The Flip Wilson Show 0814332528, 9780814332528

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The Flip Wilson Show

TV Milestones Series Editors Barry Keith Grant Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television 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 Patricia B. Erens Dominican University

Robert J. Burgoyne Wayne State University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Peter Lehman Arizona State University

Anna McCarthy New York University

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

THE

WILSON SHOW

Meghan Sutherland

TV

MILESTONES SERIES

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2008 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. 12 11 10 09 08 54321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sutherland, Meghan. The Flip Wilson show / Meghan Sutherland. p. cm. — (TV milestones series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8143-3252-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8143-3252-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Flip Wilson show (Television program) I. Wilson, Flip. II. Title. PN1992.77.F595S88 2008 791.45’72—dc22 2007033339

' The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Betty and Henry, whose warmth and love of thought exceed their keeping, and my telling in turn.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION xi

1. Instituting Ambivalence: Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV 1 2. Entertaining Identities, or the Politics of Variety Performance 33 3. Variety and the Art of the Audience 77 Conclusion 99 NOTES 109 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 121 INDEX 125

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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irst and foremost, I would like to thank Annie Martin and Jane Hoehner at Wayne State University Press, and Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, the editors of the TV Milestones Series, for their kindness and continued support of this project. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript and my copyeditor, Kirsten Patey Hurd, for their many helpful suggestions. To properly acknowledge the teachers, colleagues, friends, and family members who helped make this book possible—some of whom fit into all of these categories at once—would require another book still. Let it just be said that I am deeply indebted to the following people (and many more, to be sure) for their varied expertise in education, provocation, commiseration, and/or celebration: Anna McCarthy, Daphne A. Brooks, Brian Price, Bill Simon, Jeffrey Sconce, Hugh Manon, John David Rhodes, Rob Cavanagh, Racquel Gates, Ceridwen Morris, Sam Lipsyte, Phil Hallman, Mike Graziano, Margo Miller, Elizabeth Nathanson, Ernesto Laclau, Mimi White, Lynn Spigel, Scott Curtis, Bambi Haggins, Lucia Saks, Olga Pyrozhenko, Carol Mason, Lindsey

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Acknowledgments

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Claire Smith, Sam Robertson, Scott Krzych, my comrades in the Stonewall Theory Circle, Sally Mills and Tom Bowman, Lisa and Andrew Hurayt, Betty and Henry Philler, Eva Hurayt, Anna and Matt Hullum, Leslee Shaw and Meredith Bell, the entire Mills-Beach-Bowman-Morgan-BlackwoodKelly-Philler tribe, and my lovely new colleagues at Oklahoma State University. A few people who are listed above deserve to be named at least twice. Betty and Henry Philler, to whom this book is dedicated, are inimitable, and to be imitated. Sally Mills, my mother, is surely from another universe, and I am most proud to call myself one of her people—especially if that entitles me to a share of her courage, tenacity, and boundless joie de vivre. Tom Bowman deserves an actual medal for his patience and kindness. Andy and Lisa Hurayt provided steady encouragement. Last of all—and most of all—I must thank Brian Price. Brian Price. Brian Price. Is there anyone else in all the world?

INTRODUCTION

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or viewers tuned in to the debut of The Flip Wilson Show on Thursday, September 22, 1970, at 7:30 p.m., it must have been an uncanny sight: onstage stood a black man, smiling and running his hands over a large stack of money, and standing next to him was a white police officer, grimacing and running his hand over a holstered gun. The uneasy truce between the two figures does not directly invoke the racist police brutality that came to a head during the civil rights demonstrations of the sixties. Nor does it refer decisively to the bloody day of demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, five years earlier, or to the violent television news footage of white police officers assaulting peaceful marchers with fire hoses, dogs, and batons that day produced. In 1969 police killed noted Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark after years of armed clashes with the Black Panther Party, but nothing in the exchange between the two men indicates a specific correlation with this violent encounter. And yet, nothing in the scene lets any of these references to the racialpolitical conflict of the period rest, either.

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Despite such heavy connotations, this opening scene begins in the highest of spirits. Flip Wilson—the man who will later worry the officer, but for now is simply the star of the show—bounds through the audience to a stage in the round, high-fiving and hugging all the studio-audience members he meets along the way. He grins and bugs his eyes out like the famous black vaudevillian Mantan Moreland. He dances and sways as if “Pigmeat” Markham’s “Here Comes the Judge” act were playing on a loop in his head.1 Well before the cop and the money appear onstage, Wilson greets the audience and delivers an upbeat monologue about the show itself, his name towering above him in lights on one side of the theater: “FLIP” in arrow-shaped letters. Wearing a blue three-button suit with a hot-pink shirt and tie, he confides to the camera, “For quite a while now everyone’s been

Flip Wilson welcomes the studio audience to the debut episode of his show.

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stopping me and asking me what The Flip Wilson Show’s gonna be like. Yesterday a guy ran into my car at an intersection, and said, ‘I stopped you because I want to ask you what The Flip Wilson Show’s gonna be like.’” He pauses to laugh and continues, “I decided the best way to put it would be to say . . . watch out!” Framed in a wide-shot that captures his whole body alone onstage, Wilson skips to the side to accentuate this warning and the audience members howl. If the nature of the warning remains unclear, hovering somewhere between a threat of razor-sharp satire and a killer dance move, they choose to revel in the blur between the two. With the crowd warmed up, Wilson brings matters back to the show at hand: “Since this is the first program, everyone figured we should open with a big production number, you know something really fancy, lots of great scenery, beautiful costumes, dancing girls, the works.” Again, Wilson dances in a tight but swaying circle—presumably in place of the absent girls—then abruptly stops moving and recalls, “We found out that the opening number we had planned would cost $104,000. I said, ‘Gentlemen, this is ridiculous! Everyone’s seen those fancy production numbers on the other shows. But how many people have ever seen $104,000?’” Both Wilson and the crowd crack open with laughter, and he concludes, “So I decided we’d open the show by showing you what $104,000 looks like.” Without further ado, the armed police officer carrying the money joins Wilson onstage. Wilson takes the money from the officer and presents the smallish stack of bills to the crowd: “This is it, ladies and gentlemen . . . and $500 of it’s in cash!” As the studio audience surrounding the stage laughs noisily, Wilson begins the exchange with the officer onstage. First, he furrows his brow and demands to know, “What’chu doing with your hand on the gun?!” Then he quickly refers the conflict to the multiracial studio audience, complaining,

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“People can’t relax and enjoy looking at the money, you standin’ there with your hand on the gun.” After working the cop’s reflexes just a little more and laughing intermittently throughout the exchange, Wilson sends the officer on his way, looks into the camera, and asks, “Now wasn’t that much better than watching a bunch of girls jumping all around on the stage?” The applause says yes. With remarkable narrative economy, Wilson has raised the specter of real racial violence, laughed in its face with grand cathartic pleasure, and roused the audience with the prospect of a new kind of star and a new kind of variety show in the process. All without a single dancing girl. It is hard to imagine a more fitting debut for The Flip Wilson Show. Indeed, it succinctly introduces many of the features that would become the program’s trademarks. Wilson’s

Big entrance: Wilson almost always began the show by making his way toward the stage through the cheering studio audience.

Introduction

high-energy entrance would remain virtually the same throughout the show’s four-year run. His exaggerated facial mugging became the signature of many popular characters in his repertoire, from the no-nonsense Geraldine (played in drag) to the philandering Reverend Leroy. The small, uncluttered stage amidst the sea of the studio audience would likewise remain much the same. Before inviting a revolving group of celebrity guests onstage for a comedy sketch or musical performance, Wilson alone would always command the stage with the comedic storytelling that made him famous, as if all the familiar props and hoopla had been funneled into his own animated body. As many critics note, Wilson and his producers almost entirely jettisoned the spectacular accoutrements associated with seventies comedy-variety shows, from detailed background sets to large ensemble casts. In this respect, the raw elements for the show’s breakout success were already in place. Wilson’s quick rise to stardom as host of his own comedy-variety program owed much to the collection of outlandish characters he played, as well as to the diverse roster of guests (from Richard Pryor to the Osmond Brothers) featured in the show’s mix of comedy and musical performances. In 1971, The Flip Wilson Show triumphed as the number one variety program on television and received Emmy Awards for Best Variety Show (Comedy) and Best Writing in a Variety Show. By 1972 the Nielsen ratings placed it second only to the hit CBS sitcom All in the Family (1971–79), a show built, significantly enough, around the notorious bigotry of cranky patriarch Archie Bunker. On the auspices of this popularity, NBC was able to charge a nearly unprecedented $86,000 for one minute of the show’s commercial airtime. Meanwhile, Nipsey Russell was promoting a new dance based on Wilson’s moves called “Doing the ‘Flip’” in the pages of Jet magazine.2 As if to make official

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The January 1972 issue of Time proclaimed Wilson “TV's First Black Superstar.”

Introduction

what an unprecedented number of television fans spanning races, regions, and generations already knew, Time magazine ran an image of Wilson’s face on its cover and proclaimed him “TV’s First Black Superstar.”3 This last distinction, in particular, has come to sum up Wilson’s significance in American pop-cultural history with little further discussion—and, to some extent, for good reason. Even as Flip Wilson’s show warmed television sets in living rooms throughout the nation’s suburbs, racist zoning and financing policies, such as redlining and restrictive covenants, often kept black families out of those same neighborhoods.4 Segregationist attempts to boycott network television shows that featured black performers loomed in the very recent past, and schools, firehouses, and police stations in various parts of the country remained segregated into the eighties.5 As the first black performer to draw the national audience necessary to attain a top-ranking spot in the Nielsen ratings—and the first black comedian to do so as star of his own television show— Wilson very consciously tried to use the medium of broadcast television to nudge many of those same living rooms toward integration.6 However, from this perspective, the calculated form of ambivalence that structures Wilson’s overtures to race politics in the show’s opening monologue may be the latter’s most telling aspect. Owing in no small part to the very real racial violence invoked by the scene with the police officer, Wilson rarely engaged in blatant social satire like that of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (CBS, 1967–70) or Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1968–73), the two shows that effectively realigned television’s variety genre with the countercultural politics of the late sixties. For example, although the undercurrent of trigger-happy prejudice that runs through Wilson’s opening scene is a risky premise for the black star of a new primetime comedy-variety series in 1970,

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the performance that Wilson lays over it, like his willful smile, makes it feel much less so. An undeniable, if vague, reference to racialized police brutality draws a whole chain of social and political implications into the show, but it does so under the cover of a discourse on performance. An encounter that looks an awful lot like a critique of police power and bigotry, only to defer the implicit act of violence, presents itself in the jolly terms of a $104,000 stage spectacular that is similarly deferred, or rather, swallowed whole by a single performer. The displacement of direct political engagement onto a discourse of performance will figure heavily in this study of The Flip Wilson Show. However, combined with Wilson’s distinctly “ethnic” expressions and characters, a calculated ambivalence between putting on a race-show and showing up racial-political injustice defines the program’s aesthetic even more fundamentally. The nature of this ambivalence, as well as the aesthetic and industrial forms in which it appears in the show, thus constitute the core interest of this study. The sketch that directly succeeds the opening monologue of Wilson’s first show offers a good example of how this aesthetic unfolds on-screen.7 In this scene, Wilson plays one of his best-known characters, the Reverend Leroy of the Church of What’s Happening Now. The Reverend’s usual dress of tails and spats was made popular on television by Amos ’n’ Andy’s Kingfish (CBS, 1951–53), but appeared long before that on the minstrel stage. Of course, the character invoked more than just sartorial stereotypes. Week after week, Wilson’s Reverend danced, shimmied, and proselytized in deep musical tones in order to hustle his flock for the funds he so infamously funneled into his Cadillac. In the first episode—one of Reverend Leroy’s most storied appearances—he paces back and forth before the pulpit and urges his congregation to raise funds for a pageant. He begins by

Introduction

intoning, “We gotta make this a show we can be proud of!” Four representative church members sit in a row of chairs behind him, responding to his call with nods, claps, and declarations of agreement as Wilson looks at the camera and mutters, “Syndicated!” out of the corner of his mouth. Having briefly stepped out of character to plug his new show in his own voice, Wilson continues by shaking his hips even harder, rolling his neck, pacing the floor, and inveighing, “This church has gotta progress!” There are more nods and shouts of approval, and he adds, “First it’s gotta crawl!” and claps his hands. The assembly cries out, “Let it crawl, Rev, let it crawl!” Wilson then leans back heavily to the right, lurches side to side with his hands shaking wildly, and shouts, “After this church crawls, it’s got to stand up and walk!” The

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The Reverend Leroy of The Church of What's Happening Now in the debut episode of The Flip Wilson Show.

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assembly responds, “Let it walk, Rev, let it walk!” Smiling broadly and mimicking the moves of a sprinter, Wilson calls out that next the church must run, to which the assembly responds, “Let it run, Rev, let it run!” Finally, the big sell comes: “And for this church to run it’s gonna take MONEY.” From the silent assembly, one congregant, who senses another scam in the Reverend’s familiar financial appeal, bolts out of his seat and shouts, “Let it crawl, Rev, let it crawl!” Appearing only two years after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., one can imagine why the popularity of this parody of a showbiz-inflected church service provoked ambivalent feelings. It was funny, but why? Because it portrayed the stereotypes of black religious expression through an exaggerated performance? Because it was a stereotype of black religious expression? Because it offered a wry “hidden transcript” of critiques of the black church from within black culture, as critic Christine Acham has proposed?8 Or because it recognized a convergence between the spectacular charisma of evangelism and Wilson’s desire to rouse the devotion of the mass television audience as his flock, whether in the name of laughter, racial progress, syndication, or all three at once? The number of possible interpretations clearly outstrips the dualism that the term ambivalence implies. However, in the context of the racial-political discourses that surrounded the show during its run, the distinction between the kinds of meanings that mattered fell into categories as stark as black and white: Was the laughter of Wilson’s audience—especially his white audience—socially critical or simply derisive? Although little scholarship on Wilson’s pivotal show exists, most of it is preoccupied with setting up this intractable question. Accordingly, the ambivalence that runs through the show’s comedic address of racial politics bleeds directly into the critical discourse surrounding it, so that the

Introduction

racial composition of the audience becomes the arbiter of which valence of the show—derogatory or socially critical— inheres. In the encyclopedic Primetime Blues, for instance, Donald Bogle writes: “For Black America’s intellectual community, Wilson’s characters were a collection of repackaged stereotypes that belonged to another era. . . . Others believed that the . . . antics [of Wilson’s characters] were funny when performed within the Black community. Taken out of an African American context and put on white television, this kind of humor could be misinterpreted.”9 Like the hypothetical audiences he cites here, Bogle expresses great ambivalence toward Wilson’s comedy. In the course of discussing the show, he fondly recalls a sketch in which Geraldine, one of the show’s most famous characters, puts a series of white icons in their place with inimitable flair and confidence. He halfheartedly concludes, however, “The Flip Wilson Show brought the old-style ethnic humor—the outrageous antics, the dialects, the mugging—out of the closet and back into vogue. For better or for worse, the show said it was alright to laugh at the simple shenanigans of a Black character as well as to laugh about race and ethnicity.”10 In the 1983 survey Blacks and White TV, J. Fred MacDonald offers a similar but more decisive assessment. He submits that Wilson’s show was funny, especially for viewers within the black community, but that it was absolutely too soon to perform such ethnic humor before a white mainstream audience.11 In this account, a rehearsal of the flexible politics of Wilson’s comedy once again circumscribes a critical examination of it, so that a discussion of the show’s racialized audience and its various reading positions overwhelms any substantive discussion of the show itself. In her book on African American images in seventies television, Revolution Televised, Christine Acham makes a valuable effort to discuss the show beyond this critical horizon.12 In a spirit similar to

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that of Mel Watkins—who sees Wilson’s show as the introduction of a “distinctly black voice” into mainstream comedy, and, moreover, one that enabled the success of comedians such as Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor—Acham emphasizes Wilson’s promotion of black guest performers, and reads Wilson’s sketches against the context of contemporary debates within working-class black culture.13 Despite the instructiveness of these readings, though, Acham still positions the discourse of ambivalence surrounding the show as a simple problem of cultural authenticity and reception: Wilson’s introduction of a kind of “private” black comedic culture to the white public becomes the show’s only political crux. A discussion of the audience’s racial politics once more usurps a deeper inquiry into the intricacies of how and why the show might produce this political crux in its own right. The above descriptions of Wilson’s performance style should suggest the aptness of the ambivalence these critics express toward the political import of The Flip Wilson Show, both in their own accounts and in their attention to the general problem of audience reception that racial comedy foregrounds. In fact, the accounts of Bogle, MacDonald, and Acham offer telescopic views of the controversy the show raised for critics in the press when it first aired—most of which concerned the very same problem of audience and race. Yet, they tell us very little about how and why this show—seemingly even more than others dealing with race at the time—might have raised these issues so acutely.14 Did the show become a flash point for debates about the racial politics of television, and then an impasse for those same debates, simply because Flip Wilson brought “authentic” black humor before white eyes? Or was it something more? This question deserves our most serious attention. Few contemporary television comedians, either white or black, cite Wilson among their influences.15 Most casual reminiscences of

Introduction

the great African American comedians of the seventies revolve around Bill Cosby, on the one hand, or Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor, on the other. Perhaps Wilson’s competing reputations for selling out and speaking out place him in an awkward position in popular memory, somewhere between the very proper Dr. Huxtable played by Cosby in the eighties and the inimitably improper Foxx and Pryor. Yet, in the years since Wilson’s pathbreaking success on network television, the comedy-variety format that his show introduced has effectively been instituted as one of the more prominent genres for black comedians trying to make it on television. In addition to the ill-fated Richard Pryor Show (NBC, 1977), which followed shortly after The Flip Wilson Show went off the air, programs ranging from In Living Color (Fox, 1990–94) to The Chris Rock Show (HBO, 1997–2000) to Cedric the Entertainer Presents . . . (Fox, 2002–3) to Chappelle’s Show (Comedy Central, 2002–5) draw from several different elements of Wilson’s example. As such, reexamining the institutional and aesthetic precedents that The Flip Wilson Show set for these later black comedy-variety shows promises to reveal a great deal about the workings of this controversial offshoot of the larger variety genre. Such a reexamination also holds important prospects for changing the critical approaches that we bring to these shows. Despite their many and great differences, among critics each of the shows listed above has raised exactly the same questions about racial parody, political ambivalence, and the laughter of the white audience as The Flip Wilson Show. In fact, these issues very nearly dominated the national media conscience in the summer of 2005, when comedian Dave Chappelle abruptly walked away from a multimillion-dollar contract to produce another season of the hugely successful Chappelle’s Show for Comedy Central. Horrified by the number of white frat boys mindlessly aping the trademark line of

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one of his characters—“I’m Rick James, bitch!”—Chappelle wondered very publicly whether certain segments of his audience were laughing at the critical ingenuity of his comedy or at the stereotypes in which it sometimes dealt. In an interview with the New York Times, he put it this way: “I want to make sure I’m dancing and not shuffling.”16 As the literature on The Flip Wilson Show already suggests, the comedyvariety format itself seems to heighten the potential for ambivalence between these two possibilities—dancing and shuffling—wherever mainstream black comedy is concerned, and, as such, the problem posed by Chappelle has been vexing scholars and critics for decades. For example, in Watching Race, Herman Gray rightly points out that the ever-controversial race parody of In Living Color obeys “the politics of ambivalence” above all else, so that its representations are “inherently neither progressive nor reactionary; instead, they are potentially both, depending on how they are taken up, by whom, and under what social conditions.”17 Although Gray’s discussion presents an extremely insightful case study for approaching the problem of ambivalence, it ends only by admitting the critical impasse this problem presents: “This ambivalence,” he writes knowingly, “makes it hard to construct a critical space from which to speak.”18 Gray may be reflecting strictly on his own efforts to write about a single show, but as we have seen, he might as well be reflecting on the endeavor of writing about black comedy-variety shows more generally. In the course of this study, I propose that examining the discourse of ambivalence in and around The Flip Wilson Show from another perspective can tell us a great deal more about how this discourse works in Wilson’s show and in subsequent black comedy-variety shows, and, in turn, how the critical impasse that has formed around these shows might be reopened. More specifically, I propose that the show’s inno-

Introduction

vative and influential appropriation of the comedy-variety genre invites us to take Gray’s idea about “the politics of ambivalence” much further—that is, to position ambivalence more explicitly as a multifaceted style of production on television rather than simply as a problem of reception.19 The Flip Wilson Show incorporates what I refer to as the “aesthetic of ambivalence” into many different registers of its address. Some of these registers are aesthetic in the traditional sense of an artistic sensibility—for instance, the non-naturalistic performance techniques that Wilson used to perform his characters—and others are not—for instance, the way the show used its guest roster to attract viewers from potentially antagonistic segments of the broadcast audience, or the way NBC used Wilson’s turbulent life story to promote both the show and the network’s own record of corporate liberalism. Generally speaking, I use the phrase to refer to any strategy or discourse that the show employs to inscribe a full range of conflicting viewing positions, interpretive possibilities, political sensibilities, and audience demographics into its ostensibly singular address. To put matters another way, the aesthetic of ambivalence within the show simply appears as the textual counterpart—and indeed, the motor—of the discourse of ambivalence surrounding the show. However, the aim of framing the show’s storied ambivalence as part of a legible industrial and stylistic strategy will not be to eschew my own position as a white, female academic in the twenty-first century. On the contrary, I will read unabashedly from this position for signs of how and why The Flip Wilson Show plants the seeds of ambivalence in its own structure. A key part of this examination concerns the history and mechanics of the comedy-variety genre itself—how they inform Wilson’s aesthetic, and how they, in turn, inform the discourse of ambivalence surrounding the show. Critics often render Wilson’s performance in terms commonly used to

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describe tropes of minstrel performance, such as “mugging,” “antics,” and “dialects.”20 However, it goes unmentioned that The Flip Wilson Show appropriates the very comedy-variety genre that minstrel shows made into a major institution of American entertainment in the nineteenth century. Further, the genre’s development from stage to screen suggests that the ambivalent politics in black comedy-variety shows today have a deeper history with the variety form. For indeed, when minstrelsy fell out of favor at the turn of the twentieth century, the comparatively liberated vaudeville variety stage gradually absorbed many of its performers. Vaudeville became an essential battlefront on which black comedians, often still in the blackface they wore on the minstrel stage, struggled to renegotiate mainstream tropes of racial representation. For example, Bert Williams and George Walker—perhaps the most renowned black vaudeville team—wrote an editorial decrying the “absurd antics which might please the non-sympathetic, biased and prejudiced white man.”21 Responding to charges that they used characters and tropes from minstrelsy, the team describes its performance style as a progressive one that satisfies both black and white audiences’ different demands while continuing to transform them. Facing the commercial and mortal necessity of performing within the accepted racial rubric of the popular stage, Williams and Walker wore blackface and played the same old roles from minstrelsy. But in so doing, they refined a set of dramatic techniques designed to undercut these supposedly authentic tropes. Accordingly, the principal techniques taken up by black performers on the vaudeville stage became the repository not only for minstrelsy’s derogatory tradition of racialized variety performance but also for the tactical critique of this same tradition. Only a small percentage of black performers from the minstrel era went on to work in the opulent white vaudeville theaters of the urban centers, especially at the level that Bert Williams did; in 1910, he became the

Introduction

first African American to join the Ziegfeld Follies, and, in 1918, the first to perform at the Palace Theater in New York City.22 To be sure, many followed in Williams’s footsteps. However, even more took their acts on tour with the segregated institutional counterpart of white vaudeville, the Theater Owner’s Booking Association (TOBA), or traveled the legendary network of black theaters known as the Chitlin Circuit. Many comedians crisscrossed these two itineraries even though they operated in very different ways. On the white-owned TOBA circuit, the talent often faced prejudice, violence, and exploitative pay arrangements—an indication of why so many joked that the acronym stood for “Tough on Black Asses.”23 In comparison, the Chitlin Circuit, which included both the Apollo in Harlem and the Regal in Chicago, offered a safe and welcoming venue. However, as Watkins has shown, comedians satirized the tropes of minstrelsy on all of these theatrical platforms, often using some of the same techniques that Williams and Walker did, which the latter no doubt adapted from other sources as well.24 In this much, the strategies of black comedic performance that found a mainstream institutional foothold in the vaudeville period— through the practice of Williams and Walker, in particular— emblematize a major challenge of talking about this diasporic tradition of humor: a number of different cultural components, political implications, and historical meanings blur in the aesthetic relay of satire between private black culture and the public performance of that culture in the white mainstream. And as vaudeville’s storied place in the aesthetic and institutional formation of early variety television suggests, the interconnectedness of these contravening performance histories—exploitation on the one hand, and subversion on the other—has had a considerable impact on the ways in which both racial representation and the variety show aesthetic have developed on television.25

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With this genealogy of black performance in mind, the following chapters examine aspects of how The Flip Wilson Show takes up the comedy-variety genre—and indeed its history of ambivalence—to negotiate the racial-political landscape of American culture and media in the seventies. The first chapter focuses on how the show adapts the genre to negotiate the industrial and institutional context of seventies television. The remaining two chapters expand this discussion to consider how the show incorporates comedy-variety practices into its aesthetic and discursive registers. It is here that Wilson’s sublimation of politics into performance—a sublimation, we should note, that Dave Chappelle echoes above—unfolds most fully. It is here also that we return to the problem of the audience with which we began, but on a radically different terrain. Altogether, then, this approach to The Flip Wilson Show attempts to deal with two overlapping sets of questions. The first and most fundamental set concerns how and why the show succeeded when it did, how its aesthetic both structured and undermined the politics of ambivalence, and how its aesthetic and institutional success has impacted television since. The second set of questions focuses on how the comedy-variety genre figures into answers we might propose for the first set: How did Wilson’s innovative adaptation of the genre help define the aesthetic and political valences of black comedy-variety on television? Why has the genre remained a prominent one for black comedians on television today? What can The Flip Wilson Show tell us about how these later black comedy-variety shows work, and how we might approach them critically? Of course, this line of inquiry has implications that go beyond the limits of the black comedy-variety show. As in the seventies, in the politically fractious climate of the twentyfirst century—with its notorious red and blue states—“the

Introduction

politics of ambivalence” could be said to organize the comedic treatment of political issues in a much more general sense. Indeed, we find a similar approach to politics at work in comedy-variety shows such as Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975–) and Blue Collar TV (WB/Comedy Central, 2004–), talk-variety shows such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (NBC, 1992–), reality shows such as Wife Swap (ABC, 2004–), sitcoms such as Will and Grace (NBC, 1998–2006), and cartoons such as South Park (Comedy Central, 1997–), to name a few. Examining The Flip Wilson Show’s timely aesthetic of ambivalence thus provides a glimpse of how this aesthetic developed in broadcast, and how it inflects the institutional strategies by which television continues to negotiate the representation of race and politics today.

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CHAPTER 1

Instituting Ambivalence: Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV

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ong before Flip Wilson stormed the nation on magazine covers and television screens, he traveled it by more traditional means: from one gig to the next, working small black clubs and then the theaters of the Chitlin Circuit. In the copious interviews that accompanied his success, Wilson recalls these early years as a rewarding challenge. “Those black audiences in the little weekend clubs were the toughest I’ve ever played. With all the trouble black people have, they try to forget on the weekends. You’ve got to be good to make them laugh.”1 However, the rewards garnered during this chapter of his life were not limited to winning an audience’s hard-earned laughter. After an on-air plug from Redd Foxx on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (NBC, 1962–92), Wilson made his first television appearance as a stand-up on the same program in 1965. On the strength of his success there, he was able to storm prime time television one comedy-variety show after another. In addition to his frequent return performances and guest-host appearances on The Tonight Show, Wilson was a frequent guest on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, The Dean Martin Show (NBC, 1965–74), The Carol Burnett Show (CBS, 1967–79), The Ed Sullivan

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Show (CBS, 1948–71), and others. During the same period, he released a string of comedy albums that achieved both critical and popular acclaim.2 By the time Wilson made his television debut as a stand-up in 1965, and as a television star in 1970, he was a seasoned performer with a formidable repertoire of characters and vignettes. This gradual, hard-fought ascent to fame resembles the diamond-in-the-rough narrative standard among many talented stage comedians who make it big on television. However, its details remind us that Wilson was not just a talented performer, nor did he strike the nation like a bolt from some blue comedy act. He was a talented black performer, aspiring to success at the grand proportions of broadcast television in a nation that remained deeply divided on the subject of race and largely segregated despite the Supreme Court’s 1964 civil rights legislation to the contrary. To be sure, the networks had already achieved some noteworthy success in marketing black stars to a national audience, particularly Diahann Carroll (Julia, NBC, 1968–71) and Bill Cosby (I Spy, NBC, 1965–68 and The Bill Cosby Show, NBC, 1969–71). Multiracial ensemble shows that advocated an ethos of racial equality, such as The Mod Squad (ABC, 1968–73) and Room 222 (ABC, 1969–74), also had registered in the popular conscience. Despite their popularity, though, none of these shows or their stars came close to achieving the success that Wilson and his show would, either in the ratings or with the cross-racial and cross-regional national audience. To make matters worse, the networks had made frequent but meek attempts to build variety shows around a black star who commanded the stage primarily with his or her own talents and personality, deeming each show a failure at the first sign of a flagging audience. Like The Nat King Cole Show (NBC, 1956), which segregationist audiences hastened off the air, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Show (NBC, 1966) and The Leslie Uggams Show (CBS, 1969) both focused primarily on

From Radical to Relevant In the debut season of The Flip Wilson Show, variety shows ranked near the top of the programming schedule at two of the big three networks, both in volume and ratings.3 Thus, before we can understand what separates Wilson and his producers’ use of the genre from that of their competitors and predecessors, we must first understand the circumstances that made variety so popular with network executives at the time. Strangely enough, the canonical account of early-seventies television history ignores this matter entirely. Todd Gitlin’s influential Inside Prime Time and the studies of the 1970–71 season written in its wake all focus exclusively on the industry’s “turn toward relevancy.”4 That is, they devote their full attention to the shift in programming models that resulted in network airwaves being flooded first with socially engaged dramas meant to lure the big-spending but activistoriented “youth” demographic, and, failing that, with issueoriented sitcoms such as All in the Family (CBS, 1971–79), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–77), and M*A*S*H

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the musical talents of their respective hosts and lasted only a few months. What, then, made NBC gamble on Wilson, let alone another variety show, when it did? What makes the story of The Flip Wilson Show end so differently within this volatile social moment? As we will see, the show’s unique appropriation of the comedy-variety genre, from its formal structure to its historical associations onstage and on-screen, helped make the show an especially viable response to the economic and sociopolitical challenges that faced the television industry in 1970. However, it was the combination of this strategy with Wilson’s unique star persona that laid the groundwork for the aesthetic of ambivalence—an aesthetic which may just explain the show’s sweeping success with such a wide range of audiences and its larger impact on the industry moreover.

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(CBS, 1972–83). For example, Aniko Bodroghkozy’s account of this era in television goes so far as to include “vaudevillian fare”—which is to say, the fun-loving spectacles of the variety show—among the list of old-fashioned, hick-centric, and escapist forms displaced by socially relevant programming.5 This particular discourse on the history of early-1970s television leaves little room for a program like The Flip Wilson Show, which owes no small part of its success to its evasion of the critical binary that divides escapist spectaculars from politically engaged narratives—or, rather, television pre-1970 and television post-1970—as if the punch-linedriven comedies that ultimately claimed the mantel of relevancy didn’t already throw this distinction into question. It is perhaps for this reason that the show is missing from most television histories of the period despite its perch at the top of the ratings next to All in the Family. It is perhaps also for this reason that these same histories gloss over the full menu of country-style variety shows that flourished on seventies television—from The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (CBS, 1969–72) to The Johnny Cash Show (ABC, 1969–71) to The Don Knotts Show (NBC, 1970–71)—all of which so clearly preserved the rural sensibility that relevancy was said to squelch. In fact, it may even be for this reason that such a deep cleavage has opened up between the basic narratives of television relevancy on the one hand, and, on the other, the accounts that scholars of race in television give of the same moment. While relevancy narratives mark 1970 as the year a political sensibility emerged on primetime television, those concerned with racial representation mark 1970 as the year that saw the abrupt demise of the socially and politically conscious programming of the sixties.6 In fact, J. Fred MacDonald polemically refers to the time between 1970 and 1983, beginning with the appearance of The Flip Wilson Show, as “The Age of the New Minstrelsy.”7 For him, Wilson’s emergence represents the return of “safe” black television “char-

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acters” that followed Spiro Agnew’s attack on the network news and the latter’s purported “glorification of ‘embittered’ black radicals” such as Stokely Carmichael.8 While neither of these opposed scenarios independently explains what made The Flip Wilson Show interesting or successful, when viewed together against the social and industrial contexts from which they arose, they reveal a great deal about why Wilson’s show, and the comedy-variety genre more generally, might have flourished. To begin with, both scenarios allude to the rise of political radicalism in the late sixties and early seventies, especially with respect to race. The stories are well known: the assassination of Malcolm X and the Watts riots in 1965, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and the violent encounters between nonviolent civil rights protesters and white law enforcement in the South, to name a few. Along with countless other frustrations and losses, these devastating events helped give explicitly revolutionary movements within black activism—including Black Power and the Black Panther Party—an increasingly prominent place in debates about how to effect social change. When Stokely Carmichael took over leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1966, he brought this more aggressive demand for black self-determination into the mainstream discourse of civil rights. At the same time, the predominantly white student movement was also becoming increasingly radical. While only a small proportion of white students actually joined violent revolutionary groups such as the Weathermen, a great majority of them entered into increasingly bloody conflicts with police while protesting the Vietnam War or social injustice more broadly, culminating in the National Guard’s fatal attack on student protesters at Kent State in 1970. Cities as disparate as Tampa, Detroit, Memphis, and Rochester still smoldered from the widespread race riots of 1967 and 1968;

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the entire nation brimmed with unrest. Still, as Richard Nixon’s narrow victory in the 1968 presidential election suggests, and his campaign’s famous appeal to a “silent majority” that decried the current sociopolitical changes confirms, one could hardly suppose that Americans had rediscovered their revolutionary roots. On the contrary, the national sociopolitical landscape in 1970 was deeply divided and growing increasingly polarized. As Arthur Knight and Sasha Torres discuss in two very different studies, this polarization proved especially problematic for the entertainment business where race was concerned.9 Programs representing the civil rights movement, or even black characters, in a positive light risked boycotts from disapproving southern audiences. In turn, such programs were a risk for the networks, as a loss of local station clearance in such markets would ultimately cut into the revenues from nationwide sponsorship deals. During the same time, however, the networks also faced increasing pressure to reform their racial agendas. In 1964 the New York Ethical Culture Society documented the gross under-representation of black people on network television, citing a 1963 programming sample in which an average of three black people appeared in one full evening of television.10 This study underscored the findings of the 1967 Kerner Commission Report, which officially attributed the race riots of the late sixties to a de facto apartheid in the United States. At the same time, this report bolstered the claims of activists fighting to improve the industry for black audiences and black performers.11 In other words, race was a “problem” of both politics and revenue for the networks. Given their goal of uniting this divided populace into one big, happy audience, it is perhaps already evident how shows designed to solicit ambivalent readings of their racial and general political tone would have been useful to broadcasters at the time. Few shows demonstrate this logic as well

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as All in the Family—not only the most famous sitcom of the relevancy paradigm but also the biggest hit on television at the time. A much-cited study of the show’s appeal claims that liberals enjoyed the show as a satire of conservatives, and vice versa.12 One could laugh at Archie’s sexist and racist jokes or take them ironically, and the same went for his sonin-law Meathead’s stereotypical leftism. As I have already suggested, though, this slippage is better explained by the particular style in which the show was produced than it is by the unpredictability of mass media reception; it was an aesthetic rather than a response. As producer Bob Wood emphasized to a Variety reporter before All in the Family even aired, the show was designed precisely to “present both [sides] as ridiculous and slightly hypocritical,” regardless of creator Norman Lear’s avowedly liberal politics.13 It is thus hardly surprising that these ideologically opposed valences cultivated ideologically opposed audiences. Setting The Flip Wilson Show alongside All in the Family—as the television schedule itself did—highlights the extent to which a concerted aesthetic production of ambivalence both characterizes and exceeds the relevancy paradigm of early-seventies programming. Consider, for example, the resemblance between the comedic address of politics on All in the Family and another sketch from Wilson’s first episode. Featuring the British newsman and talk-show host David Frost, this sketch has Wilson playing his famous character Geraldine, whose trademark repertoire of rehashed stereotypes, satirical social critiques, and often-scathing treatment of major white celebrities is on full display. The sketch begins with Frost introducing an interview segment as if he were on the set of his own concurrent talk show, The David Frost Show (syndicated, 1969–72). Dressed in the drag of a brief purple minidress, matching accessories, and a reddish wig with a flip, Wilson (as Geraldine) saunters onto the stage for the interview to the bump and grind of a quintessential

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striptease soundtrack, throwing his hips with every step under the colored lights. As Geraldine sits in one of the two chairs that comprise the only props, she spins herself around with her toes pointed out and adds a liberal coat of hairspray to her coif. When Frost compliments her dress by proclaiming her “quite the couturier,” her eyes widen in the horror of her misunderstanding and she shouts, “You better watch yo’ mouth, honey!” When he asks if she has a relationship with Killer, her notorious boyfriend, she replies, “Not only that but we’ going together,” adding that he bought her a ring, she just “couldn’t keep up with the payments.” Finally, when he asks her opinion about the rights of women, she proclaims an answer with fire in her eyes and a flip of her hair: “The cost of livin’s going up and the chance of livin’s goin’ down!” This performance trades on all the same ironic slippages of All in the Family, only to further confound the situation with a barrage of conflicting signs. On the one hand, seventies critics such as Lerone Bennett felt that Geraldine’s lack of sophistication, squeaky voice, sexualized gait, and aggressive demands recalled the brash demeanor of Amos ’n’ Andy’s Sapphire (CBS, 1951–53), as well as the minstrel-era stereotypes of bossy and even masculine black matrons that circumscribe her.14 If anything, Geraldine’s position onstage next to Frost, with his suave British comportment, would seem to heighten such qualities. Furthermore, despite the gains of feminism at the time, the very fact of Wilson’s cross-dressing would have seemed fundamentally disempowering in the macho era of Black Power—another measure to take the threat out of his blackness. On the other hand, though, Geraldine’s keenly worded indictment of the social prospects for civil rights, not to mention her acerbic ripostes to Frost’s smug setups, makes for an unprecedented expression of black disdain for white culture on television. Along these same lines, Wilson himself proposed in interviews that Geraldine stood as a strong, hardworking, and sympathetic character in a landscape of vi-

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9 In a scene from the debut episode, Wilson's most popular character, Geraldine, plays to the camera while singing “All of Me” for guest David Frost.

olent, insulting jokes about women in mainstream comedy.15 (A discussion of Wilson’s drag performance as Geraldine and its political interest appears at greater length in the chapter that follows.) However politically divided the national audience was at the time, though, it should be clear that the show did not simply lay bare the mixed feelings and divergent readings of that audience. On the contrary, it incorporated the aesthetic of ambivalence into the very physicality of its most famous character. That is, the slippery political import of the scene above issues not only from the question of whether Geraldine is a positive or negative representation of black women but also of how the black male body beneath her dress even signifies in this economy.

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Of course, to say that the writing, staging, and performance of the show play a principal role in producing the ambivalent interpretations attributed to it is not to say that the show’s politics can be neatly categorized. It is not either to say that the aesthetic strategies used to produce this ambivalence took only one form, such as the doubleness of satire or drag. In the pages ahead, many more examples will illustrate how complicated and varied the show’s address could be, as well as the many different aesthetic strategies deployed in order to cultivate its ambivalent address of politics. In the meantime, two sketches that appeared on the October 1, 1970, episode of the show, which featured Lily Tomlin, Redd Foxx, Roger Miller, and the Temptations as guests, attest well to this variety. Both star Wilson and Tomlin, and both deal with interracial dating. The first begins with a close-up that zooms out to show Tomlin onstage sitting at a bar alone. A jazz piano plays a meandering tune in the background. Wilson approaches her and asks, “Can I buy you a drink, blue eyes?” With Tomlin gazing off in another direction, a carefully syncopated exchange set loosely to the piano music ensues. It can perhaps only be described as a thwarted suitor’s take on the nursery rhyme “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” First, Tomlin answers Wilson’s request in a languid voice, saying that her very jealous seven-foot-tall boyfriend is in the bathroom and carries a gun. Wilson, ever the optimist, asks, “If I beat up your boyfriend, take the gun, and sit beside you, can I buy you a drink, blue eyes?” Tomlin blankly answers that she’s drinking a $35 bottle of champagne. Wilson again rises to the challenge: “If I beat up your boyfriend, take the gun, sit beside you, and buy you champagne, can I drive you home, blue eyes?” Still unmoved, Tomlin tells him she lives in Philadelphia. But Wilson persists, expanding the list and its increasingly challenging repetition to the point that Tomlin has added to the list of impediments a moat full of crocodiles and deep fatal undercurrents, a vicious dog, a mother

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cleaning the floor, a protective father, and the inevitable need to wash her hair. “It’s a simple tale,” she quips, breaking a smile as the studio audience cracks up. With this, Wilson furrows his brow and asks, “You really don’t want me to take you home, do you blue eyes?” Confronted with an explicit no, he finally breaks down and wonders aloud, “Why don’t you like me, blue eyes?” With the studio audience surrounding the stage visibly rapt at the prospect of an uncomfortable answer, Tomlin turns toward him, narrows her eyes, and retorts, “ ’Cause my eyes are brown.” In 1970, only three years after the Supreme Court overturned the law against interracial marriage, and long before some southern states would officially recognize the decision, this sketch could be interpreted in a number of ways. For example, one could argue that the mere conceit of an interracial relationship on-screen was quite daring in its own right; or that the punch line displaces the issue of racism onto the more comfortable issue of sexism; or that its refrain of appeals to “blue eyes” either expresses or satirizes the discourse of black male desire for white women, a particularly heated topic within the Black Power and black feminist movements at the time. Some would undoubtedly even argue that none of these issues matter as much as Wilson’s feat of repetition and Tomlin’s deadpan delivery of romantic ennui: It’s the performance! In this sense, the show raises the stakes considerably on the kind of ironic flexibility that made All in the Family famous. In this example, the poles of interpretation do not simply divide into left and right, or racist and nonracist—alternatives that take the material’s political significance for granted. Instead, The Flip Wilson Show incorporates an implicit theme of interracial dating so casually that it allows for a more basic question: Is the scene political or not in the first place? Of course, it is not just the way the sketch opens itself to interpretation through comedy—as seen in a few different in-

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stances now—that makes it such a noteworthy example of the slippery aesthetic the show cultivated in order to deal with racial conflict on-screen. It is the way the sketch appropriates the segmented structure of the comedy-variety genre to further confound a similar scenario later on in the episode. While a sitcom or drama can easily employ a similar aesthetic strategy at the level of the script—All in the Family confirms as much—the variety show can also accommodate deep shifts in tone and narrative from one sketch to the next. The second sketch on dating that Wilson and Tomlin perform in the same episode offers an interesting example of how this formal quality could work in tandem with others to structure divergent registers of political import. It begins with Wilson standing onstage alone as host, telling the audience that it is about to see a story about the new phenomenon of computer dating. The lights fade, and when they rise Tomlin sits alone, looking glum, in what appears to be a waiting room; a couple of chairs and a reception desk make up most of the few props. When a perky lady-attendant in a sweater set comes to greet her, Tomlin laments that she’s been running her data through the “Compu-Date” database for four months with no luck. “The computer’s a lot fussier than I am,” she jokes, to which the prim clerk responds, “We have to maintain our reputation!” Here Tomlin plays up her disillusionment, exhaling loudly. When the lady offers to run her data through the computer again, she mocks, “Well why not? If a computer can put a man on the moon, surely it can put one in my living room.” But Tomlin’s spirits rise once Wilson, playing a new man in town, breezes into the waiting room. The attendant, eyeing him and his data card suspiciously, asks the diminutive Wilson, “You’re 6v2w?” Her disdain rolls right off him as he hops up to sit on the reception counter and gamely responds, “If I have to be.” From here the sketch takes on a less punchy comedic tone. The attendant disappears to run the numbers for his

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“Compu-Date” match, and Wilson and Tomlin instantly take to one another. They trade a few soft-pedaled jokes about zodiac signs; she admits that he reminds her of O. J. Simpson, a comparison for which he bluntly chides her. They find they share a consuming passion for watching sports and listening to Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix, and (guest performers) the Temptations. Then, with the meet-cute chemistry between them evident in their sparkling eyes, things take a somber turn. The attendant returns to tell Wilson that she’s already contacted a perfect match for him (except that she hates sports), but she tells Tomlin that she is still unmatchable. Wilson, clearly stricken, hesitates before traipsing offstage with a searching expression. The lights go black except for a tight spotlight that illuminates Tomlin onstage alone, wearing an equally troubled expression and holding up her crossed fingers. The dour tone of this scene, which veers quickly from comedy to serious drama, positions its story of thwarted interracial union as a tragedy for both black and white. Tomlin’s fretful expression of optimism at the end is subtle, but it stands out as an emotional appeal to change a social prohibition that has very personal effects. To be sure, the fact that the sketch precludes the mixed couple’s union keeps it within the “safe” domain of racial representation—that zone of restraint that gives MacDonald and many others such mixed feelings about both Wilson and the show. It does not, for example, attempt the interracial kiss that incensed so many white viewers of the 1968 Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.”16 Nevertheless, it clearly attempts to deliver a poignant commentary on a divisive and very current topic in racial politics without driving away audiences that might not immediately agree with that commentary. And further, the restaging of this topic in the wake of the first sketch between Tomlin and Wilson positions the second sketch as a kind of companion piece, which, in retrospect, pushes the prejudi-

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cial undercurrents in the relationship between Wilson and “Blue Eyes” in the first sketch much closer to the surface. Together, then, the sketches suggest a few ways the show used the genre and aesthetic of comedy-variety television to articulate contradictory political positions for the expansive broadcast audience it hoped to gather. A great number of details remain to be considered, though. Thus far I have emphasized why this aesthetic would have appealed to network executives in the divisive ideological context of the early seventies—that is, as an attempt to woo a national audience with deeply polarized feelings about racial issues. However, the state of the television industry at the time also offers crucial insight into why the comedy-variety genre, in particular, proved such an enticing form of programming for Wilson’s producers and for the networks more generally. Selling Variety In the 1970 season the big three networks faced a number of economic challenges, ranging from the revenue loss predicted to accompany a ban on cigarette advertising to the enactment of new limits on national programming hours, which further cut into sponsorship dollars.17 Perhaps most significant, however, was the emerging science of audience demographic measurement that replaced the householdbased method by which networks had previously sold advertising spots. As Gitlin explains in his account of the “turn toward relevancy,” in addition to knowing how many television sets had tuned into a specific show, for the first time advertisers wanted to know precisely what kind of consumers with what sort of buying habits were watching.18 This change did not just upset the stability of the industry’s hierarchical selfunderstanding about the value of the individual networks’ respective audiences; it also set the networks themselves scrambling to orient their programs to the demographic con-

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stituency that advertisers coveted most—the big-spending “youth” contingency—without entirely alienating the rest. While the networks clearly set a premium on this valuable demographic, it nevertheless bears noting that the emergence of demographic measurement articulated many more sought-after categories of viewers than the high-minded white teens associated with “youth” programming. For example, film scholars have linked the concurrent rise of blaxploitation cinema to the studios’ newfound awareness of the black audience as an avid but underserved market.19 This “new” African American market obviously would have factored into the audience NBC envisioned for The Flip Wilson Show, too. With these parallel phenomena in mind, then, seventies television and film should not be viewed solely through the rise of the youth demographic but through the rise of segmented programming methods more generally— that is, through the rise of genres and aesthetic strategies that address multiple demographic groups at once. It is common enough to talk about market segmentation in the seventies, as the executives adjusting to the world of demographic measurement clearly did; however, to speak of an aesthetic of ambivalence in both The Flip Wilson Show and All in the Family helps highlight the ways in which individual shows tried to manage the conflicts between newly privileged audience segments—black and white, old and young, left and right— within their own address. From this perspective, the prominence of variety shows on the 1970 schedule makes a great deal of sense, for the genre rests on a concept that echoed the exact problem of the television audience in the demographic scheme: variety. Indeed, the mixture of performers and performance acts that defined the television variety show held out the prospect of offering “something for everyone,” a claim that vaudeville variety theater had made famous long before.

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A full-page ad for The Flip Wilson Show in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago’s black community, indicates one way that NBC put this aspect of the comedyvariety genre to work in Wilson’s show. Published just before the show’s debut, the ad features an extremely large close-up of Wilson’s face in a state of alarm, with eyes wide and mouth open. The caption reads, “NBC’s Record: The ‘Flip’ Side.” In the print beneath this caption, the network appeals to readers to reward it across the board for broadcasting black shows. It states: The decision to make Flip an important part of NBC’s schedule was designed to appeal to a very special group—those 200 million Americans who love to break up laughing. So now Flip joins Bill Cosby, Diahann Carroll, Johnny Brown, and the other black stars who make it every week on NBC. Not to mention Dean Martin, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Rowan and Martin, and a lot more. . . . We hope you’ll catch it all. And in particular that you’ll try flipping your dial to The Flip Wilson Show every Thursday night. Flip’s going to be very big—in color and black-andwhite.20 As this ad suggests, Wilson’s show was meant to bolster the appeal of the network’s entire schedule to black viewers, effectively emblematizing a quantitative expansion of its service to them. Despite the ad’s furtive address to “those 200 million Americans who love to break up laughing,” it clearly emphasizes the goal of integrating the show’s viewership by listing white and black performers side by side in the copy— even if in separate camps. It entreats readers to commend NBC for its “record” on race by tuning in to Wilson’s show, and, on the basis of that record, it positions the show as a cross-promotional opportunity to woo black audiences to the rest of the network’s programming lineup.

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In order for this strategy to succeed and prove profitable, though, it must work in multiple directions at once; no demographic is an island. Just as NBC appealed to the black audience with the promise of black performers and performance types to suit a variety of tastes, in the course of the show’s run it appealed to a variety of demographics from within the national audience on the same basis. In addition to Wilson’s talent as a comedian, the show offered sketches that drew on various aspects of black culture for inspiration and an array of black guests, including the Pan-Africanstyled musician and dramatist Oscar Brown Jr., Chitlin Circuit comedian “Slappy” White, the fighter Sugar Ray Robinson, the country singer Charlie Pride, and singing legend Ella Fitzgerald, to name just a few. At the same time, white viewers who felt discomfort or disdain for black popular culture could also tune in to see white guests, such as country-pop singer Roger Miller, boy band The Osmond Brothers, antiwar balladeer Kris Kristofferson, or beloved talk-show host Ed Sullivan. For instance, the January 18, 1973 episode featured a diverse collection of stars. Television’s favorite comedic ingenue Sandy Duncan, legendary sports announcer Howard Cosell, British slapstick star Marty Feldman, and country-blues great Taj Mahal all appeared on the same stage, allowing for the possibility of their diverse audiences tuning in to the same hour of paid advertising. The January 11, 1973, episode featured straightlaced black character actor Roscoe Lee Browne, white-bread television icon Andy Griffith, and the very hip musician Curtis Mayfield. The November 13, 1970, episode featured French mime Marcel Marceau, the infamously foulmouthed black comedian “Moms” Mabley, white Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw, and Laugh-In’s favorite smoking Nazi, Arte Johnson. In this sense, the aesthetic of ambivalence deeply informs the way in which The Flip Wilson Show took up the segmented structure of comedy-variety performance at the

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18 “Something for Everyone”: Bobby Darin, Flip Wilson, and Charlie Pride sing a medley of country music together in 1970.

level of programming. It used this structure to literalize the market logic of integration with discrete appeals to multiple demographics at once, all the while defining these demographics more broadly—as the ad above suggests—in terms of black and white. That is, NBC, producer Bob Henry, and Wilson oriented the variety of their variety show—and the comedy-variety show, in particular—in order to target and indeed reach an integrated audience unlike any before. The Flip Wilson Show was not the first to use the comedyvariety format in this way, of course, and as the popularity of the variety show format at the time suggests, it was not the only show during the early seventies to do so, either. For instance, Bodroghkozy points out that The Smothers Brothers

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Comedy Hour—which was a youth-oriented show—sometimes cast older guest stars in order to attract audiences from across the generation gap.21 Richard Nixon’s bizarre guest appearance on the psychedelic Laugh-In, shot during his 1968 presidential campaign, suggests a similar anticipation of the discourse of segmentation. Both of these shows also took advantage of the comedy-variety format as a platform for satire and parody and traded regularly in the slippery engagement of politics that it set up. In this respect, The Flip Wilson Show must be understood as a program that is highly representative of its time. However, the explicit integrationist ethic of Wilson’s show also puts into relief at least two factors that make it unlike its predecessors and contemporaries. First, the comedyvariety genre’s links to both minstrelsy and vaudeville in the pop-cultural imagination endowed the show with a much more unstable hierarchy between the valences of its race-oriented jokes. As Bodroghkozy mentions with respect to The Smothers Brothers, despite the show’s efforts to close the generation gap by using satire and a diverse guest list, there was little doubt as to where the political allegiance of those mainstream countercultural heroes lay.22 The same is true for Laugh-In: the giant fluorescent paisley sets for which the show is known say all that needs to be said about its primary target audience. In contrast, white audiences who grew up laughing out of hatred at blackface comedy might find just as much to enjoy in Wilson’s performance—say, as Reverend Leroy—as black audiences who grew up enjoying the casual deconstruction of such a character in a TOBA or Chitlin Circuit theater. The show’s integrated audience is not the source of this duality; the audience simply embodies the dormant political contradictions of the aesthetic itself, forcing them to the fore. In other words, the racial history of the comedyvariety genre and its performance tropes plays a significant role in implementing the more literally ambivalent aesthetic

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of The Flip Wilson Show, which never quite appears to be for one audience. This first distinguishing characteristic of the show in turn begets the second: with its segmented appeal to discrete audiences, won by means of both humor and a diverse guest roster, by October 1970, The Flip Wilson Show had succeeded across more demographics at once than any of its comedyvariety competitors.23 In this sense, its unique way of taking up the comedy-variety genre promised to improve NBC’s image as a socially engaged public servant of all Americans while simultaneously helping it negotiate the complicated new economy of demography. And especially when framed this way, the two historical accounts of early-seventies television examined earlier—Gitlin’s relevancy on the one hand, and MacDonald’s black jokesters on the other—begin to seem like two sides of the same advertising dollar. As the success of The Flip Wilson Show proved to the industry once and for all, the black comedy-variety genre held very profitable prospects for corporate liberalism’s brand of multiculturalism; it was integration for capitalists. This is not to say that The Flip Wilson Show’s effort to integrate the stage and in turn the audience was either unnecessary or disingenuous. In a 1972 Penthouse interview, for example, Wilson earnestly expresses his investment in using the show to this end. When asked if his awareness of the southern viewership effects his writing, he responds at length: A show hosted by a black had never been accepted in the South, so the first time that knob’s turned on and the people look they are judging against all they have ever been taught. . . . And when a young kid looks, and sees the rapport between the guests on my show and sees how people can work together, maybe this will ring a little bell, so that whenever

The racist remainder of Wilson’s own ideal response from the hypothetical schoolboy testifies powerfully to his limited hopes for integration in 1970. In a chilling reference to the dangers he faced breaking the popular barriers he did, he acknowledges in the same interview, “My original aim was just security. Today I think it has to be a little more than that. Without upsetting anybody, I think I can just stimulate the interest of people in each other.”25 At the same time, then, Wilson’s response also testifies powerfully to his own belief in the pedagogical dimension of the show’s ambivalence. The integrationist scenario that Wilson describes in the interview also anchors one of the show’s most consistent setups. Indeed, Sinatra-styled crooner Bobby Darin and comedian Tim Conway—a popular lead on McHale’s Navy (ABC, 1962–66), a frequent comedy-variety show player, and host of the short-lived Tim Conway Show (NBC, 1970)—each played in a number of such scenarios with Wilson throughout the course of the show. For example, in an episode that aired on January 13, 1972, Darin and Wilson play expectant fathers attending a childbirth preparatory class taught by Conway. Race stands out as an issue from the start of the sketch, as Conway takes roll for the class. When Conway calls out for “Booker T. Roosevelt Jones,” Darin raises his hand to this pastiche of black-identifying names; and when Conway calls “Pat Muldoon,” the name of the white actor made famous by the soap opera Days of Our Lives in 1965,

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negative thoughts are expressed the kid stops. Like, he looks at it and says: “I like that cat.” Then somebody tells him: “Niggers ain’t no good.” He’ll say: “Now hold it, I like that nigger.” That’s the difference, it makes them stop and think for themselves. So maybe at school there will be a little black kid next to him, and they’ll want to get interested in each other because they have both seen it work.24

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Bobby Darin helps Wilson—who plays his pregnant wife—through labor pains in a 1972 sketch.

Wilson raises his hand. Later in the sketch, Wilson reaches into the box of practice baby dolls and retrieves a white one. Conway stops him—“No, no, no . . . yours is in the back of the box”—and hands him a black baby. Wilson casts a contemptuous glance at Conway and mutters, “They all look alike to me.” Darin and Wilson laugh easily together throughout the sketch, even taking an unusual turn roleplaying as husband and wife—an odd television couple for viewers to see locked in embrace, for sure. A similar sketch that aired on February 11, 1971, finds Wilson and Art Carney of The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955–56) in a now-classic biracial buddy-film scenario: working together to get out of a jam. Playing up Carney’s on-air career

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as an embattled husband, the sketch features Wilson and his guest as bowling partners who must stop bickering long enough to conceal their after-work trip to the alley from the latter’s wife, played by Get Smart’s (NBC, 1965–69; CBS, 1969–70) girl-spy Barbara Feldon (Agent 99). The trouble is, the two men have managed to lodge their fingers in the same bowling ball, and Feldon is eager to serve them coffee and to talk after their day of hard work. In the end, the two cannot work together quite well enough, and Feldon—no doubt drawing on the skill set of Agent 99, who routinely got the bumbling Max Smart out of his jams—solves the problem herself: to the loudening laughter of the studio audience, she cracks the ball over Carney’s head and sends Wilson on his way. This sketch and the one with Darin suggest that the comedy-variety genre stages a highly reflexive kind of roleplay that unfolds in both predictable and unpredictable ways on The Flip Wilson Show. It could put Wilson in the middle of a Honeymooners episode with a mod secret-agent girl or snug in the arms of a white man as the two share an embrace with rapt anticipation for their soon-to-arrive baby. It is in these more unpredictable moments, in particular, that the anarchic spirit of vaudeville variety comes to the surface of the show’s aesthetic. But even these moments generally feed back into Wilson’s larger project of integrating television and its audience, and, in this respect, they do not interfere with the sociopolitical and economic reasons the industry also had for embracing the genre. Of course, it was not simply the ease with which the comedy-variety genre was able to address complex and often polarizing racial-political issues that would have led NBC to gamble on Wilson’s show when it did, nor was it just the flexible appeal of the genre’s segmented structure for wooing multiple demographics: Wilson’s politically efficacious biography and affable stage persona proved just as valuable to the network’s institutional discourse on race at the time.

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The Epic Clerow Wilson’s first asset as a potential network star in this period was his confirmed appeal to a cross-racial mainstream television audience. He had already charmed NBC executives by earning exceptional ratings for his two guest-hosting gigs on The Tonight Show—twice as high as Bob Newhart, Hugh Downs, or Johnny Carson himself in April of the same year.26 His popularity on Laugh-In and the high audience share he won for his 1968 special only further cemented his marketability. There can be little doubt, however, that at least part of Wilson’s marketability can be attributed to his second major asset: the style and tone of his delivery. True to both Gitlin’s and MacDonald’s industry protocols—as the sketches discussed above should attest—Wilson’s comedy concerned blackness and some of the politics relevant to it, but it muted a direct attack on racial injustice characterized by a contemporary like Dick Gregory. In fact, even Wilson’s club act had been relatively clean and upbeat. When he came to television, he routinely underlined the apolitical nature of his comedy in interviews with the popular press, stating invariably that though his comedy deals with black culture and some of its issues, “the funny has no color,” and referring instead to the (apolitical) theories of comedy put forth in Max Eastman’s The Enjoyment of Laughter.27 It is surely this diffusion of racial confrontation that NBC programming executive Herb Schlosser praised, using the patronizing lingo of the industry, as Wilson’s “likeability factor.”28 The relentless retelling of Wilson’s life story in the popular press offers perhaps the best indication of how NBC used his persona to market The Flip Wilson Show to a national audience divided on race. Indeed, his by-the-bootstraps biography made him an ideal poster boy for exactly the kind of racial uplift with which it behooved companies like NBC to become both financially and politically affiliated;

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virtually every single one of the many magazines in which Wilson appeared repeated the story verbatim. Born Clerow Wilson, one of twenty-four children (eighteen surviving), he was abandoned by his mother as a child. His father, who long struggled with alcoholism, could not care for him either. Wilson ran away from foster homes thirteen times, and he finally lied his way into the Air Force at sixteen to escape his poverty. “I wasn’t patriotic,” he quips, “just tired of being ashamed of my clothes.”29 A white superior took an interest in Wilson while he was in the service and enrolled him in typing classes to help him succeed when he returned to civilian life. In the meantime, he began practicing jokes on his fellow soldiers in Guam, and in his free time he studied Eastman’s theory of comedy with laserlike focus, eventually leaving the service in 1954. After working as a “drunk act” between performers at a San Francisco hotel where he also served as a bellhop, he hit the road, honed his act in clubs and on the Chitlin Circuit, and eventually found success as a stand-up. Two supporting roles in the happy ending of this story are played by a white schoolteacher who believed in Wilson and a white southern businessman who offered to subsidize his income while he perfected his act. In short, unlike other promising black comedians who had college educations and stable middle-class upbringings—Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge, for instance—Flip Wilson had an uplifting whopper of a life story, and, for white television executives trying to sell a full-fledged black star while larding their advertising accounts, a highly marketable one. It is difficult to overestimate the role this story played in NBC’s effort to work Wilson into the hearts of viewers. In addition to feeding the print media, it produced at least two editions of a book describing Wilson’s rocky ascent to stardom that sold in the Scholastic book catalogues distributed to grade schools.30 NBC also aired two animated specials featuring Wilson’s most popular characters, both of which in-

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corporated variations on Wilson’s biography into their larger narratives. The Reverend Leroy, Geraldine, Marvin Lattimer, and Freddy the Playboy all make appearances, with Wilson performing each one in its famous voice. The first of these specials, Clerow Wilson and the Miracle of P.S. 14, aired on NBC on November 12, 1972, and is touted as the second cartoon ever to feature black characters in prime time.31 In a fascinating fusion of Wilson’s biography and the characters he developed in the space of his act, this Fritz Freleng cartoon follows the young comedian and his buddies as they try to raise money for their public school. The second special, Clerow Wilson’s Great Escape, aired on NBC on April 3, 1974, and works from the same strange fusion.32 It deals more exclusively, however, with Wilson’s early struggles. With fantastically amorphous animation, it shows the young Wilson shuffled away from his sister’s home by a social worker, only to be pressed into servitude by a grotesquely drawn black family with two other foster-slaves. Vibrant montages drawn in billowing lines refer to the freer spaces of Europe in the thirties and forties, but the narrative follows Wilson as he tries to escape to a less oppressive life without ever making it past Bayonne, New Jersey. The happy ending to this seventies reincarnation of an antebellum emancipation narrative depends, of all things, on Wilson’s reunion with his sister in a triumphantly displayed new housing project. As such, the special also represents a telling merger between Wilson’s individual story of self-reliance and the larger social narrative of slum clearance and urban renewal of the early seventies. With little ambiguity, the ending binds the star to a celebration of the government’s ever-contracting and often-destructive social welfare initiatives— specifically, the large-scale urban housing projects that in fact postdated Wilson’s youth by decades—and tops it off with the assurance of his exemplary success. Airing in the wake of numerous public efforts to emphasize the problems of insti-

Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV

tutional racism in housing as well as Martin Luther King Jr.’s ill-received call for “open housing” in the Chicago suburbs, this assurance countered a steadily growing sense of dissatisfaction with federal projects in the political discourse of various black communities. More importantly, it played directly into the stereotypical profile of the broken black family that the controversial Moynihan Report, released by the government in 1965, blamed for much of the trials faced by African Americans.33 To some extent this was beyond Wilson’s control: his life story was what it was, and he was proud of it. But for a network trying improve its “record” of service with black audiences on the one hand, and trying to address racial politics in terms acceptable to the white mainstream on the other, this Horatio Alger–style narrative proved especially useful to the discourse of corporate liberalism. It publicized NBC’s benevolent position in and sensitivity to one remarkable black man’s officially emblematic struggle, while simultaneously commending “enlightened” whites, the government, and Wilson’s can-do self-reliance. For black audiences otherwise happy to see a talented black performer finally make it on television, this particular use of Wilson’s persona surely afforded maddening adventures in white liberal self-congratulation. For example, a 1971 Good Housekeeping article on Wilson’s success includes a comment from Robert Goulet, who rhapsodizes, “From what [Wilson’s] been through, it should be bitterness. But he has overcome, and it’s all love.”34 The author of this article then intones “Of such stuff is black bitterness made, but not with Wilson,” and goes on to compare Wilson’s face to “a polished walnut yo-yo.”35 These wanton displays of white condescension—especially with the rise of Black Power in the offscreen space—give serious weight to Les Brown’s assertion that white liberal audiences welcomed Flip Wilson primarily as their “new pet Negro.”36 Such displays also validate the reservations that critics Bogle and MacDonald hold

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about the basis of Wilson’s popularity, as well as the need for these reservations to be central to any critical account of Wilson’s success. Nevertheless, Wilson’s star persona cannot be described as homogeneous or purely affable, and it is this more complicated aspect of his public image that drops away from the glosses on his perceived subservience to mainstream white desire for a “safe,” or simply amusing, black star. Wilson’s studied approach to comedy is one of the most interesting recurring themes in the press on his persona and show. As often as articles stress his turbulent youth and the kindness of that series of white mentors, they also emphasize Wilson’s intellectual engagement with comedy—in particular, his devotion to socialist scholar Max Eastman’s analysis of comedy in Enjoyment of Laughter, the number of years it takes him to perfectly hone a five-minute act, and his theoretical writings on comedy.37 In these contexts, Wilson is represented as distinctly concerned with dismantling the stereotypical assumptions, originating in American minstrelsy, that black people have a “natural” talent for comedy. Moreover, Wilson seldom smiled for the press like he smiled on his show. In addition to taking long, unaccompanied drives out West, which allowed him to flee the spotlight, he famously barred the press from his private life.38 In the same issue of Time that proclaimed him “TV’s First Black Superstar,” he punctuates his thoughts on the chance he has to succeed with his show by confirming he’ll do his very best, then declares, “I may not be better than you, but I’m goddamn equal.”39 With this politically useful but complicated star persona in mind, it is no surprise that the popular press on Wilson reproduces the discourse of ambivalence built into the show’s address. To be sure, some writers respond to him in no uncertain terms; Bennett, for example, attacks Geraldine, in particular, as a misguided and “ultimately insidious reincar-

Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV

nation” of old stereotypes.40 Views of Wilson in articles that appeared in mainstream black publications such as Ebony vary, but they tend toward nonjudgmental accounts of Wilson’s success, his creative process, and his desire to keep his comedy color-blind. Articles in mainstream white publications such as Time and Good Housekeeping applaud his stunning victory over both a harsh youth, and, of course, the bitterness associated with black radicalism.41 On the other end of the spectrum, one Newsweek critic refers to Wilson—in an awkward pastiche of race lingo from the fifties and seventies—as a “sawed-off Negro comic” whose hard-luck life inspires “instant empathy . . . among soul brothers.”42 While slightly alarming, these instances of pure hyperbole and sober distance are the most easily explained. The more conflicted responses to The Flip Wilson Show and Wilson himself reveal the most about the popular currency of the show’s concerted production of ambivalence. For example, John Leonard, writing for Life in 1972, cannot seem to resolve his feelings about what kind of racial image Flip Wilson presents in his show. He begins with confident praise, stating, “Flip Wilson has not permitted his blackness to be sanitized for home consumption,” and marvels at how “Wilson breezes into the attic of the white American mind, where all those fantasies about sex and rhythm sit around collecting guilt, and . . . plays there. The fantasies are his props.”43 Unlike various other critics, he sees Wilson’s mugging characters as exorcising black stereotypes; it is the obvious favorable reading. Nevertheless, it is also where things come unhinged for him. He soon adds, “There is no confrontation. There is no assault on the audience. There are no victims,” and ends by bluntly questioning the validity of “selling ghetto yardgoods for a million yucks.”44 Finally, he arrives at an opinion of Wilson’s show that represents a near-complete reversal from where he began:

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What Flip Wilson has accomplished is almost incredible in a time of Black Panthers and savage rhetoric. He has taken the threat out of the fact of blackness. He doesn’t frighten anybody. He wouldn’t hurt you, any more than Glen Campbell or Carol Burnett or Ed Sullivan would hurt you. Or Captain Kangaroo. Preserved in the fat of my head is the feeling that I don’t deserve Flip Wilson’s harmlessness. I like him, but apocalypse is the sandbox in which critics make mudpies, and maybe liking him is part of the problem instead of part of the solution. He wouldn’t hurt me, but maybe, just maybe, he should.45 The vague character of this prose may or may not suggest something more than the nagging guilt of white liberalism; the reference to “savage” rhetoric might just indicate which. Nevertheless, it also suggests the degree to which the aesthetic of The Flip Wilson Show and Wilson’s complex star persona converged in the sociopolitical context of the early seventies to produce a discourse of ambivalence even in mainstream white popular culture. With this convergence in mind, it is easy to see what attracted NBC producers to the show. Wilson and his producers crafted a variation on the classic comedy-variety genre that effectively served the industry’s need to attract a variety of racial, economic, and regional demographic segments all at once, despite the racial and broader political debates that divided them. Paired with the star’s biography of individualist racial uplift and his avowedly color-blind take on comedy, it fit right into the network’s very profitable brand of corporate liberalism, as well as the mild claims to relevancy that it so famously begat. So far, though, we have considered Wilson’s comedy-variety show almost entirely as an expression of its sociopolitical and industrial moment, which is to say, as a strategic production on the part of the television indus-

Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV

try. And as the ever-elusive Wilson put it, “My show is my statement. What I have to say is on the screen. My life is my own.”46 It is thus the space in his performance that sets the bipolar compass of the show’s politics spinning most wildly—where artifice reigns and time falls out of joint with space—that should interest us still more.

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CHAPTER 2

Entertaining Identities, or The Politics of Variety Performance

F

or critics of The Flip Wilson Show, both today and in the seventies, Wilson’s performance style is often the most troubling aspect of the show’s aesthetic. His exaggerated facial expressions and the stereotypical outlines of many of his recurring characters summon both implicit and explicit allusions to the racist culture of the minstrel stage in their accounts. The disturbing similarities between a 1971 Good Housekeeping layout of Wilson’s “many faces” and a pictorial showcasing the vaudeville team Williams and Walker’s “facial stunts”—the latter of which appeared in an issue of Variety from the dawn of the twentieth century—underline the difficulty of viewing Wilson’s aesthetic as anything but retrograde.1 As I have already explained, though, this aesthetic echo calls up more than just the potency of minstrelsy’s legacy. It also recalls the critical tradition of black comedy-variety performance that grew out of that legacy in an effort to change the terms minstrelsy set for popular images—a tradition that has since developed another legacy that is much harder to categorize in terms of black or white or good or bad.2 In-

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An undated pictorial feature from Variety for the vaudeville team Williams and Walker. Courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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A photo spread of Wilson's “many faces” from the April 1971 issue of Good Housekeeping bears an eerie similarity to images from another time.

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deed, like Williams and Walker, Wilson faced the professional and mortal challenge of forging an opening for black comedians in an institution of American popular entertainment that was famous for its racist imagery, while also reforming it in the process. The performance strategy that Williams and Walker developed to dismantle tropes of minstrelsy on the vaudeville stage—a particular blend of mimicry, pastiche, and other reflexive techniques common there—thus presents a particularly good model for examining the critical dimension of The Flip Wilson Show and its successors on television. A critical examination of one complete episode of Wilson’s show and several additional sketches demonstrates how Wilson refined a similar blend of familiar vaudeville techniques—emphasizing mimicry in general, but pastiche and drag, in particular—to critique the codes of racial representation on early-seventies television. This blend of techniques certainly incorporates many of the same tropes of minstrelsy that Williams and Walker attempted to dismantle almost seventy years before, and, in this much, it bases its aesthetic on the same dichotomy that already structured black comedy-variety in the vaudeville era. However, approaching the show from this angle offers a crucial perspective on how Wilson adopted the more liberatory performance traditions of the comedy-variety genre, and, in turn, why the genre has remained an important one for so many black comedians. In this respect, such an approach affords a detailed understanding of how the seldomconsidered “better half” of the aesthetic of ambivalence works in the show. Furthermore, it offers a historical primer on exactly what it means to talk about exploding or deconstructing stereotypes—phrases that are as easy to take for granted as they are difficult to pin down. Although an examination of Wilson’s studied appropriation of vaudeville strategies cannot transcend the institutional paradigm of political ambivalence that so thoroughly shaped the show and its re-

Entertaining Identities

ception in the press at the time, it can help work through the critical impasse this paradigm has since produced. That is, it can detail the rich and innovative ways that Wilson worked, through an ostensible discourse on something as harmless as performance, to address and even undercut those politics. And this latter discourse, to be sure, appears in tones far more nuanced than black and white. Critical Mimicry from Vaudeville to Primetime The March 2, 1972, episode of The Flip Wilson Show began unlike any other, but the long scene that replaced Wilson’s usual opening monologue attests very well to the prominent role that vaudeville-style mimicry played on the show throughout its run. The scene begins with the camera trained on featured guest Sammy Davis Jr., who trots down the main aisle through the sea of studio audience members. He sidesteps, slaps hands, does a few steps from “Pigmeat” Markham’s “Here Comes the Judge” routine, and, after he reaches the stage in the middle of the studio, works his face through a series of outsized expressions. Pausing there, he shouts, “Don’t you worry and don’t you fret, ’cause what you see is what you get!” He has just welcomed the audience to the show when Flip Wilson comes bounding up the steps to the stage yelling, “Thief!” In addition to mimicking Wilson’s famous sayings and grand gesticulations, Davis has cribbed the tagline of his most popular character, Geraldine. Once Wilson assumes his rightful place as himself, he and Davis rap about the idea of imitation. Wilson exclaims, “You can imitate so many performers so well that sometimes I think you forget who you are—you’re Sammy Davis Jr.! When you came down that aisle a minute ago, I thought you were me!” Davis looks hopefully at Wilson: “Really?” Wilson’s joke is punched: “No!” The two go back and forth on the subject of imitation for a few minutes more before Wilson finally reprimands Davis for his mimicry, positing firmly, “I think you’ll

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agree with me, Sammy: We who in the long run struggle ever onward to preserve our individuality will be right or wrong?” Sammy concedes that such strugglers will be right. Wilson nods with approval and disappears from the stage. Of course, for the remainder of this episode, both Wilson and Davis make it hard to take this agreement as a simple or direct imperative. In fact, Davis—still nodding yes—moves directly into the second stage of his mimicry act. The image cuts to a close-up of his face as he stands beside a spotlit piano on the darkened stage, casually singing the opening lines to Frank Sinatra’s “All the Way.” Davis talks about accompanying Sinatra to Las Vegas casinos where shy performers covered his famous song, then he launches into a stupefying series of imitations of different stars covering it: Nat “King” Cole, Tony Bennett, Billy “Mr. B.” Eckstine, Frankie Laine, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, and Dean Martin all have a shot at the chorus before Davis sings it one last time, proclaiming, “And that was me, Sammy Davis Jr.” Each of his imitations, like the one of Wilson, is a brilliant study combining gesture, facial expression, and voice—and for Dean Martin, a half-spent glass of scotch to boot. The lights darken onstage, and the opening segment ends. One of the most immediately striking things about this performance is its near-exact reprisal of the act that made Davis a star. As part of The Will Mastin Trio (originally a black minstrel troupe), from the age of three he toured the country with his father and uncle, honing this basic mimicry act (among others) on vaudeville stages, the TOBA circuit, and, later, on fifties television variety shows such as Texaco Star Theater (NBC, 1948–56) and The Colgate Comedy Hour (NBC, 1950–55) with Eddie Cantor. On one level, then, Davis’s performance pays tribute to these difficult chapters in the history of American black performance, when traveling acts faced everything from unfair contracts and exhausting

Entertaining Identities

runs to outright violence, often while working within the confines of degrading racial stereotypes. Davis’s dramatic rendition of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” which appears later in the same episode, underscores this tribute. In this subsequent scene, Davis appears alone under a spotlight once again, but this time he is outfitted with a form-fitting brown leotard, a hat, and a cane, mourning the black tap legend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson with stories and moves from the latter’s long years of labor in minstrel shows and vaudeville revues. However, it is not only the genealogy of black performance that Davis’s career traces backward from Wilson’s television show that should interest us here. As Donald Bogle points out, Davis’s performance of the same mimicry act on an early-fifties episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour, which threw a brief parody of host Eddie Cantor’s stage persona into the mix, also holds a noteworthy place in the history of race on television. While most remember the act for the uproar it caused among white audiences when the white Cantor casually wiped the sweat from Davis’s brow, Bogle offers a different, but related, recollection: “For the first time in pop culture history, white audiences saw a Black man openly (but gently) mock a white one.”3 By invoking these two moments in the history of popular black performance, Davis’s act imbues this episode of The Flip Wilson Show with a subtle reminder of that history and mimicry’s key place in it. In order to fully understand what this use of mimicry tells us about the aesthetic of Wilson’s show, though, it is important to recognize what made this act typical for the program, as well as how far the critical side of the history it tells extends beyond a single reference to The Colgate Comedy Hour. After all, despite Wilson’s efforts to warn his guest about the perils of losing oneself in another’s voice, the show regularly featured black performers doing their own variations on this basic mimicry act. In the March 25, 1971, episode, for instance, variety show regular Johnny

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Brown—who would later play Nathan Bookman on Good Times (CBS 1974–79)—sings “When I Fall in Love” in the voices of Nat “King” Cole, Billie Holiday, blue comedy legend “Moms” Mabley, and Louis Armstrong—all as he narrates the importance of having one’s own “sound.” In the January 20, 1972 episode, Aretha Franklin mimics Diana Ross, Sarah Vaughn, and Dionne Warwick between snippets of her own current singles. These kinds of mimicry acts hardly would have been foreign to viewers familiar with fifties television comedy-variety shows, on which The Will Mastin Trio and many other black vaudeville-style acts performed. In the early seventies, however, The Flip Wilson Show’s heavy emphasis on mimicry and vaudeville performance in general was often considered “prosaic and passé,” to quote one reviewer who marveled at Wilson’s ability to make these performance styles seem fresh.4 The show liberally peppered its roster of contemporary mainstream acts and celebrities with older performers, who, like Davis, first appeared on the mainstream vaudeville stage and/or the black theater networks that grew out of it, including TOBA and the Chitlin Circuit—Sid Caesar, “Slappy” White, “Moms” Mabley, Pearl Bailey, and Jack Benny, to name just a few. Furthermore, unlike on other comedy-variety shows at the time, especially the youth-oriented ones, sketches on Wilson’s show were frequently built around the bygone rites of the vaudeville stage and the theatrical practices on which many of these performers grew up. For example, in the very same episode that begins with Davis’s “All the Way,” Wilson and his guest team up in a similar but more sentimental skit as a bickering song-and-dance duo, Farrell and Fairchild. Despite all their problems and money woes after years of shilling for the crowds—at one point Davis complains to Wilson, “You ain’t my brother, you’re just heavy!”—the two eventually make peace. Although these beleaguered performers, decked in old-school

Entertaining Identities

top hats, tails, and canes, attribute their decision to get back together to the roar of the waiting crowd, the gleam in their eyes suggests it has more to do with the comfort they take in working together. Indeed, Wilson and Davis’s tuxedoed song-and-dance performance of the classic “Side by Side” at the end of the show—this time as themselves—seems designed to confirm this very sentiment. As these examples suggest, then, Davis’s opening mimicry act is representative of the guiding performance aesthetic of The Flip Wilson Show, which draws heavily on both mimicry and the wider performance history of the vaudeville stage. At this point, however, we must know more about the historical form of vaudeville mimicry that the show invokes in order to know what it can tell us about how the latter worked and, furthermore, how we might understand Wilson’s seemingly paradoxical warnings against mimicry. After all, this form of mimicry was especially popular among black and white ethnic vaudeville comedians who also dealt in “ethnic” humor. As Henry Jenkins describes in a discussion of the form: “Actors made only minimal efforts to blend into [the characters they mimicked] and often evoked sharp contrasts between their personality and their chosen roles; the very Jewish Fanny Brice, for example, appeared as an Indian squaw, a French courtesan, or a black housewife, lapsing into occasional Yiddish phrases to underscore the effect.”5 Jenkins’s account indicates well that stereotypes of racial, ethnic, and gendered identities were central to the humor of these performances. Not uncoincidentally, dominant white entertainment culture had long deemed mimicry the domain of those supposedly too feeble minded to be creative, marking it as an acceptable art form for the women and African Americans working within that culture, whom its stereotypes so often concerned.6 However, as Bogle suggests, vaudeville mimicry’s nonnaturalistic performance style could and very often did facil-

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itate a critical social subtext, too, and it is here that the critical tradition of vaudeville mimicry invoked by Wilson’s show more broadly materializes. The segmented structure of the vaudeville comedy-variety show plays a key part in facilitating this tradition. Without a realistic unified narrative to sustain, the performer’s ability to shift from one character to another—the artifice of performance—becomes a spectacle itself. In refusing to “act naturally,” the mimic literally denaturalizes the boundaries between him or herself and the role he or she plays, and likewise moves to denaturalize the various identities he or she takes on. Not mistakenly, this self-reflexive style of performance opens up another one of vaudeville’s famous double valences, this time between player and part, or reality and absurdity; it is possible to laugh at either notion. Once again, however, it opens up this ambivalence precisely in order to break down its terms. Mimicry foregrounds a blurred distinction between not only the performer’s identity and the identity taken up but also the real and the fake, or the self and the self as culture defines or projects it. In this sense, vaudeville-style mimicry can facilitate a theatrical practice roughly analogous to Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, which likewise deconstructs the “naturalness” of the affective behaviors and traits we ascribe to different identities.7 Along these same lines, Susan A. Glenn shows that female vaudeville performers of the early twentieth century used the non-naturalistic aesthetic of mimicry to mount an onstage critique of gender representations and discourses of “natural” female identity. Mimicry, she writes, “was a model of crucial importance to the evolving feminist project. For to embrace an interactive model of the self located in imitative relations with others was to challenge the proposition that biology was destiny.”8 According to Glenn, the dialogue between this onstage challenge and emerging conceptions of identity as a social phenomenon fig-

Entertaining Identities

ured powerfully in debates about the agency of women and the utility of performance for constructing and deconstructing the determinants of cultural identity. Vaudeville mimicry’s antirealistic approach—that is, its affront to the indexical claims of mimetic realism—was thus fundamentally engaged in the political project to deflate essentialist notions of authenticity and the self through performance. This feminist tradition of critical vaudeville mimicry comes through quite strongly in a performance by Lily Tomlin in the same episode of The Flip Wilson Show opened by Davis. As Davis did before her, Tomlin appears alone on the darkened stage under a single spotlight, but not as a single self. Instead, she alternately speaks the voices of her now-famous character Edith Ann, an eight-year-old girl, and the adult female neighbor whom she pesters for a little attention and ice cream. As Edith Ann, Tomlin screws up her face with the laser focus of a girl on a mission, rubbing her elbows and arms with nervous energy. But when speaking in the voice of the adult woman—who quickly tires of Edith Ann’s exaggerations and accuses her of lying—she stands tall with elbows crossed. Ricocheting back and forth between the two characters she embodies, Tomlin ends the sketch in the voice of Edith Ann, looking steadily at the camera in a close-up and responding to the accusation at hand: “Lies is not truth, but the truth can be made up if you know how, and that’s the truth.” Tomlin smiles with a look of sly satisfaction that is part Edith Ann and part Lily Tomlin, and the lights on the audience around her come up. Much in the spirit of Glenn’s female vaudevillians, this dialogical take on a classic vaudeville mimicry act performs a wry commentary on the construction of gender identity in general; at the same time, it tightly zeroes in on a trope of femininity that, despite the rise of feminism, dominated television at the time: the girl-child.9 By showcasing her ability to shift radically between the persona of a young girl and that

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of an exasperated grown woman, Tomlin throws into question the “naturalness” of both personas, not to mention the distinction between them. Tomlin’s brief discourse on the way in which “the truth can be made up if you know how” prescribes that the “characters” we see in popular culture should be regarded as constructions, but ones that have powerful and potentially “real” personal and social effects. In the process, then, it effectively returns the show’s salute to vaudeville mimicry to the feminist territory that helped found it. Like Davis’s revolving repertoire of white and black personas, Tomlin uses performance to play up the fiction and fluidity, rather than the fixity or truth, of the identities circulating in popular culture. Together, these two mimicry acts shed a great deal of light on how Wilson adapted the non-naturalistic performance aesthetic of vaudeville mimicry—especially the political discourse it opens up on popular representation and identity—to the critical discourse his show mounted on representation and identity. As both acts underscore, this comedyvariety aesthetic turns on an explicit concept of performance, and that performance turns on the non-naturalistic embodiment of multiple personas. Wilson emphasizes these very same qualities in an interview dealing with his stylistic influences, and, in particular, how childhood trips to see vaudeville stars at Newark’s Mosque Theater and New York’s Apollo Theater fit into them. Noting that many of his favorite performers from the era had only one-dimensional personas—from the comedy team Stump and Stumpy to Mae West and Charlie Chaplin—he explains that he tries to blend “multiple characteristics” of all these performers into different moments of his own body. “I’ve never affiliated with a group,” says Wilson, “because I am a group.”10 Given this sentiment, it is hardly surprising that Wilson took full advantage of vaudeville mimicry’s multiplicitous performance aesthetic, as well as the segmented comedy-variety structure

Entertaining Identities

that facilitated it, to construct a wide array of personas. For example, Wilson’s famous hustler character, Marvin Lattimer, cut just the kind of familiar figure that led critics such as Les Brown to complain that “not since Amos ’n’ Andy had television portrayed blacks in such stereotypical ways.”11 And yet while Marvin’s seemingly endless arsenal of half-baked get-rich-quick schemes made him quite like a modern-day equivalent to Amos ’n’ Andy’s infamous Kingfish, his junkyard antics never aired on the show without competition from a different kind of character altogether. In addition to regular characters like Sonny the White House Janitor, who reportedly knew more about running the country than the president, Wilson played a revolving menagerie of characters that bore little resemblance to earlier caricatures. For example, in a March 25, 1971, sketch with recurring guest Tim Conway, Wilson plays a rather unremarkable amateur sportsman who has won a trophy with his friend. The comedy turns on the two characters as they attempt to program a newfangled automatic camera to photograph both of them at once with the shared trophy. And in a March 15, 1973, sketch with Richard Pryor and Don Knotts, Wilson and Pryor play a pair of wealthy movie producers who inadvertently terrify Knotts while he delivers their room service, and, with implicit racial prejudice, mistakes the fictional murder plot they brainstorm for a real hit. Most importantly, though, Wilson often remains onstage “as himself” between his introduction to a sketch and his assumption of a character’s persona in the same sketch, so that the brazen artifice of the shift in his performance disrupts any sense of continuity between himself and his characters. For example, in an October 29, 1970, episode, Wilson ends his monologue by explaining that the next sketch features two characters who’ve been friends since childhood and have always had bad luck.12 Then he simply steps forward to the front of the stage where he meets Bill Cosby, playing Howard, and as-

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sumes his role. The sketch that follows is interesting for a number of reasons. For example, the meandering conversation that ensues between the two friends about life and death—which makes up the entirety of the sketch—showcases the more story-driven side of Wilson’s comedic style, which relies less on punch lines and “facial stunts” than on the pleasure of an unfolding exchange between two of the most popular black comedians working at the time.13 More importantly in the present context, though, it shows how the mimicry-derived strategy Wilson often used to introduce his performances as performances, which was unusual for sketch-based comedy-variety shows at the time, further emphasized the artifice at hand. Generally speaking, then, the non-naturalistic spirit of mimicry that defines vaudeville variety performance presented Wilson with an intriguing critical platform. Because the structure of the comedy-variety sketch on which it is found turns explicitly on the comedic performance of multiple identities rather than on the faithful representation of one essential or fixed identity, its use fundamentally complicates the prospect of representing a “real” or coherent black identity on television. In contrast to the realist sitcom or drama, which effectively made black characters, like the title character of Julia, function as representatives of black life, the performance aesthetic of vaudeville variety allowed Wilson to engage with the performativity of identity—especially black identity as defined by television—without ever losing sight of the multiplicity and diversity of that identity beyond the screen. That is, it gave Wilson a point of access within the generic norms of popular entertainment to explore how those norms, which are inevitably stereotypical at the level of performance, have totalized both the representation of black identity and the very limited idea of what constitutes black identity as such in American popular culture.

Entertaining Identities

Seen this way, Wilson’s stern reminder about the “struggle” for “individuality” seems less paradoxical than mournful. The studies in mimicry that follow emphasize precisely how far short television falls in representing any sense of black “individuality,” let alone Wilson’s—which, as we may recall, he shielded from the press quite fiercely. Similarly, his interest in adapting the comedy-variety genre and its performance aesthetic begins to make sense precisely because of its connection to minstrelsy, as does its interest for subsequent black performers. The ambivalent structure of the show’s address constitutes a rare convergence of the interests of television executives with those of black comedians interested in negotiating a complex notion of racial representation on popular terrain, while also foregrounding the degree to which a racist popular culture still circumscribes those representations on-screen. Today, many take this understanding of black comedy-variety shows as a matter of course, and even as a facile evasion of both popular racist images and their history. But Wilson’s efforts to spotlight guests doing straight-up vaudeville-style mimicry acts, as well as his repeated references to the vaudeville institutions that gave these acts a critical function, belabors this history. It works at every chance to align the practice of mimicry with the historical approach to identity politics it took up. In this much, it offers an instructive view of how this practice has since changed. Realism, Wilson seems to suggest, was no more a prospect for black performance on television than onstage, and a capture of a “real” black identity was even less of a possibility. So far, though, we have seen only how Wilson incorporates one critical performance tradition of the comedy-variety genre into the show’s overall aesthetic and structure. How do the strategies of this tradition fit into his performances more specifically, and how else do they work to highlight the artifice of the stereotypes on display there?

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Amos, Andy, and Marvin Lattimer Although a discussion of the practice of vaudeville mimicry can tell us a great deal about the performance politics of The Flip Wilson Show as a whole, it can only provide the first steps to understanding Wilson’s in-character performances. We have already caught a glimpse of how closely the Reverend Leroy mimics the exaggerated physical and facial expressions, the dress, and the conniving schemes of the minstrelsy-era stereotypes that still defined black television characters in the fifties, most particularly Amos ’n’ Andy. We have now also seen how Wilson’s approach to playing a parade of characters in the course of his show trades on the effect of vaudeville mimicry, if at an expanded scale. Moreover, we will see that Wilson played several of these characters with the explicit affect of vaudeville mimicry. Unlike so many of his guests, though, Wilson himself did not actually do a mimicry act per se. In order to understand how Wilson incorporated this practice into his own style, it is useful to return at least briefly to the work of the vaudeville team Williams and Walker. Their effort to transform mainstream representations of race from within, especially in the 1902 play “In Dahomey,” offers the best model for understanding the performance aesthetic Wilson adapted for television decades later. In an introduction to the script for “In Dahomey,” John Graziano explains that the play was one of the first African American stage works to synthesize minstrelsy, vaudeville, comic opera, and musical comedy.14 Most striking about this synthesis, however, is its blend of performance techniques from variety and narrative theater: dialogue and lyrics pulled from minstrelsy, current events, advertising, and black slang; and characters from minstrelsy and dime novels. In an extremely loose plot that includes a hunt for a silver box and the settling of a black nation based on Liberia, Williams and

Entertaining Identities

Walker both “impersonate” familiar caricatures, to quote one reviewer.15 Williams plays Shylock Holmes, a minstrelsyinspired variation on the popular literature detective Sherlock Holmes, and Walker plays Rareback Punkerton, a stock minstrelsy character who embarks on a moneymaking scheme with him. The script thrives on allusion, darting from the turgid language of a minstrel show burlesque—as when one character describes “a pyrotechnical display of humorous humorosities”—to the smooth lingo of a twentiethcentury hustler, who tells of a secret society that’s been “pilin’ up coin for years.”16 Interestingly enough, in his show Wilson plays a detective character named Hemlock Jones that virtually recreates Williams’s Shylock Holmes character. For example, when a client in a sketch tells Jones that he senses his “cogitation,” Jones replies with a play on the malapropism that would have fit into a script for either “In Dahomey” or Amos ’n’ Andy: “Yeah,” he offers, “and I’m thinking, too.”17 The aesthetic link indicated by this loose reference is even more telling. Although the politics of Williams and Walker’s dizzying play are more complicated to categorize than those of The Flip Wilson Show—especially from a twenty-first-century perspective—the team’s use of pastiche as a way of incorporating the non-naturalistic performance of mimicry into a narrative medium greatly informs Wilson’s style.18 Consider, for example, how Wilson uses mimicry in a February 4, 1971, performance, in which he and George Carlin play anchormen for the What’s Happening Now News. The sketch begins with the music of countless news flashes playing over a wide-shot of Wilson and Carlin sitting at adjacent desks in front of a backdrop that bears only a clock set to 4:10 p.m. and a sign for the “WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW NEWS.” The coherence of this vaguely familiar scene immediately unravels when the two apparent anchormen introduce them-

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selves. Carlin goes first, noting that it’s 4:10 and thus time for the six-o’clock report: “I’m Howell Dean!” he bellows in his best news voice. “And I’m Dean Howell!” Wilson retorts with classic anchorman gravitas. From here, the report devolves into an absurd volley between the two men, where the names and the voices they use to deliver the news shift with each topic they report. After covering a gag story about religious cults, Carlin passes the torch to Washington correspondent Rod Bernard, who will report on Congress for the day. At this point, the shot cuts to Wilson, who identifies himself as “Dan Thomas in Yellowstone Park,” before noting that Congress had a busy day. When the shot volleys back to Carlin, he says simply, “Thanks Steve, always a penetrating report,” and passes the broadcast off to Stafford Cripps for a story “from the other side of the tracks.” Here the shot cuts to Wilson again, who inveighs in an emphatically stereotypical “black” voice, “Ah, hello there, I’m Stafford Cripps, and I’m over there on the other side of the tracks.” Using this same voice, he reports that Wilt Chamberlain has “decided to become a baseball team.” Then he shifts back to his Dean Howell voice and gives two items “on the human side.” First, he states that the president has announced that the nation is winning the war on poverty and will thus continue removing “200,004 people a day from the city until it’s won.” Second, he declares the occurrence of a miracle in Harlem: Three children witnessed the city collecting the garbage. The volley goes on like this, with Wilson reporting as “science editor” Ralph Ladd in his most studious voice, then Carlin doing sports scores in the spastic Howard Cosell–inspired voice of Biff Barf, and then a weather report in the spaced-out voice of Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman. To top it all off, the scene ends with Wilson—in the somber diction of Dean Howell—giving a special announcement for the broadcast’s sponsor, the Reverend Leroy of the Church of What’s Happening Now: “If it rains in the after-

Entertaining Identities

noon, the church picnic will be held in the morning.” In what may be the first effort at the “fake news” broadcasts that Saturday Night Live, SCTV (NBC, 1976–81), and their progeny would make famous, this sketch riffs with glee on the aesthetic procedures of network television journalism—from the shifts of multilocation editing to the bizarre codes of telegenic diction. Yet it is just as noteworthy for demonstrating how thoroughly Wilson incorporated the non-naturalistic performance styles of mimicry into the abbreviated narrative form of sketch comedy. By using a pastiche of generic personas to cover the typical categories of the evening news, Wilson and Carlin effectively manage to incorporate the non-naturalistic aesthetic of mimicry into a narrative that foregrounds the artifice of television performance more directly. That is, in addition to spoofing the news, this sketch also puts into bold relief the highly regimented tropes that code even the medium’s most “objective” representations of people, things, and ideas. Here, the way media “personalities” talk about a given topic utterly overwhelms, and thus effectively defines, the topic itself. The echolalia of television discourse wreaks havoc on the events it is meant to cover, not to mention the notions of logic, truth, and documentation that they imply. In moving openly from the mimicry of one persona to the next with each topic, both performers lay an especially heavy emphasis on how television’s performance styles condition “the facts.” Yet, Wilson’s explicitly racialized turn as Stafford Cripps to cover the news “on the other side of the tracks” also points to how different the stakes are for him as a black performer. Indeed, when he offers his final announcement on behalf of the Reverend Leroy in the measured voice of Dean Howell, he extends the scope of this critique of television to the domain of the racialized representational codes circumscribing his performance on his own show. That is, the comedy of this out-of-character reference to his famous creation turns pre-

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cisely on the link of artifice between the Reverend and a trumped-up generic concoction like Biff Barf or Stafford Cripps. As this example suggests, Wilson adapted the critical techniques that Williams and Walker refined for the stage in his own way. For instance, here he and Carlin filter their predecessors’ pastiche of dialogue and character through a more traditional form of vaudeville mimicry, forging the characters themselves with so many tropes of television performance that they shatter into a pile of mirrored pieces. Over the years, Wilson developed a unique critical performance strategy based on these techniques. While this strategy depended on the same non-naturalistic style of acting that aligned his performance with the critical tradition of mimicry more generally, it also extended the element of pastiche from the discursive level of the sketch to the material level, most often by mixing contemporary props with blatantly anachronistic ones. One can imagine that this material intervention made it slightly harder to ignore the critical valence of Wilson’s aesthetic. His performance of Marvin Lattimer in the 1972 episode that begins with Sammy Davis Jr.’s mimicry act offers an interesting example of how it worked. In this sketch, Marvin decides to start a rental-car company with his friend Kenny (played by Davis). In the middle of the stage is an unlikely source of income for such an endeavor: a positively dust-coated, beat-up Model T–era car that seems to have traveled from the twenties to the seventies. Kenny is not amused: “Who did you buy this thing from—Sanford and Son?” He wants to know what Marvin has done with his $38 investment, but Marvin only assures him that the money has been well spent. All the while, Marvin’s face registers everything from smiles and wide eyes to mercurial grimaces; an off-kilter newsboy cap completes the look. Throughout their confrontation, Marvin tries to convince Kenny that they will find someone who will pay to rent

Entertaining Identities

this relic of an automobile. To prove that it is in working order, he turns on the radio, which blares the sound of a popjazz orchestra that belongs to the same distant era as the car. “That’s a local soul station!” quips Marvin. Quickly returning to business, however, he tells Kenny that he will be the “outside man” for their company, which means he will walk around town wearing spats, a top hat, and a sandwich board advertising their service. Marvin, of course, will not do much of anything. Kenny, wearing the hemp-woven hat and bellbottoms of a blaxploitation film extra, looks suspicious, but intrigued. Before the two can get much further in their scheme, a white man in a top hat and pinstripe suit (played by Ed McMahon) approaches with a gun, informs them that he has robbed a bank, and demands the car. Marvin refuses, even after the man threatens that he is desperate and will shoot— a threat to which Marvin replies, “Big deal. I’m desperate, you’re desperate.” Marvin challenges the robber to shoot him, against Kenny’s pleadings, until it becomes apparent to everyone that Marvin will win this battle of wills. The robber gives up, buys the car for $200, and gets behind the wheel. The sketch ends as Kenny remarks, “They been sayin’ that some of us ain’t ready yet, but if you ever get ready, whitey’s in trouble.” Marvin just counts his money. This sketch meticulously reprises the antiquated tropes of the “misguided hustler” genre, which gained popularity on the minstrel and vaudeville stages even before Amos ’n’ Andy made it an institution of popular media in the twentieth century. Marvin’s outsized facial mugging and sidewaysbilled cap, which almost exactly matches the one Amos wore, represent only the most obvious echoes of these precedents. Like the scheming Kingfish and his minstrelsy forefather Zip Coon, Marvin is always looking for a way to get rich quick, and the plans that he comes up with are as ludicrous as anything dreamt of by his predecessors. Furthermore, he

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is always roping a buddy into the scenario, echoing the eponymous premise of Amos ’n’ Andy. As if the coherence of the allusion would not be complete without an identical story line, Marvin’s schemes regularly involve launching a taxi service, the very business enterprise that brought Amos and Andy together in the first place. Moreover, the sketch meticulously yokes these antiquated generic tropes to similarly anachronistic objects. The thickness of the layer of dust on the car, for example, suggests that a peculiar kind of distant history is intruding on the contemporary moment. Then there is the car itself, the talk of spats and top hats, and the old-time music that the car picks up from some alternate universe trapped in the past— perhaps the universe of broadcast media itself. All of these things hark back to the historical space of postminstrelsy vaudeville, mediated through the bodies of Amos, Andy, and Kingfish—the last of whom, like his friend Henry Van Porter, often sported the spats and hats of a nineteenth-century minstrel character. Thus, if the very notion of a black character involved in a ludicrous get-rich-quick scheme cued television audiences to the familiar narratives of Amos ’n’ Andy, then, in an almost Brechtian fashion, everything material in the sketch, from the bodies to the clothes, made them strange—relevant indeed, but far from the realist sitcoms of the day. To top it off, Kenny’s contemporary hustler getup— not to mention the number of times the two characters call each other “turkey,” “soul brother,” and “chump,” invoking the trendy lingo of blaxploitation films such as Superfly (1972)—puts a schizophrenic spin on the simultaneously current and ancient generic history playing out. At the center of this pastiche of commodified black identities is an expansion of Williams and Walker’s critical stage practice. In addition to mimicking the facial expressions, dialects, and character profiles of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and (later) Amos ’n’ Andy, Wilson fills the stage with material

Entertaining Identities

trappings of the various historical contexts that helped to produce these performances. In other words, the outdated objects onstage trace the same basic historical trajectory as the performance tropes that Wilson appropriates: minstrelsy’s garb drives vaudeville’s car into a plot line from television’s Amos ’n’ Andy that has been revamped for a blaxploitation hustler on the stage of a seventies variety show. The sketch thus draws out a historically specified morphology of minstrelsy’s constructions of blackness in different incarnations of popular media. More importantly, it grounds these constructions not in the ether of eternal truisms but in a world of tangible props defined by their respective moments. In this sense, these uncanny objects further denaturalize the stereotypes behind the particular “facial stunts” Wilson appropriates for a character like Marvin by reminding viewers, in yet another way, of their antiquated historical provenance and their artificial staging. That is, insofar as the props’ disorienting effects constitute one of the sketch’s main punch lines, they underline the fact that the tropes shaping Wilson’s performance are unrealistic, yet they hold strong force over the physical world of people and objects; the props are resolutely out of date and yet hold currency. Wilson often used anachronistic mise-en-scène in this way and in ways similar to it. For example, in a March 15, 1973, episode, Wilson and guests Oscar Brown Jr., Don Knotts, and Richard Pryor perform a favorite scenario of early-twentieth-century passing narratives and vaudeville, in which a wealthy patriarch’s long-lost heir must be distinguished from illegitimate ones by a hidden birthmark. This sketch is played almost entirely according to the vaudevillecentric codes of silent cinema, complete with intertitles for the dialogue, a dramatic piano accompaniment to set the mood, and a black-and-white image on-screen. Wilson plays the lost heir; Brown is the patriarch; Knotts is the tramp who leads Brown to his son in the process of robbing him; and

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Pryor is the cop who carts off Knotts after the caper and the hijinks have ended. Although the language of “turkeys” and “jive” pops up intermittently in the otherwise old-fashioned intertitles, the grand mime-based expressions of silent-film acting embraced by each player once again reassert the power that historically defined performance styles have in shaping the information they represent. As Knott’s losing place in this scenario already suggests, Wilson tampered with the racial tropes and scenarios he drew from minstrelsy and television in various ways. For example, in the Marvin Lattimer sketch previously discussed, as well as in many others, Wilson revises the losing outcome of the misguided hustler’s plan. Unlike Amos, Andy, and Kingfish, Marvin always pulls off his schemes, invariably at the expense of unsuspecting white men, or white men who cannot compete with his determination, as in the sketch with McMahon. This dynamic is fundamental to the way in which the show capitalizes on the notion of the “television performance persona” in order to incorporate its white guests— whose racial identity formed the rule rather than one of the many exceptions in most shows—into the antinaturalistic discourse of race that Wilson’s use of mimicry and anachronism framed as pastiche. For example, while the fine black suit and top hat worn by McMahon’s character in the sketch described above render him as the typical greedy capitalist of a bank-heist film, he also plays his famously stiff speaking style to the heightened affect of mimicry, so that against Marvin and Kenny’s smooth slang, his exaggerated performance of stiff elocution marks that trope as a decidedly white one: the greedy white capitalist. An earlier sketch in the same episode features McMahon playing up his rigid, declarative performance persona as an infomercial salesman, a role that both heightens this otherwise subtle affect and puts its anachronistic trappings in an intriguing conversation with seventies television culture. In-

Entertaining Identities

deed, McMahon blends his trademark delivery with the familiar cadence of a late-night Ginzu knife evangelist who tries to sell Wilson’s enraptured character a worthless empty box. This television version of a shell game, then, posits more than just a prompt for Marvin’s subsequent financial retaliation; McMahon plays off his famous persona to perform a remarkably coherent trope of whiteness—one that serves as a counterpoint to and perhaps even a partial explanation for the tropes of blackness on display. That is, by embracing the non-naturalistic strategies of pastiche and mimicry in general that inform Wilson’s pastiche of popular images of race, this performance of whiteness brings the largely taboo concept of white identity and its connection to economic exploitation into comic relief; and it does so, most interestingly, right alongside the anachronistic images of blackness consequently produced by this connection over the last century or so. Knotts and Conway, two of Wilson’s most frequent guests, effectively mimic their own well-known television personas to a similar effect on the show. For instance, in Knott’s multiple guest appearances, he repeatedly performs sketches “in character” from his time as a local yokel on The Andy Griffith Show, so that he plays the sporting white fool of Marvin’s plots more than once. In the March 15, 1973, episode referenced above, he plays a bumpkin tourist in New York City who gladly pays Marvin for a ride in a rickshaw— yet another anachronistic prop in the American context— that he ends up pulling himself for fifty blocks. Conway draws on his blank-eyed character Ensign Charles Parker from McHale’s Navy in much the same way, although the blank smile and deadpan idiocy of his straight-man routine often borders more on a parody of whiteness as a hegemonic nonrace.19 In this way, Wilson’s strategic incorporation of mimicry into a critical discourse on race, performance, and television representation extends to white images, too. Using

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the personas of its guests to mark out contemporary tropes of television performance, the show presents a spectacle of performance that blends racialized images, objects, and discourses from the past and present to dizzying effect. No matter how disorienting this elaborate aesthetic may be, though, at its core lies vaudeville variety’s critical tradition of nonnaturalistic performance and the same basic strategies its performers used to critique popular stereotypes from within popular culture. Of course, detailing Flip Wilson’s relationship to this tradition leads right back to the problem with which we began: Can these strategies really hold any progressive valence so many decades after Williams and Walker and their peers brought them to the vaudeville stage? Can they even begin to account for stereotypical images that intervened during the decades between Marvin’s car and Kenny’s pants? Whether this dilemma is unsolvable or not, it would be easy and arguably right to say no—especially given the fact that black performers from Dave Chappelle to Tyler Perry still use many of these strategies and are still wading through the same murky issues of racial politics that their use raised a century before. Furthermore, as I have already suggested, the evolution these strategies have undergone in the culturally linked but historically separate spaces of popular black performance over the years has exacerbated the challenges of delineating these issues in the first place. And yet, one can only begin to fathom the politics of these strategies and of black variety performance as a practice more generally in relation to the unique aesthetic economies of racial representation that produce them; the case of The Flip Wilson Show is no different. For instance, it would be difficult to recognize what made Flip Wilson’s performance aesthetic so innovative and controversial at the time without considering the dominant discourse of racial representation in 1970. Realism and indexical representations more generally have been major

Entertaining Identities

themes in both black image production and critiques of that production.20 However, the seventies mark a period in which demands for a realistic reflection of black life dominated all others among both intellectual filmmaking movements, like the L.A. Rebellion at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and mainstream political advocates. CBS’s relevance paradigm was at once a weak effort to answer that demand and a disappointing prompt for it. As Kirsten Marthe Lentz has explained, “With respect to race, television [in the period of relevancy] . . . emphasized one-to-one correspondences between the image and the referent”—a principle she dubs the “politics of the referent.”21 In other words, television shows at the time that dealt with race almost invariably embraced a realist aesthetic meant to directly reflect real black identity and culture, and the discourses about racial representation that formed around these shows focused almost exclusively on their success or failure in doing so. Phillip Brian Harper finds much of the same scenario in his study of Julia and Room 222, two of the most influential race-themed shows leading up to 1970.22 In his account, critics of black images at the time were preoccupied above all with the question of what kind of realist mimesis would improve the lives of black people in America rather than the question of what might constitute a reflection of real black life in the first place. Given the grotesque caricatures and limiting stereotypes that had determined the representation of black life in popular culture so completely and for so long, this political commitment to the notion of realism was important.23 But it repeatedly ran up against what Harper aptly describes as “the problematic situation at the intersection of demands for televisual fidelity to a unitary ‘black experience’ and the increasingly evident illusoriness of such a social phenomenon.”24 Harper focuses on the example of Diahann Carroll, star of Julia, to show that as a new class of black celebrities began to

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emerge in the late sixties and early seventies, the growing social and economic diversity of African American life made this already monolithic concept nearly impossible to sustain, let alone to represent, within television’s existing formulations of realism. So, while the discourse of realism largely determined the ways in which critics talked about black images, it often resulted in television sitcoms like All in the Family producing new and equally constrictive constructions of blackness. These constructions were now simply underwritten by the sense of realism that bad lighting, unsympathetic characters, and shabby props affect in these sitcoms. In this context, it is clear how sharply the performance aesthetic of The Flip Wilson Show clashed with television’s dominant aesthetic paradigm for race at the time. In addition to playing with all the outdated tropes that the call for realism was meant to eradicate, its absurdist cocktail of mimicry, anachronism, and other vaudeville-inspired techniques of pastiche eschewed the very idea of realism. In stark contrast to the politics of the referent, Wilson’s show emphatically staked its politics on a whirlwind of signifiers—from the trademarked personas of his guests, to the tropes of blackness handed down from minstrelsy to television, to the flashing arrow-shaped lights above the stage that spelled FLIP. Overlapping with the broader practice of signifyin’, which has taken many historically specific forms in black culture, this emphasis turns precisely on the subversion of dominant tropes from the unpardonably long history of purportedly real black images in American popular culture.25 Particularly in its use of anachronism, the show presents something like a genealogy of these images in Michel Foucault’s sense of the term.26 That is, without forgetting the intimate imprint these images leave on the bodies they circumscribe, it marks them as part of a material and political order that is defined by external forces rather than any natural truth or historical progress. It suggests that these images do not inevitably

Entertaining Identities

evolve into extinction from American culture any more than they inevitably evolved into it. On the one hand, then, the aesthetic dissonance between Wilson’s show and its counterparts suggests that the former’s style of performance—the abrupt shift it demanded in the way viewers understood the relationship between television’s images of black life and actual black lives—also contributed to the controversy surrounding its more outmoded characterizations. On the other hand, however, this dissonance also helps make sense of the circumstances that gave the show’s vaudeville-derived critical strategies such discomfiting currency in the ongoing debates about race and representation in popular culture. Capitalizing on the segmented structure of the comedy-variety show, as well as the multiple identities it allowed Wilson to take on, these strategies cleverly undercut the very premise of television’s racial politesse at the time—especially as the latter eventually codified in the paradigm of relevancy. Indeed, the resolute refusal of realism that defined Wilson’s performance style at every turn—from the overtly rehashed expressions to the overtly rehashed props— played havoc on any natural equation between television’s take on blackness and some fixed black identity. In this sense, the notoriously retrograde aesthetic of the show was, at the same time, surprisingly timely. From this perspective, it is interesting to consider a sketch that Wilson performed with Julia’s Diahann Carroll in the March 4, 1971, episode. Here Wilson plays Freddy the Playboy, a recurring character whose little black book is not little at all, as he works a bartending gig at a wealthy white man’s social event. Carroll’s character is a celebrity and honored guest that clearly echoes her television persona. Dressed in an ethereal gown, she displays the same mannered elocution and partakes in the same white social milieu that spurred some to accuse her of acting like a “white Negro” in her starring role in the sitcom Julia, which ran simultane-

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ously to Wilson’s show.27 When the two characters strike up a conversation, Freddy pretends he is a guest rather than a bartender in order to woo her. The conversation continues, and the two connect while talking about the identities they’ve concealed behind their social facades. In the end, they decide to go somewhere else where they will feel more like themselves. In some respects, the stable sense of a “down-home” identity here runs counter to the slippery performative ethos of the show. Perhaps more than any other sketch it posits an idea of authentic blackness, particularly with respect to class determination, where the social roles both characters play conceal a real informal black self that cannot be expressed around whites. At the same time, however, it is worth noting that the true identities the two characters proclaim remain entirely in the offscreen space. They leave together—the party, the scene, and the stage surrounded by no small number of white spectators at once—having just expressed a desire to get to know each other outside a white milieu. With little fanfare, then, the sketch offers a striking commentary on the status of both stars’ hotly debated television personas. That is, if Wilson and Carroll both figured prominently in critiques of black stars who failed to represent black life properly—especially before the judging eyes of white television audiences—their discourse on performance here explicitly undercuts the reality of their respective personas. For Wilson, this gesture rearticulates the dilemma of private black cultural space versus public white cultural space as a problem of performance—one that is exacerbated by the realist conceit of racial representation on seventies sitcoms like Julia. For Carroll, whose straightlaced television persona was increasingly criticized, it creates an impenetrable offscreen space from the unified narrative of black sitcom life, where all is not what it seems. In both cases, though, it once again

Entertaining Identities

puts the realist conceit of seventies television, and its black characters in particular, up for political question. As this scene underlines, Flip Wilson adapted vaudeville variety’s non-naturalistic performance aesthetic primarily to critique the representational politics of television. However, his drag performance as the infamous Geraldine—an emblem of this aesthetic that drew far more attention than his ingenious fusion of mimicry and pastiche—shows just how varied and unpredictable the political ripples of this discourse on performance could be. Geraldine’s Closet When Wilson donned Geraldine’s stylish Pucci frocks and her colored tights, and took on her high-pitched voice and her foam-formed curves, he reprised yet another long performance tradition of vaudeville and burlesque variety theater. Indeed, his predecessors Fanny Brice and Williams and Walker had all incorporated drag into their critical performance methods on the popular stage; likewise, vaudevilletrained stars like Ed Wynn and Milton Berle made their own sometimes ribald drag acts a staple of variety television in the fifties. In other words, the basic use of drag in a variety act would hardly have seemed shocking or innovative to viewers of The Flip Wilson Show. On the contrary, it was practically a generic norm. So what made Geraldine such a lightning rod in 1970? Two answers to this question should be apparent in light of the preceding discussion. First, as her scene with David Frost indicates, Geraldine’s overtly sexual and dominating personality blends a long lineage of stereotypes in pastiche. For example, Wilson himself often attributed his inspiration for Geraldine’s high-pitched voice to Butterfly McQueen, who was typecast as a shrill maid first in Gone with the Wind (1939) and later in television’s Beulah (ABC, 1950–53) before

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she retired out of frustration with the limited roles available to her.28 Also noted is Lerone Bennett’s recognition of Geraldine’s brash and sometimes aggressive demeanor as a disturbing revival of Sapphire, Kingfish’s stern wife on Amos ’n’ Andy. Pairing her with Sweet Sweetback, the sexually voracious hero of Melvin Van Peebles’s blaxploitation epic Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), he calls the two characters “provocative and ultimately insidious reincarnations of all the Sapphires and Studs of yesteryear.”29 Bogle reaffirms the similarities between Geraldine’s “loud and raucous” behavior and Sapphire’s sharp rebukes of her husband Kingfish (who, it must be noted, ridiculed and deceived his wife on a regular basis). However, he adds that Geraldine “was also the best of what Hattie McDaniel represented” in some of her roles as mammy and maid—“a powerhouse who couldn’t abide pretense”—and emphasizes that Geraldine “had a sexuality missing from earlier comic Black females.”30 As if to make up for the apparent absence of this character type before Geraldine’s appearance on television, he refers forward to a clear (and far more misogynistic) successor: Martin Lawrence’s Sheneneh character from his eponymous show, Martin (FOX, 1992–97). And yet, I would argue that when read in tandem, Bogle’s and Bennett’s appraisals of the stereotypes at work in Geraldine’s persona offer a more complicated view of the characters it jumbled together. Although Bennett hardly seems to mean it in this way, it is worth noting that his plaint about Geraldine’s coarse attitude edges on suggesting that she represents a “revival of the Sapphires and Studs of yesteryear.” That is, Wilson’s masculine body makes Geraldine a vessel of black male stereotypes as well as female. More to the point, the trope of the “black buck” or “Stud”—popularized on the minstrel stage, but rehearsed in very different ways for both Birth of a Nation (1915) and Sweetback—becomes the missing allusion in Bogle’s account of Geraldine’s forceful sexuality. As this

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Wilson and Geraldine stand apart from one another on the December 1970 cover of Ebony magazine.

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scenario suggests, then, Geraldine’s cross-gender body only multiplies the vectors of pastiche that her character opens up. And in this much, it makes her an especially concentrated expression of the show’s ambivalence between reproducing stereotypes, on the one hand, and making them absurd, on the other. Of course, Wilson’s use of drag to play Geraldine also invites controversy by offering a camp object lesson in the show’s stance against realist performance. As Butler, Esther Newton, and many others have argued so memorably, drag is a mode of performing gender that aligns more closely with mimicry than mimesis: it is designed not to deceive; it calls attention to gender identity as performance rather than as a natural state.31 From this perspective, Geraldine’s trademark admonishment of guests who assume too much familiarity with her male body—“You don’t know me that well!”— seems like a statement of pedagogy for viewers who take Geraldine’s artificial persona as fact. Indeed, the unfailing irony of the male Wilson declaring Geraldine’s most famous tagline—“What you see is what you get!”—only concentrates the show’s insistent discourse on artifice and black images in popular circulation. However, these two simple explanations of Geraldine’s infamy lead to more complicated questions: How did the discourses of gender and race overlap in early-seventies politics? And how, in turn, was it different for a black man to don the trappings of femininity? The gender politics of radical movements like Black Power provide the most revealing framework for answering such questions. Generally speaking, many of these movements drew a direct discursive connection between asserting the power of black masculinity and establishing black political determination. As Phillip Brian Harper and E. Patrick Johnson both explain, late-sixties black activists, including Eldridge Cleaver and Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), accused James Baldwin and other gay black figures of betraying

Entertaining Identities

the race with their effeminacy, a quality to which Cleaver and Baraka ascribed a form of whiteness.32 They believed in promoting a more rigid, hegemonic notion of black identity— the masculine—for the political advantages offered to such clear delineation. It was this basic sentiment that produced Cleaver’s remarkable 1968 memoir Soul on Ice, which not only relegates black homosexuals to white culture but also frames the raping of white women as a necessary political act. Within this context, it is clear that Wilson’s performance of Geraldine ran afoul of major black political discourses on many levels at once. Not only did it blur the boundaries of Wilson’s black manhood with the accoutrements of a second sex; the larger performance aesthetic of which this drag act was a part fundamentally questioned the fixed notion of black identity on which Black Power relied. Wilson’s intense sense of privacy offscreen—especially after divorcing the mother of his children—would only have exacerbated matters. It gave the gossip rags free range to ponder his frank disinterest in all the adoring women that surrounded him in articles that often carried a gay subtext. For example, a July 1971 edition of TV-Radio Mirror features a picture of Geraldine standing with Dean Martin—dubbing them “The Sexiest Couple on TV”—while the article inside wonders why Dean “flaunts it” and Wilson, despite a number of female fans and confirmed close friends, “hides it.”33 In short, regardless of whether or not these implicit accusations carried any weight, Black Power’s often misogynistic insistence on the purity of black masculinity made Geraldine, and by extension Wilson, an even more loaded figure in the popular discourse on racial politics. On one level, the gendered terms of this discourse make it difficult to disagree with critics at the time who dismissed Wilson as a “safe” star for white culture. As Bogle points out, shows featuring assertive black male characters seldom

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Geraldine and Dean Martin share the honor of “sexiest couple” on the 1971 cover of the TV-Radio Mirror.

Entertaining Identities

lasted long on television during the days of Black Power and Black Panthers.34 It thus seems likely enough that Wilson’s willingness to embrace a female persona did mark him as a pleasantly apolitical or even submissive black figure for white audiences who unreflectively equated strong black men with radical politics and violence. Without denying the problem at hand, though, these terms make it difficult to ignore how the masculine rubric of authenticity that they organize quickly shuts down any deeper reading of Geraldine’s political significance. More specifically, these terms cannot account for the ways in which Wilson’s use of drag fits into the show’s larger performance aesthetic, which revives such old-fashioned vaudeville strategies precisely to critique the notion of a rubric for defining authentic black identity. And as the scale of the discourses it engaged suggests, this critique also held political implications that went beyond the domains of either race or television’s representation of it. Consider, for example, Wilson’s performance as Geraldine in the final sketch of the 1972 episode that began with Sammy Davis Jr.’s mimicry act. The scene begins with Lily Tomlin dressed as Ernestine the Telephone Operator, her popular Laugh-In character. She sits alone on the stage in the round at the antiquated telephone switchboard her character tended. Snorting uncontrollably as she laughs at her own taunting of delinquent customers and accidental callers, she cuts the figure of an aged refugee from a fifties sock hop: she wears a long pink swing skirt fit for a poodle print, catrimmed eyeglasses on a chain, a wide black belt at the girdled waist, and a primly ruffled white blouse with puffed cap sleeves. “One ringy-dingy . . . two-ringy dingy!” she brays in the fussy, nasal voice the role made famous. “I suggest you hide the liquor,” she advises a customer over the phone, adding that the bill collector soon to arrive is “a mean drunk.” But just as she connects her line to a fellow operator to explain that a substitute will be joining her for the day, the

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striptease music starts to blare and Geraldine enters the frame. Wearing her usual bravado and purple tights, Geraldine declares, “If you’re having trouble with your circuit, I’ll show you how to work it!” and rocks her hips to the side. After their introductions, Ernestine and Geraldine make fast friends, trading surly barbs with customers and sharing love advice. Geraldine begins a more personal exchange by mentioning the name of her adored boyfriend, Killer, at which point Ernestine squinches up her face and asks, “Who or possibly whom is Killer?” Geraldine spins in her chair and beams, “I guess you could say he’s my bridge over troubled water, and I’m happy to pay the toll,” then continues to wax about her absent beau. Ernestine honks out a laugh and the two continue to wisecrack, tell off callers, and talk small for the remainder of the sketch. When their shift ends, Ernestine tells Geraldine, “It’s a pleasure to plug in beside you—we have so much in common.” After the camera lingers on a wide-shot of these two misfit women—both time-warped in with their switchboard from another era—the audience laughs, the lights dim, and the sketch ends. On the one hand, this sketch demonstrates the way in which Geraldine’s drag could allow some of the more discomforting aspects of laughing at race to be displaced onto gender, so that the joke turns on her pretense at femininity instead of the racial stereotypes that define it. For instance, when the audience laughs at Geraldine’s giddy announcement of how much she and Ernestine have in common, it could be the comic spectacle of drag—her absurd gender rather than her racial type—that ostensibly authorizes laughter. It is thus important to keep in mind how well Geraldine’s intersecting embodiment of racialized and gendered identities fits into the show’s institutional paradigm of political ambivalence. On the other hand, however, if we recall how deeply intertwined gender and racial identity were in black political discourse at the time, we can begin to comprehend

Entertaining Identities

how reductive any purely operational, racial, or bivalent reading of Geraldine’s politics or this sketch would be. That is, it would be impossible for either race or gender to completely displace one another as independent topoi, and the very impossibility of such a displacement opens up a new framework for understanding how they relate here. To begin with, this framework reminds us that the sketch deploys the same performance techniques Wilson and Tomlin use in parallel critiques of race and gender tropes throughout the episode, for instance, in Tomlin’s mimicry act and Wilson’s turn as Marvin Lattimer. By playing Ernestine’s anachronistic attire and switchboard technology against equally dated tropes of black and white femininity, this sketch yokes the elaborate drag-show both characters enact to a historically defined pastiche of social identities: the black matron and the white marm travel up the same outdated circuits. In turn, this framework reminds us that the show’s vaudeville techniques share a tactical history with feminist efforts to gain equality, too. With this link in mind, Geraldine’s parting declaration that she and Ernestine “have so much in common” still carries the awkward weight of an allegorical social message, but it goes far beyond a programmatic call for integration to suggest a political commonality between the fights against misogyny and racism. Wilson’s cross-gendered performance and sexually inscrutable body only adds more layers to Geraldine’s basic embodiment of this sentiment. As Johnson argues in his indispensable study of black drag performance and identity politics, many such performances undercut the challenge they pose to heteromasculine paradigms of black authenticity with homophobic gestures.35 Focusing on In Living Color’s “Wanda, the Ugly Woman” and “Men On . . . ,” in particular, and with reference to Martin Lawrence’s Sheneneh as well, Johnson points out how comedians often scramble to assert their own distinct heterosexual male identity even as they

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trouble that boundary through drag. In comparison to these later performances, which I would argue draw at least partly on Wilson’s precedent, Geraldine cuts a remarkable figure. While in her clothes, Wilson is unafraid to wax poetic on her boyfriend Killer’s body or touch the men with whom she relentlessly flirts, and in interviews he refers to both Geraldine and Killer—an appellation he also bestowed on the Rolls Royce he used to flee Hollywood for the desert—as extensions of himself.36 In other words, Wilson hardly flinched at the blur between gender, sexuality, performance, and identity that his drag performance set up. From this perspective, one of the most interesting details of the sketch above occurs within the offscreen space: the notorious Killer goes MIA throughout the sketch, just as he did despite countless invocations throughout the entire run of The Flip Wilson Show. With little more than a menacing moniker, scattered anecdotes, and his girlfriend’s rhapsodic proclamations of love and lust to give him life, Killer lingers in the show’s mythology as a mystery, a threat, and a charismatic lure at once—not so unlike the way he seems to loom in Wilson’s imagination. In this respect, the tandem structure of the Geraldine/Killer persona only further underscores the ways in which a discourse of black male identity overflows the character’s enthusiastic talk about sex, most of which actually revolves around tales of Killer’s skill as a lover. It is thus tempting to read Wilson’s phantasmal performance of Killer as a kind of placeholder for the image of a strong, committed, and even angry black man who was missing not only from his own on-screen repertoire but also from television in its entirety. It is likewise tempting to read Geraldine’s mediate position in this performance as a pointed reinscription of women—black women, in particular—into the discourse of political self-determination that this image had largely monopolized. The character’s boldness, self-possession, and insistence on working to support herself should of course be

Entertaining Identities

recognized as a departure from the few prominent images of black women that did make their way to television—the prim Julia, on the one hand, and the recidivist “welfare mothers” already vilified by the Republican administration, on the other. However, in concert with the non-naturalistic sensibility that the show embraced, Wilson’s drag facade makes it difficult to interpret the character as a simple effort to represent black women in more realistic ways. Even Wilson’s own efforts to explain the character, which reliably position Geraldine as a rebuttal to the misogynistic images floating around popular culture, explicitly emphasize the way in which a dominant macho sensibility fueled these images. As he puts it in one discussion of his female alter ego, “I wanted to relate to women, but didn’t want to knock women . . . the comics were knocking women. I wanted to make my character the heroine of the story.”37 For Wilson, then, it would seem that the problems attending the representation of black women at the time had everything to do with the representation of masculinity; speaking of one meant speaking through the other. As this scenario suggests, Wilson’s performance as Geraldine in this sketch and in general does not contradict the radical political discourses decrying the emasculation of black males so much as it confounds it. At a time when American feminism was rising as a normative white discourse and Black Power continued to articulate a normative masculine discourse, Wilson and Tomlin’s united performance front playfully subverts the rigid ideologies of authentic identity that divide these movements for equality against each other. And in the process, it effectively lays bare the stereotypes and political essentialisms that often excised black women—and implicitly black homosexuality—from both of these discourses. This is not to say that the stereotypes defining Geraldine were not also problematic. And it is not to ignore the fact that Wilson also used Geraldine’s flirta-

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tious demeanor to express respect and even attraction for many guests who embodied the ideal of black male empowerment—or that Geraldine sometimes invoked a simpler notion of black identity in these exchanges. Along these lines, in a January 21, 1971, episode featuring Muhammad Ali, Geraldine spends much of her stage time flirting with the fighter, telling the audience how handsome he is and how much he resembles Killer, and telling him how safe she feels standing next to “the Champ.” In this same scene, she pulls Ali aside in feigned confidence to ask him not to hurt Joe Frazier in their upcoming fight because “he’s one of us”—a justification she repeats with a mischievous smile on her face.38 As we have seen again and again, Geraldine embodied—like so many other aspects of Wilson’s show—a variety of possible meanings and intentions, and that was exactly what made her such a vexing figure in popular political discourse. Even when she tossed off a confident line about being “one of us” among the likes of Ali and Frazier, the crisscrossed signs that clothed her own male body inevitably begged the question of “who or possibly whom” she meant by “us.” Of course, this is also the basic question that The Flip Wilson Show was always working to raise through the medium of performance. As seen repeatedly, Wilson’s reinvention of vaudeville-style mimicry and drag reanimated numerous images from minstrelsy. However, by adapting these strategies and others into a larger aesthetic strategy built on the logic of pastiche, it also mounted a very coherent and very timely critique of the codified forms of black identity that television and popular political discourse normalized in the early seventies. And while these twin itineraries did indeed make Wilson’s show a perfect comedic vessel for the aesthetic of ambivalence that defined the representation of political issues during the period, they also made it possible for the show to signify outside its dualistic oppositions be-

Entertaining Identities

tween black and white, male and female, reality and artifice. Furthermore, the playful and thoroughly populist tone of Wilson’s vaudeville-based aesthetic raised the possibility of broaching taboo subjects with a wide audience that might not always agree on these subjects at the outset. As Max Eastman points out in Enjoyment of Laughter—the tome Wilson championed as the basis of his comedic philosophy—“When we are in fun, a peculiar shift of values takes place.”39 It is no doubt the prospect of this “peculiar shift of values” that moved Wilson to adapt the vaudeville tradition of black comedy-variety to television in the first place and, later, moved so many black comedians in his wake to retool it. But then again, if the presence of a potentially unsympathetic audience undergirds this prospect for change, it also returns us to the question that concerns Wilson’s critics perhaps even more than his actual performance: Exactly what were white audiences of the show laughing at?

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CHAPTER 3

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elevision’s ability to deliver close-up views of a performance into the privacy of the home led many of its early critics to call it an “intimate” medium, a term that still inflects the way we think about many styles of staging and shooting live acts.1 It is difficult, however, to imagine feeling this sense of intimacy while watching a performance televised on The Flip Wilson Show. In its effort to convey the sensation of watching a live theater act, almost every shot of Wilson and his guests onstage includes the studio audience that surrounds the stage in the round. In fact, the show’s shooting style often gives the sea of onlookers a more commanding portion of the frame than it does Wilson, the man they all watch so intently. Furthermore, Wilson’s trademark opening for the program, in which he works his way through the cheering studio audience to reach the stage at its center, only ritualizes for home viewers the reminder of this audience. In other words, watching others watch the show is part of the spectacle. Like so many elements of Wilson’s show, this preoccupation with the audience holds a key place in the generic pro-

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cedures of the variety show, both onstage and on television. For example, Eric Lott describes an engraving of a famous minstrel performance that is remarkably similar to the scene just described: “The crowd has become both background and foreground—it is not too much to say that it has become the spectacle itself, so much is Rice [the performer] dwarfed by the crowd’s interest in its own activities.”2 Similarly, Henry Jenkins writes of vaudeville: “Variety entertainment required that entertainers remain constantly aware of the tastes and interests of their audience and adjust their performances to feedback from the gallery. . . . Performers built upon this intimacy through direct interaction with the audience, moving as close to the edge of the stage as possible to allow for max-

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imum communication.”3 In comparison to Lott’s self-regarding minstrel gallery, the vaudeville audience that Jenkins describes here engages the performer on more active, communicative terms, actually shaping the show’s acceptable limits. However, both accounts place variety spectators in an active exchange of regard with each other as a group. Their selfawareness situates them and the meanings of the show to which they respond in a shared popular culture. In other words, variety theater’s reputation as a popular medium takes a more literal form in its emphasis on the populace that sanctions and consumes it. The Flip Wilson Show more or less restages this practice for the small screen. That said, it was hardly the first to give its studio audience screen time. Fifties variety shows often included brief cutaway shots to the audience, as did some of the variety shows airing in the late sixties and early seventies. For example, The Carol Burnett Show (CBS, 1967–78) was known for its weekly question-and-answer segments, during which Burnett jettisoned her Bob Mackie armature for a more casual, improvisational—and, indeed, more intimate—exchange with fans. In its final season, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour also shot a few episodes on a stage in the round, a strategy that Aniko Bodroghkozy attributes to the show’s desire to recreate the “nonhierarchical, participatory” folk scene of a coffeehouse, and, at the same time, its desire to reach a “uniformly young and ‘hip’ looking” audience by making it manifest on-screen.4 However, while The Flip Wilson Show’s staging of the studio audience certainly draws on the generic precedents of all these shows, it is crucial to recognize what makes this staging historically, aesthetically, and institutionally unique, too. How does the show’s very deliberate style of staging and shooting the audience relate to its larger aesthetic strategy? What role does it play in the aesthetic of ambivalence that underpinned the show’s institutional politics? And what role does it play in the critical discourse that the show

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developed around the subject of racial identity and popular representation? Some answers to these questions are more readily apparent than others. For example, it is clear how the on-screen presence of an engaged studio audience would have underscored Wilson’s emphasis on performance and performativity and, thus, his thematic and aesthetic repudiation of realist mimesis. (Bertolt Brecht himself might have prescribed such a blatant strategy for denaturalizing the conceit of identity between performer and role.) As a careful reading of scenes from the show makes clear, though, how the audience appears on-screen is far more important than the mere fact that it appears there. It is the figure of the audience, after all, and an altogether different kind of intimacy with it, that enables the show to produce the scene of its own reception and, more specifically, to articulate, manage, and sometimes even undercut the discourse of ambivalence that was already forming around the show in the popular press. Integrating the Audience In Desperately Seeking the Audience, Ien Ang argues that the television audience as we know it is largely an institutional entity.5 Actual viewers are not only unpredictable and quite individual in their tastes and motivations, but also they are dispersed in unsurveyed living rooms all over the country. As Ang concludes, then, rating systems like Nielsen do not just count and classify some self-evident audience into natural commodity units that can be sold to advertisers; they produce it in the same gesture. On the most basic level, The Flip Wilson Show’s spectacular staging of the studio audience performs a similar institutional role. Like the example from The Smothers Brothers, in particular, this staging articulates the show’s target audience by embodying it on-screen, whether in passing or as the

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subject of the shot. If we recall the complex multidemographic address that the show fashioned, we can begin to imagine how different these two endeavors would be. Unlike the “uniformly young and ‘hip’” audience that the Smothers worked to secure at the time—a coveted one that was at least believed to exist, if hard to attract—Wilson’s show used the variety structure to target a segmented collection of audiences that would prove even more valuable, if only it could be forged. That is, the show simultaneously targeted all the various segments of the national audience that the issue of race presumably divided. The show’s studio audience thus had to perform the key institutional function of translating the integrationist language that both NBC and Wilson used to talk about the show’s diverse guest list into the currency of the media marketplace: a manifest cross-demographic viewership. Because the studio audience for The Flip Wilson Show generally included people of different races, generations, levels of hipness, and so on, virtually all of the wide-shots that frame the audience, either in passing or as the sole subject of the shot, contribute to this purpose. By showing a variety of people laughing together, these shots produce an institutional embodiment of a happily integrated television audience willing to consume images of black people because it embraces racial difference and cultural specificity as part of its own group identity. A January 18, 1973, segment featuring Wilson and famed white sports announcer Howard Cosell demonstrates well how the show adapted common strategies of representing the television variety audience to more precise ends. Wilson opens the episode with his normal procession through a studio audience that a series of wideshots shows to be racially mixed, as usual. After performing a couple of sketches with his guests for the week, he takes the stage with Cosell. While introducing Cosell as “the alltime heavyweight champion of rapping,” Wilson takes a seat

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next to his revered guest and leans against him snugly. Whenever the shot cuts to the stage, it frames the men in a tight two-shot; whenever an audience member poses a question, it cuts to a medium-shot of the featured individual standing up amidst the surrounding array of faces, then back to Wilson and Cosell. The first question comes from a young white woman who wants to know if magazine reports that Cosell is “more easily recognizable than Burt Reynolds” are true. Framed in the two-shot and smiling at Wilson, he responds that, although Reynolds was the Cosmopolitan centerfold, it is “altogether clear that I am the sex symbol of Monday night football.” Laughter blares as the shots alternate between images of Wilson and Cosell and the smiling audience. A couple of questions later, a young black woman asks Cosell how long he has been an announcer. When he probes her for a motive for her question, she laughs shyly and responds, “I’m curious,” pauses uncertainly, then adds, “Brown”—a riff on the pun that Pam Grier would soon immortalize in Foxy Brown (1974). As Wilson and Cosell glance at each other and break into laughter with the entire audience, she raises her right fist to shoulder level, squeezes it in a nervous nod to the revolution, and walks away smiling while the audience applauds. The next question is for Wilson, and it comes from a very young white boy who wants to know how old the host is. Wilson shifts his weight against Cosell, smiles, and offers, “Since today is my birthday, I’ve been black for exactly thirtyeight years.” Cosell, Wilson, and the audience again share alternating shots as loud laughter and applause crescendo. The exchange is not over yet. After a few more questions from two white audience members of different ages about Cosell’s support for Muhammad Ali and his love of Joe Namath, a young black man stands and asks Wilson if he plans to work in movies. Here, Wilson looks solemnly into the camera and

Variety and the Art of the Audience

declares that, despite thinking about it, “I’ve devoted my attention these last three years to television and there’s no picture that gets me to as many people as I get to in one hour, and I’m not trading it.” Wilson smiles proudly as Cosell and the audience cheer their loudest. Neither exchanges with the audience nor the heavy use of tight shots was typical for The Flip Wilson Show. However, the care with which these techniques are employed to choreograph a particular kind of relationship between the performances of Wilson and Cosell, on the one hand, and the performance of the audience, on the other, is thoroughly characteristic of the show’s deliberate approach to staging. In this double-team variation of Burnett’s popular question-andanswer segments, for example, snug two-shots and close-ups emphasize Wilson and Cosell’s bond across racial difference, and as they relay back and forth with the audience, these shots work to embody on-screen the fact and promise of the diverse broadcast audience the two share. Their active exchange with this audience thus offers a kind of pedagogical sketch of the products and personalities that appeal to their segmented constituencies. That is, the ease with which the audience engages in black and white pop-cultural discourses—from references to blaxploitation films to Burt Reynolds to Muhammad Ali—traces the viability of the integrated pop-cultural marketplace across a variety of consumer indices on either side of the racial divide. Like Wilson, the show openly claims a vague black identity and declares its project to make black people an equal part of American culture by reaching “as many people” as possible via broadcast technology. However, it also declares the openness of that identity to cultural intermingling and the economic value of an integrated marketplace. The pride with which Wilson offers his final declaration, as well as the overwhelming applause of the audience in response, present integration as a social and commercial ideal at once.

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The first chapter of this study included a discussion of NBC’s economic and industrial motives for integrating its viewership, as well as Wilson’s open attempt to promote racial integration by showing black and white stars working together in sketches with themes of integration. Insofar as it binds these two projects together, the spectacle of the audience on The Flip Wilson Show articulates, with unusual clarity, the institutional value of producing a tangible audience. As this example already suggests, though, the show’s unique staging is hardly the strict domain of market science; there is an art of the audience, as well, and it is rarely so stable in its functions. Indeed, because the studio audience is part of the spectacle, it takes on aesthetic and textual properties that are often just as unpredictable as any live audience, whether the latter sits in a bustling theater or on a cloistered couch. Accordingly, it is this aspect of the show’s staging that brings most fully into view the discourse of ambivalence and the circular relationship with the audience it produced. Regarding White Laughter As seen throughout this study, the question of who was watching The Flip Wilson Show—and, more to the point, which valence of its comedy white audiences were laughing at—has troubled scholars and journalists writing on the show and its progeny for good reason.6 There are indications that this issue was of concern to many black viewers at home, too. In a 1972 issue of Redbook, for example, the activist-journalist Jean Carey Bond published a roundtable discussion with thirteen other black women of different ages, occupations, and economic-class positions, the main topic of which concerned how participants felt about black images on television.7 While the participants offered decisive appraisals of Mission: Impossible and The Mod Squad, among other shows, Bond notes that most display “mixed feelings” about Wilson, finding him “almost irresistibly funny,” as one

Variety and the Art of the Audience

viewer puts it, but “uncomfortable with his overall image,” especially given the presence of a white audience.8 In much the same spirit that critic Les Brown refers to Wilson as “America’s new pet Negro”—charging that smug white fans would congratulate themselves for being “open-minded” about race on the mere basis of tuning in—some express concern that he’s a “safe” ethnic phenomenon.9 In other words, the problem was not only what openly racist white audiences could or did say in response to the show, but also what self-described liberal whites might not be saying about why they enjoyed it so much. It is perhaps only with this issue in mind that we can understand how carefully the show used the figure of the studio audience in its attempt to manage the sociopolitical dynamics of its reception, or rather, to inscribe different potential viewing positions and the sociopolitical questions they raise in the address itself. After all, the integrated audience that the show produced for institutional purposes hardly would have eased the minds of critics most concerned with its slippery political valences. It made the exact image at issue—whites laughing heartily at black stereotypes—a kind of visual refrain. In this respect, I would argue that the show’s audience aesthetic actually helped precipitate the debates about the racial politics of reception that were prominent in the mainstream press on the show. By framing white and black audience members laughing together, this shooting style articulated the aesthetic of ambivalence that defined the show’s humor in terms of two broadly defined racial publics. But if the show’s many wide-shots of the audience beg the question of who is laughing and why, then its sparing use of close-ups deserves even more attention, for the use of these shots poses a remarkable array of answers to this question. A sketch from the February 25, 1971, episode offers a good example of how The Flip Wilson Show uses the close-up

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to stage an encounter with the studio audience that entirely reconceives the terms of television’s “intimacy.” The sketch features the black actress and singer Leslie Uggams and the infamous white insult-comic Don Rickles. Wilson plays the recurring character Freddie the Playboy—but before he became a playboy, as Wilson explains (out of character) while introducing the sketch.10 The scene begins with Freddie sitting onstage at a desk amidst the Spartan contents of a rented room. A lone windowsill and a door mounted at the perimeter of the stage are the only gestures toward walls. In the wide-shots that introduce the scene and dominate throughout the sketch, members of the studio audience who surround the stage are shown through the window frame and peek out from behind the furniture. Freddie quickly commands our attention when the phone rings and he picks it up. Smiling at the sound of a familiar voice, he tells an aunt who has called to check in that his new apartment in New York is nice and has a view of the park. Then he pauses, screws up his face at her response, and revises the statement: “No, not Central Park—the sign on top of the garage says PARK.” Presumably in an effort to ease her concerns about his rudimentary accommodations, he assures her that he’s found a company that can rent him whatever he needs in this unfamiliar new home, even friends. With that the doorbell rings and Wilson hangs up the phone to answer it, skipping to the side in another one of his trademark dance moves to greet Uggams’s arrival. In a brief conversation that disappoints Freddie greatly, we learn that the lovely Uggams has arrived only to fulfill a professional capacity: to introduce Freddie to his less comely new “Rent-a-Pal,” played by Don Rickles. With this setup complete, the scene then takes a sharp turn. From the moment Rickles zooms through the door onstage, he is a ball of positive energy. Most notably, he clearly mimics Wilson’s lively dance moves and elaborate trademark handshake—no doubt an alarming sight to viewers who

Variety and the Art of the Audience

knew his curmudgeonly act. As their exchange develops, Rickles lavishes Freddie with profuse praise and declarations of friendship. Only traces of his famously ornery stage persona peek through this enthusiasm—for instance, he teases Freddie about his interest in the inanities of college marching-band formations, continually calls him by the wrong name, and tells him he’ll need “different makeup” if they’re to be friends. But the tone of adulation dominates, culminating when Rickles embraces Freddie tightly and unleashes a frenetic declaration of loyalty: “We gotta have friendship, pal! I got a brother, I don’t need more brothers. We gotta understand each other! It’s not a question of brotherhood—it’s a question of loving and caring. And you’re my pal! ‘Rent-aPal’! But this is not a job to me! This is love because you’re

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Don Rickles gets “close-up” to Freddie the Playboy in the first half of the 1971 “Rent-a-Pal” sketch.

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tops with me, fella, yes, you are! That’s what you are, tops!” As Rickles professes these ardent lines to Freddie, the image cuts to a tight shot of the two men’s faces and Rickles’s smothering embrace of his employer’s neck. Freddie looks alarmed to say the least, but pleased, too. Until a buzzer on Rickles’s watch goes off. At the sound of the buzzer, the image shifts back to medium-wide-shots for the next few beats. The look on Rickles’s face changes, and he notes that it’s his ten-minute lunch break. Safely off the clock, he unleashes an assault on Freddie that is just as frenetic as his praise: “Now I can tell you what I really think, pal! Can I tell you something as a friend? I don’t like you!” At this moment, the image cuts to a close-up of a guest in the studio audience—an older white woman wearing a leopard-print coat, bursting into a wideeyed laugh that betrays embarrassment only for its lack of reserve—then to Freddie’s stunned expression. All he can do is try to reason with Rickles, and, not so surprisingly, it works. Within a few more beats, the camera has zoomed out to give us another wide-shot, this time rising to a high aerial angle so that we can take in the scene and the audience as a whole. And what a scene it is: having successfully lured Rickles to reveal his own latent love for marching-band formations, Wilson dons a feathered marching-band hat, hoists a baton, and leads his newly recruited friend in a promenade around the set as the audience encircles them. So ends the conversion experience, and the scene. Speaking only in respect to the performance onstage, this sketch already structures a relatively bald allegory for the larger integrationist project of Wilson’s show: he wins over a grouchy, hostile old white man with his almost trenchant affability, appealing to the pleasure they share in spectacular performance. But the style in which the sketch is shot gives the show’s studio audience a more literal and yet more com-

Variety and the Art of the Audience

plicated role in the scenario it frames. Wide-shots of audience members laughing with one another play their typical institutional role, only this time they take on the additional significance of officially reconfirming Wilson’s ability to win over even the most unsympathetic spectator. This is especially true of the dramatic zoom out to a wide high-angle shot that ends the scene, where the viewer is left with a grand, almost Busby Berkeley–style spectacle of Wilson’s command over both Rickles and the integrated studio audience at large. However, the use of the close-up in the scene sends this allegory of Wilson’s effect on his audience in at least two directions at once. In particular, we should consider the tight cutaway to the leopard-bedecked white matron who seems so scandalized by her own gleeful cackling at Rickles’s betrayal. How could this shot relate to the ones around it? On the one hand, it might simply articulate a classical editing progression from the generality of the studio audience to the specificity of one from its ranks. Seen this way, the shot reorients the sense of “intimacy” or identification with which the classical use of the close-up has been associated to an entirely unexpected star performer: some random white lady. In turn, we could read the image as an opening of identification for white viewers at home—that is, an “intimate” reassurance that it is acceptable and even exciting for them to consume racial comedy on television as an extension of the integrated audience on-screen. On the other hand, though, when it is read against the allegory unfolding onstage, the shot undercuts this assurance with a biting assessment of Wilson’s appeal to white audiences. Indeed, Rickles’s mercurial performance as Wilson’s “Rent-a-Pal” gives a remarkably animated allegorical form to the specter of white liberalism hanging over discourses of the show’s reception. In his 1964 collection of essays, The Negro Mood, Lerone Bennett offers this description of the white liberal:

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The white liberal is a man who finds himself defined as a white man, as an oppressor, in short, and retreats in horror from that designation. But—and this is essential—he retreats only halfway, disavowing the title without giving up the privileges, tearing out, as it were, the table of contents and keeping the book. . . . The white liberal talks brotherhood; he writes about it, prays for it, and honors it. But: Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow.11 Here Bennett traces a profile of progressive whites who advocate a moderate approach to the fight for racial equality and ultimately pay the cause nothing but lip service. It is hard to imagine a more fitting description of the liberal white viewer who made so many viewers and critics nervous about how Wilson’s comedy would be interpreted. As Brown put it, “Many who were drawn to [The Flip Wilson Show] for negative reasons undoubtedly believed their hour a week with a Negro, filtered through a TV screen, manifested their tolerance, their essential goodness as Americans.”12 It is also hard to imagine a better description of Rickles’s basic conduct in the scene above. While he proclaims his love and admiration for Freddie, he can neither remember his name nor resist the nervous suggestion that black and white people cannot be friends at all. He lauds a connection even stronger than “brotherhood,” but when Freddie’s allotted time runs out—just as Wilson’s will at the end of the hour—he reverts to his true sense of disdain for his supposed friend. As the emphasis here on a time slot suggests, this rather ingenious conception of the white liberal as a kind of “Rent-a-Pal” is hardly vague in its aim. On the contrary, Rickles’s dancing entrance into the scene is not simply the footwork of a man who knows how to appropriate black culture in general; it is explicit mimicry of Wilson’s trademark dance

Variety and the Art of the Audience

moves and the handshake he exchanges with the studio audience. In this much, it marks him as a viewer and fan of Wilson’s show in the opening moments of the scene. Once again, then, we find one of Wilson’s white guests using mimicry and exaggerating his own performance persona to comment on white performances of identity. But in this instance, the disingenuousness of this performance takes on a charged racial-political significance with respect to the show’s larger audience, for it very clearly expresses Wilson’s own awareness of the false favor with which white audiences might regard both him and his humor. From this perspective, the close-up of the white matron takes on a very different significance. The cut to her loss of

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Flip Wilson Show cameras often singled out members of the studio audience in close-up just as they responded to the comedy onstage. This particular shot captures a response to Don Rickles's torrent of insults in the second half of the “Rent-a-Pal” sketch.

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composure—which occurs right when Rickles’s will-to-insult bubbles uncontrollably to the surface of his platitudes— draws a direct connection between these respective responses to Freddie and to Wilson. The scene’s only other close-up, which gives a claustrophobic view of Rickles’s embrace of Wilson, further underscores this connection. Accordingly, these shots seem to work less like classical montage and more like Eisensteinian montage: they juxtapose images of the studio audience with the allegory onstage in a spectacle of white laughter that is only slightly less grotesque than the laughter of fat capitalists that the Soviet theorist/filmmaker gave us. As such, the star treatment given to this anonymous viewer foregrounds a key player after all. That is, it presents black and white audiences alike with an image of white laughter that prompts self-consciousness as much as it does identification. Rather than simply brokering the “intimacy” of the performance onstage for the home audience, this particular close-up would—like Wilson’s outright rejection of realist mimesis—put the lie to intimacy as such. More accurately, it would make the sense of intimacy that the close-up builds between viewers at home and on-screen a deeply selfconscious one. At the same time, if we return to our alternative analysis of the sketch and its shooting style, it will immediately be clear that the show’s audience aesthetic opened up other ways of reading this sentiment. Indeed, the show’s persistent and measured use of just such audience close-ups transformed a standard procedure of comedy-variety television into a key element in the aesthetic of ambivalence that defined its address. By weaving the figure of the studio audience into the visual and textual fabric of the show, Wilson and his producers framed a relationship between the two that simultaneously supported and undercut the latter’s institutional production of a color-blind audience for racial comedy. More importantly, the flexibility of this relationship allowed

The Hecklers The Flip Wilson Show often used the studio audience to bring the matter of its white audience into the frame. However, it was equally concerned with situating both white and black studio-audience members in a social relationship to the stage, and its strategies for doing so challenged the show’s harmonious vision of the integrated audience from an entirely different perspective. A recurring sketch featuring Wilson as a stand-up comedian and Redd Foxx as his heckler offers an instructive example of how the show positioned these viewers in relation to its humor. A typical installment of the sketch from January 13, 1972, begins with Foxx sitting at an onstage cocktail table that has been put to exceedingly good use—cigarette butts and spent cocktail glasses litter its surface—as Wilson trots buoyantly into the spotlight before him. The studio audience welcomes him with loud clapping as an announcer proclaims Larry Chong’s “eighty-sixth consecutive week at the Kit Kat Club”; Foxx looks on skeptically. Alternating between wide-shots and medium-shots that show the audience watching in the dim background—a pattern that will generally run through the entire sketch—we see the two performers settle in next to each other. By way of an opening, Wilson as Chong ingratiates himself to the applause in something like a parody of his own excessively gracious demeanor: “It almost makes a performer feel humble to receive an ovation such as the one you’ve accorded me. And I’d like to add that if I can bring a smile to your face, a laugh to your lips, or even make you cry, then I

Variety and the Art of the Audience

them to use close-ups of the studio audience as a kind of shorthand representation for viewers everywhere and, accordingly, an opportunity to inscribe competing valences of interpretation into the show itself. But before we consider the nature of this inscription further, it is worth looking at a different segment of the audience it invoked.

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94 Guest Redd Foxx plays the heckler to Wilson's failing stand-up Larry Chong in a 1972 sketch.

feel I’ve accomplished what I’ve been put on this earth for.” The audience laughs tentatively from the background of the on-screen image until Foxx, in their stead, grouses back, “I just ran in here to get away from a mugger—obviously I didn’t know when I was well off.” The studio audience laughs louder, and the two continue. Wilson tells another stale joke, and Foxx spits back, “I’ve heard of watering down a drink, but this is the first time they watered down an act.” Wilson protests that last night he “killed ’em,” to which Foxx sips his whiskey and replies, “And tonight you returned to the scene of the crime.” Wilson implores him to “go somewhere else if [he] doesn’t want to see a funny act,” to which Foxx flatly responds, “I am somewhere else.” The exchange goes on like this, with Wilson telling a series of remarkably bland jokes, and Foxx spewing cutting assessments of his

Variety and the Art of the Audience

act, until Foxx demands a real show featuring strippers. When Wilson proclaims, “You’re drunk!” Foxx smiles and lasciviously boggles his eyes as if channeling vaudeville great Groucho Marx, then retorts, “Good! Then I’ll see four of everything!” The studio audience erupts in laughter and applause. As it does during much of the sketch, the camera contains both performers in a wide two-shot, with the audience that surrounds the tiny stage they share highlighting their proximity. The sketch ends with Foxx and Wilson together in the spotlight. Foxx declares his friend’s comedy “a gas,” and Wilson shows his forgiveness by letting Foxx plug Sanford and Son. The image then cuts in close to two members of the studio audience: a black woman in her twenties with a mod dress and an Afro, and a younger black woman more conservatively dressed. This sketch frames the audience dynamics of Wilson’s show in a number of interesting ways. Most fundamentally, it literally puts the subject of spectatorship at center stage. Not just any sort of spectator, though: Foxx’s unruly heckler directly harks back to the kind of active, reciprocal relationship between performer and crowd that Jenkins linked to the vaudeville variety stage, but which later flourished in all the black, white, and blue comedy clubs where Wilson and Foxx first worked together. Both performers brought up this period of their respective careers with some regularity in interviews.13 In this respect, the sketch pays tribute to another black performance culture that informs Wilson’s aesthetic. But I would argue that Wilson and Foxx’s comedic reconstruction of a charged stand-up club represents far more than a trip down memory lane. Foxx and Wilson’s volley of punch lines, which moves a bit like a halfhearted game of the dozens, stages a critical distinction between the defiantly blue sensibility of the former and the eager-to-please, “safe” reputation of the latter—a reputation which the routine of Wilson’s ethnic alter ego Larry Chong hyperbolizes so well

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that Foxx must reconfirm his respect for Wilson’s actual act when the scene is done. Indeed, Foxx’s position as both Wilson’s spectator and comedic counterpart models a critical response to Wilson’s style that is notably absent from the wellbehaved crowd that surrounds the two performers in NBC’s studio. That is, it traces the outlines of a spectator who talks back at Wilson’s television persona, and, not insignificantly, it does so through a lighthearted riff on the kind of vocal audience Wilson recalled when speaking of his days on the Chitlin Circuit. Once again, then, the show gives viewers a paradigm of television intimacy that introduces the self-conscious audience encounter of live variety theater into the quiet comfort of the home. Like the example before it, this scene structures more than one position for the viewer, and the close-up of the two young black women that concludes it plays a key role in doing so. On the one hand, for example, this shot could offer up a point of identification for black viewers watching at home. It could also draw a connection between the communal theater space that Foxx and Wilson invoke and the culture that supported it, defined it, and may or may not have positive things to say about either performer’s persona. On the other hand, it could also offer white audiences cloistered at home an invitation to laugh as if it were part of a black cultural sphere. As Christine Acham makes especially clear, The Flip Wilson Show made many black viewers uncomfortable not only because it delivered Wilson’s ethnic humor into the privacy of red-lined suburban living rooms, but also because it effectively invited the residents of these homes into the once-enforced privacy of this same sphere.14 From this perspective, the sketch above simply acts out the problem of the show’s reception among whites from yet another direction. In either of these cases, the show’s strategy of framing the studio audience both onstage and off serves as a structuring hinge in the viewing positions that the show opens up. Yet,

Variety and the Art of the Audience

despite how fundamentally this strategy supports the aesthetic of ambivalence by abiding its visual syntax at the level of the shot, the sketch with Foxx also demonstrates one of its more aleatory side effects. In addition to bringing out the distinction between Foxx’s rowdy heckler and Wilson’s docile taping-audience, it brings out what they share in common. Namely, while Foxx invokes the physical proximity and the social situation of the popular theater—from minstrelsy to vaudeville to the comedy club—the meticulous shooting style of Wilson’s show endows the televised audience around him with similar intensities. In its effort to adapt the generic procedures of comedy-variety television to produce the image of an audience that could “laugh across the colorline,” as one scholar puts it, it also codes the audience members as being on one side or the other of this line.15 And in its effort to accommodate, thematize, and manage the variety of potential responses across this divide, ranging from platitudes to dissent, this shooting style ultimately just emphasizes the volatility of both the responses and the divide. After all, in each of the examples above, representing the audience most often also means acting out the very issues that fueled critics’ ambivalence about the show’s politics. In this respect, the show’s audience aesthetic played a role as important as its performance aesthetic in giving the discourse of racial representation—its codes, its consumption, its potential effects—a spectacular form. As previously suggested, it seems likely enough that the show helped provoke much of the controversy surrounding its reception. However misrepresentative the show’s racial and textual coding may have been with respect to the intentions of its audiences, then, it represents the significance of the television audience with rare clarity: as a diverse gathering of situated but inscrutable social actors that holds decidedly political implications. And in the process, it represents the stakes of laughing at television’s racial comedy in intimate detail.16

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Conclusion

A

t the outset of this study, I proposed that the discourse of ambivalence surrounding The Flip Wilson Show should be recognized as part of a concerted aesthetic production rather than just as an aftereffect of reception. Insofar as the show works to elide these two moments, its aesthetic treatment of the audience illustrates this scenario most literally. As we have seen, though, the show’s broader appropriation of the comedy-variety genre sets the discourse of ambivalence in motion on many levels at once. Several of the generic attributes that help produce this discourse are, like the staging of the audience, primarily formal. The show takes advantage of the segmented dramatic structure and the rotating roster of players to address the political, industrial, and institutional challenges facing television in the early seventies. And Wilson takes advantage of the non-naturalistic performance aesthetic to speak in multiple voices that simultaneously address multiple audiences situated at various positions on the racial and political spectrum. The zigzagging genealogy that the use of these techniques traces through the history of American popular performance charges them with an even more determining sense of racial

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ambivalence, for it links them at once to the subjugating tropes of minstrelsy and the subversive tactics of vaudeville and the Chitlin Circuit. We might thus say that the cultures and practices of comedy-variety play a significant role in mediating the subject and style of ambivalence inscribed not only in the address of Wilson’s show but also in the provocative discursive space it opens up for debates about identity and representation. Although I would argue that these same racial and aesthetic dichotomies haunt virtually every black comedy-variety show that has aired since Wilson’s, as well as how we talk about these shows, some hew particularly close to the latter’s model for negotiating these dichotomies. Perhaps more than any other show, Cedric the Entertainer Presents . . . revises several of Wilson’s most unique performance techniques in order to engage with contemporary issues of race and performance in popular culture. For example, the episode airing on October 30, 2002, presents an intriguing variation on Wilson’s use of anachronous props to historicize tropes of black performance and identity in American popular culture.1 The scene begins in a fifties-themed retro diner, where a manager behind the counter reminds Cedric—a new waiter in kitchen whites and a paper hat—to embrace the “spirit of the fifties” with “all the dialogue and fun.” Taking this task in earnest, Cedric promptly greets a table of customers with the cowering affect, slow southern dialect, and nervous reverence of the grateful slaves imagined by films like Disney’s 1946 Song of the South. “I’d rather gouge my eyes out with a butter knife than look at yo’ powerful white skin!” he tells two white customers trying to order. With this declaration, Cedric’s character turns to the matter of rushing some “colored” customers out of the dining room and into the safety of the alley. When the baffled manager comes over to calm the commotion, Cedric explains, “I was just trying to stay true to the era.” With this,

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the manager suggests he show a little more “dignity and selfrespect.” Cedric responds with a wink—“Oh, you mean late fifties”—and returns to greet the white couple in his best imitation of Sidney Poitier in the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. With Poitier’s fierce elocution, Cedric declares himself a man and not a servant, then storms away from the table. When the confused woman in the couple calls out “Waiter?!” to stop him, he spins around, narrows his eyes, and fires back the defiant riposte that the film made famous: “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” After failing at one more chance to summon the fifties “fun” as the manager demands, Cedric returns to his familiar style of speaking and explains his confusion to the manager: “There weren’t no black people havin’ fun in the fifties!” He is promptly fired, and the scene ends. As this clever commentary on the racial politics of nostalgia and the historical situation of black performance suggests, Cedric’s show blends anachronism, tropes, and pastiche in a discourse on performance that at times greatly resembles Wilson’s. In this respect, paying close attention to how The Flip Wilson Show uses the comedy-variety form to address racial political issues of popular culture gives us new insight into some of the ways subsequent black comedy-variety shows do, too. At the same time, though, our consideration of the form and its uses here emphasizes very timely debates about realism, authenticity, multiplicity, and black masculinity. So in another respect, it serves as a heuristic framework for recognizing the important historical, aesthetic, and thus political differences among the shows that have taken up the form in such various ways since Wilson— differences that vague discussions focused on the moment of reception tend to collapse. Along these lines, we might consider the role the live studio audience plays in more recent black comedy-variety shows, and how shifts in this role relate to both industrial and tactical aesthetic shifts in the genre. For example, while

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Chappelle’s Show takes great care to foreground the live studio audience during the comedian-host’s monologue and stand-up bits, it resolutely cordons off this audience from the sketches themselves and other performance sets. This boundary is particularly palpable in the segments featuring live musical guests. When the Roots play “Hardware” on the March 19, 2003, episode, they do so in New York’s legendary Electric Lady recording studio, and Chappelle is the only fan seen on-screen moving to the music during the session.2 The same goes for Mos Def’s January 29, 2003, performance of “Close Edge,” which takes place in the intimate enclosure of an SUV with only Chappelle nodding at the wheel. While this shift away from a typical aesthetic of liveness surely has much to do with the economic and aesthetic norms of cable programming—a medium with distinct differences from Wilson’s broadcast environment—I would argue that it also plays an important part in the way Chappelle frames the dynamics between black performance and a racially mixed television audience that remains, with the studio audience, decidedly removed from it. That is, the show’s adamant foregrounding of a previously recorded event—the stark boundary it draws between a private space of cultural production and a public culture of consumption—works to foreclose and perhaps even disavow the sense of reciprocity and community between the two. In other words, Chappelle’s Show reinvents the audience aesthetic of comedy-variety and reorders the notion of intimacy it promises for a moment in American popular culture that Wilson helped make possible—one where Eminem and other morsels designed for “eating the other” make the consumption of black pop culture and its relationship to white pop culture more visible and more complicated at once.3 As we know all too well, neither Wilson nor Chappelle could ultimately hope to control how their vast audiences would relate to the images they produced. But setting up a conversation between them sheds a

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great deal of light on how each tried to use the generic figure of the comedy-variety audience to stage contravening engagements with prevailing discourses of race and community in popular culture. Of course, it is not primarily the subtle performance techniques or the audience aesthetics of these black comedyvariety shows that binds them together in a meaningful subgenre; it is the stereotypical tropes in which they trade. So what can our emphasis on the cross-media history and practices of comedy-variety aesthetics tell us about them? Obviously, there are no simple or fixed answers to this question. And yet, one of the more interesting critical possibilities that such an approach opens up leads us back to the precedent of Wilson’s show. In the course of examining its particular appropriation of these tropes as they morphed from the minstrel stage to the vaudeville stage to film and television screens, I suggested that the style of this appropriation holds the potential for a popular genealogy of the images it organizes. That is, Wilson’s non-naturalistic techniques hold the potential to foreground the ways in which different historical moments have redefined these same stereotypes to serve different sociopolitical purposes and material orders. While one can certainly see the traces of such a genealogy present in Wilson’s show, it is perhaps only when we examine the latter in conversation with its generic precursors and successors that this potential can be fully realized. For instance, when seen together, these very different shows effectively foreground how drag and other performances of mammies and jezebels weave in and out of different media, wardrobes, attitudes, and power structures among Sapphire, Geraldine, Wanda (In Living Color), Shenehneh (Martin), The Cafeteria Lady (Cedric the Entertainer Presents), Big Momma (Big Momma’s House, 2000), and Madea (Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, 2005), to name a few. Likewise, they foreground how shifts in popular cul-

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ture—ranging in scale from particular ad campaigns to economics in general—help reposition the performance of nineteenth-century hustlers among Kingfish, Marvin, the Reverend Leroy, the Wino (The Richard Pryor Show), the founders of the Homeboy Shopping Network (In Living Color), Velvet Anderson (Cedric), and Tyrone Biggams (Chappelle’s Show).4 Putting these performance repertoires in conversation with one another also calls attention to how the tropes they repurpose bleed into new ones over the years— for example, in the trope of the black president, which blends elements of the archetypal hustler with presidential figures ranging from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush to Bill Clinton, in The Flip Wilson Show, The Richard Pryor Show, Cedric the Entertainer Presents, and Chappelle’s Show, among others. In short, paying closer attention to the details that define how these shows take up longstanding tropes of comedy-variety performance can give us a more nuanced understanding of the critical encounter they propose with the situated discourses of race and power that help form them. At the same time, such attention can also help us recognize the pleasures and frustrations the genre might afford for black comedians repeatedly hemmed in by these images, as well as the dead-serious stakes for which their laughs play, and the aesthetic distinctions between their efforts to denaturalize them by recasting them as a kind of rhetoric. As I have emphasized, though, the implications of examining the aesthetic and industrial mechanics of The Flip Wilson Show extend beyond generic limits. Insofar as these mechanics helped refine the institutional aesthetic of ambivalence that continues to inform so much ethnic, racial, sexual, regional, and political comedy on television today, it also constitutes a historical case study of how this aesthetic works. That is, it offers a useful model for thinking about the ways in which broadcast networks today—facing what is often called a postnetwork media landscape and a divided

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electorate at once—target divergent demographic niches in one grand address. As The Flip Wilson Show makes clear at a pivotal moment in the codification of such niche audiences, broadcasters used comedy-variety aesthetics to negotiate the phenomenon of audience fragmentation well before the advent of cable technology that supposedly gave rise to it, and they still do; the genre effectively aestheticizes the conceit of this technology. Indeed, the social coordinates of a guest lineup continue to draw the wide-reaching segments of viewers that shows such as Wife Swap (ABC 2004–) and The Tonight Show summon. Similarly, a touch of vaudeville-style antics can make a sitcom like Will and Grace both a celebration and a parody of queer culture, or make a variety show like Blue Collar TV reach audiences that might not be rednecks (let alone red staters). Last but not least, the spectacle of a sprawling studio audience can give any broadcast offering—even if it is as deeply normative as The Today Show— the mantel of a broad popular will. Altogether, then, The Flip Wilson Show offers a particularly rich example of some key aesthetic strategies that television shows still use to manage the volatile politics of reception. On account of the very same gestures, however, it also offers important historical cues for how we can most productively understand and write about the political issues these shows raise. In particular, it suggests the merits of paying more attention to television style and performance as political coordinates and, indeed, as media through which shows address, imagine, and even model the politics of their potential audiences at a given moment. While the methodological paradigms of cultural studies have certainly had a salutary effect on the way we think about television and politics, they have also had the unintended side effect of directing the bulk of attention to the agency of the viewer—or to use Stuart Hall’s influential terms, to the moment of “decoding” as opposed to “encoding.”5 Recent attempts to energize some of

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these paradigms with continental philosophy have largely reproduced this same emphasis, stressing only the power of journalistic and fan discourses over images and the categories we use to talk about them.6 But as we have seen again and again in our examination of The Flip Wilson Show, the political relationship between the production and consumption of television can in no sense be classified in the neat sequence of “linked but distinctive moments” that Hall so famously looped in order.7 The important point here is not simply that some shows use the live studio audience to stage the scene of their reception at the front of this chain, to enfold the moments of production and reception, or to code the politics of whatever response they draw in the terms organized by the address itself. And it is not that reception studies shouldn’t have a place in the political histories we write for television, or that my reading of an image can tell us everything we need to know about a show and why it matters to people. As the concept of white liberalism makes all too clear, the important point is that the politics of reception, its records, and its influence on production can work in ways far more complex and evasive than this model admits. Hegemonic contests do not simply unfold around images, or on the subject of images; their discourses do not simply play out in the transparent responses of other media, whether we take that to mean journalism, fan mail, or corporate memos. These discursive battles also play out within images themselves, and the ways in which they do can often tell a more instructive story about the mediation of politics in American history than the data of reception. In the case of The Flip Wilson Show, the aesthetic strategies associated with the comedy-variety genre play a decisive role in this story. By adapting these strategies for seventies television, and orienting the multiplicities they open up at the level of performance and interpretation to the dominant discourses of racial representation at the time, Wilson’s show

Conclusion

collapsed or blurred almost all of the oppositions that made the politics of these discourses seem so singular and clearcut: progress versus regress, black culture versus white culture, complicity versus critique, real versus fake, and the key political notion of “us” versus “them.” It is perhaps for this reason that the genre Wilson helped shape in the process has remained an important one for black comedians and producers interested in the terms we use to think, represent, and discuss race. But it is certainly for this reason that the images these artists produce remain so contested.

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Introduction

1. Comedian Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham honed this act—where he repeats the refrain “Here comes the judge!” in a mock performance of comic justice—on the vaudeville stage and in black comedy clubs. Years later, it became a popular skit on the variety show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1968–73). 2. Nipsey Russell was a popular black comedian, dancer, and television personality during the period. In 1964 he became the first African American to appear as a regular guest on a network game show, Missing Links (NBC, 1963–64; ABC, 1964). He also costarred in the sitcom Barefoot in the Park (ABC, 1990) and performed on a number of variety shows throughout his career. “Doing the ‘Flip,’ Baby; It’s the Latest Dance,” Jet, 4 March 1971, 58–59. 3. “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” Time, 31 January 1972. 4. Redlining refers to the mortgage-lending practice of designating black neighborhoods as undesirable ones in which to finance homes. This practice made it virtually impossible for African Americans to purchase homes, given that they were also denied loans for houses in white areas on the premise that their presence would ultimately lead to the redlining of white neighborhoods as well. Restrictive covenant refers to an agreement between the seller

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and buyer of a piece of property, where the latter is contractually obligated to honor some stipulation on the property even after purchasing it. Segregationists often used restrictive covenants in home sales in order to incorporate contractual language forbidding that future owners of the property sell it to black buyers. 5. For example, see Steve Classen, “Southern Comforts: The Racial Struggle over Popular TV,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 305–24 . 6. The CBS sitcom Amos ’n’ Andy (1951–53), which featured an allblack ensemble cast, was very popular with white audiences in the fifties and sixties. However, the show’s characters and story lines actually were made famous by two contemporary white comedians, Gosden and Correll, who brought their blackface minstrel act to radio. In fact, the black performers who appeared on the television version were required to recreate Gosden and Correll’s characters and dialects so closely that CBS pulled the show from syndication in 1966, finally bowing to NAACP demands after years of protests. See, for example, Thomas Cripps, “Amos ’n’ Andy and the Debate over Racial Integration,” in American History/American Television, ed. John O’Connor (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983), 33–54. 7. This episode is available on the multivolume set of DVDs of The Flip Wilson Show that Rhino released in 2007. Prior DVDs of the show released by Rhino contain only drastically edited versions— the same ones play in rotation on TV Land. For this study, I consulted the Rhino compilation and many of the edited TV Land episodes, and I also reviewed the complete episodes available at the Museum of Radio, Television, and Film in New York; the media library at the University of Michigan’s Program in Film and Video; and various videos I acquired from personal collections. Complete episodes of the show are also available at the University of California, Los Angeles. 8. Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 73–76. Acham borrows the phrase “hidden transcript” from Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994). 9. Donald Bogle, Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Tele-

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vision (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 181. For an amplified version of this common position, see Michael Omi, “In Living Color: Race and American Culture,” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. Ian Angus and Sut Jhally (London: Routledge, 1989), 121. 10. Bogle, Primetime Blues, 183. 11. J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television Since 1948 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1992), 175. 12. Acham, Revolution Televised, 66–84. 13. Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy, from Slavery to Chris Rock (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 521. 14. For a more common example of controversy, see Aniko Bodroghkozy, “‘Is This What You Mean by Color TV?’: Race, Gender, and Contested Meanings in NBC’s Julia,” in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 143– 68. 15. Cedric the Entertainer is an exception here. In press junkets leading up to the debut of his comedy-variety show in 2004, he repeatedly emphasized Wilson’s influence on his work. See, for example, Marc Berman, “Variety’s Next Act,” Mediaweek, 23 September 2002, 1. 16. Lola Ogunnaike, “Dave Chapelle, Alive and Well,” New York Times, 16 May 2005, E2. 17. Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 132, 142. Norma Miriam Schulman uses the term “bimodal appeal” in a similar appraisal of In Living Color’s politics. Like the scholars cited above, Schulman emphasizes the racial composition of the audience as the defining source of this “appeal.” See Schulman, “Laughing across the Color Line: In Living Color,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 20, no. 1 (1992): 2–6. 18. Gray, Watching Race, 144. Gray’s effort to shift studies of racial representation toward discursive terrain also figures strongly here. 19. Lynne Joyrich raises a related idea in Re-Viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 20. These specific terms come from Bogle, Primetime Blues, 183.

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21. “The Stage Negro,” Variety, undated, Williams and Walker clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. Daphne A. Brooks deserves credit for unearthing this clipping. For a fascinating study of black performance in the late eighteenth and early twentieth century—one which helped inspire important aspects of the discussion here—see Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 22. For an excellent discussion of the deeper complexities of Williams’s career and performance style, see Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 207–80. 23. Watkins advances this argument on a number of different levels throughout On the Real Side. 24. Ibid. 25. On the relationship between vaudeville and early television, see William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 65–92. Chapter 1

1. “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” 59. 2. Wilson’s most famous stand-up comedy albums came from this period: Live at the Village Gate (Springboard, 1964), Cowboys and Colored People (Atlantic, 1968), and The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress (Little David, 1970). 3. In the 1970–71 season, the big three networks aired thirty-one variety shows. “Webs’ Favorite Program Types,” Variety, 16 September 1970, 29. 4. See Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 203–20; Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 199–235. 5. Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube, 204. 6. In Bogle’s Primetime Blues, for instance, the chapter on the sixties is titled “Social Symbols,” and the chapter on the seventies, “Jokesters.” 7. MacDonald, Blacks and White TV, 155. 8. Ibid., 157–58. 9. Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 8–13; Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television

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and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 10. MacDonald, Blacks and White TV, 100–101. 11. See Phyl Garland, “Blacks Challenge the Airwaves,” Ebony, November 1970, 35–38; “Broadcasting and Black Rage: Media Indicted by IRTS for Daily Slight of Black Citizen and Distorted Portrayal of Ghetto,” Variety, 20 May 1970, 2. 12. Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, 213. 13. “CBS-TV’s Bigot That BBC Begat Figures to Salt Up Second Season,” Variety, 22 July 1970, 34. 14. Lerone Bennett, “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,” Ebony, September 1971, 32. 15. Louie Robinson, “The Evolution of Geraldine,” Ebony, December 1970, 180. 16. For an account of the episode and the response to it, see Daniel Bernardi, Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 38–39, 108. 17. In 1970 the Finance and Syndication rules went into effect, limiting the number of primetime hours that the networks could use for national, as opposed to locally owned, broadcast. With fewer national broadcast hours also came fewer national ads. 18. Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, 208. 19. See, for example, Ed Guerrero, “The Rise and Fall of Blaxploitation,” in Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 69–111. 20. Daily Defender, 8 September 1970, 9. 21. Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube, 128. 22. Ibid., 229–30. 23. “Web Leaders in Demographics: Top Fifteen Demographics Winners,” Variety, 14 October 1970, 33. 24. “Flip Wilson: The Penthouse Interview with Leonard Feather,” Penthouse, January 1972, 36. 25. Ibid. 26. “Flip’s Fillip,” Variety, 6 May 1970, 63. 27. An example from Wilson: “I don’t know anything about Negro humor. I’m telling you what I think is funny about a particular situation, my brand of humor, which can include Negro humor (‘this is my culture’) but it’s not limited to it.” Quoted in Ponchitta Pierce, “All Flip over Flip,” Ebony, April 1968, 70.

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28. James A. Hudson, Flip Wilson: Close-Up (New York: Scholastic, 1971), 56. 29. “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” 58. 30. Hudson, Flip Wilson: Close-Up; James A. Hudson, Flip (New York: Scholastic, 1971). 31. I have not been able to find a copy of this special. 32. This discussion is based on a tape of the special that I obtained from a collector. 33. In this deeply contested document, future New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the instability of the black family, particularly the absence of black fathers, “the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.” Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, United States Department of Labor (Washington, DC: United States Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965), 1. 34. Bill Davidson, “The Many Faces of Flip Wilson: To TV’s Versatile Comic, Laughter Has No Color,” Good Housekeeping, April 1971, 15. 35. Ibid. 36. Les Brown, Televi$ion: The Business behind the Box (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 206. 37. “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” 59. 38. P. F. Kluge, “Notes from a Little Trip with Flip,” Life, 4 August 1972, 38. 39. “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” 60. 40. Bennett, “The Emancipation Orgasm,” 32. 41. See Pierce, “All Flip over Flip”; “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot”; Davidson, “The Many Faces of Flip Wilson.” 42. “Flipping It,” Newsweek, 12 August 1968, 85. 43. John Leonard, “Flip Wilson, Etc.” Life, 22 January 1971, 12. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” 60. Chapter 2

1. Davidson, “The Many Faces of Flip Wilson,” 15. The Williams and Walker pictorial comes from an undated issue of Variety included in the Williams and Walker clipping file in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. I am grateful to

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Daphne A. Brooks for bringing this pictorial to my attention. 2. As Daphne A. Brooks suggested in a lecture given at New York University in the spring of 2003, Williams and Walker include a critical gesture in this pictorial, too. Two images show the performers out of and in the process of applying blackface, as if to underline the facade of these “stunts.” Flip Wilson puts a similar emphasis on the donning of drag as noted in Robinson, “The Evolution of Geraldine,” 180. 3. Bogle, Primetime Blues, 85. 4. “Flipping It,” Newsweek, 12 August 1968, 85. 5. Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 70–71. 6. For a useful discussion of these issues in terms of gender, see Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997). 7. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). E. Patrick Johnson offers an excellent discussion of gender performativity in relation to race in Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 8. Susan A. Glenn, “‘Give an Imitation of Me’: Vaudeville Mimics and the Play of the Self,” American Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1998): 67. 9. See Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube, throughout which she discusses “feminine childishness.” 10. “An Evening with Flip Wilson,” Museum of Television and Radio, New York, 23 September 1993. 11. Quoted in MacDonald, 178. 12. Here the “born loser” trope invokes a stereotypical black persona—the “son of Ham” or “Jonah Man”—which Bert Williams became famous for performing. In this sketch, though, the conversation between Cosby’s and Wilson’s characters more properly suggests a lifetime of fighting the odds. 13. This meandering style also can be found in the October 12, 1972 episode, in which Wilson and guest Bill Russell talk over a game of pool. In my estimation, these sequences are indications of the newer sensibility and rhythms Wilson was trying to introduce into mainstream television comedy. 14. John Graziano, “Introduction: In Dahomey,” in Black Theatre USA

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Revised and Expanded Edition: Plays by African Americans from 1847 to Today, ed. James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, 63 (New York: Free Press, 1996). 15. This British review—which echoes several others—comes from the “In Dahomey” clipping file at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection in the New York Public Library. It dates from May 18, 1903, and describes a performance of the play at England’s Shaftesbury Theatre, but it contains no source information. I am indebted to Daphne A. Brooks for leading me to this file. 16. J. A. Shipp, Will Marion Cook, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, “In Dahomey,” in Black Theatre USA, 66, 71. 17. This episode aired on December 3, 1970. 18. Here and throughout the remainder of this study, I use the term pastiche in order to specify a particular use of traditional vaudeville mimicry, where the multiple voices traversed by the latter are incorporated into a sort of collage in the course of an otherwise naturalistic narrative structure. While pastiche certainly implies an imitative dimension in its own right, I have retained my reference to mimicry in order to emphasize the specific mechanics and history of the vaudeville practice, which I believe to be central to Wilson’s use of it. Of course, the term pastiche holds a more controversial place in the academic lexicon, as well, and it is hardly irrelevant here. Citing the aesthetic sensibility of seventies postmodernism, in particular, Frederic Jameson has used the term to decry the elimination of a political dimension from imitative aesthetics, describing pastiche strictly as “blank parody.” Richard Dyer has more recently argued for an understanding of pastiche that binds politics even more intimately to both affect and imitation. I can hardly resolve this disagreement here. However, it is worth noting that The Flip Wilson Show—or, more properly, the discourse of ambivalence surrounding it—dramatizes the undecidable tension that structures its two alternatives as the very locus of the political in popular representation. Moreover, it links this tension to an aesthetic history that precedes the advent of “late capitalism” by at least a century. See Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 111–25; Richard Dyer, Pastiche: Knowing Imitation (London: Routledge, 2006).

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19. For example, in a December 21, 1972 sketch he plays a wealthy white man who attempts to befriend characters played by Wilson and “Slappy” White in a watering hole on “the wrong side of town.” After imploring them to teach him one of their (made-up) games, he beams with the vapid contentment of an old dog receiving a pat on the head—even after Wilson and White relieve him of his money and the fancy car he parked outside. 20. For example, see Manthia Diawara, “Black American Cinema: The New Realism,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3–25. 21. Kirsten Marthe Lentz, “Quality versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television,” Camera Obscura 15, no. 1 (2000): 63. 22. Phillip Brian Harper, “Extra-Special Effects: Televisual Representation and the Claims of ‘the Black Experience,’” in Living Color: Race and Television in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 62–81. 23. It seems likely that television’s role in the civil rights movement also influenced this political commitment to realism. As Torres shows, Martin Luther King Jr. took full tactical advantage of news footage as an indexical document of unjust violence against peaceful protesters. Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13–35. 24. Harper, “Extra-Special Effects,” 70. 25. It is tempting to define Wilson’s performance almost entirely in terms of signification, or “black double-voicedness,” and the African American critical tradition Henry Louis Gates Jr. ascribes to the latter—especially given its focus on “repetition with revision.” However, as heuristic as this theoretical paradigm may be for explaining the mechanics of Wilson’s humor, its sense of play, and its importance in black comedy, I would argue that the history of vaudeville theater I have outlined as its precedent tells at least as much about the historical and cultural development of Wilson’s practice, especially insofar as that practice crosses essentialist boundaries of race, ethnicity, and gender. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 51. 26. Foucault writes, “Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a

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species and does not map the destiny of a people . . . it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.” Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. and trans. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 81. 27. See Bodroghkozy, “‘Is This What You Mean by Color TV?’ in Spigel and Mann, 143–68. 28. See, for example, “An Evening with Flip Wilson.” 29. Bennett, “The Emancipation Orgasm” 32. 30. Bogle, Primetime Blues, 182. Hattie McDaniel is best known for her Oscar-winning performance as the outspoken maid, Mammy, in Gone with the Wind (1939). 31. In fact, Jose Estaban Muñoz’s notion of “disidentification” in drag culture offers a compelling model for understanding Wilson’s performance as it relates to white culture’s dominant representations of black identity. See, for example, Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Jose Estaban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 32. Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity (New York: Oxford, 1996); Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 48–65. 33. Jim Bell, “Why Flip Hides Love and Dean Flaunts It!” TV-Radio Mirror, July 1971, 29. An informal poll gave the two performers their “sexiest” mantel. Thanks to Jeffrey Sconce and Lynn Spigel for this article. 34. Bogle, Primetime Blues, 156–61. 35. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 48–75. 36. For instance, when a fan goads Wilson to perform a line as Geraldine on one of his road trips, he growls, “Geraldine doesn’t do that; Killer don’t go for it.” Kluge, “Notes from a Little Trip with Flip,” 44. 37. Robinson, “The Evolution of Geraldine,” 180. 38. This scene is noteworthy as an expression of solidarity with Ali during his ban from the ring and impending Supreme Court trial

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for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. It also includes a futuristic variation on the basic gag of the anachronistic object. Toward the end of the sketch, Geraldine reaches into her purse and pulls out a phone receiver so that she can call Killer and let him talk to Ali. After Ali has spoken to Killer, Geraldine promptly chides both him and the audience for abiding this untimely object. “Yes,” she says into the receiver, “he actually believes you’re on this phone, Killer. He believes there’s such a thing as a telephone pocketbook.” 39. Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 3. This Max Eastman and the preeminent Soviet scholar are one and the same. Chapter 3

1. For an overview of these discourses, see Boddy, Fifties Television, 80–92. 2. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. 3. Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? 73. 4. Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube, 211–12. 5. Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge, 1991). 6. See also Omi, “In Living Color” in Angus and Jhally, 121; Schulman, “Laughing across the Color Line,” 2–6. 7. Jean Carey Bond, “Flip Wilson, The Mod Squad, Mission: Impossible: Is This What It’s Really Like to Be Black?” Redbook 138 (February 1972): 82–83+. 8. Ibid., 131. 9. Ibid. See also Brown, Televi$ion, 206. 10. Leslie Uggams’s appearance is noteworthy as it came shortly after the precipitous cancellation of her 1969 variety show on CBS. As mentioned in the first chapter, The Leslie Uggams Show was the first television variety show with a black host to air after NBC pulled the plug on The Nat King Cole Show in 1956. It took over the time slot of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour after CBS cancelled it in controversy. Some felt the network hired Uggams in order to improve its censorious image by replacing the Smothers with a show featuring a socially engaged African American woman. Unfortunately, CBS cancelled the show before the season

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ended, insisted it was surprised the show could not displace NBC’s massive hit Bonanza in the ratings, and replaced it with another white, rural-themed variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. See MacDonald, Blacks and White TV, 138. 11. Lerone Bennett, The Negro Mood (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964), 77. 12. Brown, Televi$ion, 294. 13. See, for example, “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” 59. 14. Acham, Revolution Televised, 77. 15. Schulman, “Laughing across the Color Line,” 2–6. 16. Spike Lee examines this aspect of the live audience, as well as many of the same issues of black comedy-variety entertainment examined here, in Bamboozled and The Original Kings of Comedy (both 2000), which I view as companion films. Conclusion

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1. All Cedric the Entertainer Presents . . . episodes are available on DVD. 2. All Chappelle’s Show episodes are available on DVD. 3. I refer here to bell hooks, “Eating the Other,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21–40. 4. Herman Gray performs a similar and very valuable analysis of some of these images in the context of the eighties throughout Watching Race. However, in my estimation, the core of this analysis lies as much in the textual and aesthetic strategies of these shows as in the discourses they invoke. 5. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 90–103. 6. See, for example, Jason Mittel, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). 7. Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” 90.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

See notes for articles and additional sources. Acham, Christine. Revolution Televised: PrimeTime and the Struggle for Black Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Bennett, Lerone. The Negro Mood. Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964. Bodroghkozy, Aniko. Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Bogle, Donald. Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Brown, Les. Televi$ion: The Business behind the Box. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanavich, 1971. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. New York: Routledge, 1997. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Glenn, Susan A. “‘Give an Imitation of Me’: Vaudeville Mimics and the Play of the Self.” American Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1998): 47–76. Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Black-

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Selected Bibliography

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ness.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Hatch, James V., and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre USA Revised and Expanded Edition: Plays by African Americans, from 1847 to Today. New York: Free Press, 1996. Jenkins, Henry. What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Johnson, E. Patrick, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Knight, Arthur. Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Lentz, Kirsten Marthe. “Quality versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television.” Camera Obscura 15, no. 1 (2000): 45–93. Lhamon, W. T., Jr. Raising Cane: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lyons, Paul. New Left, New Right, and the Legacy of the Sixties. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Marc, David. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. MacDonald, J. Fred. Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television since 1948. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1992. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1994. Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Schulman, Norma Miriam. “Laughing across the Color Line: In Living Color.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 20, no. 1 (1992): 2–6. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Spigel, Lynn, and Michael Curtin, eds. The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict. New York: Routledge, 1997. Stein, Charles W., ed. American Vaudeville: As Seen by Its Contemporaries. New York: Da Capo Press, 1984. Toll, Robert. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Selected Bibliography

Torres, Sasha. Black, White, and In Color: Television and Black Civil Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. Living Color: Race and Television in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: A History of African-American Comedy, from Slavery to Chris Rock. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999.

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INDEX

Acham, Christine, xx, xxi–xxii, 96 Ali, Muhammad, 74 All in the Family, xv, 3, 7, 8, 12, 15 ambivalence, aesthetic of: xx, xxv; and audience demographics, 6, 15; in critical reception xxii, 9–10; studio audience, 79, 85, 92, 97; in variety form, 7, 13–15, 17–18, 23 Amos ’n’ Andy, 45, 54–55, 110n 6; and characters, xviii, 8, 48, 64 Andy Griffith Show, The, 57 Ang, Ien, 80 audience, demographics, 14–15. See also ambivalence, aesthetic of: audience demographics; Flip Wilson Show, The: audience address of, studio audience for Bennett, Lerone, 8, 64, 89–90 Berle, Milton, 63 Big Momma’s House, 103 Bill Cosby Show, The, 2. See also Cosby, Bill

blackness, 9, 62, media representations of, 59–63. See also race Black Power, 5, 11, 66–67, 69, 82 Blue Collar TV, xxix, 105 Bodroghkozy, Aniko, 4, 18–19, 79 Bogle, Donald, xxi, 39, 41–40, 64 Butler, Judith, 42 Carlin, George, 49–51, 52 Carney, Art, 22–23 Carol Burnett Show, The, 79 Carroll, Diahann, 59, 61–62 Cedric the Entertainer Presents, xxiii, 100–101, 103, 104 Chappelle, Dave, xxiii–xxiv, 102. See also Chappelle’s Show Chappelle’s Show, xxiii, 102, 104. See also Chappelle, Dave Chitlin’ Circuit, xxvii, 1, 25, 17, 40, 96 Chong, Larry (character), 93–97 Chris Rock Show, The, xxiii Clerow Wilson and the Miracle of P.S. 14, 26

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Index

Clerow Wilson’s Great Escape, 26 Colgate Comedy Hour, The, 38, 39 comedy-variety, and aesthetic of ambivalence, 36, 47 (see also ambivalence, aesthetic of: in variety form); in 1970s television, 3–4; examples of, xxiii, xxix, 19; non-naturalistic performance in, 44, 52, 104; segmented structure of, 12, 42, 61; history of, 15, 18–19 Conway, Tim, 21–22, 45, 57. See also Tim Conway Show, The Cosby, Bill, 45. See also Bill Cosby Show, The Cosell, Howard, 81–83

126

Darin, Bobby, 21–22 David Frost Show, The, 7 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 37–41, Dean Martin Show, The, 1 Don Knotts Show, The, 4. See also Knotts, Don drag. See Geraldine (character) Eastman, Max. See Enjoyment of Laughter, The Ed Sullivan Show, The, 1 Enjoyment of Laughter, The, 24, 28, 75 Feldon, Barbara, 23 Flip Wilson Show, The: audience address of, 20, 47, 80–81, 105; close-ups in, 85–93, 96; compared to All in the Family, 7; critical reception of, xx–xxii; debut of, xi–xiv; popular reception of, xv–xvii, 16, 20, 27, 29, 33, 84; promotion by

NBC, 16–18, 25–26, 30; studio audience for, 81–85, 88–89, 92–97. See also ambivalence, aesthetic of; comedy-variety; Wilson, Flip Foucault, Michel, 60 Foxx, Redd, 10, 93–97 Freddie the Playboy (character), 61–62, 86–88, 90–92 Frost, David, 7–8 genealogy, 99, 103 Geraldine (character), xxi, 7–8, 63–74 Get Smart, 23 Gitlin, Todd, 3, 14. See also relevancy Glenn, Susan A., 42 Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour, The, 4 Good Times, 40 Goulet, Robert, 27 Gray, Herman, xxiv Hall, Stuart, 105–6 Harper, Phillip Brian, 59, 66 In Living Color, xxiii, xxiv, 71, 103–4 I Spy, 2 Jenkins, Henry, 41, 78–79 Johnny Cash Show, The, 4 Johnson, E. Patrick, 66, 71–72 Julia, 2, 59. See also Carroll, Diahann Killer (character), 8, 70, 72 Knotts, Don, 45, 55–56, 57. See also Don Knotts Show, The

MacDonald, J. Fred, xxi, 4–5, Martin, 64, 71, 103 Mary Tyler Moore Show, The, 3 M*A*S*H, 3 McMahon, Ed, 53 McQueen, Butterfly, 63 mimicry, and pastiche, 51, 56–57, 90–91, 116n. 18; and vaudeville, 37–44, 46 minstrelsy, xxvi, 4; and audience, 78–79; and race, 33, 36, 47. See also Williams and Walker; ambivalence, aesthetic of Mod Squad, The, 2 Nat King Cole Show, The, 2 pastiche, 52, 54, 56–57, 74 performance. See Flip Wilson Show, The; mimicry; minstrelsy; realism; vaudeville performativity, 42, 46, 62, 66 Pryor, Richard, 45, 55–56 race: and gender, 70–71; integration, 21; interracial unions, 11–14, 83–84; television representations of, 2–3, 6, 15, 16–17. See also blackness realism, 43, 47, 59–60 reception studies, 85, 106 relevancy, 3–4, 7, 14. See also

Gitlin, Todd Reverend Leroy (character), xviii–xx, 48, 51–52 Richard Pryor Show, xxiii, 104. See also Pryor, Richard Rickles, Don, 86–89, 90–91, 92 Room 222, 2, 59 Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, xvii, 19, 69 Sammy Davis, Jr. Show, The, 2. See also Davis, Sammy, Jr. Sanford and Son, 52, 95 Saturday Night Live, xxix signifyin’, 60 Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The, xvii, 18–19, 79 South Park, xxix Star Trek, 13 Texaco Star Theater, 38 Tim Conway Show, The, 21. See also Conway, Tim TOBA circuit, 38, 40. See also vaudeville Tomlin, Lily, 10–13, 43–44, 69–70; as Edith Ann, 43–44; as Ernestine, 70–71 Today Show, The, 105 Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The, 1, 24 TV-Radio Mirror, 67 Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, 103 variety, 3–4, See also comedyvariety; ambivalence, aesthetic of vaudeville: female performers and, 42, 43; history of, xxvi–xxvii; and mimicry, 40–41; and

Index

Lattimer, Marvin (character), 45, 52–54 Lentz, Kirsten Marthe, 59 Leslie Uggams Show, The, 2, 119–20n. 10 liberalism: corporate, xxv, 20; white, 27, 29–30, 89–90 Lott, Eric, 78–79

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Index

vaudeville (continued) realism, 58, 60; and variety, 15,78–79; Wife Swap, xxix, 105 Will and Grace, xxix, 105 Williams and Walker, xxvi–xxvii, 33–36, 48–49

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Wilson, Flip: biography, 25; early appearances, 1–2, rumors about sexuality, 67–69; stage persona, 24, 28, 58; stylistic influences, 44 Wynn, Ed, 63 Ziegfeld Follies, xxvii