What I watched: The thirteenth episode of The Admiral Broadway Revue, a short-lived early variety series. The series was directed and written by Max Liebman, with a handful of other co-writers, including a young Mel Brooks. It starred Sid Ceasar, Imogene Coca, Mary McCarthy and the husband-and-wife duo of Marge and Gower Champion. This episode was broadcast on 8:00 PM on Friday, April 22, 1949 simultaneously on NBC and DuMont. This episode is available on YouTube, but be aware this one has real dodgy video quality.
What happened: The opening song features rural bumpkins celebrating the annual county fair, involving dances both square and chicken. This is followed by a sketch starring the core comedic trio: Sid Caesar as a father with a heavy Irish accent with two precocious and irritating children played by Imogene Coca and Mary McCarty. Caesar’s frustrated and incoherent explanations of fair attractions are pretty funny, especially his impassioned rant about a haunted house, although Coca playing a little girl is odd.
Out next is a clown with a rooster’s tail. I guess he’s supposed to be a bird? A female bird comes out, and he follows her around while the Nutcracker Suite plays. They have a long conversation through bird whistles. Entertainment! Janet Collins performs an “exotic” dance entitled “After the Mardi Gras”, which involves her lunging around with hands in a stabbing pincer motion while some poor guy plays a bongo drum. I wasn’t aware that county fairs and Mardi Gras coincided. But hey, they stayed on theme for three segments, which is making progress.
A man comes out advertising a wrestling match, and my interest instantly perks up. The match stars Caesar as “Mr. Gorgeous America”, a parody of Gorgeous George. George had just made his debut in Madison Square Garden two months ago, the first wrestling event in the Garden for 12 years, and was becoming one of television’s early stars just as much as Caesar was. They actually put some physical effort into imitating wrestling, with Caesar taking a few bumps and winning with a finger twist.
McCarty appears as “Fanny Flip-A-Disc”, a female DJ in the midst of a twelve-hour shift. Exhausted, she begins tossing records to the side instead of playing them, and broadcasting only her phone calls. This involves a couple Bob Newhart-esque bits where we hear one side of a call. She also holds what looks like a gun at various points in the sketch, unexplained. Coca does a skit demonstrating the meaning of East Indian dance, some of which is rather elaborate. It’s kind of racist.
Marge and Gower Champions are here to wrench this episode back to its purpose with a dance about going to a county fair and finding it closed. You’ll be shocked to learn that they manage to make their own excitement. Caesar gives a monologue where he imitates a singing and dancing Arab merchant that is also fairly racist. The closing musical number is set on a baseball pitch, with a somber chorus paying tribute to a player named Lucky McNeil. This becomes an extended musical narrative, in which McNeil is put into a tight end-of-game situation and ultimately fails. It’s certainly not the worst song the show’s done, but it goes on approximately forever.
What I thought: This episode, in particular the opening number, is an early example of television’s long and usually condescending fascination with the rural. Television was a medium made almost exclusively by people who lived in the largest urban centres, a trend that continues into today. However, America’s population in the immediate post-war period was still largely rural, and so slick urbanites had to deal with rural culture. So, after dealing with Hollywood and Radio City, Admiral Broadway Revue goes to the county fair and pretends it’s almost as good. Surprisingly, there aren’t a lot of jokes at the expense of the fair or its participants. If anything, the cast of ABR are a little too effusive in their praise of banal joys like ferris wheels.
At this time, the Revue seems to be running up against the limitations of a sketch show with a set cast. Actors are here cast as different age groups and even different species. This leads to some crude cultural caricatures, as noted above, and that in turn leads to lazy humour — you don’t actually have to tell a joke, just have Imogene Coca appear as an Indian woman, which is funny because Asian cultures are silly. The bird skit is cute, I suppose, but feels like a charming cartoon short awkwardly transformed into an amateur stage play. I’m probably overthinking things — the overwhelming pressure of a weekly show likely lead to desperation for something new. I would guess that half of these sketches were generated by Max Liebman finding something silly in the costume closet and writing around it.
The alternative to this kind of exhausted miscasting is to have recurring characters, a device that would be discovered by later sketch shows. That can lead to its own kind of laziness, as with the infamous catchphrase-happiness of Saturday Night Live. And this episode isn’t really bad — it’s inconsistent, but there are some genuinely funny segments, and the song and dance isn’t as tedious as it’s been in the past. But it seems as though, in trying to be a different show every week, the Revue can’t get over the obstacle of having the same cast every week.
And hey, they promised there would be another “Nonentities in the News” this week! This episode gets demerit points for that alone.
Coming up next: SUSPENSE!
The Eternal Couch Potato 