The Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Masculinity

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THE BUFFOON MEN: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD COMEDIANS AND MASCULINITY

SCOTT DANIEL BALCERZAK

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2008

For my mother, who gave me Abbott and Costello

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I thank my committee chair Maureen Turim for her support and guidance with this dissertation and all my professional ventures at the University of Florida. I am also grateful to the other members of my supervisory committee, Scott Nygren, Susan

Hegemen, and Nora Alter, all of whom provided assistance with this project and other scholarly pursuits. I also thank the Alumni Graduate Program and the Department of English for the opportunity to teach and research film comedy. Heartfelt thanks go out to the many colleagues

and friends who supported my work throughout the years, especially the students of my spring

2008 Classic Hollywood Comedy seminar for their inspiring insights and enthusiasm. Finally, I

wish to acknowledge my mother and my late father for their loving encouragement throughout

my academic career.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... 4

ABSTRACT...... 6

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE COMIC MASK...... 8

2 W.C. FIELDS AS MALE ICON ...... 26

West Meets Fields: How Do the Icons Differ?...... 29 Gender Classification and Comedians...... 38 Fields as Con Man: Masquerades of Masculinity...... 46 Fields as Husband: Breakdown of the Familial Order...... 57 Conclusion ...... 69

3 EDDIE CANTOR UNIVERSALIZES THE NEBBISH...... 76

The “Feminine” Jewish Male: Resistance and Adaptation...... 82 Cantor as Populist Nebbish...... 92 A Pre-Oedipal “Eddie-Pus”: Cantor and Women...... 101 Blackface and the Whitefaced Nebbish...... 107 Conclusion ...... 118

4 THE VOICE AND BODY OF JACK BENNY ...... 125

Benny and His Radio World...... 130 The ‘Masochism Bit:’ Benny as Radio/Male Subject ...... 137 “Picture Jokes”: Voice and Body on the Radio...... 146 The Radio Voice on Film ...... 154 Conclusion ...... 168

5 THE COMEDY DUO AND QUEERING THE FRATERNITY...... 175

Man/Man Couplings Onscreen and Fraternal Myths...... 180 Laurel and Hardy: The Comedy Duo as Queer ...... 188 Two Popular Variations on the Duo ...... 201 Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army...... 208 Conclusion ...... 222

6 BEYOND CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD / BEYOND THE BOYS CLUB ...... 229

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 252

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

THE BUFFOON MEN: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD COMEDIANS AND MASCULINITY

Scott Balcerzak

August 2008

Chair: Maureen Turim Major: English

This study provides an alternative understanding of Classic Hollywood’s depictions of

masculinity through an analysis of 1930s comedians. These figures initiated what I call the

masculine comedic, an entertainment trend for much of the 20th century consisting of a popular

fraternity of male comedians that aggressively excludes women. While certain female performers such as Mae West challenge this trend, they tend to be the exception that proves the rule. In contrast to other types of mainstream cinema, films of the masculine comedic provide a valid history of the cultural undercurrents driving American male identity. In each of my

chapters, I explore a different current that greatly defines this alternative narrative, from the

economic to the ethnic to the technological to the fraternal. The first chapter examines W.C.

Fields as an ironic male icon who can be seen as a telling contrast to Mae West’s iconic position

as feminist icon. The second chapter considers ethnic influences upon the masculine comedic in

the form of Eddie Cantor’s influential progression from a Jewish stereotype onstage to a

‘whitefaced’ version of a ‘nebbish’ onscreen. I then examine technological influence through

radio’s effect by analyzing Jack Benny’s on-air ‘queer’ voice and its only partly successful

adaptation to cinematic stardom. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of fraternal myths

as they relate to the queered relationships highlighted in three popular comedy duos: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. All these comedians illustrate a complex range of comedic commentaries on masculine ideals and expose the fragilities of gender performance itself. As such, they reveal the often peculiar, yet revelatory, relationship between masculinity identity and comedy as it still permeates throughout much of popular culture.

INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE COMIC MASK

He is the average American upon whose simple features life has placed a vaguely comic mask. He is the surprised and blinking troll entangled in the details of his day, who fights to get into crowded elevators, who sometimes falls down a flight of steps, who, in short, is forever raising his head out of what the alarmists call the debacle of modern civilization to crack a joke. -J.P. McEvoy (Curtis 159)

In 1925, cartoonist J.P. McEvoy wrote a show for Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld

Jr. based on the types of families regularly found in the newspaper funny pages called The Comic

Supplement (of American Life). His star was W.C. Fields, who would develop into one of

America’s most popular and problematic comedians with, among other roles, film variations on the henpecked husband that he perfected onstage. McEvoy’s description of Fields’ character is telling, since the comedian often is presented in film as a supposedly average American male only distinguished by the addition of a “vaguely comic mask,” even if this mask could be alcoholic, bitter, and misanthropic at times. This original aspiration behind Fields’ characterization fits neatly into definitions of character comedy found in Henri Bergson’s

Laughter (1900), itself an influential work written at the dawn of a century when the comedian reached new heights of popularity through the spread of cinema, radio, and television. In his final chapter, after analyzing humor in situations and words, Bergson turns his attention to the comic within character, relating his general thesis on the automated and mechanical aspects of humor as a social construct to the individual human subject. To Bergson, it can be argued that

“all character is comic” since it contains a universal “mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork,” that ready-made human attribute in all of us that “causes us to imitate ourselves.” As he profoundly suggests, “Every comic character is a type” (156).

In describing Fields’ character, McEvoy suggests a similar universality in the type of the

henpecked husband. This is a comic character meant to be a representative subject for a large

portion of the audience of average Americans, exposing through lampoon the “debacle of

modern civilization.” Yet, McEvoy’s description reveals a profound oversight when viewing

comedians as reflecting and, in turn, exposing the farce of society. For this scenario to work,

there must be such a thing as an “average” American. For this to work in particular relationship

to Fields, this average American must be white, heterosexual, and, above all, male. As such,

McEvoy’s description forces us to ask a difficult question in relationship to gender identity.

Who is the comedian and what makes him so popular?

In America, the comedian greatly defined entertainment in the 20th century, making

comic characters historical benchmarks in the forms of such instantly recognizable names as

Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Groucho

Marx, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, and

numerous others. But despite this major tradition in popular entertainment, locating a realistic

gender identity for any comedian is a difficult task since many of the critical responses to such

broadly comic figures start by defining them as wholly unrealistic. In these readings, comedians

are actors without an emotionally-invested audience. The first important book-length academic

work on film humor, Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (1973), suggests

that a detachment grounds our responses to the comedian. Despite displaying some obvious

cinephilic love for Chaplin, Keaton, and others throughout the work, Mast writes: “That we do

not believe in comedy’s reality, that we consciously recognize the imitation as imitation,

produces an intellectual-emotional distance from the work that is the essential comic response”

(15).

Mast’s contention is rooted in comedy’s longstanding reputation as an emotionally- detached form of pleasure. Classical theories of humor were based in aesthetic classifications seeing comedy as the Aristotlean antithesis of tragedy, with emotional catharsis at tragedy’s core while intellectual fulfillment defines comedy. Thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer discussed humor through the suggestion of an intellectualized exercise of locating connections between unrelated ideas, not necessarily through any deeper emotional or psychological processes.

Thomas Hobbes and Alexander Bain saw any relationship with comic persons as based mainly in our deriding laughter, in our feelings of superiority over the comic subject. Even Bergson, with a more complete view of humor’s complicated role in society, promotes an emotional detachment as defining a comic environment: “Indifference is its [the comic’s] natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion” (63). Only with Sigmund Freud, with his direct correlation of jokework to the subject’s unconscious mind in Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious (1905), do we start to see the definite possibility of a deeply-rooted investment with the onscreen comedian. Yet even this proposition is problematic as Freud bases many of his definitions within the audience’s hostile or aggressive drives.

So how does one begin a gender study of the Hollywood comedian if the figure is simply the unrealistic clown meant to be dismissed by audiences? Can we understand this figure as something more profound? In truth, comedians are movie stars in the strictest sense as designated by Richard Dyer’s landmark Stars, having audience-recognized personas carried over from film to film. As one of the earliest examples, Charlie Chaplin grew in popularity by refining his Little Tramp character from shorts to features. Beyond the silent era, the comedian was usually a performer with a clearly-defined personality from another medium. Bob Hope remained popular from the 1930s till the 90s, through vaudeville to radio to film to television. In

a Bergsonian sense, comedians do seem to play with types, those mechanical pieces of human clockwork running with or counter to society’s rhythms. Groucho Marx is the sarcastic

antiauthoritarian. Jack Benny is the vain cheapskate. In McEvoy’s stage show, Fields is the

befuddled husband. But I want to open this study by suggesting such a classification is deeply

limiting, since a ‘type’ implicates only a surface characterization and dismisses a real emotional

attachment toward comedians on the part of viewer. To the public, the comedian is real enough

to make us want to revisit the same persona in film after film, if not even week after week on

popular radio or television broadcasts. With America’s century-long love affair with the

comedian, something must exist beyond simply the Bergsonian suggestion of detached

intellectual enjoyment followed by the emotional release of laugher. Identification inescapably becomes a central component to their appeal. With this understanding, I want to present the comedian as something more complex than found in earlier approaches. I will consider the audience's relation to the comedian as a representation of male subjectivity. Through this approach, I present the comedian as a window not only into culture’s changing views toward gender, but also into the individual subjectivity of sexual identity itself.

Over the various histories of Hollywood written and rewritten, some basic, yet often ambiguous, terminology appears when discussing the comedian. The Hollywood comedian is a clown. He is a trickster. He is a buffoon. Through all these discussions, one thing is clear. The

Hollywood comedian is a he. Admittedly, this conception found significant exceptions in the popularity of such figures as Mae West, Gracie Allen, and Lucille Ball. But due to the overriding masculine trend, which make these notable exceptions seem to “prove the rule,” I feel it critical to question what the male comedian means as a gendered subject. My study approaches this performer as a masculine figure by examining what his often distorted

sexualization means onscreen and as a cultural force. These films offer characterizations

illustrating a complex range of subversions of a masculine ideal, extending from mockery to

sympathy toward the unmasculine. Presentations range from the homosexualized to the

desexualized to the puckish hypersexualized to the emasculated, with various incarnations in

between. What remains a fascinating constant is how these comedians employ their personas to explore a wide variety of subverted mutations within an Oedipal framework, providing ironic commentaries on the phallic structures of Hollywood narratives and other dominant American discourses. By understanding what makes a persona comic, I will provide a clearer view of hegemonic maleness and, in turn, a deeper understanding of humor and gender’s grossly underexplored relationship. Therefore, this dissertation is an alternative narrative of Hollywood masculinity, one that uncovers the complexities of gender identity through the most unlikely of sources. In what follows, I unmask the comedian and show how he reveals the fragilities of all gender performance.

Classic Hollywood and the Comedian Comedy

To understand the influence of the male comedian in its clearest context, this study largely confines itself to 1930s popular American cinema. With this concentration, I will relate the comedian to the stage and radio influence upon film during this period, all of which created a filmic text that was culturally and technologically in flux. It is the comedian’s far-reaching significance within this expansive environment that created an American entertainment trend that

I dub the masculine comedic, a popular fraternity of comedians on and off screen that aggressively excludes women. While previous decades might have set the stage and proceeding decades saw the phenomenon continue to flourish, 30s film provides us with its most clear and influential incarnation, since it cultivated the multi-medium entertainment environment of the

20th century. Not coincidentally, it is also a decade historically fraught with masculine anxieties caused by supposed “affronts” from various social stages. To provide just a rudimentary list to be explored in more detail in the upcoming chapters, these historical considerations include the following: the sexually-transgressive Jazz Age, the financial uncertainty of the Depression, the influence of European immigrant populations, the racist fear of the African-American northern migration, the traumatic memories of World War I, the threat of World War II, and other points challenging to the perception of white male straightness as hegemony. Thus, the modern comedian’s birth coincides with a period of significant challenges to gendered orders and, as the following chapters will show, this correspondence is certainly no coincidence.

With the onset of sound during the late 1920s, Hollywood had to look for new types of movie stars and turned to other mediums already defined by talking. In the realm of comedy films, this move proved especially important, creating long-lasting effects on popular entertainment. During this period, the movie industry emphasized performers like Fields, Eddie

Cantor, Wheeler and Woolsey, Joe E. Brown, Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope, who all had careers reaching through various mediums of popular entertainment. As cultural artifacts, their films are examples of early sound cinema attempting to define itself by dipping into the talent pools of vaudeville, Broadway, and radio. In his impressive analysis of the period, What

Made Pistachio Nuts? (1992), Henry Jenkins labels many of these comedies as incorporating a vaudevillian aesthetic and, therefore, existing as a type of “anarchistic comedy.” He defines these films as anarchistic in two key ways. First, they “press against traditional film practice, moving from the classical Hollywood cinema’s emphasis upon linearity and causality toward a more fragmented and episodic narrative.” Second, they “often celebrate the collapse of social order and the liberation of the creativity and impulsiveness of their protagonist.” Thus, Jenkins

designates these motion pictures as anarchistic in “both form and content” (22). As former

vaudevillians, many of these comedians belong, at least partly, to this tradition because they

created comedies defined by fragmentation and collapsing social order that served as fitting

cinematic venues for an established vaudeville aesthetic consisting of sketches and routines.

Jenkins’s classification provides a historically valid understanding of established genre definitions for comedian comedies, films with the prime rationale of showcasing the star performer over narrative. As Steve Seidman writes in his genre analysis Comedian Comedy: A

Tradition in Hollywood Film (1981), such productions are formed by two seemingly contradictory impulses:

(1) the maintenance of the comedian’s position as an already recognizable performer with a clearly defined extrafictional personality (and in the case of comedians from 1930 on, a highly visible extrafictional personality); and (2) the depiction of the comedian as a comic figure who inhabits a fictional universe where certain problems must be confronted and resolved. (3)

As this dichotomy illustrates, the impulse to showcase the comedian remains central to both the genre’s formal and narrative construction. This lack of narrative integrity in most comedian comedies often results in an outright dismissal of them as providing images of masculinity that are worthy of study. In her 1977 book on movie masculinity, Joan Mellen excuses such personalities as useful filmic depictions, contending that while the “Marx Brothers and W.C.

Fields contributed a zany tone to thirties life, they were less male images than explorers of the

comic absurdity of social institutions.” Thus, such comedians “might be perfunctorily lecherous,

but they were not treated as models of male behavior” (96-7).

The Comedian and Gender Identity

Of course, Classic Hollywood comedians rarely are meant to be models of standard behavior. But does this mean they should be dismissed as depictions of sexual identification?

Research particularly concerning sexualization of the comedian is limited in comparison to other

screen figures, though some scholarship has broached the subject in intriguing ways. Kathleen

Rowe’s The Unruly Woman (1995) provides an important examination of women who have broken through the gender bias of the masculine comedian to challenge its dominance. Along with this type of scholarship, other specific examinations of rebellious female figures like Mae

West, Gracie Allen, and Roseanne Barr are important since they imply a greater oppressive masculine comedic order, though such an order has never been fully defined. In direct reference to masculinity, some notable collections have considered the comedian in specific (though, being collections, somewhat eclectic) sexualized terms, such as some essays in

Comedy/Cinema/Theory (1991) edited by Andrew Horton. Here, in her essay “Sometimes I Feel

Like a Motherless Child: Comedy and Matricide,” Lucy Fischer examines the comedian as a masculine model almost by default, through exploring the trend of figurative and literal deaths of mother figures in comedian comedies. The collection also contains Scott Bukatman’s questioning of Jerry Lewis’ masculine identity in “Paralysis in Motion: Jerry Lewis as a Man,” where he compares the frantic Lewis to “the nineteenth century female hysteric” (193).

Also of note, in the introduction to Comedy/Cinema/Theory, Horton designates two schools of film comedy by focusing directly on Freudian developmental terms, which could be employed for a deeper gender analysis of comedians:

In the light of development in psychoanalytic theory, however, it seems more useful to speak of Oedipal (accommodation, compromise, social integration) comedy and pre- Oedipal (wish fulfillment, dreams) comedy. Freud speaks of the comic as a sudden adult regaining of “the lost laughter of childhood.” (10)

Horton specifies comedies dealing with romance and thus “personal compromise and social integration” as in the Oedipal tradition which is represented in the final marriage act of these types of narratives (11). This comedy can include such romantic figures as Cary Grant, but also

15 involves broader comedic actors such as Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin, whose films often have an ironic commentary on such romantic resolutions. Pre-Oedipal turns “to those comic filmmakers less involved with the ‘emotional’ realm of Oedipal comedy.” Horton ties this distinction to comedies “less rooted in the everyday world” and traditionally “labeled ‘farce,’

‘slap-stick,’ and even ‘anarchistic comedy’” (12). Included in this category are the childish antics of the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello.

Problematically, Horton’s Freudian dichotomy fails to completely work when considering the male comedian as a sexual subject. It mirrors too many popular approaches to onscreen comedy that have long tainted previous scholarship on comedians with the two categories running parallel with the aesthetic distinctions of “high” and “low” comedy.

Situations and narrative define the Oedipal comedy of romance, while gags designate the Pre-

Oedipal humor of slapstick. As suggested by these titles, such distinctions signify an unfortunate ranking of the two categories, probably based in the antiquated contention that formal narrative space onscreen indicates quality. As Seidman observes, many comedian comedies, which privilege the performer over story, are counteractive to the hermetic spaces of narrative cinema, something firmly established within “high” romantic comedy. Most comedian comedies are “comprised of a more open and expansive narrative structure which acknowledges the spectator, narrative exposition that is ‘spoiled’ by actors who ‘step out’ of character, a foregrounding of its marks of production, essential artificiality, and a deconstruction of its signifying practice” (55). A clear example appears in the films of the Marx Brothers, which feature Groucho turning to give asides directly to the audience, thus heightening the artificiality of the onscreen space. This distinction commonly appears in 30s comedies where vaudevillians accustomed to performing skits and monologues on-stage were essentially molding much of the

popular entertainment. But as the upcoming chapters will show, while the fragmented and

anarchistic nature of comedian comedies appeals to impulsiveness, the character-based qualities

of comedians can still remain within Oedipal schemas by centrally incorporating sexual

identification into their personas. In other words, defining the character/persona through only

the formal structure of the film proves dangerously dismissive of the comedian’s fuller social

connotations, especially since he is an actor so heavily based in extra-diegetic significance.

Notable gender readings also appear in Frank Krutnik’s collection Hollywood

Comedians: The Film Reader (2000). Here, Steven Cohan’s piece on the homosexualized

relationship of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby addresses some crucial issues of sexual identification

in the comedy duo, something I will examine within a broader scope later in this dissertation.

Joanna E. Rapf provides a feminist perspective on Jerry Lewis (that magnet of gender readings) which focuses on the “masculine ideal uncomfortably deflated” in his films (148). Building off of Jenkins’ designation of anarchistic comedy, Krutnik introduces the collection by suggesting the limitless possibilities of Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous analysis of the “carnivalesque,” attributes of body and behavior that resemble the exhibited grotesque of the medieval carnivals of Europe.

In specific historical conditions, these carnivals provided a dynamic popular expression that reversed prevailing social hierarchies. In direct relationship to sexuality and other social classifications, Krutnik sees the comedian’s body and behavior as defined within this dynamic as s/he “serves as both emissary of and scapegoat for counter-culture impulses.” As such, “casting comedians as eccentric individuals who are in conflict with the demands of living by the rules, the films set up numerous opportunities for them to disrupt conventional procedures regulating activities of work, communication, gender and sexuality” (15). Thus, Krutnik suggests a view of the comedian that is partly Bergsonian in nature with the figure as clearly working against social

formalities, yet also working within these classifications as a Bakhtinesque mutation of the

“normal.” But, as will be seen in upcoming chapters, this proposition has its own limitations

when applied directly to gender, since hegemonic behaviors (existing, of course, beyond the

carnival) suggest performance as well. As such, the comedian comedy must contend with various levels of performance, often simultaneously confronting and conforming to ideologies that define social parameters.

So film studies has provided worthwhile digressions into questioning comedians as gender models, especially with a figure as sexually confounding as Jerry Lewis. But despite these points of research, something profound has been overlooked in defining a widespread tradition of popular comedians with unique sexual distinctions. A recognition of a malecentric comedic order feels conspicuously absent in a scholarly environment that, starting in the 90s, began to vibrantly question masculinity onscreen. Following the influx of feminist film study after Laura Mulvey’s designation of the “male gaze” in 1975, initial forays into the study of cinematic (white) maleness sometimes felt like an afterthought of the feminist wave, with only a few key articles such as Pam Cook’s “Masculinity in Crisis” (1982) and Steve Neale’s

“Masculinity as Spectacle” (1983) making any impact. As such, the stage was set for a declaration of masculinity as the great overlooked “elephant in the room” of gender studies. This was something certainly suggested by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s co-edited Screening the

Male: Exploring Masculinies in Hollywood Cinema (1993), a well-regarded collection that suggested the post-Mulveyian influx of gender scholarship had yet to fully define the complexities of male activeness onscreen. The collection featured initial forays into cinematic masculinity by scholars that would define the issue in the following decades such as Cohan himself, who wrote Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies of the Fifties (1997); Susan

Jeffords, writer of Hard Bodies: Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994); Chris Holmlund, who

authored Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (2002); and Peter

Lehman, who wrote Running Scarred: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body

(1993) and edited Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, and Culture (2001).

Not surprisingly, all of this scholarship coincided with the rise of queer studies in film as

well, with Vito Russo’s popular The Celluloid Closet (1981) initiating the concept of an

alternative homosexual history of Hollywood. Later, queer readings of supposedly “straight”

texts and, notably, studies of gay film found more complex intellectual takes with Richard

Dyer’s Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (1991), Alexander Doty’s Making

Things Perfectly Queer (1993) and Flaming Classics (2000), and Robert Lang’s Masculine

Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film (2002). All of this meant the study of cinematic

masculinity now adopted deeper understandings of gender itself, especially of supposed heterosexual “normalcy” as performance. This awareness certainly becomes clear well beyond film within cultural studies, following the publication of Judith Butler’s groundbreaking Gender

Trouble (1990) and her follow-up Bodies That Matter (1993), which both posit gender as socially-conditioned constructs with, at best, a superficial relationship with biological difference.

Overall, the work of notable gender theorists began providing a richer examination of masculinity, often aligning male gender performance with the limitations of social restrictiveness.

Of particular note for this dissertation, Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins

(1992) examines masculinities deviating from the social norm within a variety of cultural products, including key cinematic examples ranging from directors William Wyler to Rainer

Fassbinder. Silverman provides a considerably more thorough theoretical basis for examining

masculinity in the context of gender performance than initially seen in the earliest works of Cook

and Neale, who theorized maleness onscreen as something actively disavowed by viewers.

Silverman proposes the definite potential for a wider conception of masculinity onscreen, one with appeals to various disregarded types of male moviegoers:

The kinds of male subjectivity which will be anatomized here are, moreover, precisely those which open in a variety of ways onto the domain of femininity. To state the case slightly differently, the masculinities which this book will interrogate, and even in certain instances work to eroticize or privilege, are those which not only acknowledge but embrace castration, alterity, and specularity. (3)

With theorists like Silverman, deeper socio-historical definitions driving male performance are forced to the forefront, suggesting a more fragile and multifarious foundation for the phallic structures dictating cinematic worlds. Recognizing Silverman’s proposition of a cinema with classifications of maleness that embrace “castration, alterity, and specularity,” my study proposes a wider analysis of Classic Hollywood comedians as something truly exciting in its possibilities.

I present the masculine comedic as a traceable, alternative narrative of maleness that explores cultural factors that have been overlooked by previous studies.

The Masculine Comedic

In what follows, I will provide a theoretical and historical basis for understanding the masculine comedic during the decade of its greatest proliferation. As might be clear by the scholarship briefly outlined above, this study examines the comedian as a convergence of culturally-dictated and theoretically-valid forces, all of which drive the images of comic maleness we see onscreen. Dominated by Bergson and Freud in the 20th century, humor studies must be understood as a basis for pleasure when watching the comedian defy or conform to gender classifications. But I must additionally recognize the importance of genre definitions of the comedian comedy as well, itself born out of the influences of gender portrayals in vaudeville

and radio. Also, in a wider sense, the historical stage of America in the 1930s, along with the

individual comedian’s background and artistic influences, must be taken into consideration as

nourishing the total onscreen persona.

While “The Buffoon Men” provides an alternative understanding of cinema’s gendered

orders, it does so by placing these films within a wider social context. As multiple cinematic

examples will show, the comedian is a component of the Hollywood machine, but he is not of

Hollywood and its driving forces. His image was born out of key cultural legacies often

disavowed by other forms of popular entertainment. These include the usually unseen stories of

the economically-depressed, the ethnically-repressed, and the queerly ‘othered.’ Such

underlying influences often existed beyond the comedian’s conscious motivations as a performer

who was simply out to get a laugh. But from an analytical viewpoint, the comedian says

volumes about social definitions of maleness. Through a close examination of key comedians

from the 1930s, the story that emerges proves enlighteningly complicated in comparison to the

simplistic myths of masculinity perpetuated by the hegemony. As such, in contrast to other types of mainstream cinema, films of the masculine comedic provide a valid history of the cultural

undercurrents driving American male identity. In each of my chapters, I explore a different

current that greatly defines this alternative narrative, from the economic to the ethnic to the

technological to the fraternal.

The first chapter examines W.C. Fields as a telling contrast to Mae West’s position as a

feminist icon. Fields is not a figure of gender rebellion like his female counterpart in My Little

Chickadee (1940), but a performer of buffoonish masculine traits. As such, he provides a

foundation for understanding the masculine comedic as a theoretical commentary on idealized

masculinities. Notably, he has two major variations within his onscreen persona – a confidence

man, in such films as Chickadee and The Old Fashioned Way (1934), and a family man, in It’s a

Gift (1934) and Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935). Each of these provide different

commentaries on male identity, with the con man showing a definite sexuality that is undercut by

his failed attempts to masquerade as somebody more traditionally masculine and heroic. These

botched impersonations only suggest the surrounding phallic order itself as “performance” as

well. Fields’ domestic comedies employ longstanding stereotypes of nagging wives and marital

combat, but place these into a decidedly Depression-era context by comically exaggerating the

‘normative’ family’s lack of foundation in an economically-unstable America. The chapter ends

by examining how Fields even challenges the familial order in fundamentally Freudian terms by

perversely exploring the violent and incestuous desires beneath the surface of his father

characters. In essence, I open on Fields as a model of the masculine comedic since his films so

clearly address issues of male marginality that can be analyzed through theoretically-universal

definitions. After this, I move onto distinctions of comedic maleness based more in ethnic,

cultural, and historical specifics.

The second chapter posits the Jewish nebbish, which ironically appropriates the

stereotype of the ‘feminized’ Jewish male, as a paramount influence upon cinematic depictions

of comedic manhood throughout the 20th century. As a major influence upon comedians ranging from Bob Hope to Woody Allen, Eddie Cantor’s transition from the Broadway stage to

Hollywood proves central in understanding how a wider “de-Semitization” in the entertainment industry removed Jewish identification from the performer, while notably universalizing the nebbish beyond the Yiddish caricature. In the films Palmy Days (1931), Roman Scandals

(1933), and Kid Millions (1934), I explore how the “whitefaced” performances of Cantor illustrate the most problematic elements of Jewish-American assimilation as certain cultural

22 myths, such as a Jewish male “lack,” remained on the surface, while a clear ethnic identity was submerged to the point of erasure. Throughout the 1930s, Cantor’s persona was presented as populist yet Pre-Oedipal and non-sexual, even among the sexualized musical spectacles of the

Goldwyn Girls found in his films. Most problematically, this assimilative history reconfigures the stage tradition of blackface in major musical numbers, which ironically show how Cantor’s own ethnic whitewashing actually heightens the Hollywood perception of black masculinity as

‘other.’ As such, I examine the evolution of the nebbish as part of the complicated history of racial identity in Hollywood film.

The third chapter considers voice’s role in comedian comedy by examining radio superstar Jack Benny’s on-air voice and its only partly successful adaptation to cinematic stardom. I first examine The Jack Benny Program’s (1932-55) enormous popularity during the

1930s and its depictions of historically queered maleness, itself a reflection of the embrace of

“deco dandyism” as a fantasy existence during the Depression. Through this world, Benny’s persona developed into an often-degraded unmasculine figure, yet one with the ability to serve as a beloved point of identification for a larger disenfranchised male population. This is a position actually facilitated by the medium of radio itself, in which the bodiless voice exists within more transcendent and comforting spaces than in sound cinema. I then analyze two motion pictures that feature Benny portraying himself, Buck Benny Rides Again and Love Thy Neighbor (both

1940), two adaptations of his radio program. Through these films, I contemplate how radio during the period objectified the comedian’s voice in film, not in an erotic sense, but as a familiar and comforting “comedy object.” These appeals to intimacy and familiarity ultimately defined much of the course of American humor as it was heavily influenced by broadcast technologies.

My final chapter focuses on the myths of fraternity and white male brotherhood, which materialize in such American institutions as the military and social clubs like the Freemasons. I examine the three popular comedy duos of Laurel and Hardy, Wheeler and Woolsey, and Abbott and Costello as ironically subversive versions of homosocial male companionship that push the boundaries of male bonding into queer territories. Focusing on the film Sons of the Desert

(1934), this chapter explores how Laurel and Hardy prove the queerest of onscreen duos as they overtly satirize male societies and the sexual dynamics of male/male companionship in direct contrast to their heterosexual marriages. I examine the military comedy in Wheeler and

Woolsey’s Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) and Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates (1941), with each film featuring a queered subtext based in the cultural anxieties created by the memories of

World War I and the threat of World War II. Through these two films, I show how Hollywood comedian comedy transforms in a relatively short period of time to, at first, provide an ironic commentary on the masculine mythologies of WWI and then to eventually embrace the fraternal myths heavily promoted by the threat of WWII. As this suggests, queered male companionship existed as a fundamental part of the Depression era masculine comedic, even as it changed with the times to address larger narratives of male bonding.

As is evident in my summary of chapters, The Buffoon Men dissects comedians as sexualized subjects of great influence, encouraging the perception of the performer himself as simultaneously being of and beyond the cinema. Through realizing these films as establishing and facilitating the masculine comedic as a social force beyond the screen, we understand the comedian as both a sexualized subject and, culturally, an empowered performer providing a history of the complicated social forces defining maleness during the 1930s and beyond. Thus, this dissertation illuminates the often peculiar, yet revelatory, relationship between masculinity

24 and comedy as it once and still permeates throughout much of popular culture. Only after we fully contemplate this association can we begin to understand a now century-long cinematic love affair with the comedian, a populist fascination with male figures notably performed as not only buffoons but as points of identification for the male audience. We can understand not only what makes W.C. Fields’ henpecked husband so comic, but also what makes him so essential.

CHAPTER 1 W.C. FIELDS AS MALE ICON

I see that the days of chivalry are not over. –W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940)

Mae West’s image as a sexually flamboyant alpha-female establishes her as a paramount

figure in feminist film criticism. This position partly emerges out of the control she wielded over

her popular image in the malecentric Hollywood of the 1930s as she established her

moneymaking abilities with her first two films at Paramount, thus gaining a control over the

creative direction of her vehicles to follow. Beyond such a rare historical distinction, her

onscreen persona’s aggressive sexual power ultimately established her as an icon within many

feminist and gay circles. This combination of onscreen and offscreen authority, both dictated by

assertive sexuality, turned her into an appealing cultural sign and, years after her death, resulted

in multiple noteworthy studies in the forms of critical biographies and feminist film critiques.i

One of the clearest indications of West’s alpha-femaleness appears in her ability to largely outshine her male costars onscreen, an impressive feat considering they include such popular leading men as a young Cary Grant in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (1933) and

Randolph Scott in Go West, Young Man (1936). Despite any allure of the male costar, such films always exist as West showcases, a trend that continued in such late-in-life oddities as Myra

Breckinridge (1970) and Sextette (1978), and even with her first film appearance in a scene- stealing supporting role in Night After Night (1932).

But within the history of West’s sexual authority onscreen, there remains one peculiar film in which the male costar does not feel relegated to a secondary position. With comedian

W.C. Fields, My Little Chickadee (1940) provides West with an equally-billed costar unlike any other. After acquiring both actors from Paramount, Universal Studios promoted the star pairing

as a way to double their capital. In later interviews, West never included this film among her

favorites and, basically, lambasted her shared billing with a comedian whose movies “were B

pictures and in the few big films in which he had appeared he only played cameo roles” (Curtis

412-13). In a way, West was correct in her assessment of Fields’ career since the majority of his films were lower in budget than hers and his appearances in “A” pictures often consisted of supporting roles, such as his Micawber in David Copperfield (1935). Despite the budgets of

Fields’ previous films, looking at My Little Chickadee today, we see that Universal recognized something that West might have wished to dismiss. The film was produced as an event more than anything else, capitalizing upon the meeting of two icons rather than traditional movie stars.

Neither West nor Fields are figures that the public saw as actors where classifications of “A” and

“B” movies would define their appeal. Like West, Fields reached icon status in a variety of ways

– including being caricatured in comic strips, greeting cards, and popular cartoons for Warner

Brothers and Disney Studios. His hard drinking, misanthropic, and often outright dishonest

persona, sometimes softened in the public memory in proceeding decades, ultimately reached its

own impressive levels of iconic status.ii It is fitting that the only film where West fails to

dominate is due to the presence of a competing cultural sign in the form of Fields, an equal

billing to the fullest extent.

But who is W.C. Fields? What can we make of West’s only true male “costar” and his

allure onscreen? Watching the film today, we can see that the studio was correct in viewing

Fields as a complement to West’s own ironic exploration of female sexuality. His alcoholic

blustering and blowhardness are curiously fitting counterpoints to West’s sexual aggression,

which, admittedly, has been lessened by censors by this point in her career. Fields presents the

need to dissect another icon of sexual identification, one that can best be explored though an

analysis of his persona’s own ironic masculine identity. He is a complex amalgam of the core

identity-based issues defining the masculine comedic. I open my study on Fields for the very

reason that he proves so iconic, yet underexplored in a serious critical sense as a masculine figure onscreen. His persona exposes for laughs the key performative elements of masculine identity as existing without foundation, something revealed in a variety of ways throughout this study in different comedians. Yet Fields might be the clearest example of the masculine comedic as a formidable cultural force, clearly showing how the comedian as an icon of offbeat maleness stands in contrast to West’s iconic female authority.

In what follows, I will explore Fields’ onscreen persona as providing illuminating comedic commentaries on masculine ideals. He is a figure on the margins of the phallic order, yet revealing in how he uncovers the classifications of gender through his comic position. Using the traditional constructions of humor, Fields performs a persona that, through failure and rejection, aggressively exposes the conventions of masculinity as unsubstantial and worthy of mockery. In his films, he encompasses a spectrum of comedic traits as a leading man that clearly shows masculine identity as his thematic preoccupation. Through analyzing My Little

Chickadee, The Old Fashioned Way (1934), It’s a Gift (1934), and Man on the Flying Trapeze

(1935), I will show complex alterations within his persona that range from a boisterous blowhard to a timid domestic figure. By employing these two major variations within his persona in his films – the confidence man and family man – he provides two notably different depictions of male identity onscreen. In his con man roles, he explores maleness as a masquerade, providing a definite lampoon of masculine ideals. In his domestic comedies, he moves his narratives into complex amalgams of cathartic fantasies for disenfranchised Depression-era males through the comic mutation of family roles.

Of course, Fields’ relationships with women in his films are of a central concern when

analyzing him as an ironic masculine icon. As will be shown through multiple examples in both

variations on his persona, his narratives dismiss traditional Hollywood sexual interests and

provide transformations of “standard” gender relationships. These include the two most

prevalent examples of being aggressively demeaned by a powerful woman and having barely-

veiled incestuous drives toward his daughter. Throughout both the con man and family man films, Fields’ comedy exposes the fragility of gender performance itself on the cultural stage, exposing the subjectivity of the symbolic laws of sex through narratives of misguided trickery or domestic failure. While his image might never enjoy the empowered reputation of Mae West,

W.C. Fields creates an iconic persona that richly challenges different aspects of gender signification through disempowerment. As artists, both performers wielded great control over their cinematic images and endured constant struggles with studios for creative control. In

Classic Hollywood, they existed as rare genuine instances of “the actor as auteur.” Patrick

McGilligan argues that “under certain circumstances, an actor may influence a film as much as a writer, director, or producer” (199). While this contention can be heavily debated in many productions, both Fields and West actually authored many of their best films, including co- writing the screenplay for My Little Chickadee.iii As such, before I move into the complexities

of the Fields persona as a gendered standalone, it would be useful to dissect it as a direct contrast

to West.

West Meets Fields: How Do the Icons Differ?

In My Little Chickadee, the similar positioning of West and Fields as icons must be

acknowledged as solely defining the appeal of the film. In the American Old West, Flowerbelle

Lee (West) is run out of Little Bend after being caught in a romantic encounter with an outlaw

called the Masked Bandit. On the train out of town, she meets alcoholic con man Cuthbert J.

Twillie (Fields), whom she mistakenly believes to be rich. With the aid of a phony preacher, she

pretends to marry the clueless Twillie for respectability, though the “union” is never

consummated. Arriving in Greasewood City with his supposed bride, Twillie is given the

dubious job of sheriff by unscrupulous town boss Jeff Badger (Joseph Calleia), who has designs

on Lee. Meanwhile, a misunderstanding results in Twillie being mistakenly arrested as the

Masked Bandit, leaving West to brazenly save the day and have her choice of two handsome suitors, neither of whom is Fields. As this narrative suggests, the film allows for performances

heavily relying upon established personality traits tied to West and Fields’ popular personas:

West as the powerful sexual female and Fields as the bumbling drunken con man. Through the

lens of popular humor theory, it becomes tempting to dismiss the two stars’ appearances in this

particular film as living caricatures, possibly unworthy of any gender analysis outside of asking

what is being “mocked.” After all, both Bergson and Freud initially discuss the caricature artists

as masters in the art of exaggeration, craftily intensifying physical and, particularly to Freud,

personality traits for comic effect; and, without a doubt, West and Fields’ art certainly seems

defined by exaggeration. By this point in their careers, both essentially are portraying simplified

versions of past performances from successful solo projects which could be classified as

exaggerations of established personas.iv Even before this, they originally fostered exaggerated

public images based upon ironically skewed gendered dynamics. As such, they locate these

personas through exaggerated personality rather than simple gags, though both exploit the former

at times in their comedy.

Yet are these performances necessarily caricatures or, if so, caricatures of what? By contemplating this question, we can begin to more fully understand gendered comedy as it embraces the comic, that sometimes measureless quality in humorous persons that was more a

preoccupation to Bergson than Freud. Possibly understanding that Bergson attempted to exhaust

the subject just a few years earlier, Freud only devotes his final chapter of Jokes to the comic, yet usefully summarizes the term as something removed from his intricate theories of joke work, stating that, alternately, the comic is exclusively “found in people – in their movements, forms, actions, and traits of character, originally in all probability only in their physical characteristics

but later in their mental ones as well, or as the case may be, in the expression of those

characteristics” (234). As Bergson already had postulated, the comic suggests laughter that

arises initially out of our experiences with social relationships, laughter that “must have a social

signification” (65). Within the performances of both West and Fields, exaggerated physical and

mental qualities materialize through their often caricatured body types, tones of voice, clothing,

and behaviors - elements of comedy eschewing joke structure to embrace the observational and

social necessities of the comic. While gags as specific examples of Freudian joke work remain

significant components of their humor, their comic personalities actually define their appeal to

the mass public and their positions as icons.

But beyond their similar privileging of personality as device over simple gags, Fields

differentiates himself from West by being a clown, a figure of ridicule. As I will show in many

of his most popular films, his characters appear as buffoons defined by a lack of power. This is

something certainly never the case with West, who clearly is not a true caricature since she never

appears as the target of ridicule. Freud writes that caricature “brings about degradation by

emphasizing in the general impression given by the exalted object a single trait which is comic in

itself,” in essence, existing as a potent type of tenacious joke where the figure being exaggerated and what s/he represents are the objects of derision (Jokes 249). Alternately, aligning West with empowerment both on and offscreen removes her from this classification and explains her

popularity as a feminist icon. She exists as one of the comedic “unruly women” discussed in

Kathleen Rowe’s study of female comedians and comedic actresses. Rowe describes these

performers as crossing “the boundaries of a variety of social practices and aesthetic forms,

appearing most vividly in the genres of laughter, or those that share common structures of

liminality and inversion” (19). In particular relationship to She Done Him Wrong (1933), she

suggests West’s societal role as part of a Bakhtinian skewing of social definitions and a

rebellious position embracing a release from hegemonic confines seen through the character’s

manipulation of men:

That performance displays a number of motifs traditionally associated with the unruly woman: a carnivalesque openness toward sexuality; an ironic attitude toward romance; the presentation of herself, especially her gendered self, as visual construct or image, created through a performance of femininity that exaggerates its attributes and thus denaturalizes it; and a comic gender inversion that reduces men to interchangeable sexual objects while acknowledging . . . that men make the rules of the game. (119)

West offers a challenge to the phallic order by crossing boundaries, thus actually adopting ironic aggression in her performances of gender inversion. On the other hand, Fields provides something less empowered in its conception, though still notably subversive in its performance of gender. This appears in his onscreen persona in Chickadee as a caricature, even though his offscreen position as a comedian might best be aligned with the role of the caricature artist.

Fields clearly constructs his humor to provoke an antagonistic and superior stance on the part of the audience. It might seem as if Fields’ buffoonish role could exemplify Freud’s contention that “the comic” can be used for “hostile and aggressive purposes,” which can “make a person comic in order to make him contemptible, to deprive him of his claim of dignity and authority” (234). Certainly, as will be shown in multiple examples, Fields’ characters are often presented as repugnant and powerless. Yet, when considering Fields’ position as an icon, we must remember that he is performing these characteristics within a contract with an audience that

acknowledges or even admires his performances as performances. Freud contends that a person

can produce the comic within oneself through, for example, performing clumsiness or stupidity

as a way to amuse others. This can make the performer seem, on the surface, “ridiculous or contemptible, but [he] may in some circumstances, even achieve admiration.” A true feeling of superiority does not arise in the audience since they acknowledge “that one has only been pretending” (247). While Fields might appeal to the comic in his onscreen humor, his role offscreen allows him the empowered position of a clear “performer” of exaggerated gendered traits. While this acknowledgment of performance, a comical exaggeration of gender roles, is a major similarity between West and Fields, the root of the humor is distinctly different. Unlike

West, Fields presents us with the paradox of an artist who is empowered as an aggressive performer, yet famous for an onscreen persona who is disempowered as a buffoon. He represents the paradox that defines the masculine comedic.

Even upon the first onscreen meeting of West and Fields, differentials of power are clearly highlighted. The scene begins with Fields clumsily making his way through a railcar to sit next to the film’s resident gossip, Mrs. Gideon (Margaret Hamilton), a widowed conservative figure who serves as a sexually-repressed foil to West. After some typically Fieldsian wordplay, he spots West across the railcar and gives a startled, supposedly sexually-excited, reaction. He

tips his hat in her direction, to which West, filing her nails, simply rolls her eyes and looks out

the window. In this exchange, the power dynamics ingrained in each comedian’s persona

instantly becomes reinforced, as Fields’ reaction constitutes a misplaced masculine bravado as he

attempts to gain her attention. Always in control, West’s lack of response manages to

simultaneously reaffirm her power and deflate Fields’ pathetic endeavors. Also found here, both

figures established physical attributes are highlighted by their telltale wardrobes. Fields is

dressed in an eccentric Victorian garb, wrapped in a tightly-fitted pin-striped coat with a

distinctive white carnation in his button hole and, upon his head, a comically large stovepipe hat.

After Fields’ death in 1946, this image persisted in caricatured statues and cartoons that have him

dressed in his famous attire of the confidence man. The likeness remains reminiscent of his

career-launching performance as sideshow medicine-man Professor McGargle in Poppy on

Broadway, a role that embraced the huckster or trickster caricatures of the 19th century

confidence men who appeared in the works of Mark Twain in America and Charles Dickens in

England.v West’s wardrobe, consisting of an elaborately embroidered dress and feathered hat, also resembles the look of other film roles such as her performances in the period pieces She

Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel where her aggressive sexuality is contrasted with Victorian mores. Interestingly, both figures find their potency within their contrasts to this 19th century conservatism, challenging it either as a huckster or as a sexual aggressor. As this brief moment illustrates, Fields does not locate power within this image like West since his very likeness can be read as degrading as his bulbous body-type – hard to hide in his form-fitting coat – can hardly be described as anything but buffoonish. West’s wardrobe might be excessive, but never foolish within the context of the film. As the reactions of various male characters illustrate, Fields among them, West might be a contrast to her surroundings, but she is always considered stylish and sexually alluring.

Fields quickly abandons Hamilton and makes his way to the seat across from West, where he once again attempts to gain her attention as he mumbles “Pardon me.” In a close shot,

West provides another annoyed reaction, still nonchalantly filing her nails, as she responds to

Fields’ offscreen fumbling. He attempts once again to tip his hat, this time looking sternly at her and nodding his head; but the power differential remains intact as she simply skeptically looks

him over without much interest. After all this visual play, the film finally rewards us with a

verbal exchange between the two icons. Fields tritely observes, “Nice Day,” to which West

dismisses, “Is it?” Fields, in a pathetic attempt to continue the conversation concedes, “Of

course it is only one man’s opinion.” As the scene carries on, Fields hands West his business

card. Upon reading it, Flowerbelle brazenly asks, “‘Novelties and Notions?’ What kind of

notions you got?” Twillie, showing some sexual sophistication underneath his silly demeanor,

smirks, “You’d be surprised. Some are old. Some are new.” In such exchanges, West dismisses

Fields’ banal attempts at charm since they initially appear to adopt the guises of Victorian

formality. Being “unruly,” yet acutely aware of the rules of the game, she understands that these

formal gestures mask sexually-forward “notions” underneath their polite surfaces. But unlike

other characters chided by West’s aggressiveness, Fields contains an underlying absurdity as a

clown figure that never allows the rebukes to have much effect. He willfully admits that his

gestures have barely-veiled carnal aims, which are not really both “old” and “new,” but simply

the same old sexual advancements West has witnessed since puberty. With the reaction to the

card, the scene presents an interesting variation on a common type of verbal humor based in

Freudian displacement, gags containing as their central point a “diversion of a train of thought”

(Jokes 58). This exchange is more complicated than what at first simply appears a joke of

double meaning or double entendre, since “notions” takes on a naughty connotation. Instead,

through verbal play, the sequence displaces the language on two levels by relating the gag to the

power differences in each comic persona. West appropriates “notions” to suggest sexual

thoughts, while Fields moves the term into a much more absurd area. With the summation of his

notions being “old” and “new,” his response seems both playfully sexual yet foolishly misguided

since it is difficult to believe any of his sexual notions would be new to West.

This playful dialogue is soon interrupted by an Indian attack upon the train, a comedic

action sequence that further contrasts the exaggerated personas of Fields and West and moves

this relationship into one of overt, nearly cartoonish, gender reversal. Like many moments in

this comedy, the scene spoofs the standard elements of the cowboy narrative tradition, which,

sadly, does not mean the scene spoofs the genre’s racist depictions of Native Americans, seen

here as faceless yelping savages on horses.vi But beyond these degrading stereotypes, the

sequence becomes a fascinating exercise in gender reversal by comparing the manners in which the foolishly inept Fields and the take-charge West react to the assault. She appears at first bored

by the attack and continues to file her nails, only taking an active role in defending the railcar

after a passenger is killed. She then shoots the indistinguishable attackers with, at first, a pair of

revolvers and, eventually, a variety of other firearms, all the time spouting out such one-liners as

“Got ‘em right in the canteen” and “There he goes in a shower of feathers.” On the other hand,

Fields is literally relegated to a childlike position as he seeks refuge in a car filled with school

children where he foolishly attempts to defend the train with a child’s slingshot. Pushing the

teacher aside, he screams, “Out of my way, mademoiselle, this is a man’s size job!” As this

elaborate visual joke illustrates, the film provides a substantial clarification of the two characters’

power differentials in clearly phallic terms. West’s successful use of a variety of phallic firearms

(varying in size from pistols to a rifle) has her taking charge within what would be considered a

masculinized position in a cowboy narrative. Fields’ feeble attempts with his childish slingshot

(significantly, still a weapon but not an effective one) do not completely demasculinize his role

as much as disempower him by suggesting a lack of sexual maturation. Unlike the other

impotent male passengers who cower behind the seats, he clearly still attempts to defend the

train. But the slingshot only snaps back into his face, essentially driving home the joke by

having his demeaningly puny phallus prematurely backfire.

As a result of this elaborate contrast, West’s powerfulness and Fields’ powerlessness are

firmly confirmed within the film as a continuation of already established exaggerations of personality traits. Following the attack, which West singlehandedly defeats, the scene returns to

a more intimate exchange between its two stars. For one of the few times in the film, Fields and

West are framed in various two shots as a lampoon of romantic courtship transpires, one with

layers of irony added due to a strange series of cons that transpires. Upon catching a glimpse of

a bag of worthless coupons for Fields’ “medicine,” West mistakenly assumes it to be filled with

cash, thus making the buffoonish blowhard into a more desirable spouse in the manipulative

West’s eyes. In an ironic reversal that initiates the plot’s central phony marriage, West actually

becomes conned herself as she attempts to grift her target. But it is significant to note that

Fields as confidence man really only deceives West here by accident, since he remains unaware

of her true motives for matrimony. Therefore, the power dynamic established through their

personas never dissipates and West’s own misunderstanding has little to do with making her

buffoonish as much as being a simple narrative device, something removed from the established

personas of the stars which are, more or less, extra-fictional. For the film to successfully pair the

two icons, it needs a storyline pushing them together, even if the plot point has to briefly remove

some of the authority of West.

As the scene plays out, West adopts some of the flirty characteristics typically associated

with a “gold digger,” which easily fools Fields’ inept confidence man. When Fields offers her a

worthless ring shaped like two “lonesome hearts,” she uncharacteristically coos, “What a pretty

sentiment.” While never actually surrendering her power to the buffoonish Fields, her body

language relaxes as she leans back in her seat and allows him to repeatedly kiss her hand, a clear

“performance” that allows West to conform through her own con to the unruly, yet powerful,

position originally proposed by Rowe’s reading. The iconic sexual power of West flourishes

even in this moment, as she plays the rules of the sex game and displays her abilities to

manipulate men with great ease. But where does this leave Fields? As the train scene illustrates,

he performs as a disempowered, though not impotent, contrast to West. Ironically, this persona

somehow proves a more empowered role than West’s typical leading men, who might appear

sexually capable, but never as eccentric and, therefore, appealing as Fields for the viewer.

Gender Classification and Comedians

Even when his comedy emphasizes a persona that is being disempowered, Fields persists

as a definite sexualized male subject. For example, as illustrated during the Indian attack, Fields’

masculinity is mocked as he is armed with only a slingshot. Yet, significantly, this weapon still

remains a representative phallus and, as such, he remains a sexualized subject with carnal aims.

More obviously, even though he is seen as a “lesser” male specimen in the film, his character

still aggressively attempts to charm West with motives that are obviously sexual in nature. His

“novelettes and notions” clearly are marked as failed attempts at sexual conquests, something that, as I will illustrate, defines his character throughout the film. To understand this seemingly contradictory stance – the minimized phallus paired with sexual aggression – I suggest his sexual identification as existing within the patriarchy, yet significant in how it lingers at the margins.vii

Anybody familiar with the more persuasive attributes of the Fields persona, which are often blatantly coded as heterosexual, could be surprised by any association with gendered marginalization. In his book Masculinities and Identities, David Buchbinder echoes a common perception of marginal masculinity. He defines the concept primarily through sexual orientation or through such gender-bending sexual signifiers as crossdressing, even entitling his chapter on

homosexuality and crossdressing in film “‘Well, Nobody’s Perfect’: Marginal Masculinities”

(48). Within a modern context, having homosexuality indicate the marginal male subject is

understandable, since, as Buchbinder states, “the simple existence of male homosexuality . . .

apparently issues a challenge to dominant discourses of masculinity; and society often responds by discriminating against gays.” On the basis of such responses, Buchbinder describes a binary between male homosexuality and heterosexuality that is similar to “the patriarchal response to femininity and to feminism” (64).

When analyzing a comedian like Fields, I propose our conception of gender classification and its boundaries must transcend identifying sexual object choice or obvious plays with sexual signification like crossdressing as the only modes of analysis. This is an approach that finds validity in the context of historically-sensitive social theory. In his groundbreaking study

Masculinities, sociologist R.W. Connell suggests that the social orders which classify masculinities are based in fundamental binary forces, writing that “two types of relationship – hegemony, domination / subornation and complicity on the one hand, marginalization / authorization on the other – provide a framework in which we can analyse specific masculinities” (81). Notably, Connell stresses that these classifications should not fall into the trap seen in Buchbinder, which carelessly suggests social binaries as tied to fixed definitions:

I emphasize that terms such as ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘marginalized masculinities’ name not fixed character types but configurations of practice generated in particular situations in a changing structure of relationships. Any theory of masculinity worth having must give an account of this process of change. (81)

This suggestion of a changing structure of relationships will prove essential to my analysis of comedians throughout this study, as I will show how a process of change in gender classification can occur even within the span of a few years.

Connell’s outline for analysis suggests a social mutability for all the binaries of

classification often employed by gender studies, including the hegemony itself, which he

suggests “is a historically mobile relation” with its own “ebb and flow” (77). As a basic

historical look at gender classifications illustrates, this adaptability certainly can be applied to

how we classify the boundaries of masculinity. For example, historian George Chauncey states,

“the hetero-homosexual binarism,” which defines sexual categories through object choice rather

than gender status, is actually a rather “recent historical creation” (13). In the late 19th and early

20th centuries, behavior as opposed to sexual object choice largely designated masculinity. The

heterosexual sex act did not necessarily define hegemonic normativity in American society until the mid-20th century, when a more visible gay subculture emerged, something Chauncey outlines

in his case study of New York City from 1890 to 1940. Notably, we must recognize Fields as

existing in a moment removed from such a hetero/homosexual binary, thus allowing for

challenges to an idealized masculinity to flourish beyond this specific “either/or” classification.

In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman suggests men can be marginalized

through a variety of culturally-dictated ‘affronts’ to their “aspirations to mastery and

sufficiency,” including “sexual, economic and racial oppression; and by the traumatically

unassimilable nature of certain historic events.” It has only been recently that “yet another threat

has come into play in a politically organized way – that constituted through the representational

and sexual practices of feminism and gay liberation” (52). She goes on to explore the cinematic

examples of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and The Guilt of

Janet Ames (1947) as reflecting a larger cultural “male castration” caused by the historically

traumatic events of WWII. In each of these films, characters provide illustrations of maleness

somehow scarred by the war, which exposes the fragility of the larger phallic order as “the

40 dominant fiction.” While her readings are on films succeeding the period of comedian comedies explored here, her employment of specific historical realities in defining male anxieties does provide a framework for beginning to consider somebody like Fields. In truth, Silverman seems most concerned with the intense impact of a clear historical trauma in these particular dramatic films, though her definition of such an event is intriguingly open-ended:

To state the case more precisely, I mean any historical event, whether socially engineered or of natural occurrence, which brings a large group of male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction. Suddenly the latter is radically de-realized, and the social formation finds itself without a mechanism for achieving consensus. (55)

Silverman looks specifically at emotionally-scarred male characters in the postwar period as being “radically” awakened to recognizing their own lack. Yet, I cannot help but wonder how previous filmic depictions of “failed” maleness might depict something subtler. Beyond the monumentally traumatic, as even suggested by Silverman, such factors as economic, racial, and sexual oppression also notably challenge phallic dominance. It is within these subtler, though still crucial, cultural undercurrents that many 30s comedians provide their own telling depictions of maleness. These might not always result in the dominant fiction being “radically de-realized,” but they do provide their own challenges through traditions of humorous commentaries on the masculine order and gender classifications.

In general, comedians in Hollywood history display a variety of marginal positions as males. Film comedians ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Adam Sandler regularly locate their comedy through failed attempts at assimilating into “normal” society, which through the lens of basic gender theory sets its parameters through the phallic order. In fact, such a failed or, at times, purposely disrupted assimilation into the rigidities of community serves as the basis of foundational humor theory. Bergson famously suggests that “rigidity is the comic, and laughter

is its corrective” (74). As outlined in my introduction, most studies of film comedians embrace

social misplacement as a defining feature of the characterization onscreen. Initially, this might seem to position the comedian as somebody culturally unable to reflect the same sort of wider masculine anxieties explored by Silverman’s reading of postwar dramas. Are not comedians as onscreen characters meant to be outsiders and does this not discount them as representational

figures of maleness? To understand comedians as full and complicated gender subjects, as

profound as ‘serious’ male images onscreen, I want to suggest their cultural position as

something both transgressive and representational. In this way, they can reflect the gender order as well as provide theoretical commentaries upon this structure as marginalized outsiders. Most remarkably, they often do both these things within the same performance.

To understand this complicated position, let us briefly contemplate W.C. Fields as a cultural product in the years following his death. Much like with Humphrey Bogart, Fields represented a potent male figure of rebellion for some of the youth culture of the 1960s. He even appears between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Carl Jung as one of the cultural icons surrounding

The Beatles on the cover of the landmark rock album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

(Notably, this cover also features Mae West.) Ironically, as Connell points out, rebellion in masculine idols can paradoxically exist as a defining characteristic of hegemonic identification:

“Few men actually match the ‘blueprint’ or display the toughness and independence acted by

Wayne, Bogart, or Eastwood” (70). While Connell’s point proves a fascinating question in terms of revisionist celebrations of such figures, it really does not reflect the realities of the films’ true social contexts within their eras of production. As Steve Cohan suggests about Connell’s generalizations, they more accurately depict “the cultural status of Bogart and Wayne in the years following the fifties . . . than it characterizes their star value during that period” (Masked

38). Similarly, placing Fields alongside more masculine rebel figures would misrepresent his

actual performances within the films themselves since he plays the comic buffoon. Unlike West,

whose position as an empowered woman seems centralized when viewing her films in the

context of any era, Fields’ comedic persona only permits for variations upon powerlessness.

Yet, this is not to say he suggests conformity. Fields is neither a true masculine ideal nor a

masculinized rebel, but a buffoon whose power exists in his ability to make surrounding power

structures seem equally buffoonish. Significantly, this is not so much an intellectualized critique

on the part of Fields the performer, but a logical target for anybody adept in the art of comedy,

which has personality bordering on exaggeration and, thus, ridiculing the social order. His performances and their warped gender dynamics are symptomatic of his specific historical period, but the basis of his humor is tenacious in its attacks on gender conventions.

In discussing the comedian as culturally significant, Frank Krutnik employs Mikhail

Bakhtin’s definition of the “carnivalesque” – the Medieval parades of exaggerated bodies and behaviors that, for lower classes, “celebrated liberation from prevailing truth and from the established order” and “marked the suspension of all hierarchal rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 10). Krutnik suggests this famous cultural reading supports an expansive set of binaries for analyzing comedians where theorists can focus on “the play between disruption and containment or difference and conformism.” This could open endless possibilities for ideological readings of comedians:

The most obvious manner in which the Hollywood comedian film reconfigures the carnivalesque process lies in the way it individuates the unruly energies of the crowd in the figure of the comedian. As an embodiment of that which is socially excessive or excluded, the comedian serves as both emissary of and scapegoat for counter-culture impulses. Thrown into conflict with the social codification of gender and sexuality, the body and identity, class and ethnicity, comedians inspire a disorderly rewriting of normative protocols. (Hollywood 14)

This Bakhtin-inspired approach proves enlightening since it is a step forward in presenting a reading of the comedian as neither solely a figure of rebellion nor a symbol of conformity. This

is a dichotomy that plagues some previous star studies of not only individual comedians, but

male movie stars in general. Instead, Krutnik suggests the carnivalesque as a way to continue the

historically-driven reading of the comedian comedy proposed by Henry Jenkins, who analyzes

the genre in the 1930s within historically-relevant definitions. But beyond this suggestion, with

a focus on masculinity in particular, stressing the “disorderly” nature of the cultural influences

prompting these films allows us to fully analyze comedians since it opens the door to readings

transcending the limiting labels of “rebels” (comedians as anarchists) or “conformists”

(comedians as supporting the hegemony). It allows us to view the masculine comedic as

symptomatic and, thus, correlating to the historically-sensitive gender readings of somebody like

Silverman. Yet, it does so without overlooking that, at its core, comedian comedy is pleasurably

transgressive, usually lampooning rigid social structures as suggested in the foundational humor

theories of Bergson and Freud.

Fields created two alternate comedic personas during his creative highpoint in the 30s.

In such films as The Old Fashioned Way (1934), Poppy (1936), You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man

(1939), and My Little Chickadee, he portrays a bachelor or widowed social outcast. He is an

inept confidence man and indulges in large amounts of double talk, basically attempting to

intrude upon ordered society. As Wes D. Gehring writes in his celebration of Groucho Marx and

Fields as “huckster comedians,” Fields’ prototypical con man role as McGargle in Poppy is a

clear “trickster” figure and “is in the literary tradition of America’s nineteenth-century

confidence-man golden age” (Groucho 103). Reflecting this historical reading of Fields’ con

man, only You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man is not a period picture, yet it still draws heavily upon

a nostalgic celebration of circus culture. You’re Telling Me! (1934), It’s a Gift (1934), Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), and, to a point, The Bank Dick (1940) feature the comedian in the role of family man. Here, he is usually more timid and overpowered by his dominating spouse.

None of these films are period pieces and, thus, base his domestic persona in a thoroughly modern world. While certain aspects of the comedian’s image drift between these two archetypes, some writers such as Gehring and Simon Louvish note a definite split within his most popular roles. Many of these observations appear in discussions of It’s a Gift, with

Gehring’s calling Gift one of Fields’ “bumbler films,” based in exploring “a marriage from hell”

(Groucho 138). Film historian Louvish also notes the difference from the huckster, calling this film an example of “Fields’ suburban mode,” which is a bit revisionist in its classification since the “suburban male” actually exists as a post-WWII convention (It’s 28). As I will show, Fields’ husbands are more based in a long stage history of the henpecked husband, here intensified to meet the needs of a disenfranchised Depression era audience.viii

Fields’ two variations in persona provide two extremely different, yet equally telling,

commentaries on maleness. As the con man, he adopts various unsuccessful masquerades of masculinity, pretending to have an abundance of masculine prowess, only to be revealed as a charlatan at key moments. These characterizations prove humorous because of his boisterous belief that he still represents a phallic dominance, even as this contention falls apart around him.

In this regard, Fields’ character humorously and unintentionally challenges the assumptions of symbolic gender representations, often exposing them as highly subjective. As the family man, he portrays a misguided and defeated father figure. His inability to fulfill the patriarchal role disrupts the balance of his family, providing radical breakdowns within the real relations of the familial order, unknowingly exposing them to be highly unstable. Despite their dissimilarities,

the two character types show him equally adopting warped versions of a “symbolic father” role,

failing to assert a phallic dominance through either floundered social prominence or familial

relationships. Through portraying different versions of a male pushed to the margins of

masculine orders, Fields mocks the power structures by exposing their fragile subjectivity. In the

remainder of this chapter, focusing on each of these character variations, I will discuss how

Fields’ role as comic icon presents an exploration of sexual identity that is an enlightening

counterpoint to Mae West’s own iconic position. Yet while West’s aggressive stance celebrates an empowerment, Fields is disempowered and ultimately shows the fragility of gender laws.

Through Fields’ performative weakness, he challenges phallic dominance in his own unique way.

Fields as Con Man: Masquerades of Masculinity

Not surprisingly, one of the films that best exemplifies Fields as the con man is My Little

Chickadee, a classic example of this persona with an expressed focus upon sexuality within his

contrast to West. Jill Watts summarizes that the film’s star pairing “also teamed up two trickster

figures. . . . Both characters stand apart from the narrative while propelling the action along.

They are weaker figures, Mae as woman and W.C. as silly eccentric. Regardless, they both

emerge as victors” (238). Watts is correct in her assertion of both performers’ roles being

“weaker,” or, to be more accurate, established outside the social order. Yet her summation of

Fields as simply a “silly eccentric” lacks a sufficient exploration of his role as male subject.

While strongly caricatured eccentricities constitute a major part of the characterization, his

weakness relates more to his lack of masculine prowess and, as such, his inability to truly be a

love interest for West. While Fields might evade execution at the hands of an angry mob, his

role within the narrative could hardly be viewed as that of “victor” since various obstacles leave

him unable to truly penetrate the hyper-masculine order of the Old West. These hindrances

include his lack of prowess, alcoholism, unattractive features (Fields’ famous nose), and, of

course, overall buffoonery as a comic figure.

This lack of prowess is central to the narrative since his character performs multiple

failed attempts to consummate his marriage, something that, in his eyes, would establish his

masculine dominance. Upon their “honeymoon,” Fields stands outside the locked door of

West’s hotel room and asks, “Listen, didn’t you promise to love, honor, and be obedient?” She

replies with a dismissive, “Don’t be old fashioned. Be a good boy and run along.” As this exchange illustrates, the power dynamics first seen in the earlier train sequence have now

blossomed to fully confront the issues of Victorian mores suggested by their popular personas’

physical appearances. Fields performs a pathetic attempt at masculine domination, suggesting

her role as “wife” is to “be obedient,” while West quickly deflates his bravado by not only

suggesting his implication is outdated, but also treating the comedian as nothing more than a

mischievous child within his pursuits of the flesh. This lack of consummation becomes more

than just a running gag and serves as a major narrative obstacle that eventually leads to Fields’ near demise. After numerous attempts at picking West’s lock, he disguises himself as the

Masked Bandit to gain entry into West’s bedroom, an action that leads to his arrest and near execution. In the end, Fields is relegated to being rescued by the woman who refuses his sexual advances, a comic inversion of typical Hollywood narratives.

Fields also explores sex role inversion in sequences not involving the overpowering persona of West. While Fields temporarily fills in as a bartender one afternoon, the film cuts to an angry and drunken petite blonde (Fay Adler) marching into the barroom and giving off a loud whistle. The scene cuts to Fields dutifully wiping the counter and giving a startled reaction. He attempts to ignore her, but she simply walks closer to the bar and gives off an even louder

whistle. Meeting her at the far side of the bar, he tells her to stop all the noise and asks for her

order, to which she slurs, “Bottle of whiskey, straight.” In her slurring speech and overpowering

manner, she represents in Fields’ world another form of a dominant female, yet a version much cruder than West. The comedian’s reaction is one of annoyance, but, even more tellingly, one of caution as well despite Adler’s tiny physique. He requests, “Go over and take a seat at one of those tables. I can’t serve you here.” Drunkenly leaning over the bar, she ignores his demand and proceeds to gripe about her husband. Fields attempts to assert himself by calling her a

“pygmy” and threatening to “throw her on her head.” Unimpressed, she slurs, “You and who else?” Fields seems frightened by her swagger and finally states that his coworker, ‘Squawk’

Mulligan (Jimmy Conlin), will help him. After the blonde leaves the bar, Fields turns to a male patron and proudly tells the story of a time he actually did physically overpower a woman. He brags about when he knocked the notorious “Chicago Molly” to the ground. Throughout the telling of this story, he is interrupted by ‘Squawk,’ an actual eyewitness to the event who continually corrects his false and self-serving version of the encounter. ‘Squawk,’ a comically puny figure, angrily blurts out that he “was the one who knocked her down.” The sequence ends with the patron asking if Molly ever returned, to which Squawk interrupts, “I’ll say she came back. She came back a week later and beat the both of us up.” Fields tries to reclaim some of his dignity by mumbling, “Yeah, but she had another woman with her, an elderly lady with gray hair.”ix

Such inversions of sex roles suggests Fields’ position in the film as beyond that of the

“silly eccentric” and something more comically demeaned. He serves as the feminized victim actually physically assaulted by masculinized women, the opposite of West’s aggressive woman who is never physically or mentally assaulted by anybody. Within the narrative construct of a

Hollywood western, such victimization leaves Fields figuratively castrated for comic effect. As

the barroom sequence illustrates, Fields remains unique among male comedians not in his failed attempts at acceptance into society, but in his boisterous and preposterous contention that he already maintains a powerful role within the phallic order. His bogus story (his actual fantasy) consists of violently dominating empowered women, but these dreams are simply deflated by

Squawk, a character certainly more in touch with his own diminutive masculinity. Tellingly,

Fields’ fantasy in this shockingly funny sequence basically is that of the dominant fiction, which is warped here as the fabrication that he actively takes part in the suppression of women. As

Gayle Rubin suggests in her influential “The Traffic of Women,” “Kinship rests on a radical difference between the rights of men and women. The Oedipal complex confers male rights upon the boy and forces the girl to accommodate herself to lesser rights” (198). The humor in the barroom story rather darkly derives from Fields’ inability to partake in the most violent incarnation of the laws of kinship, here literally taking the form of physical battery. In the end,

Fields has no choice but to expose his humiliating lack of prowess as even his reasoning for the defeat (“the elderly lady with gray hair”) only moves the true story into a more absurdly degrading territory within the definitions of the phallic order.

Such a sequence opens up the provocative question are Fields’ own comic degradations proposing his failures as confirmations of the virtues of supposed masculine dominance? If his inability to repress women is the point of the joke, could Fields’ buffoonish persona be suggesting this subjugation as beneficial? Not surprisingly, the answer to this question is not that simple since a film such as My Little Chickadee ultimately illustrates the layers of derision, many of which reflect poorly upon the hegemony, present in Fields’ persona. A clear way to consider the complexity of his con man characterizations is to examine how masquerade

becomes a central motif in defining the jokes. If it failed to have West and Fields in the leads,

My Little Chickadee could work as a narrative of a woman’s masquerade as “wife,” an act

exemplifying feminine masquerades on a societal level. Flowerbelle’s domestic disguise could

ironically comment upon the very “tropes of femininity” originally dubbed by Mary Ann Doane

as “masquerades” in her study of women’s melodramas (Desire 180). Yet, due to West’s

empowered persona, an actual masquerade as wife in Doane’s sense never materializes. West

openly flirts with other men and, basically, behaves like the always-independent Mae West

regardless of the title of “wife.”x In a broadly comic inversion, the disempowered Fields

actually adopts the most telling masquerades. The primary con Fields unsuccessfully attempts is the promotion of self as a truly masculine figure, something that often exposes the other hyper- masculine characters as phonies as well. Such moments of total self-absorption and self- promotion reflect a pathetic pretense in the surrounding depictions of “proper” masculinity, a world where manliness is outrageously celebrated.

Within Fields’ clumsy cons, or masquerades, there is a comic repositioning of the subjective assumptions dictating “normative” gender performance. Judith Butler suggests in

Bodies That Matter that the performance of gender is not an “assumption” or “accession” of symbolic law but a “citation” of that law. As Butler believes, this concept is not restricted by a definitive set of gender norms and actually is associated with a self-perpetuating mechanism of mutable gender characteristics:

The presumption that the symbolic law of sex enjoys a separable ontology prior and autonomous to its assumption is contravened by the notion that the citation of the law is the very mechanism of its production and articulation. What is ‘forced’ by the symbolic, then, is a citation of its law that reiterates and consolidates the ruse of its own force. (15)xi

Within Fields’ con man persona, we find comically misguided citations as cons in the form of masquerades that expose the subjectivity of the gender performance itself. The fumbles within

his masquerade expose the performance of gender as “citation” as opposed to being based upon

autonomous laws. For example, in the barroom sequence, there is a patchwork of mismatched

gender “norms” where Fields contends phallic dominance only to be threatened by a

masculinized female or exposed as a liar by a demasculinized male, two figures openly

challenging the law. As seen within the earlier train sequence, this is a process where somebody

like West can easily cite and challenge the attributes of masculine prowess by picking up six- guns and then alternately performing femininity. With Fields, there is a citation of the law just as telling. But within his lack of success, he exposes the deceit of the symbolic.

In general, Fields’ placement within a Hollywood western, a genre usually dictated by an aggressive phallic order, proves not only disruptive, but telling in how it exposes the deceit of the surrounding hegemony. Even West embraces some gendered stereotypes in the film by becoming enamored of the mysterious Masked Bandit, a hyper-masculine figure who woos her with such trite, yet aggressive, lines as “I’ll be the one man in your life if I have to kill everyone else.” In a wonderfully satiric juxtaposition to the Bandit’s theatrical masculinity, Fields attempts to enter West’s bedroom by wearing a similar mask; yet, the masquerade fails miserably and reveals the foolishness of not only Fields’ con but the absurdity of the Bandit’s masculine theatrics. After she exposes his charade, he still attempts to pursue her with typically Fieldsian talk that satirizes the straight romantic dialogue performed by the Bandit in earlier scenes, lines that initially successfully captivated West. Fields declares, “You incinerate me. Your walk.

Your talk. The way you wave your little pinkie.” Ever dominant over his pathetic attempts at copulation, West simply replies, “Your line ain’t low enough to trip me.” While the power

51 unbalance between West and Fields remains intact, the viewer cannot help but feel Fields’ foolishness only satirizes the previous aggressive romanticism of the Bandit. The exchange presents the question of why the Bandit’s lines had been “low enough” to trip West in the first place. Throughout the film, Fields adopts various unsuccessful masquerades of masculine roles, such as the Masked Bandit, the sheriff, and, most significantly, a new husband. While playing the latter, he aspires to perform the expected masculine “duties” associated with marriage by deflowering his virgin bride, a plan made doubly ironic since West never pretends to be sexually inexperienced around Fields or any man. In one of the film’s most outrageous scenes, West places a goat in her bed to mislead Fields as she dashes off to see her masked lover. The room darkened and the animal covered by the bedspread, Fields performs the wedding night custom and mistakes the goat’s noises for those of his timid bride. After hearing, “Bah bah,” he laughs to himself and states, “Mama. The sweet little dear is calling for her mama. What sublime innocence.” The replacement of the timid virgin bride (his “prize” as a male) with a goat ultimately shows the absurdity involved in his outmoded sexual fantasy. The foolishness of both his masculine performance and sexual delusion becomes apparent through an outrageous suggestion of bestiality, a tabooed sex act that would rob Fields of his last shred of sexual dignity.

Before I move onto Fields’ roles as family man, I wish provide some insights into a con man performance that does not feature the distracting presence of an overtly transgressive sexual figure in the form of West. Let us briefly look at The Old Fashioned Way, whose story, written by Fields and inspired by his early vaudeville experiences, follows a lead character largely attempting to push cons. During the turn of the 20th century, The Great McGonigle (Fields) and his traveling repertory company perform a one-night stand performance of The Drunkard in the

52 small town of Bellefontaine. McGonigle stays just one-step ahead of the law and woos the insipid rich widow Cleopatra Pepperday (Jan Duggan) in order to secure money for continuing his show. During this time, he learns that his daughter Betty (Judith Allen) wishes to marry outside her class and that the remainder of his tour has been canceled. To save face and secure his daughter’s happiness, McGonigle makes a hasty exit by falsely claiming to have a prestigious engagement in New York City. Interestingly, the film highlights the Fields persona as simultaneously an actor and con man. As a result, in this particular film, a fascinating parallel emerges between the con of the masculine masquerade and the theatrical performance of hyper- masculine roles. We see this unfold even in scenes not set in theatrical venues. For example,

McGonigle performs the ceremonies of courtship with the annoying Cleopatra to only foolish results. In a direct reference to more passionate romances, McGonigle tells Cleopatra to call him

“Mark Anthony. Mark, for short.” Typical of Fields’ relationship with women, Cleopatra responds by giving him the childlike nickname of “Markie,” thus deflating his claim of a theatrically masculine figure. While the widow might be more receptive to his advances than

West, the sequence of their courtship still proves highly humiliating for Fields – who accidently sits on a knitting needle, finds his hat crushed, and, worst of all, endures Pepperday’s horrible singing.

Pepperday constitutes an annoyance within the film, yet it is important to note that her role does not take on the empowered status of a West, Adler, or even the unseen Chicago Molly.

Instead, her own buffoonish nature adopts a position closer to Margaret Hamilton’s Mrs. Gideon, whose performances of femininity simply reaffirm the stereotypes of an overbearing old widow.

Instead of the aggressive female, Fields encounters other obstacles to establishing his inflated masculine bravado in The Old Fashioned Way. This appears in the form of Pepperday’s

precocious toddler Albert (Baby Leroy), who basically moves the threat to Fields’ manhood

away from the image of the empowered woman to a more generalized threat of the domestic

sphere. Dining with the theater troupe at the boarding house, Fields and the widow are framed in a two-shot as they sit down next to each other; yet the small head of Albert slips into the frame between the two actors. Fields gives one of his trademark startled and disturbed reactions, similar to those in response to “the pygmy” in Chickadee. As illustrated by this moment, the

pairing of Fields and Duggan as an ironic “romantic couple” is quickly punctured by the image

of a child who visually turns the three actors into a family unit. The child at one point

mistakenly calls Fields “dada,” which makes the other dinner guest burst out with laughter and

Fields respond with another startled reaction, this time pointed toward Betty. Fields corrects the

child: “Boy, you got me wrong.” Despite this dismissal, he does attempt some semblance of this

role by placing Albert into his high chair, an act he fumbles so much that the toddler loudly cries.

Throughout the dinner, while Fields attempts to charm Pepperday, the small child throws food and dunks Fields’ watch in molasses, all of which the widow simply considers to be “cute.”

Viewing even a toddler as a threat to his masculinity, Fields automatically dislikes Albert and whispers to his own daughter that he is “a brat!” Fields’ aggression toward the child builds throughout the sequence and, when alone with Baby Leroy, he eventually exacts revenge by swiftly kicking him in the rear.xii

As his progressive frustration with the toddler illustrates, Fields’ con man persona finds

the domestic sphere as threatening as the empowered, independent female. While his fantasies

can include hoodwinking Pepperday or copulating with West, Fields’ trickster persona ultimately

must remain a free spirit and see the confines of family as the enemy. In this manner, it makes

sense that Betty is introduced in The Old Fashioned Way as fully grown, since Fields’ fatherly

duties do not extend beyond simply morally supporting his daughter. As will be illustrated later,

when Fields fully adopts the father/husband role, his entire persona takes on much more

emotional substance and mocks wholly different elements of the masculine ideal. The Old

Fashioned Way is too submerged in the nostalgic celebration of the then-dying vaudevillian

lifestyle as a type of freedom from domestic confinement to provide any real deconstruction of

the family unit.

One of the film’s most memorable scenes records the act that initially made Fields

famous on stage as a juggler, a talent suggesting a power and control that usually does not

coordinate with other aspects of his persona.xiii Typical of his usual assertive self-promotion,

McGonigle is introduced as a performer who has “entertained and mystified the crowned heads

of Europe.” For the first half of the routine, Fields, dressed in a tight shirt adorned with sequins,

impressively dominates the stage by juggling multiple balls and a long stick, bouncing them off

his elbow, his feet, the ground, and even one of the on-stage extras. But typical of this

comedian, this does not last long. When he brings out his cigar boxes, the Fields persona

materializes as his command over the objects humorously gets away from him. At one point,

while he balances a large stack, an audience member hurtles fruit that knocks the boxes to the ground. As he attempts to re-stack them, he angrily fumbles to save face while they rhythmically seem to have a life of their own. By the end of the routine, he gives up and throws the final box to the ground. While the comedian takes a tired, yet proud, theatrical pose to accept the applause, toddler Albert once again throws food directly in his face and strips away the final shred of dignity remaining in his performance. Bitter over this loss, Fields looks toward the child and mutters once more, “brat!”

At first glance, this turn of events might seem similar to the physical relationship with inanimate objects of many silent film comedians, such as Buster Keaton. As Tom Gunning writes, “Keaton’s characters contend with a modern world in which nothing is stable and in which the rhythms of large machines . . . seem to rule” (75). Based within a smaller scale,

Fields often deals with modest objects in motion in his films, such as misplaced canes and hats.

But the juggling routine fully illustrates how Fields differentiates himself from silent comics like

Keaton since even the purest of physical pantomimes adopts an aggressive tone as he loses more and more dignity. A figure like Keaton might, as Gunning contends, possess “an athlete’s applied knowledge of the laws of physics” along with his victimhood, thus allowing for “a

Horatio Alger story of acquired maturity and achievement” in his films (75). Middle-aged and bitter, Fields rarely adopts the most persuasive of American masculine myths of success within his con man roles, something that tellingly suggests why his popularity rose to such prominence during the economically unstable 30s as opposed to the relatively prosperous 20s. As sociologist

Michael S. Kimmel summarizes about the decade, “With nearly one in four American men out of work, the workplace could no longer be considered a reliable arena for the demonstration and proof of one’s manhood . . . many men simply lost faith in a system that prevented them from proving their masculinity in the only ways they knew” (128). In this manner, we see a social stage where economic uncertainty could encourage the popularity of a comedian who actively eschewed such success stories. As is evident by the bittersweet ending of The Old Fashioned

Way, his con man cannot exist as the empowering Alger figure. In the end of this narrative, as seen in the epilogue, he simply moves from performing masculine prowess on-stage to becoming a literal con man in the form of a sideshow medicine peddler. As the con artist, there can be no narrative outcome of masculine success. Ironically enough, fantasies of success play much more

56 of a role in his domestic comedies. Yet, in their own ways, these performances have their own comic deviations of gender “norms” and family relationships that prove even more vicious in nature.

Fields as Husband: Breakdown of the Familial Order

W.C. Fields’ marriage comedies during the sound era all contain a similar comic scenario: Fields plays a browbeaten husband married to an overpowering woman who actively tries to destroy his dreams of success. In essence, the films unfold like the nightmare scenarios of domestic life that Fields’ con men work tirelessly to avoid. As Henry Jenkins writes in reference to It’s a Gift, these films show a narrative convention of “marital combat” – a long tradition of popular American humor where the domestic sphere is presented “as a moral battleground between the woman aggressively protecting the purity of the home and the husband eagerly pursuing bodily pleasure in the face of his wife’s prohibitions” (250). These comedic variations of figurative male castration at the hands of an overbearing spouse originally began appearing as a response to a sentimentalization of marriage in the 19th century within such works as Robert Barnwell Roosevelt’s Progressive Petticoats; or Dressed to Death: An Autobiography of a Married Man (1874) and Frances M. Whitcher’s The Widow Bedott Papers (1846-59). This sort of comic marriage, in which the female becomes phallically empowered and the male disempowered for comic effect, transferred easily to the popular vaudeville houses filled with working class male audiences and mutated throughout the 20th century in popular works ranging from comic strips to television sitcoms. In direct relationship to this chapter, the tradition appears in many vaudeville routines that informed Fields’ comedy and was the basis of J.P.

McEvoy’s The Comic Supplement, a stage show with much of its humor based around “marital combat.” Fields’ starring role in this comedy was a characterization that essentially defined his

“domestic mode” in future films, something that even at this early period was a definite removal

from his other major stage success during the 1920s in Poppy, the root of his onscreen con man

persona.xiv

Historically, comically attacking marriage as a feminine social construct began at a

telling period in America, as marriage was now being more defined as a romantic institution.

Roosevelt and Whitcher’s comic narratives were published at the dawn of the Industrial

Revolution as the growth of capitalism caused social orders defined by marriage (such as the

convergences of families/wealth/land) to disappear. Thus, proposing marriage as a sacred bond

never to be threatened for legal reasons became less of a social necessity. By the 20th century, onetime social taboos like divorce became increasingly more common, with one in six marriages legally splitting by the end of the 1920s. David R. Shumway suggests this transition illustrates a considerable shift in how society viewed marriage, shifting from being social contract to now symbolizing a more individualized search for personal happiness, a move that led to its own form of vast disappointment. He writes, “The new version of romantic marriage engendered expectations that many marriages did not fulfill, in part because romance offered no vision of how marriage might fulfill them” (22). Ironically, as society moved from interpreting marriage as less about commerce and more about romance, it also created a notable anxiety caused by defining wedlock as complete emotional and psychological fulfillment. It is not surprising that the marriage joke, told by males mainly for a male audience, rose in popularity during a time when the institution itself was changing in social significance. By 1905, as Freud was writing his catalogue of jokes, he even recognized humor about marriage as a textbook example of

“cynical jokes” which attack social conventions. To Freud, marriage, which is “strictly guarded by moral regulations,” invites attack since it is socially based in suppressing sexual freedom

(Jokes 132).

In It’s a Gift, the spirit of Freud’s cynical joke drives the narrative, which has the

institutions of marriage and family as the targets for humor. Upon inheriting money through his

uncle’s death, small-town grocer Harold Bissonette (Fields) closes his store and uproots his family to pursue his dream of buying, sight-unseen, an orange grove in California. His overbearing wife Amelia (Kathleen Howard) and his daughter (Jean Rouverol) disapprove of the plan, while his young son Norman (Tommy Bupp) seems genuinely accepting even though he finds various other ways of annoying his father. After assorted misadventures on the motor trip west, most of which characterize Fields the husband/father as inept, Bissonette and his family arrive at the ranch to find barren land and a rundown shack. The primary conflicts of the narrative appear within the relationship between Harold and Amelia, in which she usually verbally dominates her husband. Throughout much of the film, Fields remains a contradiction commonly seen in narratives of marital combat, as he seems very passive in the face of his wife’s browbeating, yet rebels against her orders behind her back. Early in the film, he tells his daughter, angry over her father’s plan to move to California, “What you don’t seem to understand is that I am the master of this household.” But, in a typical comic undercutting, he

says this line in a paranoid whisper, careful that his wife does not overhear.

The gender dynamic in the household makes this action understandable, since Amelia

constantly lectures him and attempts to secure dominance, chiding her husband with such

nagging commands as “Don’t smoke at the table” and “Don’t throw matches on the floor,” to

which Fields passively complies. She also keeps a close eye upon him as a sexual object by

being overly suspicious of any possible philandering. In one instance, Fields returns to their

single beds after receiving a late-night phone call. Upon hearing his explanation that it was a

wrong number, Amelia suspiciously believes it to be proof of her husband’s philandering. As

illustrated by moments like these, the performance of Kathleen Howard adopts all the

stereotypical “nagging” wife clichés. As is common to comedian comedies, Howard’s

characterization provides a deriding representation of a clearly phallic matriarch, whose sole

purpose is to be an obstacle in the way of bachelor bliss. Lucy Fischer comments on the role of

the phallic matriarch as “often pernicious and peripheral to the male comic focus,” in essence,

still secondary to a malecentric comic world (65). As Kathleen Rowe discusses, “Comedian

comedy often compounds its erasure of the bride by directing its corrective laughter onto the

matriarch, displacing the hostility it is licensed to level at the father onto the repressive, phallic

mother.” A performance such as seen with Howard represents “a dreaded domesticity and propriety, a fearful symbol of a ‘community’ that includes women” (105). Therefore, the character type exists more as a device than an iconic powerful woman such as Mae West, who is undoubtedly transgressive in her gender performance. But beyond the obviously sexist connotations of such a stereotype, Howard’s relationship with her onscreen husband can tell us

some important things about Fields’ own gender identity as a historically specific

characterization, one born on the vaudeville stage and then developed further in the economic

uncertainty of the Depression.

Significantly, Amelia seeks to control the family’s finances and, upon news of the

possible inheritance, yells, “If any money comes into this family, I am going to handle it.” This

dispute over money proves central to the narrative and suggests It’s a Gift as characteristically a

Depression era text, something showing the cynicism toward marriage that began in the 19th

century as heightened by the economic hardships of the 1930s. As Jenkins writes:

Fields’ speedy rise from humiliation at the hands of a ‘petticoat tyrant’ to command over a greatly enriched kingdom allowed male spectators to laugh at their own fears, sexual humiliations, and economic defeats. These feelings were apt to be complexly intertwined

in the Depression era because of husbands’ increasing dependence upon their wives to provide additional or even primary income for the family. (255)

The major narrative dilemma is the buying of the possibly worthless orange grove. Thus, the

film’s plot revolves around questioning and then reaffirming Fields’ role as a financial provider,

an indicator of masculine success basically unmet by millions during this period of widespread

unemployment. As alluded to by Jenkins, Fields does find success at the end of It’s a Gift

through luck (and a deus ex machina) when a racetrack operator appears out of nowhere and

wants to purchase the property. Learning of the buyer’s secret willingness to pay a large sum, he

negotiates a great deal for his family and, in the epilogue, is shown living a relaxed life on a

successful orange farm. Even though this turn certainly appeals to a form of wish fulfillment

within the male viewership, Jenkins’s point seems to overlook the fact that Fields’

characterization never provides a “speedy rise” from his essential demasculinized persona, only

from economic concerns. While such a comedy might be constructed as a catharsis for the disempowered male of the era, it is doing so by promoting a blatantly degraded and beaten comedian as a figure of recognition for the audience. Consequently, this moves the climactic

resolution into the terrain of not only populist fantasy but a reconfirmation of Fields’ original

warped gender signification.

In a rare scene heavily relying upon pathos, Fields finally arrives at his orange grove to

find it nothing more than a barren stretch with a decrepit shack. With his wife outraged, Fields

misguidedly attempts to play the role of patriarch by dispensing trite positive reactions, only to

have them deflated by the cold reality of the situation. After we follow him to the rotting porch,

Fields turns to his wife and smiles as he points to a horseshoe nailed above the door: “Look a

horseshoe. They say it’s lucky to walk under a horseshoe.” Immediately following this

statement, Fields steps on the porch, only to have one of the boards spring up and slam against

61 his body. After a few more physical gags with the disintegrating house, the camera follows

Fields approaching his family again, where he finally concedes that the shack is unlivable, but still attempts to give the news some sort of positive spin: “We may have to rebuild after all.” But

Amelia has finally had enough and deserts her husband, calling for the children to follow.

Norman approaches his father and offers him a pathetically tiny piece of fruit found on the property, almost a symbol of Fields’ withered phallic power. This gesture seems to be the final straw for Fields’ crippled dignity. His performed reaction illustrates the contradictory roles that aggression and acceptance play within his domestic persona. In a close medium shot, his reaction is conflicted: it first seems to be angry as he gestures to throw the fruit and then is accepting as he woefully places it in his pocket. In one final comic humiliation, he sadly sits on the family car only to have it collapse under him. Defeated, he walks over to the porch and traces a stick in the sand, mumbling to himself, “Everything goes at once.” Deserted by his family, his dog finally comes to give him a supportive nuzzle on the neck, which Fields acknowledges with a small hug. In this poignant moment we see an image of Fields as the embodiment of the masculine comedic, wallowing in his inability to partake in the phallic order’s narratives of economic success – here epitomized by the image of the deserted Dust

Bowl farm.

But this humiliation does not last for long as his neighbor quickly arrives and informs

Fields of a racetrack owner’s willingness to pay anything for the property. Fueled with this insider’s information and swigs from his flask, Fields adopts a newfound confidence when the buyer arrives. During Fields’ bargaining with the racetrack owner, Amelia interrupts what she, unknowing of the true worth of the property, rightfully perceives as her husband’s foolish demands. Understanding her spouse’s history of irrational behavior and problems with the

bottle, she yells, “Harold, are you drunk or crazy?” Taking on an aggressive patriarchal role for

one of the few times in the film, Fields walks his wife away from the negotiations and sits her by

the collapsed automobile. Eventually, he convinces the buyer to pay an enormous amount for

the land, along with purchasing a flourishing orange grove for him and his family. Despite this

momentary disempowerment, Amelia never completely compliments her triumphant husband,

but only faints in shock. Upon being revived, she concedes to Harold that “[y]ou’re an old idiot,

but I can’t help loving you.” As this suggests, while certainly a narrative of eventual masculine

success, the film never shows Amelia’s power dynamic changing and, instead, leaves the power differentials of the relationship ambiguously open.

This now unclear marital dynamic continues into the epilogue, which never shows Fields as dominating his wife as much as simply being freed from her presence, living the type of fantasy bachelor existence he embodies within the con man persona. As he sits on his prosperous ranch mixing a cocktail with orange juice, the film cuts to the remainder of the

Bissonette clan pouring into a luxury car. We cut back to Fields keenly focused on his own task of mixing his drink. In the final image of the film, he remains alone with his dog, relaxed and happy as his family drives away, though, most likely, probably not for good. This ultimate success consists of Fields being left alone on his orange ranch, which is an image presented as an ironic counterpoint to the earlier poignant desertion by his family. This time the desertion is, supposedly, on Fields’ own terms and once again he sits only with his loyal dog, who is now given a place of prominence across from him at the table. In this way, the film offers a misanthropic inversion of the original appeal to pathos at the ramshackle shack and ends on a cynical note. It is a cynical joke in the truest Freudian sense as the husband wins some kind of freedom, even if it is only momentary, from marriage as an institution, which has been viciously

mocked throughout the film. The orange grove exists as a fantasy space consisting of both a

more empowered financial status and a freedom from domesticity, but this could hardly be seen as supporting any sort of gendered norm since Fields clearly arrives here through his own terms not promoted by the social order. But this is not the only way Fields’ husband character attacks the institution and its cultural significance as seen in what could be considered the comedian’s most vicious comedy.

Nowhere does the cynicism of the marriage joke become more prominent than in Fields’

most personal film Man on the Flying Trapeze, which easily contains the most sympathetic yet

problematic variation of the Fields persona. Even though it incorporates elements found in his

other domestic comedies, this film remains the one that most aggressively subjugates Fields into

the role of victim. As biographer James Curtis recounts, while writing the story, Fields drew

inspiration from “the members of his own family.” The comedian clearly patterns the two most

unsympathetic characters, “the prune-faced, disapproving mother-in-law” and “the unemployable

mama’s boy” after his own estranged wife and grown son, whom he financially supported but

had not seen in nearly 20 years (329).xv The story consists of one hellish day in the life of

professional memory expert Ambrose Wolfinger (Fields), a remarried widower with a loving

grown daughter Hope (Mary Brian) from his first marriage. His second wife Leona (once again

Howard) is typically shrewish and domineering. Also living in the household are his prudish mother-in-law Mrs. Nesselrode (Vera Lewis) and her pampered son Claude (Grady Sutton), a lazy and dishonest loudmouth. Throughout the course of the day, Fields finds himself unfairly

arrested, given multiple parking tickets, having a professional wrestler thrown at him, fired from

his job, mocked by his family, and, ultimately, falsely accused of public drunkenness and

philandering by Claude. No longer able to take the abuse, Fields snaps during the climax,

physically attacks his brother-in-law, and nearly goes after the rest of his second family before

the sympathetic Hope stops him. As a resolution, the conclusion shows Ambrose regaining his

job at a higher salary and Leona having a change of heart, ultimately defending her husband to

the rest of her family.

Man on the Flying Trapeze deviates from other Fields domestic comedies since he draws

a definite line between his wife’s repulsive family and the child of a previous and apparently

happier union. This family dynamic accentuates a supporting character that emerges in multiple

Fields narratives in both the con man and family man films, the sympathetic daughter.

Beginning with his stage success in Poppy, Fields often included a daughter or surrogate

daughter who empathizes with his character. This figure appears in The Old Fashioned Way,

where Fields ultimately sacrifices his own happiness for the understanding Betty. In You Can’t

Cheat an Honest Man, his daughter Victoria (Constance Moore) fulfills this role by lovingly

embracing her father, while her brother Phineas (John Arledge) seems largely disapproving. The

character also appears in Your’re Telling Me! and his final starring film, Never Give a Sucker an

Even Break (1941). The latter is a curious meta-narrative where the comedian plays himself as a

Hollywood outsider with only his sympathetic niece (Gloria Jean) for companionship.xvi In Man

on the Flying Trapeze, the appropriately named Hope is the quintessential example of this

characterization, having a nearly blind devotion toward her father.

In a telling exchange, Ambrose and Hope discuss their living situation as they drive to

town. Hope complains about the deceitfulness of Claude: “I despise him, Dad. The lazy, good

for nothing, fat overfeed monkey.” Ambrose provides a weak defense of his brother-in-law, “He

isn’t too fat.” Once again, the timidness of the domestic Fields is on display, as he refuses to

criticize Claude. Yet, in typical Fieldsian fashion, his lack of a proper defense speaks volumes

about his underlying yet un-vocalized views toward this surrogate son. Hope then adopts a

guilty look upon her face and says: “Dad, I know that you would’ve never married again after

mother died if it wasn’t for me.” Fields looks disturbed by this implication and asks, “What are you talking about?” Hope discloses a childhood memory of overhearing her father argue with a

friend, stating that “you said you would’ve never married again, if it wasn’t that you wanted to

see that Hope had a mother.” Unsettled, Fields responds with a demand, “Now listen honey, I

want you to promise me one thing. Never mention that again as long as you live.” He then

pauses and tries to dismiss the memory, stating, “I must’ve been drinking.” Hope exposes this

lie and says, “No dad. You weren’t drinking.”

This exchange illustrates how Man on the Flying Trapeze takes a particularly different

approach to marriage than other Fields films. Here, the comedian scrutinizes the darker side of

matrimony by having his narrative examine remarriages, the replacement of familial roles after a

spouse dies. Within the relationship between Ambrose and Hope, the need for a mother figure to

continue a familial order dooms Fields to be gravely unhappy, thus creating an intensely

conflicted family unit.xvii In the context of narrative, Hope performs an important role in

Trapeze as a type of surrogate mistress for Fields, as she emotionally fulfills the function usually

supplied by an extramarital affair in a story of marital unhappiness. Throughout the film, the

bond between father and biological daughter remains idealized and substantially more intimate

than the marital relationship. Hope bails him out of prison, drives to work with him, and

basically exists as his singular ally against his second family and the world itself. Another

telling indicator of this position appears in how Hope has no suitor in the film, something usually

given to the daughter in other Fields comedies. Here, the character has no purpose but to provide

comfort to her weary father. Examining post-World War II Hollywood cinema, Silverman

writes on the appearance of “the ‘ideal’ female subject” who refuses “to recognize male lack, and

that disavowal and fetishism provide important mechanisms for effecting this refusal” (47). In

this comedy, Hope represents an incestuous version of the “‘ideal’ female subject” by dismissing

her father’s lack, epitomized by his heavy drinking and timidness. Fields finds idealized

sympathy through a tabooed incestuous fantasy, a blindly devoted and virginal daughter.

Fittingly, after being expelled from his own house, the film shows Fields living in a cosy

domestic setting with his daughter, now fully adopting the role of caretaker/wife as she works in the kitchen. Much like the orange grove in It’s a Gift, this is another fantasy space that seems, once again, incredibly ambiguous and somewhat fleeting. As the epilogue shows, Fields attempts to still maintain some sort of relationship with his wife as he invites her and his in-laws for a ride in his new car. As he, Leona, and Hope sit in the front, Nesselrode and her son are relegated to the open rear compartment only to have it rain upon them. While this image certainly robs a phallic matriarch in the form of Mrs. Nesselrode of her dignity, it is difficult to read if the family unit has truly been reestablished with Fields as patriarch or if this is simply a

fleeting comedic moment of revenge. Overall, in Fields’ incestuous fantasy, there is a direct

mutation of the marital and familial orders first defined by Freud in Totem and Taboo. As Freud

writes, the “marriage-classes” in human history developed to guarantee “the prevention of

natural and group incest and to forbid marriage between still more distant groups of relatives”

(9). This centrality of the incest taboo in defining the structures and essentially driving the

forces of society, of course, would become the basis of Claude Leví-Struass’s The Elementary

Structures of Kinship, which used the taboo’s restrictions to explain the conception of women as

commodity or, specifically, the “exchange of women” between tribes. Yet, as Lacan would later

contend, while these Laws of Kinship are central to determining the social order, notably, “the

prohibition of incest is merely the subjective pivot of that Law” (“Function” 66).xviii Within his

fantasy “violations,” Fields comically stresses the subjectivity of these Laws, exposing a

mutability in these foundational familial prohibitions. By exploring a paramount taboo of

incestuous bliss, Fields provides a potent attack upon the supposed primordial law by illustrating

its subjectivity and, as a result, core fragility.

Since Fields is pushing the limits of the familial order so aggressively in Man on the

Flying Trapeze, the climatic sequence where he “snaps” proves much more unsettling and

violent than the pathos-driven climax of It’s a Gift. Returning home after his absurdly difficult

day, a disheveled Fields finds himself confronted by his second family and accused of various

untruths including infidelity with his secretary, whom Claude has seen comforting an injured

Fields at the wrestling match. Claude accuses him: “You were drunk. And you were laying in

the gutter. And you did take your secretary.” The ever-supportive Hope reprimands him, “You keep quite and let my father tell his story in his own way.” Raising his hand to Hope, Claude sneers, “Don’t you yell at me or I’ll slap you in the mouth.” Only then does Fields lash out against his second family, knocking Claude unconscious and then chasing his wife and mother- in-law, who eventually hide in the next room. From behind the closed door, Leona demands,

“Leave this house and never cross the threshold again. And take your ungrateful minx of a daughter with you.” Upon hearing this, the scene cuts to Fields lunging at the door only to have

Hope pull him back. He mumbles, “I’ll exterminate the three of them.” As seen here, Fields’ timid buffoon ultimately masks a decidedly more intense fantasy of not only incestual bliss, but violent retribution. We see this in the otherwise timid Ambrose’s only overtly deceitful act in

the film. Attempting to take his first afternoon off in twenty-five years to see a wrestling match

(an aggressively masculine, yet theatrical, ritual), he lies to his boss that he is attending the

funeral of his “poor dear mother-in-law, Mrs. Nesselrode.” Upon hearing the news, Ambrose’s

secretary offers condolences by saying “It must be hard to lose your mother-in-law.” Fields

responds, “Yes it is. It’s very hard. It’s almost imposs . . . It’s hard to . . .” Of course, the joke

consists of Ambrose basically catching himself in the middle of a Freudian slip, exposing his

tabooed murder fantasy. As such moments illustrate, Fields suggests that there exists a deluded,

pathetic fantasy of violently dominating the matriarch within even the most seemingly sheepish male subject. His husband characterization lives perpetually on the margins of the phallic order, yet fantasizes about violently assuming the role of the empowered father that defines its

structures.

Conclusion

In James Curtis’s exhaustive and touching biography of Fields, he characterizes the

perception the audience had of the comedian as both a modern husband and nostalgic confidence

man: “Not only did audiences know W.C. Fields . . . they had a strong perception of his

character as well. He was expected to be browbeaten and gruff in his modern persona, effusive

and crooked in period garb” (300). While this certainly shows the most fascinating split within

Fields’ persona, I wish to stress that the public seemed to reconcile these two variations into a

singular popular image of Fields as comedian. Partly the reason for this is because he

occasionally played roles outside these two variations, such as in the farcical Million Dollar Legs

(1932), which features him as the president of the mythical country Klopstokian, and

International House (1933), which casts him as Professor Quail, a world famous adventurer.

(Notably, these are two films Fields did not author).xix Also, in general, his persona had

consistencies from film to film, especially found in his voice and use of language. Fields’ vocal

performances seem a distinctive spoof of Victorian manners and show an innate sense of what

sounded funny, both qualities that made his one of the most recognizable voices of the period.

As Curtis writes on the popularity of this bizarre voice, “Linguistically, he showed the patterns of the Philadelphia dialect, though his private speech was devoid of the volume and flourishes that made him one of the most imitated of personalities” (300). Thus, Fields through both these onscreen variations defined a unified icon of the masculine comedic for the public, who seemed to define his massive appeal through his peculiarity. His vocality along with his quirky dress and spoof of male institutions all define elements of the masculine comedic that I will focus upon in the upcoming chapters through other key figures. Hopefully, by analyzing the specifics of

Fields’ gendered role beyond issues of ethnicity, voice, or queered male relationships, I have set a theoretical groundwork for my examination of these historically-specific foundations of the phenomenon in Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, and popular comedy duos.

In his last two starring roles, both authored by Fields, the line between the con man and family man personas blur and, perhaps not coincidently, gender relationships are not so much of a concern. Both films cover a heavily caricatured and self-referential territory of comedy.xx The

Bank Dick, while certainly classifiable as a domestic farce, features the family man persona less timid than in It’s a Gift and Man on the Flying Trapeze, as large portions of the narrative take

Fields away from his family where he partakes of various shenanigans more befitting his con man persona. The Bank Dick also contains very cartoonish characters and an odd narrative structure that results in a fantasy-like scenario for its conclusion that tends to be more silly than poignant, featuring his character now wealthy and living the stifling life of the upper classes. He sits at the head of the table in a large mansion with his family, supposedly as the patriarch, and now acts uncharacteristically refined. But this image is quickly undercut when he is shown sneaking off to the local tavern. As such a deceptive ending shows, the con man and family man merge as he remains within the domestic sphere yet manages to live an irresponsible double life

70 that is closer to his previous con man pursuits. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break features

Fields playing himself pitching a rambling screenplay that we see unfold onscreen to a frustrated producer (Franklin Prangborn). Structurally, this film is truly imaginative and pushes the concept of self-reference into a nearly postmodern direction. Despite this innovative turn, this film never allows Fields to be an empowered individual. He exists as a fatigued variation of his con man person, a tired “has-been” struggling to push a con inside yet another phallic order, the

Hollywood studio system. In this final starring role, Fields moves his bitter commentary into a reflection of his own sagging career, having the unsuccessful masquerade performed in his other films now represent his actual attempts at playing a “leading man” in Hollywood.

In this chapter, I have introduced Fields as one of the clearest examples of the masculine comedic in Hollywood history and as a starting point to now examine the ethnic, technological, and fraternal influences upon the phenomenon in my upcoming chapters. As will be shown, the masculine comedic does not always adopt such a misanthropic aggressive stance as seen in

Fields. But, essentially, this hostility is something that uniquely helped to secure his place as an icon in cinematic history that is similar to Mae West. Both figures, despite taking vastly different approaches to their comedy, have undeniably powerful and personal voices as performers. Perhaps this ultimately explains why West largely disliked My Little Chickadee.

As Curtis relates, she grew frustrated with a common misperception about the star pairing: “in later years, she was asked more about the picture she did with Fields than about any of her other movies. ‘Some people have gotten the quaint idea that I made more than one film with W.C.

Fields,’ she said in 1970. ‘No way baby. Once was enough’” (413). In its misunderstanding about the number of co-starring vehicles, perhaps the public views the two stars as the perfect cinematic counterparts of gender performance. After all, both thoroughly convey different

extremes of sexual identity, ranging from the empowered feminine to the marginal masculine.

Even more significant, both aggressively attack the phallic order and gender performance itself

by exploring these concepts’ subjectivity. Perhaps both Fields and West could not help but be

permanently linked together in our minds as those rare icons who, for a fleeting moment,

unmasked the fragility of gender in Classic Hollywood.

Note

i For more on the critical focus on Mae West, see Marybeth Hamilton’s When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment, Jill Watt’s Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, Ramona Curry’s Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon, and Andrea J. Ivanov’s “Mae West is Not a Man: Sexual Parody and Genre in the Plays and Films of Mae West.”

ii Heavy marketing of Fields’ image continued throughout his lifetime and long after his death. Aspects of his persona, such as the hard drinking and hatred of children, were perpetuated by a popular 1949 biography by Robert Lewis Taylor, much of which indulges in Hollywood myth. For a more accurate study of the career and work of W.C. Fields, see James Curtis’s W.C. Fields: A Biography, Simon Louvish’s Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, Wes. D. Gehring’s W.C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography, David T. Rocks’s W.C. Fields: An Annotated Guide, and Ronald Fields’ W.C. Fields: A Life on Film and W.C. Fields: By Himself. For more specifically on the marketing of the Fields image, see 113-22 of Ronald Fields’ Never Give a Sucker an Even Break: W.C. Fields on Business.

iii Fields wrote the stories for most of his best comedies often under pseudonyms such as Charles Bogle, Mahatma Kane Jeeves, and Otis Criblecoblis. West also wrote the screenplay for many of her films, though, unlike Fields, never found herself having to use pseudonyms.

iv Some of the critical response to the film was negative and pointed out the unoriginality of the performances – especially in relation to West, whose performance was viewed by some critics as a pathetic caricature of her former self. See Hamilton 229-30 and Deschner 142-47.

v Fields’ first major success was in the hit Broadway play Poppy by Dorothy Donnelly. He played the supporting role of McGargle opposite Madge Kennedy as the title character. The play ran 336 performances and also toured. It was such a success that it helped define the popular con man persona of Fields. The comedian played the same role in both film adaptations of the play, D.W. Griffith’s Sally of the Sawdust (1925) and the sound remake Poppy (1936). In the latter, Fields received top billing in the now-centralized role of McGargle.

vi A more perplexing depiction of Native Americans appears in the character of Twillie’s Indian manservant Milton, referred to by Fields as Ugh, (George Morton) – a figure who at first appears to be a grossly insulting Indian caricature who often speaks in monosyllables. His character

almost appears so extreme in its depiction that it borders on a spoof of the stereotype itself in its absurd appropriation of past Indian cliches. Of course, this does not necessarily mean Ugh should be read as anything but another example of racist Hollywood caricature, even though the performance of Morton does seem acutely aware of how overused such stereotypes were in past productions.

vii American history must be viewed as the history of a patriarchal society; Thus, the period of Fields’ films fit into this definition. As Allan G. Johnson outlines, “A society is patriarchal to the degree that it is male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered. . . . Patriarchy is male- dominated in that the positions of authority – political, economic, legal, religious, educational, military, domestic – are generally reserved for men” (5).

viii As a writer and performer, Fields also seemed acutely aware of the two personas, something evident in his shifting performance styles. Of the two character types, his acting in the husband roles usually is more subdued and textured.

ix Even with the co-writing credit of both stars, this moment is the only scene that West claims Fields actually wrote. Despite the fact that West justly deserves story credit, Fields probably rewrote the majority of his own dialogue. As would be expected by the pairing of two domineering personalities, the production faced troubles even before the cameras rolled with each star writing his and her own version of the script and conflicts resulting in a lack of actual creative collaboration. See Curtis 389-412 and Louvish, Man, 435-47 for more on the production of the film.

x Doane’s observations could never really be applied to Mae West’s films since, through the appearance of her empowered persona, they break from some basic drives of the Classic Hollywood romantic narrative. As Bruce Babington and Peter Williams Evans write, “Despite the conventional drive of the narratives, the ending of her [West’s] films usually reaffirm the unpredictability and the outrageousness of a persona that is admittedly very prone to contradiction, both of gender and ideology. This is so even in the case of narratives where marriage is her ultimate destiny.” As they points out, Chickadee is especially significant in exemplifying her persona’s unconventionality because “marriage is deliberately avoided” (149).

xi Butler’s exploration of “citation” in Bodies is an expansion of her discussion of gender performance from the landmark Gender Trouble. Here, she applies Michel Foucault’s discussion of “juridical systems” from The History of Sex: Volume 1 to determining gender boundaries, writing, “Juridical power inevitably ‘produces’ what it claims merely to represent.” In reference to women, this “performative invocation of a nonhistorical ‘before’ becomes the foundational premise that guarantees a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed and, thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract” (5). In the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Gender, Butler writes how much of her recent work “has been devoted to clarifying and revising the theory of performativity that is outlined in Gender Trouble” (xiv). Bodies certainly falls under this classification.

xii The shocking, though undeniably laugh-provoking ending of this scene is a case of Fields briefly adopting a position similar to Mae West, in that he skews societal convention for a

moment of empowerment. As comedian Harold Lloyd commented upon the scene, “A lot of people would like to give troublesome children a swift kick. But none of us dares. When a child gets into mischief, who among us wouldn’t want to do what Bill Fields did” (Curtis 288).

xiii Fields outlined some of the tricks in an essay for a 1902 volume called The Magician’s Handbook, where he explains how the balancing of multiple cigar boxes was partly an illusion performed through substituting them with a set attached by “a very strong piece of elastic cord” (Louvish Man 51-2). In the film, it remains difficult to determine when and where this substitution takes place. Regardless, the act is still impressive since multiple tricks occur that could not possibly be done through the substitution of attached boxes. In fact, the performance proves doubly impressive since Fields was 54 at the time and very much out of practice.

xiv The Comic Supplement’s sketches also served as the basis of Fields’ silent film The Old Army Game (1926), which, in many ways, was remade as It’s a Gift. See Curtis 299-314 and Gehring’s W.C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography and “W.C. Fields: The Copyrighted Sketches.”

xv This inspiration (or, to be more accurate, character assassination) proves even more potent since he names the lazy brother-in-law character Claude after his own estranged son. See Curtis 329-33 and Louvish, Man, 391-8.

xvi Off-camera, Fields reportedly wished he had a daughter rather than a son. As Jean recounts about being on the set with the aging comedian: “‘I felt that he was playing his own life. He said to me, I wish I had a daughter like you. He said, all my life I’ve wanted someone like you’” (Louvish Man 464).

xvii In his con man roles, a similar motif appears as Fields’ attempts at deceiving wealthy women into matrimony often seem for his daughter’s benefit even more than his own. This is seen not only in The Old Fashioned Way, but in Poppy and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. But Man on the Flying Trapeze is the only narrative where Fields actually succeeds in remarrying for his daughter’s sake. As a result, Ambrose seems to be the most depressed of all of Fields’ characters.

xviii Emphasis added.

xix His appearances in such films are similar to the performances of Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers (1930) and President Firefly in Duck Soup (1933). In all these examples, the joke largely consists of the casting itself. As an empowered figure, the comedian’s presence highlights the comic disjuncture of having a foolish individual appear in a role of authority. Therefore, these performances feel somewhat disconnected from the roles actually authored by the famous comedian. As the con man and the family man, Fields provides a much more complex commentary on masculine identity beyond the satirical device of the buffoon misplaced within a position of power. As a result of the gender dynamics in many of his most famous films, he remains a figure who defies easy explanation as a comedian.

xx Strange amalgams of the Fields persona appear in his four short films for Mack Sennett: The Dentist (1932), The Fatal Glass of Beer, The Pharmacist, and The Barber Shop (1933). These films, all written by Fields, are largely plot-less affairs featuring extreme versions of the

character attributes seen in his feature films. Most notable are The Dentist, which contains his most meanspirited father role, and The Fatal Glass of Beer, a bizarre lampoon of a weepy melodrama featuring Fields as a humble elk herder in the Klondike.

CHAPTER 2 EDDIE CANTOR UNIVERSALIZES THE NEBBISH

As a noun, nebech means: 2. An innocuous, ineffectual, weak, helpless or hapless unfortunate. A Sad Sack. A “loser” [ . . . ] 3. A nonentity; “a nothing of a person.”

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

In the joke-filled “dictionary” The Joys of Yiddish, which examines the confluences of

English and Yiddish, Leo Rosten provides the above definition of nebech that contains some decidedly complicated connotations. Before this, Rosen provides numerous alternate spellings for the word (pronounced neb-ekh or neb-ikh), including nebech, nebbech, nebish, and nebbish.

The final spelling actually is what appears in many English language appropriations, with the

Oxford English Dictionary listing it as its primary spelling. Notably, the noun nebbish is consistently identified with only the male subject and, while related, contains a major difference from a schlemiel. With schlemiel, “a foolish person; a simpleton,” the word suggests a much less sympathetic connotation than nebbish (344). As Rosten suggests, “A nebech is more to be pitied than a schlemiel. You feel sorry for a nebech; you can dislike a schlemiel.” Nebbish is also a word that transcends the Jewish stereotype even within its Yiddish origins, with the ability

to describe a “universal character type” (261).i

Probably the most popular American comedian that comes to mind when thinking of the

nebbish is Woody Allen, who is clearly coded as Jewish, small of stature, physically weak, nervously, jittery, and humorously self-deprecating. The stereotype especially appears early in his career when he was identified more as a comedian than a filmmaker in such movies as Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Play it Again Sam (1972), and Sleeper (1973). But

even as his career veered into more serious territory after his multi-Oscar winning Annie Hall

(1977), the nebbish continued to appear, though he certainly complicated the persona with

human depth and, often, moral ambiguity in films like Manhattan (1977), Husbands and Wives

(1992), and Deconstructing Harry (1997). More fascinatingly, in many films, Allen actually

dissects the nebbish as something facilitated by the entertainment industry itself. In Broadway

Danny Rose (1984), he firmly places the persona in a Jewish show business tradition as he

portrays the titular character of a crafty, though outclassed former Catskills comedian now barely

making ends meet as a personal manager. Similarly, with Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), he

portrays one of the most sympathetic versions of the persona as a poor filmmaker, ultimately

rejected by a gentile woman who goes for a more successful and handsome Jewish television

producer.

Much of Allen’s career can be read as a deconstruction of the nebbish as cultural and

personal image, a succession of dialogues on Jewish-American male self-perception. Mark E.

Bleoweiss suggests self-mockery is central to understanding Allen as an artist since the

“underlying message in Allen’s self-deprecating humor is that, mostly because of his Jewishness,

he feels like an outsider.” Surprisingly, this ethnically-defined outsiderness is something that

Bleoweiss suggests as universalizing Allen’s persona as well:

He rarely, if ever, actually refers to himself as an outsider, probably because he assumes that alienation is a natural part of his identity as a member of a minority. . . . The main source of his alienation, like that of most outsiders, lies in our contemporary social framework and not just in his identity as an ethnic minority. Because his humor attracts such large and diverse audiences, most of his fans must also identify as or be empathic to outsiders for them to appreciate his work so much. (210)

The contention of a universalized empathy for Allen is problematic when we squarely place the onscreen persona into the confines of Jewish humor where “self-deprecation” would also reflect

a struggle with cultural identity. This is something even Bleoweiss defines in far from

“universalized” definitions, contending that the central comic paradox of Jewish identity in

America is that “Jews understand their shortcomings – in this case, the inability to accept those

who accept them . . . they [Jews] assume that those non-Jews themselves cannot be social

‘insiders’ or they would not accept Jews” (211). In essence, such a dynamic would make Allen as self-analytical nebbish impossible to be fully universalized for non-Jewish viewers, since the

anxiety that grounds his humor is based in a distinctly Jewish-American paradox.

Despite Bleoweiss’s analysis, in the confines of seeing Allen as mainly a purveyor of

Jewish humor, suggesting his comic persona as truly universalized becomes problematic. On the other hand, historically following the roots of Allen’s onscreen persona as an example of the masculine comedic provides a different avenue for understanding his popularity with both Jews and gentiles. Doing so suggests Woody Allen is far from a singular Jewish nebbish figure positioned in a strictly later 20th century context. Instead, he comes from a longer tradition of

onscreen nebbishes that began with cinema’s transition to sound. Even though many of these

figures were not overtly ethically identified as Jewish, they are historically rooted in traditions

founded by Yiddish comedy. As often suggested by Allen himself, the clearest influence on his

performance style is Bob Hope, whose 1930s-50s screen persona was often as a witty and

demasculinized loser, who lapses into nervous, under-the-breath asides.ii In a 2005 interview,

Allen reflected: “I've always been a passive comedian, in the mould of Bob Hope or something

that's victimized. A coward, a failure with women, a loser and I'd love to sometime try a picture

where I was a winner and I would like that just for the fun of it” (Allen). Given the distinctly

hegemonic American identity found in his commitment as a USO performer, Anglo comedian

Hope feels like an odd component in tracing the history of the nebbish onscreen. But this linage,

as noted by Allen himself, is actually based in Hope’s unmasculine “passive” characteristics

onscreen, a generalized failure to live up to phallic ideals within film narratives as opposed to

anything clearly linked to ethnicity. Bob Hope’s movie persona (though certainly not his latter

television persona) confirms, as Rosten suggests, that the nebbish is a universal character type.

This does not mean the nebbish is something gentile or, even more limiting in definition,

ethnically neutral. Through all its variations, this characterization is clearly born out of Jewish

comedic tradition even as it has grown to be applicable to a broader gendered characterization

that transcends ethnicity. As I will outline in this chapter, it is clearly a comedic persona born out of an ironic embrace of degrading stereotypes of a Jewish masculine inferiority that persisted in the early 20th century. To see how the nebbish moves from Jewish stereotype to universalized

comedic type, we only need to look to a comedian who is a direct influence upon Hope and, in

turn, Allen. Eddie Cantor was one of the top American stars, comedic or otherwise, of the first

half of the 20th century. Even if his reputation subsided in succeeding decades among Classic

Hollywood aficionados, as biographer Herbert G. Goldman suggests, the significance of Cantor

particularly appears in his role in the history of stardom itself since “he, singlehandedly and

consciously, changed the very nature of stardom.” Through Cantor’s massive popularity on

stage, film, radio, and, eventually, television “the line between ‘celebrity’ and ‘actor’ became

gradually blurred, and stars were finally perceived not as simply top-of-the-line actors but as

public figures” (xiii). His appeal crossed between the highest levels of popular entertainment: as

the toast of the Broadway stage to performing weekly as radio’s biggest pre-Jack Benny star to

recording hit records such as “Making Whoopee” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

During these triumphs, he also starred in a series of high-budget A-pictures for Samuel Goldwyn

at United Artists.iii While most of his fellow comedians appeared in smaller budget B-features

and shorts, Cantor quickly developed into a heavily promoted personality that was a precursor to

the huge popularity of later comedians.

In this manner, Cantor exists as a central figure when examining the masculine comedic

in the history of American popular entertainment. More specifically, he is a paramount figure in

bringing the nebbish into the popular consciousness in the 1930s, moving the character type

beyond the Broadway stage into national recognition. In What Makes Pistachio Nuts?, Henry

Jenkins devotes a chapter to Cantor and the most intriguing modification that his persona undertook during his transition from Broadway to movies. As he suggests, adopting the terminology of Irving Howe, this move illustrates a “de-Semitization” in Cantor’s persona, a rejection of the traditional marks of Jewishness, basically “a strenuous effort at cultural assimilation, among performers appearing outside the safe confines of Broadway” (175). This distance from his ethnic heritage onscreen proves ironic since, in real life, Cantor remained celebrated within the Yiddish press and supported many Jewish causes throughout his career.

His initial success was largely established in New York City during the 1920s performing for

Ziegfeld’s famous Follies. Like many revue comics of the era, he became closely identified with his New York roots, especially his Hester Street upbringing and distinctly Jewish background. Thus, the comic song-and-dance man, born Edward Israel Iskowitz, heavily relied upon his Jewishness to appeal to the city’s ethnically diverse theater audiences. Cantor’s 1928 autobiography makes frequent references to his religion, even quoting the Talmud on its first page, and recounting his Hester Street upbringing and synagogue wedding.

As Jenkins contends, such publicity “suggests how much Cantor’s ethnicity was taken for granted as a central component of his public personality” during the 1920s (172). But this clear ethnic identification faded as studios had to broaden his appeal, thus divorcing his persona from

80 his Jewish identity onscreen. As I will argue, the development of Cantor as a national comedian was the establishment of a universalized and homogenized nebbish, a comedian adopting many characteristics of the classic Yiddish weak male while moving the stereotype into a wider acceptability. While maintaining crucial elements of the Jewish stereotype as a core, Cantor intertwined disjunctive characteristics to move between ethnic identifiers, challenging borders and codes for laughs. This ultimately opens the question of how much of this ethnic complexity transferred into the masculine comedic as a cinematic construct. How much remained as the cinematic comedian moved further and further away from this vaudevillian-rooted ethnic stage tradition?

To contemplate this question, I will consider Cantor’s career during his time contracted to

Samuel Goldwyn as it illustrates a progression away from such stage-born ethnic identifiers and shows his development into what we more traditionally label a Hollywood comedian. This cultivation appears early on within his first film not based upon a stage show, Palmy Days

(1931), a production that, while still influenced by Broadway musical comedy, shows a definite shift in his persona away from ethnicity toward humor more ambiguously based in sexual roleplaying. Another concern will be Cantor’s appearances in later, more polished productions, specifically the historical farce Roman Scandals (1933) and the follow-up Kid Millions (1934).

While still musical spectacles, these films resemble the comedian comedy in its more standard form, less Broadway-influenced and closely reflecting the genre conventions identified by Steve

Seidman. Through this development, Cantor’s persona was presented as, eventually, populist yet distinctly Pre-Oedipal and non-sexual, even in the midst of musical spectacles that provide hyper-fetishistic sexual fantasies through the appearance of the famous Goldwyn Girls. With the development of his Jewish persona into a “white” characterization, his career and onscreen

self illustrate the most problematic elements of Jewish-American assimilation as certain cultural

myths, such as a Jewish male “lack,” remained on the surface, while a clear ethnic identity was

submerged to the point of erasure. Nowhere does this assimilative history become more

complex and disturbing than in the retention of the stage tradition of blackface in Cantor’s 30s

films. It is within this aspect of his popularity that Cantor’s own ethnic whitewashing onscreen actually heightens the Hollywood perception of black masculinity as distinctly ‘other.’ But to fully understand all these layered appropriations and erasures of ethnic and racial identities, we must first dissect Eddie Cantor’s own nebbishness as rooted in the stereotypes of Jewish male

“femininity.” Doing this shows why this character type was such an important formative component for the masculine comedic.

The “Feminine” Jewish Male: Resistance and Adaptation

Looking at his largest Broadway success, the Ziegfeld extravaganza Whoopee (1929), it

is clear that Eddie Cantor’s stage self was a Jewish persona. Similar to another huge success of

the period, George and Ira Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (1930), Cantor’s show contained a comically

simple ‘fish out of water’ plot that placed a Jewish character into a Wild West setting, where he

lacked the brawn needed to survive, yet found his way through sheer nervous wit. Whoopee

casts Cantor as Henry Williams, who, despite the decidedly gentile name, clearly is coded as

Jewish through various ethnic jokes. A comical hypochondriac, the character is a classic

example of the stereotypical “unmasculine” nervous Jewish male. Upon the film adaptation of

the stage show (1930), the persona of Cantor as Jew was heavily marketed to audiences hungry

for new sound productions. One pressbook advertisement promised “laughs, giggles, gurgles,

roars run riot when Eddie Cantor starts to cut up as a Jewish Indian in the funniest mirthfest ever

flashed on the talking screen” (Jenkins 173). Advertisements also sold Cantor as a “Jewish

Cowboy,” attempting to carryover the witty ethnic and urban outsider dynamic of it and Girl

Crazy’s stage popularity to the new medium of talking pictures.iv Given the success of the film

adaptation of The Jazz Singer (1928) with its heavily Jewish narrative, this blatant selling of

Cantor as Jewish subject made sense for the studio. The film version still continues many ethnic

identifiers in its comedy including a famous scene where Cantor masquerades as an Indian

salesman, yet gradually falls into the characteristics of a stock Jewish merchant, suggesting that

the potential buyer’s offer takes “Such chutzpah!” Later in the scene, he transitions from an

Indian War dance into a Jewish folk dance, singing “Yiddle-diddle-dee!”

One of the most shocking running gags found in Whoopee strikes right at the heart of

ethnic masculine identity, more pointed at the behind-the-greasepaint persona of Cantor himself

as Jew, by actually referencing circumcision. When a nurse accuses Eddie of being a

hypochondriac, Cantor offers to pull down his pants to show her his “operation,” as proof he is really sickly. Later, he shows off his circumcision in a game of manly “one-ups-man-ship” with a wealthy rancher, suggesting that he look down his pants when asking, “You think you’ve got a scar?” Upon winning the heart of the domineering Nurse Custer, Cantor’s character eventually sings that “she enjoys my operation!” These jokes about his circumcision illustrate a playfulness with cultural myths, since circumcision became the bodily marker to many of a feminine state for male Jews. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud himself contended in an extended footnote that circumcision exists as a label of masculine disempowerment, resignation to a powerful father figure, writing that the “primeval custom of circumcision, another symbolic substitution for castration, can only be understood as an expression of submission to the father’s will”

(Gilman, Freud 70). To Freud, the circumcision custom was innately tied to neurosis and, in essence, to masturbation as a compulsion born out of the anxiety of castration. As Sander

Gilman summarizes, to Freud, circumcision culturally “was seen as a ‘cure’ for the sexual

diseases associated with masturbation; it was also seen as a sign of the sexual disease of the

Jewish male” (Freud 71). Cantor’s own suggestion that the religious ceremony was an

“operation” mocks the idea of circumcision, the ultimate bodily signifier of a male Jew’s ethnic

identity, as being a physical lack, a supposed surgical removal of manhood. Of course, what

remains open to debate is the cultural connotation of such a joke, whether it can be regarded as

self-deprecation or the mockery of bigoted myths. In truth, the implications of such humor

reside somewhere in between these two extremes, suggesting the onstage Cantor to be a truly

complex ethnic subject hovering between the stereotypically demasculinized and the ironically

performative. Through the lens of masculinity studies, he is a true figure of the masculine

comedic. With the complexity of such a persona, we find ethnically significant roots for the

phenomenon itself, a Jewish tradition of comic self-deprecation as an underlying influence on the

trajectory of the Hollywood comedian.

Historically, the concept of a feminized masculinity equated with the Jewish male was

very much in the public consciousness during the late 19th and early 20th century as

“intellectualized” observations on Jewish masculinity, including the work of Freud, entered the

popular discourse. This was especially evident in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903) – which continued many hegemonic myths of sexual and ethnic inferiority by identifying women as physically and mentally inadequate, along with suggesting the Jewish male shared these characteristics. As Gilman notes in The Jew’s Body, Weininger’s views were wildly popular and were not really innovation but a summation of longstanding myths of a weak and “female-like”

Jewish masculinity, dating all the way back to medieval ethnic distinctions.v In her analysis of

male identification in Yiddish cinema, Michele Aaron writes that Weininger’s popularity, along

with this general correspondence between misogyny and anti-Semitism, proves crucial in

understanding a supposedly larger “crisis of masculinity” in the early 20th century. This concept

can be identified as a societal response to feminism and more openly homosexual subcultures,

along with the overall loosening of sexual mores in urban centers mainly based in Europe. She

writes that this correspondence “indicates how anti-Semitism at this time is not simply wedded to

misogyny, but becomes a part of, or a displaced, misogyny.” We can historically regard anti-

Semitism as “a ready site for the expression of this male crisis, and of the hatred of women” (92).

Here, Aaron points to a larger masculine anxiety emerging at the time which, as my much of this

dissertation proposes, fuels the masculine comedic as it materialized with great force in 1930s cinema. By suggesting the male Jew as part of this national anxiety, a performative appropriation of the stereotype of the nebbish now seems like a logical outlet for comedic expression since, as I will later illustrate, Jewish identity could more readily be assimilated into

American popular culture than different racially or sexually-marked forms of otherness.

One of the most intriguing takes on the history of the supposedly unmasculine Jew

appears in the work of Daniel Boyarin, who examines the gender classification as fraught with

complexities and actually providing outlets of resistance to gentile hegemonic myths. In

Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, he provocatively claims “there is something correct – although seriously misvalued – in the persistent European representation of the Jewish man as a sort of woman. More than just an anti-

Semitic stereotype, the Jewish ideal male as countertype to ‘manliness’ is a historical product of

Jewish culture” (3-4). To Boyarin, these cultural approximations can be read not only as cultural myths, but as based in perennial performative elements of male Jews in the public sphere, figures who resisted gentile masculine ideals as a form of rebellion. Boyarin traces gendered

performance as far back as the Roman Empire, where rabbis defined themselves as more

feminine as a way of resisting the hyper-masculine Roman state, a dominant fiction that, in turn,

defines European (i.e., Western) masculinity. More specifically to the 20th century, he suggests

this lineage fed the phallocentrism that defines Freudian and, in turn, Lacanian theories of gender

identity. While unlike Freud, Lacan argues for the phallus as more a psychic universal – since

all subjects, male or female, can never possess the symbolic phallus – Boyarin still sees this

phallocentrism as a construct based in a distinctly non-Jewish cultural mentality: “Freud and

Lacan were misled by the pressures of their own cultural situation, not in the sense that this

‘charge’ is usually made – that Freud was simply a Victorian or simply a Jewish male – but

rather that Freud’s and Lacan’s ideas on this matter were formed by the entire tradition of

Western culture going back to the Greeks.” With this broad cultural classification of Western

culture as antithetical to Jewish identity, Boyarin positions a supposed Jewish male “femininity”

as an active resistance of aggressively phallocentric identities. Even if Jewish communities also

prove patriarchal in their own ways, he suggests, “rabbinic Jewish culture thus refuses prevailing

modes through which surrounding cultures represent maleness as active spirit, femaleness as passive spirit” (10). Therefore, for many Jews, resistance to the dominant culture was found in performing passive masculinity as a form of cultural identity.

Such points might initially invite a reading of something like Cantor’s nebbish cowboy in

Whoopee as a form of cultural resistance. Employing Boyarin in her reading of Cantor and

Willie Howard (the star of Girl Crazy), Andrea Most argues for a form of empowerment through

performing stereotypical personas onstage:

In creating their characters, Cantor and Howard had to contend with the stereotype of the feminized Jewish man, which was often attached to them by the anti-Semitism of the era. Because they were actors in musicals, however, they did not have to allow the stereotype to disempower them; instead, they manipulated it to their own benefit. Like rabbis of ancient Rome whom Boyarin writes about, Cantor and Howard reject the macho image of

the cowboy [. . .] and instead adopt a feminized persona that allows them literally to dance circles around the “real” cowboys with whom they share the stage. (54)

While suggesting Cantor as an updated form of the ancient rabbis has its appeals, it unfortunately

neglects to acknowledge some simple facts about the development of his popular persona.

Certainly, the feminized male Jew in a European sense can be read as born out of a clear

resistance to Western classifications of maleness as “active.” But this fails to fully acknowledge

Cantor’s nebbish as born out of a 20th century immigrant experience as well, in which new dynamics caused by the question of assimilation arise. Thus, such performances exploit a feminized persona for laughs in contrast to a “proper” American gentile masculinity. With this understanding, Cantor provides a clear ethically-based configuration of the central paradox – empowered as performer/disempowered as persona – found in the masculine comedic as he is an empowered Jewish performer embraced by the gentile public, but one essentially performing a character type conforming to cultural myths of Jewish male lack.

No matter how complex an ethnic subject Cantor was on Broadway, movies proved a different medium that needed to appeal to a broader, less ethnically aware, audience. As Jenkins outlines, Whoopee’s stage pedigree, which was heavily promoted upon the release of the film adaptation, ultimately met with much “regional resistance” and turned only a modest profit through strong showings in “several northern cities and its mild success elsewhere, but it failed to excite interest in the ‘sticks’ or in regional centers” (166). In an ultimately successful attempt to expand Cantor’s popularity, the studio shifted publicity away from the comedian’s Jewishness when selling his follow-up vehicle Palmy Days. Here, Cantor plays Eddie Simpson, the former assistant to a phony psychic who is mistaken as a memory expert and put in charge of a large spectacular bakery, where fantastical musical numbers and gag sequences transpire. In this presentation of his persona onscreen, unlike Whoopee, a definite de-Semitization occurs as he is

no long clearly implied to be Jewish.vi Interestingly enough, the film still allows him to perform

as the ethnic roleplayer in two notable sequences, donning blackface to perform a song in one scene and, in another, pretending to be a French psychic to outsmart a villainous fortuneteller

(Charles Middleton). Yet, as Jenkins summarizes, such moments do little to continue the ethnic identification found in promoting his first film, since ethnicity exists in Palmy Days as a “mask to be assumed rather than an identity to be maintained” (176). As a result of the film’s success, his succeeding productions all took on a similar bent, removing clear ethnic classification for the sake of wider audiences and, in essence, requiring the on-stage Cantor persona to assimilate.

While assimilation problematizes classifying Cantor as a Jewish subject in the majority of his films, it actually proves enlightening in understanding an ethnic influence upon the masculine comedic itself. Cantor was a second generation Jewish-American, born out of an era from 1880-

1920 that brought more than two million Jews from Europe to the United States (Heinze 4). On a purely historical basis, this had a major influence upon American popular culture, especially on the vaudeville stage where such figures as Cantor, the Marx Bros., Jack Benny, George Burns,

Ed Wynn, The Three Stooges, The Ritz Bros., Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers, and countless others shaped the direction of popular film and broadcast comedy. All these comedians, as they reached a wider movie and/or broadcast audience, rarely overtly portrayed their Jewishness as part of their act, which speaks more to the economically-driven pressures to conform than to the performers’ proclivities. Since most of these comedians rose to popularity on the vaudeville stage of the 1910s-20s, the pressure to erase ethnic identification as they left northern cities also could be linked to a very real atmosphere of anti-Semitism during the period. As Gerald Sorin outlines in his history of the Jewish experience in America, “in the xenophobic 1920s anti-

Semitism was plainly and openly expressed by a variety of important people, institutions, and

88 legislative acts” (181). By the 1930s, as many of these vaudeville stars were attaining massive popularity, there was a steady influx of economic, ideological, and even organizational support from Nazi Germany to anti-Semitic causes in America. Also, during this period, some of the anti-Semitic proclamations of all-American masculine folk heroes like Henry Ford, who published the anti-Jewish newspaper the Dearborn Independent, and Charles Lindbergh, who warned Franklin Roosevelt that Jews were carelessly conspiring against American interests, made gentile/Jewish relations in America anything but idealized (Sorin 179-93). While a narrative of success was certainly being attributed to the Jewish experience in America, as seen in the growth of the entertainment industry itself, expressing one’s true ethnic identity in any medium meant to reach the wider population was never seen as economically viable. Therefore, the ethnic erasure seen in Palmy Days basically mirrors the career progression of countless

Jewish performers during the period.

This history brings forth the question of what this progression meant as a form of assimilation in the films of Jewish comedians. In his reading of Jewish identity in the films of the Marx Bros., Mark Winokur takes issue with the concept that a true de-Semitization of the

Jewish comedian occurred during this period, since the comedies actually provide various strategies of “resistance” along with accommodation, something critics like Henry Jenkins supposedly overlook. Winokur suggests that the Marx Bros.’s films contain the profound subtext of communal feelings of Jewish lansmannschaft (“individuals from the same village . . . or region in the Pale”), which immigrated to America as “an attempt to maintain a recognizable bond apart from sanctioned identities; . . . it emphasized a memory and history separate from

American memory and history” (107). Winokur suggests this bond materializes in the Marx

Bros.’s sense of placelessness as a type of metaphorical immigrant experience recreating “being

89 physically, socially, and intellectually vulnerable to hostile environments that reveal the disjunction between one’s inadequate personal resources, and the visible, yet inaccessible, abundance of goods” (110). Through such a metaphorical immigrant position, the brothers conflict with the authority figures in the narrative and, alternately, aggressively confront the viewers, thus “attempting to establish a landsmannschaft with their audience, a society of hometown Jews with shared sensibilities” (112). Though he writes this in particular relationship to the Marx Bros., Winokur’s critique of Jenkins suggests he sees this as a scenario tied to most

Jewish comedians of the era, certainly applicable to Cantor, the sole focus of Jenkins’ chapter on the subject.

Seeing the comedian comedy of the period as any version of critique or resistance is tantalizing and, certainly, employing the Marx Bros.’s films can provide many examples of the outsider as anarchic (metaphorical) immigrant. In truth, the landsmannschaft argument has some merit, but mainly as a subtext to early sound productions influenced by the Broadway stage. In general, it proves applicable to a purer form of anarchistic comedian comedy, which the Marx

Bros. exemplify in their attacks on not only authority in their films but on narrative form itself.

As Jenkins outlines, this type of comedy in its plainest forms, as seen in the Marx Bros., began to fade out of existence by the end of the 1930s. As the decade progressed, a far more persuasive comedian comedy was taking shape where a stability of form was more prevalent; here, a different influence of Jewish immigration was materializing by embracing a less threatening version of masculinity than seen in the metaphorical immigrants of the Marx Bros., who, not coincidently, were falling out of popularity and being force-fit into more narratively stable comedies by MGM in the late 30s.

This history of cinematic assimilation suggests some complicated dynamics found in a

Jewish adaptation to gentile culture. The drive to “whiteface” the Jewish stage comedian in

Hollywood appeals to a supposed visual similarity to Christian “whiteness” within the Jew.

Undoubtedly, there has been a long tradition of exaggerating bodily difference in stereotyped

representations of Jewishness, including focusing on skin, eyes, hair, and the shapes of noses and

foreheads. Despite these stereotypes, unlike other ethnic minorities, many European Jews

actually had a tendency to be visually adaptive to surrounding gentiles, which was something

noted by other persuasive cultural narratives in Europe by the late 19th century. As Gilman

notes, many European scientists suggested Jews were “the adaptive people par excellence,” as

the “‘reality’ of the physical difference of the Jew as a central marker of race had come more and

more into question” (Jew’s 176-7). By the 20th century, immigrant Jews themselves were

commenting on their perceived ability to assimilate among gentile populations in America,

noting, as Gilman writes, it “is not merely that second- and third generation decedents of Eastern

European immigrants do not ‘look’ like their grandparents; but they ‘look’ American” (177).

Given Hollywood’s belief that simply not mentioning Jewish identity turned such performers

gentile or, at the very least, ethically neutral, de-Semitization actually promotes a stern belief in

the Jew’s visual “closeness” to whiteness, as opposed to really promoting the Jew’s otherness in

a physical sense. Of course, an irony arises in that the process still suggests Jewish identification

on a blood level as something “other” to be hidden from gentile audiences. When admitting this

complexity about de-Semitization, viewing comedian comedies as any true form of resistance

can only be argued so far, since such beliefs ultimately force assimilation as a performative

function for the comedian. Even on the most superficial of levels, it promotes an erasure of

Jewishness as opposed to a promotion of otherness within gentile Hollywood narratives.

In White, Richard Dyer suggests that the Jew’s “closeness” to whiteness has long been an untrustworthy proposition for the Western hegemony:

[I]t is a closeness that has only sometimes worked to the Jews’ advantage. Adaptability could easily be viewed as the capacity to infiltrate, passing for gentile as a kind of corruption of whiteness. The uncertainty of colour means that at different times Jews may be fully assigned to one or other side of the black:white divide. In Nazi Germany, Jews were regarded as black; in contemporary New York, most would be surprised to find themselves so categorised. (57)

With this problematic closeness in mind, the “whiteness” of Eddie Cantor’s eventual onscreen persona has numerous complications to overcome, since a total emersion into a gentile mask could suggest a “corruption” of whiteness. Instead, Cantor could never fully allow himself to portray hegemonic whiteness, which would never actually occur anyway since he was a comedian, a performer that traditionally portrays disempowered figures. Instead, Cantor emerges onscreen as a universalized nebbish – a construct born out of the Jewish stereotype, which itself is a comic appropriation of feminized male performativity. Yet unlike what is suggested by Boyarin’s European or Winokur’s immigrant histories of resistance, Cantor remains acutely attuned to the importance of passing as a white/gentile in his films, though only to a certain degree. Since the nebbish can never be an empowered individual, the adapted Jew can only remain on the edges of gentile/phallic power structures. True to the definitions I have already laid out for the masculine comedic, Cantor as hidden Jew and male subject can only exist on the margins.

Cantor as Populist Nebbish

By the end of the 1930s, Cantor became a textbook example of the masculine comedic’s ability to create multi-medium superstars, essentially making the transition from vaudeville to

Broadway to film to radio. After making Palmy Days and during the filming of his follow-up

The Kid From Spain (1933), Cantor emerged as the number one radio star of the period on The

Chase and Sanborn Hour. His radio show developed very high ratings and these broadcasts,

along with personal appearances and enormously successful films, made him a top entertainer in

America on various fronts, something that would later be similarly achieved by Bob Hope in the

1940s and 50s. Thus, as we view the de-Semitization of Cantor in film, we must recognize these

characterizations as also heavily influenced by a broader nationalization within these various

venues. In this manner, it is understandable why the films focused so squarely on attracting a larger national audience who was already embracing Cantor in different ways. For example,

most influentially, as an ethnic subject on radio, Cantor resembles the Jewish-born Jack Benny –

born Benjamin Kubelsky and the focus of the next chapter – in that his on-air persona does not

suggest any overt ethnic identifiers beyond his New York accent.vii Thus, when considering the

concept of assimilation in defining Cantor’s screen performances, we must take into account a

larger, multi-medium push for national celebrity that was occurring at the time.

This larger assimilation into a “whiter” persona certainly appears in some of Cantor’s most popular films, which clearly show him as representing something populist in appeal for 30s audiences. Eddie Cantor becomes an American “every-nebbish.” Roman Scandals tells the story of Eddie (Cantor), a small town bumpkin who is an amateur authority on ancient history.

After being thrown out of his American hometown of West Rome by corrupt city officials, he fantasizes himself in ancient Rome. Sold as a slave, he soon is mixed-up in palace intrigue involving the corrupt Emperor Valerius (Edward Arnold), who is as crooked as the politicians in

Eddie’s hometown. In Kid Millions, Cantor is Eddie Wilson Jr., a simpleton from Brooklyn, who inherits a fortune from his dead father, an archeologist who looted ancient treasures. In order to claim the inheritance, Eddie begins his ocean voyage to Egypt and meets various suspicious characters who wish to steal the money. Upon arrival in Egypt, Eddie and the crooks

all become entangled with the dangerous Sheik Mulhulla (Paul Harvey), who claims rightful

ownership of the treasure. In both these narratives, the films deal more overtly with genre

identification than Whoopee or even Palmy Days, now placing the comedian in familiar filmic

settings and allowing much of the humor to emerge from his inability to mesh with these hyper-

masculine surroundings. This is a common trope of the comedian comedy and allows the comic

to remain the unmasculine buffoon in comparison to his genre-specific masculine surroundings,

something we saw with W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee.viii

To be completely accurate in terms of genre identification, Cantor’s 30s star vehicles,

unlike Fields’ films, are not just comedian comedies. The formula Goldwyn located for his star

in Palmy Days and his other United Artist films is a hybrid of two genres which notably came of

age during the decade: the comedian comedy and the musical spectacle. In truth, ‘hybrid’ might be a misleading term, since the two genres really sprang out of the same Broadway tradition that heavily informed early sound cinema and, as such, the filmmakers might not have recognized each as separate entities. Only as the decade progressed did studios more specifically put their resources separately into musical spectacles with larger budgets and comedian comedies, which were often outright “B” movies. Regardless of the actual history, seeing Cantor’s Goldwyn productions as hybrids proves fruitful in understanding their places in later genre readings of

Classic Hollywood, which give some intriguing insights into the films as textual constructs working from various levels of audience involvement. Steve Seidman, in defining the comedian comedy, suggests that “films with comedians are directed, written, and designed as commodities for public consumption.” In this sense, both “the comedian’s awareness of the spectator’s presence and the assertion of his own presence” can allow him “fiction-making capabilities,” which are “evidenced by the frequency of revealing the narrative as a contrivance, and exposing

the materiality of sound and image” (30). This “fiction-making” capability, in which narrative spaces are often overtly suggested as contrived spaces, meshes well with the spectacular musical

genre. In his analysis of Busby Berkeley’s art, Martin Rubin characterizes this relationship in

the Cantor comedies such as Palmy Days and Roman Scandals that Berkeley choreographed as

allowing for “a certain amount of overlap between the concerns of comedian comedy and those

of the musical genre, Berkeleyesque spectacle, and the aggregate/revue tradition” (89).ix

Thus, both the comedian comedy and spectacle musical are coming from a basic stage revue tradition, which often works in creating fantasy spaces that are distinctly sexualized in nature. Broadway’s large chorus lines of fetishized Ziegfeld Girls begot the spectacular onscreen

Goldwyn Girls.x While Palmy Days might be diminishing the ethnic distinctiveness of the stage

Cantor, it is still invoking previous stage-like film productions in its mise-en-scéne, especially

within its male fantasy spaces that are filled with the scantily-clad female chorus. The film

opens on a direct reference to Cantor’s first major supporting appearance in Glorifying the

American Girl (1929), a standard Broadway-like backstage musical where the comedian

performed in an elaborate closing sequence reproducing the 1929 Ziegfeld Follies.xi Palmy Days

begins with a large sign reading “Glorifying the American Doughnut,” standing atop a fanciful

bakery. Inside, we see dozens of barely-covered Goldwyn Girls in white frocks and chef hats

making doughnuts and sliced bread with sexually rhythmic machines. As they carry large bowls

of vaginally-suggestive pastries, the images play as some sort of stage-inspired fantasy wet

dream, an aggressively fetishized space common to Berkeley’s films. The first male onscreen,

surprisingly enough, is not Cantor or even a typical Hollywood masculine subject, but a homosexual stereotype dressed in a snazzy suit with white gloves and a flower in his lapel. He walks up to a girl behind the desk to order, in a “queered” voice, a birthday cake that is “all

95 chocolate” with a “pansy” on top. His appearance along with the fantasy female workforce establishes the world of the film as a type of sexualized funhouse, the 20s Broadway stage aesthetic bleeding over and now defining the popular musical/comedy escapist cinema of the

Depression era.

Removed from 20s stage ethnicity, Cantor’s appearances illustrate how, while the elements of the overtly Jewish subject were downplayed, the masculine comedian was being developed into a particular type of sexual subject that could be humorously “misplaced” in this sexually frank landscape. The writers, Cantor credited among them, still make a minor reference to the previous phallic running gag from Whoopee. Eddie briefly tries to show his new employer, who has mistaken him as an efficiency expert, his “operation.” However, the reference appears only briefly, almost as just a quick wink to his New York audience as an ethnically “submerged joke.” Beyond such a minor allusion, the filmmakers understood how to keep some of the nebbish traits that initially made Cantor popular, like his intense nervousness; yet, they decidedly show these elements in a less Jewish manner. For example, instead of breaking into Yiddish like he did onstage when nervous, Cantor now frantically sings to mark his neurotic “lack” of masculinity, something that notably materializes not only when in danger but with the appearance of the Goldwyn Girls’ overpowering sexuality. In Palmy Days, Cantor emerges as a bit of a hybrid himself as a sexualized subject. He is harmless as a persona yet empowered as his timid comic persona becomes heightened in contrast to the surrounding spectacle, a sea of female flesh that humorously heightens his nebbish sexual nervousness.

This nervousness clearly surfaces in Cantor’s scenes with numerous women, something found when he appears in drag in the film. While drag was common onstage for the Jewish comedian when playing broad female characters, the film moves the practice into a situation not

based in roleplaying as much as pure farce and slapstick. As he runs from the fortuneteller’s

henchmen, Cantor dresses like one of the bakery’s female employees and, with the comedian’s

small frame, actually looks rather feminine. Most important, the scene returns to the male

fantasy space of the opening sequence as Cantor is reluctantly whisked away to the ladies’

changing room where the aggressive trainer Helen Martin (Charlotte Green), not recognizing his

maleness, tells him to undress and shower to get ready for swimming. The film then proceeds

into long tracking shots of nude, yet strategically covered, Goldwyn Girls showering.

Eventually, Cantor finds himself covered only with a towel and nervously trying to escape before there is a widespread discovery of his ‘maleness.’ As opposed to a comic drag act in a

traditional stage sense, the scene alternates between fetishizing the bodies of the real women and

showing Cantor attempting to escape this sexualized fantasy space. The nebbish’s place within

this fantasy is to highlight his own nervousness and lack of sexual aggression as comic spectacle

in tandem with the overpowering feminine spectacle. In many ways, as will soon be seen, this

early example ultimately defines his sexually-tinged relationships with many women in his films.

But before I address Cantor’s problematic association with women onscreen, I think it is

significant to point out that the nebbish character ironically allowed for the persona to emerge as

something surprisingly empowered – a populist New Deal hero.

Roman Scandals opens rather typically for a comedian comedy, establishing Cantor as a

harmlessly quirky social outcast in a small town, whimpering to the powerful town-boss Warren

Cooper (Willard Robertson). Surprisingly though, this diminutive characterization is soon

dispelled as the film launches into an elaborate musical number that clearly empowers Cantor as

a performer and suggests his growing popularity offscreen as a Depression era celebrity. The

comedian comes across a large crowd of dispossessed townsfolk who have been thrown out of

their homes by Cooper and now sit in the street surrounded by their furniture and other

possessions. He asks what has happened, only to be told that “the city’s taking away our home.”

Now, Cantor becomes the empowered proletariat as he suggests that in a show of protest the

dispossessed refuse to leave the street. He tells them, “Look, the city put you here. Well, you

stay here until the city puts you somewhere else.” With this advice, he launches into the

elaborate musical number, “Build a Little Home,” where he sings “it’s not a palace or a poor house/ But the rent is absolutely free” and “this is my house but this is your house/ if you come and live with me.” Despite being in what is otherwise a typically Berkeleyesque musical, the sequence develops into a fascinating “unspectacular” outdoor number with Cantor singing the

song among the accompanying dispossessed, all donned in everyday Depression era clothing.

As the song progresses, Cantor works his way around the crowd, their furniture, and household items – eventually walking triumphantly on a long dinner table surrounded by the singing townsfolk. But this spectacle of the dispossessed is interrupted finally by Cooper, who angrily stops the dancing. As a result, he receives an angry reprieve by Cantor, who states, “You think

you’re a great man. But look what you do!” Not surprisingly, Cooper has had enough and

banishes Eddie from the city limits.

This sequence clearly shows how far Cantor had evolved from Palmy Days as a popular persona embraced by the public. In these early moments of the film, he is positioned into the role of every-man, an outright populist hero that shows how the nebbish was being positioned as a point of identification for the Depression era audiences. Cantor is still the comedian and

unmasculine, as is evident from his various sight gags and relevant place as town outcast, but the

film is now clearly capitalizing on his nationwide popularity by making him an ethnically

ambiguous champion among the populace. He is the buffoon as spokesman for the displaced.

This dynamic in Cantor’s character is noted by William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson in

their reading of Roman Scandals.xii In discussing Cantor’s extra-fictional connotations in the film, they suggest:

The position of Cantor’s persona - outside of normal society - gave it abnormal insight, as well as abnormal blindness: Cantor was more-than-social, rather than other-than- social. His obsessions tended towards the idealistic: he attempted to live the myths that others knew were impossible [ . . . ] There is, in other words, a mad surplus in the persona Cantor constructed. It is a locus of specifically social and cultural contradiction and conflict within which much that is marginal or aberrant is given a positive expression, and which at the same time respects its difference from those who watch (the voyants). It is mad, we would say, and it is also populist. (22)

This complicated and sometimes contradictory populist position applies not only to Cantor, but is typical of the comedian’s role in general as comedically disempowered (“mad”), yet powerful in his relationship with the audience. It makes sense such a persona could emerge as universalized during the 1930s, as dispossession was turning numerous citizens into outsiders as well. This basically made even multi-generational Americans share in the immigrant experience by now being “outside” the social order. Yet for Cantor to adopt this role of spokesman for the dispossessed, his clear connections to the immigrant Jewish experience had to be assimilated since, in truth, economic downturn often breeds suspicion toward the ethnic ‘other’ within the white and gentile populace.

Cantor as a populist spokesman also appears in his follow-up to Roman Scandals, the more broadly absurd Kid Millions. Here, the narrative trajectory itself confirms Cantor as populist hero, yet one still firmly placed in the masculine comedic tradition. The film firmly assigns Cantor to the role of a nebbish New Yorker, though this position is never ethnically identified as Jewish. Instead, he is orphaned and lives on a barge on the East River with his abusive adopted family, an old stevedore and his three sons who all feel vaguely Irish. The film introduces Cantor with some of the populist dynamics seen in the “Build a Little Home” number;

this time, he is embraced by a racially and ethnically diverse group of children that he conducts

as a sort of makeshift, shipyard band. Dressed in a ripped shirt and baggy pants held up by a

rope belt, Cantor begins the band’s rehearsal on the deck of a barge as the sounds of blowing horns are heard in the background. Here, he breaks into the song “When My Ship Comes In,” which contains lyrics describing a type of utopia for the poverty-stricken. Accompanied by the children, Cantor sings of a day when he can buy “every ice cream factory so all the kids can come and get in free.” This Depression-era dreaming of wealth is interrupted by an

economically fruitful plot-point when news comes of his estranged father’s fortune. Thus,

initially, Cantor is once again aligned with the populace as he dreams of sharing wealth and, in

typical Hollywood fashion, a madcap plot unfolds that will eventually make this dream come true.

Kid Millions is notable for its complete transition into spectacle within a closing number filmed in bright Technicolor, a dazzling new display for a 1934 audience who might have never seen the process in a live action film before.xiii The scene features hundreds of children joining

Eddie and the rest of the cast at a fantastical “free” ice cream factory, just as he had promised the children in his first musical number. In clever visuals, the Goldwyn Girls milk giant cows, carry

hulking ingredients up spiral staircases, work massive machines, ride giant ice cream bars, and

eventually help stuff the children’s bellies with free treats. All of this spectacular madness is set

to a rousing number celebrating the simple pleasures of ice cream, as the film ends with a refrain

of “When My Ship Comes In.” In this final display, Cantor the populist comedian merges with

the grandest of spectacles. In moments like these, even though he is a nervously jittery nebbish

in the majority of his scenes, Cantor illustrates the most obvious form of assimilation into

Hollywood product possible, seemingly trading ethnic identity for spectacular universality as

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movie star. But such utopian unions of populism and spectacle should not solely characterize

Cantor as a Hollywood comedian. Far more problematic elements of the feminized Jewish male

stereotype still emerge in profound ways throughout his comedies.

A Pre-Oedipal “Eddie-Pus”: Cantor and Women

Even with these forays into populism, we must be careful not to dismiss the origins of the

nebbish as anything except stereotypical, still born out of the comic appropriation of the

“lacking” Jewish male. To consider the lingering effects of such feminizations, I want to discuss

an overt sequence of comedic gender reversal from Palmy Days. Cantor becomes the target of

affection for the sexually overbearing Helen Martin, who aggressively pursues the meek man

after the phony fortuneteller informs her that Eddie is her true love. Upon seeing her imposing

frame, Cantor tries to escape, but she pulls him into a tight embrace and bullies him over to the sofa where she aggressively wraps her arms around his body. Cantor wails out, “No, no, no, no.

I am not the kind of a man for this kind of a job!” As she bear-hugs the squirming nebbish, she unfavorably compares his masculinity to a matinee idol, suggesting, “Oh, I don’t know why I

should love you. You’re no Ronald Colman.” Offended, Cantor pushes himself away and

cracks, “Say, you’re no Marlene Dietrich, yourself.” Helen, proving her womanhood, suggests,

“Dietrich has got nothing that I haven’t got!” and lifts her skirt to show her leg as she bursts into

a brief rendition of “Falling in Love Again.” Here, to accentuate the lampoon of straight love scenes, the film equates each comic figure with dramatic stars that, as sexual subjects, actually

crossed boundaries. Both these figures are distinctly “foreign” and sexually exotic to the

American audience: Colman, the Brit, and Dietrich, the German.xiv Helen then makes a smutty

sexual pass, a thinly-veiled reference to Cantor’s phallus, by purring, “Oh baby, you’re the key

to my ignition.” Significantly, the scene cuts to a reaction shot, with Cantor’s large expressive

eyes shooting a skeptical look toward Helen, as if unsure how he would sexually please such a

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powerful woman. He then cracks, “Well, then you better start your engine and keep moving.”

The scene then devolves into pure physical comedy to even further suggest the sexual imbalance

between Eddie and Helen. She proceeds to pull Cantor into the gymnasium and puts him

through a series of physical tortures to “build him up,” including twisting him like a pretzel.

Thus, there is an aggressive verbal and then physical attack toward Cantor’s manhood as he is figuratively raped by the overpowering gym instructor.

While jokes like the one suggesting Cantor’s “key” as insufficient might no longer be based in overt references to circumcision like the reoccurring mentions of his “operation,” they

certainly find their roots in cultural narratives where the Jewish male body is seen as lacking.

Perpetuating the view of the Jewish male as feminine, the influence of Otto Weininger was central to Freud’s appropriation of the Jew’s body when defining Aryan male anxiety, which, to

Freud, explains anti-Semitism itself as a neurosis. As Gilman suggests in Freud, Race, and

Gender: “For Weininger, ‘Jewishness’ is the stain that marks the diseased individual. [...] Freud accepts the difference of the Jewish body, as he does the difference of the Jewish mind, but sees the response of the Aryan as a kind of pathology” (83). The Aryan pathology is formed through response to the Jewish male’s supposed phallic lack, something perpetuated by the understanding that the Jew’s body is marked by circumcision. While, to Freud, a Jewish male still suffers from the castration complex, the Aryan male can undergo “a double displacement of his anxiety,” since “he becomes anxious, fearing he will become a Jew himself”– fearing losing part of his penis (84). So as Cantor’s Palmy Days is assimilating the nebbish into a gentile world, it still

plays with these cultural and psychological narratives by suggesting the nebbish as phallically

lacking. Yet through its assimilation of the Jewish performer, it actually sets-up a defense

against such a “double displacement” for the gentile male audience of the 1930s.

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This defense appears in the gender reversal outlined above, as the sexual aggression is attributed to not Cantor but a phallic temptress in the form of Helen Martin – who even performs briefly as Dietrich, an icon of gender-bending sexuality. Throughout the sequence, Cantor still adopts many of the fictions that drive the Freudian reasoning behind anti-Semitism, as he is eventually shown to be physically weaker than other males in the gym and even asks Helen, at one point, “Why don’t you get a fella your own size?” In other words, he clearly lives up to the

phallic lack that defines the stereotype. Yet, what does it mean when a film perpetuates these

anti-Semitic fictions through a cultural assimilation since Eddie Cantor, now Eddie Simpson, is

no longer clearly marked as Jew? Removing the overt reference to ethnicity has allowed the

filmmakers to sidestep the more potent ramifications of the Aryan castration anxiety suggested

by Freud, who contends that a fear of the circumcised other creates a tangible “double

displacement.” Cantor as ethnically neutral everyman, even while suggesting phallic lack in this

sequence, no longer suggests the circumcision (his “operation”) as the reason for his lack.

Instead, Cantor emerges in the post-Palmy films as a more generalized male buffoon, something

seen in the satiric comparison of the nebbish to Ronald Colman, an Anglo figure of

unconventional witty masculinity. The joke of the sequence relates to a more ambiguous

lessening of phallic power in Cantor, one now spoofing Hollywood versions of sexuality rather

than overtly referencing a distinctly Jewish lack, not bothering to complicate the comedy with

mental images of the ethnic other’s literally severed phallus.xv

Cantor’s relationships with aggressive women in some of his other comedies also play

with Freudian gender dynamics in fascinating ways, often making Cantor feel childlike as

opposed to feminized or necessarily castrated. These suggest Cantor’s transition from Jewish

nebbish to whitewashed nebbish as moving the characterization into distinctly pre-Oedipal states.

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In Roman Scandals, through a misunderstanding over his distinctly modern name, after time-

traveling to ancient times, Eddie is dubbed by his slave-owner Eddie-Pus (pronounced Oedipus)

- a wordplay gag typical of writer George S. Kaufman who had a hand in the screenplay.xvi This new name adds an overtly classical and, in a modernist sense, Freudian dynamic to the comedy, which is especially apparent when Cantor finds himself an unwilling participant in a plot to assassinate the emperor. Once again, the comedian is at the mercy of another sexually aggressive woman, Empress Agrippa (Verrea Teasdale), who highlights his comparatively docile demeanor as she, at first, tries to seduce then simply threaten Cantor into helping her murder her husband. Eddie-Pus, dressed in a comically short toga, is led into Agrippa’s extravagant bedroom, where she lies suggestively on a pillow-covered mattress. Light playful music plays over the soundtrack as he walks up to the empress, who wiggles her finger at him to join her in bed. This results in him shyly prancing away and burying his head in the corner of the room like a bashful child. The film cuts to a closer shot of Teasdale, with her body sprawled out across the bed, as she calls out, “Eddie-Pus” and finally persuades the shy Cantor to come to her bedside.

When the empress asks to hold his hand, Cantor cracks, “No. No. You’ll start out by holding my hand and pretty soon you’ll want to shuffle the whole deck.” In essence, the sequence plays out as a partial spoof of the Oedipal narrative, with innocent Eddie-Pus being driven to kill the

Emperor (the father), while being invited to sleep with the alluring Empress (the mother). But

Eddie-Pus is innocently pre-Oedipal, ultimately leaving the Empress to have to threaten as opposed to seduce him into regicide, which he never successfully performs.

Unlike Palmy Days’s seduction lampoon, this scene does less to comically spoof both genders since the sexually aggressive female is clearly a femme fatale meant to spark Cantor’s nervousness and highlight his lack of sexual sophistication. While Palmy Days features a

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character aware of his supposed phallic lack, Eddie-Pus seems to be fighting to maintain some

kind of childlike purity in character. In this variation of the love scene lampoon common in

many comedian comedies, the film positions Cantor in the role of the pre-Oedipal subject,

stammering and sexually pure as opposed to consciously unsure due to a lack. This time, he performs childlike resistance to the sexual advances of the lusty matriarch, thus exemplifying his naive innocence as its own form of comic masculine lack. Yet even this falls into its own stereotypical variation on the Jewish male subject, one that shows the hegemonic drive to assimilate Cantor as selectively embracing some cultural myths while casting aside others. In this scene, Eddie-Pus can be read as an ironic appropriation of the Jew’s supposed sexual stuntedness, but an appropriation only in the most limited of manners.

As seen in the influential sex studies of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and many others, this period perpetuated a cultural myth of male Jewishness and homosexuality as both lacking proper sexual maturation. Yet this logic was often used to suggest sexual excess rather than innocence, as Jews historically as a people were seen as lacking sexual maturity. Concerning such narratives of Jewish sexual promiscuity embraced by these studies, Gilman writes:

These are signs of reversion to earlier stages of the history of sexual development. “Civilization” had moved from the most primitively organized system of sexual activity through the stage of Judaism to its height – modern Christianity. This was Krafft-Ebing’s summary of the sexual history of the human race. (Freud 137)

Considering this seduction sequence in the context of some of the era’s persuasive views of Jews and sex, Eddie-Pus is a character proving sexually “immature” in a way distinctly different from the narratives of Krafft-Ebing and others. Cantor’s lack of development is personal as opposed to societal, developmental in a Freudian sense and actually lacking aggressive libidinal drives.

While there remained a persistent cultural myth of the Jew as sexually excessive, a safer variation on Jewish masculinity was chosen to be assimilated for popular consumption. For

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Hollywood, the stereotype of the sheepish Jew, with the character stunted before proper sexual

appetites developed, proved the suitably cautious formula for universalizing the nebbish.

Cantor’s role in Kid Millions even more absurdly defines his persona as a sexually

undeveloped nebbish. As Gregory Koseluk suggests, “it would seem that the screenwriters have

scripted him to be schizophrenic,” since Cantor switches from being an appealing “little guy,” as seen in the “When My Ship Comes In” number, to sometimes being an extremely infantile simpleton (235). Partly, this “schizophrenia” in Cantor has much to do with how the film focuses on other notable stars of the period in key comedic parts. This casting has the comedian sometimes perform as reactionary straight man, and then, alternately, as the comedic focal point.

These supporting parts include a young Ethel Merman as Dot paired with her dim-witted gangster sidekick Louie (Warren Hymer), a formidable duo of scene-stealing comic heavies out to secure their fortune through their claim of Dot’s “common-law wife” relationship with

Eddie’s dead father. Interestingly, it is within his relationship with Merman that we find one of the most shocking variations of the Oedipal seduction scene that we already saw spoofed in

Roman Scandals. After learning of Eddie’s rightful claim to the money, Dot shows up at his cabin dressed in black like a grieving widow in order to fool him into signing a document transferring his inheritance. In a spoof of melodramatic family dramas, Dot tearfully exclaims,

“My boy. My boy. My little boy. Don’t you know me?” Cantor innocently states, “No ma’am.” Dot replies, “I’m your mother.” Cantor gets caught up in the emotion and cries,

“Mama!” They embrace and Dot motherly suggests, “Kiss me, darling.” Cantor puckers his lips expecting an innocent peck only to be met with an inappropriate lip-lock when Merman bends him over in a romantic embrace. Confused, Cantor stammers, “Now I know what killed father.”

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Once again, Cantor is part of a seduction spoof, but this time it consists of roleplaying the

male as child and the seductress as literal mother, which brazenly establishes Cantor as unmasculine and Pre-Oedipal in the presence of the dominating matriarch. As they sit down, the confusion continues as Eddie, gently holding Dot’s hand, begins to sensitively ask questions of his “mother.” When learning that she is actually six years younger than him, he suggests,

“Maybe I am your mother.” Dot continues her strange motherly seduction of Eddie by having

him sit on her lap as she “reminisces” about his childhood with her and the father. She then

convinces Cantor, now completely reverted back into a childlike state, to play leapfrog on the

floor. This results in her wrestling Eddie to the ground, in hopes of getting the contract out of his

pocket. Just then, romantic straight woman Joan Larrabee (Ann Southern) enters to witness the

strange, sexually-charged scene. Cantor and Merman stop wrestling and he excitedly states,

“Hello, I want you to meet my mother.” Joan looks suspiciously on the young woman and

suggests, “Well, somebody should tell your father.” Notably, this sequence adopts many of the

typical components found in other comedic takes on seduction in Cantor’s films, such as the

bedroom setting, the intense physicality with the female co-star, and the cluelessness of the male.

But this variation completely makes the comedian infantile through accentuating his pursuit of

motherly affection which, throughout the film, actually proves stronger than any other desire

shown in the character. His desire for mothering is centralized to the point of him dismissing the

obvious sexual connotations of the situation. The seductress/mother is now, in Eddie’s eyes,

literal mother and he responds in childlike glee, making his sexual lack, here in the form of pre-

Oedipal immaturity, performed to absurd degrees.

Blackface and the Whitefaced Nebbish

Nowhere does the question of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality become more problematic

than when considering Eddie Cantor’s numerous blackface performances in his 30s films. Early

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in blackface’s American history, individual acts employed the process of blacking one’s face

with burnt cork or, later, dark paint as parts of revues acts. The complete minstrel show, with all

the actors in blackface performing songs and skits in Southern black dialects, rose to popularity in the mid-19th century, only to grow exponentially after the Civil War through the 1890s. Born

out of regional histories of segregation and violent repression, the shows themselves were

performances that essentially made the black male subject buffoonish. This is a stage tradition

born out of a fear within white males of not only violent rebellion within repressed black

populations, but of racial miscegenation as well. In essence, caricature is often viewed as one of

the most potent forms of offsetting a supposedly threatening sexuality within the ‘other.’ As Eric

Lott writes, by having white males performing comic black caricatures, “The black mask offered

a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threatening – and male – Other while at

the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them" (211). The idea of minstrelsy as

born out of white, presumably male, anxiety was something central to one of the benchmark

essays against the practice, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1958). Here, Ralph Ellison

writes that when “the white man steps behind the mask of the [blackface] trickster his freedom is

circumscribed by the fear that he is not simply miming a personification of his disorder and

chaos but that he will become in fact that which he intends only to symbolize” (53). This

reading of blackface suggests the tradition conceals the deluded pathology of the white male,

allowing him to perform through his fears of a degraded ‘other’ by demeaning this symbolic

figure.xvii

While this response to racial caricature has a solid historical and social basis, it has

notably been complicated by cultural historians over the last 20 years who are more interested in

tracing the phenomenon’s history beyond a black/white cultural binary.xviii Susan Gubar writes

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that there is no “single effect, no simple ideology can be said to emanate from a trope [blackface]

that embodies the slipperiness of metamorphosis in its adoptions and adaptations as well as in its

historical evolution” (41). This approach to the tradition begins to view such racial roleplaying

as not only an act of degradation of an ‘other,’ but as also the product of a multifarious national

pathology based within multiple racial and ethnic influences. The signification of blackface,

while undoubtedly a racist masquerade, has to be reconsidered on various levels since the

practitioners and audiences cannot be defined so narrowly. For example, one of the most

problematic complications arises in the African American’s use of blackface throughout its

history and its popularity with some black audiences, as even the radio show Amos and Andy

reportedly had a notable black fanbase.xix Much like with the whitewashing of Jewish comics,

economics often dictated the ultimate reason why black performers “corked-up” for white and

racially-mixed audiences. As Joseph Boskin writes, several black companies after the Civil War

had to perform in the white-dictated stage standards, thus in blackface: “When blacks managed

to reclaim their own heritage, it was often, though not always, within the white mold” (84). One

of the most famous 20th century blackface performers, Bert Williams, always wore blackface

when he performed despite actually being of a black heritage.xx Though Williams, often dubbed

by critics of his day as the greatest of vaudeville comedians, often disliked having to wear the

make-up, he found it a necessity for performing before mostly white audiences.

Along with the influence of actual black performers, the blackface tradition even

complicated further in the 20th century due to the white immigrant populations influencing the

popular stage. By the 1910s, the minstrel show’s popularity had declined greatly, yet the blackface practice continued as a revue tradition with selected performers on vaudeville stages.

These performers used the trope often as a part of an act as opposed to singularly defining their

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popularity – though white performers like Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll as Amos and

Andy certainly kept the minstrel disguise central for the duration of their career well into the

1950s. Notably, after the death of Bert Williams in 1922, three of the most famous blackface

performers of the Broadway stage were all well-known Jews – Cantor, Al Jolson, and Sophie

Tucker.xxi It is within this cultural moment that we must position Eddie Cantor as a blackface

artist, a performer actually influenced by some of the trope’s most complicated cultural and

ethnic influences. As the two key male blackface performers of the era, Jolson and Cantor can

be seen as appealing to different aspects of the racial divides in America during the period: 19th

century nostalgia for Jolson and Jazz Age masquerades for Cantor.xxii As Andrea Most writes,

somebody like Jolson’s “brand of racialized Jewish entertainment was rooted in forms of the past

– minstrelsy, ragtime, and melodrama.” Cantor, on the other hand, transformed into “a modern

jazz entertainer” by abandoning older forms of minstrelsy to become a type of “quick change

artist,” adopting ethnic stereotypes “the way a jazz trumpeter might improvise a solo.”

Basically, the performances, while certainly still steeped in racist caricature, re-imagined these

stage stereotypes “as a radically modern theatrical mode,” more a product of distinctly

complicated Jazz Age racial divides than 19th century forms of minstrelsy (32).

So Cantor emerges as an intensely complicated ethnic subject as a modernist comedian, one born out of Jewish stage tradition, yet innovative in his adopting of various ethnic personas

as a Jazz Age performer. On stage, Cantor found his initial success solely as a blackface artist,

but even this role was an untraditional take on the originally Southern-defined aspects of the

racial stereotype. In his autobiography, Cantor writes of his early stage blackface persona: “I

brought my negro friend up north . . . add[ing] an intellectual touch to the old-fashioned darkery

of the minstrel shows” and actually made a trademark character out of “the cultured, pansy-like

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negro with spectacles” (Rogin 153). This emasculated version of the minstrel stereotype could

be seen as adding sexual uncertainty to the persona, something that feels tied to Cantor’s later

development of his own witty nebbish character. Fascinatingly, this variation in his original

blackface performances might have been influenced by Bert Williams, since Cantor performed

with him multiple times during the early 20s and often regarded him as a type of mentor.xxiii

While notably expressing resentment offstage about only performing in blackface, Williams actually would employ it to innovative and expressive degrees, including developing “mournful- looks” through make-up and manner when portraying a smaller, meeker comedic character

(Goldman 59). Some of these influences upon Cantor’s own blackface characters, often more sophisticated and wittier than Jolson’s appeals to ragtime nostalgia, seem to also manifest in the whitefaced nebbish that would appear later in film. It might seem surprising to consider the nebbish as having some roots in a black stage performer. But this is a logical possible linage for elements of Cantor’s persona since he eventually moved away from blackface to appear unmasked to the audience to develop, in his words, more of a “personal contact with it” (Rogin

155). Cantor’s career in the 30s becomes a strange movement away from blackface toward an assimilative whiteface onscreen. Yet he still retained some of the performance techniques he developed with blackface, partly learned from Bert Williams, a black man famous for performing a theatrical blackness for white audiences. As this linage illustrates, the true racial and ethnic implications of a comedian like Cantor can be, to say the least, complicated.

Such influences only illuminate on the actual complexities of assimilation as a concept.

In particular reference to American immigrant populations, the word itself can sometimes rather simplistically suggest mainstream culture as resistant to the influence of “outsiders.” Even if

Cantor’s onstage self was made more mainstream in Hollywood, that does not necessarily

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suggest a white American “ideal” that was not already greatly modified by African American

and Jewish cultures, among other “nonwhite” influences. Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White

Noise provides an important recontextualization of Hollywood’s depictions of blackface and

minstrelsy as greatly influential on the entertainment industry in general. It examines the direct

correlations between the Jewish immigrant experience and blackface performance as popular

culture benchmarks, even going as far to suggest how blackface is ingrained in the overall

history of the motion pictures industry, itself defined by the European immigrant experience of

Jewish studio heads, performers, and others key figures.xxiv Throughout his discussion, Rogin

often focuses on blackface as an ironic marker of Americanization for Jewish immigrants

through the early parts of the 20th century. He suggests the trope as “a popular expression that

emerged . . . not to free oppressed folk but to constitute national identity out of their

subjugation” (18).

We see an influence of some of these elements of Jewish blackface in early sound films,

especially ones based on Broadway stage shows where the central performer’s Jewishness is still prominent. While analyzing The Jazz Singer (1927) – Al Jolson’s famous first synchronized sound production, which tells the story of a rabbi’s son who dreams of becoming a blackface singer – Rogin gives an illuminating assessment of the transitional role of Jews during the period by suggesting them as now distancing themselves from marginalized black populations:

The Jazz Singer blacks out the non-Jewish group behind the blackface mask [ . . . ] Blackface carries The Jazz Singer both backward to the origins of mass entertainment and forward to American acceptance [of Jews]. The sign of what has been left behind appears not in collective Jewish identity but in the instrument of the jazz singer’s individual success, the pasteboard that points to another American pariah group, African Americans. (89-90)

Thus, with these very early sound productions, a larger influence of ethnic identity still points

“backward” to its origins, even if such productions were ultimately going to define the 30s era of

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sound entertainment. Yet, as Henry Jenkins suggests, the de-Semitization process ultimately

moved performers like Jolson and Cantor away from Jewishness onscreen. Rogin proposes this

as a movement toward “acceptance,” but, especially in Cantor’s case, it is also a potent movement toward assimilation and the removal of ethnic identity. For this reason, unlike on the stage, cinematic blackface challenges the consistency of Cantor as a sexual subject since he has been ethnically erased. As such, while watching them today, the blackface scenes often stand out as feeling extra-textual or performative peculiarities within his films.

To consider how this history influences the depictions of masculinity we see onscreen, I will examine a scene from Roman Scandals which proves remarkable in its integration of blackface into Hollywood spectacle. Interestingly, this moment is a comedic set-up similar to

Cantor’s extended drag sequence in Palmy Days, in which he adopts a masquerade to evade the villains. This time Eddie is outrunning a guard and wanders into the ladies bathhouse, where men are forbidden. After some comic misunderstandings, Eddie ends up completely covered in dark mud. Another beautician then mistakes him to be the “Ethiopian beauty specialist” and

Cantor plays along. As the sequence continues, two Goldwyn Girls stop him and ask the

“doctor” for “some beauty hints,” to which he breaks into the song, “Keep Young and

Beautiful.” As the song continues, the camera follows Cantor walking through yet another male fantasy space, this time filled with all blonde Goldwyn Girls being rubbed down and papered by smiling black slave girls, who are also attractive and scantily-clad. Of course, the sequence is a virtual playhouse of female flesh similar to the sexualized bakery of Palmy Days, but this time racially different bodies serve as a central fetishization. The Goldwyn Girls are mostly adorned in long blonde wigs, which highlight their Caucasian complexions. The black females are depicted in servitude and seen, for the first half of the scene, rubbing and manipulating the

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feminine white flesh. Yet, despite this obvious racial divide, the sequence is still notably

fetishizing both races, since they are all sexualized and objectified.

Finally prepared, the white Goldwyn Girls emerge from revolving mirrors and dance onto a large floor. The camera pans across the room, where the slave girls emerge from similar revolving mirrors and do a more jazzy dance down steps.xxv The film pans back-and-forth

between the different racial groups, separated by a series of revolving mirrors, to reveal the

darkened Cantor dancing with the slave girls. Holding up his toga as he tap dances, Eddie’s

whiteness is discovered when one of the African dancers notices his pale thighs, indicating, as

well, that this supposed eunuch has a phallus hanging slightly above this area.xxvi As he

nervously drifts over to the other side of the set, a white dancer notices the pale skin too, which

results in both races of chorus girls chasing Eddie through the elaborate set’s revolving mirrors.

He finally hides in the steaming section of the bathhouse, where increased heat causes him to

shrink into a small dwarf version of himself, still blackfaced, who now sings in a child’s voice.

He then is chased into the pool, which restores his normal size and washes most of the blackface

away. As seen here, Cantor’s adoption of a different race, for a while, serves as his way to move

about the women much like he had previously done by adopting drag in Palmy Days. But this

time, he moves through the racial barrier as well. Much like Andrea Most, Rogin also notices a

modernist “quick change” central to Cantor’s persona, but suggests it is a “quick-change” act

both ethnically and sexually, writing: “As a blackface performer Cantor was ambiguously

male/female and black/white; he played Salome in drag [on the stage] and moved from man to

woman to black eunuch in a slave harem in the movie Roman Scandals” (153). Thus to Rogin,

Cantor, ever the “quick change” artist, adopts numerous masquerades in the scene as he morphs

from a woman to a eunuch to a shrunken child and then back to himself. But despite this

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observation, the elaborately staged number is still, notably, a blackface performance meant to

serve as this particular film’s required minstrel number. Notably, Goldwyn never let go of that

aspect of Cantor’s stage persona, having one blackface musical sequence per-film in the 30s.

But what does such a racially and sexually provocative sequence mean in relationship to

Cantor’s already established whitefaced nebbish? Routt and Thompson suggest that Cantor’s

racial masquerade in the scene illustrates how at “the same time that he puts on his blackness,

Eddie is also taking off his physical masculinity. He has become a sexually neutral and racially hysterical sign, if you will” (30). While this “neutral” mask defines his masquerade to the fictional women within the narrative space, Routt and Thompson grossly overlook the obvious appearance of Eddie’s sexual drives within the scene. The adoption of blackface makes the

comedian more sexually-charged than seen in the rest of the film. The disguise makes Cantor

hypersexual, with visual sexual excitement barely contained underneath his blackface make-up.

His eyes roll consistently as he looks at the nearly nude Goldwyn Girls, more similar in performance technique to his 20s stage persona. Moving between the racial divide, he even manages to pat a slave girl on the behind as the number begins. The song ends with Cantor joyfully singing “Oh death, where is thy sting?/ I don’t care, ‘cause I’ve seen everything” – as if his being chased into the pool was some kind of orgasmic release.

This overt sexuality was actually rare for Cantor in later comedies, especially in blackface numbers. As Arthur Knight notes, Roman Scandals was the only time for Cantor that

“blackface and black performers [were] linked erotically, though not romantically” (82).

Therefore, what is fascinating in this sequence is how blackface distances Cantor from his filmic persona as the pre-Oedipal Eddie-Pus is now sexually-charged. Such a sexualization through

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blackface actually firmly places the scene clearly back in the trope’s 19th century minstrel roots.

As Mark Reid writes about the history of minstrelsy:

By masquerading in blackface, whites objectifed African-American life experiences. From the viewpoint of an assimilative gaze, blackface minstrelsy allows whites to take pleasure in the “hostile or sexual aggressiveness” of blacks while the white race escapes the harm that such dramas assign to the African-American community. (19-20)

While this viewpoint generally brings us back to suggesting blackface as exposing an essentialist

white pathology, Reid’s summary of the practice does help to explain the change in the “white”

persona occurring as Cantor adopts the black mask. While the nebbish was assimilated as a safe

form of Jewish sexuality, he was also whitewashed to certain degrees to offset adverse national

biases. One of the clearest illustrations of this assimilation is found in Cantor’s performance as a

“white man in blackface” as opposed to a “Jew in blackface,” which would be the ‘other’

masquerading as another ‘other.’ As a result, he adopts the stereotypical “sexual aggressiveness”

of a white blackface performer, wielding an assimilative gaze through his performance. Thus,

he confirms supposed sexual aggressiveness within the black subject. This double masking

ultimately helps to confirm Cantor’s supposed position as gentile ‘white nebbish.’

But, as suggested by Knight, this aggressive sexualization in the blackface number was rare in Cantor’s films, though there are other ways such performances conform to the hegemonic

othering of blackness in Hollywood. In Kid Millions, the sequence is set within a stage show

upon the oceanliner carrying the characters to Egypt, which allows for a “show-within-a-show”

delay of narrative progression.xxvii Unlike Roman Scandals, the film makes direct reference to

blackface as a nostalgic stage construct, as something distinctly Southern and ragtime. The

extended musical sequence starts with an actual black performer, the young Harold Nicholas

dressed in a white tuxedo and standing before a curtain. To a jazzy tune, he sings, “I want to be

a minstrel man.” After Nicholas sings and dances around a few white Goldwyn Girls, the film

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moves to the female chorus and a nonmusical introduction of the cast members who will be

performing this nostalgic stage tribute to the minstrel show. Later, the blackfaced Eddie appears

and adopts a heavy Southern minstrel dialect as he partakes in a traditional patter routine with

Jerry Lane (George Murphy). As apparent from the performative nature of this scene, the film

contextualizes blackface as a minstrel Southern stage tradition, even incorporating old-fashioned

patter and a stage design where the performers sit in a line of chairs as was common to the

minstrel stage. As the scene progresses, Cantor and the cast sing “Mandy,” a popular song from

the period written by Irving Berlin. The sequence then takes a romantic turn as Cantor and Ethel

Merman disappear when Murphy and Ann Southern launch into their duet “Your Head On My

Shoulder,” which is set on a 19th century river boat. The Goldwyn Girls are now dressed like

Southern belles and accompanied by formally-dressed beaus. Here, the entire minstrel show is

associated with the Deep South, thus suggesting a historical perspective to the jazzier minstrel

number that came before.

Later in the sequence, the still blackfaced Cantor dances alone with both Nicholas

Brothers, who launch into their full-bodily form of tap dancing. In a comical display, each

African-American brother takes turns showing their dance prowess to Cantor, who has no choice

but to stand motionless since he cannot match their moves. He finally pathetically backs offstage

with his hands waving in rhythm, allowing the duo to finish the routine on their own. As with

the different dancing styles of the chorus girls in Roman Scandals, the point of this exchange is

to highlight the supposed dissimilarities in white and black dancing. The humor is based in

there being an acknowledgment of Cantor’s racial mask as phony, since his actual “white”

dancing is understood to counter the genuine “black” dancing of the Nicholas Brothers. Once

again, there is a racially-mixed performance within the minstrel number. But while the scene

117 might seem to integrate some black performers, it is important to acknowledge that they are not adult males and, as such, are a “safe” depiction of supposedly pre-sexual black maleness. In other words, adult male African-Americans probably would not be so aggressively integrated with a white female chorus at the time. What proves the most significant difference from “Keep

Young and Beautiful” is Cantor’s nonsexuality in the sequence, despite the surrounding

Goldwyn Girls. He essentially is aligned with the safe, sexual non-maturity of the Nicholas

Brothers. Unlike Roman Scandals, the film does not attempt to make the sequence part of the narrative, instead allowing Cantor the stage minstrel and Cantor the cinematic comedian to exist as two separate performers. Yet, notably, the stage minstrel is harmless and now appealing to the historical roots of the minstrel show, thus confirming Cantor’s place as connected to

American nostalgia. He is no longer a relatively recent Jewish addition to the blackface phenomenon, but a desexualized “whiteface” behind the mask.

Conclusion

In her study of race and feminist psychoanalytic writers of the 1920s and 30s, Jean

Walton suggests “whiteness” as a foundational element in most Freudian-based accounts of sexual subjectivity. She writes that while “femininity” and “masculinity” were coming to be understood at the time as “a ‘mature’ stage one attained after successfully completing . . . a developmental sequence that culminated in heterosexual, gendered adulthood,” what many have overlooked is how much the subtext of race in these accounts also played a central role. In essence, “whiteness” was often aligned with the male/female binary when discussing the development of the gendered subject:

[R]acial subtext informs this developmental model, in which maturity also implies the full [ . . . ] assumption of a heterosexual, raced adulthood, according to this model, one must be fully “white” (or perhaps fully one’s “race,” however that might locally be constructed) in order to fully become a subject, or more to the point, one’s subjectivity will inevitably be marked by the way in which one fails to be fully white. (5)

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The idea of “whiteness” existing along with gender ideals as a socially-dictated assumption of maturation brings us to a central paradox found within the assimilation of the nebbish. To appeal to a wider audience that was falsely perceived as an essentialized “whiteness” by the studios, Cantor was de-Semiticized. Yet, while an adoption of “whiteness” would normally be a push toward white adulthood as some kind of social ideal, what actually occurred was something less conforming. Through having the most problematic elements of his Jewish stage persona thrive even within a white mask, the image of Cantor’s sexuality that we see onscreen is still decidedly on the margins of the white phallic order. Cantor is still a nebbish, though this caricature is now ascribed to something beyond ethnic ‘otherness.’ It is universalized, thus allowing ‘feminized’ masculinity to appear in a wider range of comedians, including Bob Hope,

Danny Kaye, and even Jerry Lewis.

Gerald Mast draws a significant comparison between Woody Allen and Eddie Cantor’s screen personas, writing of the “anti-heroic, anti-romantic Cantor, whose tiny body made him the perfect comic foil for all the physical menaces of life” as being a precursor to Allen’s latter explorations into the unmasculine. In his comparison of Cantor’s own witty nervousness with

Allen’s, Mast concludes that by the mid-1930s, Cantor’s persona was “still small, weak, cowardly, and clumsy, but not at all Jewish” (“Woody” 129). He also makes a case for this ethnic erasure as heavily influencing the career path of the popular Danny Kaye, another Jewish

Broadway performer Goldwyn signed in the 1940s to star in a similar string of big budget comedies with musical numbers. I would argue that Cantor’s development into a universal nebbish directly influenced countless gentile film comics as well, especially Bob Hope.

Ironically, the comedic history of the nebbish goes full-circle here. Cantor is divorced from the overt references to his Jewish identity by Goldwyn, yet remains an onscreen nebbish. He

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influences the Anglo Hope, who, in turn, influences Allen, who reestablishes the supposed

Jewishness with the caricature. In the end, the ethic origins of the nebbish were simply under the

surface waiting to be uncovered as the century progressed.

Notes

i As noted by the OED, the word also has a popular meaning as an adjective when ascribing the characteristics of a nebbish, which might account for its popularized spelling of “nebbish” for English speakers. (“The nebbish boy was never introduced at parties.”) Also, as documented by both the OED and Rosten, the word also has significance as an interjection expressing commiseration, dismay, and pity. For this study, I am employing the spelling “nebbish,” which in English appears to be its most popular spelling.

ii Among references to Hope, Allen is quoted as saying, “When my mother took me to see Road to Morocco [with Bob Hope] I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life” (Canaby).

iii The development of Cantor into a public figure extends beyond his success on stage, screen, recordings, radio, and television as a frequent guest host of The Colgate Comedy Hour in the 1950s. He was also active in the public sphere as a political voice during the early 1930s for liberal causes and as one of the founders of The March of Dimes, which he heavily promoted. Cantor’s popularity was so large that Warner Brothers produced a bio-pic about his life, The Eddie Cantor Story in 1953. See Goldman and Koseluk for more on his offscreen and off-air persona.

iv This promoting of Cantor’s Jewishness was tied to the studios’ larger promotions of exciting Broadway entertainment, an early attempt at selling sound productions and a tactic studios later reconsidered. Jenkins outlines in detail the promotion of the film and its eventual failure outside of large urban areas in his chapter on Cantor and “regional resistance.” See Jenkins, 153-84.

v The book grew in popularity since Weininger, himself born a Jew, committed suicide shortly after its publication, which, to many, proved the author’s inferior ethnic Jewish pathology, despite his later conversion to Protestantism. For more readings and responses to Weininger throughout the 20th Century, see Harrowitz and Hyams.

vi The promotion of Palmy Days resisted mentioning Cantor as a Jew or even a New Yorker. In an ironic illustration of this change, the film even had a promotional tie-in with the classic WASP-associated Wonderbread, which tried to capitalize on the movie’s setting in a bakery. See Jenkins, 153-84.

vii To Sig Altman, these two comedians thrive for universality as broadcast performers, something emphasized by clearly coded Jewish characters who made periodic appearances on their programs. Cantor had the “Mad Russian” and Benny had “Mr. Kitzel,” each one a Jewish stereotype who appeared frequently with a thick ethnic accent. The Mad Russian was portrayed on radio by Bert Gordon, but never appeared in any of Cantor’s films. With a ridiculous accent,

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he coined the then-popular catchphrase, “How do you do?” and “Do you mean it?” which were caricatured in many popular Warner Bros. cartoons. Mr. Kitzel was a reoccurring character on The Jack Benny Program portrayed by Artie Auerbach with a thick Yiddish accent. While he made the transition to television with Benny, he never appears in films with him. Notably, while Cantor’s radio program was popular, it never was adapted into a film as was the case with Benny. In other words, Cantor was already an established stage and screen star when he went into radio; Benny used radio to establish his popularity. See Chapter 3 for a discussion of Benny as a clearer example of the radio star in film.

viii Notably, Cantor’s stage success in Whoopee also takes this basic narrative structure, but has the ethnic marker of Jewishness. This shows that the comedian comedy in film was working from a basic stage tradition in its positioning of unmasculine subjects in hyper-masculine settings.

ix Rubin writes on Berkeley’s later sub-genre of the “backstage musical” as born out of a tradition of the American revue, which he defines as “a mixture of self-contained acts, with a general emphasis on music and comedy. However, the format of the revue is more solid and ‘anchored’ than that of its predecessor, vaudeville.” This “anchoring” was usually linked together by “some sort of continuity” in the form of a tenuous plot, theme, or selected performers” (26). Interestingly, this influence on Berkeley’s work shows a link to Cantor own history as a Broadway revue performer. This common background might be another reason for why both these artists could adapt to same types of productions.

x The sexual spectacle of the stock dancers known as the Goldwyn Girls was a heavily promoted aspect of many of Goldwyn’s musicals. The actual dancers changed throughout the 1930s and 40s from film to film, but they were collectively billed as the Goldwyn Girls. Many famous actresses made their start as part of this revolving chorus, including Virginia Mayo, Lucille Ball, Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable, Jane Wyman, and Ann Southern. Similarly during Broadway’s height of popularity in the 1910s-20s, Flo Ziegfeld also sold his shows through the appearances of his famous line of scantily-clad showgirls known as the Ziegfeld Girls, who often were in the same stage shows as Cantor.

xi Since Glorifying the American Girl was a production heavily promoted as Broadway entertainment, Palmy Day’s direct reference to it illustrates the filmmakers’ uncertainty in completely divorcing Cantor away from his stage roots. While his persona has changed, there still remains stage references in these small touches. This is not the case with later productions.

xii Routt and Thompson’s reading of Roman Scandals focuses mainly upon the number “Keep Young and Beautiful,” which they use to uncover ideological content through excess meanings that they describe as the “surplus” of a scene. In other words, rather than “defining or prescribing populist ideology in advance,” they are using the text as an exercise “to discover content and expression” (21). As a result, many of the observations on race and gender that I note from their analysis are not tied to any larger theoretical or socio-historical observation on the film, but to a fragmented exercise of textual deconstruction inspired by Roland Barthes.

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xiii Technicolor as a process was technically evolving during the late 1920s and early 30s, but was not widely distributed. Cantor’s first sound film appearance in Glorifying the American Girl is also notable because the film used a two-color process in a dance sequence. The inclusions of these technological innovations show how these musical comedy productions were viewed very much as visual spectacles for the public. See Haines.

xiv Greenwood’s singing of “Falling in Love Again” references the song’s appearance in The Blue Angel (1930). Joseph Von Sternberg’s German production had proven popular upon its American release and, notably, tells the story of a sexually aggressive singer (Dietrich) seducing and ruining the life of a timid college professor (Emil Jannings). With this reference, Palmy Days is spoofing that film’s sexual dynamics in a very direct way. Notably, Sternberg’s fetishistic framing of Dietrich in his films is discussed in Laura Mulvey’s landmark “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Therefore, this spoof clearly illustrates how a comedian comedy warps malecentric cinematic constructs for comic effect.

xv Notably, of course, these specific Jewish/gentile dynamics of the text are very historically specific, as circumcision lost much of its ‘othered’ social signification as, often, gentile children were also circumcised for hygienic reasons with more frequency in the 20th century.

xvi Kaufman was a successful playwright known as the “great collaborator” due to his successes co-writing plays with figures such as Moss Hart. On Broadway, he notably worked on two pun- filled Marx Brothers plays The Coconuts (1928) and Animal Crackers (1929), which were quickly turned into early sound films. His contribution to early sound comedies had much to do with establishing the types of verbal gags common to the genre. It also shows how the Broadway stage continued to be plundered for talent in the new medium of talking pictures. See Goldstein.

xvii In this piece, Ellison was challenging the view of Stanley Edgar Hyman, who had previously suggested that the minstrel trickster reflected Afro-American culture rather than a wider view of American and white culture.

xviii As Mikko Tuhkanen outlines, Ellison marks one of three major shifts in the theoretical response to the theatrical tradition of blackface. The first pre-Ellison responses, mainly from the 1920s and 30s, were based in viewing blackface as simply cultural borrowing in the open spirit of the theater. Initiated by Ellison, the second phase also was confirmed by such figures as Hans Nathan, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Robert C. Toll, and Alexander Saxton. This movement viewed blackface as a “reflecting surface in which the image of white audiences is projected according to social, political, and psychological exigencies – and at a considerable expense to African Americans” (Tuhkanen 16). By the 1990s, though, much more complex readings of the phenomenon emerged in scholars such as Susan Gubar, Eric Lott, W.T. Lhamon, and Dale Cockrell. While this newer generation never dismisses the racism rooted in blackface, they also fruitfully examine the practice as not solely attributed to any singular universal pathology.

xix Despite this, it should be noted that there was also an understanding among African American intellectuals of the period, like W.E.D. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, that blackface was demeaning. See Knight, 29-48 for more on racial receptions to the practice.

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xx Born in Antigua, though relocated to New York City at age 10, Williams became the preeminent black performer of his era and, beyond racial classification, easily one of the most famous stage comedians in general. He was the best-selling black recording artist before his death in 1922, thus also proving a key figure in the development of African-American music. Significantly to the history of the comedian’s movement from stage to screen, Williams became the first black American to take a lead role on the Broadway stage, and did much to push back racial barriers during his career despite having many elements of his act still based in minstrelsy. See Chude-Sokei for more on Williams.

xxi Sophie Tucker, who started as a blackface singer, was one of the most famous performers of the first part of the 20th Century. She proves a fascinating gender study in her own right. As a singer and comedian, she recorded many hit records and influenced countless later female comics. Often billed as “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” her hearty sexual appetite was often the subject of songs and comedy routines. See Fields.

xxii Cantor appears in blackface in six of his seven films during the 1930s, just one less than Al Jolson who could have been considered the most recognizable “blackface” in popular culture at the time.

xxiii In 1958, Cantor wrote a piece for Ebony magazine called “Bert Williams: The Best Teacher I Ever Had.” See Knight, 256.

xxiv Rogin examines how four benchmarks of the American film industry are defined by blackface or key minstrel-influenced roles for black actors: Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903), D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927), and David O. Selznick’s Gone With The Wind (1939). Along with these films, of course, were numerous productions with similar racializations predating and/or following these benchmark productions.

xxv Routt and Thompson discuss the racial difference as showing in the film “the role of black people to serve white people. But it is just as true to say that black people are active, whites are passive within the sequence . . . Blacks work, whites are worked upon” (30). They suggest that the scene extends this passive/active relation even into the eventual dancing as the black women “dance with hot verve and swing,” while the white women dance with “little energy, mechanically” (31).

xxvi Though, one has to also wonder if the label of “beauty specialist” was meant to be coded as homosexual in the film, since he is never overtly suggested to be a eunuch. Such speculation adds even more layers to Cantor’s roleplaying, turning the masquerade into an amalgam of racial and sexual masks.

xxvii The sequence’s ability to pause the narrative world to present a “show within a show” is reminiscent of the structures of Busby Berkeley’s “backstage musicals” for Warner Bros. As Rubin explains about these films, “The clear and absolute separation of performance space/discourse from narrative space/discourse . . . imparts to the musical numbers a revue-like autonomy, freed from the demands of even the most tenuous narrative-to-numbers consistency.”

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(39). Ironically, Kid Millions is not a Berkeley/Cantor collaboration, even though this moment illustrates a definite influence of the work the choreographer was doing at Warners during this time.

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CHAPTER 3 THE VOICE AND BODY OF JACK BENNY

What did that [Jack Benny’s] voice mean? That warm irritated, Midwestern-tinged instrument, somehow ruling a household in the little duchy called Beverly Hills. – Peter Kaplan

While Eddie Cantor became one of the largest radio stars of the 1930s on The Chase and

Sanborn Hour and a major recording artist, I wish to employ another notable Jewish-born comedian to contemplate the undeniable importance of voice to the history of the masculine comedic. Born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago, Jack Benny worked his way through the ranks of small vaudeville theaters and grew in reputation as a monologist. While he had found some initial success on the stage, he never proved the headlining star as is the case with other figures in this study, such as Cantor or Fields. On radio, Benny found his largest audience, establishing a voice and distinctive style as a performer, to become one of the largest stars of the period in any medium. The Jack Benny Program (1932-55) could easily be categorized as the most popular and influential radio show of the 1930s, since it redefined broadcast comedy in ways we still feel today. The program began in 1932 and placed in the top three national programs by

1934. Unlike most other shows, it continued to attract these high numbers for the rest of the decade, topping the ratings in 1940 as radio’s number one attraction. By this time, it was estimated that a staggering 40 million listeners tuned-in every week. Thus, unlike many other radio comics who carried over stage or screen personas to the airwaves, Benny established his persona within radio and found his largest success there. In various magazine polls, he was voted the most popular radio personality several years running.i Such impressive numbers could

characterize his voice as, possibly, one of the most easily recognizable in the nation during the

period. For this reason, through existing as a true vocal comedian in every sense of the word,

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Benny becomes the ideal figure to question the masculine comedic beyond the bodily and into the realm of voice.

Benny had appeared in sound films preceding the launch of his show, but these performances were largely unsuccessful and gained little recognition. Early on, he starred as a lovable sideshow barker in the low-budget The Medicine Man (1931). More notably, Benny

carried over his reputation as a vaudevillian monologist in the role of Master of Ceremonies for

the plot-less The Hollywood Review of 1929 for MGM, the studio which had the comedian

briefly under contract but supposedly had difficulty finding vehicles for his talents. Despite

these diversions, his popularity was ultimately established on the air, in which he proved

revolutionary in his understanding of the medium, often crafting relatively subtle character

comedy more than simple gag routines. At the time, such a move was primarily born out of his

recognition that the environment for comedy had changed due to the technological innovations

of radio and sound film. He stated in a 1934 interview, “Few may realize it but comedy is going

through great changes. The radio and screen have been the primary cause . . . the comedian has

to be on the alert for new material, and as a result, his position is very uncertain” (Livingston-

Benny 65).ii On radio, Benny’s understanding of the need for innovation was not always

appreciated by the financial backers and he moved quickly through various sponsors in a few

years in search of an audience, going from Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Chevrolet, General Tire, and,

in a last ditch effort, a then little-known desert product, Jell-O. It was with this final sponsor

during the 1934-5 season that his popularity soared, climbing from a rating of 22.9 to 35.3

million in a matter of months. Through most of the 1930s, his periodic appearances in films

primarily were building off this broadcast celebrity, such as his starring role in The Big

Broadcast of 1937, an entry in the Paramount film series that showcased popular radio

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performers. Despite a notable supporting part in Broadway Melody of 1936 and appearances in

other revue format productions, attempts to sell Benny as a bankable leading man were not aggressively pursued until the later part of the decade, with such films for Paramount as Artists

and Models (1937), Artists and Models Abroad (1938), and Man About Town (1939).

Obviously, Hollywood took Benny seriously only after his radio persona had been established

and the consistently high ratings cemented his popularity.

Surprisingly, there are only a few spots in both scholarly and popular writing where the

actual sound of Benny’s voice, with its irritated Midwestern twang and haughtiness, is discussed

in a meaningful way. Peter W. Kaplan significantly ponders in the quotation opening this

chapter, what did “that voice mean?” (44) While he never gives more than a contemplative

answer, Kaplan understands through his ruminations the paradox of the Benny voice as oddly

central and, thus, empowered within his radio cast, but also characteristically small in its grain

and “instant warmth.” It is a truly empowered/disempowered paradox common in the masculine

comedic. But, as Kaplan suggests, it also was a “revelation in mass medium” as he met his cast

and the listener “each week with a genuine intimacy, both casual and familial” (44). This

description actually derives from the groundbreaking approach to broadcast comedy that began

on The Jack Benny Program, an appeal to intimacy that ultimately makes him a more significant

object of study than many of his contemporaries in radio who were only transplanting a stage

and/or screen persona to a picture-less medium.

Benny has long been regarded as an innovator through his understanding of how the

technology of radio broadcast changed the nature of comedy. As his popular contemporary Fred

Allen later correctly summarized, “Practically all comedy shows on radio owe their structure to

Benny’s conceptions. He was the first to recognize that the listener is not in a theater with a

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thousand other people, but is in a small circle at home” (Livingstone-Benny 65). CBS president

William S. Paley, who later employed the comedian after he left NBC, commented that familiarity and identification become key in establishing Benny as a wildly popular persona since “comedy was more than just being funny.” He would later recall that Benny once explained to him that listeners “‘tune in to me every week not because I have a great show every week. I can’t and nobody can. But they get in the habit of wanting to know what I am up to’”

(Kaplan 43). Benny himself contemplated on his own innovativeness, explaining in his autobiography:iii

The radio audience totaled approximately thirty million, but it really consisted of small family groups. I felt that now I understood the medium. I would play to those small family groups and get them to know me and my family (the cast) as real people with real problems. Exaggerated people, yes, but fundamentally honest and true to life. (41)

This fundamental understanding of the intimacy of broadcast in comparison to the theater

experience was key to his success, as he honed the first radio character comedy of the 20th

century, which, in turn, influenced countless situation comedies and, in general, the direction of

broadcasted humor in America. As David Marc explains, this turn changed the direction of

comedy away from the vaudevillian clownish and toward the character-based. He explains how

the Benny show “was a place that a listener could visit rather than attend. If a stage comic’s job

had been to dazzle the audience with something rare, the radio comic would depend on a

recognizable persona moving through endless variations of habitual themes” (33). This is not

necessarily a turn toward realism in a traditional sense, but a move toward the familiar through

repetitious variations upon often exaggerated character traits. No other character was more

heavily developed than Benny’s own, with his monologue style and restrained reactions

eventually influencing numerous stand-up and talk-show personalities. By the 1950s, he

basically was a mentor to a young Johnny Carson, whose own heavily Benny-inspired style went

128 on to influence current male broadcast comedians such as David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan

O’Brien, and Jon Stewart.

So to return to Kaplan’s original question, but with a keen eye on the enormous influence of Benny as comedian and broadcaster, what does Jack Benny’s voice mean? Culturally, as seen with Cantor, this is another transitional figure within the history of the masculine comedic. Yet despite a Jewish background, Benny does not necessarily conform to the narrative of ethnic assimilation as seen in Cantor’s influential transition from Yiddish nebbish to “universalized” nebbish onscreen. While ethnic identity certainly plays a role in accessing the significance of

Benny within his radio world, I will expand my examination to comprehend fully the meaning of his influential voice upon a broader cultural stage. This moves the masculine comedic into the performance of a quirkier universalized type which, unlike the nebbish, feels more overtly tied to the technological innovations of the period. In essence, I wish to understand Benny as a historically-specific queer voice, wittily unmasculine, as a direct response to the depictions of heterosexualized dandyism prevalent in the cinema of the Depression era.

As the above quotations from Benny himself suggest, he was a performer who understood that a change was occurring in America born out of the technological revolutions of radio and sound cinema, a cultural celebration of the mediated voice. Benny has an undeniable influence on other comedians as a sexual construct, yet his body is not really the privileged element his cultural significance. In understanding him as a vocal performer, we must recognize his voice’s significance as an ethnic, gendered, and sexualized construct – a detached signifier suggesting an unseen body that, due to its invisibility on radio, could push the sexual boundaries further than many of his screen contemporaries. As I will show, Benny’s radio persona became an intensely unmasculine figure, yet one with the ability to serve as a point of identification, even

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as he publically performed individual attributes meant to be mocked. In short, he is a clear illustration of the comedian as a masochistic performer. But it is also important to recognize that this is a position actually facilitated by his medium, in which the bodiless radio voice could exist within more transcendent and comforting spaces than found in sound cinema. Through employing the pioneering work on voice in film by Michel Chion, Amy Lawrence, and Kaja

Silverman, I will show how the dynamics of radio voice provided an objectified comedic voice in Benny’s films. This is a textual position that does not necessarily eroticize his voice or body, rather poses them as familiar objects of comedy. I will analyze two motion pictures where

Benny portrays himself (or his radio version of self), Buck Benny Rides Again (1940) and Love

Thy Neighbor (1940), both which are, to a degree, film adaptations of his popular radio program.

Through these two films, the voice of Jack Benny exists as a text onto itself, floating between the worlds of cinema and radio. It is a voice that illustrates how the auditory and the visual provide different yet entwined venues for the sexual body of the comedian.

Benny and His Radio World

Throughout the early years of the radio show, Jack Benny was most innovative in the

way he fostered a supporting cast that would ultimately define the structure of the program for

the remainder of its run. In 1932, when his wife Mary Benny proved popular in a guest

appearance as the character Mary Livingstone, she was added as a permanent cast member

playing the wisecracking platonic friend to the comedian. In 1934, Don Wilson found popularity

as his announcer, who often served as a straight man, but later developed as an overweight and

oversensitive slave to the sponsor. In 1936, Phil Harris joined as bandleader and became one of

the show’s most popular characters, a hard-drinking and oversexed lush with a boisterous

disposition that conflicted with Benny’s easily aggravated personality. Later, replacing singer

Kenny Baker, Irish tenor Dennis Day joined the ensemble as an innocent, yet dim-witted mama’s

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boy. After a popular guest appearance as a train porter, Eddie Anderson was added as Rochester

Van Jones, Benny’s African-American valet. At the center of this universe was Benny himself,

whose persona evolved into one of the most complex of comedic creations as he adopted a wide

variety of supposedly “unlikable” characteristics over the years such as cheapness, vanity,

bitterness, un-masculinity, and sexual inadequacy. Also, there were regular appearances by

recurring characters who were broad caricatures encompassing different gendered and ethnic

types, including Frenchmen, Jews, homosexuals, and the working class.

Despite this colorful world of characters, the radio show is not a situation comedy in the

same sense that the genre would later develop into the “sitcom” on television. Instead, the

program’s the radio cast ultimately exists as part of a strange meta-variety show that, to modern

listeners, might sound surprisingly innovative in its self-reflectivity. As a variety show, there are

songs and sketches, but the program’s actual popularity grew out of the repartee of the cast

members and the variety ultimately became minor diversions. Also, the show legitimately feels

like later sitcoms when flashbacks or “beyond the studio” situations became central to the

format, as the lives of the radio cast developed as the focus of running jokes and plot lines. In

other words, The Jack Benny Program is not actually a “situation comedy” since the humorous

situations were not necessarily the focal point. Instead, it is a “character comedy,” since the

characters existed to be adapted to specific situations or, often, just humorous conversations.

This is a character-based approach to humor that, despite their label, actually still defines a long

history of the American “situation comedies,” ranging on television from The Dick Van Dyke

Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Cheers and Seinfeld.

Benny’s on-the-air world was diverse, with regular mentions of cast member Dennis

Day’s Irish heritage and appearances by frequent ethnically-coded guest stars including Artie

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Auerbach’s Mr. Kitzel, a hotdog vender with a heavy Yiddish accent, and “man of a thousand

voices” Mel Blanc as a variety of nationalities. Most notably of course, was the addition of

African-American Eddie Anderson as Rochester, who served as Jack’s personal valet and

allowed the show to veer into extended explorations of black culture, but, of course, through a

very confining white lens. Characterizing Rochester’s role as a racial subject in the Benny cast

is complicated, since, on the one hand, he undeniably fits into the stereotypical position of the

black manservant seen during the era. Rochester as a character exhibited the characteristics common to the stereotypical ‘Sambo’ and ‘Coon’ types – during his off-hours, drinking gin, playing dice, and having a high sex drive. However, as many have also suggested, Eddie

Anderson exists as a transitional figure in popular culture as well through his wit and individualism. Joseph Boskin writes, “By the late 1930s and into the next decades, Anderson was not a Stepin Fetchit comedian but one with considerable dignity, perseverance, intelligence, and talent” (196). Donald Bogle categorized Anderson within a collection of servant characters in Classic Hollywood that moved beyond some of the subservient and dependent characteristics of Fetchit and others, writing that this “new set of eccentrics . . . lived in their own screwball worlds, did exactly as they pleased, and took little time to weigh the pros and cons of racial protocol” (77).

In his autobiography, written in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, Benny himself honestly addresses some of the racist origins of the character, stating that Rochester “conformed to many of the traits of the stock Negro stereotype,” such as playing craps and drinking gin (105). After

World War II and the news of Nazi Germany’s horrific genocides, the Jewish-born Benny supposedly viewed ethnic and racial humor as more damaging than in previous decades. As recounted in his autobiography, he “would no longer allow Rochester to say or do anything that

132 an audience would consider degrading to the dignity of a modern Afro-American” (108). Yet, despite such noble sentiments and some definite challenges to the popular stereotypes of the day, it is difficult to read Rochester as a truly “equal” character. He is always associated with domestic duties on the radio show as opposed to being integrated with the white cast, even though he was notably allowed to mock Benny like the others. Therefore, the character to modern listeners might feel straddled between two eras as racist in conception (stereotypical jokes, behaviors, and in his removed servant role), but more transcendent in execution.

Even within the earliest and more racially stereotypical depictions of Rochester in the

1930s, the character was a profound component in the construction of the show’s humor, since

Rochester’s jokes about his boss were a direct link to the most private home-life aspects of the comedy. As Benny correctly writes, “even in the days when he played the most negative stereotyped minstrel character, Rochester was never a servile, suplicating Stepin Fetchit. I was as much the fall guy for Rochester as I was for Phil Harris or Mary Livingstone” (105).

However, unlike the relationship with the rest of the cast, the most fascinating aspect of

Rochester remains his actual closeness to his employer both on and beyond the show. As

Thomas Cripps suggests, this pairing illustrates the typical economic fate of many black performers who were inevitably tied to famous white performers, like Fetichit with Will Rogers and, most notably, Bill Robinson with Shirley Temple. Rochester’s link to Benny was something even more profound, since “Eddie Anderson seemed so centered in Jack Benny’s act as to seem the cause of Benny’s success” (48). While this is debatable, at the very least, the perceived closeness certainly helped to greatly facilitate Benny’s success, so much so that

Anderson was made a regular and co-stared in films with his radio employer. Most notably,

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Anderson became the highest paid black star of the period, which means he was viewed as

indispensable to Benny’s fame and the revenue it created.

Over the last two decades, two significant readings of The Jack Benny Program appear

within the research of Margaret McFadden and Alexander Doty. Each take notably different

approaches to understanding the show’s standing as a cultural product by embracing its comical

collection of characters as either ironically enforcing the status quo or as transgressive. In her

study, Margaret McFadden employs Fredric Jameson’s theories that popular culture texts

“perform the ideological work of legitimating the social status quo (or some new order) by representing social and political tensions and anxieties.” As a result, by exploring tensions “texts defuse, repress, or ‘manage’ them by constructing imaginary narrative resolutions or visions of

social harmony, offering utopian hope of a different world in order to gain acceptance of the

existing one.” Through a variety of depictions of types, The Jack Benny Program’s “tremendous

popularity derived in part from representing and celebrating these mainstream values, even while

appearing to subvert them” in its depictions of sexes, races, and classes (115). McFadden goes

on to present a variety of comic depictions from the show based in Depression and WWII-era

economic and, concurrently, family-based anxieties, explaining how the broadcasts had to seem

“polysemic” in order to appeal to a diverse audience of various classes and ethnicities. While

underlying “messages supporting white male dominance and consumerism were always present,”

these meanings were not always “received intact by the ‘negotiating’ audience” (133). In

essence, McFadden seems to suggest that the show proves undeniably hegemonic as a cultural

product, even if its popular reception allowed for more selective audience responses that

considered the show’s ambiguous ethnic, class, and gender messages in their own ways.

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On the other hand, Alexander Doty reads Jack Benny and, more specifically, the

interactions of the cast as something much less conformist, making Benny and his show the

focus of one of his chapters in his controversial Making Things Perfectly Queer. As outlined in

his first chapter, Doty adopts an expansive use of the word “queer” within his analysis of popular

supposedly “straight” texts and their receptions by suggesting that “within cultural production

and reception, queer erotics are already part of culture’s erotic center.” This predisposition

makes queerness “a position that can be and is occupied in various ways by otherwise

heterosexual and straight-identifying people” (3-4). It is important to remember that Doty does

not open the possibilities for applying the term “queer” as a way to divorce the word from

identification with gay culture since, as he writes (in a nod to bell hooks), the purpose of his

appropriation is to “recapture and reassert a militant sense of difference” that views the

“marginal” as both a “‘site of resistence’ and a ‘location of radical openness and possibility’” (3).

So despite his inclusive use of the term, there is a radical approach in Doty’s reading of the radio

show as anything but “polysemic,” writing that “Jack Benny was actually America’s favorite

fag,” since “patriarchal cultures can’t comfortably support for very long the paradox of a straight

male with mannerisms traditionally coded as feminine” (63).iv This contextualization of Benny

as homosexualized really has much to do with the cast dynamics of his radio show, which to

modern listeners often sounds surprising in its “unconventional” gendered and sexual dynamics.

The program can easily be read as “queered” within its quirky exchanges between its mostly male cast members – all of whom eschew idealized straight masculinity in significant ways, especially Benny himself with his vanity, haughtiness, and lack of masculine prowess. Phil

Harris’ hyper-sexualized lush with a “feminine” obsession with appearance, Dennis Day’s attachment to his mother, and Don Wilson’s sensitivity also all help to feed a “queered” reading

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of the show. Most significantly, Eddie Anderson, as caretaker of Benny, seems to have the

strongest of domestic bonds to his employer as a type of proto-wife. This all-male atmosphere,

even with the inclusion of the perpetually single Mary, who spends much of her time talking

about her many dates, only heightens the perceived homoeroticism of the show in later years. As

Doty suggests, by “the mid-1940s, many of Benny’s radio programs begin to sound like early versions of The Boys in the Band, with Mary Livingstone as the token witty ‘fag hag’”(69).

Therefore, McFadden and Doty’s reading of Benny’s show and his persona provide two differing approaches that probably have as much to do with each scholar – McFadden as historically investigative, Doty as politically urgent – as much as the actual subtext of the program. By suggesting a more culturally ambiguous dynamic to the radio show, McFadden categorizes various moments within a multifarious tapestry without suggesting any overriding alternative narrative of gender, ethnicity, or economic history. On the other hand, Doty does present an alternative narrative of maleness as “queered,” but one which, as his above reference to Mart Crowley’s landmark play suggests, borders on revisionist since a clear politicized gay movement grew toward its current significance in the 1960s. That decade, appropriately enough,

contained the first production of The Boys in the Band, a play that cemented “witty banter” as a

cultural marker of homosexual male interaction. In the context of my study, both readings prove applicable within their impressive analyses of specific elements of the show through the lens of gender and sexuality, yet both also become limiting in their ultimate agendas. As suggested by his position as a key multi-medium performer of the masculine comedic, Jack Benny is part of an overriding alternative formation of masculinity, thus undeniably transcending some of

McFadden’s belief in the show’s hegemonic core. In relationship to Doty’s reading, to consider

Benny and his cast as “queered” for the context of this study, it must be a queerness very much

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aligned with a 30s cultural perception that is less defined by a homo/heterosexual binary.

Therefore, The Jack Benny Program exists as a definable alternative masculine universe, but one

confined to the tangible male anxieties of the period – a historical queerness in tune with that particular popular culture landscape. More problematically, both McFadden and Doty suggest a fundamental misunderstanding about the performers of the masculine comedic. Both approaches discount a comedian as complex as Benny as existing as a representative subject for a wider disenfranchised male population. As I will eventually illustrate, this appeal is facilitated by the venue of radio, a medium which works with considerably different conceptions of body and space than sound cinema.

The ‘Masochism Bit:’ Benny as Radio/Male Subject

One of the relationships from the show warranting the most attention by scholars has

been, not surprisingly, the Benny/Rochester relationship. The most common reading of the

twosome has suggested it as a queered domestic partnership, though to what degree is often the

subject of disagreement. In Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester, Joseph Boskin

devotes a considerable amount of attention to the relationship, positing it as a classic “odd male

couple” who existed as “surrogate spouses,” yet managed to evolve during their radio and

television run to “become a racially liberated, aging couple who also managed to avoid the

stigma of gayness” (193-5). Doty finds this characterization enticing yet sees Boskin as

dismissive of the more obviously queered aspects of the text, writing “[i]ronically, in tracing out

Jack and Rochester’s ‘odd couple purity,’ Boskin provides the material for a more gay-positive

reading of the pair as a couple” (77).v To Doty, by the mid-1940s, the Rochester/Benny

relationship had developed into something much more marriage-like since it “worked itself out

within the complicated comic and dramatic narrative tensions . . . combined elements of

domestic sitcom parody, or combined with moments of interracial male erotic tenderness,” as

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Rochester tended to Jack when sick, put him to bed, drew his bath, laid out his clothes, and often

served as his giggling confidant (77-8). On the other hand, McFadden uses Rochester’s

continually evolving and often contradictory role as further proof of the series’ ultimate

promotion of the status quo since the “potentially subversive representation of an interracial

marriage between two men is undermined” by the overt plays with heterosexual identification

with each character. Rochester has a succession of usually unseen girlfriends, while Jack is an

unsuccessful pursuer of women (127). Ultimately, for the context of this study, the actual extent

of the queerness of the Benny/Rochester relationship is of less concern. The relationship is

defined by a specific historical queerness less about a hetero/homosexual binary than a very

specific race-related gender signification of the period. Since Eddie Anderson is consistently

othered in the white entertainment environment of the era, what becomes a key consideration for

studying the masculine comedic is how this consistent pairing defines Benny as a “white” male

persona developed for a perceived white male audience.

Portraying, by all accounts, a “white” and “gentile” man on radio, the Jewish-born Benny

is an example of the assimilative whitefaced performances already seen with Eddie Cantor.

However, the assimilative drive is present to a much lesser extent since Benny never was famous

for portraying his ethnicity on the stage. In truth, his ethnic background was as identifiably

immigrant as Cantor’s or other New York-born Jewish comics, with Jack’s father Meyer

Kubelsky fleeing the Russian Czar’s empire and anti-Jewish pogroms as a small boy. The

Kubelskys’ story was an American success story, though, with Meyer eventually opening his

own business in the Chicago-area town of Waukegan, Illinois. As a result of a relatively

comfortable and assimilative childhood, Benny’s manner and, more important, speaking voice actually never was too easily identifiable as Jewish. This voice was accented more by an

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American Midwestern twang and, thus, not coded for listeners as necessarily “ethnic” as Cantor

or Groucho Marx’s New York, East Side accents. In terms of clear Jewishness on the radio

show, the character of Mr. Kitzel, introduced as a frequent guest star late in the show’s run in

1947, proved the more unquestionably Jewish caricature with a thick Yiddish accent and initially

a profession as a hot dog vendor, a common immigrant job.

Kitzel’s popular guest appearances on Benny and, later, other radio shows emerge as part

of a larger post-WWII engagement with the subject of Jewish immigration that was occurring in

American popular culture. As Henry Bial writes, the late 1940s was a period in Hollywood

when Jews in power were faced with “an identity crisis,” since the horrifying realities of the

annihilation of European Jews made it less possible to take “comfort in the apparently secure

position that Jews had established in the United States,” especially in the entertainment industry.

Most notably, this atmosphere produced a liberal, yet somewhat simplistic addressing of the

Jewish experience in film with, most famously, Gentleman’s Agreement (1945) and with the

television adaptation of Gertrude Berg’s family serial The Goldbergs (1948-55).vi As Bial

contends, such entertainment sought “to negotiate the double bind, acknowledging the value of

Jewish difference while simultaneously stressing the universal brotherhood of all people” (30).

In many ways, reflecting this more liberal post-WWII mentality toward race and ethnicity,

Kitzel’s otherness resembles the eventual evolution of Rochester’s otherness, unthreatening and

likeable despite being clearly stereotypical in its origins. Yet no matter what their positions as

pre and post-WWII subjects, both characters ultimately only contrasted with, while, concurrently, coding Benny as “white.” While it might be tempting to read Benny’s two most

famous character traits – his cheapness and poor violin playing – as anti-Semitic caricatures, his

actual immigrant roots were rarely, if ever, mentioned on the radio show or any other medium.

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Instead, his upbringing in Waukegan was usually referenced as something more-or-less all-

American on broadcasts, a comedy-filled and ethnically-neutral childhood. Concurrently, his

run-ins with Kitzel were usually presented not as interactions between two Jews, but as comic

ethnic ‘other’ meeting the white reactionary comedian.

Therefore, Benny proves most fascinating not necessarily as an ethnic comedian nor even

an example of “whitewashed assimilation” like Cantor. He is a persona illustrating a broader

historical queerness since, as Doty suggests, his performance evolved to incorporate an

extensive variety of elements that were coded as unmanly in a less ethnically specific way:

As Benny’s comic star image took shape [ . . . ] it gradually became associated with qualities conventionally considered unmasculine: vanity (about his blue eyes, his hair, his age); coyness; excessive hand and arm gestures; a loose bouncy walk; a high pitched nervous giggle; an interest in playing the violin; a lack of aggressive sexual desire for women; and a general lack of aggressiveness in his dealings with other people, except in the form of frequent so-called catty remarks. (63)

Considering the popular culture landscape of masculinity during the 1930s, the widespread

embrace of such a wittily unmasculine comedian is not completely surprising. In film, providing

an alternative to the hypermasculine tough guys of the era, dandyism, itself rooted in Victorian

homosexual subcultures, was presented as a desirable trait in many popular stars.vii Dubbing

these figures “deco dandies,” Drew Todd explores this modernist reconfiguration of the

Victorian fop as an “emblem of the modern age, he preferred the ballroom, nightclub, and

penthouse to the jungle, desert, or office; cocktails and champagne to beer; lovers to wives”

(168). The cinema’s first sound decade found such dandies, with their verbal wit, an appealing

way to highlight “hearing” the movie star, allowing the type to appear in figures like William

Powell, Leslie Howard, Ronald Coleman, Bing Crosby, and Fred Astaire.

It proves telling that the Benny program grew in popularity during this same cultural

moment. The weekly activities of a vain, though witty, wealthy celebrity living in Beverly Hills

140 certainly had its escapist appeals to the Depression era audiences in the same manner as the urbane Powell or Coleman – the latter became a frequent guest star on the radio show as Jack’s

“neighbor.” As a symbol of a carefree upper-class enjoyment, the dandy had a definite escapist appeal to an audience where luxury and leisure were no longer commodities. This economic dynamic explains why the dandy was often aggressively heterosexualized beyond its homosexual origins as the “playboy” in film, since, as Todd explains, Hollywood cinema “became the epitome of mainstream culture, the reinforcement of normative values has been standard practice.” As such, even though these films feel to play with masculine signification in some key ways, the “heroes are perpetually walking a fine line between straight and gay, feminine and masculine, the need for reaffirmation was even greater” (176). Therefore, Hollywood’s embrace of a now heterosexualized dandyism certainly helps to explain The Jack Benny Program’s popular collection of witty men. Yet, Benny’s radio persona and the supporting cast are not really “deco dandies” in the sense of Todd’s classifications. Benny’s persona can be read as a more ironical “deco dandy,” whose attempts at wit and sophistication were often met with ridicule by his cast members.

Benny’s inability to perform as this heterosexualized dandy ultimately tends to make his persona feel all the more queer by modern standards. As a fictional character, the on-air Benny was continually unsuccessful sexually, something the comedian writes about rather cryptically in his autobiography, never diving into any deeper psychological or biological reasons for his character’s inabilities: “I [his fictional self] didn’t dare make a pass at a beautiful woman. Oh, I made believe I was Don Juan . . . There’s a kind of bittersweet side to the sex game and if you can play it somewhere between broad farce on the one hand and tragedy on the other, you get a fine irony which reflects a true-to-life situation” (111). As discussed by McFadden, much

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humor was derived from Benny’s lack of sexual prowess in comparison to other cast members,

guest stars, and references to popular movie stars. As she summarizes, “He is extremely jealous

of Phil, whose multiple dates in one evening and frequent phone calls from movie stars enrage

Jack” – a trend on the show that is also duplicated, to a lesser degree, with Rochester, who also has women calling him frequently. To describe this dynamic, McFadden suggests the characters’ referenced physicalities had much to do with this humor and relates a joke about

Benny’s “pathetic” body. Phil says of a shirtless Jack, “Get a load of that chest! It’s the only skin hammock I ever saw!” (127-8). Doty suggests, despite the aggressive heterosexualizing of

Harris, that the radio program cast him as “female” and “Jack’s most overtly gay compatriot and rival” through numerous jokes about his obsessions with personal appearance (71). Yet, both these readings misconstrue how much Harris actually resembles the “deco dandy,” whose queerness was overtly offset by aggressive heterosexualizing onscreen. Therefore, Benny’s lack of a successful heterosexualization in comparison to Harris forces the comedian into a queerer role, yet notably in a manner ironically tied to historically-specific amalgams of masculinities.

Both characters made numerous jokes based upon their obsessions over physical appearance, but

Benny’s lack of womanly contact implies a definite queerer contrast since he fails to “legitimize” the urbane dandy as properly straight.

Such a recognition of Benny as “feminized” or “unmasculine” does bring up the question of what his persona actually does suggest as a sexual subject. Ironically, while McFadden and

Doty have different approaches, each find ways to suggest the show promotes hegemonic ideals of (hetro)sexuality through its humor. To McFadden, Benny’s supposed heterosexuality on the show is confirmed by minor reoccurring characters who are clearly coded as homosexual. This includes a voice that reappears in small walk-ons, scripted as the Nasty Man, who “has an

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[exaggerated] effeminate voice, is pompous and cranky, and holds jobs typically associated with

homosexual men, including those of floorwalker and waiter” (128). Benny has multiple run-ins

with this inexplicitly rude character, whose haughty annoyed responses are peppered with him

jokingly calling Benny “Dreamboat,” “Bright Eyes,” and “Sweet Pea.” McFadden suggests that

such peripheral “gay” voices were used to suggest, in contrast, the heterosexuality of Benny.viii

Yet there are some flaws in this logic since Benny’s reactions to such homosexual caricatures are rarely aggressive or “masculine” in any notable way. Such characters only add to the implied

“femininity” of Benny’s own popular catchphrases such as “Now cut that out!” and “Well!,” two exclamations implying his own comical haughtiness. Therefore, even if peripheral characters like the Nasty Man might have been overtly coded as gay, they do not serve the same purpose as

Kitzel in “normalizing” Benny since such inclusions do little to heterosexualize the more sexually-ambiguous comedian.

Part of the reason for the ambiguity of Benny as a sexual subject - presented narratively as straight but queered in key behaviors - might be related to his position as comedic victim on the show. There are constant verbal attacks made toward Jack by a variety of supporting characters, extending from figures as clearly homosexual as the Nasty Man to the heterosexual ideals found in guest stars ranging from rugged Humphrey Bogart to dandyish Ronald Coleman.

In fact, one of the most consistent elements of Benny’s persona is the continual deflation of ego since his entire approach to humor was to create an environment where he could develop his self- satire. He was constantly placing himself as the butt of his wisecracking supporting cast and guest stars’ often wicked barbs about everything ranging from his age to his looks to his cheapness to his sentimentality to his lack of education to his sexual inadequacy. In fact, it is difficult to think of an entertainer who more actively set himself up to public degradation for

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comedy. In his autobiography, Benny tells of the pinnacle of this victimization in the form of a write-in contest on his show, pitched by the youngest member of his writing staff, George

Balzer. The contest had listeners write on the topic of “I Can’t Stand Jack Benny Because . . . ”

The comedian first showed a very brief reluctance to the idea: “I knew if we went through with this idea it would be the most extreme limit to which I had ever carried the masochism bit.”

Despite these reservations, Benny ultimately said the “hell with public relations and images” and the contest went on as planned (133).ix

It is through such aggressive self-deprecating humor on the show that Doty suggests

hegemonic ideals of sexuality could still be confirmed, even if his reading presents Benny as a

more overtly queered subject than McFadden suggests. Doty writes that such humor constructed

Benny’s “effeminate” character to work “comfortably and conventionally within long-

established Western cultural traditions that try to neutralize and contain the threat of the

unmasculine or feminine man by making him the butt of homophobic laughter” (64). While

certainly there is some truth in Doty’s classification of Benny as “neutralized,” this reading fails

to address how such a figure could remain so embraced by a massive audience. After all,

perversely, the “I Can’t Stand Jack Benny Because . . . ” contest ultimately proved nothing more

than how beloved the comedian actually was by the American public. As Benny writes, the

show expected “at the most there would be twenty thousand letters,” but, instead, the network

had to hire a staff of twelve women to sort out the staggering 277,000 letters that they received in

just six weeks.

The best illustration of what Benny’s popularity meant to a wider audience actually

appears in the winning essay for the contest by Mr. Carroll P. Craig, Sr.:

He fills the air with boasts and brags And obsolete obnoxious gags.

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The way he plays his violin Is music’s most obnoxious sin. His cowardice alone, indeed, Is matched by his obnoxious greed. In all the things that he portrays He shows up my own obnoxious ways. (Benny 134)

In essence, Craig’s words provide insight into the only reasonable explanation for the ritual-like

devotion by millions of male fans. Benny’s “failings” were not just targets of homophobic

laughter nor a comparative method of hegemonic conformity. His supposedly lacking character

traits were meant to define him as an accessible representative male subject as well. For the

male population, he could “show-up” their own “obnoxious ways,” their failures to live up to the

masculine ideal. Therefore, Benny is right to define his humor as the masochism bit. He

essentially made himself the target of some of the nastiest jokes as a public display that exposed the male population’s own limitations as well. Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the

Margins provides a fitting definition of the “male masochist” by asking what such a figure displays for society and what are the consequences of this self-exposure:

To begin with, he acts out in an insistent and exaggerated way the basic conditions of cultural subjectivity, conditions that are normally disavowed, he loudly proclaims that his meaning comes to him from the Other, prostrates himself before the gaze as he solicits it, exhibits his castration for all to see, and revels in the sacrificial basis of the social contract. The male masochist magnifies the losses and divisions upon which cultural identity is based, refusing to be sutured or recompensed. (206).

Even though she later applies these definitions to characters in the violently masochistic cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, it is surprising how many of these characteristics, in a sense, defines the masculine performance of Benny as it evolved on-the-air. He is defined by jokes exposing his lack of masculinity, soliciting, as a performer, a judgmental gaze and exhibiting his lack for the radio public. In this display, he is exaggerating the divisions of cultural identity by proving himself “feminine” and, thus, magnifying the definitions of hegemonic maleness. Yet, it

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is key to remember that Benny is not totally removed from hegemonic social orders since his ethnicity and sexuality are still positioned as “white” and “straight” within the narrative of the show. But even this is fitting to the cultural position of the masochist, since as Silverman reminds us, masochism “in all of its guises is as much a product of the existing order as a

reaction against it” (213). In the end, this ability to exist as part and, simultaneously, as a

commentator upon the hegemony means Benny is never completely positioned as ‘other’ within

the text. He is only marginal and, as such, “shows up” the divisions of the social order while

never truly transcending them.

Therefore, the best way to grasp the paradox of Benny’s popularity is to understand his

masochism bit as a real point of identification for many male listeners, a true figure of the

masculine comedic tied to the same kind of national anxieties that allowed for the deco dandy to flourish. Benny was allowed to push the envelope so far in his (un)masculine portrayals on radio mainly because of the nature of the medium itself, in which the limits of gender and sexuality could be challenged more easily than in film. As I will soon show, Benny’s appeal had much to do with what it means to perform in a supposedly “bodiless” medium.

“Picture Jokes”: Voice and Body on the Radio

At the height of radio’s popularity in 1936, Rudolf Arnheim suggested that an ideal

broadcast personality was a type of “bodiless” voice, which meant “certain expressive voices do

not strike the naive listener as ‘the voice of somebody one doesn’t see’ and whose appearance

can be speculated on, but rather the experience of an absolutely complete personality” (142).

This view of the radio performer essentially feels antithetical to the appeal of many radio

comedies, since imagining the physicality – the body size, sex, ethnicity, and race – of

performers became crucial for many of the jokes to make sense. As Benny explains in his

autobiography, “In radio we used to have what I once coined a good phrase for, namely, ‘picture

146 jokes’” (119).x These are jokes dependent upon the listener imagining a physical body attached to the voices or having the humor based in the referenced bodies within an imagined space. In both these approaches, the humor plays upon the ridiculousness of the visual image created in the listener’s mind.

Benny provides a good example of this technique with the appearance of regular guest stars Ronald Colman and wife Benita Hume in a gag revolving around the show’s band. The couple is dining and Colman asks, “Benita, have you ever happened to notice Phil Harris’s musicians?” She responds, “Please Ronnie, not while I am eating.” As Benny writes, “This crack got one of the loudest and longest laughs from our studio audience and yet it wasn’t the cleverness of the joke that did it. . . . As soon as Benita Hume spoke her line, the audience called up in their minds’ eye the image of a crowd of unshaven, badly dressed, unshowered, stinking, drunken saxophone players and trumpeters.” To Benny, “this was the best picture joke we ever did,” since it was based upon years of establishing the imagined bodies of the musicians as slovenly and disgusting, a reoccurring joke on the program (119). What is fascinating about

Benny’s example is that it relates the response of the studio audience who saw before them at the broadcast the actual band whose appearance was usually in well-tailored suits and, generally, neat. But by this point of the program’s run, the imagined bodies of the musicians had gained such importance that the physical reality of them in the studio meant little to the show’s fans.

Benny’s program excelled in multiple examples of this sort of comedy that developed over years of cultivating not only the personalities of characters, but their unseen imaginary bodies as well.

These ranged from references to Benny’s supposed toupee, age, and false teeth to other cast member’s distinctive physical characteristics: from Mary’s feminine attractiveness to Don’s girth to Rochester’s racial difference. In this sense, the voices and situations never had too much of a

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detachment from bodily recognition for the listeners, who were reliant upon the “mind’s eye” to

picture many of the jokes.

Beyond this skillful understanding of the listener’s imagination by the radio writers,

generally the body always feels fastened to a distinctive vocal performance even when the

performer is not physically present. To Roland Barthes, this physicality constitutes the “grain”

of a voice that he relates to a nearly indecipherable significance found in effective singing.

Barthes’ definition can move beyond singing because it feels tied to the inexplicable

individualized elements of voice found in performance itself as something not necessarily

musical, though certainly tied to the act of performing. In a direct reference to the bodily, he

writes that the “‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it

performs” (188). With this bodily relationship, he implies the symbolic register, itself defining

gender identification, as key in dissecting the voice’s affective qualities:

Above all, this voice bears along directly the symbolic, over the intelligible, the expressive: here, thrown in front of us like a packet, is the Father, his phallic stature. The ‘grain’ is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly significance. (182)

Thus, the significance of voice becomes a bodily response to the performing subject, a

recognition of self as subject in relationship to the heard voice as other. It is key to recognize that in his definition of the grain, Barthes embraces the sexuality of a performing body in overt ways, stating that he is “determined to listen to my relation with the body of the man or woman singing or playing and that relation is erotic - but in no way ‘subjective’” (188). To Barthes, the voice provides significance through a definite recognition of the performing subject as a gendered body.

In his autobiography, Benny does suggest an innate understanding of the sound of the voice as key in creating radio comedy and, more important, implying the sexualized body as

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implicit in the grain of the broadcast voice. He perceptively discusses these components not

through analyzing his own distinctive voice, but only in analyzing the appeal of his cast

member’s vocal performances. Here, he discusses the show’s popular regulars and reoccurring

characters with a distinct focus upon how the program was very successful in “[l]etting character develop out of voice quality” (120). With casting Eddie Anderson as Rochester, he writes about originally auditioning and hiring the actor because of his distinctive, deep hoarse voice that conjured a bodily image through its sound. Even though Anderson supposedly gave the worst reading at the audition, Benny hired him because “he had a deep husky growl in his voice and his words came up through his larynx like there was a pile of gravel down there” (101). In discussing the boozy and oversexed Phil Harris’s on-air “vitality, joie de vivre, immorality and a sheer gusto in animal pleasure,” Benny suggests this characterization developed out of Harris’s voice more than actual personality, since “his voice went with the character, with the braggadocio and, so to say, the cocksureness.” To Benny and his writers, the sound of Harris’s voice eventually allowed them to develop him into “probably the finest fornicator of all time.”

The Harris vocal joie de vivre ultimately is related to the sexual body by Benny, who states that when Harris “made his first speech, which was usually a simple ‘Hiya, Jackson,’ he somehow got across the idea that he had come to the studio right after having experienced a most satisfying orgasm” (118).

While never dissecting his own vocal performances in such fascinatingly physical terms,

Benny does seem aware of the bodily in voice within his performance technique. In his famous timing of jokes, Benny’s vocality implies the imagined body as a central component even in the

“bodiless” medium of radio, since his humor often became reliant upon the absence of voice to create comedic effect. He took great pride in his ability to get laughs without speaking, even on

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the radio where the threat of dead-air is always a worry. He often related the story of his show’s supposed longest on-air laugh being a result of his silent response to a threatening question posed

by a stickup man: “Your money or your life?” Building on years of stingy jokes, Benny told the

actor portraying the robber to wait for his physical cue of touching his earlobe before responding

to the silent reaction with “Come on, hurry up.” A notably long silence is followed by Benny’s

punchline of “I’m thinking it over!” In his autobiography, Benny proudly relates that “this line

clocked over two minutes of laughter” (88).xi Such moments suggest how skilled a vocal performer Benny actually became on radio, understanding how to play silent pauses to the greatest effect.

More significantly, such moments also show how his technique could centralize his unseen body for the radio listener. As Kaplan fascinatingly suggests, Benny “was, in short, radio’s greatest silent actor, the Zen master of the medium” (44). To characterize a radio performer as a silent actor creates an enticing paradox that essentially proves understandable in

its insight into the bodily dimensions inherent to all vocal performances, something that relates

to cinematic voice theory in particular. In The Voice in the Cinema, Michel Chion suggests the

radio voice as a detached representative entity for audiences more related to the bodily

dimensions of silent cinema than sound cinema:

Neither radio nor telephone, nor their complement, the silent cinema, is dualistic. Isolating the voice as they do, telephone and radio posit the voice as representative of the whole person. And a character in a silent film, with her animated body and moving lips, appears as the part of the whole that is a speaking body, and leaves each viewer to imagine her voice. So in explicitly depriving us of one element, both radio and silent cinema cause us to dream of the harmony of the whole. (125)

As a performer, Benny plays with this “harmony” to create his bodily dimensions, sometimes implying the lack of vocality as the imagined fulfillment of the complete body for the listener.

He understood the inert in his vocality as a bodily lack of movement, not only a lack of vocal

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movement. After all, the picture joke of the “Your money or your life” gag, with its extended

on-air silence, is the imagined image of an inert body pondering the question. Thus, Benny built

his popularity from being a complete representative voice on-air, which, as I will later illustrate,

is distinctly different from the sonic spaces of sound cinema.

But what does this voice, with all its bodily wholeness, mean in affective terms? To

consider this question, we must admit that broadcast voice is not actually bodily in a real sense,

even if it is undoubtedly bodily on a symbolic or, in Chion’s phrasing, representative level. The

radio voice is actually a paradox, affective in both its representative bodily nature and within its

actual removal from the living body. As outlined in the opening of this chapter, Benny’s

innovativeness as a broadcaster can best be explained through his understanding of how to foster

intimacy within the radio medium. Through playing to “small family groups” as opposed to

crowded theaters, Benny created what often has been regarded as one of the most influential

character comedies of the 20th century. Yet, the concept of intimacy and radio actually

transcends simply the construction of character and humor as it relates to the pure auditory

pleasures of listening to the detached voice. Chion discusses the pleasure of voice when

removed from the image of the body in decisively maternal terms. Expanding from Denis

Vasse’s theories of the mother’s voice, Chion suggests that “the voice could imaginarily take up

the role of an umbilical cord as a nurturing connection . . . Clearly when the voice is heard

separate from the body -, i.e., in a regressive situation – it can play this role most easily” (62).

Therefore, beyond the representative, the broadcast voice has the ability to suggest the familial and comfortable, something that Benny understood in his appeals to “small family units” and

“instant warmth.” Such a dynamic to broadcast voice becomes key when considering the audience’s embrace of the gendered ‘otherness’ prevalent on the Benny show. The concept of a

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bodiless voice as seemingly regressive in effect is something also explored by Amy Lawrence,

who suggests the recorded/broadcast voice as closing a gap between the listener and the

gendered other: “In the mirror stage, vision abets language and the voice in inscribing separation

of self and other. Sound, especially as discussed here in reference to recordings and radio, can

provide the illusion of repairing the split by reincorporating the other” (27-8). In this sense, we

can think of radio broadcast in terms of representative space as well, suggesting an illusionary

comfort-location for listeners since recorded or broadcast voice “allows the individual [listener]

to recover or recreate a pre-linguistic condition where s/he existed in an infinite space, united

there with the mother and the body, objets (a) that the recorded voice momentarily returns us to”

(29).xii Benny’s radio performances for the listener create the illusion of existing beyond (or before) the symbolic register – suggesting objets (a) – allowing comfort and distance from the

bodily image of the ‘un-masculine,’ since such an image is ultimately stigmatized by the social

order.xiii

But it must be admitted that there is no way for Benny’s voice to be completely removed

from the symbolic, even if broadcast voice can work through a heightened, intimate comfort

level for listeners. To understand how aspects of Benny’s voice consistently tie the voice to the

body, even in the ‘bodiless’ medium of radio, consider how voice-overs work in film. Kaja

Silverman proposes in The Acoustic Mirror that Classic Hollywood sound suggests how

“synchronization is synonymous with a more general compatibility of voice to body – that a

voice which seems to ‘belong’ to the body from which it issues will be easily recorded, but that

one which does not will resist assimilation into sound cinema” (46).xiv This ‘belonging’ is why

scholars such as Silverman, Chion, Lawrence, and Mary Ann Doane have suggested that the

voice-over in film is partly a privileged object, affective in its distance from the body onscreen.

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In this sense, Benny’s voice on radio is privileged to a degree, yet it is not totally removed from

the body since the listener recognizes, on some level, that the body exists to create the voice. As

Silverman relates, the onscreen voice-over can have differing distances from the body with each

related to the authority of the voice: “[T]he voice-over is privileged to the degree that it

transcends the body. Conversely, it loses power and authority with every encroachment, from a

regional accent or idiosyncratic ‘grain’ to definitive localization in the image” (49). This

classification shows how Benny’s radio voice is not really an independent entity, since it proves

to be idiosyncratic in its irritated tone and Midwestern twang. Similarly, we hear this as well in

the sounds of Benny’s co-stars, with Rochester’s implied gravelly larynx and Harris’ post-

orgasmic gusto. Despite the comforts that exist when listening to a “bodiless” medium of

performance, the voices always contain definite ties to the bodily, never actually transcending

those classifications. The voices of Benny and his co-stars are only intimate and comfortable,

“safe” to those who perceive them as ‘other’ and, more importantly for this study, representative

to those male subjects who hear themselves within Benny’s masochism bits.

Before I consider how the radio voice transplanted to cinema, I should briefly address

how image was later added to broadcast through television. Here, Benny’s specific observations on creating intimacy through appealing to “small family units” become tested since the comfort- levels afforded by radio’s lack of bodily image are no longer present. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he found success on television as well. Yet, as his television career became firmly established, Benny’s success could never match the overwhelming devotion given to him as a radio star by 1930s and 40s audiences. Despite being a TV fixture and respected broadcaster, Benny never was the dominant force in the television Nielsen ratings that he had

been in the Hooper ratings for radio. While his TV shows were popular, they largely existed as

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visually-expanded versions of his radio show, but, notably, without fully using the talents of his

supporting cast who now only made reoccurring visits. As it continued into the early 1960s, the

TV show took on more of a variety format and employed the comedian’s talents as a monologist

to greater effect. This diminishing of potency as a persona was undeniably due to his long run as

a celebrity and the historical differences of broadcast in the 1930s as compared to the 1950s and

early 60s, which could be substantially more conservative.

There is also a notable difference between broadcasting as a detached voice or,

alternately, as televised image/voice. Lisa Lowe makes this observation in relationship to Gracie

Allen’s transition from radio to television: “The Gracie of the [television] screen and the Gracie

of the air are of different historical eras and production contexts . . . Still, it is interesting to note

how a visual context can work against the power Gracie establishes through language. On the

radio, the gaze absent, Gracie’s voice suggests a woman free of real-world substance and

unbounded by real-world limitation” (243). Perhaps, Benny as a historically queer subject finds

the same constrictions on television as Gracie, since the medium is essentially removed from the

safer infinite spaces of radio. But, notably, his popularity could continue on some level since

television still enters the home with its “small family units.” Hence, television still requires that

initial appeal to the intimate that made Benny so revolutionary as a broadcaster in the 30s, even

if the heightened safeness found on radio had been diminished. This smooth transition was not

the case when he attempted to crossover to cinema, since the relationship with the audience is something considerably less intimate.

The Radio Voice on Film

By 1940, the height of the show’s popularity, the film career of Jack Benny took an

interesting turn when he starred in two well-publicized productions that were essentially film

versions of his program.xv In April, Paramount released Buck Benny Rides Again, which

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featured much of his cast in an adaptation of a popular reoccurring sketch from the show featuring Benny as an ineffectual cowboy. A few months later, the same studio released Love

Thy Neighbor, a film inspired by his popular on-air feud with comedian Fred Allen.

Significantly, Benny played “himself” in both these productions – or, to be more accurate, the persona established on the radio as “Jack Benny.” Conceptually, they literally are examples of

cinema being created as an addition to preexisting vocal characterizations, radio aesthetics, and weekly running gags. In direct relationship to this project, they provide fascinating insight into

the relationship between radio and cinema in the development of the masculine comedic,

showing onscreen the more awkward intersections of the two mediums. As Chion suggests, “If

the talking cinema has shown anything by restoring voices to bodies, it’s precisely that it doesn’t hang together; it’s decidedly not a seamless match” (125). With 30s comedians, who largely were vocal performers, we can see this uneven nature of onscreen performance as the comedian’s vocality is privileged. As I will illustrate, the voice is not privileged in the same sense as heard with other types of film performers since it is less about a fetishization in an erotic sense than an appeal to familiarity and “instant warmth,” aspects of performance perfected by

Benny on radio.

Buck Benny Rides Again tells the story of Benny, as radio star “Jack Benny,” who has

long been making fictitious boasts on his broadcasts about “roughing it” as a real cowboy he-

man. While romantically pursuing an attractive singer, Joan Cameron (Ellen Drew), Benny finds

himself wrapped up in his own web of lies, which results in him having to spend his summer at a

Nevada ranch in a ruse to prove himself as a rough and manly cowboy. The film co-stars much

of his radio cast of Eddie Anderson, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, frequent guest star Andy Devine,

and, briefly, Don Wilson and continues many established gags from the series. It opens by

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asserting a definite radio-influenced aesthetic. Immediately after the Paramount logo, the film

dissolves into a tight medium-shot of radio announcer Wilson standing behind a radio

microphone and declaring: “And now ladies and gentlemen, we bring you that rugged hero of the

great outdoors, that strong silent sphinx of the prairie, that man among men where men are men.”

The film then dissolves into a traditional title card, which Wilson reads for the audience over the

soundtrack: “Jack Benny in Buck Benny Rides Again.” When it cuts back to Wilson with a radio

script in hand, Benny stands beside him, dressed in a similar snazzy tux and a large-rimmed

cowboy hat. With a smug look of false modesty, he says, “Oh Don, please.” Wilson goes on to

read the content of the next title card, which lists the supporting cast, excitedly exclaiming at the

end, “And Rochester!” To which, upon cutting back to the two-shot, Benny cracks, “You don’t

have to shout it, Don.” Wilson looks squarely into the camera and proclaims, without the cut to a title card, “Together with the radio voices of Mary Livingstone, yours truly, Don Wilson, and

Fred Allen.” Playing off the popular radio feud, Benny peevishly turns to Wilson and exclaims,

“Fred Allen!” Then, turning to the camera as he exits, Benny sneers, “So long, folks.” The

credits then proceed traditionally, with a series of title cards adorned with the image of a cowboy hat, gun, and spurs.

The point of such an innovative and truly cross-media opening essentially is to have the

audience recognize the film as a continuation of the radio show. It establishes this connection by

having as the first screen image popular radio announcer Wilson, who is a celebrity based almost

solely in the effect of his voice. In the manner of the radio show, Wilson proceeds to introduce

Benny through an ironic listing of manly characteristics typical to the cowboy hero, basically

using the words “man” and “men” in a repetitive rhythm to comically set-up the image of the

overdressed Benny in his ridiculous cowboy hat. The point of the opening is to add a comical

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queer body to the preexisting mediated voice of Benny, which the audience pre-acknowledges as

not representative of these descriptions. The comedian then continues to confirm many of the

traits typical of him on the radio by performing jokes similarly heard in broadcasts, mainly

referencing his “feminine” false modesty, his diva-like jealousy of other cast members, and his

dislike of radio rival Allen. Much like the broadcasts, these characteristics are part of the

comedic masochism executed by Benny the performer, quickly setting up a series of supposedly

“unmasculine” characteristics. These are not for the audience to necessarily judge – since such

traits do not come as a surprise to fans – but for them to embrace as some kind of familiar and

comfortable old friend. After all, the unreality of the introduction is found not in Benny’s

behavior but in Wilson’s unrealistic characterization of masculinity, with the joke appearing in the comedian’s inability to confirm the fanciful cowboy image. Also key, of course, is Wilson’s crediting of the “radio voices” of other established broadcast stars, Mary Livingstone and Fred

Allen, as if they will be presented as body-like entities onscreen.

All of this sets up how the film will, at key times, conform to a radio-influenced aesthetic which becomes most evident in the introduction of popular radio regulars. For example, a shot of a high-dollar dandyish apartment with nobody present is accompanied by the offscreen voice of Rochester as he washes Carmichael (Benny’s pet polar bear, an established gag from his radio program). We hear a nervous Rochester joke, in a witty and, then, very timely gag, “Let go of me. Remember, we got a nonaggression pact!” The film finally cuts to inside the bathroom with the “polar bear” sitting within an ice-filled bathtub as the scene introduces the bodies as accompanying the established voice of Rochester and even the familiar growl of Carmichael.xvi

The introduction of another regular highlights the historically queered masculinity of the radio show, if only in a watered-down version for the motion picture audience. The first appearance of

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Phil Harris continues some very typically dandyish characterizations. Once again, the scene finds another crafty way to introduce the body image of Harris as Rochester answers the door and addresses the unseen body positioned out-of-frame with, “Hello, Mr. Harris.” Phil, ever the aggressor of the radio show, marches into the frame and places his hat into Rochester’s hand.

The camera swiftly follows his body as he walks across the room and exclaims, “Hiya Roch.

Hiya Jackson. How’s the boy?” Surprisingly, the film quickly goes into what, on radio, would have existed as a “picture joke.” Jack says, “Hello Philsy. Say, how do you keep that gorgeous marcel in this weather?” Phil cracks, “I use a washboard for a pillow.” Jack says, “Oh. You ought to keep your face off it.” Unlike on radio, Harris’ actual hair exists to punctuate the joke, with its humor based in numerous references on-the-air to the bandleader’s obsessions with grooming.

A more perplexing employment of radio aesthetics appears in, to use Don Wilson’s words, “the radio voices” of Livingstone and Allen. Fred Allen’s voice emerges mainly to continue the popular radio feud and further attack Benny’s claims of being a Western he-man.

The film shows an exterior shot of Radio City in New York City, a lit “on-the-air” sign, and then a photo of Allen. We then see Benny angrily pacing before his radio, listening to the voice of his rival as it sneers: “That’s what they tell me. Jack Benny’s going out west and roughing it . . .

Benny’s idea of roughing it is to go two days without a manicure.” The film then cuts to Joan

Cameron and her friends listening to Benny’s program. We hear Jack, Don, and Mary discuss

Allen’s attacks on Benny’s masculinity. Mockingly positioning Benny in a feminine role, as she often did on radio, Mary suggests that Jack has bought “a sidesaddle” for his trip out west. The presentation of these established performers in the sound-only venue that defined their fame further suggests the radio voice as powerful, but not authoritative in a sense usually afforded to

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the bodiless voice in cinema. By adding the visual apparatus of radio as a buffer within these

scenes, the voice’s authority dissipates even within the diegesis of the film. As Mladen Dolar

suggests, “[r]adio, gramophone, tape-recorder, telephone: with the advent of the new media the

acousmatic property of the voice became universal, and hence trivial” (63). Thus, as opposed to

authority, the film establishes through these bodiless voices a reference to the intimacy afforded by the medium of radio by adding the medium itself to the diegetic space. Tellingly, the most feminized aspersions to Benny’s weak masculinity actually appear in this buffered venue.

Unlike other verbal gags in the film, which are not nearly as gender specific, we hear accusations of Benny having his nails done and riding a woman’s saddle. Adapting such feminine characteristics into visual gags would have been too aggressively gender-defying for period audiences. But through the buffer of radio, the film could present the provocatively queered humor as purely verbal jokes safely distanced from the bodily image.

As seen in all these instances of privileging voice in Buck Benny, radio influence does heighten the duality of voice and body inherent to all synchronized sound films. In direct relationship to gender, though, the significance of this heterogeneity is not necessarily similar to other types of centralized vocal performances found in Classic Hollywood. Kaja Silverman writes that the female voice is folded “into what is overtly indicated as an inner textual space, such as a painting, a song-and-dance performance, or a film-within-a-film. Through it the female voice is doubly diegeticized, overheard not only by the cinema, but by a fictional eavesdropper or group of eavesdroppers” (Acoustic 56-7).xvii In Buck Benny, this dynamic clearly appears in sequences of musical performance as Benny and nightclub patrons listen to

Joan Cameron’s musical numbers. In a narrative context, mirroring the cinematic apparatus itself, these moments show the female voice as a consumed object, as Cameron exists as little but

159 a glamorous studio contract player as opposed to a familiar radio personality. As Silverman proposes, such an overall affiliation of the female voice with the textually-embodied aligns

“male subjectivity” to that “seemingly transcendental auditory position, and so aligned with the apparatus” (57). As such, this textually-based position onscreen always ties the female voice to the desired feminine as object: “in other words, it permits the male subject to pose as the voice that constrains and orchestrates the feminine ‘performance’ or ‘striptease,’ as enunciator rather than as himself an element of the énoncé” (62). This clearly gendered subjugation can be seen in many Classic Hollywood texts, since the voices exist neatly within the diegesis of the film without the outside influence of radio. But Benny’s male voice feels not necessarily related to the apparatus of cinema, but to the intimate radio medium where fantasy spaces cushion his program’s queerer characteristics. So, notably, when the body of Benny is used as a point of

“localization” for his voice, it often accompanies not a textual position as masculine “enunciator” but a position as posed subject. In these depictions of the male voice/body, Benny is ‘feminized’ as object; yet, notably, this occurs not in an erotic sense, but instead in a lampoon of hegemonic ideals with Benny as a ‘comedy object.’

This textual position clearly occurs as Benny disguises himself as a cowboy on “real cowboy” Andy Devine’s ranch in Nevada.xviii The scene begins with a standard western location, a slow pan across a busy ranch with cowboys leading some cattle pass a small ranch house. Devine rides his horse up to the house, yelling upon his arrival, “Hey Buck! Hey Buck!”

– his standard radio nickname for Benny and, at the time, a catchphrase closely associated with the character actor’s scratchy voice. The film cuts to a shot of the open ranch door, where Benny swaggers out wearing an extremely comical cowboy outfit consisting of a large-brimmed cowboy hat, a leather vest, and chaps – the last two items extravagantly embroidered with metal

160 studs in the patterns of stars. Benny looks up to the off-camera Devine and, adopting a deep manly bravado, asks, “Well, Andy, How do I look?” The scene cuts to Devine erupting into his distinctively scratchy laugh. As Devine gets off the horse, Benny explains, “You know, Andy, I thought since I am supposed to be owner of this ranch, I might as well dress the part.” The two of them discuss a plan to fool Joan, until the offscreen voice of Rochester is heard singing, “I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande. And my legs ain’t bowed and my cheeks ain’t tanned. I am a cowboy who ain’t never seen a cow . . . ” As Rochester sings, the film cuts to the ranch- house door again, Eddie Anderson emerges wearing a large hat, a shinny shirt, and a vest with a black and white design resembling a Holstein cow. As the camera follows him into a three-shot with Benny and Devine, Andy erupts into his distinctive laughter once again. As Devine exits the scene uncontrollably laughing, Benny looks over to his manservant with a slight look of contentment as if happy to not be the only foolish one onscreen.

This introduction of “Buck” Benny adorned in theatrical queered cowboy attire shows a fascinating relationship between voice and body, one that exemplifies how the masculine comedic, when defined by preexisting radio voice, can reposition the standard gender dynamics of Classic Hollywood. On one level, the comical reveals of Benny and Rochester are based in degradation as the subjects are made foolish as comic spectacles for the gaze of the audience and

Devine, which makes them doubly diegeticized. Benny is positioned under the gaze of Devine who reacts much like the audience is supposed to react, by erupting into an ego-deflating laughter. While the Benny/Rochester reveals position them as ‘others,’ queered cowboys, it also nearly paradoxically positions them as familiar others thanks to their radio popularity. The deeper manly voice adopted by Benny in his asking, “How do I look?” was a standard vocal lampoon performed on the radio anytime the comedian adopted his “Buck” Benny persona.

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Here, the picture of his body adorned in a queer outfit accompanies the established vocal spoof as the realization of a ‘picture joke.’ More tellingly, Rochester arrives onto the scene to present another body for the doubly-diegetic gaze, yet one that is also telling in how the film aligns him next to Benny. Carrying over his racially complex role from the radio show with all his domestic/wifely characteristics, Eddie Anderson is presented as an unmasculine buffoon as well.

He is subjugated as demasculinized, but, tellingly, also positioned next to his white employer as an equal figure of degradation. The representative audience in the sequence, Andy Devine, helps to keep the objectification light and less an act of judgment than familiarity, since Devine, with his then familiar scratchy voice and heavy frame, was anything but an idealized masculine figure.

The film continues with more of such moments as it moves into the terrain of cowboy spoof during its second half, with Benny unsuccessfully trying to fool Joan in a variety of tough guy scenarios that mirror pulpy westerns of the day. The deep manly voice is continually and foolishly adopted by Benny, while more audaciously queered cowboy clothing is worn by the comedian and his manservant. In such a clear lampoon-able genre as the western, with its hypermasculinity so ripe for spoof, the voice and body as queer depictions become understandable and something found in many comedian comedies of the period, as already shown with W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee. While the mediated voices of the radio cast certainly are key in establishing a “safe” venue for such gender-defying characterizations, the film’s transition into lampoon can be seen as also adding to this acceptability of the unmasculine as well. Therefore, since it is completely removed from the genre of spoof, a more complicated radio/cinematic masculine construct actually appears in the film Love Thy Neighbor, which

162 adopts more of the pure verbal wit developed on the radio program. With this film, I will further dissect radio persona and verbosity as it reveals itself in Classic Hollywood comedy.

Love Thy Neighbor continues the popular radio feud between Benny and Fred Allen that, throughout the runs of both comedians’ programs, escalated and cooled at various times.xix At the height of popularity, the feud greatly increased the ratings of both shows. As Benny explains, it was another example of crafty audience manipulation by the writers: “Forty million listeners were caught up in our feud and followed it with bated breath, week by week. And I don’t know how many millions thought we really hated each other’s guts. Of course, Allen and I never hated each other . . . Allen admired me . . . And I admired Allen” (130). The verbal attacks largely occurred between the two on their respective programs, which smartly made listeners feel compelled to tune in to each show to hear the responses. Also, the two comedians notably made periodic appearances on each other’s shows, which usually garnered large ratings. The feud allowed the writers and comedians to shine in the realm of verbal gags and genuinely catty insults. Despite the constant threat of violence between the two comics, the only realization of a physical brawl occurred with a misguided charity boxing match. Benny explains this row was declared “a draw” since neither comedian “had the strength or technical skill to knock-out a bee.” Instead, the feud was a largely verbal affair and showed the approach to humor perfected by each comedian with Benny performing more in the masochistic role and Allen more sadistic.

As Benny explains, “it wasn’t in my radio character to attack other people and my humor came out of my being the butt of everybody else’s jokes. I was at a disadvantage. I couldn’t be as nasty as he could be” (132). On the other hand, Allen was seen by the public as a cerebral humorist, unmasculine like Benny, but with a biting ability to attack with verbal jabs and

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satirical insights.xx This reputation and approach to comedy allowed for a less character-based

humor, which, in turn, meant wickeder jokes could be performed by Allen.

In a Freudian schema of humor, the entire feud and its popularity with late 30s audiences

could be seen as exploiting aggression and existing as classic hostile jokes. For example, on a

March 27, 1938 broadcast, Benny calls Allen a “weather-beaten gargoyle.” Allen pointedly

asked Benny on a June 19, 1940 show, “Have you ever turned around, looked down, and had the

illusion you were looking into a mirror?” On both radio shows, the jokes were often aggressive

attacks on the imagined bodies of the comedians, which were both distinctly defined as

unmasculine. As Benny explains, “We fought with vituperation, wisecracks, insults, innuendo

and most outrageous slaps at each other’s so-called physical deficiencies” (129). All this

aggressiveness was from a ‘safe’ distance for the listener and, tellingly, there was never any real documented “taking of sides” by the majority of the radio audience. As suggested by Freud in defining hostile jokes, this lack of substantial investment with either “side” allows for a fleeting form of pleasure for the listener, something the radio medium afforded through its limited air times. He writes that the “[hostile] joke will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible. It will further bribe the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides with us without any very close investigation” (123). In other words, the on-air feud allowed for the temporary and fleeting pleasures of insult humor, establishing a comfortable relationship with whoever happens to be making the cleverest joke at the time. The aggression of the comedians was from a safe distance for the listeners that could be seen as unthreatening since, as noted by Benny about the boxing match, the physical prowess of both comedians were always understood to be unmasculine. This was created through numerous picture jokes on each

164 program, but also significantly developed through the distinctively “unmasculine” grains of each performer’s voice: Benny with its irritated twang and Allen with its snide sophistication.

The paper-thin plot of Love Thy Neighbor tells the story of Fred and Jack continuing to clash, pushing Allen to the point of near-homicidal mania in his attacks against the more passive

Benny, who complicates matters by falling in love with Allen’s niece Alice (Mary Martin).

Unlike Buck Benny, Eddie Anderson is the only member of the radio cast to appear since the primary goal of the production is to visually realize the verbal sparring of the popular feud as opposed to recreate any fuller picture of the radio world. Similar to their differing approaches to comedy on radio, in the film, Benny actually appears more developed as a character while Allen performs, in essence, an unfurled and angry stream of biting wisecracks as opposed to being developed as a workable screen persona. The introduction of Allen privileges his distinctive voice and ability with long, humorously verbose insults. The scene opens with a car driving down a busy and snowy city street and, then, cuts to a shot of the chauffeur at the wheel. He reaches over to switch on the radio, which tunes-in the voice of Don Wilson introducing Benny as “the little New Year himself, Jack Benny.” The radio voice of Benny then exclaims, “Hello again, this is Baby Benny talking. And before we go any further, folks, I’d like to wish every one of you a happy New Year . . . except Father Time’s father, Fred Allen!” The offscreen voice of Allen yells, “Turn that passé Peter Pan off! Turn him off!” The camera pans to a visually peeved Allen sitting in the backseat, fuming over Benny’s jab, and, then, launching into a verbally-rich attack upon his rival: “Why that biological faux pas! Physically, he is a waste of skin. Mentally, he is a Dead End Kid. Socially, he is riffraff. And that is only a synopsis!” Of course, this introduction of Allen mirrors the conceptual “voice-preceding-body” intros of other radio stars in cinema, something already clearly shown in Buck Benny with Rochester, Phil

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Harris, and even Carmichael. Since he had even less previous exposure in film than other cast members, Allen’s introduction is tied directly to the radio feud and his established confrontations with the radio voice of Benny.xxi Fittingly, his response is pure verbosity performed in the dry style often associated with the popular comedian, showing him more the aggressor of the two figures.

In the film, one confrontation finds a creative way to stress the verbal and comically deflate the threat of physical violence between the two comedians. When Benny and Allen run into each other at a nightclub, they begin to verbally spar as usual. They continue to inch closer to each other as if they are nearing a violent physical confrontation; but the film quickly deflates this tension with a clever comic device. A waiter enters the frame and warns the two shouting comedians, “Gentlemen please. Shhh.” Benny and Allen, ever the dandyish gentlemen, continue to angrily threaten each other with violence in polite hushed whispers that deflates the supposed threatening nature of the confrontation. Later, another interruption occurs as a young female fan enters the frame and cheerfully asks, “Can I have your autograph, Mr. Allen?” Fred says, “Why, certainly” and dutifully takes her book to sign. Benny politely waits till Allen can resume his insults, which are interrupted once again by the autograph seeker stating, “Thank you.” Allen responds with a polite, “You are eternally welcome.” Then, the insults and physical threats continue, with Benny at one point yelling, “Oh yeah!” Allen quickly motions to the club and reminds him to quiet his voice. The cheerful fan interrupts again now for Benny’s autograph. He politely states, “Of course” and takes the book. After all the interruptions, the

“fight” finally continues but with no actual physical contact as Allen takes a more aggressive stance and approaches Benny, telling him to “put up those emaciated dukes.” Benny feebly states, as he backs up, “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me. Why, if I ever hit you on the nose, the

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world will finally know what you are using for blood.” Allen moves his hand up to fix his own

tie, which Benny mistakes as an aggressive move. He backs up and trips into a fountain, the

sight of which makes Allen erupt with laugher.

As seen in this sequence, the humor is based largely upon the lack of physical

violence within the feud. Both comedians find themselves prone to polite civility as opposed to masculine aggression, which consistently interrupts their supposed confrontation. In their fear of the waiter, they must ridiculously whisper their insults, thus deflating their supposed threats. In their loyalty to their fans – or, really, the feeding of their own diva-like egos – they meet the autograph seeker not with annoyance but with appreciation for the attention. Each of these instances reaffirms the absurdness of the physical threats since the bodies onscreen confirm the

‘unmasculine’ and, therefore, the nonviolent. Even the female fan does not feel particularly threatened by the possible violence about to erupt; notably, as a representative radio fan, she asks both comedians for autographs and, therefore, shows a lack of investment with either side of the feud. It is fitting that the actual physical hostility that transpires confirms Allen as the more aggressive, though in a manner still illustrating neither figure as particularly physical. He simply walks closer to Benny and fixes his own tie. Benny, who cowardly begs not to be

“rushed,” backs into the fountain. No blows are struck, but Allen certainly comes across as the figure more capable of harmful aggression. This stance continues throughout the film as he actually appears increasingly homicidal and obsessive, eventually shooting a rifle at Jack’s speeding motor boat and firing a slingshot at his stage show. Benny only fires back only with his weaker verbal jabs, once again being posed as a comedic object as opposed to being the aggressor.

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Interestingly, Benny does ‘win the girl’ in the form of Allen’s niece, which would seem to suggest he is more capable of assimilation into a typical Hollywood narrative. In some ways,

Benny’s radio personality with all its queer connotations still had to fall into the same sort of

heterosexualization found in the film depictions of dandyism during the decade. But his

transformation into a “successful” heterosexual dandy never feels too complete in the sense that

it would threaten his more widely embraced radio persona, which, as already shown, was defined

by his lack of ability to conform into this role. His relationships with actresses Ellen Drew as

Joan and Mary Martin as Alice in each respective film are, in a manner, simply presented as plot

contrivances to not only force-fit Benny into the Hollywood mold but to legitimately continue

radio gags. For example, in Buck Benny, the love story is a chance to have the comedian partake in various gag-filled scenarios as a failed cowboy. In Love Thy Neighbor, his actually winning

Alice is presented to set-up the final visual gag of the film, a silly scene featuring the now married Jack and Alice’s twins as an absurd image of Benny and Allen dressed like babies and fighting. The “romance” of Jack and Alice exists primarily to facilitate the radio feud within a more cinema-friendly sight gag, since verbal jokes alone could not sustain the already four-year- old feud as it moved into film.xxii Thus these cinematic adaptations of the radio show offer no

great challenges to the on-air Benny’s reputation as wholly unmasculine, a persona which

continued to thrive long after the films’ releases.

Conclusion

After these two adaptations, Hollywood did attempt to mold Benny into a legitimate movie star by placing him in films with less radio-influenced narratives. Yet even his casting in these movies still contains the heavy influence of his radio persona and its consistent pushing of gender classifications. Charley’s Aunt (1941), his follow-up to Love Thy Neighbor, repositioned

Benny as a star in cinema for a brief time, even placing him in the top ten box office draws of the

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year. The film is based on the classic cross-dressing Brandon Thomas comedy originally written

for the stage in 1892. The story follows Benny as Fancourt “Babbs” Babberly, who

impersonates a rich middle-aged woman to help two friends with their romantic affairs. The

other largest box office hit of his career found Benny performing a gender-bending act in a

subtler manner, one tied to the film’s production history. George Washington Slept Here (1942) was based upon the Broadway hit by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, which tells the story of a New York couple’s move to a dilapidated farmhouse in Pennsylvania. The stage version had the husband as the straight part, a nature-loving provider, who buys the old house without telling his wife, the Manhattan-loving wisecracker. Despite this, the screen adaptation actually shifted the gender dynamics of the play to accommodate Benny. Now, Benny as Bill Fuller was the one surprised by his wife’s purchase and afraid of nature, while Ann Sheridan played the nature- loving spouse Connie. As seen with both these productions, Benny’s box office hits were very much tied to an acknowledged gender-bending developed and fostered on his much more popular radio program. As his film career progressed, Benny’s other star turns ranged from the moderately successful, like the gentle farce The Meanest Man in the World (1943), to the notoriously unsuccessful The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), an ill-conceived fantasy with

Benny playing a low-level angel given the task of blowing Gabriel’s horn to end the world. The latter was Benny’s final starring role in film and became a notorious running gag on his radio and television shows due to its supposed poor quality.

In retrospect, only one film has stood the test of time to be regarded as a classic, Ernest

Lubitsch’s biting war comedy To Be Or Not To Be (1942). As ham Shakespearean actor and somewhat reluctant Polish patriot Joseph Tura, Benny excels mainly because of how precisely

Lubitsch understood the comedian’s strengths as rooted in his character-based development as a

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radio performer. On set, Lubitsch reportedly told Benny: “You are not a comedian. You are not

even a clown . . . Jack, you are an actor, you are an actor playing the part of a comedian and this

you are doing very well. But do not worry, I keep your secret to myself” (Benny 150). To

Peter Barnes, this multilayered performance style is partly the reason for Benny’s success in the role of Tura, since the character is “an actor who is playing the part of a Resistance leader and

German spy and ‘doing very well’”(24). In another sense, Lubitsch’s insight into Benny’s comedic technique also shows his understanding that the persona was character-based within its various quirks, ranging from being cheap to other more overtly “queered” qualities. In casting

Benny believably within the role of a husband continually cuckolded by his wife Maria (Carol

Lombard), Lubitsch wisely highlighted some key “unmasculine” attributes of the Benny persona, especially his queer “diva-like” vanity. As a result, even years after Benny’s success on radio and television, the film still feels like the only cinematic performance not overshadowed by his broadcast persona.xxiii

As underwhelming as they might be in comparison to Lubitsch’s masterpiece, Buck

Benny Rides Again and Love Thy Neighbor clearly expose the centrality of radio voice that is essential to understanding the trans-media growth of the masculine comedic. The mediated voice fostered on radio and in sound cinema illustrates a significant technological influence on the evolution of the comedic male subject that is as potent as any economic, stage, or ethnic

influence. By examining Benny’s voice as a text within itself, we can begin to comprehend how

it existed as a cultural entity beyond narrative and even beyond the cinematic. It endured as pure

personality, a comically sexual body adaptable to multiple mediums. With this freedom, sound

technologies facilitated the masculine comedic as a representational vision of maleness both of

and beyond the screen.

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Notes

i See Henry III, 14-8 for more on the program’s enormous success.

ii Unlike many comedians of the era, Benny proves interesting through his own documented ruminations about the nature of comedy. In this interview, Benny actually discusses many “old principles” of comedy that are also, coincidently, covered by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, such as “the joke, exaggeration, ridicule, ignorance, surprise, the pun, and, finally, the comic situation” (Livingstone-Benny 65). He goes on to actually give examples of all these types of humor through references to popular comedians of the day, such as Eddie Cantor and Burns and Allen. See Livingsone-Benny 65-6.

iii Benny’s planned autobiography, originally to be titled I Always Had Shoes, was finished in a manuscript form of nearly 400 pages. It was reportedly purchased by a publisher, but, for an unknown reason, bought back by the comedian. Long after his death, Benny’s daughter Joan found the manuscript and published long passages along with her own memories of her father in 1990 as Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story.

iv Since there are no detailed records of his sex life, though he remained married to Mary Livingstone until his death, the specifics of Benny’s sexuality could never be properly determined and, therefore, factor little into my approach to his persona and voice. Interestingly, long before becoming a star in vaudeville and radio, writings about Benny’s sexuality always tended to lean toward the ambiguous. In a 1919 hometown newspaper article discussing an amateur music act performed during his navy days, Benny (under his real name Benny Kubelsky) is characterized as a young heartthrob, yet in a decisively feminine manner. The article discusses his rolling eyes during a violin solo as “flirtatious” and “rarely displayed by a man and had the girls exclaiming over him in the style known as raving. If there are such things as stage-door Janes, Benny had better protect himself” (“Praises”).

v Despite a legitimate tracing of this “impossible mythos” in popular culture, Boskin’s reading of the Benny/Rochester relationship has been validly criticized as homophobic by Alexander Doty in its attempts to desexualize the pairing. In response to Boskin’s reading, Doty writes, “he also seems intent upon making a homophobic case for what he calls the pair’s asexual, interracial ‘odd couple purity’ as opposed to their being branded by what he terms ‘the stigma of gayness’” (Doty 76-7).

vi The Goldbergs proves a fascinating study on radio as an ethnic domestic comedy, with sentimental overtones, exploring the daily life of a Jewish family in America. As with most daily 15-minute fictional broadcasts during radio’s golden age – like Amos 'n' Andy, Lum and Abner, Easy Aces, Vic and Sade, and Myrt and Marge – The Goldbergs was a serial with running storylines as opposed to the influential type of character comedy developed on the weekly broadcasts of The Jack Benny Program. Yet, interestingly, through this more soap opera-like format, creator and star Gertrude Berg comfortably explored issues of Jewish identity and family, finding great popularity as lovable and somewhat stereotypical Jewish matriarch Molly Goldberg. Adapted to television in 1949, the show is often considered the first official television

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sitcom. For a detailed chronicle of the cultural history of The Goldbergs on radio and television, see Weber, 126-55.

vii Throughout his long and complicated history, the dandy has gone in and out of fashion in Europe, applauded as an ideal in some cultural moments while derided as emasculated in others. Of course, the Victorian model for this figure is Oscar Wilde, whose public persona ultimately encompassed both these perceptions as celebrated for his style and wit then, once verified as homosexual, derided for these same qualities.

viii Another unnamed reoccurring character played by Frank Nelson also frequently appeared coded as possibly “gay.” He also often held floorwalker positions on the program and appeared unreasonably “snippy.”

ix “. . . masochism bit” [emphasis added]. Surprisingly, the original pitch for the contest had the even more insulting title of “Why I Hate Jack Benny.” Benny’s only change to the original idea was to drop the word “hate.” As suggested by Balzer, this bizarre stunt really could have only been done by a comedian as self-deprecating as Benny, since he was maybe the only person in Hollywood who would “have the guts to do it” (Young 243).

x Emphasis added.

xi Despite Benny’s pride over the duration of the laugh, there is no recorded proof of it being so long. It was successful, but clocked in less than 30 seconds. Despite broadcasting myth, show writer George Balzer suggested in an interview that this was not really the longest laugh in radio history or even in the show’s run. According to Balzer, the reason for the joke’s notoriety really was based in newspaper columnist John Crosby’s visit to the station that week and his publicizing of the gag. See Young, 244-5. Also, the Museum of Television and Radio’s cataloging of episodes has found longer laughs on other broadcasts. See Museum.

xii Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror, which is discussed later in this chapter, posits the female maternal as being key in the power of the voice. She writes that “the maternal voice also plays a crucial part during the mirror stage, defining and interpreting the reflected image, and ‘fitting’ it to the child. Finally, it [the maternal voice] provides the acoustic mirror in which the child first hears ‘itself’” (100). Despite this component, Silverman also finds much theory from previous decades as pointing to a fantasy of a “sonorous envelope” of the maternal voice - which grows out of a cultural fantasy of the supposed “infantile containment” as pleasurable” (72). Keeping Silverman’s points in mind, it is crucial to understand that Lawrence, whose work proceeds Silverman’s book, frames her infinite space within the realm of the “illusion” of repairing the split between self and other, not necessarily doing this in the realm of the real.

xiii In a Lacanian schema, this singling out of voice as a privileged object is only logical, since, along with the gaze, voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the objet a. While Lacan’s earlier theories certainly show a privilege to the mirror stage and the visual as a point of self- recognition, as Mladen Dolar suggests, “the voice can be seen as in some sense even more striking and more elementary; if the voice is the first manifestation of life, is not hearing oneself, and recognizing one’s own voice, thus an experience that precedes self-recognition in a mirror?”

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(39). As will be shown with his film appearances, we can think of the radio-established voice of Benny onscreen as its own preceding entity for 30s audiences. In a larger cultural sense, it metaphorically follows this same pattern of an elemental voice preceding a recognition of body.

xiv Silverman uses the example of Lina (Jean Hagen) in Singing in the Rain (1952) as an illustration of this principle. In the film, her character fails to make a successful transition to sound cinema due to a screechy voice that does not “match” her appearance. Therefore, she is dubbed by another woman’s (Debbie Reynold) “proper” voice. The film’s representative narrative also illustrates how this rule is “imposed so much more firmly upon female characters than upon their male counterparts” (47).

xv In truth, Benny’s transition into movie star in films not explicitly based on his program, such as Artists and Models and Man About Town, was advertised heavily on his radio show, almost existing as cross-media events. For example, with the release of Man About Town, Benny took his radio program for a weekend of activities celebrating the comedian and the show in his hometown of Waukegan, IL. The weekend concluded with a broadcast of his program and a cross-promotional premier of the film as well. (“Welcome”). Also, Man About Town featured radio cast members Eddie Anderson and Phil Harris in supporting roles.

xvi It was common for performers established on radio to be “introduced” in films as voice before their image appeared onscreen. For example, along with the introduction of Fred Allen in Love Thy Neighbor, later outlined in this chapter, the popular comedy team of Abbott and Costello actually was introduced in their very first film in a similar manner. In One Night in the Tropics (1940), their trademark fast-paced banter was already well-known through their numerous guest appearances on Kate Smith’s radio show and actually precedes their visual introduction by several seconds in the film.

xvii By suggesting this auditory version of a male gaze, Silverman expands the apparatus first theoretically outlined in Laura Mulvey’s landmark “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” with its discussion of a male gaze projecting “its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly” (27).

xviii Devine was a popular guest star on the Benny radio show in the late 1930s and often appeared in his “Buck” Benny sketches. While certainly aligned with the supposed “real” west in the film, Devine himself hardly could be called an idealized masculine subject. On-the-air and in his long Hollywood career as a comic relief in many popular westerns, Devine was a comical figure with his heavyset frame and a screechy, high-pitched voice. This character actor, whose persona seems to straddle between traditionally rural and queer characteristics, would himself make for a fascinating gendered star study.

xix The feud actually began organically on Allen’s program on December 30, 1936, when he made a non-scripted crack at Benny’s violin playing. Benny’s show responded and the back- and-forth jabs began to pick-up steam over the next few weeks. After recognizing the positive audience response, the two shows had a summit of writing staffs to calculate the feud’s trajectory. See Museum 128-51 for a detailed outline of the feud on radio.

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xx As Benny describes, Allen had a genuine razor-shape wit and “commanded the respect of great humorous like James Thurber and Robert Benchley” (130). For more on the radio career of Allen, see Havig.

xxiAllen’s film appearances were limited throughout his career, only having one starring role in It’s In The Bag! (1945), which has grown a cult reputation due to its innovative absurdist humor. Notably, Benny makes an extended cameo in the film. By the time of Love Thy Neighbor, Allen only appeared in two supporting roles in Thanks a Million (1935) and Sally, Irene, and Mary (1938).

xxii In fact, some critics of the period gave the film a poor review since they thought it felt tired after four years of radio bickering. Bosely Crowther of The New York Times stated that the comedy “is about as forced as that four-year-old ‘feud,’” which shows that the popularity of the conflict was probably starting to wain at this point.

xxiii Despite the magic “Lubitsch-touch,” To Be Or Not To Be was only moderately successful upon its release. Lombard’s recent death in a plane crash during a war bond tour hurt its chances at becoming a massive hit, since the morbid news probably hampered the comedy for audiences. Also, many critics found Lubitsch’s darkly comedic, yet humanistic, take on Nazi Poland disturbing. C.A. Lejeune of The Observer wrote that he found the film “in the poorest of tastes” (Barnes 46). Roger Manvell of The New Statesman panned the movie’s depictions of Nazi violence against Poles as “inexcusable, especially when conceived in Hollywood” (Barnes 48). For more on the production and reception of the film, see Barnes.

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CHAPTER 4 THE COMEDY DUO AND QUEERING THE FRATERNITY

She says I think more of you than I do of her. –Oliver Hardy

Well, you do, don’t you? –Stan Laurel

Well, we won’t get into that. –Oliver

The above exchange occurs in the Laurel and Hardy short Their First Mistake (1932), which finds Hollywood’s most famous comedy duo comically pushing the limits of their supposedly hetero bond. Laurel visits his married friend and finds him in the aftermath of a violent marital spat with Mrs. Hardy (Mae Busch), who, typical of the domestic slapstick situation, physically dominates her husband. As the short continues, Laurel carelessly convinces

Hardy that the addition of a baby to the household would smooth over the conflicts with his wife and, more importantly, allow him to spend his evenings with real favorite companion, Stan. In a typically absurd fashion, Hardy quickly adopts a baby but learns that his wife has abandoned him. In a spoof of melodramas, Laurel tries to leave Hardy’s home only to be chastised with, “It was you that wanted me to have the baby and now that I’m in this terrible trouble, you want to leave me flat!” Stan replies, “I don’t want to get involved in this; I have my future to think of, my career!” Hardy, nearly in tears, lashes out, “You should have thought of that before we had this baby.” The rest of the film consists of the duo’s misadventures trying to care for the infant, which results in various sight gags. One of the most shocking has Laurel sitting down to feed the baby and, suggesting breast feeding, unbuttoning his shirt, only to pull out a bottle from within.

As suggested by some noted gender critics, this short is one of the most shockingly gender-defying moments in early sound film.i This is not only due to the bodily nature of some

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of the gender-bending gags, like the hidden bottle, but because they are occurring in an ironic

domestic scene between Hollywood’s most compatible male/male couple. These jokes work

through the audience’s recognition of the truth in both the wife’s and Laurel’s words. Hardy undoubtedly “thinks more” of Laurel than any female companion and, in reality, he is his true onscreen spouse. Despite the appearances of comically shrewish wives and coquettish love interests in their numerous shorts and features, Laurel and Hardy are undeniably a couple onscreen that feels just, if not more, compatible than the vast majority of heterosexual couples in

Classic Hollywood films. The humor of the short ironically plays with the conception of Laurel and Hardy as a couple as they perform the marital scenario to silly results. But for the humor to work, it must be based in a recognition within the viewer of an intensely strong homosocial bond between the comedians, one that pushes the limits of what the hegemony suggests as “safe” male bonding or, in general, fraternal companionship.

Within a revisionist sense, a comedy duo such as Laurel and Hardy makes it difficult to escape some of the queerer aspects of the comedic male performance. As a male/male couple, they are the most long-lasting of any onscreen duo (male/male, female/female, or male/female).

Their first film as an official comedy duo was for Hal Roach Studios in the silent short Do

Detectives Think? in 1927, in which they appear for the first time in their trademark bowler hats and misfitted suits. They finally finished their careers in the odd international feature Atoll K in

1952, wearing the same outfits and still, to an extent, playing the same basic characters they originated twenty-five years prior. Southerner Hardy is the overweight, bossy figure, though with a sheepish sensitive side as well. West Side Londoner Laurel is the childlike dim-bulb who feels hopelessly clueless and manages to get his partner into various complicated and sometimes physically painful situations. Despite any obstacles created by the world outside, they remain

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loyal companions who never could really abandon each other. In fact, we think of Laurel and

Hardy almost within the singular, as two sides of the same comedic performance. They are

unlike other popular duos onscreen in the form of heterosexual romantic couples, since such

twosomes as Myrna Loy and William Powell or Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn had

recognizable screen personalities independent from the partnership. This comparison can extend

beyond the openly romantic to other male/male pairings, even to other slapstick comedy in the

form of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. While such couples were popular at the box office and

suggest their own homosocial complexities, these duos could split and exist independent of the

other in the eyes of the filmgoing public.ii Despite three minor solo appearances by Hardy in his

sound career, Laurel and Hardy appeared together in multiple films a year solely as a team, a

defined male/male couple in the eyes of the studio and the public.

Suggesting Laurel and Hardy’s relationship as queered is nothing new as various critics

and scholars have noted their intense closeness as something unseen in other male/male

relationships onscreen. Certain critics respond defensively (and homophobically) to such

contentions. Charles Barr, who wrote one of the first extensive critical works on the duo’s films

in 1967, suggests any perceptions of a homosexual-like relationship simply misconstrued

elements of their already childlike behavior since “homosexuality itself consists of a fixation at a

certain level of immaturity” (58). Even noted biographer Simon Louvish takes on a somewhat

“protective” tone toward the beloved duo, dismissing possible queer readings as simply products

of a current overly psychoanalytic age “in which male friendships cannot be seen without their

sexual aspect, in the world since Sigmund Freud, sex looms everywhere” (297).

Louvish is primarily responding to the work that goes the furthest in suggesting Laurel

and Hardy as derived from complicated sexual and gendered positions. Jonathan Sanders’s

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Another Fine Dress: Role-Play in the Films of Laurel and Hardy provides readings of all the

duos’ films as illustrating a multitude of “role-playing” scenarios by adopting childlike behaviors, various class roles, professions, and sex roles for laughs. While avoiding any theory- based gender analysis, Sanders finds his more interesting readings at least within the realm of the sexual, rightfully contending that “to deny that homosexual humor is present in many of their films is, I think, to diminish their stature and richness” (30). In short, Sanders’ book is not afraid

to at least suggest a more homoerotic nature to a short film as surprisingly gender-defying as

Their First Mistake. But, ultimately, what can be said beyond the fact that Laurel and Hardy’s

relationship in such a film veers toward the “non-heteronormative?” What happens when we step back to contemplate what such a relationship means as a socially-embraced construct in

1930s popular culture?

If this duo is, to say the least, a non-heteronormative twosome, they certainly were not

alone during the first two decades of sound cinema. As an alternative to Laurel and Hardy’s

quieter form of slapstick, 30s audiences also embraced the rowdier comedy of Bert Wheeler and

Robert Woolsey, an all but forgotten comedy team who were second only to Stan and Oliver in

popularity. As Laurel and Hardy’s stardom began to fade in the 1940s, the team was

overshadowed by the enormously popular burlesque comedy of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello,

whose fast-paced verbal humor appealed to wartime audiences.iii Within the context of this

study, all these duos push the masculine comedic into directions unseen in the single comedian

film by exploring the boundaries of masculine bonding and blurring the socially-dictated line

between the homosocial and homoerotic. In essence, through the act of being the most famous

onscreen “couples” in Hollywood, such duos exist as the queerest of constructs, male/male

twosomes that feel “made for each other.” In what follows, I will show how these comedy duos

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queered close male companionship through their ironic misfit positions, thus creating humor

through disorienting the concept of fraternity – social structures rooted in Freud’s “primal

horde,” that key cultural myth that defines the dominant fictions of male brotherhood. As I will

show, these are not just theoretical structures but actually materialize in the form of social

institutions such as fraternal clubs and the military that are openly addressed by the films

analyzed in this chapter.

After contemplating male companionship’s popular forms and functions onscreen, I will

analyze Laurel and Hardy as the most overtly queer of the comedy duos who unabashedly revel

in their unmasculine and outsider roles. Focusing upon their feature length motion picture Sons

of the Desert (1934), this chapter explores how the two overtly satirize the all-male fraternity and

the sexual dynamics of male/male companionship in direct contrast to heterosexual couplings.

Next, I examine two of Laurel and Hardy’s comedic competitors in the forms of Wheeler and

Woolsey and Abbott and Costello, both of whom provide era-specific variations upon queering the fraternity. Each of these duos feature a queered subtext based in the cultural anxieties created by the memories of World War I for Wheeler and Woolsey and the threat of World War

II for Abbott and Costello. With Wheeler and Woolsey, I analyze the war comedy Half Shot at

Sunrise (1930) and with Abbott and Costello, Buck Privates (1941), with the former a cynical

reflection upon WWI and the latter a patriotic precursor to WWII. Between these two takes on

wartime fraternity, we can see how Hollywood managed to transform the comedy due to fit

WWII-era America, when the homefront promoted the masculine myth, thus offsetting the ironic

subversion of such hegemonic ideals that existed in the years following the horrors of the First

World War. Through these three duos, the chapter shows a progression of ironical queered male

companionship as it changed with the times, from the sexually unstable Jazz Age to the financial

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and, thus, patriarchal uncertainty of the Depression to the aggressive fraternal myths evoked by

WWII.

Man/Man Couplings Onscreen and Fraternal Myths

The definition of the comedy duo as queer has been noted before in some interesting

ways, though never in a manner fully placing it in a fuller historical or theoretical context. In

what has become a kind of obsession with certain critics, the career of Jerry Lewis has spawned some noteworthy gender readings, including Frank Krutnik’s study Inventing Jerry Lewis and the notable collection Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis and American Film, edited by Murray

Pomerance. Such interests inevitably lead to an examination of Lewis’s time as one half of the last of the popular comedy duos in film, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, during the late-1940s to the mid-1950s.iv As far back as 1968, when Martin and Lewis’s solo careers were still booming,

Andrew Sarris was commenting on how the now dispelled act felt like the accumulation of some

social outsiderness present in generations of previous comedy teams, who had “a certain internal

cohesion that unites them against the world outside.” Yet, he viewed Martin and Lewis as

adding something different and sexually-charged to this insulated relationship: “The great thing

about them was their incomparable incompatibility, the persistent sexual hostility” (Krutnik

Inventing 45). With Lewis’s bizarre high-pitched voice and hyperactivity that always seemed in

contrast to Martin’s cooled heterosexuality, the sexual dynamics of the team have often been

called into question with Lewis posited as a proto-woman in the scenario. Scott Bukatman

describes Lewis’ position as similar to that of “the nineteenth-century female hysteric” as Lewis

acts out “his own ambivalence toward an inscribed and proscribed position (masculinity)” (193).

In a similar manner, Ed Sikov finds Martin and Lewis’ brand of humor and male bonding a

standout in a decade where conservatism was on the rise and homosexuality was being

negatively “diagnosed” by waves of popular psychology. He derives such a reading from

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initially comparing the duo to Laurel and Hardy, writing that they similarly “play the sexual side of buddyism for dangerous comic effect, turning a kind of vicarious homosexual panic on the part of audiences into pleasure by way of nervous laughter” (186-7). Using a short reference to

Their First Mistake as the most extreme example, he views such a subtext in Laurel and Hardy as something which is “infrequent” in overt instances and more an under-the-surface tension. Of course, Sikov makes this distinction about Laurel and Hardy based solely upon a comparison to the manic nature of somebody as flamboyant as Jerry Lewis.

Another key queer reading of the comedy duo is Steve Cohan’s look at Hope and

Crosby’s Road movies. While, as designated before, the two are not identifiable as solely a duo, their pairings did prove to be highly profitable at the box office. Much like the Lewis-heavy readings of Martin and Lewis, Cohan primarily seems interested in the queerness of Bob Hope’s onscreen persona already established by the time he was paired with Crosby, who might better be read as a crooning heterosexualized dandy. Basing his reading within the specific military male bondings of WWII, Cohan writes that “in his solo films, as in the ‘Road to’ series, Hope’s persona is unmistakenbly readable as queer because of the way his screen personality folds together the fairy of the 1930s pansy craze and the invert of 1940s military diagnostic practice, which identified queerness through the very same signs of gender disorder that his persona exaggerated: mainly effeminacy, superiority, and fear” (160). Much like Lewis’ pairings with

Martin, Hope’s periodic couplings with Crosby “homoeroticized the queer dimensions of Hope’s persona by linking it to a buddy relationship” (162). In this manner, there is a similar take on the comedy duo as queer in the works of Sikov and Cohan since they both view the function of the duo dynamic as having one member heighten the queerness of the other. Undoubtedly, this is a byproduct of the dynamics of the duos they choose to examine, since each team consists of a less

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quirky member who will routinely “get the girl” in the narrative and allow for the fullest extent of “unmasculine” behavior to exist within their counterpart.

Such observations do little to truly explain the male bonding found in less

counterbalanced versions of sexual identification onscreen. Undoubtedly, some of the dynamics

of Hope and Crosby influenced Martin and Lewis. They both had a straight man who was a

singer and a comic who played the part of his lackey. But it is important to note that this

dynamic was popular during the final stages of the comedy duo phenomenon as other media such

as recording and television were calling for multi-medium stars. Thus, the pairing of a singer

with a comic made more sense since it allows for more capital to be made through each individual member. But what of the sexual dynamics of other duos who were, essentially, less

sexually confined in their roles? This is the key reason for my decision to focus upon these duos

because, in the eyes of the industry and the audience, their linkage defines their overall

popularity as more overtly homosocial and even, subtextually, homoerotic. These duos are not examples of one figure necessarily queering the other, but two figures as a defined queered unit since both exist as some form of outsider. Each on their own feel to be representative of the masculine comedic even if these representations might exhibit certain imbalances in power. So now, we are moving away from the comedian as a single individual, something that still haunts the readings of Martin and Lewis and Hope and Crosby outlined above.

Before considering the masculine comedic as a “unit,” I want to touch upon Sigmund

Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he elaborates on the supposed

“primitive” roots of group identity, something originally defined in Totem and Taboo. Well into

Group, he devotes a chapter to clarifying the significance of the “primal horde” – the supposed original human group ruled by a dominant father – as it continues to exist as a drive within male

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subjects. The primal horde drives the group mentality within men, based in a common violent rejection of the patriarch’s enforced sexual limitations upon them:

[T]he primal father had prevented his sons from satisfying their directly sexual impulsions; he forced them into abstinence and consequently into emotional ties with him and with one another which could arise out of those of their impulsions that were inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak, into group mentality. His sexual jealousy and intolerance became in the last resort the causes of group psychology. (72)

Freud contends how the tyrannical role of a father essentially creates a fraternity impulse in the male subject to bond with male peers, a drive that ultimately manifests itself in the social fraternal institutions of the church, army, and modern governments.

It is important to note that the concept of fraternity implied here is not solely one based in a distant respect and fear within males toward the patriarch. Instead, the desire for fraternity ultimately steers toward a violent “murdering” of the father, which often creates the myth of equality within the “band of brothers.” Freud writes that the “primitive” male group “then formed the totemic community of brothers, all with equal rights and united by totem prohibitions which were to preserve and expiate the memory of the murder.” But these equal rights are fleeting due to the need to demolish the possible establishment of a matriarchy, since the “male became once more the chief of a family, and broke down the prerogatives of the gynaecocracy which had become established during the fatherless period” (87).v For this study, these supposed primal origins of the fraternal impulse prove most interesting within this continual cycle of violent repression of various “weaker” figures. These threats come in the obvious form of the females who might create a gynaecocracy in the absence of the patriarchy. Yet, in direct relationship to the masculine comedic, they also appear in any figure the patriarch of any generation represses, which, in Freud’s view, includes male sons. The horde itself represses other male members after and during an illusionary period of comradery and bonding. This

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hypocrisy essentially defines its cycle. But as I will show with the comedy duo, this cycle ultimately can be contested by those unable to – or, in rarer cases, unwilling to – belong, a challenge that defines the social conventions lampooned within many of the films outlined in this chapter.

In a historical sense, the fraternal has long been fundamental to defining a supposed

American identity, something that makes the concept of “brotherhood” all the more critical during the intra-war, economically-depressed period of the 1930s. An impressive study of the

“imagined fraternity” of white males from the Revolutionary War to the 1850s, Dana D.

Nelson’s National Manhood suggests the myth of national fraternity is inevitably tied to disappointment for much of the population, even many white males. After all, the fraternal myth is at its core prone to cause disappointment and, thus, is an agent for anxiety: “what men are symbolically promised by national/white manhood is almost never what they get: a space where men can step out of competitive, hierarchy ordered relations and experience rich emotional mutuality of fraternal sameness” (19). The dominant fiction of a fraternal culture is based in nationalizing white men as essentially unified subjects, which historically restricts the perceived

‘other’ from achieving full entitlement in culture. But as Nelson contends, this is, of course, myth since a “clear, national/”white” manhood, however effective for certain purposes, is not a

‘unified’ identity.” It is at its core an “impossible identity – impossible in the sense that it is an always-agonistic position, making it difficult for any human to fit into a full sense of compatibility with its ideal construction” (27-8). This impossibility was a realization collectively bubbling to the surface during the 1930s. As sociologist Michael S. Kimmel characterizes the decade, the 30s challenged white male self-identity on various fronts, such as more racial diversity due to the African American northern migration, more ethnic diversity from

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the decades of immigration, and, of course, the painful memories of World War I. More potently, all these anxieties intensified with the economic depression, which, as Kimmel writes,

had “many men simply [lose] faith in a system that prevented them from proving their

masculinity in the only ways they knew” (128). In essence, the 30s might be viewed as a clear

failure of the very fraternal myths that, as Nelson suggests, defined American identity during its

conception and beyond. Then, with the threat of World War II, as we will see with Abbott and

Costello’s military comedies, this myth ultimately reestablishes itself on a wider cultural stage.

To fully understand the fraternal as key to the appeal of the 30s comedy duo, it is helpful

to project ahead in film history. Doing this acknowledges how male companionship ultimately

changed onscreen into something more overtly homophobic. This will not only give context to

the comedy duo as a contrast, but will illuminate upon why proceeding buddies onscreen never

fully embraced queerness in the same manner. A post-1960s homophobia possibly is the reason

why the majority of analysis of male/male coupling onscreen covers Hollywood product of the

last 40 years, when clear buddy films were produced almost as a genre onto itself. This begins

with a threesome of male bonding opuses in 1969 with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,

Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy, the last of these being a complicated examination of

masculine sexuality, thus ironically challenging the homosocial buddy relationship.vi This genre continued throughout the 70s with Scarecrow (1973), The Sting (1973), Thunderbolt and

Lightfoot (1975), and others. Even further homogenized versions of such narratives were released well into the 80s, 90s, and beyond with, for example, racially mismatched action comedies such as the Lethal Weapon (1987-1998) and Rush Hour (1998-2007) films.

Gender specific readings of these films suggest that they exist as confirmations of the patriarchal order, often found in how the texts sublimate essentially homoerotic parings of

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appealing male bodies onscreen. While something like Midnight Cowboy is an ironic

examination of gender construction born out of 1960s liberalism, the (de)evolution of the last

few decades of cinematic male bonding essentially supports the fraternal myth. Robert Lang, in

his study of male homoerotics in film, suggests, “the kind of self-consciousness that infects

Midnight Cowboy around questions of intimacy between men becomes increasingly exacerbated

in the genre of the buddy film . . . [and eventually] reaches the limit of its own logic as a genre

based on the sublimation of homosexual desire” (7). John Troyer and Chani Marchiselli’s reading of the 80s and 90s series of “slacker” or “dude” comedies such as Bill and Ted’s

Excellent Adventure (1989) and Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000) ties these more adolescent

bondings to a clear social celebration of a distinctly Freudian fraternity. While having narratives about rebelling against paternal orders, such buddy films still are based in a sublimation of any homoerotic desires. The clearest way these films exhibit this sublimation is in how the protagonists are always obsessed with obtaining the objectified female. Troyer and Marchiselli

write, “In this way, the dude movie is fraught with homosocial anxieties; its heroes are confused

adolescent homophobes, frightened of, yet also bent on escaping, paternal controls and fixated on

the talismanic bodies of women” (267). There might be a rejection of paternal authority, but the

films usually still subscribe to the fraternal constructs that essentially confirm the protagonists’ roles within socially-accepted phallic classifications.

So where does this leave the male bonding found with Classic Hollywood comedy duos?

First, we must contend that the post-1960s male buddy films are born out of sexual dynamics considerably different from the 1930s. A more socially mainstreamed understanding of a homosexual population during the 60s and 70s ironically forced a more overtly homophobic response toward male friendships onscreen. In films produced for a heterosexual male audience,

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the relationships reflected a wider distrust of all male/male companionship. Sociologist Henning

Bech suggests that “particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century,” there existed intensified homophobia within depictions of the homosocial, which essentially resulted in a literal lack of male friendships in modern societies (72). The male/male relationships that do appear onscreen ultimately exist as fantasy relationships that can, somewhat paradoxically, confirm heterosexuality through male companionship, since they usually succumb to the violent or, in a lesser form, the heterosexually aggressive. Bech elaborates that these fantasies must always partake in overt denials of homosexuality and they are “being transformed in themselves by being situated in the spectatotial space.” As such, various plot-points confirm heterosexuality such as a heterosexual sex scene, a homosexualized villain, insulting homophobic jokes, or the appearance of a ridiculous ‘real’ homosexual.vii

All these readings of current buddy films actually suggest a popular view less overtly suspicious of male/male companionship during the first half of the 20th century, when the comedy duos of the masculine comedic are found. As such, these particular onscreen pairings force us to admit how much popular gender theory’s views of film buddies as something offsetting the homoerotic are historically delimited. As I will show, a better way to consider the

Classic Hollywood comedy duo is as an onscreen relationship actually challenging the fraternal.

They are the antithesis of the modern buddy relationship in films. This clarification certainly should not suggest the pairings of this chapter as any kind of idealistically tolerant depictions of male companionship. The 30s and 40s comedy duos still exist within the definitions of Freudian masculine fraternity, but in a way distinctly related to the masculine comedic as still providing an alternate narrative of onscreen maleness. In my earlier definition of the masculine comedic, I illustrated how the male anxiety of the period predated the relatively recent boundaries set by the

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politically-organized movements of feminism and queer theory. As such, comedy duos are born out of another set of male anxieties, yet anxieties still attached to societal definitions of “proper” maleness and, specifically, fraternal structures. While these relationships certainly blur the line between the homosocial and homoerotic, they do so often within the degradations dictated by the

Freudian comic. These duos usually illustrate pathetic failures at belonging to the fraternity, which are shown either as literal failures or, at the very best, satirical “successes” through attaining one very childlike female love interest. Their male/male pairings still constitute all the trappings of the masculine comedic, but now squarely pointed at fraternity as its comic target, tackling male bonding’s obsessive quests for talismanic female conquests and aggressive power.

In each member’s shared rejection by the fraternity (and, in rarer cases, rejection of the fraternity), the duos essentially queer the fraternity. To consider this queering, I want to take a look at Hollywood’s most famous comedy duo, which can be read as one of the queerest constructs ever presented in mainstream film.

Laurel and Hardy: The Comedy Duo as Queer

Laurel and Hardy were an enormously prolific comedy duo, popular during three turbulent decades of Hollywood history, the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. In the late 20s, the duo made

32 silent shorts together. The following decades produced 40 talkie shorts and 24 talkie features.

In total, as a duo, they appeared in a staggering 96 films, not counting their guest appearances in other films. While they began their careers as solo acts, their pairing in 1927 resulted in what was understood to be one of the friendliest of partnerships offscreen, unlike the two other acts covered in this chapter, Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello, who were known to have numerous creative and personal disagreements. Also unlike these other duos, their roots were firmly placed within silent cinema where each of the comedians had, if not thriving, at least sustainable careers by appearing in countless movies as a solo comic in Laurel’s case and, for

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Hardy, in supporting roles as usually a comic heavy. In this manner, Laurel and Hardy are physical comedians onscreen, often using their oddly mismatched “unmasculine” bodies as instruments of humor. Yet, it is important to note that unlike the vast majority of their comedy contemporaries, they thrived in sound cinema due to their distinctive voices that somehow perfectly matched their physically mismatched frames. They exist as truly representative of transitional comedians of the later silent era, as they adapted perfectly to the changing technology of sound film.

As also seen with all the comedy duos of this chapter, each of the two members distinctly appeals to the dynamics of the masculine comedic even if we were to divorce him from the other.

Building on characterizations from their solo stage and film careers, Laurel and Hardy both had established unmasculine characteristics when they teamed, though these personas would develop over the years and change to accommodate the couple dynamic. English-born Stan Laurel had adopted many of the feminizing stage traditions of the British music hall upon his arrival to

America. Most notably, he made a specialty of comic drag performance in many of his solo films, such as The Sleuth (1925) and Eve’s Love Letters (1927). The drag act was common of

British comedians in early film and Laurel had idolized Dan Leno, one of the most famous drag pantomimes of all time.viii Other less obvious unmasculine characteristics are harder to trace in

Laurel’s evolution as a solo act, though he developed into a less “aggressive” figure than usually found in the knockabout theatrics of other silent comedians. As Jonathon Sanders outlines,

Laurel’s pre-1925 films actually present a brasher “go-getter” character modeled on earlier

Charlie Chaplin (who Laurel understudied as a young comedian) and Harold Lloyd. But his persona changed throughout the decade to resemble Harry Langdon, a baby-faced comedian whose humor was based in a childlike innocence (8-7).ix

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Born in Georgia, Oliver Hardy’s history proves somewhat more complicated in the development of a distinctively unmasculine character. Teamed with Laurel, his persona was an effeminately fragile Southern softie, characteristics often barely hidden under a pathetic guise of masculine pride used to overcompensate his obvious lack of prowess. As Sanders writes of

Hardy’s silent films, the comedian specialized in playing heavies and other embodiments of

masculine authority such as cops, yet “both villains and comic cops were set up to be defeated, to have their proud masculinity undermined” (18). Therefore, in his supporting roles beside featured comedians, the emphasis was on the loss of masculinity for laughs. As for the softer side of the persona, one can contemplate that Hardy’s own social rejection as an overweight and fatherless child surrounded by Southern masculine pride might have contributed to the more complex elements of his onscreen persona.x This is seen in his tendency to veer into sheepish

fiddling with his tie or hat in the face of attractive femininity, men of authority, or dominating

wives.

Whatever the individual roots of each comedian’s unmasculine persona, what becomes of

paramount concern for this study is how to approach their dynamic as a couple. As already

suggested earlier, there are certain short films that heavily play with the homosexual subtext

found in the teaming of two unmasculine men. In a few significant cases, the earliest of Laurel

and Hardy shorts, years before the restrictive guidelines of the Hays Code, overtly play with such

issues. The most notorious example of gay humor occurs in their silent short Liberty (1928), in

which the duo play escaped convicts who change their prison clothes for civilian outfits, only to

discover in their hurry that they have put on each other’s pants. Throughout the first half of the

short, the two continually try to find a private spot to switch trousers, only to be embarrassingly interrupted with their pants down by shocked onlookers and policemen. As they constantly have

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to run-off, they attempt to switch their trousers in corners, alleyways, and, ultimately, a

construction site. Of course, the joke of the situation is that they are continuously looked upon

as homosexual lovers trying to have a sexual encounter, which makes them have to flee to even more outlandish locations to make the switch. Humorously, the more nervously they try to redress after being “caught,” the more their actions confirm their homosexuality to the gazers.

As film critic Andrè S. Labarthe suggests, the sequence is a play on sexual signs as Laurel and

Hardy attempt the “innocent” only to provide passers-by with “the unequivocal sign of unnatural

love” (quoted in Russo 73). Yet, despite this Pre-Code provocativeness, the short is an anomaly

for Laurel and Hardy since such overt jokes about the duo’s sexuality fail to appear as their careers progress and feel tied to a general atmosphere of randier humor during the 1920s.

The shorts that feature the queerest depictions of the duo actually appear during the early sound period, though still notably preceding the stricter Hollywood censorship regulations to come. The before-mentioned Their First Mistake feels almost excessive in suggesting the boundaries of sexual roleplaying within what, by 1932, was the established “couple-ness” of the team, allowing for various homosocial boundaries to be challenged to suggest something overtly homoerotic yet domesticated. While Liberty finds its humor through a frantic and farcical misunderstanding, an exercise in paranoid homophobia, Their First Mistake relates more to the masculine comedic as it developed throughout the 30s since the short suggests a wider range of unmasculine characterizations. Such a range appears through Stan and Ollie’s relationship as a single unit, something especially highlighted by the wife’s desertion of Hardy. As Sanders writes:

It is a remarkable film for its refusal to present that [Laurel and Hardy’s] relationship as fixed in any way; instead it charts Stan’s metamorphosis from the ‘lover’ of the opening scenes, to the ‘father’ who returns with the ‘baby, to the ‘mother’ who feeds it and finally to the ‘baby’ who displaces the real infant. (161)

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Sanders’ assessment illustrates how the team could employ various elements of the masculine comedic through adopting various roles for each other. As opposed to Stan being just the proto- female for Oliver, there are two gender roles interrelating and substituting throughout. Yet, it is key to note that “roleplaying” exists in various forms in the duo’s films.xi For example, the two appeared in traditional drag for various farcical reasons throughout their film career, such as escaping cops or fooling crooks. However, only once did they do so to portray “real” women within the film’s narrative. The short Twice Two (1933) features Laurel and Hardy portraying their own twin sisters with female actors dubbing-in their voices. To complicate the queerness of the established Laurel and Hardy relationship even further, the drag Laurel plays Hardy’s wife, while the drag Hardy is Laurel’s wife. Even more strange, they all live within the same house.

Through trick photography, an elaborate visual joke emerges further suggesting the roleplaying humor of Their First Mistake, since the image of the “female” comedians paired with the male comedians only suggests a bizarre fantasy version of the male/male couple already established onscreen.

Acknowledging the overtly queer in isolated films leads us to question the relationship in its many subtexts, in which such a comic couplehood challenges the fraternal in ways beyond overt sexual roleplaying. Films which feature clear gender-bending gags were rarer and less influential, while the duo’s most popular films actually show how fraternity could be subtlety lampooned and still queered by the presence of Laurel and Hardy. Filmed well into their careers,

Sons of the Desert (1934) has arguably been designated as the duo’s finest feature film and was a considerable success upon its release. In the film, Laurel and Hardy portray two married men who spend their evenings attending a secretive all-male society known as the Sons of the Desert.

After being forced to take a pledge to attend the national convention in Chicago, the two have to

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gain their wives’ permission. Hardy’s wife Lottie (Mae Busch) strenuously objects, which

results in Laurel and Hardy constructing a plan in which Oliver fakes an illness and has a phony

doctor suggest he leave on a long ocean voyage to Honolulu for his health. Since Lottie is easily

seasick, Laurel agrees to accompany his friend and they sneak off to Chicago for a week of

drunken revelry. Upon their return, the duo learns their supposed ride home, the oceanliner from

Honolulu, has sunk. While the wives panic, Laurel and Hardy find themselves hiding in the attic

of their conjoined homes and hatching a plan to “return” to their wives when the rescue ship

docks the next day. Through a string of more bad luck, the wives find out their husbands were in

Chicago upon seeing them playfully prancing around in a movie newsreel covering the

convention. After being spotted tiptoeing on their roof, the two comics eventually come face-to-

face with their spouses and promptly launch into a ridiculous story involving “ship-hiking” their

way home. In the end, Laurel cracks and admits the truth to his wife Betty (Dorothy Christie),

after Hardy had pathetically tried to continue the lie. As a result, Hardy is physically

overpowered by his wife with a barrage of pots and pans, while Laurel is rewarded for his

honesty and properly pampered by his usually cold wife.

As the narrative shows, the film is centered around lampooning the idea of formal social

fraternities within its satirical take on the Sons of the Desert, a clear fictional lampoon on the

Freemasons and like groups. Nelson writes of the fraternal society as a phenomenon that

thrived greatly during the 19th century, especially in the upper and, later, middle classes. The

century resulted in the reestablishment of the Freemasons and the rise in popularity of other

groups such as the Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, and the Fraternal Order of Red Men.xii

Most fascinating are the traditions of these all-male, all-white and, usually, all-Protestant organizations, such as their strict adherence to symbolic rituals with strange dress and nods to

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mysticism. Even though such ritualism and even the names of many of these organizations

might suggest a hallowed respect for the Other, as Nelson outlines, the groups did little to

promote true connection to anything outside of fellow white males: “In their rituals, they would learn to love their Others, but only in the most symbolic, denatured, purified form – the symbolically pure mother, the symbolically noble Red Man, the symbolically mystic ‘primitive’”

(187). In truth, within their rank and file, the members were (and are) allowing for a myth of victimization about their personal statuses to emerge, despite their relatively privileged place in society. As Nelson elaborates, since men used the lodge to “escape” their wives and children,

“the rituals did work to redress men’s rightful sense that they were being deprived of something

in the world outside the lodge . . . Thus, as victims, men turned to fraternal mysticism to regain

a sense of ‘wholeness’ – a structure that reinforced existing power imbalances rather than

encouraging social change in the form of democratic expansion” (188). In this sense, the

fraternal lodge as a space provides one of the clearest examples of the core disappointment

promised by all fraternity, in both its variations of the officially-organized (the Freemasons) and the socially-suggested (a cultural brotherhood of American white men). Relating these organizations back to her book’s core premise, Nelson suggests that these groups’ “rituals of friendship and brotherhood promise egalitarian emotional exchange.” Yet these are idealistic impossibilities, especially since such fraternities “depend on elaborate and hierarchical structures

that merely symbolize such exchange” (178). Thus, despite their success at helping white men

ward off the fraternal order’s own psychic and political abortiveness, they were (and are) still

fragilely symbolic affairs.

The thinness of this facade is overtly lampooned in Sons of the Desert. The film opens within an atmospherically lit din of a local Los Angles chapter, as a group of men dressed in fez

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hats (denoting supposed cultural Otherness) and sashes marked with California meet to listen to

their “exalted ruler” (John Elliot). This old man is a mystically ominous and nearly skeletal

figure sinisterly lit from below and towering above the seated lodge members. Ever the outcasts,

Laurel and Hardy are introduced as latecomers to the solemn occasion as they clumsily make

their way through the obviously annoyed men to the open seats near the front of the room, all the

time under the frowning gaze of the now silent ruler. As the speech continues, the exalted one

orders that all the members must be present at the national convention since “there should be no

weaklings in our midst.” Making the members stand to take an oath, the leader then announces,

“And remember, once taken, this oath has never been broken by any man, down through the

centuries of time, in the history of this fraternal organization. If any member is doubtful of his

strength to keep this solemn pledge, he will please be seated.” Upon hearing this, rather

reasonably, Laurel sits down, to the shock and dismay of all the other fraternity members.

Ultimately, Stan is forced by Hardy to stand and take the oath with the others. After all the solemn pomp of this ritualistic moment, the lights brighten and the members launch into a silly

anthem suggesting the true purpose behind their organization as something much more boyish

and hedonistic: “We are the Sons of the Desert. Having the time of our lives. Marching along,

two thousand strong. Far from our sweethearts and wives. God bless them.”

The Sons of the Desert here as an organization is fraternal in the fullest extent of the word as its narrative purpose is based in exerting the power structures common to Freudian conceptions of male brotherhood. It also lampoons the preconditioned “rebellion” involved in such structures, the socially acceptable “boyishness” exerted by the members and the mystic rituals that do little but promote the idea that they are somehow victimized by the outside world

(i.e., their “sweetheart and wives”). The “exalted leader” makes demands upon the fraternity’s

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members based in their not fulfilling relationships with the female ‘other,’ but, instead, in their

bonding within the total white maleness of the brotherhood. Obviously, this figure is

representative of a primal father, who, as Freud suggests, forces subordinate males “into abstinence and consequently into emotional ties with him and one another . . . He forced them, so to speak, into group psychology” (Group 72). Within the next scene, Laurel confesses that his reluctance to take the oath was based in the worry that “maybe my wife wouldn’t let me go.”

This scene then proceeds to directly satirize the supposed grave seriousness of the fraternity and of the exalted ruler himself, whom Stan mistakenly dubs “the exhausted ruler.” This is a great

example of Laurel’s stupidity allowing for winking Freudian slips, unbeknownst to Stan, but

clear to the audience. The leader, both in his gaunt appearance and corny ancient manner of

mysticism, feels “exhausted” and, while able to project fear within members as easily malleable

as Laurel and Hardy, actually does not reflect the true purpose of the organization. As illustrated

by the song, the fraternity is actually an excuse for adolescent-like behavior away from spouses

and sweethearts, something clearly evident once we actually see the Chicago convention. The

organization essentially is a socially acceptable “rebellion” for its all-male membership.

As Laurel’s confession suggests, the narrative also continues some of the domestic

slapstick conventions already discussed in W.C. Fields’ It’s a Gift and Man on the Flying

Trapeze, in which the comedian is married to a form of a phallic matriarch. Lottie Hardy is a

traditional shrewish wife caricature, shrieking at her husband and even throwing items at him in

volcanic eruptions of rage in response to his rebellious and boyish antics. The wife’s role is

firmly established in the sequence where Hardy sheepishly informs Lottie that he plans to attend

the convention in Chicago, since it would be good for him “in a business way” as well as simply

because “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Mrs. Hardy, holding a long phallic

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kitchen knife, at first sarcastically stands over her husband and sneers, “Well, I hope you have a nice time, dear,” before launching into a shrewish rant, which essentially stresses the point: “You are not going to the convention. You are going to the mountains with me!” Each point she makes, she gestures the knife at her husband, which he responds to with a slight startle. The planned vacation to the mountains, as Lottie explains, is a cultured and adult (i.e., matriarchal) environment far removed from the fraternally boyish brotherhood of the Sons of the Desert: “If you think you are going gallivanting off with a lot of hoodlums to any convention whenever you want to, you’re not! . . . I plan a vacation for you in the mountains at a nice resort, where they play bridge and have lectures on art and color!” Essentially, Lottie knows the real enemy is the fraternity itself. She ends her knife-wielding rant screaming as she storms out of the room,

“You’ll go to the convention over my dead body! I’ll put you in jail first! [To Laurel] And you too . . . with the rest of The Sons of the, oh, the Sons of the Desert!” She then proceeds to smash not one, but three vases upon her husband’s head.

Lottie’s caricatured persona supplies an extreme version of the myth of a white male victimization that is perpetuated by fraternal orders. Through literal violence, Lottie makes the myth a reality by turning Hardy into an actual victim, essentially making him a battered husband.

Notably, the film also moves away from simple stereotypes to provide a more complex variation upon the phallic matriarch. As the above sequence continues, Betty Laurel enters to take on a much different gendered position over her husband. Entering the house through the kitchen, she dresses in a hunter’s coat and hat, holding a long shot gun and string of dead ducks. In one of his few attempts ever at asserting masculinity, Laurel sits in the living room with his partner and spews out some hilariously garbled platitudes about “proper” sex roles: “You know, I may not be king of my castle, but I certainly wouldn’t allow my wife to wear any pants. I’d like to see my

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old woman throwing things around. It’s disgraceful. Never heard of such goings off . . . on.”

During this speech, Betty, still holding the gun, silently enters the room and drives a cold stare into her husband. Laurel finally notices his deadly silent wife, who accompanies her now nervously fumbling husband out of the room.

Mrs. Laurel is a different type of phallic matriarch than seen in the previous comedian comedies, removing the overpowering shrewish caricature and adopting a cool, cold “masculine” sexuality as a contrast to her husband’s flightier “feminine” stupidity. She more directly inverts the cultural myths attached to the roles of servitude and mastery found in Freudian fraternal constructs. It is she who keeps Laurel as some kind of feminized totemic wife, providing the food and wielding her phallic weapon (the shot gun) with much more precision than her counterpart, Lottie, with her knife. Mrs. Laurel proves the more powerful of the two wives, finding the source of most her anger not in any desire to change her husband, only in a desire to maintain control, seen in small acts of mastery such as her forbidding Stan to smoke. She despises the thought of losing control of her own totemic possession, something evident in the fact that she actually also rewards Stan like one does a pet or a child if he makes the proper choice. It is she who suggests to Lottie that they test the two husbands to see which one comes clean about their deception and, when Laurel eventually tells the truth, she pampers him, even allowing him to smoke a cigarette.

Overall, Sons of the Desert provides another example of a comedian comedy that involves a classic “battle of the sexes” scenario. As already discussed in many of W.C. Fields’ films, these situations highlight the domestic sphere’s male/female cohabitation as a site for power struggles.xiii While such a scenario is common in comedian comedy, the fact that this film deals with a tight-knit male/male duo adds something to that which initially only seems a

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lampoon of the phallic matriarch. Here, male bonding becomes a target as well. After all,

Laurel and Hardy are shown as outcasts even within the fraternity itself, though they pathetically attempt to belong to the brotherhood. As outlined in my description of the film’s opening, the two comedians disrupt the ceremonial charade of the boys club and even create a spectacle by hesitating over taking the oath, a pledge that the exalted ruler suggests that, if not taken, exposes

“weaklings” in their midst. Even when partaking in the fullest adolescent activities of the organization in Chicago, the duo does not completely fit in. After they are shown shyly walking into a crowed speakeasy, they are targeted by an annoying prankster (Charlie Chase). The hyper-adolescent scamp befriends the duo by performing corny practical jokes on Oliver, making him a humiliated spectacle for the other men in attendance. In most situations with the Sons of the Desert, Laurel and Hardy feel more like actual boys (sympathetic innocents) within rooms filled with men playing boys, fulfilling the socially-accepted roles of the adult fraternity. Their typically befuddled reactions, especially Hardy’s childlike fiddling with his clothing, always clash with the more aggressive masculine tomfoolery of their cohorts. Also, unlike their fellow revelers who seem to be partaking in extramarital affairs, outside of an innocent brief tickling of a woman’s chin in a shot of the parade, there is nothing really suggesting that Laurel and Hardy are partaking in these adolescent games of sexual conquests. Their vacation away from their

“sweethearts and wives” feels less like a hunt for sexual release than yet another attempt by the duo to simply belong to the fraternity, something they never fully achieve.

The two comedians’ misfit positions within the general creeds of the fraternity are accentuated by their lack of ability to be successful husbands away from the lodge. As such, their sole companionship with each other heightens their queerness, something clearly found in their attempts to enact a secret life together away from their spouses. The domestic arrangement

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of Son of the Desert welcomes the analogy that the two supposed heterosexual relationships

depicted actually masks two more logical homosexual pairings. Since the two homes are

conjoined, it spatially serves as, more-or-less, one large home with all four under the same roof.

As the scheming reaches new heights through the farcical plot, the two men and the two women each become the more logical or compatible couples onscreen. Betty and Lottie have their own strong bond, almost as snippy and comically mismatched as Stan and Oliver. Upon arriving

home from Chicago to an empty house, Stan hypothesizes that the wives could have gone to the mountains as some sort of girls-only counter to the husbands’ supposed “ocean voyage.” In an ironic mirroring of Lottie’s comic shrewishness, Oliver suggests this possible turn of events as illustrating how his wife is “selfish.” To Hardy, the establishment of an alternative lesbian existence away from he and Laurel would be unfair since he obviously views his marriage squarely within the definitions dictated by fraternal myths. As promoted by his lodge, he must be the victim and, thus, create a completely male existence away from the home. This same scenario would only be “selfish” if adopted by the women.

As the farcical plot thickens, Stan and Oliver find themselves locked in the attic of their

own home during a dark and stormy night, forced to hide from the wives who are now situated

below. The comedic battle of the sexes then adopts a pronounced spatial dimension with two alternate domestic situations being depicted in the home below and the dark attic above. Laurel and Hardy are dressed in long nightshirts and sleep in a makeshift double bed in the attic. They gently prepare for bed together and concede that they are now comfortable as “two peas in a pod.” But their comfort is soon disrupted when lightning strikes the attic, resulting in them loudly screaming and startling their wives below. Thinking they hear buglers, the two wives head to the attic, Lottie cowering behind the comparatively masculine Betty, equipped with her

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shotgun. Upon hearing the wives approach, the boys escape their once cozy set-up to hide out on

the rainy rooftop, where they will eventually be mistaken as buglers once again, this time by a

passing policeman. As the farcical trajectory of the narrative shows, the film aggressively

creates a paired battle of the sexes with two alternate domestic situations under the same roof,

wives as duo and husbands as duo. Thus, Laurel and Hardy once again embrace the male/male

domesticity seen in their queerest film, Their First Mistake. Here, though, the queering of the

male friendship is found even more clearly in their inabilities to partake in the hegemonic creeds

dictated by the fraternity. This humiliation provides clear examples of the masculine comedic

since there is no empowerment found in their queered distinctiveness from their fellow Sons of

the Desert or, in a larger sense, the supposed fraternity of American society itself. Instead, they

continue to bend to the wills of the phallic matriarchs at home and be humiliated by their

supposed brothers at their lodge. They cannot live the impossible existence dictated by the laws

of the fraternity.

Two Popular Variations on the Duo

To consider the comedy duo in a wider historical context, I will now explore two sets of comedians that provide variations upon the male companionship seen in Laurel and Hardy.

Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello both were comedy teams based in clearer joke- based routines than Stan and Ollie. Both made their progression to Hollywood via the

Broadway stage, though in notably different ways that respectively affected the dynamics of their humor. Nearly forgotten today, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey were originally teamed by producers for the Broadway show Rio Rita in 1927, pairing two already established stage personas as a way to provide comic relief to a Ziegfeld musical romance. The film version was brought to RKO in 1929, with the two comedians in tow. The studio quickly distinguished the performers as a hot new comedy duo. Both were very much the products of vaudeville and, then,

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the Broadway stage, carrying over their early popular stage personas to the films. Bert Wheeler

is a perpetually cheery and pint-sized innocent, though certainly never to the degree of Stan

Laurel or even Eddie Cantor. Instead, his personality reflects that of a comedy song and dance man, with a thick New York accent and perpetually adolescent-like behavior, which means he chases young women and often catches at least one in the films. Robert Woolsey is a tall, skinny, homely, and bespectacled motor-mouth comedian. Of the two, he is the one most often hatching schemes and firing off strings of wicked and outrageous bards – similar in stage tradition to a Groucho Marx, even down to the use of a cigar as a prop. During their heyday, the two were enormously popular, starring in over twenty feature-length comedies, basically saving

RKO studios from bankruptcy during the Depression.xiv As this lineage suggests, they are very

much products of the Jazz Age as quick-witted, New York stage comedians, which is one of the

reasons their films are often overlooked by comedy fans in preceding decades since the humor

often relies on 30s popular culture references as opposed to universal character types.

As such, Wheeler and Woolsey’s films are prototypical examples of Henry Jenkins’

classification of early sound comedy being of a “vaudeville aesthetic” or “anarchistic” in the

breakdown of story for the allowance of gag routines. In a narrative sense, these films position

the comedian as “disruptive” agents in the social structures of the diegesis, two clowns that a

disruptive narrative can be built around.xv Describing their gender classification as anything as

fixed as Laurel and Hardy becomes problematic, since such a stage-influenced turn toward manic

clownishness creates, as Jenkins so rightly suggests, “highly unstable characterization,” which

unfold in such films’ excessive roleplayings and cartoonish masquerades. These fleeting

characterizations fit various performative set-pieces, ranging from verbal byplay to silly

“impromptu” musical numbers (198). Such roleplaying games ultimately allow for tantalizing

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queer readings of the team’s humor, especially within notable “pre-Code” films made between

1930-34.xvi Reflecting upon this more randy series of comedies, David Boxwell writes in an article for Bright Lights Film Journal:

Wheeler and Woolsey's "queerness," on ample display in the films I'm highlighting here, isn't a true reflection of their own personal self-expression; rather, their "queerness" is just a concentrated site in which long-standing comedic traditions of drag, "dirty" double entendre, gender role reversal, and presentation of non-normative sexual identities and behaviors (what entertainment journals in the 1930s like Variety racily called "panze humor") were on ample display between 1930 and 1934.

Boxwell suggests the films less as examples of developed queered characterizations, which clearly is the case for Laurel and Hardy, but more as providing litanies of “non-normative” sexualities emerging through comedy bits and situations. The films are a “site” for the convergence of pre-Code queered humor. This is a reading also suggested by Jenkins while looking at the team’s most manic film, the gag-a-second political satire Diplomaniacs (1933).

He suggests such instability also creates sexual ambiguity within Wheeler and Woolsey’s personas: “Fundamental aspects of their characterization, most notably indications of their sexuality, fluctuate radically from scene to scene depending upon the comic potentials of each new setting and situation” (201). Jenkins points to moments of possible homoeroticism between the duo, only to have them quickly countered with aggressive heterosexuality and, then alternately, sexual timidness.

Unlike Boxwell and Jenkins, I propose that even within the anarchistic nature of their humor, Wheeler and Woolsey conform to the warping of fraternity seen in Laurel and Hardy.

Underneath the layers of gags is a lesser, though still potent, mutation of masculine fraternity that suggests a more stable sexual identification that initially implied by the often manic narrative structures. As I have submitted throughout this dissertation, stable sexual identification does appear in comedians whose films are distinctly anarchistic such as Eddie Cantor or, to a

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lesser degree, W.C. Fields. Though, admittedly, in these other comedians, sexual dynamics feel more grounded in the past, present, and future of the personas’ experiences with women. In texts as aggressively anarchistic as many of Wheeler and Woolsey’s films, it becomes more difficult to chart tangible masculine anxiety since the momentary comic situation takes almost total precedent over characterizations at times. Yet, as we will see, the possibility to define the comedian as sexual subject still exists underneath the layers of gags and situations, since the persona’s position in the narrative world still implies his role as existing within the Freudian comic, a narrative marginality in relationship to the phallic orders usually seen onscreen.

Also, it is important to note that such an anarchistic dynamic faded as the careers of

Wheeler and Woolsey continued and the comedies became more formulaic. As Edward Watz writes in his thorough history of the team’s films, the duo adopted a more familiar comedian comedy genre structure as their career carried on. By 1936's Mummy’s Boys, Woolsey develops into a “particularly obnoxious and belligerent simpleton” and Wheeler moves away from his singing, adolescent charm, emerging “as little more than a mute Harry Langdon clone” (264).

As Jenkins summarizes, when the 30s came to a close, most anarchistic comedians like Wheeler and Woolsey and The Marx Brothers lost their edge in vehicles designed to “integrate their comic routines more fully into plot progression” (150-1). This transition is not surprising since, by the decade’s end, the assembly-line Hollywood production machine was in full swing and producing numerous programmers a year. Economically, having easily transplantable, fixed comedic personas showcased in routine comedy scripts (usually genre spoofs) made more financial sense inasmuch as it allowed for easily producible “B” films, often with straight romantic subplots.

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The anarchistic nature of early Wheeler and Woolsey does not appear within the final comedy duo I will examine, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. This twosome moves the discussion beyond the 30s squarely into World War II-era America. Unlike Laurel and Hardy or Wheeler and Woolsey, Abbott and Costello joined forces on their own accord in 1936 on the burlesque stage, an entertainment venue which was already dying by the mid-30s. While the shows of such theaters usually contained adult entertainment in the form of striptease, the comedy was also a central component and rowdy two-acts were very common. The humor was even less

“sophisticated” than in the vaudeville teams that eventually graduated to the Broadway stage in the 1920s, with burlesque clearly based in situations and settings familiar to working class audiences.xvii Less dependent upon topical references, a common source of humor was the spoofing of social conventions, as seen in popular routines of linguistic confusion such as Abbott and Costello’s famous “Who’s on First?” Within this venue, sexual innuendo was also very prominent, though, notably, Abbott and Costello eschewed such humor, which, along with their undeniable performance skills, helped them reach a wider audience.

Born out of burlesque’s broader characterizations, Abbott and Costello’s personas embody the prototypical formation of a comedy duo – literally, the skinny straight man and tubby comedian. Abbott adopts the clearly-defined straight role as an aggressor, basically a bully toward his companion. The clearly-defined comic, Costello, performs the role of a total innocent, extremely dim-witted, yet lovable in his cluelessness and sweetness. With a litany of well-polished verbal routines, Abbott and Costello moved to better theaters and frequent guest appearances on the popular Kate Smith Hour on radio, ultimately appearing in the revue format

Broadway show The Streets of Paris in 1939. In all these venues, they performed many of the routines that they already perfected on the burlesque stage. By1940, they traveled out to

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Hollywood to star in, not surprisingly, a film resembling Wheeler and Woolsey’s Rio Rita. In

One Night in the Tropics (1940), Abbott and Costello played clear supporting roles as comic relief within an otherwise underwhelming romantic comedy. With their well-rehearsed stage material, they stole the show and rose to major popularity throughout 1941 in a series of military comedies, all of which were produced just as the first peacetime draft was put into effect prior to

America’s engagement in WWII later that year.xviii

Abbott and Costello clearly adopt many of the basics of Freudian aggression and degradation that grounds the masculine comedic. Unlike the other teams outlined in this chapter, the aggressor is clearly the straight man himself who attacks or, at least, humiliates the comedian as victim. This dynamic often results in Bud literally slapping and manhandling Lou, slapstick physicality common in the rowdier venue of burlesque. While both performers were outsiders within the films’ plots, they also had the distinction of beginning their film careers well into the post-Code period and at the start of WWII’s patriotic fervor. All of this makes Abbott and

Costello feel like the most conservative of duos outlined in this chapter. The films made during their years of excessive production at Universal Studios in the early 1940s are clearly different sorts of comedies than the characteristically queered antics of Laurel and Hardy or the anarchistic sexual tomfoolery of Wheeler and Woolsey. Abbott and Costello’s comedies tend to conform to the masculine myths commonly perpetuated by genre films of the period. Each film is a broad, slapstick comedy and a genre spoof to some degree, from the various military comedies to a western in Ride ‘Em Cowboy (1942) to a South Seas adventure in Pardon My

Sarong (1942) to a mystery thriller in Who Done It? (1942) to a strange hybrid of gangster picture/ice-skating in Hit The Ice (1943). Despite elements of spoof, the films still contain a basic hegemonic or “straight” narrative progression as the action centers around a clichéd

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romantic plot. These films rarely feature the comedians as anything but the manly hero’s comic

sidekicks or, in an interesting twist, the female love interest’s platonic friends. Their films

exemplify a basic comedian comedy structure that now had the comics as completely separate

from the straight world of the genre narrative. Unlike the other comedians outlined in this

dissertation, Abbott and Costello prove most fascinating in how their early films fully formulated

their positions as something to be totally separated from and, thus, never truly disruptive to a

straight storyline.xix

So Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello are two duos that illustrate two

different manifestations of comedian comedy – the anarchistic and the formulaic, though, as

Jenkins rightfully suggests, anarchistic comedy was a formula onto itself in the 30s. As such,

we can use these two teams to contemplate comedic takes on the fraternal within two very

different comic stylings. Each of these approaches tells us much about the social views (or,

more accurately, the social views perpetuated by the Hollywood system) toward masculinity at the beginning of the 1930s and the 1940s. Employing these two comedy duos as similar

constructs, each fully characterizing their respective decades of popularity, is not just a

revisionist proposition. After the death of Robert Woolsey in 1938, it can be easily suggested

that Abbott and Costello filled the void left by Wheeler and Woolsey, a hunger for a populist

entertainment to subside growing national anxieties over the threat of war. Unlike Laurel and

Hardy, both teams were more easily definable as “gag” comics with readily quotable jokes, often

in the form of puns. The idea that Abbott and Costello “replaced” Wheeler and Woolsey even

literally came to fruition when the duo starred in a loose remake of Rio Rita in 1942. Therefore,

it is only fitting to examine them in correspondence by looking at two clear examples of

onscreen depictions of fraternity. In what follows, I will contrast each duo’s then popular

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military comedies Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) and Buck Privates (1941). In each of these

comedic takes on army life, the comedy duo proves to be disruptive to authority, thus

challenging the primal father. Yet each film also illustrates intensely different views of maleness

and brotherhood dictated by their respective periods, with one overtly spoofing the fraternal

while the other promotes its fictions.

Wheeler and Woolsey and Abbott and Costello Join the Army

Half Shot at Sunrise was Wheeler and Woolsey’s forth film and the first real attempt to

move the team away from the stage-bound feel of their successful debut in Rio Rita. Set in Paris,

1918, the film follows the duo as Tommy Tanner and Gilbert Simpson, two buck privates who

are AWOL (absent without leave) and running amuck throughout the city. They are a constant

worry of Colonel Marshall (George MacFarlane), who is having various troubles with the

women in his life, including: his former mistress Olga (Leni Stengel), his suspicious wife (Edna

May Oliver), his love-struck grown daughter Arlene (Roberta Robinson), and his sixteen-year

old, boy-crazy daughter Annette (Dorothy Lee). Throughout the film, Wheeler and Woolsey

become romantically involved with, respectively, Annette and Olga, who attempt to make heroes

out of the boys in order to win them the colonel’s favor. Eventually, the privates are convinced

by the ladies to deliver a message to the front lines only to be put into genuine danger. As this narrative suggests, the military world of the film is presented as a sexualized funhouse, with the three main male characters all partaking in the sexual appeals supposedly available to American soldiers in wartime Paris. This is a film clearly showing over a decade’s worth of distance from the horrors of WWI, with the idea of male heroics often downplayed or warped for comic effect.

In contrast, Buck Privates is a very different film in that it closely predates America’s involvement in WWII, yet is obviously produced to prepare a nation for the threat of war through promoting what was America’s first peacetime draft.xx As Abbott and Costello’s second film, it

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was a hit of blockbuster proportions and cemented the duo as top box office draws. The film

tells the “straight” story of spoiled playboy Randolph Parker (Lee Bowman), who is selected for

service, but believes his rich father’s connections will get him out of performing his duty. Not surprisingly, his father sees this as an opportunity for his son to gain character and does not

interfere. Meanwhile, Randolph’s long-suffering valet Bob Martin (Alan Curtis) takes his call

to duty in stride and both men find themselves competing for the affections of a beautiful camp

hostess Judy Green (Jane Frazee). By the conclusion of the film, Randolph proves himself

during training exercises and gains the respect of both Judy and Bob. In the end, the three are shown as friends as they all have been transferred to officer training school, Judy to only continue as a noncommissioned hostess. In a separate plotline, Abbott and Costello perform a funhouse mirror version of a military story playing Slicker Smith and Herbie Brown, two sidewalk peddlers who hawk cheap neckties from a suitcase. After running from a policeman, they hide in a recruitment station and accidently enlist in the army. At boot camp, they are horrified to find that their drill sergeant (Nat Pendleton) in civilian life was the policeman who once chased them. Throughout their time at camp, Herbie continually messes up even the most basic of tasks, but these mishaps have no major consequences. The main narrative trajectory is based around the Randolph/Bob conflict and resolution. Though, it must be noted that the success of the film was undoubtedly based in the appeal of Abbott and Costello and their well- polished burlesque routines.xxi Even though, by definition, their storyline is clearly a subplot,

they were billed as the film’s above-the-title stars.

In his ambitious From Chivalry to Terrorism, Leo Braudy provides a condensed history

of how perceptions and myths of masculinity changed throughout the history of war in Western

Civilization, ranging from Homer’s The Iliad to America’s current “War on Terror.” Braudy

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suggests early in this work that war itself produces the clearest markers of masculine gender performance during distinct historical periods:

There are too many elements of performance (and performance anxiety) in its [masculinity’s] presentation. War may make masculinity more single-minded. But what constitutes male dress, let alone behavior, shifts constantly throughout history, as do the rituals of becoming a man or going to the men’s room. What a great change it must have been when the penis sheath of the loincloth was invented! (15).

Braudy’s contemplation on male dress (providing literal protection against castration) is a fitting

example, but the real test of changes in maleness when exploring wars relatively close in period

exists in ritualized behaviors, which are often dictated by a state-orchestrated aggression. While certainly patriotic fervor existed during the years of America’s involvement in WWI, by the time of Wheeler and Woolsey’s Half Shot, the country is caught in the midst of the Depression and a more isolationist mentality. Thus, the nostalgic look back at the war seen in this film provides

various affronts to the fraternal myths of an earlier era, ranging from the cynical to the outright

silly. Buck Privates finds a reestablishment of the aggressiveness needed for fraternal myths to

thrive. To use Braudy’s words, the film shows masculine “performance” as undeniably “single-

minded” in its goal. It promotes the need to fulfill one’s masculine duty by willfully being

drafted.

Each film exhibits different eras of male performance since both are positioned as

responses to different historically traumatic moments, here, respectively, post-American

involvement in WWI and pre-American involvement in WWII. As outlined in my first chapter,

Kaja Silverman, writing of the postwar anxiety in males, defines historical trauma as “any

historical event, whether socially engineered or of natural occurrence, which brings a large group

of male subjects into intimate relation with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant

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fiction” (Male 55). In essence, Half Shot depicts a society more savvy to the recent historical

traumatic past, displaying an ability to mock the imaginary structures defining the dominant

fiction.xxii Buck Privates finds distance from this shrewdness since it was produced during a

period aggressively reestablishing the dominant fiction, here in the form of military myths of

masculinity.

In discussing dramatic war films, Robert Eberwein suggests that when a WWII war film

provides supposed “affronts” to masculinity, these are usually recanted through the use of

particular motifs:

Again and again, narratives present situations that seem to undermine masculinity and sexuality in order to disavow the negative implications of the representations. This occurs in a number of ways. Sometimes humor is used as a defensive strategy. At other times, showing men’s capacity for acting maternally demonstrates the strength, stability, and expansiveness of their masculinity. Sometimes narratives deflect possible threats such as homosexuality by addressing them directly. Representations of the male body that display men’s sexuality can be seen to preempt negative interpretations by denying their erotic appeals. (53)

In Buck Privates, we see some of these attempts to disavow the supposed negativity of queered masculinity, including the denial of the straight male leads as anything erotic. More crucially,

Abbott and Costello broadly perform the role that Ederwein suggests comic relief fulfils in straight war dramas. The comedians now exist, more-or-less, to be a “defensive strategy” in a text clearly promoting the benefits of fraternal duties. Thus, comparing Half Shot to Buck

Privates illustrates intense differences in how national perceptions of fraternity changed in a

relatively short period of time due to, among other things, the forcing of military service upon

the male population.

In Half Shot, the fraternity itself is quickly satirized during the opening scene even before

Wheeler and Woolsey’s “disruptive” presence makes an appearance. Sitting in his lavishly

decorated office and being briefed by General Hale (Elisha H. Calvert) as to the importance of

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the upcoming military charge, Colonel Marshal has a letter delivered to him by one of his

subordinates. Despite the fact that the general thinks the letter must be of great military

importance, a close-up reveals that it is actually a mushy love note from Olga calling Marshal

“snuggle-puff.” The colonel nervously hides the letter as the general aggressively asks the

meaning of the message. Marshal mumbles that it is a “memorandum on sharp shooting,” a possible phallic joke about the colonel’s sexual proclivity. As in Sons of the Desert, the fraternal

order once again masquerades adolescent sexual games, something typically present behind the

fraternity’s serious and ritualistic facade. Throughout the film, the presence of Olga and a series

of perfumed-scented love notes serve as a constant source of bother for the colonel. This is a

different military environment than the one suggested in Buck Privates, which presents the

military as certainly idealized but never as a careless playground for fornication. While pretty

singers such as The Andrew Sisters entertain and attractive camp hostesses socialize with the

new recruits, the basic narrative drive is still one suggesting a sense of masculine duty and

brotherhood. The straight storyline of Randolph and Bob that drives the film provides us with,

as sugarcoated as it seems, a rather standard hegemonic narrative about self-sacrifice and

adopting a socially-approved male identity.

The military order in Half Shot is further subverted upon the introduction of Wheeler and

Woolsey, who largely view the war as their own personal playground. Upon the general’s exit,

Col. Marshal asks for the military police and inquires about the two comedians who are AWOL

and “running around Paris as if this was a picnic instead of a war.” Here, we learn that the duo

have been pulling a series of authority-defying hijinks, including impersonating officers, flirting

with congressmen’s wives and, even, romantically misleading a Russian ambassador’s mother-

in-law. Upon the comedians’ introduction on the streets of Paris, they are once again

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impersonating authority figures by masquerading as military police officers. They attempt to use

the disguise to steal a group of French coquettes away from some doughboys, only to find the

women not interested. They then decide to change disguises, this time simply pinning on some

stripes to their uniforms to become lieutenants only to find the ladies are still not interested.

Continually pulling out different insignias from their pockets, they disguise themselves finally as majors to impress two women at a sidewalk café. Woolsey also adorns himself with aviator wings and, ultimately, impresses one of the ladies, who happens to be the colonel’s former sweetheart Olga, who asks, “You are distinguished aviator?” Woolsey, with false modesty, gushes, “I don’t think so. But what is my opinion compared with thousands of others.” As the pick-up continues, Wheeler further impresses the ladies by mockingly placing a silver bowl upon his head and two pieces of bread on his shoulders to imitate, in the words of Woolsey, a

“brigadier general.” Upon learning of Olga’s connection to the colonel, the two comedians assess the danger of staying and quickly remove themselves from the table, only to be chased by the actual military police down the street.

As the introduction of the comedians suggests, the military environment of Half Shot does not take the concept of rank and order too seriously, seen as Wheeler and Woolsey indifferently adopt the various insignias of authority. Dressed in their standard buck private doughboy outfits (denoting the lowest of ranks), the boys are thrilled to find that their positions can be reestablished by simply the addition of stolen adornments, a joke highlighting the fragile nature of masculine ideals since such rankings supposedly will impress the women. As all this suggests, the comedic world presented in Half Shot is not afraid to mock the very structures of authority that defines the military, attacking the symbolic-ness of the symbolic father, a slippery value which military rank attempts to categorize and formalize. Insignia and symbols are

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adopted as adolescent play as opposed to rank, something that actually makes Wheeler and

Woolsey, in these early moments in the film, resemble the later 20th century adolescent buddy comedies discussed by Troyer and Marchiselli, in which the search for female conquests is clearly paired with a general rebellion against authority.

Such single-minded mockery is not found in the opening of Buck Privates. Instead, the audience is quickly given the dual narrative structure (straight story/comedian story) as soon as the film begins. Randolph and Bob show up to report for army duty at a movie theater converted into an army registration station.xxiii Each man illustrates two different versions of masculinity

as they face their supposed duty, with Randolph quickly asking the captain in charge if his father

had called to get him out of service. The captain dismisses this question and leads the spoiled playboy into the next room filled with half-clothed men getting ready for their physicals. True to

Eberwein’s observation about the period’s disavowing of the erotic appeal of the soldier’s body, the sight of multiple men in various stages of undress is presented as nothing erotic, only something dutiful. Meanwhile, Bob accepts his service in stride as a type of “poster boy” for fulfilling the supposed masculine duty necessitated by the draft. The film pushes this concept by presenting Bob not only as the model soldier but as the literal first peacetime draftee, actually reporting for duty as the famous “number 158.” As the prelude of the film reminds us, this was the number first drawn by Franklin D. Roosevelt to initiate the draft. Being a model citizen and model male, Bob takes this all in stride by laughing with the officer taking his information, joking, “Imagine me being first prize in a raffle.” Set-up by this straight storyline, masculinity and duty are a focus of the film in a manner distinctly unlike Half Shot. Made a decade later,

Buck Privates now fully provides the audience with idealized models of masculinity, something

not surprising in a film clearly used as propaganda for the peacetime draft.

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Abbott and Costello’s introduction in the film does little to actually disrupt the fraternal order in the same sense as Wheeler and Woolsey. The film follows Bud and Lou escaping from a police officer, who finds them peddling cheap neckties without a license. The selling of shoddy neckties – cheapened versions of male dress codes – shows the duo to be some kind of substandard version of maleness. Running into the converted movie theater, Abbott and Costello mistake the enlistment process for a raffle to win free dinner plates, a common promotional campaign at theaters that was tellingly aimed at female moviegoers. An officer approaches and asks, “Draftee?” which Costello responds with, “Not a bit . . . I feel very comfortable in here.”

After accidently signing-in and finding out they are now in the army, the comedians panic and run out of the theater only to be confronted by the policeman. Weighing their options, they decide to remain enlisted. As this opening suggests, Abbott and Costello will have a very different relationship with the military than Wheeler and Woolsey. Their induction pretenses the fraternity as something almost inescapable as the two comedians are forced into enlistment through an absurd series of events, almost denoting that service is a type of fate for the duo.

Abbott and Costello exist here clearly as the buffoonish version of the straight storyline.

This narrative function is highlighted in a joke that ends the recruitment sequence. Now supposed “equals” within the fraternity, Bob decides to violently confront his former employer

Randolph, since the spoiled playboy has spent the last two years degrading Bob’s manliness by making him nursemaid. Bob complains about, among other grievances, “I’ve carried you upstairs and put you to bed any number of times.” Finally, Bob gives his “resignation” by swiftly punching Randolph, thus knocking the playboy to the ground. Witnessing this confrontation, Costello decides to stand-up to his own bully in the form of Abbott. Raising his fist toward Bud’s face, the comedian finds each attempt at aggression thwarted by a powerful

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slap from his partner, who scolds, “Don’t!” Finally, frustrated by his inability to exact revenge in the same manner as Bob, Costello gives up and yells at his own fist, “Well, what are you waiting for?!” This old burlesque gag, set-up here as a comic parallel to the confrontation between Bob and Randolph, serves to ultimately designate the duo as failures in enacting behaviors typical to the phallocentric narrative. Costello could never truly fulfill the role of a

“Bob,” asserting his supposed equal position with his fraternal brother. Lou can only find this course of action stumped, as Abbott’s quick slaps cause the comedian to literally chide his own deprived physical body for its lack of aggressive action.

As military comedies, Half Shot and Buck Privates both must, to some degree, be based within a lampooning of military authority figures. This is a standard dynamic of the broad military comedy since confrontation must happen within the ranks itself as opposed to on the battlefield, something that would imply too much of a realistic threat of death to be perceived as

“humor” for audiences. Thus, the comedy largely is set in relatively peaceful settings such as camps, bases, or even on the homefront. Such settings appear in both comedies, with Half Shot largely being set in, apparently, late 1918 Paris and Buck Privates at a boot camp. Despite this similarity, each film notably approaches military authority in different ways. Half Shot clearly lampoons Col. Marshal as a clear primal father in the form of actor George McFarlane, with his gray hair and full mustache denoting the authoritative patriarch. In one extended sequence,

Wheeler and Woolsey have been chased into the kitchen of a fancy restaurant by the military police and they disguise themselves as waiters. The duo ends up serving the colonel and his wife, played by Edna Mae Oliver, whose own famously stately appearance suggests matriarchal authority. Wheeler and Woolsey quickly have fun at the expense of the two, launching into a series of pun-filled gags. The colonel asks, “How’s your turtle soup?” Woolsey cracks, “Of,

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very snappy, sir. Very snappy.” Later, Woolsey goes even further to insult and demote the

colonel by calling him “lieutenant.” The scene ends with the comedy duo humiliating the

colonel through delivering and reading aloud a letter from Olga in front of his wife, undermining his lofty authority by exposing his duplicitous nature. Unmasking the true intentions of the fraternal facade before such a clear phallic matriarch as Oliver leaves the colonel’s ego deflated, as he childishly babbles to explain the letter to his wife.

Abbott and Costello have their own run-ins with military authority in Buck Privates, yet

the primal father generally feel much less undercut since such scenes involve Drill Sergeant

Michael Collins – a less fatherlike figure played by gruff tough-guy character actor Nat

Pendleton, who was roughly the same age as Bud Abbott. As suggested by the lesser rank and younger age, the lampooned authority no long contains the same gravity. Pendleton appears, more-or-less, as a version of a comic heavy. In fact, the character of Collins serves mainly as another version of Abbott, an aggressor toward the small Costello. His role is to overpower the comic and, unlike Half Shot, any dignity stripped away from Sgt. Collins is done by accident on the comedian’s part. For example, on two separate occasions, Costello blindly throws a suitcase then a bucket of hot water out of his tent only to hit the sergeant. In other scenes, Pendleton is there to read obvious straight lines for Costello, for example, mockingly asking him, “How can you be so stupid?” Costello answers, “Oh, that just comes to me natural.” The concept of true fatherly authority remains unscathed in the film, still appearing in various forms promoting military and even familial institutions. The camp’s commander General Emerson (Samuel S.

Hinds) is a stately fatherly figure with white hair whose purpose in the narrative is solely within the straight world of Randolph and Bob. In one sequence, Randolph’s father (Douglas Wood) appears at the camp to stop the attempts by his wife to remove her son from service. With

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Randolph sheepishly standing before the two authoritative “fathers,” the private is rebuked and informed that he will remain in uniform. The general chides, “It seems that your father has a little more respect for army life and army institutions than you have, Parker.” Randolph’s father suggests that the boot camp is “excellently equipped to make a man out of a playboy.”

In the film, the only true disturbance of military order takes the form of self-contained burlesque routines. For example, reenacting a bit they performed numerous times on stage,

Abbott and Costello do a mock version of army drills. Since straight man Abbott actually proved more adept at performing the gags to the correct beats, the film has Sgt. Collins order the low-ranked Bud to run drills with Costello and three other substandard soldiers. As this move suggests, the role of authority clearly can move between Abbott and Pendleton with little concern. The scene plays out as a typical burlesque routine filled with miscommunication and slapstick buffoonery, with the comedian getting hit multiple times in the head by his neighbor’s riffle. Abbott yells, “Get your chest out! Throw it out!” Costello cracks, “I’m not through with it yet.” As the routine continues, Abbott barks different orders at the men, leaving Costello confusingly turning and moving in different directions. In contrast to the attacks on rank and order found in Half Shot, the scene ultimately serves as an example of “comedy for comedy’s sake” in a more burlesque tradition appealing to a “working class,” here, literally, army recruits who were noted as a major audience for Buck Privates.

The film’s only critiques of military order usually take the form of Costello as the befuddled buffoon, lamenting some rather generalized constrictions attributed with army life. In a rare musical number, Costello sings the song, “When Private Brown Becomes a Captain,” while being forced to peal potatoes. During the number, he exuberantly informs the men on kitchen duty how he would run the army. But unlike Wheeler and Woolsey, Costello finds

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himself completely disempowered and rejected by – as opposed to actively rejecting – the

fraternity. In the song, he dreams of the sexualized fantasy world that he will never experience,

singing, “When I become a captain, there will be no bugle calls to spoil your slumber. There

will be no KP duties and we’ll draft a bunch of cuties and instead of doing drills we’ll do the

rumba!” But this fantasy is ultimately squashed with the interruption of Sgt. Collins, who places

Costello on dishwashing duty. In the end, the authority of Collins is reaffirmed in such sequences due to Costello’s recognized outsiderness. The buffoon exerting any real power would reject the fraternal law being promoted in the straight storyline of Randolph and Bob.

The clearest gender-specific difference between Buck Privates and Half Shot is found in the role of women in each film, something that, while certainly different in nature, ironically suggests both sets of comedians as queered constructs. While Wheeler and Woolsey adolescently pursue women at the start of the film, their two love interests actually are the active ones in the relationships. The colonel’s teenaged daughter Annette is played by frequent

Wheeler and Woolsey co-star Dorothy Lee, a childlike and attractive object of desire for the often equally childlike Wheeler. Here, though, she notably proves to be the sexual aggressor who outwits the boys at every turn and continually sneaks behind her father’s back in her quest to find a solider to make love to her. In a clear affront to the primal father’s authority,

Woolsey’s love interest is yet another woman in the colonel’s life, his former mistress Olga, who is so sexually aggressive in one sequence that she comically implies “raping” the skinny comedian. During a musical number set in a garden, she and Woolsey sing a comically romantic duet. Yet throughout the sequence, she paws all over him, ripping off patches of his uniform as he sits helplessly and shyly covers his body. He sheepishly cries, “Mama,” before ultimately ripping off his pants to end the duet by dancing in his underwear in a comic ballet with Olga.

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The dance presents Woolsey as clearly feminized, as he girlishly prances through a shower of

water fluttering his arms. Through their aggressive pursuit of the comedians, Olga and Annette

actually place the duo in a more passive role, ultimately, as noted in the plot synopsis, with the

two females sending the boys into battle. On the other hand, the women in Buck Privates either exist as spectacular musical entertainment in the form of The Andrew Sisters or solely as a love interest in the straight storyline, with camp hostess Judy Green as a proud (and platonic) supporter of all the boys in uniform. She even is responsible for “reforming” Randolph by chiding his selfish behavior as something opposed to the creeds of fraternity, telling him in one key scene, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, there is no price tag on loyalty or friendship.” But notably, her role as an idealized female is separated from the world of the comedians, who feel removed from any feminine presence outside of arbitrary run-ins with a few camp hostesses. In this sense, the comedians are queered, removed from the narrative complications of romantic interests.

Such a separation between burlesque and straight masculinity in Buck Privates allows for a complete affirmation of the fraternal myth in the conclusion of the film, as Randolph redeems

himself by winning the war games for his outfit. In the film’s epilogue, the once spoiled mama’s

boy is shown to be respected by his fellow soldiers and admired by the pretty camp hostesses.

He is even commended by the film’s two primal fathers, General Emerson and Randolph’s literal

father, who both present him with orders to report to officer training school. By this point in the

narrative, Abbott and Costello are relegated into complete comic relief positions, only making a

brief appearance. Though in this final scene, Costello provides some surprising jabs at the

straight narrative’s unbalanced support of fraternal myths. Excited to see Randolph after the war

games success, Costello compliments him: “You know, it’s really something overcoming the

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handicap of being a millionaire.” He then pauses, as if to reflect upon his own lower social status: “Gee. I wish I were handicapped like that.” After Judy enters and whisks Randolph off to the dance floor, Costello cracks, “Another handicap.” Of course, the humor here is based in pointing out the actual imbalance between those benefiting from the fraternal myth and those in an outsider queered position. The joke is implying the ridiculousness of suggesting anybody as privileged as Randolph would be “handicapped” in the same sense as Costello’s character, who is poor, childlike, short, and fat. But this brief comic subversion of the straight narrative’s warped mores is quickly disavowed by a complete turn towards patriotic propaganda, as the entire cast march off to a spectacularly rousing rendition of “You’re a Lucky Fellow, Mr.

Smith,” a song which promotes the benefits of army life to the audience, many of whom were now susceptible to the draft.

In contrast, Half Shot’s climax and resolution proves more complicated in its subtext, affirming the bonds of companionship but in a way still subverting fraternal myths. As Wheeler and Woolsey head to the front line, the film adopts a graver atmosphere, with a realistic landscape adorned with barbed wire, foxholes, and explosions. The harsher location, a lifetime away from the hedonistic playground of Paris, becomes reflected in the tone of the comedians as well, now no longer rapidly firing off verbal gags. When an officer asks which of the men will volunteer for, basically, a suicide detail, Woolsey viciously pushes his partner into performing this “duty.” It is a surprisingly cold-hearted act and one that suddenly suggests Woolsey’s cowardliness and craftiness as something more darkly selfish rather than charmingly antiauthoritarian. Yet, the film quickly has Woolsey atone for this selfishness as he stops

Wheeler before he heads out into battle. Woolsey selflessly says, “You know, you might not

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come back. Now wait a moment. I’ll go.” Showing genuine affection toward his partner,

Wheeler replies with, “I’ll come back. It’ll be OK,” as he rushes out into the fighting.

When Wheeler seems to have been struck by a shell, Woolsey crawls out to his partner,

whose body is half-buried in debris. This oddly serious turn of events suggests that as the film

moves away from the anarchistic comic landscape of Paris to the harsher realities of a battlefield, the duo’s relationship actually stabilizes long enough to suggest something not only queer, but deeply rooted in emotional ties. The devotion they express toward each other is not based in a

vague obedience to their military unit, as is seen in Buck Privates, but solely to each other. This surprisingly touching scene is interrupted by a gag, as it is revealed that Wheeler has been sitting atop another soldier buried in the dirt, one of the MPs who has been chasing the team throughout the film. The sequence ends with the policeman chasing the duo, thus meaning a moment of true emotional queer bonding is interrupted and thwarted by hegemonic authority. Having its queerest moment successfully disavowed, the film drifts back to the silly sexual mischief of Paris for its resolution, a landscape where the boys can exist more as fantasy than as emotional reality.

They now blackmail Col. Marshal with Olga’ letters to gain his forgiveness, ultimately winning the love of Olga and Annette for themselves. In the end, Half Shot must return to the anarchistic

fantasy world for its queered heroes to have a Hollywood ending.

Conclusion

To return briefly to the most renowned comedy duo in Hollywood history, the trajectory

of Laurel and Hardy’s career stretched from the era of Wheeler and Woolsey well into the height

of Abbott and Costello’s popularity. With most of their classic films produced at the smaller studio of Hal Roach during the 30s, the team spent the 40s making movies for two major studios,

20th Century Fox and, on loan, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Now, the duo found themselves more

part of the Hollywood machine, with Laurel losing much of the creative freedom he found at the

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smaller studio. Produced quickly as an attempt to cash-in on Universal’s huge success with Buck

Privates, the team’s first film for Fox was a draft comedy entitled Great Guns (1941), which

force-fit Laurel and Hardy into a formula already seen with Abbott and Costello, which meant

separating the duo from a straight storyline. Here, Stan and Oliver are the retainers of a

pampered son (Dick Nelson) of a millionaire. Unlike Randolph in Buck Privates, this rich boy is

thrilled to be drafted so he can finally prove his manhood. Laurel and Hardy, worrying about the

young man’s health, enlist and meet-up with their own version of a tough sergeant character

(Edmund MacDonald).

The narrative world of the film stresses the two comics as outcasts, but never in a manner

that also lampoons fraternity like in Sons of the Desert. With masculine fraternity being

nationally reestablished at the time, the film often cruelly characterizes the duo as dregs among

the “normal” men of the military. As Scott MacGillivray characterizes the film, “Apparently,

according to the script, Laurel and Hardy are to be regarded as bungling buffoons and are not

supposed to resemble ‘normal’ human beings” (12). In one sequence, one of the straight

characters looks at a photo of the boys and asks, “Has Ripley seen them?” – a reference to

Robert Ripley’s newspaper features about ‘freaks’ and ‘oddballs.’ As if the aged comedians did

not standout enough among the younger men in the cast, the film dresses the duo differently

from the other soldiers. Their fellow fighting men are adorned in neatly-fitted uniforms, while

Laurel and Hardy wear outdated and baggy doughboy outfits or denim work clothes. In general,

the studio seems focused on repeating the Buck Privates formula by having the queered

outsiderness of the duo heighten the idealized masculinity of the surrounding fraternity of

fighting men.

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Since this new version of Laurel and Hardy was a success at the box office, the lesson

was learned by the studio to keep them in similar formats. In fact, only one film they made in

the 40s did not feature the cumbersome straight plot of romantic leads.xxiv The Bullfighters

(1945) was made as Fox was close to terminating the duo’s contract, thus they allowed Laurel to gain some creative control. As MacGillivray writes, “This [The Bullfighters] is a ‘Laurel and

Hardy picture’ instead of ‘a movie with Laurel and Hardy’” (106). As this suggests, the team’s later films, while they proved to be successful for a short time at the box office, usually are regarded as disappointments to fans. The clearest reason why devotees dismiss these films is that the duo’s 30s personas never do mesh well with the 40s manner of studio production, which mass produced formulaic genre plots. It is difficult to imagine in this environment that such films as Their First Mistake or, even, Sons of the Desert could have been produced. Though, this atmosphere would not last forever as the duo’s films grew in popularity through television broadcasts. Not surprisingly, this largely occurred in the 1960s when we see many “affronts” to white male fraternity in the forms of powerful political movements. During this time, the two comedians had a major revival, including the release of three compilation films, Laurel and

Hardy’s Laughing Twenties (1965), The Crazy World of Laurel and Hardy (1966), and The

Further Perils of Laurel and Hardy (1967). In the end, the fraternal myth of straight masculinity can never thrive for too long before resulting in a larger societal disappointment. In these moments, there is always room for Laurel and Hardy.

Notes

i As will be outlined later, Their First Mistake makes appearances as a “queer” text in work of Vito Russo, Ed Sikov, Jonathon Sanders, and Micheal S. Kimmel. Surprisingly, though, none of these studies go very far in questioning the Laurel and Hardy relationship beyond this short’s comedic take on male/male domesticity.

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ii In the case of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, the pairings were largely viewed as special events bringing together two massive film and radio stars on periodic occasions. Also, notably, they were always paired with 40s sex symbol Dorothy Lamour in their Road pictures: Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1946), Road to Rio (1947), Road to Bali (1952) and Road to Hong Kong (1962). As the timing of these releases certainly suggest, Hope and Crosby were not viewed by the public or the studio as only a paired attraction.

iii There were also other comedy duos, such as Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough and “Ole” Olsen and “Chic” Johnson. Though, few seemed to have the cultural impact of Laurel and Hardy and their two major comedy competitors. For a listing and summary of various popular comedy teams, even beyond the “duo,” see Leonard Maltin’s Movie Comedy Teams.

iv Martin and Lewis are a rarity among comedy duos in that their individual celebrities remained and even grew after their split in 1956. Also, unlike the other acts outlined in this chapter, they eventually appeared in big budget Technicolor musicals – such as Money From Home (1953), which was also shot in 3D and Artists and Models (1954), shot in wide-screened Vista-Vision. See Jerry Lewis and James Kaplan’s Dean and Me for more of a personal history of the last of the great comedy duos.

v Freud suggests that male descendants of the primal horde do not have a conscious knowledge of the past event, but their unconscious minds retain its significance. Thus, prohibitions against killing one's father – representing the primal father – and having sexual relations with one's mother – representing a woman of one's own clan – are in conflict with unconscious wishes to break these prohibitions. All of this would be an anthropological basis for the Oedipal complex. By all accounts, Freud does seem to view the primal horde and the ultimate murdering of the chief as an actual historical event driving the subject’s desires. But for the basis of this study, I wish to stress his theory is of more importance as an illustration of a dominant cultural myth which, as suggested later, drives an American white male identity. For readings of Freud’s Group Psychology see Person.

vi I set aside Midnight Cowboy as a clear buddy film since, as other scholars have noted, it feels directly related to a dialogue about the boundaries of male sexuality arising in the late 1960s. Also, clearly, the film itself is overtly queering the cowboy myth.

vii This is something noted within Vito Russo’s famous study of homosexuality in film, The Celluloid Closet as well, through violent and intensely demeaning depictions of gays in Scarecrow and Deliverance (1972), where homosexual rape is introduced in both narratives (83- 4). Such a paranoid obsession to confirm a buddy team’s heterosexuality can be seen clearly recently in the Rush Hour films, where caricatured homosexuals and gay jokes abound.

viii Dan Leno (1860-1904) had one of the most popular music hall acts in England during the later half of the 19th century, with an act that usually revolved around cockney stereotypes and dressing as a pantomime dame. His influence – along with other music hall giants like Marie Lloyd, Albert Chevalier, and George Robey – upon British and American comedians of the first half of the 20th century has been recognized as paramount. Ironically, there is no evidence that

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Laurel ever saw Leno in person, since the comedian died when Stan was only twelve. Though, Leno’s influence upon the comedian was probably initiated through the countless imitators who populated the British stage for years after his death. See Brandreth.

ix Langdon’s career flourished during the silent era but faltered somewhat with the transition to sound, though he had some form of film work until his death in 1944. He was a talented pantomimist whose character was considerably gentler than the other rowdier slapstick artists of the day. Notably, during a contact dispute with Laurel in 1939, producer Hal Roach attempted to pair Langdon with Oliver Hardy in a misguided vehicle called Zenobia. The teaming was not a success and Laurel and Hardy were quickly reteamed.

x See Louvish’s Stan and Ollie for an account of each comedian’s upbringing and career.

xi As Sanders argues, roleplaying in general (gendered and nongendered) appears to be a preoccupation with Laurel, who wrote large portions of many films and always had the duo adopting various “disguises” and “masquerades.” For a useful listing of various motifs and themes within the films of Laurel and Hardy, see Glenn Mitchell.

xii Of course, such ritualistic fraternities still exist today, including the Freemasons. In Sons of the Desert, it is difficult to say what social fraternity is specifically being spoofed, though its oaths and local chapters seem to suggest it being a take-off of the Freemasons. Notably, a worldwide Laurel and Hardy “appreciation society” was started by biographer John McCabe in 1965. With the approval of Stan Laurel, it was called The Sons of the Desert. Needless-to-say, this society actually is much less solemn in its rituals than the one spoofed in the film, actually making fun of its own absurd existence. Laurel’s own suggested motto adorns a cartoon crest - "Two minds without a single thought." On the crest, it is translated into Latin: Duae tabulae rasae in quibus nihil scriptum est (literally: Two blank slates on which nothing has been written).

xiii As covered in the first chapter, Henry Jenkins suggests these scenarios are based in a tradition actually lampooning the sentimental Victorian novel. In essence, these responses appear to have evolved at least somewhat from the male’s celebration of the same myths of victimization perpetuated by the fraternal lodges, which grew in popularity during the same period.

xiv Edward Watz’s history of the team actually notes how their successful pairing occurred nearly without either comedian’s planning. In fact, after the film success of Rio Rita, both figured they would return East to pursue individual careers and, at one point early on, RKO split the team to attempt to double their revenue. For more on the team and their films, see Watz’s impressively researched book.

xv As Jenkins suggests, the series of films the two comedians made together largely fits into two narrative trajectories. The first is “structured around a series of confrontations between the anarchic clowns and some controlling agent” (187). This appears in the form of landowners in Cockeyed Cavaliers (1934), a prison warden in Hold ‘Em Jail (1932), or army officers in Half Shot at Sunrise (1930). The second narrative structure has “the clowns help some failing enterprise, employing their disruptive behavior to foil the film’s self-interested antagonists” (187). This is seen as they try to save a young woman’s ramshackle hotel in Hook, Line and

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Sinker (1931), a poor woman’s drugstore in Caught Plastered (1931), help a young boy claim his inheritance in Kentucky Kernels (1934), or bring water to a drought-stricken town in The Rainmakers (1935).

xvi Along with the article by Boxwell quoted in the chapter, Wheeler and Woolsey have also been noted for their queer humor in Richard Barrios’s history of gay representations in Hollywood Screened Out. Here, Barrios contemplates the duo’s first screen appearance in Rio Rita, a scene ending with them slapping each other, then kissing each other on the lips.

xvii Despite some notable differences in the venues, some routines certainly floated between vaudeville and burlesque houses. Also, both venues were born out of 19th century music hall and other lower class stage traditions. Yet, in the early 20th century, burlesque notably grew more proletariat than East Coast vaudeville, which eventually graduated to Broadway, film, and radio with more fluidly. For more on burlesque, see Robert C. Allen.

xviii Abbott and Costello nearly had a run that challenged Laurel and Hardy in terms of length, appearing in 36 films from 1941-1956. More notably, they were bankable stars in a variety of venues during their careers, including having a popular radio and, later, television program. See Furmanek and Palumbo.

xix Their later films also became noteworthy in how they revised the comedian comedy format, even challenging genre conventions in the horror/comedy classic Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which actually combines horror and comedy genres as opposed to simply lampooning monster films. Despite this impressive history, I wish to focus on their work early in their careers, mainly as a direct contrast to the masculine comedic as a 30s phenomenon.

xx The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was singed into effect by Franklin D. Roosevelt on September 14. Historically, it is viewed as the American government’s response to the looming threat of World War in Europe. It marked the effective end of the 1920-30s isolationist mentality in the United States, requiring for the first time while the country remained officially at peace, that male civilians could be drafted into the armed forces to face the threat of war from abroad. This particular Selective Service Act required that men between the ages of 21 and 30 register with local draft boards. Later, when the U.S. officially entered WWII, all men 18 to 45 were made liable for military service and all men ages 18 to 65 were required to register. See Clifford and Spencer.

xxi The concept that Abbott and Costello were the true appeal for the audience can be seen in how most records of the film’s previews and popular critical responses overwhelmingly discuss the duo’s comic abilities as opposed to the straight storyline. As such, the success of Buck Privates was enormous, grossing more than 4 million dollars upon initial release at a time when first-run tickets cost around 25 cents a piece. These numbers also fail to reflect the money earned from the film’s numerous re-releases. See Furmanek and Palumbo, 42-8.

xxii While, here, I primarily focus upon military service and war as agents of the historically traumatic, a case could be made, of course, that a breakdown of the financial institution during

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the 1930s also called into question the dominant fiction. Of course, this equally had an effect upon the nature of the comedy of the period as well.

xxiii It is difficult to access how knowingly the filmmakers are embracing the humor of opening a film promoting the draft within a movie theater literally converted into a draft station. If anything, with Buck Privates historically being the first film to deal with the 1940-initiated draft, such an opening is, to say the least, ironic.

xxiv It should be noted that some of the duo’s 30s features also contained straight romantic plots separate from the comedians. But, notably, these were often in Hal Roach’s feature-length adaptations of operettas: Fra Diavolo (1933), Babes in Toyland (1934), and The Bohemian Girl (1936), which were taking off from the long stage tradition of having the comedians as clowns in the opera. Two notable exceptions to this are Bonnie Scotland (1935) and Swiss Miss (1938), though the duo were also making very overt spoofs of masculine genres at the same time without the additions of “straight” storylines. Pardon Us (1931) spoofs prison films. Pack Up Your Troubles (1932) spoofs war movies, while Way Out West (1937) is a hilariously warped version of the western. Also, up until 1935, the duo’s shorts were all self-contained vehicles that solely focused on Laurel and Hardy as their protagonists.

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CONCLUSION: BEYOND CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD / BEYOND THE BOYS CLUB

The other important joke for me is one that's, uh, usually attributed to Groucho Marx but I think it appears originally in Freud's Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious. And it goes like this – I'm paraphrasing: Uh . . . "I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women. –Woody Allen, Annie Hall (1977)

After creating a string of successful slapstick comedies, Woody Allen wrote and directed

Annie Hall (1977), a film that won the Oscar for Best Picture and influenced a generation of relationship comedies. It is often acclaimed as the first truly post-Classical romantic comedy since it moved away from farcical plot into a comically-enhanced, stream-of-consciousness meditation on romance. Yet, the movie, for all its emotional weight, is unapologetically a comedian comedy as well. Allen’s persona is essentially the same nebbish he employed in numerous sillier films, onstage, and on television. Writing of the genre constructs of the comedian comedy only four years after Hall’s release, Steve Seidman employs the film as an example multiple times, concretely defining Allen as an enunciator, the all-powerful textual position held by many comedians in their films, in which they can acknowledge the audience and, generally, “point to the artificiality of individual films” (30). Allen opens Hall by aggressively pursuing this concept, standing before an empty background and musing on relationships and jokes in a direct address to the audience. But in this opening, he enunciates something more than just his central role within the text or even his philosophies. By referencing Groucho Marx – who also directly addressed the audience in numerous movies with his famous brothers like Animal Crackers (1930), Duck Soup (1933), and A Night at the Opera

(1935) – he also suggests his historical position as a movie star, his lineage in a long line of cinematic comedians dating back to Classic Hollywood.

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More specifically, Allen is also defining himself as a figure within the masculine

comedic, a performer heavily reflecting and commenting upon the national anxieties of the era.

Even within just the ten-year span covered by this study, I have shown cinematic comedians as clearly reflecting specific ethnic, economic, political, and technological impacts on masculine identity. The dissertation began by examining how W.C. Fields provides a general foundation for understanding the masculine comedic as a theoretical commentary on idealized masculinities.

Yet his performances also illustrate the economic strains placed upon families during the

Depression era. With Eddie Cantor, we saw how the effects of Jewish assimilation and

Hollywood’s “de-Semitization” created a new identity in American comedy in the creation of the universalized nebbish. Due to the influences of broadcast technologies, Jack Benny’s career confirmed how the wider proliferation of the mediated voice changed not only how we approach character comedy, but depictions of gendered voice and body onscreen. Laurel and Hardy,

Wheeler and Woolsey, and Abbott and Costello each confronted popular myths of fraternity in

American culture, including specifically those seen in the Freemasons and army life. Through

all these examples, I showed how comedian comedy can transform in a relatively short period of

time to provide different commentaries on male identities. With Annie Hall, Allen suggests new directions are possible as popular humor explored more overtly personal and emotional material by the 1970s. He is changing the implications of the genre by placing it firmly in the sexual politics and pop psychology of the period. As a post-Classical comedy, it makes sense that the comedian self-analyzes his quirks, especially since they so perfectly reflect a wider anxiety

present in the Baby Boomer dating scene of the decade. As David R. Shumway suggests, the

film belongs to a group of comedies about remarriage from the period, but exists in a different

context than found in the Classic Hollywood era since it is specifically about the real world

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anxieties of “the postmarried and repeatedly married” (102). Just as 30s comedians perform their own cultural anxieties, Allen reflects the social fact of large percentages of the audience now being divorced during the 1970s.

As this suggests, a wide range of cultural forces, extending from the politically-urgent to the subtle, can expose the fragilities of the masculine order and its classifications of gender.

Born out of these forces, the masculine comedic through all its variations shows us how comedy provides a consummate way to uncover the fragility of gender performance itself, exposing the illusions of the hegemony. Judith Butler ends her groundbreaking Gender Trouble with a conclusion entitled “From Parody to Politics,” aligning the repetition of supposed ‘proper’ gender behaviors with a form of comedy – the parody:

The parodic repetition of gender exposes as well the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance. As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an “act,” as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self- criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status. (187)

Unquestionably, the comedy I analyzed in this study was born out of phallocentric societies and the performers usually identified themselves as nothing more than marginal figures as opposed to radicals meant to initiate social change. As opposed to existing as barriers, they only comically perform anxieties, manifestations of their eras more aligned with social classifications rather than anything knowingly transgressive. Yet through these performances, they expose the parody of all gender performance, unmasking the “act” as only an act. Fields’ con man and family man suggest that all males are only “performing” gender roles on some level. The removal of Jewish identity in Cantor’s nebbish reveals the precondition of gentile whiteness in American versions of “proper” maleness. Benny’s transition from radio to screen shows how the voice and body often fail to correspond within popular performances of queered masculinity. Classic comedy

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duos often parody both, as Butler phrases it, the “subtle and politically enforced performativity” found in masculine fraternities ranging from social clubs to military orders. And, years later,

Woody Allen addresses performances of maleness in the post-sexual liberation America. In the quotation opening this afterward, he contemplates which “joke” best defines his own anxiety as a male. By accrediting the joke to Sigmund Freud, Allen admits that some psychological truth shapes humor, which can be used to deconstruct the male subject. When referencing Groucho, he asks how the comedic maleness of the past helps to define his own masculine identity.

Though, notably, Allen is half wrong in crediting the joke. No variation or even forerunner to the “membership” line appears in Sigmund Freud’s work (though it feels like it could). Instead, the joke is the sole creation of Groucho, though its appearance is surprisingly not from any stage, radio, television, or film performance. Confirmed by two different biographical sources, one by Groucho’s son and the other by Groucho himself, the line is actually attributed to the great comedian’s private correspondences with the Friars Club in the

1950s. The social organization, based out of New York City but also with a Beverly Hills version, has a long history of a membership of popular comedians. The clubs also until the mid-

1980s had a history of all male membership and is still to this day notorious for their bawdy

roasts and generally jovial atmosphere of nasty putdowns. Despite his onscreen reputation as a

razor wit, Marx, who had been pressured to join in the first place, found the club’s atmosphere

dismal and decided to quit supposedly after some member targeted him with rude jokes. He

gave as a polite reason that he did not have time to participate in the organization’s activities.

When the Friars lamented losing such a major star, they pressed him to find out the real reason for his resignation. According to most sources, Marx’s exact reply via telegraph was simply,

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“Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member” (Raskin).

In the context of this study, I find this anecdote enormously illuminating about an aspect of the masculine comedic I have avoided directly contemplating up until this point. Throughout my dissertation, despite some specific diversions into stage/radio/cinema histories, I have avoided discussing this fraternity of male comedians as something real world, intensely powerful offscreen as a Hollywood creative and economic force. In truth, I have avoided this specific history, which really came of age in the 1930s, because it could have veered my approach into the often limiting area of auteur studies, though intelligent cases could be made for many of these performers as comedy auteurs. Also, the comedian’s relationship with vaudeville and, then, the studio system has been wonderfully outlined in Henry Jenkins’ book What Made

Pistachio Nuts?. My primary goal throughout this dissertation has been to consider the masculine comedic onscreen as symptomatic, a product of specific cultural anxieties of the era.

But I would be remiss not to also point out the greatest irony of the phenomenon in how such performers, who perfected unmasculine performances in film, used their popularity to develop considerable empowerment offscreen. We have seen onscreen the alcoholic blowhard in Fields, the fragile nebbish in Cantor, the overly queered dandy in Benny, and the queered buddy relationships of three comedy duos. Yet the popularity of all these comedians allowed for a level of acceptance in the Hollywood community for the performers themselves. As the Friars show, the male comedians even developed their own literal fraternal order, something their onscreen counterparts could never truly enjoy.

Contemplating the significance of the actual context of Groucho’s seemingly self- deprecating joke, Richard Raskin writes, “Paradoxically, one of the most striking examples of a

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self-disparaging joke turns out to have been motivated by a wish on the jokester’s part to

dissociate himself once and for all from a group of people to whom he felt superior.” Yet this is

only part of the paradox, since Raskin misunderstands the ultimate irony found in Marx’s

brilliant retort. The reply actually dissects the male comedian and poses the question of what is

his role as a performer and a cultural product. On one level, Groucho Marx is the comedic persona we see onscreen, who Friars mistook as heavily dictating an actual appreciation of insult humor. Conversely, Groucho Marx is the man behind the persona, who found such an environment unappealing and, reportedly, looked down on the club’s membership as witless.

Most intriguingly, Groucho Marx is the combination of both these persons, a Jewish kid born into poverty who found a voice performing the most vocal of wisecracking outsiders. With this third incarnation, he exists clearly as a significant cultural product of the masculine comedic as his onscreen self and offscreen biography correspond. On some level, Marx must have recognized there remains an element of social marginality in his public/private self. This is a person that should not really belong to any fraternal club, the ultimate definition of acceptance into the phallic order. This irony is something Groucho the “snob” wickedly points out as dictating his reasoning for retracting membership, his disdain that the club accepts his marginal self. This is the ultimate charade of the masculine comedic. They created a fraternity as performers by pointing out the absurdities of the phallic order in their films.

After the 1930s solidified the multi-medium comedian as an entertainment force, this fraternity of male performers grew even more powerful in Hollywood, certainly blossoming in the 1950s with television’s popularity as well. Figures like Bob Hope, Red Buttons, Jackie

Gleason, Jerry Lewis, and others went on to define film and television comedy during the 50s and 60s. The 70s brought about comedic talents aligned with differing aspects of the post-60s

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youth countercultures, as seen in everything from the silly drug-fueled antics of Cheech and

Chong to the brilliant racially-tinged stand-up comedy of Richard Pryor, who all transferred successfully into cinema. This cultural change also informed the development of the comedy institution of television’s Saturday Night Live (1975-present), which went on to spawn many of the remainder of the century’s largest comedian superstars in film, including: Steve Martin (a frequent guest host), Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal,

Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, and Will Ferrell. Similar to 30s comedians and their cultural moments, all these performers redefined conceptions of the masculine comedic in ways specific to their eras, playing-off new sets of anxieties and social parameters.

For example, allowing for more racially-mixed images in the comedy of the post-Civil

Rights era, Pryor’s celebrity coincided with the racially-strained 1970s, after the social movements of the Black Panthers and Black Muslims forced a more confrontational image of black maleness into the spotlight. In the 1980s, Murphy, to a lesser degree, carried on this tradition as a response to the myths of racial unity being perpetuated by the decade’s politically conservative revolution. Even without race as a provocative focal point, other figures also shed light on the male anxieties of specific periods. Some of these comedians have been addressed by previous film scholars, though without a larger examination of the male comedian as an evolving construct. Examples include: Bob Hope providing a queered alternative to WWII mythologies of maleness (something already addressed by Steve Cohan); Jerry Lewis’ manic

“femininity” as a reaction to 50s sexual conservatism (as explored by Frank Krutnik); John

Belushi embracing the runaway consumption of 1970s maleness; Bill Murray displaying the evolving cynicism of disillusioned Baby Boomers; Adam Sandler embracing childish rage as a rejection of Boomerism; and Will Ferrell performing lampoons of masculinity run amuck, a

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mockery of previous generations of machismo. As this rudimentary list suggests, the moments and dynamics of the performances continually change to provide a wide variety of possible readings of historically-specific maleness. As such, I have laid the groundwork with the first decade of sound cinema as a (somewhat arbitrary) starting point for a continuing history and evolving cultural theory. Though, I hope it is a foundation that illuminates upon some of the fine previous readings of comedians and, undoubtedly, much work to come that will focus on new areas of cultural analysis.

But what of the most disparaging aspect of the masculine comedic as a real world fraternity? How do we approach the fact that it actively excludes women from being major comedic stars? While my approach addresses comedians as exposing the hypocrisies and fragilities of the phallic order, I have written this dissertation with the understanding that, in truth, the offscreen reality of the masculine comedic is overtly sexist. For it to exist as something concretely influencing the production and promotion of films, it must be facilitated by a heavily-perpetuated entertainment myth – the concept that women aren’t funny. We have seen the stereotype of the humorless woman in the domestic comedies of Fields and Laurel and

Hardy, in which the wives are obstacles to pleasure emphasizing the emasculated comedian’s own lack and, in contrast, humorous disposition. But in a very real world sense, in the writing and production of comedian comedies, this myth was long perpetuated among male filmmakers and comedians. As recently as 2000, Jerry Lewis shocked an audience at a comedy festival, earnestly proclaiming, “I don’t like any female comedians,” a statement that confirmed in a public forum what most women in comedy knew to be a long-held bias (Stanley 185).

In truth, while comic cinema remained malecentric in the decades following Mae West, television actually found some profound challenges to the male comedic order. Though, this is a

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complicated history since some of the creative forces behind these popular women often were

male. Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore proved very popular, yet the creative teams behind their shows consisted of powerful men such as Desi Arnaz and James L. Brooks. Other shows like The Garry Moore Show (1958-67) and Laugh-In (1968-73) featured powerful female comedic talents like Carol Burnett and Lilly Tomlin, though these were still the comedic worlds of Moore and Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. Yet, such female performers also eventually broke through the glass ceiling of comedy, with Burnett starring in her own successful variety show

(1967-78) and Tomlin creating critically-lauded television specials in the 1970s. But despite some of these crucial leaps, on other major shows, female comics still struggled in comparison to male counterparts. Even as post-60s liberalism more so influenced popular comedy, institutions like Saturday Night Live were still notably boys clubs with male cast members usually being promoted as the bankable stars. After all, such remarkable comedic talents as Gilda Radner, Jane

Curtin, and Laraine Newman, from the show’s groundbreaking original cast, never went on to any real cinematic stardom like their male peers.

The 1980s and 90s brought more aggressive female comics, like Whoopi Goldberg and

Roseanne Barr. The latter proves the most fascinating of comediennes since she directly challenged conceptions of working-class domesticity and femininity in her stand-up comedy and enormously successful television sitcom Roseanne (1988-97), which she also produced. The response by many popular critics was to recognize Barr as something ‘other,’ shocking in that she found such popularity for a short time representing everything supposedly “grotesque” to the larger boys club of entertainment. Katherine Rowe opens her illuminating chapter on Barr in

The Unruly Women by dissecting the controversial rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” performed by the comedienne in July of 1990 at a major sporting event, where she comically

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acted out the most disgusting aspects of male sports behavior – grabbing her crotch, spitting on

the ground, and making an obscene gesture to the booing crowd. In such controversial displays

and even on her much beloved sitcom, Barr “used the semiotics of unruliness to break frame, to

disrupt, to expose the gap between, on the one hand, the New Left and the women’s movement

of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and, on the other, the realities of working class family life two

decades later” (54). As such, Barr is a comedienne fully employing a feminist appropriation of what we have seen unfold in the masculine comedic. I do not mean she is “masculine,” but that her persona, crafted by Barr herself, embraces definite gendered anxieties of the period in ways less about empowerment than acknowledged social complexities. In short, while often aggressively confrontational in her approach to humor, Barr is more W.C. Fields than Mae West,

even as she often resembles the latter in her attacks on the patriarchy. Proving a crucial figure in

the history of the female comic, she positioned herself as a point of identification to large

portions of working class women who felt marginalized on various social fronts.

Despite all these major changes on television, maleness still dominated comedian comedy

in film, in which no major female comedy star emerged outside of, arguably, Whoopi Goldberg,

whose onscreen persona also was heavily affiliated with dramatic parts. This discrepancy is not

surprising since, as seen with my look at radio with Jack Benny, the perceived intimacy of the

broadcast medium often proves more progressive than popular cinema. This is even more so the

case over the last 20 years as popular American cinema has been dictated by targeting the ticket

sales of 18-25 year old males with action movies, special effects fantasies, and broad comedies.

All of these genres usually relegated the female cast members to eye candy for the hormonal

heterosexual viewers. Therefore, television still exists even in recent years as the primary place

where the masculine comedic as a creative force is being more overtly challenged. For example,

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in 1999, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels named Tina Fey as the show’s first female head writer and, soon after in 2000, gave her the revered seat as “Weekend Update” co- anchor. As a result, the reported boys club atmosphere had notably been challenged and some of the brightest stars of the show emerged as female cast members writing and performing their own sketches. After leaving the show, Fey created her own popular NBC sitcom 30 Rock (2006- present), a comically surreal version of her experiences writing on SNL that, at times, mirrors the very structures of character-based situation comedy pioneered on radio by Benny, right down to the ‘show within a show’ structure. In the meantime, other challenges to malecentric comedy also appeared in popular comediennes like Amy Sedaris and Sarah Silverman developing their own comically-warped shows for cable networks in the forms of the cult hits Strangers with

Candy (1999-2000) and The Sarah Silverman Program (2006-present).

At least on the small screen, a notable tide had turned and popular journalism took notice.

In April of 2008, Vanity Fair attacked the long-held cultural bias toward comediennes with a glamorous Annie Leibovitz cover photo of Silverman, Fey, and Amy Poehler dressed as Greek

Goddesses, posing the question, “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” The cover and the accompanying Alessandra Stanley article are presented directly in response to a previous

Christopher Hitchens opinion piece from the magazine’s January 2007 issue that defended the concept that ‘women aren’t funny.’ Hitchens, whose piece feels ironically unaware of how many sexist stereotypes it promotes, bases his evidence in basic reductive differences between the sexes. He suggests that the ability to have children give women the inability to be properly

“childish” since motherhood “imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only google” (54). In short, as common to many anti-feminist arguments in relationship to the arts, the “sanctity” of motherhood is used to ‘other’ the female as too earnest, a feeble

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attempt to lionize women, though, in truth, only dismissing their fundamentally human potential

for baser thoughts.

Despite a bizarre photo-shoot of comediennes and comedic actresses recreating tabloid

scandals inside the magazine, Stanley’s responding Vanity Fair article, featuring interviews with

popular women in comedy, actually makes a strong case for a changing comedic order. This

notable change in direction arises out of multiple factors, though still finds itself victim to

cultural double standards especially pertaining to physical appearance. Writer/Director Nora

Ephron points to the general cultural change with females in more power roles as a cause, but

also couples this with entertainment’s technological evolution as well, stating, “Here’s the

answer to any question: cable. There are so many hours to fill, and they ran out of men, so then

there were women” (184). Fascinatingly, probably the most subtly revolutionary comedienne of

the moment, Fey suggests women as dictating the viewing habits for television more than men,

“Women drive what’s on television, and husbands and boyfriends decide on movies” (191).

Recently, though, Fey and Poehler branched out into film with somewhat successful results, co-

starring in Baby Mama (2008), a hit earning over $60 million thus far. But time will tell if this is a marker of a larger trend of bankable female comics in popular cinema that can rival the enormous amount of ticket returns seen with current male stars like Jim Carrey, Sandler, Myers, or Ferrell – all of whom have made numerous films grossing well over $100 million in domestic box office. In truth, though, if the history of stage and radio influence on film comedy has taught us anything, cinema will continue to feel the great effect of other mediums in upcoming years.

As women increasingly define those areas, film comedy will eventually follow.

Therefore, I want to end this study by recognizing comedy in film as constantly evolving, making way for comedians and comediennes to address new gendered roles and other cultural

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changes. While the work of Fields, Cantor, Benny, and others challenges the myths of the

phallic order, the humor itself was still born out of phallocentrism and, as we have seen, could

position women as ‘other.’ But as the role of women in comedy continues to transform, such

changes determine new images of the masculine comedic as well. Male comics now compete

more heavily for screen time with increasingly equaled female stars, which results in male

images changing to compensate. After all, being contrasted with powerhouse Mae West

produces a different reaction to W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee. Of course, the long-lasting

ramifications of the current challenge have yet to fully materialize, but as even Vanity Fair

recognizes, it certainly feels on the horizon in popular film. So the actual greatest challenge to

the masculine comedic today is found in the rise of the female comic as a genuine “affront” to films produced by and for males. If ethnic identity and economic welfare greatly dictated the

phenomenon during the 30s, gender and sexual identity even further dictate it today. Beyond

just the current rise of the female comic, the inevitable rise of an openly gay, bisexual, or

transgender film comedian will irreversibly affect the course of comedic maleness onscreen. If

Cantor’s nebbish transformed how we view funny men in film, imagine how other more

aggressive challenges to hegemonic masculinity will alter cinematic history. After all, there

might have never been Woody Allen or Annie Hall without Eddie Cantor. As membership in the comedic order extends beyond heterosexual men, how will Hollywood continue to depict buffoonish masculinity?

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Scott Balcerzak grew up in Bossier City, Louisiana. He attended Louisiana State

University, Shreveport, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 2001. He earned a

Master’s of Arts in English with an emphasis in film studies from Oklahoma State University in

2004 and received his doctorate in film and media studies from the University of Florida in

August 2008. His essays on film history and performance have appeared in such publications as

Literature/Film Quarterly, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, and Post

Script. He has also co-edited with Jason Sperb a collection of essays entitled Cinephilia in the

Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture (Wallflower 2008) and contributed a chapter for this volume on digital imagery and performance. He is currently a

Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

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