What I watched: An installment of Texaco Star Theater, a variety show starring Milton Berle. Frank Gallop served as the announcer, and guest stars included Edward Horton, the Pieros, the Mazzone-Abbott Dancers, Mary Small and Phil Regan. The episode aired on NBC at 8:00 PM on Tuesday, November 29 1949, and is available in its entirety at the Internet Archive.
What happened: Since we last tuned in, the show now has a fancy title card, but the singing mechanics are still there. Berle is introduced as “your Tuesday knight”, and comes down through the crowd in shining armour and with a horse as part of his costume. His monologue has some jokes about Margaret Truman that I didn’t get, and some malapropisms that he managed to make work. Berle chastises one of his orchestra members for arriving late, and introduces the first act: the sensational Pierro brothers. They do a juggling routine involving pins, hats, and batons. Sadly, no chainsaws.
Berle comes out to introduce “Walter Pigeon”, which turns out to be an actual pigeon. (I think he’s an ancestor of City Face.) The actual next guest is comedian Edward Horton, who spends some time insulting Miltie before saying that he’s written a play, centred around a love scene between him and Betty Grable. Berle hurriedly reminds Horton that there are children in the audience before the humour gets too risque. He continues censoring the story as Horton tells it, including cutting out such dangerous words as “bustle” and “jersey.”
The next act is a great “delineator of song”, Mary Small. She sings about the East Side of the New York, specifically the tenements full of (white) immigrants. It’s rather gimmicky, with a lot of stops and sound effects. Her next song is also about the people of New York, and how hard they work, accompanied by a quartet of women (all seemingly men in drag) doing laundry. Still in the dress, Berle introduces Sid Stone for another Texaco ad. There’s a lot of schtick, involving a jacket packed full of food and a mini-opera, and not a lot of actual advertising. Not that I’m complaining, mind.
Sid comes out in front of the curtain to present the Mazzone-Abbott dancers. It’s two women who show a lot of leg and sing in French. In other words, it’s my kind of dance. This scene is interrupted by a boorish Berle in French costume, and then by a short armed robber. Complete chaos ensues, but there are some dancing and acrobatics mixed in.
The next guest is Irish tenor Phil Regan. He sings about how great it is to be there, and then does a version of “My Blue Heaven” with audience accompaniment. Berle comes out and they perform the song that Berle apparently did in a contemporary film, “Always Leave Them Laughing.” It’s about, well, leaving them laughing, in hopes that you’ll be remembered in this shithole of a world.
This song serves as a bridge into a song-and-dance number about the “American kings and queens of comedy.” We see a caricature of a famous movie comedian on the curtain, and a version of “Always Leave Them Laughing” customized to their particular bit, before an impersonator of that actor pops out to sing a verse and do a couple steps. We see some well-remembered stars like Groucho Marx and the then-exiled Charlie Chaplin, and some forgotten ones. This goes on for about fifteen minutes, and while it does include a couple women, we also get a guy in blackface — a final kick in the junk after a long trial of my patience. Well, good night everybody.
What I thought: This is only the second episode I’ve seen of Texaco Star Theater, but I’m already starting to see a formula. As in the March episode the show begins with Berle doing a monologue in a silly costume, which is followed by a physical performing act, some banter between Berle and a guest comedian, some musical and dance performances, and a lengthy closing bit that refers to other popular culture. (The sidekicks seem to be gone, or maybe they’re just on vacation.) When you have to fill an hour each week with no overarching story, I suppose a structure like this really helps, even if it can make the individual programs feel a bit repetitive.
What holds the show together is Berle himself, a manic force of comedic energy. Berle is a prime example of what Susan Murray describes as a “vaudeo star”, one of a generation of Jewish comedians who brought the tradition of vaudeville comedy to the nascent medium of television. As Collins argues, the Jewish nature of stars like Berle or Sid Caesar was never stated but always implicit, as can be seen here in the reference to another star’s “big schnozz.”
More important than his ethnicity was Berle’s sheer commitment to entertaining at every turn, even if half the jokes were at his expense. Despite the fairly obvious structure, it always seems like the show is on the verge of spiraling out of control. We can see this in the exchange with Horton, where a genuine flirtation with the risque creates a sense of uneasiness in the audience. Berle then plays with this uneasiness through a humorous escalation of ridiculous censorship rules, appearing to flout the authorities without actually doing anything that could get him in trouble. It’s a good bit.
Less good is the long closing number, a parade of singing impersonators of famous film comedians. There’s a part of the variety genre which is very intertextual and endlessly recursive: these shows rely not just on the viewer being familiar with a constellation of actors, musicians, films, and so on but to have a certain obsession with them. These shows may tweak the nose of Hollywood celebrity, but never in a way that suggests genuine critique or contempt. This attitude would endure and be passed down to the variety show’s modern descendant, the talk show.
There’s almost something religious to the way that the “kings and queens of comedy” are presented in the final sketch. The pantheon are presented to the viewer — not directly, just as gods cannot be glimpsed directly (at least not on the small screen), but through impersonators. There’s something remarkably obsequious about insisting on doing a bit about how great Groucho Marx is, even if you can’t get the real Groucho Marx to appear on your show. The chorus of “Always Leave Them Laughing” is repeated so many times that it becomes kind of ritualistic, giving no pleasure to the audience besides that of pattern recognition.
Of course, the downside to this kind of Hollywood worship is that it can blind you to the more sinister elements of American culture. The comedic pantheon here generally reinforces the male dominance of comedy, and most notably includes a blackface performance. Berle was someone who fought to book black performers on his show, but here he regurgitates uncritically a tradition rooted in stereotypes of racial inferiority. The result, along with the extended length and obscure references of the final segment, was an episode that left me deeply cold after a strong first twenty minutes.
Coming up next: We return to more usual fare, with another episode of The Life of Riley.
The Eternal Couch Potato 