What I watched: The October 27, 1949 episode of Fireball Fun-for-All, a short-lived variety series. The episode starred J. C. Olsen and June Johnson, with guest appearances by Bill Hayes, Marty May, Carlton Emmy, the Mathes Duo, Ron Fletcher and Joy Skyler. It aired at 9:00 PM on Thursday, October 27, 1949 on NBC and is available to watch at the Internet Archive.
What happened: We open on a pair of bank robbers blowing a safe, with an actually credible explosion effect. The police won’t come quick, they explain, because everyone is watching “the Olsen and Johnson show.” Said show opens with a veritable parade, complete with drum majors, sprinklers and kids. The two stars come out to explain that they’re celebrating being able to get a seat on the subway. They joke a bit more about the subway being crowded, but are interrupted by a series of strange characters who each stop for one quick joke, concluding with a stack of three kids in a black coat claiming to be Napoleon.
We then launch into our first full-fledged sketch, a musical about the Halloween Queen picking her choice for the annual dance. A quintet of smooth crooners sing about how Irving Berlin never wrote a song about Halloween. How meta. They love their queen, even if they wish she would shut up. Humour! The next skit is a more physical bit of comedy, with a trio of women sealing letters using a kid’s spit. But it turns out they’re answering anonymous letters, so at the end of the assembly line they just have to tear the letter up and toss them into the waste basket.
This turns out to be the office of a pair of private eyes played by Olson and Johnson. A guy playing Charlie Chan and “The Thin Man” (a shirtless surfer dude) briefly appear. A woman comes barging in saying that she’s just poisoned her husband and wants the detectives to lock her up. SUSPENSE! Wait, wrong show. She shot her husband because he was a Republican, an understandable motive. Their next “client” is a woman whose husband is trying to leave her and run off with a buxom redhead. Her husband, a Sid Caesar type, comes by to throttle the woman, which needless to say is not treated with appropriate severity.
This sketch continues on, with a Sherlock Holmes type coming in to find some dead bodies. They kill a dude off-screen, and then the other detective (“of Scotland yard”) plays the bagpipes. For good measure they insult a fat woman before quickly moving on. Up next: dog tricks! Fabulous dogs do fabulous dog tricks, jumping and rolling over and under each other. (20:00) The trainer (Emmy) seems very disappointed by one dog, who he calls “dumb” and manhandles a bit.
After a brief reappearance of the Olsen & Johnson Detective Agency, we see an act where a man and a woman, the Mathes Duo, do stunts on a bicycle. They then spin a bunch of rings while perched on each others’ shoulders (26:00), and the dude plays paddle-ball while riding a giant unicycle. It’s actually pretty impressive, and reminded me of the kind of momentary diversion one might get at a NBA half-time show.
Our next segment is “Manhattan Symphony”, in which a cop sings a dramatic ode to New York, while a number of stereotypical characters pass through a city street. We cut to a cab driver, who finds that the metaphor of a symphony is inappropriate, as it’s not complex enough. There’s another dance by a sextet of girls who “work in the bargain basement”, and a Beat parody. Even in 1949, making fun of hipsters was easy. A group of kids play dice, and a young woman who “always leans towards a louse” – referring to her taste in men. After one more song-and-dance routine featuring a pair of young lovers, who I believe are Fletcher and Skyler, everybody takes their bows.
The episode’s final sketch ties everything together, with Olsen & Johnson’s private-detective characters looking for the jewel thieves from the opening sketch. They find them in a dark mansion on “13 Bleak Street.” They get scared by the spooky house, complete with moaning voices, skeletons in the closet and parodies of various movie monsters. One of the robbers sneaks out by physically standing behind the detective and matching their steps. When they do finally trap someone down, it turns out to be a surprise birthday party. Everyone sings the theme song about how fun Thursday night is, and the curtain falls.
What I thought: Well, that was… a lot. Olsen and Johnson bring an entirely different comedic sensibility to the variety show than anything we’ve seen before. Rather than the virtuoso solo performances of a Sid Caesar or the comfortable banter of a Milton Berle, this comedic duo decided to simply throw as much stuff at the audience as quickly as possible. And you know what? It sort of works.
Fireball Fun-for-All is very fast-paced and manic, with characters and gags popping up for moments before being shunted aside in favour of another idea. Given the general quality of the jokes on display, this is a smart approach. If a joke is corny, misogynist, or racist, that’s okay: there’ll be another one in five seconds. For that reason, even if some of the gags are of the type I was repulsed by on The Ed Wynn Show, they didn’t bother me nearly as much.
Fireball Fun-for-All comes off as a more expensive production than most other variety shows. I don’t know if it actually had a higher budget, or if the overwhelming amount of stuff happening on the stage just created the impression of it, but even though it’s performed in a theatre it seems a world away from the awkwardly transplanted stage shows of Admiral Broadway Revue or The Ed Wynn Show. This was a series that embraced television as a visual medium watched by people with short attention spans. Remarkably, this visual overloading was seen as a tamer version of Olsen and Johnson’s stage show and film, Hellzapoppin.
However, a variety show demands variety, and when Olsen and Johnson are off-camera the show slows down to a typical variety-show pace. The dog act and acrobats we see in this episode are genuinely talented, and have a wow-factor that many past variety acts haven’t, but they still don’t quite fit in with the manic tone of the comedy bits. In particular, the “Manhattan Symphony” segment feels like one of those over-ambitious and interminable Admiral Broadway Revue closing numbers, albeit with a bit higher standard of execution. There would seem to be a struggle, then, between Olsen and Johnson’s very specific aesthetic vision and the generic demands of a TV variety show.
Ultimately, it was a conflict that the series was never able to resolve. Fireball only lasted one season, and this is the only episode available online. No doubt the extra- and stunt-filled broadcasts were more expensive than the network would like. There’s also no notable sponsor for the show, which may indicate other financial problems. Or maybe audiences just didn’t want this kind of comedy on television, instead preferring the more relaxing and personable approach of a Berle. Despite this episode’s flaws, however, I’m a little sad there are no more of them.
Coming up next: The grand finale of Crusade in Europe, which may or may not just be a recap episode.
The Eternal Couch Potato 