcased the approach to humor each comedian perfected, with Benny performing more in the masochistic role and Allen more sadistic. As Benny explains, “it wasn’t in my radio character to attack other people and my humor came out of my being the butt of everybody else’s jokes. I was at a disadvantage. I couldn’t be as nasty as he could be.”65 On the other hand, the public saw Allen as a cerebral humorist, unmasculine like Benny, but with a biting ability to attack with verbal jabs and satirical insights.66 This approach to comedy allowed for a less character based humor, which, in turn, meant Allen could perform wickeder jokes. On both programs, these rows were created through numerous picture jokes, something made more so absurd with the distinctive grains of each performer’s voice: Benny with its irritated twang and Allen with a nasally snide sophistication, itself a potent form of catty queerness. The paper-thin plot of Love Thy Neighbor tells the story of Fred and Jack continuing to clash, pushing Allen to the point of near-homicidal mania in response to the more passive Benny, who complicates matters by falling in love with Allen’s niece, Alice (Mary Martin). Unlike Buck Benny, only Eddie Anderson appears in his manservant role from the radio cast, since the primary goal of the production is to visually realize the verbal sparring of the popular feud as opposed to recreate any fuller picture of the radio world. Similar to their differing approaches to comedy on the air, in the film, Benny appears more developed as a character while Allen performs, in essence, an unfurled and angry stream of biting wisecracks as opposed to being developed as a workable screen persona. The introduction of Allen privileges his distinctive voice and ability with long, humorously verbose insults. The scene opens with a car driving down a busy and snowy city street and, then, cuts to a shot of the chauffeur at the wheel, who reaches over to switch on the radio to The Jack Benny Program, where we hear Benny mock Allen. Allen’s off-screen voice yells, “Turn that passé Peter Pan off! Turn him off!” The camera pans to a visually peeved 1 3 4 | c ha p t e r 4

Allen sitting in the backseat, launching into a verbally rich attack on his rival: “Why that biological faux pas! Physically, he is a waste of skin. Mentally, he is a Dead End Kid. Socially, he is riffraff. And that is only a synopsis!” Once again, this introduction of Allen mirrors the conceptual “voice preceding body” intros of other radio stars in Buck Benny. But since he had even less previous exposure in film than other cast members, Allen is tied here directly to the radio feud and his established confrontations with Benny as an embodied radio voice.67 In the film, one confrontation finds a creative way to stress the verbal and comically deflate the threat of physical violence between the two comedians. When Benny and Allen run into each other at a nightclub, they begin to verbally spar as usual. They continue to inch closer to each other as if they are nearing a violent physical confrontation. But the film quickly deflates this tension with a clever comic device. A waiter enters the frame and warns the two shouting comedians, “Gentlemen please. Shhh.” Benny and Allen, ever the dandyish gentlemen, continue to angrily threaten each other with violence in polite hushed whispers that deflates the supposed threatening nature of the confrontation. Later, another interruption occurs as a young female fan enters and cheerfully asks each comic for their autograph, which they gleefully give. After all the interruptions, the “fight” finally continues but with no actual physical contact as Allen takes a more aggressive stance and approaches Benny, telling him to “put up those emaciated dukes.” Benny feebly states, as he backs up, “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me. Why, if I ever hit you on the nose, the world will finally know what you are using for blood.” Allen moves his hand up to fix his own tie, which Benny mistakes as an aggressive move. He backs up and trips into a fountain, the sight of which makes Allen erupt with laugher. As seen in this sequence, the humor is based largely on the lack of physical violence within the feud. Both comedians find themselves prone to polite civility as opposed to masculine aggression, which consistently interrupts their supposed confrontation. In their fear of the waiter, they must ridiculously whisper their insults, thus deflating their supposed threats. In their loyalty to their fans—or, really, the feeding of their own diva-like egos—they meet the autograph seeker not with annoyance but with appreciation for the attention. Each of these instances reaffirms the absurdness of the physical threats, since the bodies on screen confirm the queerness of the voices and, therefore, are perceived as nonviolent (at least by Hollywood’s definitions of masculine virility). It is fitting that the minor physical hostility that transpires confirms Allen as the more aggressive, though in a manner still illustrating neither figure as particularly physical in face-to-face confrontations. This stance continues throughout the film, as Allen appears increasingly homicidal and obsessive, though always from a distance, eventually shooting a rifle at Jack’s speeding Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 3 5

motorboat and firing a slingshot at his stage show. Benny only fires back with his weaker verbal jabs, once again being posed as a comedic object as opposed to being the aggressor. Benny does “win the girl” in the form of Allen’s niece, which suggests he is more capable of assimilation into a typical heteronormative Hollywood narrative. In some ways, Benny’s radio personality, with all its queer connotations, still had to fall into the same sort of heterosexualization found in other film depictions of dandyism. But his transformation into a “successful” heterosexual dandy never feels too complete in the sense that it would threaten his widely embraced queered radio persona. His relationships with actresses Ellen Drew as Joan in Buck Benny and Mary Martin as Alice in Neighbor are, in a manner, presented as plot contrivances to not only force fit Benny into the Hollywood mold but also to legitimately continue radio gags. For example, in Buck Benny, the love story allows the comedian to partake in various gag-filled scenarios as a failed cowboy. In Neighbor, his winning of Alice sets up the final visual gag of the film, a silly scene featuring the now-married Jack and Alice’s twins as an absurd image of Benny and Allen dressed like babies and fighting. The “romance” of Jack and Alice exists primarily to facilitate the radio feud within a more cinema friendly sight gag, since verbal jokes alone could not sustain the already four-year-old feud as it moved into film.

“Playing the part of a comedian”: Benny beyond Radio After these two adaptations, Hollywood did attempt to mold Benny into a legitimate movie star by placing him in films with fewer radio-influenced narratives. Yet even his casting in these movies still contains the heavy influence of his queered radio persona. Charley’s Aunt (1941), his follow-up to Love Thy Neighbor, is based on the classic cross-dressing Brandon Thomas comedy originally written for the stage in 1892. The story follows Benny as Fancourt “Babbs” Babberly, who impersonates a rich middle-aged woman to help two friends with their romantic affairs. The other largest box-office hit of his career found Benny performing a gender-bending act in a subtler manner, one tied to the film’s production history. George Washington Slept Here (1942) was based upon the Broadway hit by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, which tells the story of a New York couple’s move to a dilapidated farmhouse in Pennsylvania. The stage version had the husband as the straight part, a nature-loving provider who buys the old house without telling his wife, the Manhattan-loving wisecracker. Despite this scenario, the screen adaptation shifted the gender dynamics of the play to accommodate Benny. Now, Benny as Bill Fuller was the one surprised by his wife’s purchase and afraid of nature, while Ann Sheridan played the nature-loving spouse, Connie.68 As seen with both these produc1 3 6 | c ha p t e r 4

Jack Benny, Mary Martin, and Fred Allen, publicity photo for Love Thy Neighbor (1940). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

tions, Benny’s box-office hits were very much tied to an acknowledged queered persona developed and fostered on his much more popular radio program. In retrospect, only one film has stood the test of time to be regarded as a classic, Ernst Lubitsch’s biting war comedy To Be or Not To Be (1942). As a ham Shakespearean actor and reluctant Polish patriot Joseph Tura, Benny excels mainly because of how precisely Lubitsch understood the comedian’s strengths as rooted in his character-based development as a radio performer. On set, Lubitsch reportedly told Benny: “You are not a comedian. You are not even a clown. . . . Jack, you are an actor, you are an actor playing the part of a comedian and this you are doing very well. But do not worry, I [will] keep your secret to myself.”69 To Peter Barnes, this multilayered performance style is partly the reason for Benny’s success in the role of Tura, since the character is “an actor who is playing the part of a Resistance leader and German spy and ‘doing very well.’  ”70 In another sense, Lubitsch’s insight into Benny’s comedic technique also shows his understanding that the original radio persona was character based within its various quirks, ranging from being cheap to other more overtly queered qualities. In casting Benny believably within the role of a husband continually cuckolded by his wife Maria (Carole Lombard), Lubitsch Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 1 3 7

wisely highlighted some key “unmasculine” attributes of the Benny radio performance, especially his diva-like vanity. As a result, even years after Benny’s success on radio and television, the film still feels like the only cinematic performance not overshadowed by his broadcast persona. Unlike many of his radio contemporaries, Benny also found success on television in the 1950s and ’60s. But despite being a TV fixture and respected broadcaster, Benny never was the dominant force in the television Nielsen ratings that he had been in the Hooper ratings for radio.71 As his television show continued into the early 1960s, it took on more of a standard variety format and employed the comedian’s talents as a monologist to greater effect. While still funny, this led to a diminished potency as a performer, which was probably due to his long run as a celebrity and the historical differences of broadcast in the 1930s as compared to the 1950s and early 1960s, which could be markedly more conservative. Also, there is a notable difference between broadcasting as a mediated voice or, alternately, as mediated image/voice. Leah Lowe makes this observation in relationship to Gracie Allen’s transition from radio to television, noting how “a visual context can work against the power Gracie establishes through language. On the radio, the gaze absent, Gracie’s voice suggests a woman free of real-world substance and unbounded by real-world limitation.”72 Perhaps Benny as a queered subject finds the same constrictions on television as Gracie, since the medium is essentially removed from the safer infinite spaces of radio. In the end, though, his popularity could continue on some level since television still enters the home with its “small family units.” Through broadcasting, even with images, his buffoonish masculinity could still challenge the boundaries of sexual identity with the warm midwestern tinge of Benny’s queered voice.

1 3 8 | c ha p t e r 4

5

Queering the Fraternity Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood

They [Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy] are the comedy sensations of the season. And all because they have learned, by a lucky stroke, that the public likes to see themselves caricatured on the screen; that the public can laugh at the maundering of a fat man who shakes a warning pudgy forefinger at a sensitive simpleton who is prone to weep. Dorothy Spensley, “Those Two Goofy Guys,” Photoplay (July 1930)

Written as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were gaining widespread celebrity in sound shorts, the above observation acknowledges one of the key points stressed throughout this book. The comedians of Classic Hollywood could serve as points of identification for the male public, who could “see themselves” in the comedians’ outsider positions. As comics embraced often-neglected narratives of economic, ethnic, and queered otherness, they became beloved cultural icons, and Laurel and Hardy are particularly potent examples of this phenomenon—ones with, as will be discussed, a thriving fan community that distinguishes them from many of the other figures this book covers.1 As the article suggests, even their relatively low-budget shorts upon release were “billed over feature pictures with sex appeal heroines in theater electrics.”2 In short, Laurel and Hardy’s film personae conform to the perceived queered aspects of buffoonish masculinity, implying through their appearances on screen a denaturalization of “normal” masculine protocols in ways that ultimately proved iconic. Even when describing the duo’s physicality, Photoplay stresses it by reminding its readership which comedian is which through characterizing each of their physical and mental “lacks” in contrast to other male stars: Oliver 139

“weighs well over two hundred and fifty” pounds while “Stan is the one who weeps,” feminizing the comic by highlighting a behavior seen as unmanly.3 While each comedian is prototypical of much of the buffoonish masculinity discussed thus far, Laurel and Hardy move us into a cinematic construct that more overtly plays with queered masculine relationships—the comedy duo. As a male-male couple, they are the most long lasting of any on-screen twosome (male-male, female-female, or male-female). Their first pairing as an official comedy team was for Hal Roach Studios in the silent short Do Detectives Think? in 1927, in which they appear for the first time in their trademark bowler hats and poorly fitted suits. They finally finished their careers in the odd international feature Atoll K in 1952, wearing the same outfits and still, to an extent, playing the same basic characters they originated twenty-five years prior. Southerner Hardy is the overweight, bossy figure, though with a sheepish sensitive side. West Side Londoner Laurel is the childlike dim-bulb who feels hopelessly clueless and manages to get his partner into various complicated and sometimes physically painful situations. Despite any obstacles the world outside creates, they remain loyal companions who never could really abandon each other. They are unlike other popular duos on screen in the form of heterosexual romantic couples, since such twosomes as Myrna Loy and William Powell or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn had recognizable screen personalities independent from their partnerships. Despite three minor solo appearances by Hardy in his sound career, Laurel and Hardy appeared together in multiple films a year solely as a team, a defined male-male couple in the eyes of the studio and the public. It is safe to say, outside of George Burns and Gracie Allen, true “comedy duos” usually were established male pairings in the eyes of the moviegoers. Along with Laurel and Hardy, these queered twosomes would eventually include popular teams like Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.4 While all the comedians in this book artfully play with their positions as outsiders, the comedy duo forces the issue by existing as a more easily identifiable queered affront to established parameters of homosocial male relationships. Laurel and Hardy’s comedy usually positioned them as outsiders from successful male figures—often portraying them as victims of the Depression in such shorts as Below Zero (1930) and One Good Turn (1931). Making films as the turmoil of the 1930s was changing masculine roles in society, Laurel and Hardy most notably challenged different male orders as opposed to just being contrasted to individual masculine archetypes. The humor is often based in their intruding upon symbolic orders of maleness: such as the military in Beau Hunks (1931) and Bonnie Scotland (1935), the police force in The Midnight Patrol (1933), the university in A Chump at Oxford (1940), and even prison in Pardon Us (1931).5 Given the duo’s substantial lasting impact, such intrusions 1 4 0 | c ha p t e r 5

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, publicity photo (date unknown).

force us to ask what this on-screen relationship means in American popular culture—or, more broadly, in the supposed orders of heterosexual male identities defining this culture through homosocial relationships. An interesting way to approach this question might be to acknowledge how Laurel and Hardy have persisted in the popular imagination, as they still have an impressive fan base. Collectively known as the Sons of the Desert, this network consists of various local clubs called “tents”—with dozens of tents adopting the names of different Laurel and Hardy features and shorts. The local clubs stretch from Anchorage, Alaska, with a tent named after the short Below Zero (1930); to London, England, with Helpmates (1932); to Trondheim, Norway, with Wrong Again (1929); to Wagga Wagga, Australia, with March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934); to one of the longest-lasting and most active tents with Way Out West (1937) in Los Angeles. As such a network might suggest, the Sons of the Desert is essentially designed to lampoon social fraternities or “sacred brotherhoods” famous for their exalted rituals and ranking of membership—societies such as the Order of the Eastern Star, the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks, and, most pointedly, the Honorable Fraternity of Ancient Freemasons. The origins of this peculiar take on fandom have much to do with one of the duo’s most popular films, Sons of the Desert (1933), the title Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 4 1

of which founder John McCabe adopted for the organization. In the film, Laurel and Hardy portray two married men who spend their evenings attending a secretive all-male society known as the Sons of the Desert, a sacred order that takes oaths and requires its membership to wear fezzes in an obvious lampoon of the Freemasons and its North American offshoot, the Shriners, who sport similar headwear. The fictional organization exists primarily as a playground for middle-class white men away from their wives and children, representing a social order to which Laurel and Hardy usually have considerable trouble conforming. Today, members of the much less exclusive Sons of the Desert also wear fezzes, but more as a silly derision of the all-male organizations that inspired the film’s original spoof. Unlike actual fraternities, the appreciation society grants membership to anybody regardless of gender or relationship to other members, with the only prerequisite being one’s enjoyment of Laurel and Hardy. While certainly the Freemasons existed for centuries before, the fraternal order and, especially, the local lodge as we think of it today in the United States really began to thrive during the nineteenth century. The establishment of these networks of lodges, with their largely white, working- to middle-class membership, tellingly corresponds with the development of a broader conception of US brotherhood during the century. In her study of the “imagined fraternity” of white males from the revolutionary war to the 1850s, Dana D. Nelson suggests that the myth of national fraternity is inevitably tied to disappointment for much of the population, even many white males. It is at its core an agent for anxiety, since “what men are symbolically promised by national/ white manhood is almost never what they get: a space where men can step out of competitive, hierarchically ordered relations and experience rich emotional mutuality of fraternal sameness.”6 Fraternity promotes an “impossible identity”—impossible in the sense that it is difficult for any human to fit into a full sense of idealized compatibility with others.7 By the twentieth century, one could argue that the impossibility such organizations facilitated masked new levels of anxiety, as supposed threats to this male identity appeared with the rise in public profile of independent women and homosexuals driving the heterosexual male anxieties defining the so-called crisis of masculinity. In this manner, a push to define one’s identity as aggressively heterosexual emerged in the early twentieth century as a new way to support the fraternal identity as manly and straight. The societal conceptions of the homosocial were thereby consistently de-eroticized, a historical phenomenon that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies as limiting our conception of male bonding throughout much of the twentieth century by reducing it to a hetero/homosexual binary.8 As an appreciation society, the Sons of the Desert constructs itself as a living homage to the Laurel and Hardy film that most potently attacks such 1 4 2 | c ha p t e r 5

structures. The organization has located and celebrated something about the comedy duo that critics and scholars have overlooked. Laurel and Hardy prove significant not only because of their individual queered relationship but also because they offer a unique reaction to society’s definition of brotherhood and the impossible identity of unified hegemonic heterosexuality. They are most impressive as an act of comedic deconstruction, through their ability to explore the boundaries of masculine bonding and to blur the socially dictated line between the homosocial and the homoerotic—the very boundaries legitimate social fraternities promote. Employing the appreciation society’s cultural imprint as my guide, this chapter establishes how Laurel and Hardy are the most overtly queer of on-screen buddies in that they represent a queered unit as opposed to contrasting sexual identities, a sexual dynamic found in most other comedy duos. But beyond this classification, this chapter contextualizes their relationship through a fuller understanding of the fraternal orders their humor targets, a lampoon their fans still celebrate today. Focusing on Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s impact and their film Sons of the Desert, this chapter explores how the comedy team proves the queerest of on-screen duos as they overtly satirize male societies such as the Freemasons, illustrating a comic affront to the parameters of homosocial male brotherhood—queering the fraternity. Most remarkably, the film takes this subversion beyond simple spoofing and also explores the sexualized dynamics of male-male companionship as a more successful pairing than each comedian’s respective heterosexual marriage, challenging core elements of the misogynistic humor that runs throughout much of comedian comedy by adding a queered female pairing to counter the two males. By analyzing the lasting cultural implications of this particular comedy film, we can understand what the appreciation society has known all long: Laurel and Hardy prove relevant as long as viewers continue to “see themselves” in the comedians’ failure to live up to the fraternal myths of heterosexual male identity.

“Two minds without a single thought”: Laurel and Hardy as Queered Unit Taking its name from the 1933 film, the Sons of the Desert is termed an appreciation society as opposed to a fan club. This was a unique move away from celebrity worship, one Laurel supported when in 1965 the biographer John McCabe approached the aging comedian about organizing the duo’s aficionados. By McCabe’s account, Laurel helped originate the organization’s distinctive aura of, as he put it, “half ass dignity” by suggesting the motto, “Two minds without a single thought”—which was translated into Latin to adorn a cartoon crest: “Duae tabulae rasae in quibus nihil scriptum est.”9 While not Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 4 3

mentioned in Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers, the Sons of the Desert exists as an early exercise in “participatory culture,” possibly predating the television series–based fandom outlined in that landmark work.10 As Jenkins states in his introduction, a particularly active fan community is defined by the following dimensions: “Its relationship to a particular mode of reception; its role in encouraging viewer activism; its function as an interpretive community; its particular traditions of cultural production; its status as an alternative social community.”11 To see all these components clearly, one only has to watch the short documentary The Revenge of the Sons of the Desert (1987), which documents the 1986 international convention of the Sons in Philadelphia. The film intercuts footage from Sons of the Desert and The Flying Deuces (1939) as it praises the eccentricities of the fans. For example, on showing fez-adorned conventioneers partaking in a trivia contest, Laurel and Hardy are spliced in, appearing as audience members appreciating the fans’ extensive knowledge of even the smallest details from their films. The documentary also highlights multiple ways in which both male and female fans (mostly white, middle age, and gleefully embracing their geeky side) directly engage the Laurel and Hardy comedies as texts during the convention, including reenacting moments from March of the Wooden Soldiers, right down to a costume ball where sets and scenes are reconstructed. While more than twenty-five years old, the documentary proves fascinating in showing, to use Jenkins’s phrasing, an intensely active “alternative social community” established long before the days of Internet networking. Today, we do find for Laurel and Hardy a relatively strong Internet presence for a Classic Hollywood comedy duo. Probably one of the most extensive websites is the Laurel and Hardy Forum, in which fans can register to have access to archived articles, embedded videos, and a chance to “mingle with members of the International Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society, the Sons of the Desert” in the forum area.12 Yet as even the most sophisticated of their fan sites suggests, the duo’s presence online often reflects the Sons as they existed in predigital decades rather than as a pure example of a fan network emerging out of a web-based participatory culture. In this manner, the Sons of the Desert’s online presence almost feels like a relic from a different era. In truth, one only needs to look at the photos from the events to recognize that many of the Sons comprise an aging fan base.13 After all, today’s participatory culture often embraces expansive mythical worlds of gender and sexual possibilities in such postmodern texts as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, or Twilight. In contrast, the Sons might seem archaic as a network in comparison to fans who, for example, create progressively homoerotic fan fiction or, simply, more openly queer tributes to their objects of affection.14 1 4 4 | c ha p t e r 5

Yet undeniably, there is something queer about Laurel and Hardy and, therefore, in the long-held fan obsession over the duo. This observation is nothing new as various critics and scholars have noted the team’s intense closeness as something unseen in other male-male relationships on screen. Certain critics respond defensively (and homophobically) to such contentions. Charles Barr, who wrote one of the first extensive critical works on the duo’s films in 1967, suggests that any perceptions of a homosexual relationship between Laurel and Hardy simply misconstrue elements of their already childlike behavior, since “homosexuality itself consists of a fixation at a certain level of immaturity.”15 Even biographer Simon Louvish takes on a protective tone toward the beloved duo, dismissing possible queer readings as products of a current overly psychoanalytic age “in which male friendships cannot be seen without their sexual aspect, [since] in the world since Sigmund Freud, sex looms everywhere.”16 Louvish is primarily responding to the work that goes the furthest in suggesting that Laurel and Hardy derive from complicated sexual and gendered positions. Jonathan Sanders’s Another Fine Dress: Role-Play in the Films of Laurel and Hardy provides readings of the duo’s films as illustrating a multitude of role-playing scenarios by adopting childlike behaviors, various class roles, professions, and sex roles for laughs. While avoiding any deconstructive gender analysis, Sanders finds his more interesting readings in the realm of the sexual, rightfully contending that “to deny that homosexual humor is present in many of their films is, I think, to diminish their stature and richness.”17 But what can be said beyond the fact that Laurel and Hardy’s relationship eschews the heteronormative, itself a limiting and fragile classification? What happens when we contemplate the comedy duo as a long-standing and fanembraced phenomenon? As I will show, the Laurel and Hardy personae are not only queer but also a form of cinematic queerness that is a historically relevant response to the fraternal myths that serve as the foundation of American male identities. This essentially suggests a more complicated definition of queerness than that often found in studies of on-screen buddies. Culturally valid readings of buddy films such as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), and the Lethal Weapon films (1987–98) all rightfully contextualize the movies in a post-1960s conception of gender and sexuality. In other words, the films exist as confirmations of the patriarchal order within sexually unstable times. As gay liberation and feminism challenged the hegemony, these texts sublimated essentially homoerotic pairings of appealing male bodies to confirm a supposed hegemonic normalcy. Robert Lang suggests about the evolution of the buddy film, “the kind of self-consciousness that infects Midnight Cowboy around questions of intimacy between men becomes increasingly exacerbated in the genre of the Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 4 5

buddy film . . . [and eventually] reaches the limit of its own logic as a genre based on the sublimation of homosexual desire.”18 It is important to realize that this sublimation has much to do with the growing visibility of a homosexual culture in the 1960s and ’70s. The sociologist Henning Bech writes, “particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century,” there existed intensified homophobia in depictions of the homosocial, which essentially resulted in a lack of male friendships in modern societies.19 The male-male relationships that do appear on screen exist as fantasy relationships that can, paradoxically, confirm heterosexuality through male companionship, since they usually succumb to the violent or, in a lesser form, to the heterosexually aggressive. Various plot points in these films confirm heterosexuality, such as a straight sex scene, a homosexual villain, insulting homophobic jokes, or the appearance of a ridiculous “real” homosexual as a contrast to the heterosexual heroes.20 These readings of post-1960s buddy films suggest a popular view less overtly suspicious of male companionship on screen during the first half of the twentieth century. Consequently, previous readings of Classic Hollywood comedy duos position them almost as the antithesis of the modern buddy movie, since these buddies are not obsessed with sublimating homosexual desire and thereby overtly play with gender identities. Such a classification is found, for instance, in readings of Jerry Lewis and his partnership with Dean Martin, which is analyzed in noteworthy studies by Scott Bukatman, Frank Krutnik, and Ed Sikov.21 With Lewis’s bizarre, high-pitched voice and hyperactivity that always contrasted with Martin’s cooled heterosexuality, the sexual dynamics of the team have often been analyzed with Lewis posited as a protowoman in the scenario. For example, Bukatman describes Lewis’s position as similar to that of “the nineteenth-century female hysteric,” as Lewis acts out “his own ambivalence toward an inscribed and proscribed position (masculinity).”22 Another key queer reading of the comedy duo appears in Steven Cohan’s look at Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road to movies. Much as occurs with the Lewis-focused readings of Martin and Lewis, Cohan is primarily interested in the queerness of Hope’s on-screen persona, which was already established by the time he was paired with Crosby. Hope’s periodic couplings with Crosby “homoeroticized the queer dimensions of Hope’s persona by linking it to a buddy relationship.”23 There is thus a common approach to the comedy duo, since most gender studies view the function of the duo dynamic as having one member heighten the queerness of the other. Undoubtedly, these readings are a by-product of the dynamics in the duos these scholars choose to examine, since each of the above teams consists of a less quirky member who will routinely “get the girl” and allow for the greater queered behavior to exist in his counterpart.

1 4 6 | c ha p t e r 5

Such observations do little to truly explain the male bonding found in less counterbalanced versions of sexual identification on screen. In his discussion of early portrayals of homosexuality in Hollywood, Vito Russo suggests that neither Laurel nor Hardy is classifiable as a typical “sissy” of the era, since the closeness of the duo “hinted at the deeper level of a visual language that could at times capture the possibility of pure androgyny.”24 Laurel and Hardy thereby do not offer an example of a team in which one figure necessarily queers the other, but a case of two figures as a defined queered unit, one based neither in the swishing caricature of the sissy nor in the sexual imbalance seen in other comedy duos. Further, as already suggested, Laurel and Hardy are the most long lasting of any cinematic duo of any gendered construction. In fact, we think of Laurel and Hardy almost in the singular, as two sides of the same comedic performance. Through their perceived couplehood, they were enormously prolific. In total, as a duo, they appeared in a staggering ninety-six shorts and features, not counting their guest appearances in other films. While they began their careers as solo acts, their official pairing in 1927 resulted in what was understood as one of the friendliest of partnerships off screen. This relationship was unlike other twosome acts covered in this book, like Wheeler and Woolsey or Abbott and Costello, who were known to have numerous creative and personal disagreements.25 Without either of the performances confirming the straightness of the other, Laurel and Hardy do not necessarily substantiate a heterosexualized “norm” (no matter how comedic). Instead, they work to provide a richer definition of the homosocial itself. Their buddy relationship is relatable to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s original eroticizing of homosociality in Between Men, where she contends that unlike perceived heterosexual female bonding, much of twentieth-century society promoted “the radically discontinuous relation of male homosocial and homosexual bonds.”26 In her analysis of English literature, she brings the homosocial “back into the orbit of ‘desire’ of the potentially erotic,” with the implications of all male-male relationships suggesting “the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual— a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society is radically disrupted.”27 As a more balanced queered relationship, Stan and Oliver are expanding the continuum of the homosocial as a queered unit refusing to adhere to heterosexualized protocols (even if this refusal is unbeknownst to their characters). They never completely differentiate the straight man (pun intended) from the comic, as is the case with Martin and Lewis or Hope and Crosby. Through this refusal, we can view Laurel and Hardy as playing against the “homosexual panic” of the twentieth century, which Sedgwick describes in Epistemology of the Closet as resulting in: “the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 4 7

now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or heterosexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence.”28 As will be discussed in specific reference to fraternal orders, Laurel and Hardy denaturalize the homo/heterosexual binary through a disruption of the social institutions promoting its limited conception of sexual identity. While this could also be done with other comedy duos (as will be seen in chapter 6’s discussion of military comedies), Stan and Oliver’s position as a more defined queered unit certainly makes their transgressions feel all the more compelling. Unlike these other duos, Laurel and Hardy had their roots firmly placed in silent cinema, where each of the comedians had, if not thriving at least sustainable, careers by appearing in numerous movies, as a solo comedian in Laurel’s case and, in Hardy’s, in supporting roles as usually a comic heavy. In this manner Laurel and Hardy are physical comedians, often using their oddly mismatched, nonmasculine bodies as instruments of humor. It is important to note that unlike the vast majority of their comedy contemporaries, they thrived in sound cinema due to their distinctive voices that somehow perfectly matched their physically odd frames. They are truly representative of the transitional comedians of the later silent era, as they adapted perfectly to the changing technology of sound film. Most significant, building on characterizations from their solo stage and film careers, Laurel and Hardy both had established comedic gendered characteristics when they teamed, though these personae would develop over the years to accommodate the couple dynamic.29 The English-born Laurel had adopted many of the feminizing stage traditions of the British music hall on his arrival in America, proving yet another comic in this study with direct ties to drag performance. Most notably, he made a specialty of comic drag performance in many of his solo films, such as The Sleuth (1925) and Eve’s Love Letters (1927). The drag act was common of British comedians in early film, and Laurel had idolized Dan Leno, one of the most famous drag pantomimes of all time.30 Other less obvious, nonmasculine characteristics are harder to trace in Laurel’s evolution as a solo act, though he developed into a less aggressive figure than that usually found in the knockabout theatrics of many silent comedians. As Sanders outlines, Laurel’s pre-1925 films actually present a brasher “go-getter” character modeled on early Charlie Chaplin (who Laurel understudied as a young comedian) and on Harold Lloyd. But his persona changed throughout the decade to resemble Harry Langdon, a baby-faced comedian whose humor was based in a childlike innocence.31 Born in Georgia, Hardy manifested a more complicated history in the development of a distinctively queered gender performance on screen. Teamed with Laurel, he personified the fragile southern softie, something often barely 1 4 8 | c ha p t e r 5

hidden under a pathetic guise of masculine pride that tries to overcompensate for his obvious lack of prowess. As Sanders writes of Hardy’s silent films, the comedian specialized in playing heavies and other embodiments of masculine authority such as cops, yet “both villains and comic cops were set up to be defeated, to have their proud masculinity undermined.”32 So in his supporting roles beside featured comedians, the emphasis was on setting up the loss of masculinity as a comedic situation. As for the softer side of the persona, one can imagine that Hardy’s social rejection as an overweight and fatherless child surrounded by southern masculine pride might have contributed to the more complex elements of his film persona.33 This is seen in his tendency to veer into sheepish fiddling with his tie or hat in the face of men of authority, attractive femininity, or dominating wives. Whatever the individual roots of each comedian’s unmasculine persona, what becomes of paramount concern is how to approach their dynamic as a well-defined queered unit. In some significant cases, a few of the earliest of Laurel and Hardy shorts overtly play with issues of homosexuality, years before the restrictive enforcement of the Hays Code. The most notorious example of gay humor occurs in their silent short Liberty (1928), in which the duo play escaped convicts who change their prison clothes for civilian outfits, only to discover in their hurry that they have put on each other’s pants. Throughout the first half of the short, the two continually try to find a private spot to switch trousers, only to be embarrassingly interrupted with their pants down by shocked onlookers and policemen. The joke of the situation is that they are continuously looked upon as homosexual lovers trying to have a sexual encounter, which makes them have to flee to even more outlandish locations to make the switch. As the film critic André S. Labarthe suggests, the sequence is a play on sexual signs, as Laurel and Hardy attempt the “innocent” only to provide passersby with “the unequivocal sign of unnatural love.”34 Yet despite this pre-Code provocative humor, the short remains an anomaly for Laurel and Hardy, as such overt jokes about the duo’s sexuality fail to appear as their careers progress and feel tied to a general atmosphere of randier humor during the 1920s. Made after the duo’s transition to sound, the short Their First Mistake (1932) feels almost excessive in its sexual role-playing within what, by this time, was the established couplehood of the team. In the film, Laurel visits his married friend and finds him in the aftermath of a violent marital spat with Mrs. Hardy (Mae Busch), who, as typical of the domestic slapstick situation, physically dominates her husband. As the short continues, Laurel carelessly convinces Hardy that the addition of a baby to the household would smooth over the conflicts with his wife and, more important, allow him to spend his evenings with his real favorite companion, Stan. In classically absurd fashion, Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 4 9

Hardy quickly adopts a baby but learns that his wife has abandoned him. The rest of the film consists of the duo’s misadventures as a makeshift family trying to care for the infant. In one of the most shocking sight gags, Laurel sits down to feed the baby and, suggesting breastfeeding, unbuttons his shirt, only to pull out a bottle from within. As some critics have mentioned, this short is a richly gender-defying example of provocative pre-Code humor.35 Pushing this kind of joke further, the short Twice Two (1933) features Laurel and Hardy portraying their own twin sisters, with female actors dubbing their voices. To complement the queered equality of the established relationship, all the characters live in the same house, with the drag Laurel playing Hardy’s wife, while the drag Hardy is Laurel’s wife. Through trick photography, an elaborate visual joke emerges where the homosocial has overtly morphed into the homosexual, further suggesting the role-playing humor of Their First Mistake, since the image of the “female” comedians paired with the male comedians only suggests a bizarre fantasy version of the male couple already established on screen. Acknowledging the overtly queer humor in isolated films might be a good start in understanding the duo as pushing the boundaries of heterosexual classifications. But to analyze them as establishing a considerably appealing variation on buffoonish masculinity, where their impact continues to this day as their numerous fans evidence, we must question the relationship within less obviously subversive moments, where they play within the socially prescribed confines of homosociality. Films that feature gender-bending gags were rarer and less influential, while the duo’s most popular comedies show how fraternity could be subtly—and not so subtly—lampooned and queered by the presence of the comedy duo. Much like the appreciation society, to understand Laurel and Hardy, we must question the social fraternity as a dynamic yet absurd historical construct—one that reacts to the supposed “cult of masculinity” that so deeply influences Classic Hollywood comedians.

“Article VI is ridiculous”: Fraternal Maleness and the Rise of Heterosexuality From its very conception as an appreciation society, the Sons of the Desert overtly satirized formal fraternal orders. The originally adopted constitution spoofs the foundational documents of formal fraternities in which protocol and reverence abound. For example, the constitution designates in Article 3 the officer and board members, including Grand Sheik, Vice-Sheik, Sub-ViceVizier, Grand Vizier, and Board Members-at-Large (a classification that can hold no more than 812 members). Article 4 proclaims that these positions will have an exalted place at the annual banquet table, while Article 5 stipulates the “officers and Board Members-at-Large shall have absolutely no author1 5 0 | c ha p t e r 5

ity whatever.” Article 6 stresses there must be “parliamentary procedure” and “innate dignity, sensitivity and good taste” at meetings, while Article 7 simply proclaims “Article VI is ridiculous.”36 Almost with Mad Hatter–like logic, all orders of rank are established only to be quickly dismissed, while all protocols are outlined only to be proclaimed as pointless. In The Revenge of the Sons of the Desert, we get a detailed discussion of the tenets of Article 8 of the constitution, which states that the annual meeting “shall be conducted in the following sequence,” only to outline some of these protocols: “a. Cocktails; b. Business meeting and cocktails; c. Dinner (with cocktails); d. After-dinner speeches with cocktails,” and later (if you have not already noticed the pattern), “g. Showing of Laurel and Hardy film; h. After film critique and cocktails; i. After-after film critique and cocktails.” As the film reads over this schedule, the corresponding footage shows the conventioneers taking part in toasts along with general drunken tomfoolery that essentially removes any pomp and respect from even the highest-ranked members. We see the biographer McCabe—whom the film subtitles as the “founder and exhausted ruler”—attempting to give a serious toast, only to stumble and admit to being on his third scotch. As such activities show, the appreciation society is designed to directly mock the Robert’s Rules of Order that organize other more serious organizations, lampooning the rituals and rankings of fraternal orders. While such tomfoolery might seem frivolous, it is important to remember that in mocking fraternity the Sons are also deconstructing the orders of homosocial relations that defined much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Especially in the United States, the nineteenth century resulted in the proliferation of working- and middle-class organizations, ranging from labor unions to Christian and reform groups, and from professional organizations and sports clubs to political parties. But it is in the fraternal lodges, all-male social spaces designed explicitly to promote a supposed brotherhood, that we find the most peculiarly ritualistic celebration of rank-and-file maleness. While the Freemasons had been active in America since the early eighteenth century, the nineteenth century saw new offshoots like the Ancient Freemasons and the Shriners. The century also resulted in the rise in popularity of other groups such as the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and the Fraternal Order of Red Men.37 As Mark C. Carnes documents, these groups’ adherence to ritual was surprisingly thorough and bizarre in their formulations. Symbolic death (in the form of humiliation) and eventual rebirth (through the embracement of one’s brothers and the approval of a mystic father figure) were often central to an individual male’s initiation. For example, Carnes summarizes the Odd Fellows initiatory degree of 1845 as a ritual of harsh humiliation and eventual redemption based on the biblical story of Adam’s fall. Forced to grovel on the ground, Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 5 1

the blindfolded candidate “was ‘naked’ (his shirt had been removed) and was repeatedly told ‘Thou art dust,’  ” only to have the blindfold removed to reveal the shocking site of a skeleton “thrust into his face.”38 In a sense, such organizations wanted the self-identification of their members to be based in a mystical hierarchy of maleness and, ultimately, in the salvation offered in the form of a fraternal bond. Even more tellingly, the popularity of such organizations corresponded with the rise of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, promoting comfort with patriarchal power as a type of rite of passage. Initiates could not acquire maturity and gain entry into the order until they had won the approval of the symbolic patriarch. As Mary Ann Clawson suggests, the organizations upheld the myth that social mobility was available to “all industrious men who would care to take advantage of it.”39 The traditions of these all-male, all-white, and, usually, all-Protestant organizations were oddly enough often based in a cultural obsession with the ethnic minority, something seen in their strict adherence to symbolic rituals with strange dress and nods to mysticism. While the rituals and even names of these organizations often appeared to show a hallowed reverence for the Other, as Dana D. Nelson outlines in National Manhood, the groups did little to promote a true connection to anything outside of fellow white males: “In their rituals, they would learn to love their Others, but only in the most symbolic, denatured, purified form—the symbolically pure mother, the symbolically noble Red Man, the symbolically mystic ‘primitive.’  ”40 In truth, within their rank and file, the members were (and are) allowing for a myth of victimization about their personal statuses to emerge, despite their relatively privileged place in society. As Nelson elaborates, since men used the lodge to escape their wives and children, “the rituals did work to redress men’s rightful sense that they were being deprived of something in the world outside the lodge. . . . Thus, as victims, men turned to fraternal mysticism to regain a sense of ‘wholeness.’  ”41 The fraternal lodge as a space thereby provides one of the clearest examples of the core disappointment and displacement at the root of all fraternity. Relating these organizations back to her book’s principal premise, Nelson suggests that these groups’ “rituals of friendship and brotherhood promise egalitarian emotional exchange.” Yet these are idealistic impossibilities, especially since such fraternities “depend on elaborate and hierarchical structures that merely symbolize such exchange.”42 Despite their success at helping white men ward off the fraternal order’s psychic and political abortiveness, they were (and are) fragilely symbolic affairs. In this manner, fraternal orders are organized around a problematic paradox: their rituals promote empowerment through adherence to symbolic fathers as some kind of rite of passage, yet they do so while advocating a myth of victimization in the white, heterosexual male population.43 1 5 2 | c ha p t e r 5

By the twentieth century, the fraternal lodge and its mythologies of brotherhood could be read more clearly through our modern cultural classifications of sexuality, especially with the emergence of a definable system of heterosexual identification. As suggested earlier, this change essentially constitutes the culture’s push to de-eroticize the homosocial—or as Sedgwick characterizes it, implement “a cultural system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily through triangular relations involving a woman.” This intelligibility confines homosocial male relationships (formalized in the fraternity) within the definitions of the heterosexual order, which “far from disappearing since the turn of the century, have become adapted and subtilized.”44 As Jonathan Ned Katz outlines in The Invention of Heterosexuality, the word heterosexual in its most popular usage (representing a “straight” and supposedly “normal” sexual desire) first appeared in the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1893, and from the nineteenth-century medical world it slowly spread through popular culture during the early part of the twentieth century.45 Much of this “coming out” of heterosexuality had to do with the open discussions of sexuality now promoted by the popularity of Sigmund Freud, who, in truth, used the phrase and its variations only sparsely in his work. Still, as Katz suggests, through his discussion of homosexuality and other supposed deviations from the “norm,” Freud silently promoted a “different-sex erotic ideal” in the “modern consciousness, constructed as the dominant term of the dominant sexual ideology, the norm we all know without ever thinking much about it.”46 Fittingly, by the 1920s, as definitions of male straightness were being defined in medical and academic circles, Freud turned his attention to fraternal brotherhood as a concept and defined it as based in repressed (and aggressive) heterosexual desires as opposed to something homosexual or bisexual. Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego elaborates on the supposed primitive roots of group identity that he originally defined in his earlier controversial work Totem and Taboo.47 Well into Group Psychology, he devotes a chapter to clarifying the significance of the primal horde—the supposed original human group ruled by a dominant father—as it continues to exist as a drive in male subjects. The primal horde drives the group mentality within men, based in a common violent rejection of the patriarch’s enforced sexual limitations on them: “The primal father had prevented his sons from satisfying their directly sexual impulsions; he forced them into abstinence and consequently into emotional ties with him and with one another which could arise out of those of their impulsions that were inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak, into group mentality. His sexual jealousy and intolerance became in the last resort the causes of group psychology.”48 Freud contends that the tyrannical role of a father essentially creates a fraternity impulse in the male subject to bond with male peers, a homosocial drive Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 5 3

that manifests itself in the social fraternal institutions of the church, army, and modern governments. It is important to note that the concept of fraternity implied here is not solely one based in a distant respect for and fear of the patriarch. Instead, the desire for fraternity eventually steers toward a murder of the father, which often creates the myth of equality in the “band of brothers.” Yet any illusions of equal rights among this group are fleeting due to the need to demolish the possible establishment of a matriarchy and, generally, due to a continual cycle of violent repression of “weaker” male figures, even in the form of male sons during illusionary periods of comradeship and bonding. Freud’s version of straight male bonding tellingly results from the repression of “healthy” heterosexual desires, as opposed to existing as any example of repressed homosexual desires.49 Even more notable is the fact that Freud was designating his strictly heterocentrist conceptions of male brotherhood after a century that spawned its fair share of fraternal organizations, orders that seem almost like symbolic manifestations of his primal horde theory. Such a theory is emerging just as the supposed “cult of masculinity” established itself in Western society. As discussed in chapter 2, the rise of women’s roles in culture and the minimization of individual worth due to heavy industrialization created, in George Chauncey’s words, a type of paranoia over “the danger of the overcivilization and feminization of American men.”50 The early part of the century hence found the myths of fraternity promoted to combat the softening of males—something seen, for example, in the establishment of such boys’ clubs as Knights of King Arthur, the Sons of Daniel Boone, and, in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America. But as Chauncey’s study makes clear, this promotion of “proper” manliness also corresponds with the steady rise in awareness of a homosexual subculture in urban centers, as found in his documented references to a complex labeling of “fairies,” “queers,” “gays,” and “faggots” in New York City during the early twentieth century. The recognition of homosexuality as a definite subset of society was viewed as especially unsettling in the middle classes because it suggested the possibility of a sexual component in male homosocial interactions such as those found, for example, in the tradition of fraternal lodges. As seen with the feminizing labeling of male homosexuals (like “fairy”), such a growing recognition also served to contain the threat of gender nonconformity in heterosexual males by making homosexual desire something concretely removed from their versions of brotherhood. As Chauncey explains, this problematic distinction resulted in middle-class men aggressively proclaiming their heterosexual desires: The insistence on exclusive heterosexuality emerged in part, then, in response to the crisis in middle-class masculinity . . . and the subversion 1 5 4 | c ha p t e r 5

of manly ideals and sexualization of male social relations by the fairy. But heterosexuality became even more important to middle-class men because it provided them with a new, more positive way to demonstrate their manhood. . . . It was as if they had decided that no matter how much their gender comportment might be challenged as unmanly, they were normal men because they were heterosexual.51

Proclaimed heterosexuality as a result became more a marker of maleness in the twentieth century. With this development, it is no surprise that the intense ritualism of the fraternal lodge of the nineteenth century dissipated, as proper maleness could be more easily identified through the sole definition of sexual object choice. As the culture continually pushed to define itself through such a simplistic sexual binary, ritualistic male bonding could be classified directly through heterosexual drives, such as found in Freud’s reading of brotherhood. The fraternal lodge could now be more easily defined as a place for straight male homosocial bonding away from the dangerously queered influences of the outside world. By the time Laurel and Hardy rose in popularity, the various straight male anxieties that fed fraternal myths in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth certainly existed beyond the lodge, as the stability of the patriarchy seemed in question. As the sociologist Michael S. Kimmel characterizes the decade, the 1930s had “many men simply [losing] faith in a system that prevented them from proving their masculinity in the only ways they knew,” in other words, by fulfilling the role of family provider.52 In what might have been a final insult, the fraternal orders (once a symbolic defense against such “affronts”) began to crumble during the years of the Great Depression, as the organizations could no longer count on membership dues. Hundreds of smaller orders passed out of existence, while thousands of lodges went bankrupt, unable to meet mortgage payments.53 Even during the prosperous 1920s, as Carnes reports, the heavy ritualism of the previous years had begun to pass within these clubs, and many men became more inclined to become active in the community through hosting dinners, club nights, and sporting events.54 When Laurel and Hardy had found popularity by presenting the public with a more queered version of homosociality, the patriarchy and its symbolic counterpart, the fraternal lodge, were now fragile and volatile conceptions. As such, the time was right for Laurel and Hardy to queer the fraternity (and subvert its gendered myths) in a film that would inspire their appreciation society’s own lampoons of brotherhood.

Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 5 5

“Far from our sweethearts and wives”: Sons of the Desert While Laurel and Hardy’s humor was often based in their intruding on symbolic orders of maleness, the film that gives their appreciation society its name, Sons of the Desert (1933), proves distinctive in that the narrative specifically targets the fraternal lodge and its masculine rankings. The film begins at a local lodge meeting with Laurel and Hardy being forced to take a pledge to attend the national convention in Chicago. On returning home, they discover that Hardy’s wife, Lottie (Mae Busch), strenuously objects, which results in Laurel and Hardy constructing a plan in which Hardy fakes an illness and has a phony doctor suggest that he leave on a long ocean voyage to Honolulu for his health. Since Lottie is easily seasick, Laurel agrees to accompany his friend, and they sneak off to Chicago for a week of drunken revelry. On their return, the duo learns that their supposed ride home, the ocean liner from Honolulu, has sunk. While the wives panic, Laurel and Hardy find themselves hiding in the attic of their conjoined homes and hatching a plan to return to their wives when the rescue ship docks the next day. Through a string of more misfortunes, the wives find out that their husbands were in Chicago when they see them playfully prancing around in a movie newsreel covering the convention. After being spotted tiptoeing on their roof, the two comics eventually come faceto-face with their spouses, and they promptly launch into a ridiculous story involving “ship-hiking” their way home. In the end, Laurel cracks and admits the truth to his wife, Betty (Dorothy Christie), after Hardy had pathetically tried to continue the lie. As a result, Hardy is physically overpowered by his wife with a barrage of pots and pans, while Laurel is rewarded for his honesty and properly pampered by his usually cold spouse. As the narrative shows, the film is centered on formal social fraternities with its satirical take on the Sons of the Desert, a fictional lampoon on the Freemasons and like groups. The film opens within a dimly lit den of a local Los Angeles chapter, as a group of men dressed in fezzes (denoting supposed cultural otherness) and sashes marked with “California” meet to listen to their “exalted ruler” (John Elliot). This old man is a mystically ominous and nearly skeletal figure sinisterly lit from below and towering above the seated lodge members. Ever the outcasts, Laurel and Hardy are introduced as latecomers to the solemn occasion as they clumsily make their way through the obviously annoyed men to the open seats near the front of the room, the whole time under the frowning gaze of the now silent ruler. As the speech continues, the exalted one orders that all the members must be present at the national convention since “there should be no weaklings in our midst.” Making the members stand to take an oath, the leader then announces, “And remember, once taken, 1 5 6 | c ha p t e r 5

this oath has never been broken by any man, down through the centuries of time, in the history of this fraternal organization. If any member is doubtful of his strength to keep this solemn pledge, he will please be seated.” On hearing this, Laurel, rather reasonably, sits down, to the shock and dismay of the other fraternity members. Hardy then forces his friend to stand and take the oath with the others. After all the solemn pomp of this ritualistic moment, the lights brighten, and the members launch into a silly anthem, suggesting that the true purpose behind their organization is something much more boyish and hedonistic: “We are the Sons of the Desert / Having the time of our lives. / Marching along, two thousand strong / Far from our sweethearts and wives. / God bless them.” As an organization, the Sons of the Desert is fraternal to the fullest extent of the word: its narrative purpose is based in exerting the power structures common to Freudian conceptions of male brotherhood. It also lampoons the preconditioned heterosexual aggressiveness involved in such lodges by the twentieth century, since the socially acceptable hedonism the members exert does little but promote the idea that they are somehow victimized by the feminizing outside world (i.e., their “sweethearts and wives”). The exalted leader makes demands on the fraternity’s members based on them not fulfilling relationships with the female other, but, instead, in advancing their bonds in the totally white maleness of the brotherhood. This figure represents a primal father, who, as Freud suggests, forces subordinate males “into abstinence and consequently into emotional ties with him and one another. . . . He forced them, so to speak, into group psychology.”55 Ever the innocent, Laurel in the next scene confesses that his reluctance to take the oath was based in the worry that “maybe my wife wouldn’t let me go.” This scene then proceeds directly to satirize the supposed grave seriousness of the fraternity and of the exalted ruler, whom Laurel mistakenly dubs “the exhausted ruler.” This is a great example of Laurel providing a comical Freudian slip for the audience. Steeped in the nineteenth-century tradition of fraternal ritualism, the leader, both in his gaunt appearance and corny mystic manner, feels “exhausted”—worn out, clichéd, and inadequate to the task at hand. While able to project fear in members as easily impressionable as Laurel and Hardy, the exalted leader does not reflect the true purpose of the organization by this point in the twentieth century. As illustrated by the song, the fraternity is rather an excuse for juvenile exhibitions of heterosexuality away from spouses and sweethearts, something evident once the viewer sees the Chicago convention. The organization essentially embraces a socially acceptable sexual rebellion for its all-male membership, separating the homosocial from the homoerotic through a confirmation of straightness.

Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 5 7

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, publicity photo for Sons of the Desert (1933).

While they attempt to belong to this brotherhood, Laurel and Hardy are shown as outcasts within the fraternity’s band of brothers, a position characterizing them as queered figures within its aggressive heterosexual performances. As outlined above, they disrupt the ceremonial charade of the boys club and even create a scene by hesitating to take the oath, a pledge that the “exhausted” ruler suggests, if not taken, exposes “weaklings” in their midst. Even 1 5 8 | c ha p t e r 5

when eventually partaking in the activities of the organization in Chicago, the duo does not really fit in with the surrounding aggressive performances of heterosexuality. After they sheepishly walk into a crowded speakeasy, an annoying prankster played by comedian Charley Chase targets them.56 The hyperadolescent scamp befriends them by performing corny practical jokes on the duo, making them a humiliated spectacle for the other men in attendance: smacking them in the rear with paddles, squirting Hardy in the face with a flower, and frightening both comics with a gag cigarette case. In most of these situations with the Sons, the duo seems like actual boys—queerly sympathetic innocents—in rooms filled with men performing as boys, fulfilling the heterosexually aggressive roles of the fraternity. The duo’s typically befuddled and timid reactions, especially Hardy’s childlike fiddling with his clothing, always clash with the more aggressive masculine tomfoolery of their cohorts. Beyond these practical jokes, Stan and Oliver also misread other signs of hyperheterosexuality that defines the organization. Unlike their fellow revelers who are apparently partaking in extramarital affairs, outside of an innocent brief tickling of a woman’s chin in a shot of the parade, nothing really suggests that Laurel and Hardy play these games of sexual conquest. Their vacation away from their “sweethearts and wives” feels less like a hunt for heterosexual confirmation than yet another attempt by the duo simply to belong to a fraternity they do not fully comprehend. For example, upon hearing of Laurel and Hardy’s home city, Chase impulsively decides to call his sister in Los Angeles as a “gag.” In typically farcical fashion, his sister coincidently ends up being Mrs. Hardy. In another impulsive moment, Chase playfully hands the phone over to Oliver, who proceeds to unknowingly joke with his own wife, who figures the perceived stranger to be flirting. In an attempt to set the record straight, she slyly suggests, “When you get back to town, drop in and see me. I’d just love to have you meet my husband.” Not realizing her statement was meant to impede what she wrongfully perceived as sexual banter, the perpetually innocent Hardy asks for an address. When he suddenly realizes her true identity, he panics and hangs up the phone—barely averting a domestic disaster inadvertently caused by his mishandling and misreading of heterosexual signals. Mae Busch’s characterization of Lottie Hardy provides, once again, a deriding portrayal of a phallic matriarch, representing the very castrating threats of powerful women that the fraternity fears. She is the traditional shrewish wife caricature commonly seen in comedian comedies, similar to the performances of Kathleen Howard in W. C. Fields’s domestic comedies, shrieking at her husband and even throwing items at him in volcanic eruptions of rage in response to his rebellious and boyish antics. Such a performance represents a fearful symbol of a social order that includes women, which serves as a safer target than the patriarchal ruler of the lodge, no matter how exhausted he is Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 5 9

at this point in history. This repressive mother role is firmly established in the sequence in which Hardy sheepishly informs Lottie that he plans to attend the convention in Chicago, since it would be good for him “in a business way,” as well as simply because “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Mrs. Hardy, holding a long phallic kitchen knife, launches into a shrewish rant: “You are not going to the convention. You are going to the mountains with me!” With each point she makes, she gestures the knife at her husband as if threatening castration, to which he responds with a startled recoil. The planned vacation to the mountains, as Lottie explains, will offer a cultured and genteel environment far removed from the fraternal bonding of the Sons of the Desert: “If you think you are going gallivanting off with a lot of hoodlums to any convention whenever you want to, you’re not! . . . I plan a vacation for you in the mountains at a nice resort, where they play bridge and have lectures on art and color!” Lottie knows the real enemy is the fraternity itself. She ends her knife-wielding rant screaming as she storms out of the room, “You’ll go to the convention over my dead body! I’ll put you in jail first! [To Laurel] And you too . . . with the rest of the Sons of the, oh, the Sons of the Desert!” She then proceeds to smash not one but three vases on her husband’s head. In this variation on the sexist humor common to comedian comedy, Lottie’s caricatured persona supplies an extreme version of the myth of a white male victimization (the dangers of aggressive feminization) fraternal orders in the early twentieth century perpetuated. Through literal violence, she makes the myth a reality by turning Hardy into a victim, essentially making him a battered husband. Notably, though, the film also moves away from simple stereotypes to provide a more complex variation on the phallic matriarch in the depiction of Mrs. Laurel. As the above sequence continues, Betty enters the house through the kitchen, dressed in a hunter’s coat and hat, holding a long shotgun and a string of dead ducks. In one of his few attempts ever at asserting masculinity, Laurel sits in the living room with his partner and spews out some hilariously garbled platitudes about proper sex roles: “You know, I may not be king of my castle, but I certainly wouldn’t allow my wife to wear any pants. I’d like to see my old woman throwing things around. It’s disgraceful. Never heard of such goings off . . . on.” During this speech, Betty, still holding the gun, silently enters the room and drives a cold stare into her husband. Laurel finally notices his deadly silent wife, who accompanies her now nervously fumbling husband out of the room. Adopting the masculine-attired sexuality of a Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo, Betty Laurel is a different type of matriarch, removing the overpowering shrewish caricature and adopting a cold “masculine” sexuality as a contrast to her husband’s flightier “feminine” stupidity. Queered in her own right, she more directly inverts the cultural myths attached to the roles of servitude and 1 6 0 | c ha p t e r 5

mastery found in Freudian fraternal constructs. It is she who keeps Laurel as some kind of feminized totemic wife, providing the food and wielding her phallic weapon (the shotgun) with much more precision than her counterpart, Lottie. In short, Betty emerges as a more distinctly twentieth-century empowered woman, a female threat more in tune with the modern development of the Depression-era woman as provider as she supplies the food and appears more sexually dominant in the relationship. In a fascinating complication on the “marriage joke” seen in the W. C. Fields comedies, the domestic arrangements of Son of the Desert welcome the observation that the two supposed heterosexual relationships mask two more logical homosexual pairings. Betty and Lottie have their own strong bond, almost as snippy and comically mismatched as Stan and Oliver. Since the two homes are conjoined, the respective couples’ dwellings spatially serve as more or less one large home with all four under the same roof. Stan and Oliver even briefly address this queered dynamic. On arriving home from Chicago to an empty house, Laurel hypothesizes that their wives could have gone to the mountains as some sort of female-only counter to their all-male fraternal getaway. In an ironic mirroring of Lottie’s comic shrewishness, Hardy suggests that this possible female homosocial excursion illustrates how his wife is “selfish.” To Hardy, the establishment of an alternative lesbian existence away from Laurel and him would be unfair since he obviously views his marriage squarely within the definitions dictated by fraternal myths. As promoted by his lodge, he must be the victim of a feminizing society and thus create a completely male existence away from the home; this same scenario would only be “selfish” if the women adopted it. As the plot thickens, Stan and Oliver find themselves locked in the attic of their own home during a dark and stormy night, forced to hide from the wives who are now situated below. The comedic battle of the sexes then adopts a pronounced spatial dimension with two alternate domestic situations being depicted in the home below and the dark attic above. Laurel and Hardy are dressed in long nightshirts and sleep in a makeshift double bed in the attic. They gently prepare for bed together and concede that they are now comfortable as “two peas in a pod.” But their comfort is soon disrupted when lightning strikes, resulting in them loudly screaming and startling their wives below. Thinking they hear burglars, the two wives head to the attic, Lottie cowering behind the comparatively “masculine” Betty, equipped with her shotgun. Upon hearing the wives approach, the boys escape their once cozy set-up to hide on the rainy rooftop, where they will eventually be mistaken as burglars once again, this time by a passing policeman. As the farcical trajectory of the narrative shows, the film aggressively creates a paired battle of the sexes with two alternate domestic situations under the same roof. Now the home away from Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 6 1

the lodge has evolved into a duplex where same-sex companionship blurs the lines between the homosocial and the homoerotic. Laurel and Hardy thereby not only queer the fraternity but also the essential gendered myths defining its structures as queered bonding is promoted for both genders.

“We are, I like to think, buffs”: Celebrating Laurel and Hardy As John McCabe explains in The Revenge of the Sons of the Desert, Laurel and Hardy’s eccentric community of fans embraces films that traditional cinephiles might dismiss as they look for a clearly defined quality in cinema. As he states, “We are, I like to think, buffs. Buffs are those people who I think understand that the thing they like or admire is not perfect.” In this manner, through an embrace of essentially low-budget comedies, the fans are also celebrating films that eschew the easily classifiable depictions of heterosexual manhood found in the larger-budget studio products of the Classic Hollywood era. They are celebrating buffoonish masculinity itself, the alternative definitions of maleness found in most significant films of the comedian comedy genre. As my discussion of Sons of the Desert suggested, the film that inspires the appreciation society’s name and organizational structures not only queers the fraternity but also subverts the gender definitions dictating its myths. As such, it challenges some of the core elements of the misogynistic humor that runs throughout much comedian comedy by queering both the male and female duos on screen. With such transgressions against fraternity defining many of their 1930s films, it is understandable why Laurel and Hardy fans are most obsessed with the comedies produced at the smaller studio of Hal Roach as opposed to the 1940s films made for two major studios—20th Century Fox and, on loan, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Produced quickly as an attempt to cash in on Universal’s huge success with Abbott and Costello in Buck Privates (1941), the team’s first film for Fox was a draft comedy titled Great Guns (1941). By this point, as America entered World War II, Hollywood was aggressively promoting the benefits of that greatest of masculine fraternities, the military. The film’s central character is a pampered rich boy (Dick Nelson) who is thrilled to be drafted so that he can finally prove his manhood. In contrast to this “straight” storyline, Laurel and Hardy essentially exist as outcast comic reliefs for a more heroic story of wartime duty. As Scott MacGillivray characterizes the film, “Apparently, according to the script, Laurel and Hardy are to be regarded as bungling buffoons and are not supposed to resemble ‘normal’ human beings.”57 In one sequence, one of the “normal” characters looks at a photo of the duo and asks, “Has Ripley seen them?”—a reference to Robert Ripley’s newspaper features about “freaks” and “oddballs.” By having the queered outsiderness of the co1 6 2 | c ha p t e r 5

medians heighten the idealized masculinity of the surrounding fighting men, this film confirms rather than lampoons the myths of the fraternity. This type of confirmation of “proper” maleness was particularly strong in military comedies of the period and will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter in direct relationship to Buck Privates. As this suggests, Laurel and Hardy’s later films, while they proved successful for a short time at the box office, are usually regarded as disappointments by fans, since the duo’s 1930s queered personae never mesh well with the 1940s manner of studio production or, more broadly, with World War II–era homosociality. It is difficult to imagine in this environment that such films as Their First Mistake or Sons of the Desert could have been produced. Nonetheless, this atmosphere would not last forever: the duo’s 1930s films later grew in popularity through television broadcasts. Not surprisingly, this resurgence largely occurred in the 1960s when we see, once again, many affronts to white male fraternity, this time in the form of powerful political movements. During this period, the two comedians enjoyed a major revival, with the release of compilation films such as Laurel and Hardy’s Laughing Twenties (1965) and The Further Perils of Laurel and Hardy (1967). More important, this period marked the founding of the Sons of the Desert as a direct spoof of fraternal societies, structures based in patriarchal orders that were once again being questioned through the progress of civil rights, feminism, and sexual liberation. With the duo readily available on television, fans organized as a living homage to the 1933 film that spoofed ancient fraternity. As an early precursor to our current participatory culture of fandom, the Sons of the Desert emerged as a tonguein-cheek response to heterocentric classifications of maleness. In homage, fans developed their own alternative community to celebrate something wonderfully queered in the art of Laurel and Hardy—a spoofing of heterosexual brotherhood.

Laurel and Hardy and Heterosexual Brotherhood | 1 6 3

6

Military Disservice Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army

With the possibilities too evident to overlook, the draft has been taken to the bosom of the town as an inspiration for comedy. In recent days, every studio has investigated military service as a story theme, and six have announced plans for films about rookie soldiers. New York Times, November 17, 1940

On September 14, 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into effect the Selective Training and Service Act, historically a marker of the American government’s fear of the looming threat of world war in Europe. This act, the first peacetime draft in American history, required men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty to register with local draft boards.1 As this suggests, Roosevelt’s signing of the bill marked a new turn in the narratives of masculinity defining the 1930s, as it now required the male population to take part in that greatest of American fraternal structures, the military. Hollywood’s response to this monumental legislation was to promote it through propaganda, though not necessarily through casting the type of stars usually associated with wartime heroism and duty. Instead, as the above New York Times article suggests, there was a large and immediate push to recognize the draft as an opportunity for comedy. As the article goes on to mention, Paramount was readying Bob Hope for Caught in the Draft (1941), while two studios were fighting over the title You’re in the Army Now, with Warner Bros. wanting it for comic bandleader Kay Kyser and RKO for Phil Silvers and Jimmy Durante.2 But Universal Studios beat them all with Buck Privates (1941) starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello as a pair of hapless army privates, rushing the 165

relatively low budget production to be released just five months after the draft bill on January 11, 1941. It was a move that ensured the production became a genuine blockbuster at the time.3 The formula was so successful that Universal rushed into production two other Abbott and Costello service comedies that were equally massive hits, both released before the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941: In the Navy, released May 21, 1941, and Keep ’Em Flying, about the army air corps and released just nine days before the bombing. The films are fascinating in that they are not wartime productions, but prewar comedies obviously idealizing military service for a nation on the brink of war. Outside of the comedians performing variations on their well-oiled burlesque routines, the productions also featured boogie-woogie musical numbers, pretty USO hostesses, and romantic “straight” storylines with Universal contract players meant to counterbalance the comedians’ silliness. The movies are escapist yet barely conceal an ideology meant to ease anxieties over the threat of combat on the horizon. As the New York Times wrote in its eventual glowing review of Buck Privates (less than a year before Americans marched into combat): “If the real thing is at all like this preview of Army life—with the Messers. A. & C. dropping gags once a minute and the Andrews Sisters crooning patriotic boogie-woogie airs—well, it’s going to be a merry war, folks.”4 The studios’ rush to produce the first draft comedy and the resulting success of Buck Privates might seem like a peculiar response by Hollywood to such a monumental piece of legislation. But the military had proved a fertile setting for comedian comedies in the past, dating back to Charles Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918)—a film made during the height of World War I and featuring the Little Tramp in boot camp, the trenches, and on a secret mission behind enemy lines. By the sound era, the nostalgic World War I military comedy became a standard in films featuring comedians in roles much like Chaplin’s in the sense that they were always low-ranking doughboys. These included Harry Langdon in A Soldier’s Plaything (1930), Buster Keaton in Doughboys (1930), Joe E. Brown in Sons o’ Guns (1936), and the Ritz Brothers in Pack Up Your Troubles (1939). In general, the structures of the military speak to the needs of buffoonish masculinity since it allows for a quick displacement of the comedian among his more “manly” brothers-in-arms and, as a common point of conflict, commanding officers. Much like with the social fraternity outlined in the last chapter with Sons of the Desert (1933), such films provide us with again a literal ranking of maleness to be queered by the comedians’ presence, another eroticization of the homosocial. Not surprisingly, it is a world that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy found most appropriate for their humor, as seen in their World War I comedy with (once again) Pack Up Your Troubles (1933), as well as them joining the Scottish Army with Bonnie Scotland (1935) and

1 6 6 | c ha p t e r 6

twice joining the French Foreign Legion with Beau Hunks (1931) and The Flying Deuces (1939). By the 1940s, the period of their less creative efforts, the duo continued to explore such military structure with the Buck Privates clone Great Guns (1941) and, in an interesting variation on home front service, Air Raid Wardens (1943). Abbott and Costello’s remarkably successful string of service films marked a change in direction from the military comedies of the 1930s. Most directly, the films were no longer based in the memories of a previous war but in the threat of the looming conflict, a systematic shift in the culture to now prepare men for battle. One indication of this shift can be seen in how Laurel and Hardy’s service comedies change after the success of Abbott and Costello. As suggested in my brief discussion of Great Guns in the previous chapter, the duo as queering the fraternity no longer truly appears. Great Guns and Air Raid Wardens go out of their way to suggest almost pitiable otherness in the comedians in contrast to the surrounding idealized depictions of military maleness. The latter film even opens on the duo in a supposedly humorous sequence being laughed out of the recruiting offices of all the branches of the military to ultimately have to join a lesser definition of service with Civil Defense on the home front. But to be historically accurate, contrasting Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello does not prove too fruitful since the natures of their comedy are distinctly different. One duo feels very much born out of the quieter physicality of the silent era and the smaller productions of Hal Roach Studios while the other are a product of the assembly line Universal Studios of the early 1940s, where radio and sound cinema embraced rapid-fire verbal comedy. In truth, Abbott and Costello’s forerunners were RKO’s comedy superstars during the 1930s, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey.5 In their heyday, Wheeler and Woolsey were enormously popular, starring in over twenty feature-length comedies, basically saving RKO studios from bankruptcy during the Depression. During the period, the studio released two to three low-budget but highly profitable features with the duo a year. This approach was a prototype for the quickly produced products that would also define Universal’s relationship with Abbott and Costello. Bud and Lou essentially made the most lucrative series of comedies ever produced, appearing in ten films during their first twenty-four months then making between two and three films per year for the next fourteen years. Outside of the duo’s ever-increasing salaries, the films were modestly produced with rarely a name costar and never in color. More directly, Universal looked to Wheeler and Woolsey as a way to structure script treatments for their new stars. As producer of the first Abbott and Costello films, Alex Gottlieb recalled, in order to locate screenplay ideas, “I had gone through all the ‘team’ pictures and made a list of all the back-

Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 6 7

grounds used. RKO had Wheeler and Woolsey, a comedy team that worked almost the same way as Bud and Lou, but they weren’t anywhere as good.”6 A quick look at the two duos’ films can show this narrative influence, even if the two teams did have different approaches to comedy routines. Wheeler and Woolsey’s Hook, Line and Sinker (1930) and Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost (1941) both feature storylines in spooky rundown resorts where the duos outwit gangsters. In The Nitwits (1935) and Who Done It (1942), each team gets involved in a New York City set murder mystery. Girl Crazy (1932) has Wheeler and Woolsey on a dude ranch in a western spoof, Ride ’Em Cowboy features Abbott and Costello going through the same motions. More directly, when on loan to MGM, Bud and Lou remade the former duo’s film debut Rio Rita (1929) in 1942. Abbott and Costello thereby can be seen as filling the void (and then some) left by the death of Robert Woolsey in 1938, which, of course, ended that team’s successful run. Of all these two duos’ similar productions, the most fascinating are the films that helped to establish each of their individual paths to Hollywood success—the military comedies Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) and Buck Privates. Each film became successful with the public by placing their comedy duos within the military order, yet in very different historical contexts; Half Shot exemplifies the nostalgic World War I comedian comedy, which, in its own aggressive way, queers the military order on screen through a cynical reflection upon the past. It is a very different sort of queering than seen in the last chapter with Laurel and Hardy, as Wheeler and Woolsey exist on screen as something more fundamentally confrontational and verbally vindictive—actually providing a rowdier alternative for moviegoers to Stan and Oliver during the period. Abbott and Costello present something considerably less transgressive in their military comedies, appearing so removed from the “straight” proper soldiers that they largely confirm the societal myths of brotherhood through their exclusion. At best, their appearance in the military order queers the team while largely leaving the masculine order unscathed, ultimately creating an ideologically conflicted text. The maintaining of a separated “straight” and “queered” maleness in the film creates a fantasy dichotomy that could appeal to the public through relatable comedians while also providing them with unreal male archetypes to promote military duty. Between these two takes on wartime fraternity, we can see how Hollywood managed to transform the comedy duo to fit the homosocial protocols of World War II–era America, where the home front promoted the masculine myth and offset the subversion of such ideals that existed in the years following World War I.

1 6 8 | c ha p t e r 6

Variations on the Duo: Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello were comedy teams based in clearer joke-based routines than Laurel and Hardy. Both made their progression to Hollywood via the Broadway stage, though in different ways that respectively affected the dynamics of their humor. Nearly forgotten today, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey were originally teamed by producers for the Broadway show Rio Rita in 1927, pairing two already established stage personae as a way to provide comic relief to a Ziegfeld musical romance. The film version was brought to RKO in 1929, with the two comedians in tow. The studio quickly distinguished the comics as a hot new comedy duo.7 Both performers were very much the products of vaudeville and, then, the Broadway stage, carrying over their early popular stage personae to the films. Bert Wheeler is a perpetually cheery and pint-sized innocent, though certainly never to the degree of Stan Laurel or even Eddie Cantor. Instead, his personality reflects that of a comedy song-and-dance man, with a New York accent and perpetually adolescent-like behavior, which means he chases young women and often catches at least one in the films. Robert Woolsey is a tall, skinny, homely, and bespectacled motor mouth comedian. Of the two, he is the one hatching schemes and firing off strings of wicked and outrageous barbs—similar in stage tradition to Groucho Marx, even down to the use of a cigar as a prop. As this lineage suggests, they are very much products of the Jazz Age as quick-witted, New York stage comedians, which is one of the reasons later comedy fans often overlook their films, since the humor regularly relies on 1930s popular culture references as opposed to universal character types. Many of Wheeler and Woolsey’s films are prototypical examples of Henry Jenkins’s classification of early sound comedy being of a “vaudeville aesthetic” or “anarchistic” in the breakdown of story for the allowance of gag routines. In a narrative sense, these films position the comedians as disruptive agents in the social structures of the diegesis, two clowns that a disruptive narrative can be built around.8 Describing their gender classification as anything as fixed as Laurel and Hardy becomes problematic since such a stage-influenced turn toward manic clownishness creates, as Jenkins suggests, a “highly unstable characterization,” which unfold in the films’ excessive role-playings and cartoonish masquerades. These fleeting characterizations fit various performative set pieces, ranging from verbal byplay to silly “impromptu” musical numbers.9 Such role-playing allows for tantalizing queer readings of the team’s humor, especially with pre-Code films made between 1930 and 1934.10 Reflecting on this more randy series of comedies, David Boxwell writes: “Wheeler and Woolsey’s ‘queerness,’ on ample display in the films I’m highlighting here, isn’t Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 6 9

a true reflection of their own personal self-expression; rather, their ‘queerness’ is just a concentrated site in which long-standing comedic traditions of drag, ‘dirty’ double entendre, gender role reversal, and presentation of non-normative sexual identities and behaviors (what entertainment journals in the 1930s like Variety racily called ‘panze humor’) were on ample display between 1930 and 1934.”11 Boxwell suggests the films less as examples of developed queered characterizations (which the previous chapter shows was more the case for Laurel and Hardy as a “queered unit”) but litanies of “nonnormative” sexualities emerging through comedy bits and situations. The films are sites for the convergence of pre-Code queered humor, which is a stance Jenkins also holds in his reading of the team’s most manic film, the gag-a-second political satire Diplomaniacs (1933). He suggests such instability also creates sexual ambiguity within Wheeler and Woolsey’s personae: “Fundamental aspects of their characterization, most notably indications of their sexuality, fluctuate radically from scene to scene depending upon the comic potentials of each new setting and situation.”12 Jenkins points to moments of possible homoeroticism between the duo, only to have such moments quickly countered with aggressive heterosexuality and, then alternately, sexual timidity. Yet even within the anarchistic nature of their humor, Wheeler and Woolsey conform to the warping of fraternity and queered male identities seen in Laurel and Hardy. Underneath the layers of gags is a lesser, though still potent, mutation of masculine fraternity, an eroticization of the homosocial. As I have submitted throughout this book, stable sexual identification does appear in comedians whose films are distinctly anarchistic, such as Eddie Cantor or, to a lesser degree, W. C. Fields. Although, admittedly, in these other comedians, sexual dynamics feel more grounded in the past, present, and future of the personas’ experiences with women. In texts as aggressively anarchistic as many of Wheeler and Woolsey’s films, it becomes difficult to chart tangible masculine anxiety since the momentary comic situation takes almost total precedent over characterizations. But as we will see, the possibility to define the comedians as sexual subjects still exists underneath the layers of gags, since the comics’ position in the narrative world still implies their roles as denaturalized, an othered position in relationship to the phallic order.13 The anarchistic nature of pre-Code Wheeler and Woolsey does not appear within Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, as this twosome moves the discussion beyond the 1930s squarely into World War II–era America. Unlike Laurel and Hardy or Wheeler and Woolsey, Abbott and Costello joined forces on their own accord in 1936 on the burlesque stage, an entertainment venue that was already dying by the mid-1930s. While the shows in such theaters usually contained adult entertainment in the form of striptease, the comedy was also a central component and rowdy two-acts were very common. The humor was 1 7 0 | c ha p t e r 6

even less sophisticated than seen in the vaudeville teams that eventually graduated to the Broadway stage in the 1920s, with burlesque based in situations and settings familiar to working-class audiences.14 Less dependent on topical references, a common source of humor was the spoofing of social conventions, as seen in popular routines of confusion over language such as Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” Within this venue, sexual innuendo was also very prominent, though Abbott and Costello eschewed such humor, which, along with their undeniable performance skills, helped them reach a wider audience. Born out of burlesque’s broader characterizations, Abbott and Costello’s personae embody the prototypical formation of a comedy duo: the skinny straight man and tubby comedian. Abbott adopts the clearly defined straight role as an aggressor, basically a bully toward his companion. The comic, Costello, performs the role of a total innocent, extremely dim-witted, yet lovable in his cluelessness and sweetness. With a litany of well-polished verbal routines, Abbott and Costello moved to better theaters and frequent guest appearances on the popular Kate Smith Hour on radio, eventually appearing in the revue format Broadway show The Streets of Paris in 1939. In all these venues, they performed many of the routines they already perfected on the burlesque stage. By 1940 they traveled out to Hollywood to star in, not surprisingly, a film resembling Wheeler and Woolsey’s Rio Rita. In One Night in the Tropics (1940), Abbott and Costello played supporting roles as comic relief within an otherwise underwhelming romantic comedy. With their well-rehearsed stage material, they stole the show and rose to major popularity throughout 1941 in their series of military comedies. Beyond these initial successes, Abbott and Costello had a long career, finding ways to adapt their humor to changing audiences. Of particular note, they challenged the conventions of the comedian genre in the classic Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which inspired a successful string of horror comedies that often combined genre elements as opposed to separating the comics from a “straight” plot. Despite this evolution, I wish to focus on their financially fruitful early work as a direct contrast to the transgressiveness of 1930s comedy.15 Abbott and Costello adopt many of the basics of Freudian aggression and degradation that grounds buffoonish masculinity as a genre staple. Unlike the other duos mentioned thus far, the aggressor is the straight man who consistently attacks or, at least, humiliates the comedian as victim, providing a differentiation from the “queered unit” found with Laurel and Hardy. This dynamic often results in Bud Abbott slapping and manhandling Lou Costello, slapstick physicality common in the rowdier venue of burlesque. While both performers were outsiders within the films’ plots, they also had the distinction of beginning their film careers well into the post-Code period and at the start of America’s World War II–era patriotic fervor. All of this makes Abbott Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 7 1

and Costello feel almost like the most conservative of all the comedians covered in this book. The films made during their years of excessive production at Universal in the early 1940s are different sorts of comedies than the queered antics of Laurel and Hardy or the anarchistic sexual tomfoolery of Wheeler and Woolsey. Abbott and Costello’s comedies tend to conform to the masculine myths genre films of the period commonly perpetuated. Each film is a broad, slapstick comedy and a genre spoof to some degree, from the various military comedies to a western in Ride ’Em Cowboy to a South Seas adventure in Pardon My Sarong (1942) to a mystery thriller in Who Done It? to a strange hybrid of gangster/ice-skating picture in Hit the Ice (1943).16 Despite elements of spoof, the films still contain a basic phallic or “straight” narrative progression as the action centers on a clichéd romantic plot that is, for the most part, not played for laughs. These movies rarely feature the comedians as anything but the manly hero’s comic sidekicks or, in an interesting twist, the heroine’s platonic friends. The films exemplify a basic comedian comedy structure that now has the comics as completely separate from the “straight” world of the genre narrative. So Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello are two duos that illustrate different manifestations of comedian comedy—the anarchistic and the formulaic, though, as Jenkins rightfully suggests, anarchistic comedy was a formula unto itself in the 1930s. We can thereby employ these two teams to contemplate comedic takes on the military orders of maleness within two very different comic styles. Each of these approaches tells us much about the social views (or, more accurately, the social views Hollywood perpetuated) toward masculinity at the beginning of the 1930s and the 1940s. After the death of Robert Woolsey in 1938, as stated before, it can be easily suggested that Abbott and Costello filled the void left by Wheeler and Woolsey, a hunger for a populist comedy entertainment to subside growing national anxieties over the threat of war. It is only fitting to examine them in correspondence by looking at two examples of on-screen depictions of military maleness in similar vehicles with Half Shot at Sunrise and Buck Privates. But before moving on to these two films, let us examine the social narratives of maleness as they pertain to military service and the cinema during the period. As these two particular movies will show, even within a short period of time, public perception of fighting men can drastically change and nothing illustrates this more than how a culture cinematically laughs at its wars.

The World Wars and Citizen Soldiery In From Chivalry to Terrorism, Leo Braudy provides a history of how perceptions and myths of masculinity changed throughout the history of war in West1 7 2 | c ha p t e r 6

ern civilization, ranging from Homer’s The Iliad to America’s “War on Terror.”17 As a qualification for this ambitious work, Braudy suggests early on that war produces readable markers of masculine gender performance during distinct historical periods—thus providing possibly our clearest way to see how culture understands its myths of masculinity. As he writes, “War may make masculinity more single-minded. But what constitutes male dress, let alone behavior, shifts constantly throughout history, as do the rituals of becoming a man or going to the men’s room.”18 This history of masculine performance and war becomes especially fascinating when looking at the two world wars. Historically, the point that distinguished both these wars outside of their expansive worldwide battlefields was the technological advancements that led to mass deaths, from the trench gas attacks of World War I to the dropping of the Abomb at the end of World War II. By the end of the Great War, twenty million soldiers and civilians had died, after World War II the number of casualties was a staggering fifty million.19 In a very profound way, we can position the historical period focused on in this book as simply a lull during the longest stretch of mass murder ever known to history. As a chronicle of masculinity, this study must contend with the tragic fact that even these comedic (sub)narratives of maleness had to deal with the traumatizing effects of warfare and the loss of millions upon millions of lives. Almost paradoxically, though, as weapons of mass destruction killed millions, there was an increased public emphasis on the solider as individual during the two world wars. From this change in perception, the narratives of masculinity and wartime service that defined previous wars were now in conflict. As Braudy suggests, in the public imagination, two popular views of the soldier were now in “uneasy relation”: “One was the older view that the ordinary foot soldier was scum or cannon fodder, frequently a mercenary, who had no particular claim to citizenship and its rights and privileges merely because of his military service. The other was born in the popular revolutions when fighting for one’s country became a primary criterion for being a citizen, as it was in the early years of the French Revolution.”20 This struggle between two types of fighting men emerged as social movements around the world had begun to argue for fuller definitions of citizenship as a rejection of class systems. These two definitions found the most profound conflicts within the development of the public perception of a citizen soldier or, in America, the “doughboy” in World War I and the “GI Joe” (GI standing for “government issue”) or “Sad Sack” in World War II. The Second World War saw this phenomenon develop to its greatest heights, since as Braudy notes, the “GI Joe was a citizen before he became a soldier, and the two identities were often in conflict.”21 This idealized solider as common man resembled more the type of masculinity promoted by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War (1898). The Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 7 3

press sold these fighting men as more about the bravery of American individualism than a unified collective of men.22 Such a move might seem to offset the very fraternal myths comedians often disrupt, as seen with Laurel and Hardy as they spoof the Freemasons in Sons of the Desert. But, in truth, these changes in classifications did little but resettle the boundaries to new impossible male idealizations, now found in the citizen solider as exemplifying the Horatio Alger myth, a social narrative of becoming a proper male through dedication and hard work. New movements of individualism might have complicated the concept of fascist depictions of military groupthink, yet these turns still pointed to psychologies of small group cohesion. As Joshua S. Goldstein outlines, the small group of five to ten soldiers found in the world wars promoted comradeship within units such as infantry squads. These smaller male orders provide a key motivation for fighting, without dismissing other motivations for enlisting in the first place, such as patriotism, professionalism, employment, or conscription.23 Despite the reasons behind joining the military, the commonly held belief remains that a primary reason a soldier continues to fight once enlisted is out of loyalty to his brothers-in-arms. As such, regardless of this move from large groupthink to the individual citizen soldier, the military fraternity can still be defined in simple terms for the phallic order. The military and war itself remained a process that creates men out of boys. As discussed in previous chapters, the early twentieth century saw a rising fear in the “feminization” of American males, something that Theodore Roosevelt and the cult of masculinity attempted to offset. As Goldstein suggests, “Views of manhood have changed in industrialized societies, leading some men to worry, throughout the twentieth century, that nations were going soft, that boys were losing their way on the road to manhood because we now lack the rituals of passage found in simpler societies.”24 As one would expect, this conception often defines recruitment propaganda, something noted by Christina S. Jarvis’s study of depictions of male bodies during World War II, where the building of muscular bodies as opposed to soft “unmanly” ones remained a consistent theme on posters and magazine ads.25 Even more profoundly, as Goldstein suggests, the structures of boot camp and military academies are “the main remnant of traditional manhood-making rituals,” with drill sergeants taking on the most aggressive guise of the phallic order by feminizing the recruits with epithets like “pussies,” “girls,” and “faggots.”26 While the twentieth century certainly marks some definite reconfigurations in popular perceptions of military maleness, such modernizations still promoted military service as the key to “becoming a man.” For the purpose of this study, the interwar period shows a more immediate and traceable history of changing perceptions toward military service. These 1 7 4 | c ha p t e r 6

tangible changes in attitudes can be linked to the very real struggles between isolationist and internationalist mentalities defining the political debates of the era. For many years, Hollywood studios were quick to remind audiences of the tragedies of the First World War, a move that made them feel isolationist in their suggestion of the futility of battle as the rise of fascism in Europe made American intervention in another war possible. Dramas about World War I tended to adopt mournful tones, pacifist themes, and cynicism toward the purpose of combat. These popular films included The Big Parade (1925), Four Sons (1928), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), The Lost Patrol (1934), The Dawn Patrol (1930 and remade in 1938), and They Gave Him a Gun (1937).27 All these cynical and often melodramatic takes on war told stories of ground combat and infantrymen, dissecting the older classification of the foot soldier Braudy provided as “scum or cannon fodder” and critiquing such dismissals of individuality through antiwar messages.28 The only place where Hollywood really embraced wartime gallantry is in a subgenre where individual heroics made for easily definable heroes—the aerial combat film with Wings (1927), Hell’s Angels (1930), and The Eagle and the Hawk (1933). Such movies overtly celebrate the concept of individualism as opposed to groupthink, since World War I air combat consisted of highly cinematic man-against-man duels that allowed for the valiant knights of the air to assert their dexterity. By the decade’s end, though, there was a considerable shift in the politics of Hollywood toward the European situation and the possibility of another American intervention. Mindful of European markets and losing disapproving audiences stateside, the Hays Office tried to steer films away from overtly controversial subject matter concerning world politics. But this push began to fall on deaf ears by the decade’s end as producers embraced interventionist tendencies, a move that enraged isolationists. The turning point occurred when prewar films like Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Four Sons (1940), Escape (1940), Man Hunt (1941), and Underground (1941) overtly tackled the issue of Nazism as a clear and present danger.29 Also, Hollywood’s most critically acclaimed comedian, Charlie Chaplin, directly spoofed Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). The Hollywood publicity machine also embraced this trend, with Photoplay magazine boldly warning its readers of “the reality and danger of the subversive threat” of Nazi sympathizers and spies within in the movie industry in October of 1940.30 The final straw for the isolationists came with the release of a new type of World War I picture, Sergeant York in the summer of 1941.31 This immensely popular biopic featured Gary Cooper as the Great War’s most famous American hero who has a personal battle between religious convictions as a Quaker and patriotic duty as a citizen before committing to the fight. In essence, the narrative exists as a metaphor of the isolationist and interventionist debates Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 7 5

that were now intensifying. As Thomas Doherty summarizes, the film accomplished two turns in the way Hollywood now examined combat: “(1) to remythologize World War I as a national crusade worthy of admiration, and (2) to reconcile the conflict between state (patriotism) and church (morality).”32 With the enormous success of Sergeant York, in September of 1941, notorious anti-Semite isolationist Gerald Nye (R-ND) put the industry on trial in the Senate Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce in search of “Moving Picture Screen and Radio Propaganda.” The hearing did little except create publicity for both Nye and Hollywood. By the December 7 bombing of Pearl Harbor, of course, the isolationist and interventionist debates became pointless. On December 18, President Roosevelt formally recognized the wartime role of Hollywood cinema by appointing Lowell Mellett as coordinator of government films.33 The changing national attitude toward the necessity to fight therefore is instrumental in understanding the changing public view of the soldier. True to Braudy’s classifications, Hollywood embraced and critiqued the perception of the solider as the exploited “grunt” at the decade’s start only to adapt to the changing political landscape to promote military service as duty—not only to prove one’s citizenship but to confirm one’s maleness. This change is seen in the cinematic recontextualization of World War I with Gary Cooper cast as Sergeant York and that film’s celebration of the citizen solider as a masculine ideal. This push by studios to position idealized maleness with military service brings us back to the industry’s peculiar reaction to the first peacetime draft in 1940. Why rush to cast comedians, supposedly buffoonish male subjects, in propaganda films promoting the current call to arms? On the most basic level, the reasoning might be found in the fact that comedians, as this book has shown, are populist figures often defined by mediums in direct conversation with lower social classes (vaudeville, burlesque, and radio).34 If mandatory service were designed to bring together lower-class males for a common national mission, comedians and their buffoonish masculinity would provide the most logical pool of talent to promote such a cause. While male viewers could only aspire to be like the stoic and brave Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, they could directly relate to a wisecracking and nervous Bob Hope as he found himself Caught in the Draft. If populism gives us a sufficient reason for why Hollywood enlisted funnymen in the army, it does little to explain how these transgressive queered figures work in worlds the strictest of fraternal structures define. In what follows, I contrast two popular military comedies with Wheeler and Woolsey’s Half Shot at Sunrise and Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates. In each of these comedic takes on army life, the comedy duo proves to be disruptive to authority, thus challenging the primal father and warping versions of military or1 7 6 | c ha p t e r 6

der. Each film also illustrates different views of homosocial maleness dictated by their respective periods, with one overtly spoofing the military ranking of maleness while the other promoting its fictions in what can considered an ideologically conflicted text.

Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army: Half Shot at Sunrise and Buck Privates Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) was Wheeler and Woolsey’s fourth film and the first real attempt to move the team away from the stage-bound feel of their successful debut in Rio Rita. Set in Paris, 1918, the film follows the duo as Tommy Tanner and Gilbert Simpson, two buck privates who are AWOL (absent without leave) and running amuck throughout the city. They are a constant worry of Colonel Marshall (George MacFarlane), who is having various troubles with the women in his life, including: his former mistress Olga (Leni Stengel), his suspicious wife (Edna May Oliver), his love-struck grown daughter Arlene (Roberta Robinson), and his sixteen-year-old, boy-crazy daughter Annette (Dorothy Lee). Throughout the film, Wheeler and Woolsey become romantically involved with, respectively, Annette and Olga, who attempt to make heroes out of the boys in order to win them the colonel’s favor. Eventually, the ladies convince the privates to deliver a message to the front lines only to be put into genuine danger. As this narrative suggests, the military world of the film is presented as a sexualized funhouse, with the three main male characters partaking in the sexual appeals supposedly available to American soldiers in wartime Paris. This film shows over a decade’s worth of distance from the horrors of World War I, with the idea of male heroics often downplayed or warped for comic effect. In contrast, Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates (1941) is a very different sort of military comedy. The film tells the “straight” story of spoiled playboy Randolph Parker (Lee Bowman), who is selected for service but believes his rich father’s connections will get him out of performing his duty. Not surprisingly, his father sees this as an opportunity for his son to gain character and does not interfere. Meanwhile, Randolph’s long-suffering valet, Bob Martin (Alan Curtis), takes his call of duty in stride and both men find themselves competing for the affections of a beautiful camp hostess, Judy Green (Jane Frazee). By the conclusion of the film, Randolph proves himself during training exercises and gains the respect of both Judy and Bob. In the end, the three are shown as friends as they all have been transferred to officer training school, Judy to only continue as a noncommissioned hostess. In a separate plotline, Abbott and Costello perform a funhouse mirror version of a military story playing Slicker Smith and Herbie Brown, two sidewalk peddlers. After running Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 7 7

from a policeman, they hide in a recruitment station and accidently enlist in the army. At boot camp, they are horrified to find that their drill sergeant (Nat Pendleton) in civilian life was the policeman who once chased them. Throughout their time at camp, Herbie continually messes up even the most basic of tasks, but these mishaps have no major consequences. The main narrative trajectory is based on the Randolph and Bob conflict and resolution. The success of the film was undoubtedly based on Abbott and Costello’s appeal and their well-polished burlesque routines.35 Even though by definition their storyline is a subplot, they were billed as the film’s above-the-title stars. The basic narrative split of Buck Privates (the “straight” dramatic / the “queered” comedic) essentially exists as a variation upon a structure found in other popular comedies of the era, where the comedians are offset by a separate plotline based in a heteronormative progression. As discussed in the introduction, the clearest example of this structure appears in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1936), where the comedians are often sidelined in deference to the heterosexual romances between Allan Jones and, respectively, Kitty Carlisle and Maureen O’Sullivan. Variations on this narrative split also appear in other films discussed in this book—including the comedies of W. C. Fields, where his daughter pursues a romance in The Old Fashioned Way (1934) and Poppy (1936), and Eddie Cantor, where his nebbish assists in uniting a “conventional” heterosexual boy and girl in The Kid from Spain (1932) and Kid Millions (1934). Yet Buck Privates proves remarkable in how this structure emerges so directly as a resignation to the ideologies of the “straight” plot, queering the team while largely leaving the masculine order unscathed. When steeped in aggressive prewar propaganda, maintaining a separated “straight” and “queered” maleness creates a fantasy dichotomy, allowing the relatable comedians to be the major selling point to the public while also providing unreal male archetypes to promote military duty. In his study of masculinity in war films, Robert Eberwein suggests that when a World War II–era war film provides supposed “affronts” to masculinity, these are usually recanted through the use of particular motifs: Again and again, narratives present situations that seem to undermine masculinity and sexuality in order to disavow the negative implications of the representations. This occurs in a number of ways. Sometimes humor is used as a defensive strategy. At other times, showing men’s capacity for acting maternally demonstrates the strength, stability, and expansiveness of their masculinity. Sometimes narratives deflect possible threats such as homosexuality by addressing them directly. Representations of the male body that display men’s sexuality can be seen to preempt negative interpretations by denying their erotic appeals.36 1 7 8 | c ha p t e r 6

The war film does acknowledge the possibility of male lack and, more distinctly, the threat of homosexuality, yet it does so through disavowal and a deeroticization of the homosocial. In the variations involving a comic defense, Eberwein explains through filmic examples how dramatic war films often contain moments when soldiers adopt comically queered dialogue. For example, in Gung Ho! (1943), one soldier asks another for “pictures of pin-ups,” to which his friend jokingly responds with “I’ve got a picture of me in a bathing suit. Do you want me to autograph it?” In Objective, Burma! (1945), one soldier puts on his gear and purrs in a feminine voice, “Can you give me a hand with my bustle?”37 In Buck Privates, these attempts to disavow the supposed negativity of queered masculinity appear in a variety of ways, including the denial of the straight male leads as anything erotic. More crucially, as counters to the “straight” narrative, Abbott and Costello broadly perform the role that Eberwein suggests comic relief fulfills in war dramas. The comedians exist, more or less, as a “defensive strategy” to the “straight” narrative, which promotes the benefits of being a citizen soldier who conforms to this new variation of the phallic order. Such an approach to queered maleness does not define Wheeler and Woolsey’s army comedy. In Half Shot, the military fraternity is quickly satirized during the opening scene even before the comedians’ disruptive presence makes an appearance. Sitting in his lavishly decorated office and being briefed by General Hale (Elisha H. Calvert) as to the importance of the upcoming military charge, Colonel Marshal has a letter delivered to him by one of his subordinates. Despite the fact that the general thinks the letter must be of great military importance, a close-up reveals that it is a mushy love note from Olga calling Marshal “snuggle-puff.” The colonel nervously hides the letter as the general aggressively asks the meaning of the message. Marshal mumbles that it is a “memorandum on sharp shooting,” a possible phallic joke about the colonel’s sexual proclivity. As in Sons of the Desert, the fraternal order once again masquerades adolescent sexual games, something typically present behind the fraternity’s serious and ritualistic facade. Throughout the film, the presence of Olga and a series of perfumed scented love notes serve as a constant source of bother for the colonel. This military environment is different from the one suggested in Buck Privates, which presents the military as certainly idealized but never as a careless playground for fornication. While pretty singers such as the Andrews Sisters entertain, and attractive camp hostesses socialize with the new recruits, the central narrative is still one suggesting a sense of masculine duty and brotherhood. The “straight” storyline of Randolph and Bob that drives the film provides us with, as sugarcoated as it seems, a rather standard

Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 7 9

citizen soldier narrative about self-sacrifice and adopting a socially approved male identity. The military order in Half Shot is further denaturalized upon the introduction of Wheeler and Woolsey, who largely view the war as their personal playground. Upon the general’s exit, Colonel Marshal asks for the military police and inquires about the two comedians who are AWOL and “running around Paris as if this was a picnic instead of a war.” Here we learn that the duo have been pulling a series of authority-defying high jinks, including impersonating officers, flirting with congressmen’s wives, and, even, romantically misleading a Russian ambassador’s mother-in-law. Upon the comedians’ introduction on the streets of Paris, they are once again impersonating authority figures by masquerading as military police officers. They attempt to use the disguise to steal a group of French coquettes away from some doughboys, only to find the women not interested. They then decide to change disguises, this time simply pinning on some stripes to their uniforms to become lieutenants, only to find the ladies are still not interested. Continually pulling out different insignias from their pockets, they finally disguise themselves as majors to impress two women at a sidewalk café. In a spoof of the aerial combat films of the period, Woolsey also adorns himself with aviator wings and impresses one of the ladies, who happens to be the colonel’s former sweetheart, Olga, who asks, “You are [a] distinguished aviator?” Woolsey, with false modesty, gushes, “I don’t think so. But what is my opinion compared with thousands of others.” As the pick-up continues, Wheeler further impresses the ladies by mockingly placing a silver bowl on his head and two pieces of bread on his shoulders to imitate, in Woolsey’s words, a “brigadier general.” Upon learning of Olga’s connection to the colonel, the two comedians assess the danger of staying and quickly remove themselves from the table, only to be chased by the actual military police down the street. As the introduction of the duo shows, the military environment of Half Shot does not take the concept of rank and order too seriously, something seen as Wheeler and Woolsey indifferently adopt the various insignias of authority. Dressed in their standard doughboy outfits (denoting the lowest of ranks), the boys are thrilled to find that their positions can be reestablished by simply the addition of stolen adornments, a joke highlighting the fragile nature of masculine ideals since such rankings supposedly will impress the women. As all this suggests, the comedic world Half Shot presents is not afraid to mock the very structures of authority that define the military, attacking the symbolic-ness of the symbolic father, a slippery value that military rank attempts to categorize and formalize. Within their position as “grunts,” the comedians dismiss and critique the conception that higher orders of males are worthy of respect. In

1 8 0 | c ha p t e r 6

Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, and Dorothy Lee in Half Shot at Sunrise (1930). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

essence, military rank becomes a game of queered dress-up, yet another variation on the “drag” performances found throughout this book. Such single-minded mockery is not found in the opening of Buck Privates. Instead, the audience is quickly given the dual narrative structure (“straight” story / comedian story) as soon as the film begins. Randolph and Bob show up to report for army duty at a movie theater converted into an army registration office.38 Each man illustrates two different versions of masculinity as they face their supposed duty, with Randolph quickly asking the captain in charge if his father has called to get him out of service. The captain dismisses this question and leads the spoiled playboy into the next room, which is filled with halfclothed men getting ready for their physicals. True to Eberwein’s observation, the sight of multiple men in various stages of undress is presented as nothing erotic, only something dutiful in the military’s conception of the homosocial. Meanwhile, Bob accepts his service in stride as a type of poster boy for fulfilling the masculine duty of the citizen soldier. The film pushes this concept by presenting Bob not only as the model soldier but also as the literal first peacetime draftee, reporting for duty as the famous “number 158.” As the prelude of the film reminds us, this was the number Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 8 1

first drew to initiate the draft. Being a model citizen and model male, Bob takes this in stride by laughing with the officer taking his information, joking, “Imagine me being first prize in a raffle.” Established by this straight storyline, the duty of the citizen solider and his healthy body are now the focus of the film in a manner distinctly unlike Half Shot, providing the audience with idealized models of masculinity. Abbott and Costello’s introduction in the film does little to disrupt the military order in the same sense as Wheeler and Woolsey. The film follows Bud and Lou escaping from a police officer, who finds them peddling cheap neckties without a license. Selling shoddy neckties—cheapened versions of male dress codes—shows the duo to be some kind of substandard version of maleness. Running in to the converted movie theater, Abbott and Costello mistake the enlistment process for a raffle to win free dinner plates, a common promotional campaign at theaters that was tellingly aimed at female moviegoers. An officer approaches and asks, “Draftee?” which Costello responds with, “Not a bit . . . I feel very comfortable in here.” After accidently signing in and finding they are now in the army, the comedians panic and run out of the theater only to be confronted by the policeman. Weighing their options, they decide to remain enlisted. As this opening suggests, Abbott and Costello will have a very different relationship with the military than Wheeler and Woolsey. Their inductions insinuate military duty as something inescapable as the two comedians are forced into enlistment through an absurd series of events, almost denoting that service is a type of proper fate for the duo. Abbott and Costello exist here as the buffoonish version of the straight storyline, and this narrative function is highlighted in a joke that ends the recruitment sequence. Now supposed equals within the fraternity, Bob decides to violently confront his former employer, Randolph, since the spoiled playboy has spent the last two years degrading Bob’s manliness by making him play nursemaid. Bob complains, among other grievances, “I’ve carried you upstairs and put you to bed any number of times.” Finally, Bob gives his “resignation” by swiftly punching Randolph, thus knocking the playboy to the ground. Witnessing this confrontation, Costello decides to stand up to his own bully in the form of Abbott. Raising his fist toward Bud’s face, the comedian finds each attempt at aggression thwarted by a powerful slap from his partner, who scolds, “Don’t!” Finally, frustrated by his inability to exact revenge in the same manner as Bob, Costello gives up and yells at his own fist, “Well, what are you waiting for?!” This old burlesque gag, presented here as a comic parallel to the confrontation between Bob and Randolph, serves to designate the duo as failures in enacting behaviors typical to the phallocentric narrative. Costello could never truly fulfill the role of Bob, asserting his supposed equal position to his brother-in-arms. Lou can only find this course of action thwarted, as Abbott’s 1 8 2 | c ha p t e r 6

quick slaps result in the comedian literally chiding his own deprived physical body for its lack of aggressive action. As military comedies, Half Shot and Buck Privates must, to some degree, be based within a lampooning of military authority figures. This is a standard dynamic of the broad military comedy since confrontation must happen within the ranks as opposed to on the battlefield, something that would imply too much of a realistic threat of death to be perceived as humorous for audiences. Thus the comedy largely is set in relatively peaceful settings such as camps, bases, or even on the home front. Such settings appear in both comedies, with Half Shot largely set in (apparently late) 1918 Paris and Buck Privates at a peacetime boot camp. Despite this similarity, each film approaches military authority in different ways. Half Shot lampoons Colonel Marshal as a primal father in the form of actor George MacFarlane, with his gray hair and full mustache denoting the authoritative patriarch. In one extended sequence, the military police have chased Wheeler and Woolsey into the kitchen of a fancy restaurant and they disguise themselves as waiters. The duo ends up serving the colonel and his wife, played by Edna May Oliver, whose stately appearance suggests matriarchal authority.39 Wheeler and Woolsey quickly have fun at the expense of the two, launching into a series of pun-filled gags. The colonel asks, “How’s your turtle soup?” Woolsey cracks, “Oh, very snappy, sir. Very snappy.” Later, Woolsey goes even further to insult and demote the colonel by calling him “lieutenant.” The scene ends with the comedy duo humiliating the colonel through delivering and reading aloud a letter from Olga in front of his wife, undermining his lofty authority by exposing his duplicitous sexual nature. Unmasking the true intentions of the fraternal facade before such a phallic matriarch as Oliver leaves the colonel’s ego deflated, as he childishly babbles to explain the letter to his wife. Abbott and Costello have their own run-ins with military authority in Buck Privates, yet the primal father generally feels much less undercut since such scenes involve Drill Sergeant Michael Collins—a less fatherlike figure played by gruff tough guy character actor Nat Pendleton, who was roughly the same age as Bud Abbott. As the lesser rank and younger age suggest, the lampooned authority no longer contains the same gravity. Pendleton appears as a comic heavy—essentially another version of Abbott, an aggressor toward the small Costello. His role is to overpower the comic and, unlike Half Shot, any dignity stripped away from Sergeant Collins is done by accident on the comedian’s part. For example, on two separate occasions, Costello blindly throws a suitcase then a bucket of hot water out of his tent only to hit the sergeant. In other scenes, Pendleton is there to read obvious straight lines for Costello, for example, asking him, “How can you be so stupid?” Costello answers, “Oh that just comes to me natural.” The concept of true fatherly authority remains .

Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 8 3

unscathed in the film, still appearing in forms promoting military and even familial institutions. The camp’s stately commander, General Emerson (Samuel S. Hinds), is a fatherly figure with white hair whose purpose in the narrative is solely within Randolph’s “straight” world. In one sequence, Randolph’s father (Douglas Wood) appears at the camp to stop his wife’s attempts to remove her son from service. With Randolph sheepishly standing before the two authoritative “fathers,” the private is rebuked and informed that he will remain in uniform. The general chides, “It seems that your father has a little more respect for army life and army institutions than you have, Parker.” Randolph’s father suggests that the boot camp is “excellently equipped to make a man out of a playboy.” As such a moment shows, the narrative fully embraces the conception of the citizen soldier as exemplifying proper maturation for a young man. In the film, the only true disturbance of military order takes the form of self-contained burlesque routines. For example, reenacting a bit they would eventually perform numerous times onstage, Abbott and Costello do a mock version of army drills. Since seasoned straight man Abbott actually proved more adept at performing the gags to the correct beats, the film has Sergeant Collins order the low-ranked Bud to run drills with Costello and three other substandard soldiers. As this move suggests, the role of authority can move between Abbott and Pendleton with little concern. The scene plays out as a typical burlesque routine filled with miscommunication and slapstick buffoonery, with the comedian getting hit multiple times in the head by his neighbor’s rifle. Abbott yells, “Get your chest out! Throw it out!” Costello cracks, “I’m not through with it yet.” As the routine continues, Abbott barks different orders at the men, leaving Costello confusingly turning and moving in different directions. In contrast to the attacks on rank and order found in Half Shot, the scene serves as an example of “comedy for comedy’s sake” in a more burlesque tradition appealing to the working class—here, army recruits who were meant as a major audience for Buck Privates. The film’s only critiques of military order usually take the form of Costello as the befuddled buffoon, lamenting some rather generalized constrictions attributed to army life. In a rare musical number for the comedian, Herbie sings the song, “When Private Brown Becomes a Captain,” while being forced to peel potatoes. During the number, he exuberantly informs the men on kitchen duty how he would run the army. But unlike Wheeler and Woolsey, Costello finds himself completely rejected by (as opposed to actively rejecting) the military order. In the song, he dreams of the sexualized fantasy world that he will never experience, singing, “When I become a captain, there will be no bugle calls to spoil your slumber. There will be no KP duties and we’ll draft a bunch of cuties and instead of doing drills we’ll do the rumba.” But this fantasy is ultimately squashed with the interruption of Sergeant Collins, who places Costello on 1 8 4 | c ha p t e r 6

Lou Costello and Bud Abbott in Buck Privates (1941).

dishwashing duty. Collins’s authority is reaffirmed in such sequences due to Costello’s recognized outsiderness. The buffoon exerting any real power would reject the fraternal law being promoted in Randolph’s straight storyline. Therefore, the scene never reaches the satiric attacks of Wheeler and Woolsey. The clearest gender-specific difference between Buck Privates and Half Shot is found in the role of women in each film, something that, while certainly different in nature, ironically suggests both sets of comedians as queered Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 8 5

constructs. While Wheeler and Woolsey adolescently pursue women at the start of the film, their two love interests are the active ones in the relationships. The colonel’s teenage daughter, Annette, is played by frequent Wheeler and Woolsey costar Dorothy Lee, a childlike and attractive object of desire for the often equally childlike Wheeler. Here, though, she proves to be the sexual aggressor who outwits the boys at every turn and continually sneaks behind her father’s back in her quest to find a solider to make love to her. In an affront to the primal father’s authority, Woolsey’s love interest is yet another woman in the colonel’s life, his former mistress, Olga, who is so sexually aggressive in one sequence that she comically implies “raping” the skinny comedian. During a musical number set in a garden, she and Woolsey sing an absurd romantic duet. Throughout the sequence, she paws all over him, ripping off patches of his uniform as he sits helplessly and shyly covers his body. He sheepishly cries, “Mama,” before ultimately ripping off his pants to end the duet by dancing in his underwear in a comic ballet with Olga. The dance presents Woolsey as clearly feminized, as he girlishly prances through a shower of water fluttering his arms. Through their aggressive pursuit of the comedians, Olga and Annette place the duo in a more passive role, eventually, as noted in the plot synopsis, with the two females sending the boys into battle. On the other hand, the women in Buck Privates either exist as spectacular musical entertainment, in the form of the Andrews Sisters, or solely as a love interest in the straight storyline, with camp hostess Judy Green as a proud (yet platonic) supporter of all the boys in uniform. She even is responsible for reforming Randolph by chiding his selfish behavior as something opposed to the creeds of the citizen solider. Embracing the tenets of small group cohesion common to the army’s rhetoric, Judy tells him in one key scene, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, there is no price tag on loyalty or friendship.” Yet notably, her role as an idealized female is separated from the world of Abbott and Costello, who feel removed from any feminine presence outside of arbitrary run-ins with a few camp hostesses. In this sense, the comedians are almost totally queered, removed from the narrative complications of romantic interests. Such a separation between “queered” burlesque and “straight” masculinity in Buck Privates allows for a complete affirmation of military duty in the conclusion of the film, as Randolph redeems himself by winning the war games for his outfit. In the film’s epilogue, the once-spoiled mama’s boy is respected by his fellow soldiers and admired by the pretty camp hostesses. He is even commended by the film’s two father figures, General Emerson and Randolph’s literal father, who present him with orders to report to officer training school. By this point in the narrative, Abbott and Costello are relegated to complete comic relief positions, only making a brief appearance. In this final scene, Costello provides some surprising jabs at the “straight” narrative’s support of 1 8 6 | c ha p t e r 6

the phallic order’s fragile myths. Excited to see Randolph after the war games success, Costello compliments him: “You know, it’s really something overcoming the handicap of being a millionaire.” He then pauses, as if to reflect on his own lower social status and the absurd ideology of the “straight” plot: “Gee. I wish I were handicapped like that.” After Judy enters and whisks Randolph off to the dance floor, Costello cracks, “Another handicap.” The humor here is based in pointing out the actual imbalance between those benefiting from the phallic order and those in an outsider queered position. The joke is implying the ridiculousness of suggesting anybody as privileged as Randolph would be “handicapped” in the same sense as Costello’s character, who is poor, childlike, short, and fat. But this brief comic subversion of the straight narrative’s warped mores is quickly disavowed by a complete turn toward patriotic propaganda, as the entire cast marches off to a spectacularly rousing rendition of “You’re a Lucky Fellow, Mr. Smith,” a song that promotes the benefits of army life to the audience, many of whom were now susceptible to the draft. In contrast, Half Shot’s climax and resolution proves more complicated in its subtext, affirming the bonds of companionship but in a way still subverting the phallic order. As Wheeler and Woolsey head to the frontline, the film adopts a graver atmosphere, with a realistic landscape adorned with barbed wire, foxholes, and explosions. The harsher location, a lifetime away from the hedonistic playground of Paris, becomes reflected in the tone of the comedians as the two no longer rapidly fire off verbal gags. When an officer asks which of the men will volunteer for, basically, a suicide detail, Woolsey viciously pushes his partner into performing this duty. It is a surprisingly coldhearted act and one that suddenly suggests Woolsey’s cowardliness and craftiness as something darkly selfish rather than charmingly antiauthoritarian. Yet the film quickly has Woolsey atone for this selfishness as he stops Wheeler before he heads into battle. Woolsey selflessly says, “You know, you might not come back. Now wait a moment. I’ll go.” Showing genuine affection toward his partner, Wheeler replies before he rushes out into the fighting, “I’ll come back. It’ll be OK.” When Wheeler appears to have been struck by a shell, Woolsey crawls out to his partner, whose body is half-buried in the debris. This oddly serious turn of events suggests that as the film moves away from the anarchistic comic landscape of Paris to the harsher realities of the battlefield, the duo’s relationship stabilizes long enough to suggest something not only queered but also deeply rooted in emotional ties. The devotion they express is not based in a vague obedience to their military unit, as is seen in Buck Privates, but solely to each other, essentially eroticizing the homosocial. A gag interrupts this surprisingly touching scene, as it is revealed that Wheeler has been sitting atop another soldier buried in the dirt, one of the MPs chasing the team throughout the film. The sequence ends with the policeman chasing the duo, thus meaning a moWheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 8 7

ment of true emotional queer bonding is interrupted and thwarted by straight authority. Having its queerest moment now disavowed, the film drifts back to the silly sexual mischief of Paris for its resolution, a landscape where the boys can exist more as fantasy than as emotional reality. They now blackmail Colonel Marshal with Olga’s letters and gain his forgiveness, thereby winning the love of Olga and Annette for themselves. In the end, Half Shot must return to the anarchistic fantasy world for its queered heroes to have a heterosexualized Hollywood ending.

“Back in the states, we’re just a couple of . . .”: Buck Privates Come Home As apparent when watching the combat scenes of Half Shot, the threat of and the eventual American involvement in World War II changed the military comedy in another key way. Unlike films of the previous decade, comedians would no longer see combat. Abbott and Costello had completed and released all their military comedies in 1941 before fighting began. Their three service films only had the comedians in training facilities, as found in Buck Privates and Keep ’Em Flying, or on peacetime missions, as seen with In the Navy, which ironically features a glamorous visit to Hawaii just a few months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Obviously, the primary reasoning for not putting the comedians into combat had to do with the grim reality of World War II, where real-life casualties made such a prospect problematic. Comedian comedies were now to be pure escapist entertainment, something that might have nixed the idea of making more military comedies with the duo once the fighting began. As Abbott and Costello’s producer, Alex Gottlieb, said in a 1943 interview, “There are going to be plenty of sick people in the audience—people who have lost a husband, son, brother, or boyfriend—who will want and very much need the healing unguent of laughter.”40 As Thomas Doherty notes, the “flag waving” of Hollywood during the period had a more complicated relationship with audiences than one might think. Facing the harsh realities of war and annoyed by the cinema’s lack of realism, soldiers “were typically unreceptive to and often downright contemptuous of Hollywood’s rousing combat films.”41 In contrast, comedian comedies thrived during the period even if the direct military subject matter faded away as the war continued, which was the case outside of a few exceptions like Jackie Gleason and Jack Durant in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1942) and Danny Kaye in Up in Arms (1944). That being said, the genre often acknowledged the war and even featured Nazi spies as villains. For example, Bob Hope outwitted Nazis in My Favorite Blonde (1942) and They Got Me Covered (1943), Laurel and Hardy took them on in Air Raid Wardens (1943), and Abbott and Costello did the same in Rio Rita and Who Done It? In essence, the 1 8 8 | c ha p t e r 6

most popular comedians were facing down the Nazis in every setting except the battlefield. Abbott and Costello did return to the army one more time. After the war, in their only sequel, they portrayed once again Slicker and Herbie returning to the home front in Buck Privates Come Home (1947). The movie is an interesting counterbalance to a series of dramatic films that Hollywood was now producing that explored the difficult transition from wartime to peacetime. In her discussion of three key films from this cycle, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947), Kaja Silverman suggests that such movies “enact a range of responses to the historical trauma of World War II, and to the difficult reentry of the veteran soldier into postwar American society.”42 These narratives “open the curtain on male castration” to show, especially in the case of The Best Years of Our Lives, psychological and physical disabilities in the returning soldiers. Abbott and Costello’s return to the home front was, of course, considerably less dramatic yet telling in its exploration of masculine lack. In this story, Slicker and Herbie smuggle a six-year-old orphan named Evey (Beverly Simmons) into the United States, only to find themselves chased by immigration officials and their old nemesis, Sergeant Collins (once again Nat Pendleton), who has returned to his police beat. As such a storyline might suggest, many scenes take on a definite queered family dynamic with Bud as the gruff “father” and Lou as an affectionate “mother” to the little girl. Early on, upon having been discovered smuggling Evey onto the troop ship home, Costello pleads, “She had no place to go or no one to go to but Slicker and me. We’ve been just like a momma and papa to her.” When Abbott snaps, “Leave me out of this,” his chubby partner replies, “OK, papa.” While the years have softened his once-aggressive side, Bud still proves the realist and acknowledges the duo’s queered outsider status as making the prospect of adopting Evey difficult if not impossible: “Herbie, let the Sergeant do his duty. After all, back in the states, we’re just a couple of . . .” He sadly looks down at Evey and stops before finishing what was bound to be a deriding self-characterization. Abbott’s low opinion of the duo’s place in civilian society is consistently reinforced throughout the film as they attempt to adopt the little girl. When requesting the procedures for adoption from the French consulate, they are informed they must have a business or steady job, along with being married and “able to meet our standards of a decent home and good surroundings.” In the next scene, sitting on a park bench with Evey between the two of them, Lou asks, “Oh Slicker, you wouldn’t marry me, would you?” Bud replies, “Now don’t get silly. Did you ever hear of anyone marrying a man?” Lou, in true burlesque fashion, quickly retorts, “Yes sir, my mother.”

Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army | 1 8 9

As such moments show, Abbott and Costello are now allowed to add new emotional depth to their relationship. This is not surprising since they are portraying former soldiers in a postwar atmosphere where new social concerns are arising, essentially the fact that many servicemen were coming home to start families.43 While such new dimensions might initially suggest a queered family unit, the film still ultimately reinforces their previous positions as outsiders from the first film and suggests them as unfit to raise Evey. In searching for a possible wife for Herbie, Evey suggests visiting pretty former army nurse Sylvia (Joan Fulton), who quickly dismisses Costello as a romantic interest upon meeting him. Instead, the film gives her the more traditional love interest of the handsome Bill Gregory (Tom Brown), a midget car racer who is not a veteran. While the relationship is an interesting gender reversal, with Sylvia as the returning veteran as opposed to Bill, the film still forms them into a traditional heteronormative family unit with the two getting married and adopting Evey. Slicker and Herbie are now relegated to the roles of “uncles” to the little girl that they rescued from a life in an orphanage. The “straight” couple’s presence and their winning of Evey confirm the very nuclear family structures that would now define new definitions of maleness in postwar America. In this manner, Buck Privates Come Home proves a very different film from those Silverman discusses in that its heroes were essentially castrated males before the war and remained so afterward. In the end, the traumatic effects of war might reposition maleness on screen in other genres, but when it comes to buffoonish masculinity, the comedians remain queerly removed from heterosexual “norms.”

1 9 0 | c ha p t e r 6

Conclusion Beyond Classic Hollywood / Beyond Buffoonish Masculinity

A comedian at the Oscars / The saddest man of all / Your movies may make millions / But your name they’ll never call / I guess you don’t like laughter / And a smile brings you down / A comedian at the Oscars / Is the saddest, bitterest alcoholic clown. Will Ferrell, 79th Academy Awards

One of the highlights of the 2007 Academy Awards ceremony begins with comedian Will Ferrell sitting next to a piano, holding a single rose, and wistfully singing the above lyrics. The tempo then picks up as fellow comic Jack Black rushes onto the stage. Black asks, through song, why Ferrell ever expected to be accepted by the Hollywood community: “What did you think? / That you could change their wicked game? / Did you think when you made Anchorman [2004] they wouldn’t call it lame?” Despite this reasoning, Ferrell still laments his outsider position, suggesting he longs to be accepted into the company of respected “legitimate” actors: “I thought I’d get to have dinner with Jeremy Irons.” Suddenly, the comics’ sadness turns into mock rage as they physically threaten the nominated actors in the crowd. Addressing Leonardo DiCaprio, Black yells, “You think you can date supermodels and win awards? I’m going to elbow you in the larynx!” After the two threaten Ryan Gosling and even an elderly Peter O’Toole, Ferrell finds himself confronted with tough guy actor Mark Wahlberg, which immediately intimates Ferrell into conceding, “I won’t mess with you. You’re actually kind of badass. Once again, I hope we’re cool. You are very talented.” Character actor John C. Reilly, whose career includes broad comedies like Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) and 191

Step Brothers (2008) along with respected work as a dramatic character actor in Magnolia (1999) and Chicago (2002), then comes on stage to suggest the two look for Oscar-bait roles in small independent films. The number ends with the three joyfully celebrating this new career plan and proclaiming they will be winning Oscars in no time (along with bedding that year’s Oscar winner for The Queen [2006], Helen Mirren). As this musical number suggests, over seventy years after the historical focus of this book, many of the foundations of buffoonish masculinity still persist. Black and Ferrell’s most popular performances comment on the types of masculinities they ridiculously threaten during the song. For example, Black’s most celebrated roles are performances of juvenile maleness run amuck, a comical rejection of the cool manliness celebrated by mainstream Hollywood or even the tortured brooding males found in American independent cinema. Black excels in such roles, often with a manic rock ’n’ roller’s edge—seen in his phony music teacher in School of Rock (2003), the frustrated priest turned flamboyant Mexican wrestler in Nacho Libre (2006), and as one-half of the titular comic rock duo (with Kyle Gass) in Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny (2006). Ferrell also gained fame portraying regressed maleness, such as his thirty-something frat boy in Old School (2003) and overgrown man-child still living at home with his mother in Step Brothers. That being said, he goes further than Black to deconstruct iconographies of aggressive heteromasculinity, providing direct lampoons of machismo as barely masking immaturity seen in his buffoonish swinger newsman in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the dull-witted racecar driver in Talladega Nights, the ice-skating sex addict in Blades of Glory (2007), the cocky basketball player in Semi-Pro (2008), and the rowdy politician in The Campaign (2012). Both comedians reflect a post-baby-boomer era where white heteromaleness often attempts to prolong adolescence, representing the twenty-first-century “boy-man.” As Gary Cross defines the term, even after “men assume adult roles, they increasingly become nostalgic for the play of their childhood and youth”—often extending “the pleasures of the cool teen deep into their twenties and beyond.” During the 1990s and 2000s, in particular, consumer and media culture “learned to feed on this rejection of past models of maturity” through everything from video games to Howard Stern to the sitcom Two and a Half Men (2003–present).1 Therefore, while Black and Ferrell’s duet shows their perceived difference from movie-star masculinities, the natures of their personae are more difficult to pinpoint as presenting the types of queered transgressions this book outlines. As regressed white males from the same background as their counterparts in the Oscar crowd, their appeal relates to this contemporary concept of the “man-child,” a self-aware regression as opposed to a direct subversion of heteromaleness. While still a variation upon buffoonish masculinity, their 1 9 2 | c o n c lu s i o n

celebrity has a much different relationship with mainstream maleness than the Classic Hollywood comedian. After all, the final joke of the song is that they will try their hand at dramatic parts in search of legitimacy—something both Black and Ferrell have attempted to varying degrees of success (for Black, in The Holiday [2006], Margo at the Wedding [2007], Be Kind Rewind [2008], and Bernie [2011] and for Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction [2006] and Everything Must Go [2010]). The song’s conclusion suggests a possible reconciliation of their boyish maleness with modern perceptions of “straight” masculinity. The two comedians appear more in conversation with mainstream gender labels than as providing transgressions. Although certainly continuing some of the traditions of Classic Hollywood comedians, Black and Ferrell’s positions are decades removed from the immigrant comedy of Eddie Cantor or even the social failures of W. C. Fields. Yet as the Oscar song suggests in their performed social separation, it might be an oversimplification to see them as simply “straight,” completely removed from the queered performances discussed in this book. Performers like Black and Ferrell thereby are not easily pigeonholed, and this conflicted gender classification could also suggest them as cinematically queered signifiers as they exist without a clear ideological placement. In essence, the Oscar number shows the complications present when questioning how buffoonish masculinity still persists in popular culture. Such classifications as “comic,” “straight,” and “queerness” are historically volatile concepts; so key questions arise as we move beyond Classic Hollywood. What happens to the comedian comedy as a genre when American perceptions of hegemonic maleness change? As Black and Ferrell prove, the male comedian can remain popular even if gendered regression becomes more mainstream, suggesting there can be closer affiliation between the “comic” and “straight” in the public mind. Therefore, we could ask, has the comedian evolved (or devolved) into a less transgressive popular culture figure? Has the history of maleness in the decades following the Classic Hollywood era lessened or heightened the queer potential of male comics? As it correlates to larger social changes, has buffoonish masculinity been challenged by the rise of African American and, perhaps more profoundly, female comedic voices? The answers to these questions are far from simple and warrant investigating new histories of cultural changes and anxieties. Yet given the foundation laid out in the previous chapters, I feel at least a brief discussion of the post–Classic Hollywood journey of the male comedian is in order. More importantly, challenges to the white male as the predominant comedic voice in popular culture must be acknowledged as crucial in approaching comedian comedy beyond the 1930s. After the Depression era solidified the multimedium comedian as an entertainment force, the fraternity of male performers grew even more powerful in Hollywood, blossoming in the 1950s with television’s popularity. Figures c o n c lu s i o n | 1 9 3

like Bob Hope, Red Buttons, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Lewis, and others went on to define film and television comedy during the 1950s and ’60s. The 1970s brought about comedic talents aligned with different aspects of the post-1960s youth countercultures, as seen in everything from the silly drug-fueled antics of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong to the brilliant stand-up of Richard Pryor and George Carlin. This cultural change also informed the development of the comedy institution of television’s Saturday Night Live (1975–present), which went on to spawn many of the remainder of the century’s largest comedian superstars in film: including Steve Martin (a frequent guest host), Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, and Ferrell.2 Similar to the Classic Hollywood comedians and their cultural moments, these performers redefined conceptions of buffoonish masculinity in ways specific to their eras, playing off new sets of anxieties and social parameters. Significantly, though, these comedians were not always countering hegemonic maleness and, like performers of Classic Hollywood, prove anything but idealized progressive figures. At best, they could deconstruct and queer the male mythologies of the era (as in the case of Steve Martin’s gloriously absurd coming-of-age comedy The Jerk [1979]). At their worst, they could also conform to the sexism and homophobia that ran rampant in post–civil rights, post-feminism, and post-Stonewall America (such as seen in the heterosexist frat boy antics of John Belushi and his cohorts in Animal House [1978]). Scholars have previously addressed some of these comedians and their cultural significance, though without a larger examination of the male comedian as an evolving construct. Examples include: Bob Hope providing a queered alternative to World War II mythologies of maleness (something already addressed by Steven Cohan)3; Jerry Lewis’s manic “femininity” as a reaction to 1950s sexual conservatism (as explored by Frank Krutnik)4; John Belushi embracing the runaway consumption of 1970s maleness; Bill Murray displaying the evolving cynicism of disillusioned baby boomers; Adam Sandler depicting a childish rage as a rejection of boomerism; and Ferrell often performing lampoons of previous generations of machismo.5 As this rudimentary list suggests, the moments and dynamics of the performances continually change to provide a wide variety of possible readings of historically specific maleness. This book has therefore laid the groundwork with the first decade of sound cinema as a starting point for a continuing history and evolving cultural theory of cinematic comedy and queerness. I hope, though, it is a foundation that illuminates upon some of the previous analysis of comedians and, undoubtedly, much work to come that will focus on new areas of cultural analysis. But beyond these cultural histories, the most significant challenge to comedian comedy as a white male genre was the diversification of comedic 1 9 4 | c o n c lu s i o n

voices in popular culture. For example, Richard Pryor’s celebrity coincided with the racially strained 1970s, after the social movements of the Black Panthers and Black Muslims forced a more confrontational image of black maleness into the spotlight. In the 1980s, Eddie Murphy, to a lesser degree, carried on this tradition as a response to the myths of racial unity being perpetuated by the decade’s politically conservative revolution.6 Yet both of these figures are far from simply examples of a post–civil rights liberation of comedy, as their celebrity had to reconcile two personae: a supposedly “truth-telling” stand-up comedian (in such concert films as Pryor’s Live in Concert [1979] and Live on the Sunset Strip [1982] and Murphy’s Delirious [1983] and Raw [1987]) and a more standard Hollywood film comedian (with Pryor in Stir Crazy [1980] and Some Kind of Hero [1982] and Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop [1984] and Coming to America [1988]). As Herman Beavers suggests, such a duel position created conflicting variations on post–civil rights black maleness in contrast to white domination. In short, “Pryor’s comedy (most notably his stand-up) relies on a black nationalist posture that is often explicitly articulated, while Murphy is more implicit, embedded in a presentation of the self under attack.”7 The differences seen in these two performers illustrate the tensions between a striving for racial equality and the sustaining of an alternative queered comic identity. For example, Pryor could serve as a more vulnerable figure onstage and on screen, even to the point of discussing his same-sex sexual encounters in his early stand-up.8 On the other hand, Murphy’s 1980s persona displays more of an acceptance toward hegemonic sexual identities. This difference is evident through the homophobic humor in his stand-up and his development into a heterosexually aggressive leading man in such films as Harlem Nights (1989) and Boomerang (1992). As Beavers writes, “For while one might assume that the word ‘liberation’ is a code word for ‘paradigm shift,’ it often serves as the keyword for increased participation in the patriarchal project.”9 Thereby, while a definite challenge to the whiteness of the Classic Hollywood model, the rise of the African American comedian could also negate the queer potential of comic maleness on screen. This negation is certainly found in Murphy’s career trajectory as he developed from racially transgressive stand-up to heteroaggressive movie star to bland family movie patriarch in such films as Dr. Dolittle (1998) and Daddy Day Care (2003). While race plays a central role in challenging the foundations of the comedian comedy, the rise of the female comic provides even more complications. Although my approach throughout this book addresses male comedians as queerly denaturalizing the hypocrisies of the phallic order, as suggested in my introduction, in truth, the off-screen reality dictating the dominance of male comics is overtly sexist. For it to exist as something concretely influencing the production and promotion of films, it must be facilitated by a heavily perc o n c lu s i o n | 1 9 5

petuated entertainment myth—the concept that women aren’t funny. We have seen the stereotype of the humorless woman in the domestic comedies of W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, in which the wives are obstacles to pleasure emphasizing the emasculated comedian’s own lack and, in contrast, humorous disposition. But in a very real world sense, in the writing and production of comedian comedies, this myth was long perpetuated among male filmmakers and comics. For example, in 2000, Jerry Lewis shocked an audience at a comedy festival, earnestly proclaiming, “I don’t like any female comedians,” a statement that confirmed in a public forum what most women in comedy knew to be a long-held bias.10 Despite this view (or because of its persistence), the dominance of the male comedian was steadily challenged throughout the midtwentieth century, especially off the Hollywood sound stage where figures like Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller made important strides writing and performing stand-up.11 While comic cinema remained male-centric in the decades following Mae West, television found some challenges to the male comedic order. Yet this is a complicated history since some of the creative forces behind these popular women often were male. Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore proved very popular, yet the creative teams behind their shows consisted of powerful men such as Desi Arnaz and James L. Brooks.12 Other shows like The Garry Moore Show (1958–67) and Laugh-In (1968–73) featured powerful female comedic talents like Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin, though these were still the comedic worlds of Garry Moore and Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. Such female performers eventually broke through the glass ceiling of comedy, with Burnett starring in her own successful variety show (1967–78) and Tomlin creating critically lauded television specials in the 1970s.13 But despite some of these crucial leaps, on other major shows female comics still struggled in comparison to their male counterparts. Even as post-1960s liberalism more so influenced popular comedy, institutions like Saturday Night Live were still boys’ clubs with males being promoted as the bankable stars over the female cast members. As Jim Whalley writes in his analysis of SNL’s impact on Hollywood, “Female stars were very much part of the success of The Not Ready for Prime Time Players on television, yet in the move to film, instances of white male bias on SNL became total domination.”14 After all, such remarkable comedic talents as Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman from the show’s groundbreaking original cast never went on to any real cinematic stardom like their male peers Aykroyd, Chase, Belushi, and Murray. The 1980s and ’90s brought more aggressive female comics, like Whoopi Goldberg and Roseanne Barr. The latter proves the most fascinating of comediennes since she directly challenged conceptions of working-class domesticity and femininity in her stand-up comedy and enormously successful television 1 9 6 | c o n c lu s i o n

sitcom Roseanne (1988–97), which she also produced. The response by many popular critics was to recognize Barr as something “other,” shocking in that she found such popularity for a short time representing everything supposedly “grotesque” to the larger boys’ club of entertainment. Katherine Rowe opens her illuminating chapter on Barr in The Unruly Women by dissecting the controversial rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” the comedienne performed in July of 1990 at a major sporting event, where she comically acted out the most disgusting aspects of male sports behavior—grabbing her crotch, spitting on the ground, and making an obscene gesture to the booing crowd. In such controversial displays and even on her much beloved sitcom, Barr “used the semiotics of unruliness to break frame, to disrupt, to expose the gap between, on the one hand, the New Left and the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and, on the other, the realities of working class family life two decades later.”15 Barr is thereby a comedienne fully employing a feminist appropriation of what we have seen unfold in buffoonish masculinity. I do not mean she is “masculine” (or even “buffoonish”) but that her persona, crafted by Barr herself, denaturalizes gendered anxieties of the period in ways less about empowerment than acknowledged social complexities. In a way, while often aggressively confrontational in her approach to humor, Barr is more W. C. Fields than Mae West, even as she often resembles the latter in her attacks on the patriarchy. Proving a crucial figure in the history of the female comic, she positioned herself as a point of identification to large portions of workingclass women who felt marginalized on various social fronts. Despite all these major changes on television during the period, maleness still dominated comedian comedy in film, where no major female comedy star emerged outside of, arguably, Whoopi Goldberg, whose on-screen persona also was heavily affiliated with dramatic parts.16 This discrepancy is not surprising since, as seen with my look at radio with Jack Benny, the perceived intimacy of the broadcast medium often proves more progressive than popular cinema. This is even more so the case over the last thirty-five years as popular American cinema has been dictated by targeting the ticket sales of eighteento twenty-five-year-old males with action movies, special effects fantasies, and broad comedies. These genres usually relegated the female cast members to eye candy for the hormonal heterosexual male viewers. Television consequently still exists even in recent years as the primary place where male comedians as a dominant creative force are being more overtly challenged. For example, in 1999, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels named Tina Fey as the show’s first female head writer and, soon after in 2000, gave her the revered seat as “Weekend Update” coanchor. As a result, the reported boys’ club atmosphere had been challenged and some of the brightest stars of the show emerged as female cast members writing and performing their own sketches.17 After leavc o n c lu s i o n | 1 9 7

ing the show, Fey created her own popular NBC sitcom 30 Rock (2006–13), a comically surreal version of her experiences writing on SNL that, at times, mirrors the very structures of character-based situation comedy pioneered on radio by Benny, right down to the “show within a show” structure. At least on the small screen, a notable tide had turned and popular journalism took notice. In April of 2008, Vanity Fair attacked the long-held cultural bias toward comediennes with a glamorous Annie Leibovitz cover photo of Fey, Sarah Silverman, and Amy Poehler dressed as Greek goddesses, posing the question, “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” The cover and the accompanying Alessandra Stanley article were presented directly in response to a previous opinion piece by the late Christopher Hitchens from the magazine’s January 2007 issue that defended the concept that “women aren’t funny.” Hitchens, whose piece feels ironically unaware of how many sexist stereotypes it promotes, based his evidence in basic reductive differences between the sexes. He suggests that the ability to have children gives women the inability to be properly “childish” since motherhood “imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle.”18 In short, as common to many antifeminist arguments in relationship to the arts, the “sanctity” of motherhood is used to “other” women as too earnest, a feeble attempt to lionize women, though, in truth, only dismissing their fundamentally human potential for baser thoughts. Despite a bizarre photo shoot of comediennes recreating tabloid scandals inside the magazine, Stanley’s responding Vanity Fair article, featuring interviews with popular women in comedy, makes a strong case for a changing comedic order. This change in direction arises out of multiple factors, though still finds itself victim to cultural double standards especially pertaining to physical appearance. Writer and director Nora Ephron points to the general cultural change with females in more power roles as a cause, but also couples this with entertainment’s technological evolution as well, stating, “Here’s the answer to any question: cable. There are so many hours to fill, and they ran out of men, so then there were women.”19 Probably one of the most subtly revolutionary comediennes of the moment, Fey suggests women as dictating the viewing habits for television more than men: “Women drive what’s on television, and husbands and boyfriends decide on movies.”20 Yet Fey has found herself challenging this trend. In 2008, she and Poehler branched out into film with successful results, costarring in Baby Mama, a hit earning over $60 million at the box office. Later, she teamed with popular television comedian Steve Carell for Date Night (2010), grossing over $95 million domestically and demonstrating how both stars have true crossover appeal. During the summer of 2011, Kristen Wiig (another SNL alum) cowrote and starred in the comedy Bridesmaids, a film costarring funny women Maya Rudolph, Wendi McLendon-Covey, El1 9 8 | c o n c lu s i o n

lie Kemper, and, in a broadly comic standout (and Oscar-nominated) performance, Melissa McCarthy. The movie was a considerable hit, grossing over $287 million in international box office and resulting in public conjecture over the “breaking through” of female comediennes as a pop culture force. As New York Times critic A. O. Scott wrote on the film’s release, “   ‘Funny,’ apart from being a subjective judgment, is also a commercial imperative, and it is one that Bridesmaids has fulfilled.” As a substantial money-maker, the all-female comedienne comedy “has been hailed as a vindication of the rights and abilities of all women—not just those six—to make jokes.”21 If the history of stage and radio influence on film comedy has taught us anything, cinema will continue to feel the great effect of other mediums in upcoming years and, as seen with Fey and Wiig, the female comic presence on television will only continue to cross over to cinema. With this in mind, I want to end this book by recognizing comedy in film as constantly evolving, making way for comedians and comediennes to address new gendered roles and other cultural changes. While the Classic Hollywood work of Fields, Cantor, Benny, Laurel and Hardy, Wheeler and Woolsey, Abbott and Costello, and others queered the protocols of the phallic order, the humor was still born out of phallocentrism and, as we have seen, could position women as other. But as the role of women in comedy continues to transform, such changes determine new images of buffoonish masculinity as well. As seen with Black and Ferrell, this development might continue to be less about queered transgressions and more of a deconstruction (and comic regression) of white heteromale identity. Or perhaps it will take a new form, a reestablishment of transgression into a truly gender-neutral position. Male comics now compete more heavily for screen time with increasingly equaled female stars, which results in male images changing to compensate. The long-lasting ramifications of the current challenge have yet to fully materialize, but a cultural shift certainly feels underway as an all-female comedienne-fest like Bridesmaids can dominate the box office. If ethnic identity and economic welfare greatly dictated the phenomenon during the 1930s, gender and sexual identity even further dictate it today. Beyond just the current rise of the female comic, the inevitable rise of an openly gay, bisexual, or transgender film comedian will irreversibly affect the course of comedic maleness on screen. As membership in the comedic order accepts new gendered and queer performers, the question remains of how Hollywood will continue to depict its buffoon men (and women).

c o n c lu s i o n | 1 9 9

Notes

Notes to Introduction 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8

For more on Annie Hall as postmodern romance, see Devin Brown, “Powerful Man Gets Pretty Woman: Style Switching in Annie Hall,” SECOL Review: Southeastern Conference on Linguistics 16, no. 2 (1992): 115–31; Sam B. Girgus, “Desire and Narrativity in Annie Hall,” Explicator 51, no. 2 (1993): 122–24; Christopher J. Knight, “Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: Galatea’s Triumph over Pygmalion,” Literature Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2004): 213–21; Frank Krutnik, “Love Lies: Romantic Fabrication in Contemporary Romantic Comedy,” in Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s, ed. Peter William (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 15–36. See Peter J. Bailey, The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Robert Benayoun, The Films of Woody Allen, trans. Alexander Walker (New York: Harmony Books, 1987); Douglas Brode, The Films of Woody Allen (New York: Carol Publishing, 1991); Sam B. Girgus, The Films of Woody Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Sander H. Lee, Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God, and Existentialism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002). Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (1905; London: Penguin, 2002). Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me (New York: Bernard Geis, 1959), 321. For a history of the Friars, see Joey Adams, Here’s to the Friars: The Heart of Show Business (New York: Crown Publishers, 1976). Marx, Groucho and Me, 321. Richard Raskin, “The Original Function of Groucho Marx’s Resignation Joke,” 16:9 20, no. 2 (2007). www.16-9.dk/2007-02/side11_inenglish.htm, accessed October 12, 2012. For biographical information on Groucho Marx, see Stefan Kanfer, Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx (New York: Knopf, 2000); and Simon Louvish, Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers: Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, with Added Gummo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer (Minneapolis: University of 201

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–4. Ibid., 15. R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 81. Ibid. Ibid, 77. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Plume/Penguin, 1996). Katz discusses the intellectual development of such labels as “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in his work, while Chauncey outlines popular recognition of gay culture in his case study of New York City from 1890 to 1940. Both studies will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5. Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, xv. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. Frank Krutnik, “General Introduction,” in Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 14. For more on this decade’s technological advancements in relation to cinema, see Edward D. Berkowitz, Mass Appeal: The Formative Age of the Movies, Radio, and TV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Andrew Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927–1949 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Ibid., 22. Steven Seidman, Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 3. Geoff King, Film Comedy (London: Wallflower, 2002), 33. Ibid., 33–34. For information on Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton’s cultural impact, see Robert Kroft, The Theatre and Cinema of Buster Keaton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Simon Louvish, Keystone, The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004); and Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 15. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996); Arthur Schopenhauer, The World of Will and Idea, 6th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1909); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will,

2 0 2 | n o t e s t o i n t ro d u c t i o n

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40

3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1875). For more on premodern theories of comedy, see Eric Weitz, The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 63. Mast, The Comic Mind, 61, 50. Ibid., 131. Bergson, “Laughter,” 156. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931). Rourke’s classification of American comedic identity and “national character” will be discussed in more detail in chapter 2 in relationship to W. C. Fields as a model for buffoonish masculinity. Alan Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 14. Lisa Trahair, The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Michael North, Machine Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Trahair, The Comedy of Philosophy, 2. North, Machine Age Comedy, 23. Richard Dyer, Stars, 2nd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2008). While Gehring has written on numerous subjects related to Classic Hollywood, his focus on comedy must be noted. Mainly useful for their historical references as opposed to analytical insights, these works include, Chaplin’s World of Comedy (Muncie, IN: Ball State University Press, 1980); Chaplin, A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); W. C. Fields, A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984); The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987); Screwball Comedy: Defining a Film Genre (Muncie, IN: Ball State University Press, 1983); Laurel and Hardy: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Groucho and W. C. Fields: Huckster Comedians (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994); Personality Comedians as Genre: Selected Players (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997); and Film Clowns of the Depression: Twelve Defining Comic Performances (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007). Gehring, Film Clowns, 10. See Kathrina Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934– 65 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Lori Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Ed Sikov, Screwball: Hollywood’s Madcap Romantic Comedies (New York: Crown Publishers, 1989). For more information, see Denise Lowe, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films, 1895–1930 (New York: Haworth Press, 2005). The basic biographical information featured here was from the following entries: “Finch, Flora” (1868 Surrey England–1940 Los Angeles, CA), 207–11; Fazenda, Louise (1895, Lafayette IN–Beverly Hills), 202–5; Normand, Mabel (1894 Boston, MA–1930 Woodland Hills, CA), 406–10. For more on Normand, the most famous of these comediennes, see William Thomas Sherman, Mabel Normand: n o t e s t o i n t ro d u c t i o n | 2 0 3

41 42

43 44

45

46 47 48

49 50

A Source Book to Her Life and Films (Seattle, WA: Cinema Books, 1994). Norman Taurog, “Get a Comedian, Quick!” Photoplay (June 1934): 67+. Notably, many of these performers are more classifiable as character actresses even by today’s film writers. For example, Oliver, Boland, Robin, and Skipworth all have entries in Axel Nissen’s Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Faces from the Thirties to the Fifties (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007). Taurog, “Get a Comedian, Quick!” 67. I mention these two names since their fame would warrant some attention if this book were a look at varieties of broad female comic performances from the period. Middle-aged, forceful, and witty, Dressler was a major star in the 1930s, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine (August 7, 1933). See Betty Lee, Marie Dressler: The Unlikeliest Star (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); and Matthew Kennedy, Marie Dressler: A Biography; with a Listing of Major Stage Performances, a Filmography, and a Discography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). Standing around six feet tall, Charlotte Greenwood was best known for her long legs and high kicks, which meant she was a formidable presence for physical comedy. See Grant Hayter-Menzies, Charlotte Greenwood: The Life and Career of the Comic Star of Vaudeville, Radio, and Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007). See chapter 1 for information on Mae West. Gracie Allen found her success as the ditzy comedienne to George Burn’s straight man throughout a career that spanned stage, radio, screen, and TV. See Cheryl Blythe and Susan Sackett, Say Good Night, Gracie!: The Story of Burns and Allen (New York: Dutton, 1986); and Cynthia Clements and Sandra Weber, George Burns and Gracie Allen: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). Martha Raye was a popular American comic actress and standards singer who performed in movies, television, and, most famously, for US troops during USO shows. See Jean Maddern Pitrone, Take It from The Big Mouth: The Life of Martha Raye (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). For more information on Todd, Pitts, and Kelly, see William Donat, The Life and Death of Thelma Todd (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012); Charles Stumpf, ZaSu Pitts: The Life and Career (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); and Boze Hadleigh, Hollywood Lesbians: Conversations with Sandy Dennis, Barbara Stanwyck, Marjorie Main, Nancy Kulp, Patsy Kelly, Agnes Moorhead, Edith Head, Dorothy Arzner, Capucine, Judith Anderson (New York: Barricade Books, 1994). Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laugher (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 105. Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 96–97. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18; Pam Cook, “Masculinity in Crisis,” Screen 23, no. 3–4 (1982): 39–46; Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” Screen 24, no. 3–4 (1983): 2–16. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993). See Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties

2 0 4 | n o t e s t o i n t ro d u c t i o n

51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Masculinity in the Reagan Era (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Chris Holmlund, Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (London: Routledge, 2002); and Peter Lehman, Running Scarred: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Studlar, This Mad Masquerade, 9. David A. Gerstner, Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), xii. Barry Keith Grant, Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 6. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality at the Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). Richard Barrios, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (London: Routledge, 2003); Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003); Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Flaming Classics (London: Routledge, 2000); Robert Lang, Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). Andrew S. Horton, ed., Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 10. Emphasis added. Ibid, 11. Ibid, 12. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 8. Beckett’s reported love of film comedy and particularly Laurel and Hardy has been noted to directly inspire much of the nonsensical verbal byplay and even the wardrobe of Vladimir and Estragon. For more on this influence, see Robert B. Graves, “‘The Hardy Laurel’: Beckett and Early Film Comedy,” in Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater, ed. William Kinderman and Joseph E. Jones (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 83–94. Krutnik, “General Introduction,” 15. Butler, Gender Trouble, 187. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992). Ibid, 3. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 7. Emphasis in original. n o t e s t o i n t ro d u c t i o n | 2 0 5

Notes to Chapter 1 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8 9

“Mae West Signs for Pic with Fields at U,” Daily Variety, July 1, 1939, 1. George E. Phair, “Retakes,” Daily Variety, November 13, 1939, 2; Alta Durant, “Gab,” Daily Variety, December 5, 1939, 3. Taken up by wire news services, news of the publicity stunt spread to “practically every city in this country as well as Canada and England” according to “Hollywood Insides,” Daily Varity, August 21, 1939, 2. The quotation from West is from “West Becomes a Convert,” an article featured on the front page of the Adeline Mail, August 19, 1939, 1. Buchman was a Pennsylvania-born evangelist who formed the Oxford Group, a movement based in “world changing through life changing.” By 1936, Buchman’s fierce anticommunism drew controversy as he suggested God-controlled fascism could be warranted, even praising Adolph Hitler as a champion against godless communism (though he did speak out against his anti-Semitism). An offshoot of the movement, Alcoholics Anonymous broke from Buchman in 1937. West’s references to Fields are a clear reference to the group’s reputation with recovery from alcoholism. See Garth Lean, On the Tail of a Comet: The Life of Frank Buchman (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers and Howard, 1988). For more on Mae West’s career and cultural impact, see Marybeth Hamilton, When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jill Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Ramona Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For more on the career and impact of W. C. Fields, see James Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography (New York: Back Stage, 2004); Simon Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields (New York: Norton, 1997); Wes. D. Gehring, W. C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984); David T. Rocks, W. C. Fields: An Annotated Guide (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993); and Ronald Fields, W. C. Fields: A Life on Film (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), and W. C. Fields by Himself (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973). Many of these works will be referenced and cited within this chapter. Ad for My Little Chickadee in Daily Variety, February 8, 1940, 6–7. Ibid., 7. Of course, “hic-history” could refer to both Fields’s alcoholism (as in hiccups) and his lower-class status (as in being a “hick.”) Both these possibilities speak to the development of the Fields persona, as discussed in chapter 2. Mae West in particular was a primary concern of the Breen Office during the era, as Leonard Leff and Jerold L. Simmons outline in a chapter on her in their history of the Production Code. See Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 18–33. Also, for a detailed look at Fields’s run-ins with Breen, Simon Louvish provides the correspondences between the office and producers of his 1930s movies, as well as Fields’s responses. See Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 446–51, 360–61, 386, 424–25, 437–39, 459–591. Quoted in Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, 238. For more on the production of My Little Chickadee, see Curtis, W. C. Fields: A 2 0 6 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 1

10

11 12

13

14

15

16 17

Biography, 389–404; Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 435–47. Patrick McGilligan argues that “under certain circumstances, an actor may influence a film as much as a writer, director, or producer.” Patrick McGilligan, Cagney: The Actor as Auteur (New Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes/Tantivy, 1975), 199. Quoted in Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography, 412–13. Heavy marketing of Fields’s image continued throughout his lifetime and long after his death. Aspects of his persona, such as the hard drinking and hatred of children, were perpetuated by a popular 1949 biography by Robert Lewis Taylor, much of which indulges in Hollywood myth. See Robert Lewis Taylor, W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949). For more specifically on the marketing of the Fields image, see 113–22 of Ronald Fields, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break: W. C. Fields on Business (Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall Press, 2000). See Hamilton, When I’m Bad, I’m Better; Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White; and Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing. Also see the chapters on West in Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 23–54; and Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 116–44. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28–40. This article was one of the first major essays that shifted film theory toward a psychoanalytic framework in the 1970s, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Mulvey argues that Hollywood cinema facilitates both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ideal ego seen on the screen for male characters. She declares that in patriarchal society “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (33). It was Mulvey who coined the term “the male gaze,” which gender scholars have adopted to define the traditional gender ideology of Classic Hollywood. If one were to do a reading of West purely from the context of this article, the supposed “shock” attributed to her active looking at men in her films confirms her disruptive status because other Classic Hollywood female stars are passive. Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 54. Doane’s piece was taking up a question many feminist film theorists of the era asked. How can female spectatorship and pleasure exist within the apparatus Mulvey described? Doane is employing the terminology of Freudian Joan Riviere (1883–1963), who in “Femininity as Masquerade” examined how femininity could be employed by women as a defensive mask to hide masculinity. See Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” in The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers, 1920–1958, ed. Athol Hughes (London: Karnac, 1991), 90–102. Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 49. Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 146. n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 1 | 2 0 7

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Rowe, The Unruly Woman, 19. Ibid., 119. Kenneth Baker, “War Clouds in the West,” Photoplay (December 1933): 110. For more on the career of Dietrich, see Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich (New York: Knopf, 1993). Mae West, Three Plays by Mae West: SEX, The Drag, and The Pleasure Man, ed. Lillian Schlissel (New York: Routledge, 1997), 40. Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, 77. The 1920s in New York City notably included a cultural fascination by many straights with homosexual subcultures dubbed “the pansy craze,” which marked a higher visibility of gays in the city. George Chauncey links this phenomenon to Prohibition and the rise of speakeasies that caused new mixtures of gay and straight patronage. By the height of the craze in the early 1930s, there were popular nightclubs with pansy reviews. As such, Broadway shows, magazine articles, books, and popular movies of the period notably show elements of this craze, doing everything from being overt about gay subculture to simply reflecting elements of “pansy” humor. As will be seen with certain comedians in upcoming chapters, this craze had a long-standing impact on comedian comedy. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books), 301–33. While more progressive than other depictions of homosexuality of the era, the play is far from a simple progay piece. Despite its more complex look at the subculture, it still was filled with stereotypes and approached homosexuality as a social “problem.” As Watts writes, “The Drag was ambiguous, pro-gay in some moments and homophobic in others.” As West herself would later say, “I had presented no solution. . . . One could come, see, and make up one’s own mind.” Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, 87. Ibid., 92. Ibid. Ibid., 91. See Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 79. Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, 31. Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, 86. West, Three Plays, 132. Ibid., 122. Of course, it is difficult to say what particularly makes the line sound dirty. Outside of its meaning in baking, “buns” have long been associated with the rear end, with the Oxford English Dictionary recording that meaning as early as the early nineteenth century. “Biscuits” do not seem to have such an explicit connotation. But within the context of the dialogue and, undoubtedly, the expected performance of the line by the drag queen, the addition of “bake you a pan of biscuits” does seem to suggest a specific sex act that, at the very least, the audience might perceive as involving a part of the anatomy resembling “biscuits.” This would especially be the case for the Americanized southern variety of biscuits which are often rounded with a split down the middle, thus resembling a human rear end.

2 0 8 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 1

35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

Sadly, not much has been extensively written on Savoy (1888–1923). See George Eells and Stanley Musgrove, Mae West: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1982), 35–36, for a description of the act. Joe Laurie Jr., Vaudeville: From Honky-Tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt, 1953), 87–95, gives an overview of popular female and male impersonation acts in vaudeville from the 1880s to the 1920s, including some details on Savoy and Julian Eltinge, who Laurie suggests as “the greatest of all female impersonators, past and present— and even future!” (91). Robertson also discusses Savoy’s influence on West’s style, Guilty Pleasures, 29–30, while Curry suggests the same for both Savoy and Eltinge, Too Much of a Good Thing, 18. George Davis, “The Decline of the West,” Vanity Fair, May 1934, 82. Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, 30. Ibid., 34. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 173. In this work, Butler applies Michel Foucault’s discussion of “juridical systems” from The History of Sex: Volume 1 to determining gender boundaries and, eventually, the conception of “gender performativity,” writing, “juridical power inevitably ‘produces’ what it claims merely to represent.” In reference to women, this “performative invocation of a nonhistorical ‘before’ becomes the foundational premise that guarantees a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed and, thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract” (5). In the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of the book, Butler writes how much of her recent work “has been devoted to clarifying and revising the theory of performativity that is outlined in Gender Trouble” (xiv). This clarification in direct reference to drag performance will be discussed later in the chapter in relationship to W. C. Fields. Butler, Gender Trouble, 173. Ibid., 175. Emphasis in original. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 275–93. Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, 27. Leonard Hall, “Look Out! Here’s Mae West!” Photoplay (January 1933): 46. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 2002), 248. Emphasis in original. Frank S. Nugen, “Review for My Little Chickadee,” New York Times, March 16, 1940, 8. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 249. Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 2. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 234. The likeness remains reminiscent of his career-launching performance as sideshow medicine-man Professor McGargle in Poppy (1923) on Broadway, a role that embraced the huckster or trickster caricatures of the nineteenth-century confidence men who appeared in the works of Mark Twain in America and Charles Dickens in England. For more on early influences upon Fields’s film characterizations, see chapter 2. Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 58. n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 1 | 2 0 9

52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68

Ibid., 115, 116. Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 94. A more perplexing depiction of Native Americans appears in the character of Twillie’s Indian manservant Milton, referred to by Fields as Ugh (George Morton)—a figure who at first appears to be a grossly insulting Indian caricature who often speaks in monosyllables. His character almost appears so extreme in its depiction that it borders on a spoof of the stereotype itself in its absurd appropriation of past Indian clichés. Of course, this does not necessarily mean Ugh should be read as anything but another example of racist Hollywood caricature, even though the performance of Morton does seem acutely aware of how overused such stereotypes were in past productions. Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 49. Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, 238. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasures in Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun,” Framework 15/16/17 (Summer 1981): 14. The misogynistic stereotypes found in many of Fields’s films will be covered in more detail as essential components of his comedy in chapter 2. Yet it must be noted that in contrast to the demeaning “phallic matriarchs” discussed later, Adler’s performance here is actually rather enduring and sympathetic as she is actively rebelling against a dominating husband by coming to the saloon to drink. Even with the cowriting credit of both stars, this moment is the only scene that West claims Fields actually wrote. Despite the fact that West justly deserves story credit, given his reputation, Fields might have rewritten or ad-libbed much of his own dialogue. See Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography, 389–412, for more on the production of the film. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Raiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 198. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 230–31. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 237. Grant’s off-screen sexuality has often been a subject of popular debate due to the persistent rumors of his long-term homosexual relationship with Randolph Scott. Despite these reports, in terms of on-screen persona, he is often set up as a figure of heterosexual desire. For more on the industry’s covering-up of the homosexual relationships of its stars, see Brett L. Abrams, Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008). Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992), 52. Ibid., 55. Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, xv. Quoted in Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography, 413.

2 1 0 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 1

Notes to Chapter 2 1 2 3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14

Sara Hamilton, “A Red Nose Romeo,” Photoplay (December 1934): 32. Ibid., 115. For more on the life and career of W. C. Fields, see James Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography (New York: Back Stage, 2004); Simon Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields (New York: Norton, 1997); Wes. D. Gehring, W. C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984); David T. Rocks, W. C. Fields: An Annotated Guide (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993); and Ronald Fields, W. C. Fields: A Life on Film (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), and W. C. Fields by Himself (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1973). Many of these works will be referenced in this chapter. Wes. D. Gehring, Groucho and W. C. Fields: Huckster Comedians (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 103. Film historian Simon Louvish also notes the difference from the huckster in possibly one of Fields’s most acclaimed comedies, It’s a Gift, calling this film an example of “Fields’ suburban mode,” which is a bit revisionist in its classification since the “suburban male” actually exists as more of a post–World War II convention. Simon Louvish, It’s a Gift (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 28. Donnelly began her theatrical career as an actress at the turn of the century, when she achieved some stardom. She eventually moved on to a successful career as a playwright, lyricist, and librettist. For more on her career, see Lorraine Arnal McLean, Dorothy Donnelly: A Life in Theater (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). Ibid., 129–30. Information on Madge Kennedy is available in Anthony Slide, Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 193. Quoted in McLean, Dorothy Donnelly, 130. Ibid., 164. Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography, 82. With the former, Fields had the opportunity to portray the oddball father figure in MGM’s all-star adaptation in 1935, a task he took most seriously. At the time, he acknowledged the influence upon his comic persona, stating, “I’ve been playing Micawber all my life, under a lot of different names, and never knew it.” Press book, David Copperfield, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1935. Barry Keith Grant, Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 39. The Fatal Glass of Beer is a short produced by Mack Sennett and written by Fields, which might be classifiable as one of the strangest films of Fields’s career. It directly parodies rugged stage melodramas set in the Yukon, which were already outdated by the period of the film’s production. Fields emphasizes the stagey satire by striking various odd theatrical poses and performing archaic melodramatic dialogue. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 17. For a bibliography of the various early American works Rourke employed to explore the Yankee, see her bibliographic notes on pages 305–15 of this work. Here she outlines the characterization’s progresn o t e s t o c ha p t e r 2 | 2 1 1

15 16 17

18

19 20

21 22 23 24

sion through fiction, stage, comic poems, and songs. Grant, Shadows of Doubt, 36. Ibid, 41. See, among others, Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Joe. L. Dubbert, “Progressivism and the Masculinity Crisis,” in The American Male, ed. Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 303–20; Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/ Self: Sex Roles in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 69–93; John Higham, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 73–103. Like most long-standing terms historians use, “masculinity crisis” has been challenged. Rightfully, some, most notably Bederman, have pointed out that despite the rhetoric of the period, most middle-class men did not flee to the wilderness or, in any profound way, challenge their comfortable domestic situations. See Margaret Marsh, “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity,” American Quarterly 40 (June 1988): 165–86. Of course, the actual actions of the men of the period matters little in studying Fields, who is working in the realm of comedy performance. In short, the popular contention that there was a masculinity crisis is the social narrative referenced, a narrative not necessarily based in the reality of a successful movement. See the following for more on Roosevelt as a cultural icon: Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170–215, Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness (New York: Knopf, 1978); John Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), and Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001). Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1901; St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1970), 7, 21. The concept of a late nineteenth-century feminization was most notably considered in 1977 by Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture, new ed. (New York: Anchor Press, 1988). Here she contends that clergymen and educated women of the 1800s banded together to have a profound effect against the male-dominated industrial revolution of their period in the only areas open to them: art and literature. Since that time the phrase has also been used to characterize a national anxiety in males of the period that men were getting “soft” due to the industrial revolution. See note 17 above for works on the “masculine crisis.” David A. Gerstner, Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 51. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 11. Ibid., 12. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from

2 1 2 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 2

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35

36 37 38

the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 250. This history is taken from Rotundo, American Manhood, 222–46. Much of the following history of the play’s production was taken from Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography, 154–57, 299–314; and Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 241–56. See also Wes Gehring, W. C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), and “W. C. Fields: The Copyrighted Sketches,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 14, no. 2 (1986): 65–75. Quoted in Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography, 158. Quoted in ibid., 159. See ibid., 154–57, 299–314; and Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 241–56. Rotundo, American Manhood, 262–63. Rourke, American Humor, 30. This shows the sport as being heavily associated with femininity by the time of the film’s production. As an early “co-ed” sport, it is not surprising that it would be classified as such. It is also a sport that was often related to powerful women, as it was played in the court of Queen Victoria, something overtly spoofed through The Queen of Hearts love of the game in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). For more on the history of the game, see Nicky Smith, The Queen of Games: The History of Croquet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991). Of course, the true vulgarity of this joke is open to debate. Although it must be noted Fields was not above pushing the limits with the Breen Office over a double entendre. Most notably, in The Bank Dick, the local saloon in Fields’s script was called the Black Pussy Café in tribute to an actual establishment on Santa Monica Boulevard. The Breen Office insisted it be changed to the Black Pussy Cat Café, which appears on the establishment’s window in the movie. Fields, though, consistently drops “cat” when referring to the bar and, in one provocative ad-lib, while stuck in the entranceway, suggests, “Say, you have to either Vaseline this place in here or move the post over.” Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 446. Rourke, American Humor, 111. Fields outlined some of the tricks in an essay for a 1902 volume called The Magician’s Handbook, where he explains how the balancing of multiple cigar boxes was partly an illusion performed through substituting them with a set attached by “a very strong piece of elastic cord.” See Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 51–52. In the film it remains difficult to determine when and where this substitution takes place. Regardless, the act is still impressive since multiple tricks occur that could not possibly be done through the substitution of attached boxes. In fact, the performance proves doubly impressive since Fields was fifty-four at the time and very much out of practice. Tom Gunning, “Buster Keaton, or the Work of Comedy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader, ed. Frank Krutnik (London: Routledge, 2000), 75. Ibid. Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 250. n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 2 | 2 1 3

39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46

47

48 49

Elaine Taylor May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2. David R. Shumway, Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 22. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 2002), 132. Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 105. Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 255. Valerie Sanders, The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 62. Sanders mentions Nicholas Nickleby (1838– 39), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–53), and Hard Times (1854) as containing such father figures who are “problematic in his literary texts: at worst pompous, self-regarding and false; but at best, exuberant and life affirming” (ibid., 62). For more on Dickens’s fathers, see Hilary M. Schor, Dickens and the Daughters of the House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Dianne F. Sadoff, Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). This inspiration (or, to be more accurate, character assassination) proves even more potent since he names the lazy brother-in-law character, Claude, after his own estranged son. See Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography, 329–33, and Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 391–98. Off camera, Fields reportedly wished he had a daughter rather than a son. As Jean recounts about being on the set with the aging comedian: “I felt that he was playing his own life. He said to me, I wish I had a daughter like you. He said, all my life I’ve wanted someone like you.” Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 464. In his con man roles, a similar motif appears as Fields’s attempts at deceiving wealthy women into matrimony often seem for his daughter’s benefit even more than his own. This is seen in Poppy (before McGargle stumbles upon the heiress con), The Old Fashioned Way, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. But Man on the Flying Trapeze is the only narrative in which Fields actually succeeds in remarrying for his daughter’s sake. As a result, Ambrose seems to be the most depressed of all of Fields’s characters. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992), 47. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (1913; New York: Norton, 1950), 9. This centrality of the incest taboo in defining the structures and essentially driving the forces of society would become the basis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which used the taboo’s restrictions to explain the conception of women as commodity or, specifically, the exchange of women between tribes. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Les structures élémentaires de la parenté) (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969). Yet as Lacan would later contend, while these laws of kinship are central to determining the social order, notably, “the prohibition of incest is merely the subjective pivot of that Law.” As such, Fields’s denaturalizing of the law exposes this pivot and shows its fragility. Jacques Lacan, “The Func-

2 1 4 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 2

50

51 52

53

tion and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 66. Beginning in 1937, Fields became a frequent guest star on NBC’s The Chase and Sanborn Hour with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, where the dummy and Fields began a popular “feud.” These appearances were so popular that Fields costarred in two films with the ventriloquist and dummy, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man and, in a cameo appearance, Song of the Open Road (1944). For more on radio and its effect on the verbal nature of buffoonish masculinity, see chapter 4 on Jack Benny, who had his own radio feud that played out in films with Fred Allen. Curtis, W. C. Fields: A Biography, 300. Strange amalgams of the Fields persona appear in his four short films for Mack Sennett: The Dentist (1932), The Fatal Glass of Beer, The Pharmacist, and The Barber Shop (1933). These films, all written by Fields, are largely plotless affairs featuring extreme versions of the character attributes seen in his feature films. Most notable are The Dentist, which contains his most mean-spirited father role, and The Fatal Glass of Beer, a bizarre lampoon of a weepy melodrama featuring Fields as a humble elk herder in the Klondike. J. P. McEvoy, “W. C. Fields’ Best Friend,” New York Tribune: This Week, July 26, 1942, 16.

Notes to Chapter 3 1 2

3

4

Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: Pocket Books, 1996), 344. Ibid., 261. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, the word also has a popular meaning as an adjective when ascribing the characteristics of a nebbish, which might account for its popularized spelling of “nebbish” for English speakers. (“The nebbish boy was never introduced at parties.”) Also, as documented by both the OED and Rosten, the word has significance as an interjection expressing commiseration, dismay, and pity. For this study, I am employing the spelling “nebbish,” which in English appears to be its most popular spelling. For more on Allen’s career and influence, see Peter J. Bailey, The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Robert Benayoun, The Films of Woody Allen, trans. Alexander Walker (New York: Harmony Books, 1987); Douglas Brode, The Films of Woody Allen (New York: Carol Publishing, 1991); Sam B. Girgus, The Films of Woody Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Sander H. Lee, Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God, and Existentialism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002). Biographer John Baxter relays how Allen was most influenced as a young man by Hope’s movies and credited him as a direct influence on many of his fully comedic performances. Allen even showed up to a Carnegie Hall tribute for the seventy-five-year-old comedian in 1978 to salute his film roles as a “vain womanizer, a coward’s coward and always brilliant.” John Baxter, Woody Allen: A Biography (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2000), 22. For more on the career of Hope, see William Robert Faith, Bob Hope: A Life in Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003); Donald McCaffrey, The Road to Comedy: The Films of n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 3 | 2 1 5

5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

Bob Hope (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005); and James L. Neibaur, The Bob Hope Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005). Woody Allen, interview with Paul Fischer, Dark Horizons, March 17, 2007. www.darkhorizons.com/features/736/woody-allen-for-melinda-melinda, accessed October 12, 2012. For more on Cantor’s life and career, see James Fisher, Eddie Cantor: A BioBibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997); Herbert G. Goldman, Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Gregory Koseluk, Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995). These biographical works will be referenced throughout this chapter. Goldman, Banjo Eyes, xiii. Ibid. The development of Cantor into a public figure extends beyond his success on stage, screen, recordings, radio, and television as a frequent guest host of The Colgate Comedy Hour in the 1950s. He was also active in the public sphere during the early 1930s as a political voice for liberal causes and as one of the founders of the March of Dimes, which he heavily promoted. Cantor’s popularity was so large that Warner Bros. produced a biopic about his life, The Eddie Cantor Story, in 1953. See Goldman, Banjo Eyes, and Koseluk, Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business. See Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), and The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991). Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 5. Janet R. Jakobsen, “Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 81–82. Eddie Cantor and David Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1932), 113–15. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 5. Ibid., 155. See Fisher, Eddie Cantor: A Bio-Bibliography, 53–87; Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 57– 74; Koseluk, Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business, 54–75. Robert C. Benchley, “Review,” Life, May 4, 1922, 22. This one-reel film was made as a test for sound technologies, employing popular Broadway stars. He is credited as the star of Kid Boots (1923), which was a major stage success of the period. The Broadway show was adapted to a silent feature in 1926 by Paramount, which also signed him to do an original silent comedy, Special Delivery (1926), which Cantor authored. The comedian spent a year in Hollywood during the 1920s to pursue becoming a film star before packing up and returning to Broadway for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927. He would later return to Hollywood for his Goldwyn contract. See Koseluk, Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business, 94–127.

2 1 6 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 3

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

“See Actor’s Guild Uniting All Faiths,” New York Times, December 27, 1927, 23. Cantor and Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands, 1. Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the American Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 49. Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 173. This promoting of Cantor’s Jewishness was tied to the studios’ larger promotions of exciting Broadway entertainment, an early attempt at selling sound productions and a tactic studios later reconsidered. Jenkins outlines in detail the promotion of the film and its eventual failure outside of large urban areas in his chapter on Cantor and “regional resistance.” See Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 153–84. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 175. In truth, Palmy Days actually feels more relatable to his previous Broadway persona than later Goldwyn movies. For example, the writers, Cantor credited among them, still make a very brief reference to the previous phallic running gag from Whoopee!. Eddie briefly tries to show his new employer, who has mistaken him as an efficiency expert, his “operation.” However, the reference is dropped very quickly, almost as just a quick wink to his New York audience as an ethnically “submerged joke.” Beyond such a minor allusion, the filmmakers understood how to keep some of the nebbish traits that initially made Cantor popular, like his intense nervousness. Yet they decidedly show these elements in a less Jewish manner. For example, instead of breaking into Yiddish like he did on stage when nervous, Cantor now frantically sings. “Nazi Honor to Ford Stirs Cantor’s Ire,” New York Times, August 4, 1938, L18. Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 208–9. Andrew Heinze, Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4. For studies of this history, see Lawrence Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, 1880–1920 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007); Jack Glazier, Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants across America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), and Jews and the American Soul; Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter; a History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Robert Rockaway, ed., Words of the Uprooted: Jewish Immigrants in Early Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991). Ibid., 176–77. Ibid., 177. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 57. Greenwood’s singing of “Falling in Love Again” references the song’s appearance in The Blue Angel (1930). Josef von Sternberg’s German production had n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 3 | 2 1 7

36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

proven popular upon its American release and, notably, tells the story of a sexually aggressive singer (Dietrich) seducing and ruining the life of a timid college professor (Emil Jannings). With this reference, Palmy Days is spoofing that film’s sexual dynamics in a very direct way. Notably, Sternberg’s fetishistic framing of Dietrich in his films is discussed in Laura Mulvey’s landmark “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Therefore, this spoof clearly illustrates how a comedian comedy warps male-centric cinematic constructs for comic effect. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Psychological Complete Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey and others (London: Hogarth Press, 1955–74), 190. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 71. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 83. Ibid., 84. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick originally suggested, the homosocial bond between two male characters can often confirm a submerged homoerotic drive as well. These classifications are certainly played with throughout the early interactions between Eddie and Ricardo in the film. For more on the duo dynamic and homoeroticism, see chapters 5 and 6 of this book. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Raz Yosef, Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 10. Ibid. Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 57. See Rogin, Blackface, White Noise; Most, Making Americans; and Ted Merwin, In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Merwin, In Their Own Image, 43. Ibid., 42. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 3–4. Most, Making Americans, 54. Cantor and Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands, 113–15. Eddie Cantor, “Bert Williams: The Best Teacher I Ever Had,” Ebony (June 1958): 104. Born in Antigua, though relocated to New York City at age ten, Bert Williams became the preeminent black performer of his era and, beyond racial classification, one of the most famous stage comedians in general. He was the best-selling black recording artist before his death in 1922, and so proved to be a key figure in the development of African American music. Significant to the history of the comedian’s movement from stage to screen, Williams became the first black American to take a lead role on the Broadway stage and did much to push back racial barriers during his career despite having many elements of his act based in minstrelsy. See Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke

2 1 8 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 3

52 53

54

55

56 57

58

University Press, 2005). Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 59. Of course, Merman emerged as a major icon herself. These early Goldwyn productions were some of her earliest forays into Hollywood film. For more on her career and life, see Caryl Flinn, Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). For useful histories and analysis of the history of blackface in American culture, see Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Susan Gubar, Race Changes: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). “Jim Crow,” of course, became a pejorative expression meaning African American when the laws of racial segregation, directed against blacks, took hold throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known as “Jim Crow laws.” Before this, though, the name was associated with a song and dance racial caricature played by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface. The character—dressed in rags, battered hat, and torn shoes—featured a southern black dialect the New York–born Rice had learned while touring the South. Popularizing various minstrel songs and touring in both the United States and England, Rice’s act grew very famous and influenced minstrel performances well into the twentieth century. See Lhamon, Raising Cain, 151–28, and Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 62–91. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 82. Lott, Love and Theft, 211. This idea of minstrelsy as born out of white male anxiety was something central to one of the benchmark essays against the practice, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1958). Here, Ralph Ellison writes that when “the white man steps behind the mask of the [blackface] trickster his freedom is circumscribed by the fear that he is not simply miming a personification of his disorder and chaos but that he will become in fact that which he intends only to symbolize.” Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972), 53. As Mikko Tuhkanen outlines, Ellison marks one of three major shifts in the theoretical response to the theatrical tradition of blackface. The first pre-Ellison responses, mainly from the 1920s and 1930s, were based in viewing blackface as simply cultural borrowing in the open spirit of the theater. Initiated by Ellison, the second phase also was confirmed by such figures as Hans Nathan, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Robert C. Toll, and Alexander Saxton. This movement viewed blackface as a “reflecting surface in which the image of white audiences n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 3 | 2 1 9

59 60 61 62 63

64

65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

is projected according to social, political, and psychological exigencies—and at a considerable expense to African Americans.” By the 1990s, though, much more complex readings of the phenomenon emerged in scholars such as Gubar, Lott, Lhamon, and Cockrell. Mikko Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface and Paranoid Knowledge: Richard Wright, Jacques Lacan, and the Ambivalence of Black Minstrelsy,” Diacritics 31, no. 2 (2001): 16. Gubar, Race Changes, 41. Lhamon, Raising Cain, 70. Ibid., 77. Ibid. In truth, much like with the “whitewashing” of Jewish comics, economics often dictated the reason why black performers “corked-up” for white and racially mixed audiences. As Joseph Boskin writes, several black companies after the Civil War had to perform in the white-dictated stage standards, thus in blackface: “When blacks managed to reclaim their own heritage, it was often, though not always, within the white mold.” Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 84. Sophie Tucker, who started as a blackface singer, was one of the most famous performers of the first part of the twentieth century. She proves a fascinating gender study in her own right. As a singer and comedian, she recorded many hit records and influenced countless later female comics. Often billed as “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” her hearty sexual appetite was often the subject of songs and comedy routines. Notably, she is also often considered an influence upon Mae West. See Armond Fields, Sophie Tucker: First Lady of Show Business (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 135. For more on the life and career of Al Jolson, see Michael Freedland, Jolson: The Story of Al Jolson (London: Virgin, 1995); Herbert G. Goldman, Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); James Fisher, Al Jolson: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); and Doug McClelland, Blackface to Blacklist: Al Jolson, Larry Parks, and the Jolson Story (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998). Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, 137. Most, Making Americans, 32. Ibid. Cantor and Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands, 115. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 89–90. William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, “‘Keep Young and Beautiful’: Surplus and Subversion in Roman Scandals,” Journal of Film and Video 42, no. 1 (1990): 30. Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 82. Mark Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 19–20. For more on the career of the Nicolas Brothers, see Constance V. Hill, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (New York:

2 2 0 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 3

75

76 77

78 79 80

Oxford University Press, 2000). Cantor broke his contract with the studio in July of 1936 after numerous creative conflicts with Samuel Goldwyn, who, among other things, resented the comedian’s focus on his radio career (even though, as Cantor correctly knew, his radio appearances only helped to promote the films). By August of the same year, as an illustration of the comedian’s popularity, Darryl F. Zanuck signed Cantor to 20th Century Fox, where he made more money and had more freedom to pursue other entertainment ventures. See Koseluk, Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business, 261–76. Rosten defines a shiksa or shikseh as “1.) A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one.” Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish, 341. Cab Calloway originated this call (and the response from the audience) for the enormously popular jazz standard “Minnie, the Moocher” in 1931. For the history of this song, see Alyn Shipton, Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 35–52. Most, Making Americans, 32. Koseluk, Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business, 276. Gerald Mast, “Woody Allen: The Neurotic Jew as American Clown,” in Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 129.

Notes to Chapter 4 1

2

3

Benny’s planned autobiography, originally to be titled I Always Had Shoes, was finished in a manuscript form of nearly four hundred pages. It was reportedly purchased by a publisher, but, for an unknown reason, was bought back by the comedian. Long after his death, Benny’s daughter, Joan, found the manuscript and published long passages along with her own memories of her father in 1990. Jack Benny and Joan Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story (New York: Warner Books, 1990), 41. Biographical sources on Benny include, along with the above Jack Benny and Joan Benny autobiography, Lawrence J. Epstein, The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2002); Irving Fein, Jack Benny (New York: Putnam, 1976); Mary Livingstone Benny and Hilliard Marx, with Marcia Borie, Jack Benny: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); and Milt Josefsberg, The Jack Benny Show (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1977). Harry Castleman and Walter Podrazik credit Benny with developing this formal innovation as an “I-Me-Mine” sitcom approach that placed “a celebrity into a setting in which the fictional character was almost identical with real life. Thus, the very relaxed and natural personality that listeners had come to enjoy could be easily recognized by the audience in each new show.” Harry Castleman and David Podrazik, Watching Television: Four Decades of American Television (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 17. Outside of sitcoms, his influence as a monologist also is felt with stand-up comedy and, especially, talk show hosts, as Johnny Carson (who went on to influence such names as David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and Jon Stewart) credited him as a major influence. As Brian n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 4 | 2 2 1

4 5 6 7

8

9

10

Rose writes, “Like Jack Benny, whose strong influence he readily admits, Johnny Carson [is] a master of the resigned shrug and the quick take . . . his comedy (like Benny’s) often depends on addressing the home audience with the smallest of cracked smiles.” Brian Rose, ed., TV Genres: A Handbook and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 333. For a concise overview of this pop culture influence, see David Marc, “Lending Character to American Comedy,” in Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, Museum of Television and Radio (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), 33–45. Quoted in Livingstone Benny and Marx, Jack Benny: A Biography, 65. Edward D. Berkowitz, Mass Appeal: The Formative Age of the Movies, Radio, and TV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 53. Marc, “Lending Character to American Comedy,” 33. This dual technological revolution during this period has been documented and analyzed in noteworthy studies, both independently and as related phenomena. See Berkowitz, Mass Appeal; Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Douglas B. Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Popular Culture in the United States, 1920s–1940s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999); Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound: A History (New York: Routledge, 2005); Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), and Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Bruce Lenthall, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Many of these works will be referenced in this chapter. Unlike many comedians of the era, Benny proves interesting through his documented ruminations about the nature of comedy and his radio and television programs, which are found in his unfinished autobiography and articles from his lifetime. In the piece referenced here, Benny actually discusses many “old principles” of comedy that are also, coincidently, covered by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, such as the joke, exaggeration, ridicule, ignorance, surprise, the pun, and, finally, the comic situation. Unfortunately, I have yet to be able to track down the original source of this full article, only the sections reproduced without citation in the biography by Livingstone Benny and Marx, Jack Benny: A Biography, 65–66. Benny and Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven, 78. For a detailed history of Benny’s radio career, see Ron Simon and Rich Conaty, “The Character Behind the Man,” in Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, Museum of Television and Radio, 51–77. The larger work by the Museum of Television and Radio also gives a thorough selection of synopses of notable broadcasts and career trends. The following history of his early film references Fein, Jack Benny, 84–89; and

2 2 2 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 4

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Josefsberg, The Jack Benny Show, 407–16. Crafton, The Talkies, 6–7. Leonard Hall, “Are the Stage Actors Stealing the Screen?” Photoplay (April 1930): 45. Gomery, The Coming of Sound, 4–6. Ibid., 5. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 298. Alan Williams, “Historical and Theoretical Issues in the Coming of Recorded Sound to the Cinema,” in Sound Theory / Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 132–33. Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting, 9. Lenthall, Radio’s America, 12–13. Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public, xxv. Lenthall, Radio’s America, 55–56. Douglas, Listening In, 106. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 194. “Radio Reviews: Jack Benny,” Weekly Variety, October 8, 1941, 26. Benny and Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven, 133. Emphasis added. Surprisingly, the original pitch for the contest had the even more insulting title of “Why I Hate Jack Benny.” Benny’s only change to the original idea was to drop the word “hate.” As Balzer suggested, this bizarre stunt really could have only been done by a comedian as self-deprecating as Benny, since he was maybe the only person in Hollywood who would “have the guts to do it.” Jordan Young, The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV’s Golden Age (Beverly Hills, CA: Past Times Publishing, 1999), 243. Benny and Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven, 134. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Reed (1936; New York: Arno Press, 1976), 142. Benny and Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven, 119. Emphasis added. Ibid. Ibid. Arnheim, Radio, 142. William A. Henry III, “Mr. Benny and America: The Long Romance,” in Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, Museum of Television and Radio, 12. That being said, some have read Benny’s comedy as coded, perhaps covertly, as Jewish even if he never was an “ethnic” comic, like Eddie Cantor. Holly A. Pearse reads such elements in his humor as his vanity, stinginess, and demasculinization as based in a Jewish sensibility that would be especially noticeable to Jewish listeners. Also, she argues, the fact that the off-air Benny never actively hid his ethnic identity made him a “model ‘modern Jew’: His name, speech, and dress had no traces of the shtetl, but he was not ashamed of his heritage.” Holly A. Pearse, “As Goyish as Lime Jell-O? Jack Benny and the American Construcn o t e s t o c ha p t e r 4 | 2 2 3

34

35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42

tion of Jewishness,” in Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Representation, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 284. In terms of clear Jewishness on the radio show, the character of Mr. Kitzel (Arthur Auerbach), introduced as a frequent guest star late in the show’s run in 1947, proved the more unquestionably Jewish caricature with a thick Yiddish accent. Benny’s run-ins with Kitzel were usually presented not as interactions between two Jews, but as comic ethnic “other” meeting a white reactionary comedian. If we listen to Benny’s radio program today, it is easy to picture him since most comedy fans are aware of his later television show and, possibly, movies. But this was not necessarily the case with 1930s audiences. While he regularly appeared in articles and photo spreads, such publicity did not necessarily translate to defining his “imagined body” to the listeners. Even years later, when making the transition to television, Benny expressed relief that his radio cast could match the unseen body images promoted by his team of writers on the air. In 1951 he suggested that “no illusions are shattered” as most of his cast looked their parts. Jack Benny, “From Vadeo to Video Via Radio,” Collier’s Magazine (March 24, 1951), reprinted in Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, Museum of Television and Radio, 27. Michel Chion, The Voice of Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 62. Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 28. In relation to these points, Kaja Silverman proposes in The Acoustic Mirror that Classic Hollywood sound suggests how “synchronization is synonymous with a more general compatibility of voice to body.” As Silverman relates, the on-screen voice-over can have differing distances from the body with each related to the authority of the voice: “The [cinematic] voice-over is privileged to the degree that it transcends the body. Conversely, it loses power and authority with every encroachment, from a regional accent or idiosyncratic ‘grain’ to definitive localization in the image.” This classification shows how Benny’s radio voice is not really an independent entity, since it proves to be idiosyncratic in its irritated tone and midwestern twang, thus embodying the voice in this context. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 46, 49. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 188. Rick Altman, “Sound Space,” in Sound Theory / Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 64. Probably the best practical historical guide of the development of the program over the years is Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, Museum of Television and Radio. See also Josefsberg. The Jack Benny Show. Margaret T. McFadden, “‘America’s Boy Friend Who Can’t Get a Date’: Gender, Race, and the Cultural Work of The Jack Benny Program, 1932–1946,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 134. Ibid., 133.

2 2 4 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 4

43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 63. Since there are no detailed records of his sex life, though he remained married to Mary Livingstone until his death, the specifics of Benny’s sexuality could never be properly determined and, therefore, factor little into my approach to his persona and voice. Interestingly, long before becoming a star in vaudeville and radio, writings about Benny’s sexuality always tended to lean toward the ambiguous. In a 1919 hometown newspaper article discussing an amateur music act performed during his navy days, Benny (under his real name Benny Kubelsky) is characterized as a young heartthrob, yet in a decisively feminine manner, suggesting: “If there are such things as stage-door Janes, Benny had better protect himself.” “Praises Benny Kubelsky’s Act,” Daily Sun (Waukegan, IL), January 3, 1919. Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, 69. Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (New York: Routledge, 1992), 18. Drew Todd, “Decadent Heroes: Dandyism and Masculinity in Art Deco Hollywood,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32, no. 4 (2005): 168. Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Ibid., 95. William J. Mann, Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Star (New York: Viking, 1998), xv. William Haines was one of the top actors of Hollywood’s late silent period, finding stardom costarring with Lon Chaney in Tell It to the Marines (1926). His best-known silent films found him costarring as a quick talking “wit” beside such leading ladies as Joan Crawford and Marion Davies. Unlike other stars, he did transition to sound successfully, including starring with comedian Jimmy Durante in his first film New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford (1931). His career came to a sudden end when he refused Louis B. Mayer’s request he hide his homosexuality in a sham marriage. He subsequently appeared in a few low-budget films for smaller studios before being blacklisted. Haines then had a long and successful career as an interior decorator. See Mann, Wisecracker, for more on Haines. Todd, “Decadent Heroes,” 176. Benny and Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven, 111. Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, 71. Benny and Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven, 105. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 105. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 335. Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 48. Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 193–95. Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer, 77–78. McFadden, “America’s Boy Friend Who Can’t Get a Date,” 127. n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 4 | 2 2 5

61

62

63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72

Devine was a popular guest star on the Benny radio show in the late 1930s and often appeared in his “Buck” Benny sketches. While certainly aligned with the supposed “real” West in the film, Devine himself hardly could be called an idealized masculine subject. On the air and in his long Hollywood career as a comic relief in many popular westerns, Devine was a comical figure with his heavyset frame and a screechy, high-pitched voice. This character actor, whose persona straddles between traditionally rural and queer characteristics, would make for a fascinating star study. The feud actually began organically on Allen’s program on December 30, 1936, when he made a nonscripted crack at Benny’s violin playing. Benny’s show responded and the back-and-forth jabs began to pick up steam over the next few weeks. After recognizing the positive audience response, the two shows had a summit of writing staffs to calculate the feud’s trajectory. See Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, Museum of Television and Radio, 128–51, for a detailed outline of the feud. Benny and Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven, 130. Ibid., 132. Ibid. For more on Allen’s career, see Alan Havig, Fred Allen’s Radio Comedy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Allen’s film appearances were limited throughout his career, only having one starring role in It’s in the Bag! (1945), which has grown a cult reputation due to its innovative absurdist humor. Notably, Benny makes an extended cameo in the film. By the time of Love Thy Neighbor, Allen only appeared in two supporting roles in Thanks a Million (1935) and Sally, Irene, and Mary (1938). See Fein, Jack Benny, 84–89; Josefsberg, The Jack Benny Show, 407–16. Benny and Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven, 150. Peter Barnes, To Be or Not To Be (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 24. Henry, “Mr. Benny and America,” 18. Leah Lowe, “‘If the Country’s Going Gracie, So Can You’: Gender Representation in Gracie Allen’s Radio Comedy,” in Communities on the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture, ed. Susan Merrill Squier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 243.

Notes to Chapter 5 1

Their popularity is confirmed through the large amount of academic, biographical, and cinephilic works that exist. See John McCabe, Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy: An Affectionate Biography (London: Robson Books, 1961); Charles Barr, Laurel and Hardy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Glenn Mitchell, The Laurel and Hardy Encyclopedia (New York: Batsford, 1995); Jonathan Sanders, Another Fine Dress: Role-Play in the Films of Laurel and Hardy (New York: Cassell, 1995), Randy Skretvedt, Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies, 2nd ed. (Anaheim, CA: Past Times Publishing, 1996); Rob Stone, Laurel or Hardy: The Solo Films of Stan Laurel and Oliver “Babe” Hardy (Manchester, NH: Split Reel, 1996); Scott MacGillivray, Laurel & Hardy: From 2 2 6 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 5

2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

the Forties Forward (Lanham, MD: Vestal Press, 1998); Simon Louvish, Stan and Ollie, the Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 2001); and John McCabe, Babe: The Life of Oliver Hardy (London: Robson Books, 2004). Many of these will be referenced throughout this chapter. Dorothy Spensley, “Those Two Goofy Guys,” Photoplay (July 1930): 72. Ibid. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby might also fall into this categorization since they suggest their own homosocial complexities. Yet these two performers could split and exist independent of the other in the eyes of the film-going public. Also, they were always paired with sex symbol Dorothy Lamour in their Road to pictures: Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1946), Road to Rio (1947), Road to Bali (1952), and Road to Hong Kong (1962). See Donald W. McCaffrey, The Road to Comedy: The Films of Bob Hope (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 105–24. See Mitchell, The Laurel and Hardy Encyclopedia, and Skretvedt, Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies, for the most useful guides to all the films. Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 19. Ibid., 283. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), and Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). The Latin motto literally translates into “Two blank slates on which nothing is written.” The short documentary, The Revenge of the Sons of the Desert (1987), which I will discuss later, recounts the club’s history. For an updated list of tents, visit the Laurel and Hardy Society, wayoutwest.org, accessed October 7, 2012. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992). Ibid., 1–2. Laurel and Hardy Forum, laurelandhardyforum.com, accessed October 7, 2012. This is not to imply that fans of Laurel and Hardy are only of an advanced age. When examining fan discussions online, I found many posts from younger comedy fans. Seemingly apart from the official activities of Sons of the Desert, some interesting online experiments with Laurel and Hardy footage have appeared on YouTube, especially in the form of reedited clips of dance sequences from their films. A charming dance featuring the two comedians from Way Out West (1937) has been redubbed multiple times with modern dance music. In one of the most interesting reedits in terms of sexual identity, one fan has slowed down a Laurel and Hardy dance sequence from Bonnie Scotland (1935) and dubbed over the gender-bending rocker Iggy Pop’s song “The Passenger” (1977). As the footage is slowed down, many of the dance moves take on a definitely sexually seductive quality, with Laurel at one point lifting his kilt to a shocked James Finlayson. Barr, Laurel and Hardy, 58. n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 5 | 2 2 7

16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31

Louvish, Stan and Ollie, the Roots of Comedy, 297. Sanders, Another Fine Dress, 30. Robert Lang, Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 7. Henning Bech, When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity, trans. Teresa Mesquit and Tim Davies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 72. This is something noted in Vito Russo’s famous study of homosexuality in film, The Celluloid Closet, as well, through violent and intensely demeaning depictions of gays in Deliverance (1972) and Scarecrow (1973), where homosexual rape is introduced in both narratives. See Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality at the Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 83–84. Scott Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis as Man,” in Comedy/Cinema/ Theory, ed. Andrew S. Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 188–205; Frank Krutnik, Inventing Jerry Lewis (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000); Ed Sikov, Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Bukatman, “Paralysis in Motion,” 193. Steven Cohan, “Queering the Deal: On the Road with Hope and Crosby,” in Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader, ed. Frank Krutnik (London: Routledge, 2000), 162. Russo, Celluloid Closet, 10. See Louvish, Stan and Ollie, the Roots of Comedy, for biographical insight into this successful partnership. Sedgwick, Between Men, 5. Ibid., 1–2. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 2. Biographical work on Laurel and Hardy is plentiful. More detailed accounts of their separate and paired histories can be found in McCabe, Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, and Babe; Mitchell, The Laurel and Hardy Encyclopedia; Skretvedt, Laurel and Hardy; Stone, Laurel or Hardy; McCabe, Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy; and, among the best, Louvish’s 2001 biography, Stan and Ollie, the Roots of Comedy. Much of my biographical information is taken from Louvish’s work. Dan Leno (1860–1904) had one of the most popular music hall acts in England in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a performance that usually revolved around cockney stereotypes and dressing as a pantomime dame. Ironically, there is no evidence that Laurel ever saw Leno in person, since the comedian died when Laurel was only twelve. Yet Leno’s influence on the comedian was probably initiated through the countless imitators who populated the British stage for years after his death. See Gyles Brandreth, Funniest Man on Earth: Story of Dan Leno (London: Hamilton, 1977). Sanders, Another Fine Dress, 7–8. Langdon’s career flourished during the silent era but faltered somewhat with the transition to sound, though he had some form of film work until his death in 1944. He was a talented pantomimist whose character was considerably gentler than the other, rowdier slapstick artists of the day. Notably, during a contract dispute with Laurel in 1939, the producer Hal Roach attempted to pair Langdon with Hardy in a misguided

2 2 8 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 5

32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

48 49

vehicle called Zenobia. The teaming did not prove a success, and Laurel and Hardy were quickly reteamed. Sanders, Another Fine Dress, 18. See McCabe, Babe, for a focused biography of Hardy. Quoted in Russo, Celluloid Closet, 73. Their First Mistake makes appearances as a queer text in the works cited here by Russo, Celluloid Closet; Sikov, Laughing Hysterically; Sanders, Another Fine Dress; and in Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: Toward a Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1995). Surprisingly, though, none of these studies go very far in questioning the Laurel and Hardy relationship beyond this short’s singular comedic take on male-male domesticity. The original content of the constitution is reprinted in John McCabe, Laurel and Hardy (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), 399. For more on the history of fraternal organizations, see Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Nelson, National Manhood. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, 51. Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood, 176. Nelson, National Manhood, 187. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 178. For a more recent example, consider one of the most disturbing sequences in the pseudo-documentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). Sacha Baron Cohen’s sexist and antiSemitic reporter hitches a ride on the RV of real-life college fraternity brothers—which leads to drunken revelry, a ritualistic rite of passage in today’s college fraternities. As they drink, the young men increasingly expose their racist and sexist beliefs, including a contention that minorities in the United States are too powerful. Thus they position themselves as victims despite their privileged position as white, straight males. Yet oddly, they expose these beliefs in an effort to identify with a person they believe to be a cultural other, a reporter from Kazakhstan. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 15. Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Plum/Penguin, 1996). Ibid., 67. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (1921; New York: Norton, 1959); Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Argument between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (1913; New York: Norton, 1950). Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 72. Ibid., 28. Freud suggests that male descendants of the primal horde do not have a conscious knowledge of the past event but that their unconscious minds retain its significance. Thus prohibitions against killing one’s father (representing n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 5 | 2 2 9

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

the primal father) and having sexual relations with one’s mother (representing a woman of one’s own clan) are in conflict with unconscious wishes to break these prohibitions. All of this would provide an anthropological basis for the Oedipal complex. By all accounts, Freud seems to view the primal horde and the ultimate murdering of the chief as an actual historical event driving the subject’s desires. But for the basis of this study, I wish to stress that his theory is of more importance as an illustration of a dominant cultural myth that drives a white heterosexual male identity. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 113. Ibid., 116–17. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 128. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, 151. Ibid. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 72. Chase was a popular comedian during the silent era, making numerous films for Hal Roach. In Sons of the Desert he is notably playing against type, as his on-screen persona was usually less abrasive and more charming. See Brian Anthony and Andy Edmonds, Smile When the Raindrops Fall: The Story of Charley Chase (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998). MacGillivray, Laurel & Hardy, 12.

Notes to Chapter 6 1

2 3

4 5

Later, when the United States officially entered World War II, all men eighteen to forty-five were made liable for military service and all men ages eighteen to sixty-five were required to register. For more information, see Gary J. Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer Jr., The First Peacetime Draft (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986). Douglass Churchill, “Hollywood Reports: Columbia Considers Filming ‘The Lost Atlantis’—Noting the Draft Cycle,” New York Times (November 17, 1940), X5. The film grossed $4 million at a time when admission prices were 25 cents and, once the war started, was showed to troops on eight battlefronts: Russia, China, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Middle East, South Pacific, Alaska, and Western Europe. These box office numbers fail to reflect the money earned from the film’s numerous rereleases. Bob Furmanek and Ron Palumbo, Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (New York: Perigee, 1991), 48. Theodore Straus, Review for Buck Privates (February 14, 1941), reprinted in The New York Times Film Reviews, 1913–1968, vol. 3, 1939–1948 (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1970), 1770. For more on the team and their films, see Edward Watz, Wheeler and Woolsey: The Vaudeville Comic Duo and Their Films, 1929–1937 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994). For more on the career and films of Abbott and Costello, see Tom Mason, ed., Abbott and Costello (Newbury Park, CA: Malibu Graphics, 1989); Scott Allen Nollen’s Abbott and Costello on the Home Front: A Critical Study of 2 3 0 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 6

6 7

8

9 10

11

12 13

14

the Wartime Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); James S. Miller, The Horror Spoofs of Abbott and Costello: A Critical Assessment of the Comedy Team’s Monster Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000); and Furmanek and Palumbo, Abbott and Costello in Hollywood. Quoted in Furmanek and Palumbo, Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, 22. Edward Watz’s history of the team notes how their successful pairing occurred without either comedian’s planning. In fact, after the film success of Rio Rita, both figured they would return East to pursue individual careers onstage and, at one point early on, RKO split the team to attempt to (unsuccessfully) double their revenue. See Watz, Wheeler and Woolsey. As Jenkins suggests, Wheeler and Woolsey’s films fit into two narrative trajectories. The first is “structured around a series of confrontations between the anarchic clowns and some controlling agent.” This appears in the form of landowners in Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934), a prison warden in Hold ’Em Jail (1932), or army officers in Half Shot at Sunrise. The second narrative structure has “the clowns help some failing enterprise, employing their disruptive behavior to foil the film’s self-interested antagonists.” This is seen as they try to save a young woman’s ramshackle hotel in Hook, Line and Sinker (1931), a poor woman’s drugstore in Caught Plastered (1931), help a young boy claim his inheritance in Kentucky Kernels (1934), or bring water to a drought-stricken town in The Rainmakers (1935). Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 187. Ibid., 198. Along with the article by Boxwell quoted in the chapter, Wheeler and Woolsey have also been noted for their queer humor in Richard Barrios’s Screened Out. Here, Barrios contemplates the duo’s first screen appearance in Rio Rita, a scene ending with them slapping each other and then kissing each other on the lips. Richard Barrios, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (London: Routledge, 2003), 45. David Boxwell, “Wheeler and Woolsey Queered: The Downright Peculiar Pleasure of Pre-Code Wheeler and Woolsey,” Bright Lights Film Journal 34 (November 2002), www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/wheeler.htm, accessed October 13, 2012. Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 201. Also, it is important to note that such an anarchistic dynamic faded as the careers of Wheeler and Woolsey continued and the comedies became more formulaic. As Edward Watz writes, the duo adopted a more familiar comedian comedy genre structure as their career carried on. By 1936’s Mummy’s Boys, Woolsey develops into a “particularly obnoxious and belligerent simpleton,” and Wheeler moves away from his singing, adolescent charm, emerging “as little more than a mute Harry Langdon clone” (Watz, Wheeler and Woolsey, 264). Despite some notable differences in the venues, some routines certainly floated between vaudeville and burlesque houses. Also, both venues were born out of nineteenth-century music hall and other lower-class stage traditions. Yet in the early twentieth century, burlesque grew more proletariat than East Coast n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 6 | 2 3 1

15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30

vaudeville, which eventually graduated to Broadway, film, and radio with more fluidity. For more, see Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Abbott and Costello had a run that challenged Laurel and Hardy in terms of length, appearing in thirty-six films from 1940 to 1956. More notably, they were bankable stars in a variety of venues during their careers, including having a popular radio and, later, television program. See Furmanek and Palumbo, Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, as well as Nollen, Abbott and Costello on the Home Front. For more on the later horror comedies—which consist of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948); Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949); Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951); Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953); and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)—see Miller, The Horror Spoofs of Abbott and Costello. For more on the production and critical receptions of Abbott and Costello’s early 1940s comedies, see Nollen, Abbott and Costello on the Home Front. Nollen also gives some production insights into Buck Privates Come Home (1947), which is discussed later in this chapter, as well as categorizes an overview of the Abbott and Costello monster spoofs under the chapter heading, “Cold War Monsters.” Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (New York: Knopf, 2003). Ibid., 15. Ibid., 476. Ibid., 478. Ibid., 479. Ibid. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 196. Of course, such bonding in small groups is not solely confined to the world wars. As Goldstein notes, such rhetoric can be even found as far back as a fourteenth-century knight, who professed his love of his comrades in war. The vast majority of examples explored within Goldstein’s work are recorded in the world wars, when smaller units of men often defined battles. Ibid., 265. Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). Goldstein, War and Gender, 265. For more information, see Michael T. Isenberg, War on Film: The American Cinema and World War I, 1914–1941 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981). Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 478. See Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Martin Kaplan and Johanna Blakley, Warners’ War: Politics, Pop Culture, and Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood (Los Angeles: Norman Lear Center Press, 2004). Jack Wade, “Hitler’s Spies over Hollywood,” Photoplay (October 1940), 20+.

2 3 2 | n o t e s t o c ha p t e r 6

31 32 33

34

35

36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43

For more on Sergeant York as propaganda film and the resulting controversy, see Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 81–102. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 100. For more on this pre–World War II history, see Doherty, Projections of War, along with Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987). Both histories contributed to my summary. Notably, before they found fame in film, Abbott and Costello were establishing themselves as radio stars on The Kate Smith Hour. In their first film, One Night in the Tropics (1940), the two play supporting roles and clearly exploit their radio celebrity, even to the point of being introduced as off-screen voices before we see their bodies. Later, they had their own popular program with The Abbott and Costello Show (1942–47). See chapter 4 on Jack Benny for more on radio celebrity and cinematic comedy. The concept that Abbott and Costello were the true appeal for the audience can be seen in how most records of the film’s previews and popular critical responses overwhelmingly discuss the duo’s comic abilities as opposed to the straight storyline. See Furmanek and Palumbo, Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, 42–48. Robert Eberwein, Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 53. These moments are a cinematically “safe” version of a common practice actually found in companies where soldiers jokingly pretend to be the company “queer.” Such role-playing was noted by psychological studies of the era. See Eberwein, Armed Forces, 54–55. It is difficult to determine how knowingly the filmmakers are embracing the humor of opening a film promoting the draft within a movie theater actually converted into a draft station. If anything, with Buck Privates historically being the first film to deal with the 1940 initiated draft, such an opening is, to say the least, ironic. See Axel Nissen, Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Hollywood Faces from the Thirties to the Fifties (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 137–40. “Gottlieb Will Entertain Not Instruct in Universal Pix,” Hollywood Reporter, March 23, 1943, 6. Doherty, Projections of War, 182. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992), 120. See Mark C. Carnes, ed., The Columbia History of Post–World War II America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

Notes to Conclusion 1

Gary Cross, Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 18. n o t e s t o c o n c lu s i o n | 2 3 3

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

For a history of Saturday Night Live, see Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). For a history and analysis of its stars and their crossovers to Hollywood careers, see Jim Whalley, Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture: From Chevy Chase to Tina Fey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Steven Cohan, “Queering the Deal: On the Road with Hope and Crosby,” in Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader, ed. Frank Krutnik (London: Routledge, 2000), 155–66. Frank Krutnik, Inventing Jerry Lewis (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). See Whalley, Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture, for analysis of Belushi, Murray, and Sandler. See Herman Beavers, “‘The Cool Pose’: Intersectionality, Masculinity, and Quiescence in the Comedy and Films of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy,” in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, ed. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 253–85; Audrey T. McCluskey, ed., Richard Pryor: The Life and Legacy of a “Crazy” Black Man (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Mel Watkins, On The Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—: The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); and John A. Williams and Dennis A. Williams, If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006). Beavers, “The Cool Pose,” 257–58. See Pryor’s concert film Live and Smoking (1971). Beavers, “The Cool Pose,” 271. Alessandra Stanley, “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” Vanity Fair, April 2008, 184. See Susan Horowitz, Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1997). For more on gender and I Love Lucy, see Lori Landay, I Love Lucy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010). For more on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and gender, see chapter 1 of Bonnie Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 24–58. See Zita Dresner, “Whoopi Goldberg and Lily Tomlin: Black and White Women’s Humor,” in Women’s Comic Visions, ed. June Sochen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 179–92; Horowitz, Queens Of Comedy; Stephen A. Silverman and Alfred M. Balk, Funny Ladies: The Women Who Make Us Laugh (New York: Abrams, 1999). Whalley, Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture, 191. Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 54. For more on Goldberg, see Dresner, “Whoopi Goldberg and Lily Tomlin”;

2 3 4 | n o t e s t o c o n c lu s i o n

17 18 19 20 21

Bami Haggins Jr., “Crossover Diva: Whoopi Goldberg and Persona Politics,” in The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Chae Yung (London: Routledge, 2008), 315–43; Andrea Stuart, “The Outsider: Whoopi Goldberg and Shopping Mall America,” in Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 62–67. For a feminist analysis of Fey’s career, see Joanne Morreale, “Do Bitches Get Stuff Done?” Feminist Media Studies 10, no. 4 (2010): 485–87. Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair, January 2007, 54. Stanley, “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?,” 184. Ibid., 191. A. O. Scott, “The Funny Woman, Alive and Well,” New York Times, May 29, 2011, AR12.

n o t e s t o c o n c lu s i o n | 2 3 5

Bibliography

Abrams, Brett L. Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Adams, Joey. Here’s to the Friars: The Heart of Show Business. New York: Crown Publishers, 1976. Alexander, Michael. Jazz Age Jews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Allen, Woody. Interview with Paul Fischer. Dark Horizons. March 17, 2007. www. darkhorizons.com/features/736/woody-allen-for-melinda-melinda. Accessed October 13, 2012. Altman, Rick. “Sound Space.” In Sound Theory / Sound Practice, 46–64. New York: Routledge, 1992. Anthony, Brian, and Andy Edmonds. Smile When the Raindrops Fall: The Story of Charley Chase. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998. Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. Arnheim, Rudolf. Radio. Translated by Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Reed. 1936; New York: Arno Press, 1976. Bailey, Peter J. The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Bain, Alexander. The Emotions and the Will. 3rd ed. London: Longmans, Green, 1875. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barnes, Peter. To Be or Not To Be. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Barr, Charles. Laurel and Hardy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Barrios, Richard. Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall. London: Routledge, 2003. Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image, Music, Text, 179–89. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Baxter, John. Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2000. Beavers, Herman. “‘The Cool Pose’: Intersectionality, Masculinity, and Quiescence in the Comedy and Films of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.” In Race and the Subject of Masculinities, edited by Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel, 253–85. 237

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Bech, Henning. When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity. Translated by Teresa Mesquit and Tim Davies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Benayoun, Robert. The Films of Woody Allen. Translated by Alexander Walker. New York: Harmony Books, 1987. Benny, Jack. “From Vadeo to Video Via Radio.” Collier’s Magazine, March 24, 1951. In Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, 23–32. Museum of Television and Radio. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Benny, Jack, and Joan Benny. Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story. New York: Warner Books, 1990. Bergson, Henri. “Laughter.” In Comedy, edited by Wylie Sypher. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956. Berkowitz, Edward D. Mass Appeal: The Formative Age of the Movies, Radio, and TV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Birdwell, Michael E. Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Blythe, Cheryl, and Susan Sackett. Say Good Night, Gracie!: The Story of Burns and Allen. New York: Dutton, 1986.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Boxwell, David “Wheeler and Woolsey Queered: The Downright Peculiar Pleasure of Pre-Code Wheeler and Woolsey.” Bright Lights Film Journal 34 (November 2002). www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/wheeler.htm. Accessed October 13, 2012. Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Brandreth, Gyles. The Funniest Man on Earth: The Story of Dan Leno. London: Hamilton, 1977. Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Knopf, 2003. Brode, Douglas. The Films of Woody Allen. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1991. Brown, Devin. “Powerful Man Gets Pretty Woman: Style Switching in Annie Hall.” The SECOL Review: Southeastern Conference on Linguistics 16, no. 2 (1992): 115–31. Bukatman, Scott. “Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis as Man.” In Comedy/Cinema/ Theory, edited by Andrew S. Horton, 188–205. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. —. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 1999. Cantor, Eddie, and David Freedman. My Life Is in Your Hands. New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1932.

2 3 8 | b i b l i o g r a ph y

Carnes, Mark C., ed. The Columbia History of Post–World War II America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. —. Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Castleman, Harry, and David Podrazik. Watching TV: Four Decades of American Television. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Translated and edited by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Clawson, Mary Ann. Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Clements, Cynthia, and Sandra Weber. George Burns and Gracie Allen: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Clifford, Garry J., and Samuel R. Spencer Jr. The First Peacetime Draft. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986. Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. —. “Queering the Deal: On the Road with Hope and Crosby.” In Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader, edited by Frank Krutnik, 155–66. London: Routledge, 2000. Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark, eds. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Cook, Pam. “Masculinity in Crisis.” Screen 23, no. 3–4 (1982): 39–46. Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Craig, Douglas B. Fireside Politics: Radio and Popular Culture in the United States, 1920s–1940s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Cross, Gary. Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Curry, Ramona. Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Curtis, James. W. C. Fields: A Biography. New York: Back Stage, 2004. Dale, Alan. Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” In Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens, 41–58. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. b i b l i o g r a ph y | 2 3 9

New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Donat, William. The Life and Death of Thelma Todd. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics. London: Routledge, 2000. —. Making Things Perfectly Queer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New ed. New York: Anchor Press, 1988. Douglas, Susan J. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. New York: Times Books, 1999. Dow, Bonnie. Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Dresner, Zita. “Whoopi Goldberg and Lily Tomlin: Black and White Women’s Humor.” In Women’s Comic Visions, edited by June Sochen, 179–92. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Dyer, Richard. Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003. —. Only Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 1992. —. Stars. 2nd ed. London: British Film Institute, 2008. —. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Dubbert, Joe. L. “Progressivism and the Masculinity Crisis.” In The American Man, selected by Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, 303–20. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Eberwein, Robert. Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Ellison, Ralph. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” In Shadow and Act, 45–59. New York: Vintage, 1972. Epstein, Lawrence. At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, 1880–1920. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. —. The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. New York: Public Affairs, 2002. Fein, Irving. Jack Benny. New York: Putnam, 1976. Fields, Armond. Sophie Tucker: First Lady of Show Business. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003. Fields, Ronald. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break: W. C. Fields on Business. Paramus, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000. —. W. C. Fields: A Life on Film. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. —. W. C. Fields by Himself. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Filene, Peter G. Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 69–93. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Fisher, James. Al Jolson: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. —. Eddie Cantor: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Freedland, Michael. Jolson: The Story of Al Jolson. London: Virgin, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James Strachey. 1921; New York: Norton, 1959. —. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. 1905; London: Penguin, 2002. —. Standard Edition of the Psychological Complete Works. Edited and translated

2 4 0 | b i b l i o g r a ph y

by James Strachey and others. London: Hogarth Press, 1955–74. —. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated by James Strachey. 1913; New York: Norton, 1950. Furmanek, Bob, and Ron Palumbo. Abbott and Costello in Hollywood. New York: Perigee, 1991. Gehring, Wes. Film Clowns of the Depression: Twelve Defining Comic Performances. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. —. Groucho and W. C. Fields: Huckster Comedians. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. —. Laurel and Hardy: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. —. Personality Comedians as Genre: Selected Players. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. —. W. C. Fields, A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. —. “W.C. Fields: The Copyrighted Sketches.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 14, no. 2 (1986): 65–75. Gerstner, David A. Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Gilman, Sander. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. —. The Jew’s Body. London: Routledge, 1991. Girgus, Sam B. “Desire and Narrativity in Annie Hall.” Explicator 51, no. 2 (1993): 122–24. —. The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Glazier, Jack. Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants across America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Glitre, Kathrina. Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934–65. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Goldman, Herbert G. Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. —. Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gomery, Douglas. The Coming of Sound: A History. New York: Routledge, 2005. Grant, Barry Keith. Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Gubar, Susan. Race Changes: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Gunning, Tom. “Buster Keaton, or the Work of Comedy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader, edited by Frank Krutnik, 73–78. London: Routledge, 2000. Hadleigh, Boze. Hollywood Lesbians: Conversations with Sandy Dennis, Barbara Stanwyck, Marjorie Main, Nancy Kulp, Patsy Kelly, Agnes Moorhead, Edith Head, Dorothy Arzner, Capucine, Judith Anderson. New York: Barricade Books, 1994. Haggins, Bami, Jr. “Crossover Diva: Whoopi Goldberg and Persona Politics.” In The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Daniel Bernardi, 315–43. London: Routledge, 2008. b i b l i o g r a ph y | 2 4 1

Hamilton, Marybeth. When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Havig, Alan. Fred Allen’s Radio Comedy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Hayter-Menzies, Grant. Charlotte Greenwood: The Life and Career of the Comic Star of Vaudeville, Radio, and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. Heinze, Andrew R. Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. —. Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Henry, William A., III. “Mr. Benny and America: The Long Romance.” In Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, 5–23. Museum of Television and Radio. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Hertzberg, Arthur. The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter; a History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Higham, John. “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s.” In Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship, 73–103. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Hilmes, Michelle. Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. —. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Hitchens, Christopher. “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Vanity Fair, January 2007, 54+. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Holmlund, Chris. Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies. London: Routledge, 2002. Horowitz, Susan. Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1997. Horton, Andrew S., ed. Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Isenberg, Michael T. War on Film: The American Cinema and World War I, 1914–1941. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981. Jakobsen, Janet R. “Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics.” In Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, 64–89. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Jarvis, Christina S. The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. —. What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Josefsberg, Milt. The Jack Benny Show. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1977. Kanfer, Stefan. Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx. New York: Knopf,

2 4 2 | b i b l i o g r a ph y

2000. Kaplan, Martin, and Johanna Blakley. Warners’ War: Politics, Pop Culture, and Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood. Los Angeles: Norman Lear Center Press, 2004. Katz, Jonathan. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Plume/Penguin, 1996. Kennedy, Matthew. Marie Dressler: A Biography, with a Listing of Major Stage Performances, a Filmography, and a Discography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999. Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: Toward a Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1995. King, Geoff. Film Comedy. London: Wallflower, 2002. Knight, Arthur. Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Knight, Christopher J. “Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: Galatea’s Triumph over Pygmalion.” Literature Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2004): 213–21. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. New York: Free Press, 1987. Koseluk, Gregory. Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995. Kroft, Robert. The Theatre and Cinema of Buster Keaton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Krutnik, Frank. Inventing Jerry Lewis. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. —. “Love Lies: Romantic Fabrication in Contemporary Romantic Comedy.” In Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s, edited by Peter William, 15–36. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Krutnik, Frank, ed. Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Lacan, Jacques. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” In Écrits: A Selection, 31–106. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2002. Landay, Lori. I Love Lucy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. —. Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Lang, Robert. Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Lastra, James. Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Laurie, Joe, Jr. Vaudeville: From Honky-Tonks to the Palace. New York: Henry Holt, 1953. Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Lean, Garth. On the Tail of a Comet: The Life of Frank Buchman. Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers and Howard, 1988. Lee, Betty. Marie Dressler: The Unlikeliest Star. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Lee, Sander H. Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God, and Existentialism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Leff, Leonard, and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. b i b l i o g r a ph y | 2 4 3

Lehman, Peter. Running Scarred: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Lenthall, Bruce. Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. —. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Les structures élémentaires de la parenté). London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969. Lhamon, W. T., Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Livingstone Benny, Mary, and Hilliard Marks, with Marcia Borie. Jack Benny: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Louvish, Simon. It’s a Gift. London: British Film Institute, 1994. —. Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett. New York: Faber and Faber, 2004. —. Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. —. Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers: Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, with Added Gummo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. —. Stan and Ollie, the Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Loviglio, Jason. Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Lowe, Denise. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films, 1895– 1930. New York: Haworth Press, 2005. Lowe, Leah. “‘If the Country’s Going Gracie, So Can You’: Gender Representation in Gracie Allen’s Radio Comedy.” In Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture, edited by Susan Merrill Squier, 237–50. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. MacGillivray, Scott. Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward. Lanham, MD: Vestal Press, 1998. Mahar, William J. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Mann, William J. Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Star. New York: Viking, 1998. Marc, David. “Lending Character to American Comedy.” In Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, 33–45. Museum of Television and Radio. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Marsh, Margaret. “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity.” American Quarterly 40 (June 1988): 165–86.

2 4 4 | b i b l i o g r a ph y

Marx, Groucho. Groucho and Me. New York: Bernard Geis, 1959. Mason, Tom, ed. Abbott and Costello. Newbury Park, CA: Malibu Graphics, 1989. Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. —. “Woody Allen: The Neurotic Jew as American Clown.” In Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor, edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen, 125–40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. May, Elaine Taylor. Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. McCabe, John. Babe: The Life of Oliver Hardy. London: Robson Books, 2004. —. Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy: An Affectionate Biography. London: Robson Books, 1961. McCaffrey, Donald W. The Road to Comedy: The Films of Bob Hope. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. McClelland, Doug. Blackface to Blacklist: Al Jolson, Larry Parks, and the Jolson Story. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998. McCluskey, Audrey T., ed. Richard Pryor: The Life and Legacy of a “Crazy” Black Man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. McFadden, Margaret T. “‘America’s Boy Friend Who Can’t Get a Date’: Gender, Race, and the Cultural Work of The Jack Benny Program, 1932–1946.” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 113–34. McGilligan, Patrick. Cagney: The Actor as Auteur. New Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes/ Tantivy, 1975. McLean, Lorraine Arnal. Dorothy Donnelly: A Life in Theater. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999. Mellen, Joan. Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Merwin, Ted. In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Miller, James S. The Horror Spoofs of Abbott and Costello: A Critical Assessment of the Comedy Team’s Monster Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. Mitchell, Glenn. The Laurel and Hardy Encyclopedia. New York: Batsford, 1995. Morreale, Joanne. “Do Bitches Get Stuff Done?” Feminist Media Studies 10, no. 4 (2010): 485–87. Most, Andrea. Making Americans: Jews and the American Musical. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun.” Framework 15/16/17 (Summer 1981): 12–15. —. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. Musgrove, Stanley. Mae West: A Biography. New York: William Morrow, 1982. Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Screen 24, no. 3–4 (1983): 2–16. Nelson, Dana D. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Nissen, Axel. Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Hollywood Faces from the Thirties to the Fifties. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. b i b l i o g r a ph y | 2 4 5

Nollen, Scott Allen. Abbott and Costello on the Home Front: A Critical Study of the Wartime Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. North, Michael. Machine Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pearse, Holly A. “As Goyish as Lime Jell-O? Jack Benny and the American Construction of Jewishness.” In Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Representation, edited by Simon J. Bronner, 272–90. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008. Pitrone, Jean Maddern. Take It from the Big Mouth: The Life of Martha Raye. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Raskin, Richard. “The Original Function of Groucho Marx’s Resignation Joke.” 16:9 20, no. 2 (2007). http://www.16-9.dk/2007-02/side11_inenglish.htm. Accessed October 12, 2012. Reid, Mark. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Riva, Maria. Marlene Dietrich. New York: Knopf, 1993. Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as Masquerade.” In The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers, 1920–1958, edited by Athol Hughes, 90–102. London: Karnac, 1991. Robertson, Pamela. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Rockaway, Robert, ed. Words of the Uprooted: Jewish Immigrants in Early TwentiethCentury America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Rocks, David T. W. C. Fields: An Annotated Guide. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993. Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Roosevelt, Theodore. “The Strenuous Life.” In The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, 1–21. St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1970. Rose, Brian G., ed. TV Genres: A Handbook and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Rosten, Leo. The Joys of Yiddish. New York: Pocket Books, 1996. Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931. Routt, William D., and Richard J. Thompson. “‘Keep Young and Beautiful’: Surplus and Subversion in Roman Scandals.” Journal of Film and Video 42, no. 1 (1990): 17–35. Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna Raiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality at the Movies. Rev. ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. Sanders, Jonathan. Another Fine Dress: Role-Play in the Films of Laurel and Hardy. New York: Cassell, 1995. Sanders, Valerie. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Sarris, Andrew. You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film, History and

2 4 6 | b i b l i o g r a ph y

Memory, 1927–1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World of Will and Idea. 6th ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1909. Scott, A. O. “The Funny Woman, Alive and Well.” New York Times, May 29, 2011, AR12. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. —. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Seidman, Steven. Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981. Shales, Tom, and James Andrew Miller. Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.

Sherman, William Thomas. Mabel Normand: A Source Book to Her Life and Films. Seattle, WA: Cinema Books, 1994.

Shipton, Alyn. Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Shumway, David. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Sikov, Ed. Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. —. Screwball: Hollywood’s Madcap Romantic Comedies. New York: Crown Publishers, 1989. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. —. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. London: Routledge, 1992. Silverman, Stephen M. Funny Ladies: The Women Who Make Us Laugh. New York: Abrams, 1999. Simon, Ron, and Rich Conaty. “The Character Behind the Man.” In Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work, 51–77. Museum of Television and Radio. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Skretvedt, Randy. Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies. 2nd ed. Anaheim, CA: Past Times Publishing, 1996. Slide, Anthony. Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Smith, Nicky. The Queen of Games: The History of Croquet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” In Against Interpretation, 275–93. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Stanley, Alessandra. “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” Vanity Fair, April 2008, 184+. Stone, Rob. Laurel or Hardy: The Solo Films of Stan Laurel and Oliver “Babe” Hardy. Manchester, NH: Split Reel, 1996. Stuart, Andrea. “The Outsider: Whoopi Goldberg and Shopping Mall America.” In Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, edited by Pam Cook and Philip Dodd, 62–67. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Studlar, Gaylyn. This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Stumpf, Charles. ZaSu Pitts: The Life and Career. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. b i b l i o g r a ph y | 2 4 7

Taylor, Robert Lewis. W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949. Todd, Drew. “Decadent Heroes: Dandyism and Masculinity in Art Deco Hollywood.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32, no. 4 (2005): 168–81. Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Toplin, Robert Brent. History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Trahair, Lisa. The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Of Blackface and Paranoid Knowledge: Richard Wright, Jacques Lacan, and the Ambivalence of Black Minstrelsy.” Diacritics 31, no. 2 (2001): 9–34. Watkins, Mel. On The Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—: The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Watts, Jill. Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Watz, Edward. Wheeler and Woolsey: The Vaudeville Comic Duo and Their Films, 1929–1937. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994. West, Mae. Three Plays by Mae West: SEX, The Drag, and The Pleasure Man. Edited by Lillian Schlissel. New York: Routledge, 1997. Weininger, Otto. Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles. Translated by Ladislaus Löb. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Weitz, Eric. The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Whalley, Jim. Saturday Night Live, Hollywood Comedy, and American Culture: From Chevy Chase to Tina Fey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Williams, Alan. “Historical and Theoretical Issues in the Coming of Recorded Sound to the Cinema.” In Sound Theory / Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman, 126–38. New York: Routledge, 1992. Williams, John A., and Dennis A. Williams. If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006. Yosef, Raz. Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Young, Jordan. The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV’s Golden Age. Beverly Hills, CA: Pass Time, 1999.

2 4 8 | b i b l i o g r a ph y

Index

Abbott and Costello Meet (film series), 232n15 Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 171, 232n15 Abbott and Costello Show, The (radio show), 233n34 Abbott and Costello (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello), 17, 23, 140, 147, 162, 170–72, 199, 232n15, 233n34; Buck Privates, 23, 162–63, 165–68, 172, 176–79, 181–87, 230n3, 233n35; Buck Privates Come Home, 188–90 Abbott, Bud. See Abbott and Costello Academy Awards, 191–93 Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, 5 Adler, Fay, 44, 210n58 Air Raid Wardens, 167, 188 Alexander, Michael, 100 Alias Jimmy Valentine, 126 Ali Baba Goes to Town, 84, 105–8 Allen, Fred, 112–13, 129–31, 133–37, 226n62, 226n67 Allen, Gracie, 14, 28, 138, 140, 204n45 Allen, Woody, 1–6, 8, 17, 79–81, 108–9, 215–16n4 All of Me, 9 All Quiet on the Western Front, 175 Altman, Rick, 122 Anchorman, 191–92 Anderson, Eddie, 122, 124, 127–29, 132, 134 Andrews Sisters, The, 166, 179, 186 Animal Crackers, 2, 4, 14–15

Animal House, 194 Annie Hall, 1–4, 79 Arnheim, Rudolf, 119–20 Arthur, Jean, 13 Artists and Models, 115 Artists and Models Abroad, 115 Astaire, Fred, 124 Auerbach, Arthur, 224n34 Awful Truth, The, 13 Aykroyd, Dan, 194, 196 Baby Mama, 198 Bain, Alexander, 10 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 18–19, 31 Ball, Lucille, 196 Balzer, George, 119 Bananas, 79 Bank Dick, The, 28, 55, 76–77, 213n33 Barber Shop, The, 215n52 Barnes, Peter, 137 Barr, Charles, 145 Barr, Roseanne, 196–97 Barrios, Richard, 16, 231n10 Barrymore, John, 16, 125 Barthes, Roland, 121–22 Beau Hunks, 140, 167 Beavers, Herman, 195 Bech, Henning, 146 Beckett, Samuel, 18, 205n63 Bederman, Gail, 20, 60 Be Kind Rewind, 193 Belushi, John, 194, 196 Benchley, Robert, 84

249

Benny, Jack (Benjamin Kubelsky), 5, 8, 22, 23, 77, 80, 87, 111–14, 136–38, 197– 98, 199, 221n1, 221–22n3, 222n8, 223– 24n33, 225n43, 226n67; Buck Benny Rides Again, 22, 114–15, 129–36; Love Thy Neighbor, 22, 114–15, 129, 133–37, 226n67; and on-air feud with Fred Allen, 134–35, 226n62; The Jack Benny Program (radio show), 22, 111–14, 223n25, 223n33, 224n34, 224n35; and radio cast, 122–24, 126–29; and vocal performance, 114–22, 224n37 Bergen, Edgar, 8, 28, 215n50 Bergson, Henri, 10–12, 36–37 Berkeley, Busby, 90 Berkowitz, Edward D., 113 Berlin, Irving, 104 Bernie, 193 Best Years of Our Lives, The, 49, 189–90 Big Broadcast of 1937, The, 115 Big Broadcast of 1938, The, 28 Big Parade, The, 175 Black, Jack, 191–93 Blackface, 98–100, 219n57, 219–20n58, 220n63, 220n64; in Ali Baba Goes to Town, 107–8; and Al Jolson, 99–101; and Eddie Cantor, 21–22, 81–84, 94, 99–101; in Kid Millions, 103–4; in Roman Scandals, 101–3 Blades of Glory, 192 Blossom Time (stage), 56 Blue Angel, The, 217–18n35 Boland, Mary, 14 Bonnie Scotland, 140, 166, 227n14 Boomerang, 195 Boone, Daniel, 59, 154 Borat, 229n43 Bordwell, David, 116 Boskin, Joseph, 128, 220n63 Boxwell, David, 169–70 Boyarin, Daniel, 81, 93–94 Boy Scouts of America, The (organization), 154 Boys in the Band, The (stage), 124 Braudy, Leo, 172–73, 175–76 Breen Office, 26, 33, 131, 206n7, 213n33. See also Hays Code Brian, Mary, 72, 74 Brice, Fanny, 84

Bridesmaids, 198–99 Bringing Up Father (comic strip), 61 Broadway, 8, 13–14, 20, 21, 111, 113, 116, 231–32n14; and Abbott and Costello, 171; and Eddie Cantor, 80, 84–86, 94, 99, 216n18, 217n23; and W. C. Fields, 55–58, 61–62, 77, 209n50; and Mae West, 30–34, 36; and Wheeler and Woolsey, 169 Broadway Melody of 1936, 115 Brooks, Albert, 109 Brown, Joe E., 8, 166 Buchman, Frank, 26, 206n3 Buck Benny Rides Again, 22, 114–15, 129–36 Buck Privates, 23, 162–63, 165–68, 172, 176–79, 181–87, 230n3, 233n35 Buck Privates Come Home, 188–90 Bukatman, Scott, 146 Bungle Family, The (comic strip), 61 Bunny, John, 13 Burlesque (stage), 99, 166, 170–71, 176, 178, 182, 184, 189, 231–32n14 Burnett, Carol, 196 Burns, George, 28, 87, 140 Busch, Mae, 149, 156, 159 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 145 Butler, Judith, 20–21, 28; Bodies That Matter, 17, 47–48; Gender Trouble, 17, 19, 34–35, 209n39 Buttons, Red, 194 Cabin in the Sky, 16 Calloway, Cabell “Cab,” 107, 221n77 Campaign, The, 192 Cantor, Eddie (Edward Israel Iskowitz), 5, 8, 12, 13, 21–22, 23–24, 77, 79–87, 111–12, 120, 169, 170, 193, 199, 216n9, 216n18, 217n23, 221n75, 223n33; and Blackface, 21–22, 81–84, 94, 99–104, 107–8; Ali Baba Goes to Town, 84, 105–8; The Kid from Spain, 22, 80, 83, 84, 90–93, 94–95, 178; Kid Millions, 22, 81, 84, 93–95, 97–98, 103–4, 108, 178; Palmy Days, 22, 80, 83, 85–86, 88–90, 217n26; Roman Scandals, 22, 84, 93–98, 101–4, 106; Strike Me Pink, 22, 81, 84, 105–6; Whoopee!, 22, 80, 83–85, 89, 92, 94, 96, 116, 217n26

250 | index

Carell, Steve, 198 Carlin, George, 194 Carlisle, Kitty, 14, 178 Carnes, Mark C., 151–52, 155 Carnivalesque, 6, 18. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Carol Burnett Show, The (TV show), 196 Carrey, Jim, 5–6, 9 Carroll, Lewis, 213n32 Carroll, Mary, 61 Carson, Johnny, 221–22n3 Casanova’s Big Night, 80 Caught in the Draft, 165, 176 Caught Plastered, 231n8 Chaney, Lon, 16 Chaplin, Charlie, 5–6, 9–12, 17, 23, 67, 148, 166, 175 Charley’s Aunt, 136 Chase, Charley, 159, 230n56 Chase, Chevy, 194 Chase and Sanborn Hour, The (radio show), 111, 215n50 Chauncey, George, 5, 154–55, 202n14, 208n24 Chicago (film), 192 Chion, Michel, 121 Chong, Tommy, 194 City Lights, 10 Clawson, Mary Ann, 152 Cockeyed Cavaliers, 231n8 Coconuts, The, 14 Cohan, Steven, 15, 146, 194 Cohen, Sacha Baron, 229n43 Colgate Comedy Hour, The (TV show), 216n9 College, 10 Colman, Ronald, 88, 90, 120, 126 Comic Supplement (of American Life), The (stage), 21, 55, 56, 61–62 Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 175 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (novel), 59 Connell, R. W. (Raewyn), 5 Contrast, The (stage), 59 Cook, Pam, 15 Cooper, Gary, 13, 15, 175–76 Cops, 10 Costello, Lou. See Abbott and Costello Coughlin, Charles E., 86

Crafton, Donald, 115–16 Cripps, Thomas, 127–28 Crisis of Masculinity, 21, 55, 59–61, 68–69, 77, 142, 212n17. See also Cult of Masculinity Crockett, Davey, 59 Crosby, Bing, 28, 80, 124, 146–47, 227n4 Cross, Gary, 192 Crow, Jim (character), 98, 219n55 Crowley, Mart, 124 Crystal, Billy, 194 Cult of Masculinity, 63, 65, 70, 73, 78, 124, 150, 154, 174, 212n17. See also Crisis of Masculinity Curry, Ramona, 31, 37, 40, 50 Curtin, Jane, 196 Curtis, James, 76 Daddy Day Care, 195 Dale, Alan, 11 Date Night, 198 David Copperfield, 28, 71, 211n12 David Copperfield (novel), 57, 214n44 Davis, George, 34 Dawn Patrol, The (1930 and 1938), 175 Day at the Races, A, 6, 15, 178 Day, Dennis, 122, 124, 129 Deconstructing Harry, 79 Dentist, The, 215n52 Devine, Andy, 129, 131–32, 226n61 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 191 Dickens, Charles, 57, 71, 209n50, 214n44 Dietrich, Marlene, 31–32, 34, 44, 88, 160 Diller, Phyllis, 196 Diplomaniacs, 170 Dixie Dugan (comic strip), 61 Doane, Mary Ann, 30–31, 34, 42, 46–47, 207n15. See also masquerade (feminine) Dog’s Life, A, 10 Doherty, Thomas, 176, 188 Donnelly, Dorothy, 55–57, 61, 64, 211n6 Doty, Alexander, 4–6, 16, 123–24, 127–28, 225n43 Douglas, Ann, 60, 212n20. See also Feminization Douglas, Susan J., 118 Drag, The (stage), 21, 32–33, 35, 40, 208n25

index | 251

Drag Performance, 20–21, 28–29, 30, 32–35, 37, 40, 42, 43, 47–50, 54, 148, 150, 170, 181 Dr. Dolittle (1998), 195 Dressler, Marie, 14, 204n44 Drunkard, The (stage), 65 Duck Soup, 2, 15 Duel in the Sun, 43 Dumont, Margaret, 4, 14–15 Dunne, Irene, 13 Durant, Jack, 188 Durante, Jimmy, 11, 165, 225n49 Dyer, Richard, 12, 16, 87–88, 124 Eagle and the Hawk, The, 175 Eberwein, Robert, 178–79, 181 Eddie Cantor Story, The, 216n9 Eddie Murphy: Delirious, 195 Eddie Murphy: Raw, 195 Einstein, Harry (Harry Parke), 105 Elks, Protective Order of the Elks (organization), 141 Ellison, Ralph, 219n57, 219n58 Eltinge, Julian, 209n35 Ephron, Nora, 198 Escape, 175 Everything Must Go, 193 Fairbanks, Douglas, 16, 107, 125 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 19 Fatal Glass of Beer, The, 58, 211n13, 215n52 Fazenda, Louise, 13 Feminization, 60–63, 154, 212n20. See also Douglas, Ann Ferrell, Will, 191–93, 194, 199 Few Moments with Eddie Cantor: Star of Kid Boots, A, 84, 216n18 Fey, Tina, 112, 197–99 Fields, W. C. (William Claude Dukenfield), 5, 8, 12–15, 19, 21, 23–24, 30, 53–56, 76–78, 84, 111, 159, 161, 170, 178, 193, 196–97, 199, 206n6, 207n12, 211n12, 211n13, 213n33, 213n35, 214n46, 215n50, 215n52; The Comic Supplement (of American Life) (stage), 21, 55–56, 61–62; It’s a Gift, 21, 28, 54–55, 62, 68–72, 75–76, 78, 211n5; Man on the Flying Trapeze, 21,

54–55, 68, 72–76, 78, 214n45, 214n47; My Little Chickadee, 21, 25–29, 44–46, 54–57, 59, 63, 65, 210n54, 210n59; and scenes with Mae West, 38–44, 46–49, 50–51; The Old Fashioned Way, 21, 54–55, 63, 65–68, 73, 78, 178, 214n47; Poppy, 21, 54–55, 63–65, 68, 78, 178, 214n47; Poppy (stage), 21, 55–58, 61, 73, 209n50 Finch, Flora, 13 Flying Deuces, The, 144, 167 Flynn, Errol, 15 Follies (stage), 56. See also Ziegfeld, Florenz Ford, Henry, 86 Forty Little Mothers, 108 Foucault, Michel, 209n39 Four Sons (1928 and 1940), 175 Fraternal Order of Red Men (organization), 151 Freemasons (organization), 23, 141–43, 151, 156, 174 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 12, 17–18, 76, 96, 145, 153, 171; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 153–55, 157, 161, 229–30n49; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,1–2, 10, 36–37, 39–40, 69, 222n8; An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 89–90; Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality, 75; Totem and Taboo, 75, 153, 214n49 Friars Club (organization), 2–3 Garry Moore Show, The (TV show), 196 Gass, Kyle, 192 Gehring, Wes D., 12, 55, 203n37 General, The, 10 George Washington Slept Here, 115, 136 Gershwin, George and Ira, 85 Gerstner, David S., 16, 60 Gilman, Sander, 81, 87, 89–90 Girl Crazy, 168 Girl Crazy (stage), 85, 94 Gleason, Jackie, 188, 194 Goldberg, Whoopi, 196–97 Goldman, Herbert G., 80, 93 Gold Rush, The, 5, 10 Goldstein, Joshua S., 174

252 | index

Goldwyn, Samuel, 22, 80, 83–84, 86, 88, 91, 94, 96, 101–2, 105–8, 216n18, 221n75 Goldwyn Girls, 80, 90, 101–4, 106 Gomery, Douglas, 116 Gosling, Ryan, 191 Gottlieb, Alex, 167–68, 188 Go West, Young Man, 28 Grant, Barry Keith, 16, 58–59 Grant, Cary, 13, 17, 28, 30–31, 35, 37, 40, 42, 48, 210n64 Great Dictator, The, 11, 175 Great Guns, 162–63, 167 Greenwood, Charlotte, 14, 88–89, 204n44, 217–18n35 Griffith, D. W., 57, 63 Grumps, The (comic strip), 61 Gubar, Susan, 98 Guilt of Janet Ames, The, 49, 198 Gung Ho!, 179 Gunning, Tom, 67–68 Haines, William “Billy,” 126, 225n49 Half Shot at Sunrise, 23, 168, 172, 176–77, 179–88, 231n8 Hamilton, Margaret, 38–39 Hamilton, Sara, 53 Hardy, Oliver. See Laurel and Hardy Hark, Ina Rae, 15 Harlem Nights, 195 Harris, Phil, 120, 122, 124, 126–27, 129–31 Hart, Moss, 136 Hays Code, 149, 175, 206n7. See also Breen Office Hell’s Angels, 175 Henie, Sonja, 107 Hepburn, Katharine, 140 Hilmes, Michele, 117–20 Hitchens, Christopher, 198 Hit the Ice, 172 Hobbes, Thomas, 10 Hold ’Em Jail, 231n8 Hold That Ghost, 168 Holiday, The, 193 Hollywood Revue of 1929, The, 115–16 Holmlund, Chris, 15 Hook, Line and Sinker, 168, 231n8 Hope, Bob, 5, 8, 13, 28, 80–81, 108–9, 146,

165, 176, 188, 194, 215n4, 227n4 Horton, Andrew S., 17–18 Howard, Kathleen, 69–70, 73, 159 Howard, Leslie, 124 Howe, Irving, 86 Hume, Benita, 120 Husbands and Wives, 79 If You Knew Susie, 108 Immigrant, The, 10 I’m No Angel, 28–29 Incest Taboo, 55, 75, 214–15n49. See also Freud, Sigmund: Totem and Taboo Industrial Revolution, 21, 55, 60, 69, 152 International House, 28, 76 In the Navy, 166, 188 It’s a Gift, 21, 28, 54–55, 62, 68–72, 75–76, 78, 211n5 It’s a Wonderful Life, 49, 189 It’s in the Bag!, 226n67 Jack Benny Program, The (radio show), 22, 111–14, 223n25, 233n33, 224n34, 224n35; and on-air feud with Fred Allen, 134–35, 226n62; and radio cast, 122–24, 126–29; and vocal performance, 114–22, 224n37 Jack Benny Program, The (TV show), 138, 221–22n3, 224n35 Jakobsen, Janet R., 81 Jarvis, Christina S., 174 Jazz Singer, The, 101, 116 Jean, Gloria, 73, 214n46 Jeffords, Susan, 15 Jenkins, Henry, 8, 20, 68, 70, 85–86, 105, 116, 144, 169–70, 172, 217n23, 231n8 Jerk, The, 194 Jolson, Al, 83–84, 99–101,103, 116 Jones, Allan, 6, 14, 178 Kate Smith Hour, The (radio show), 171, 233n34 Katz, Jonathan Ned, 5, 153, 202n14 Kaufman, George S., 136 Kaye, Danny, 81, 87, 108, 188 Keaton, Buster, 5, 9–12, 23, 67–68, 166 Keaton, Diane, 3–4 Keep ’Em Flying, 166, 188 Kelly, Patsy, 14

index | 253

Kelton, Pert, 14 Kemper, Ellie, 198–99 Kennedy, Madge, 56–57 Kentucky Kernals, 231n8 Keystone Kops, The, 17 Kid, The, 10 Kid Boots, 216n18 Kid Boots (stage), 216n18 Kid from Spain, The, 22, 80, 83, 84, 90–93, 94–95, 178 Kid Millions, 22, 81, 84, 93–95, 97–98, 103–4, 108, 178 Kimmel, Michael S., 155 King, Geoff, 9 Knight, Arthur, 103 Knights of King Arthur (organization), 154 Knights of Pythias (organization), 151 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 153 Krutnik, Frank, 6, 18, 146, 194 Kyser, Kay, 165 Labarthe, André S., 149 Lacan, Jacques, 214–15n49 Lang, Robert, 16, 145–46 Langdon, Harry, 148, 166, 228–29n31, 231n13 Laugh-In (TV show), 196 Laurel and Hardy (Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy), 5, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 22–24, 139–43, 145, 147–50, 155, 162–63, 188, 196, 199, 228n30, 228–29n31; and contrast to other duos, 147–48, 166– 72, 174; Sons of the Desert, 15, 23, 141, 143–44, 156–62, 166, 174, 179; Sons of the Desert (organization), 22–23, 141–44, 150–51, 156, 162–63, 227n14 Laurel, Stan. See Laurel and Hardy Lawrence, Amy, 121 Lee, Dorothy, 177, 181, 186 Lehman, Peter, 15 Leibovitz, Annie, 198 Leno, Dan, 148, 228n30 Lenthall, Bruce, 117–18 Leroy, Baby (Ronald Le Roy Overacker), 66–67 Lethal Weapon (film series), 145 Levine, Lawrence W., 18, 127 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 214–15n49

Lewis, Jerry, 5, 11, 81, 108, 140, 146–47, 194, 196 Lhamon, W. T., Jr., 99, 220n58 Liar Liar, 9 Livingston, Mary (Sadie Marks), 122, 124–27, 130–31, 225n43 Lloyd, Harold, 11, 148 Lombard, Carole, 13, 137 Lost Patrol, The, 175 Lott, Eric, 98, 220n58 Louvish, Simon, 145, 211n5 Love and Death, 4, 79 Love Thy Neighbor, 22, 114–15, 129, 133– 37, 226n67 Loviglio, Jason, 117 Lowe, Leah, 138 Loy, Myrna, 140 Lubitsch, Ernst, 137–38 MacFarlane, George, 177, 183 MacGillivray, Scott, 162–63 Magnolia, 192 Make It Snappy (stage), 84 Man About Town, 115 Manhattan, 79 Man Hunt, 175 Mann, William J., 126 Man on the Flying Trapeze, 21, 54–55, 68, 72–76, 78, 214n45, 214n47 Marc, David, 113 March of Dimes (organization), 216n9 Margo at the Wedding, 193 Marin, Cheech, 194 Marriage Joke, 21, 55, 69, 161. See also Freud, Sigmund: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious Martin, Dean, 140, 146 Martin, Dick, 196 Martin, Steve, 5, 9, 194 Marx, Groucho (Julius Marx), 1–4, 6, 8, 15, 23, 55, 169 Marx Brothers, The, 4, 8–9, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 23, 87, 178. See also Marx, Groucho Masquerade (feminine), 30–31, 34–35, 42–43, 46–47, 50, 207n15. See also Doane, Mary Ann; Riviere, Joan Mast, Gerald, 9–11, 108–9 McCabe, John , 142–43, 151, 162 McCarthy, Melissa, 199

254 | index

McEvoy, J. P., 55, 61–62, 77–78 McFadden, Margaret, 123–24, 128 McLendon-Covey, Wendi, 198 Medicine Man, The, 115 Meek, Donald, 61 Mellen, Joan, 15 Mellett, Lowell, 176 Merman, Ethel, 97, 104–6, 219n53 Merwin, Ted, 93 Michaels, Lorne, 197 Midnight Cowboy, 145–46 Million Dollar Legs, 76 Minnelli, Vincente, 16 Mirren, Helen, 192 Mississippi, 28 Modern Times, 10 Monti, Carlotta, 54 Moore, Garry, 196 Moore, Mary Tyler, 196 Most, Andrea, 85, 93–94, 100, 108 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 13 Mrs. Doubtfire, 9 Mulvey, Laura, 15, 30, 43, 207n14, 207n15, 218n35 Mummy’s Boys, 231n13 Murphy, Eddie, 194–95 Murphy, George, 104 Murray, Bill, 194, 196 Myers, Mike, 194 My Favorite Blonde, 80, 188 My Favorite Brunette, 80 My Little Chickadee, 21, 25–30, 38–49, 50–51, 54–57, 59, 63, 65, 210n54, 210n59 My Man Godfrey, 13 Myra Breckinridge, 28 Nacho Libre, 192 Neale, Steve, 15–16, 19 Nebbish, 21–22, 79–86, 88, 90–95, 97–98, 100, 103, 105, 107–9, 178, 215n2. See also Cantor, Eddie Nelson, Dana D., 142, 152 Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, 57, 73, 77, 214n46, 214n47 New Adventures of Get Rich Quick Wallingford, 225n49 Newhart, Bob, 112 Newman, Laraine, 196

Nicholas Brothers, the (Fayard and Harold), 103–4 Night at the Opera, A, 2, 4, 6, 14–15, 178 Nitwits, The, 168 Normand, Mabel, 13 North, Michael, 12 Nugent, Frank S., 36 Nye, Gerald, 176 Objective, Burma!, 179 Odd Fellows (organization), 151 Old Army Game, The, 62 Old Fashioned Way, The, 21, 54–55, 63, 65–68, 73, 78, 178, 214n47 Old School, 192 Oliver, Edna May, 14, 177, 183 One Night in the Tropics, 171, 233n34 Order of the Eastern Star (organization), 141 O’Toole, Peter, 191 Our American Cousin (stage), 59 Our Hospitality, 10 Pack Up Your Troubles (1933 and 1939), 166 Paleface, The, 80 Palmy Days, 22, 80, 83, 85–86, 88–90, 217n26 Pardon My Sarong, 172 Passionate Plumber, The, 11 Pendleton, Nat, 178, 183–84, 189 Perry, Lincoln (Stepin Fetchit), 127–28 Peters Sisters, The, 108–9 Pharmacist, The, 215n52 Pickwick Papers, The (novel), 57 Pitts, ZaSu, 14 Playhouse, The, 10 Play It Again, Sam, 79 Pleasure Man, The (stage), 33 Poehler, Amy, 198 Pop, Iggy, 227n14 Poppy, 21, 54–55, 63–65, 68, 78, 178, 214n47 Poppy (stage), 21, 55–58, 61, 73, 209n50 Potters, The, 62 Potters, The (stage), 61 Powell, William, 13, 124, 126, 140 Power, Tyrone, 107

index | 255

Primal Horde, 153–54, 229–30n49. See also Freud, Sigmund: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Princess and the Pirate, The, 80 Progressive Petticoats: or Dressed to Death: An Autobiography of a Married Man (novel), 68 Pryor, Richard, 194–95 Queen, The, 192 Queer, Queerness, definitions of 4–8, 16–17; and ethnic identity, 81–82; and gender identity, 30, 34–35, 43, 46–49; and male/male relationships, 90–93, 122–24, 126–28, 140–43, 145–50, 154–55, 169–72; and military, 178–79; and race, 126–28; and voice, 121–22. See also individual performers Radio, 2–3, 7–8, 12, 20, 22, 76, 167, 171, 176, 197–99, 231–32n14; and Jack Benny, 111–18, 136–38; and Eddie Cantor, 80, 86, 105, 107–8; and film adaptations of, 129–36; and The Jack Benny Program (radio show), 22, 111–14, 223n25, 223n33, 224n34, 224n35; and on-air feud of Jack Benny and Fred Allen, 134–35, 226n62; and radio cast, 122–24, 126–29; and vocal performance, 114–22, 224n37 Radner, Gilda, 196 Rainmakers, The, 231n8 Raskin, Richard, 2–3 Raye, Martha, 14, 28, 204n45 Reid, Mark, 103 Reilly, John C., 191–92 Revenge of the Sons of the Desert, The, 144, 151, 162, 227n9 Rice, Thomas D., 219n55 Richard Pryor: In Concert, 195 Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, 195 Ride ’Em Cowboy, 168, 172 Rio Rita (1929), 168, 171, 177, 231n7 Rio Rita (1942), 168, 188 Rio Rita (stage), 169 Ritz Brothers, 8, 87, 107, 166 Rivers, Joan, 196 Riviere, Joan, 30–31, 46–47, 207n15. See

also Doane, Mary Ann; Masquerade (feminine) Roach, Hal, 14, 140, 162, 167 Road to (film series), 80, 146, 227n4 Robertson, Pamela, 33–36 Robinson, Bill, 128 Robinson, May, 14 Rogers, Will, 84, 128 Rogin, Michael, 83, 93, 101 Roman Scandals, 22, 84, 93–98, 101–4, 106 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 107, 117–18, 165, 176 Roosevelt, Robert Barnwell, 68–69 Roosevelt, Theodore, 16, 60, 173–74 Roseanne (TV show), 197 Rosten, Leo, 79–80, 215n2 Rotundo, E. Anthony, 60–62 Rourke, Constance, 11, 58–59, 64–66, 98, 211–12n14 Routt, William D., 102–3 Rowan, Dan, 196 Rowe, Kathleen, 14, 31, 70, 197 Rubin, Gayle, 46 Rudolph, Maya, 198 Russo, Vito, 16, 147, 228n20 Sally, Irene, and Mary, 226n67 Sally of the Sawdust, 57 Sanders, Jonathan, 145, 148–49 Sanders, Valerie, 71, 214n44 Sandler, Adam, 194 Saturday Night Live (TV show), 194, 196–97 Savoy, Bert, 33–35, 40, 48, 209n35 School of Rock, 192 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 10 Scott, A. O., 199 Scott, Randolph, 28, 210n64 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 16–17, 142, 147–48, 153, 218n41 Seidman, Steve, 8–9, 18 Seinfeld, Jerry, 112 Semi-Pro, 192 Sennett, Mack, 9–10, 13 Sergeant York, 175–76 SEX (stage), 32–33 Sextette, 28, 35 She Done Him Wrong, 21, 28–31, 33, 35,

256 | index

39–40, 42, 47–48 Sheridan, Ann, 136 Sherlock Jr., 10 Shoulder Arms, 10, 166 Show Business, 108 Show People, 126 Shriners, the (organization), 142, 151 Shubert Brothers, 56 Shumway, David R., 69 Sikov, Ed, 146 Silverman, Kaja, 19–20, 49–50, 75, 189– 90, 224n37 Silverman, Sarah, 198 Silvers, Phil, 87, 112, 165 Six of a Kind, 28 Skipworth, Alison, 14, 28 Sleeper, 79 Smart Set, The, 126 Smith, William H., 65 Smutty Jokes, 39–40. See also Freud, Sigmund: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious Song of the Open Road, 215n50 Sons of Daniel Boone (organization), 154 Sons of the Desert, 15, 23, 141, 143–44, 156–62, 166, 174, 179 Sons of the Desert (organization), 22–23, 141–44, 150–51, 156, 162–63, 227n14 Sontag, Susan, 35 Sothern, Ann, 97, 104 Spanish-American War, 60, 173–74 Speak Easily, 11 Special Delivery, 216n18 Spring Fever, 126 Stanley, Alessandra, 198 Step Brothers, 192 Stern, Howard, 192 Sternberg, Josef von, 217–18n35 Stiller, Ben, 108–9 Stimson, Harry L., 181–82 Stranger Than Fiction, 193 Streets of Paris, The (stage), 171 Strike Me Pink, 22, 81, 84, 105–6 Student Prince, The (stage), 56 Studlar, Gaylyn, 15–16, 124–26 Take the Money and Run, 79 Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, 191–92

Taurog, Norman, 13–14 Taylor, Tom, 59 Teasdale, Verree, 96, 102 Television, 1–2, 12, 68, 80, 144, 163, 193– 94, 196–99; and Jack Benny, 111–12, 122, 128, 138, 221–22n3, 224n35 Temple, Shirley, 107, 128 Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, 192 Thank Your Lucky Stars, 108 Thanks a Million, 226n67 They Gave Him a Gun, 175 They Got Me Covered, 188 30 Rock (TV show), 198 Thomas, Brandon, 136 Thompson, Richard J., 102–3 Three Stooges, 87 Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, 145 To Be or Not to Be, 115, 137–38 Todd, Drew, 124, 126–27 Todd, Thelma, 14 Tomlin, Lily, 196 Tracy, Spencer, 140 Trahair, Lisa, 12 Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, 188 Tucker, Sophie, 84, 99, 220n64 Tuhkanen, Mikko, 219–20n58 Twain, Mark, 57–59, 209n50 Two and a Half Men (TV show), 192 Tyler, Royall, 59 Underground, 175 Up in Arms, 188 Valentino, Rudolph, 16, 125–26 Van Dyke, Dick, 112 Vasse, Denis, 121 Vaudeville, 3, 8, 13, 20, 84, 87, 99, 111, 176, 231–32n14; and W. C. Fields, 57, 62, 65, 67–68; and radio, 113, 117; and Wheeler and Woolsey, 169–71 Wahlberg, Mark, 191 Waiting for Godot (stage), 18, 205n63 Watts, Jill, 32, 43, 208n25 Watz, Edward, 231n7, 231n13 Way Out West, 141, 227n14 Weininger, Otto, 89 West, Mae, 12, 14, 19, 20–21, 25–29, 33– 34, 36–37, 53–54, 65, 196, 197; The

index | 257

West, Mae (continued) Drag (stage), 32–33, 208n25; My Little Chickadee, 38–49, 50–51, 210n59; SEX (stage), 32–33; She Done Him Wrong, 21, 28–31, 33, 35, 39–40, 42, 47–48 West Point, 126 Whalley, Jim, 196 What! No Beer?, 11 Wheeler and Woolsey (Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey), 8, 23, 24, 140, 147, 165, 167–72, 199, 231n7, 231n8, 231n10, 231n13; Half Shot at Sunrise, 23, 168, 172, 176–77, 179–88 Wheeler, Bert. See Wheeler and Woolsey Whitcher, Frances M., 68 Who Done It?, 168, 172, 188 Whoopee!, 22, 80, 83–85, 89, 92, 94, 96, 116, 217n26 Whoopee! (stage), 85 Widow Bedott Papers, The (novel), 68 Wiig, Kristen, 198–99 Williams, Alan, 116 Williams, Bert, 84, 94, 99, 218n51 Williams, Robin, 9

Wilson, Don, 122, 124, 129–31 Wings, 175 Woolsey, Robert. See Wheeler and Woolsey World War I, 7, 23, 166, 168, 172–77. See also Half Shot at Sunrise World War II, 7, 23, 49, 75, 123, 127, 162–63, 165, 168, 170–71, 172–77, 188, 230n1 Wyler, William, 19 Wynn, Ed, 87 Yosef, Raz, 92 You Bet Your Life (TV Show), 2 You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, 28, 55, 73, 215n50 You’re in the Army Now, 165 You’re Telling Me!, 55, 62, 73 Zanuck, Darryl F., 221n75 Zenobia, 228–29n31 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 56, 61–62, 84, 93, 169, 216n18

258 | index