What I watched: An episode of The Morey Amsterdam Show, a variety show starring the titular Amsterdam with Art Carney as sidekick. This episode’s guest stars were Nancy Donovan and Edna Thayer. The episode was directed by David P. Lewis and written by Joe Aaronson and Amsterdam, and aired at 9:00 pm on Thursday, August 31, 1950 on the DuMont Network. It is available to view on the Internet Archive.
What happened: After plugging DuMont television and radios, we’re taken to the Silver Swan Cafe, full of pairs dancing. Interestingly enough, Morey has an emcee to introduce him. He complains about how hot it is, and then breaks down how different audience members applaud differently. It’s sort of an inside-baseball routine. Morey introduces the first performer, Nancy Donovan. She sings “The Way You Look Tonight.”
After she’s done, Art Carney charges in wearing a tuxedo, top hat, and flowers sticking out of his lapel. He says he was almost tricked into marrying his landlady (Thayer) but took off instead. There are a lot of jokes about how ugly said landlady is, and then she shows up. They don’t hold back in her presence. (“You can’t insult this lady!” “Well, I’ve been trying for three years.”) She storms off, threatening to see her lawyer. Morey weaves a story about how Art could be arrested and go to the electric chair.
As the kids are going back to school, and won’t be able to stay up watching DuMont variety programs any more, Morey says he’s presenting a story for them: an “Arabian nights” dance about a sheikh and his harem. Kids love dances and harems! The dance gets pretty weird, concluding with the sheikh collapsing and the women following him out.
Morey comes out with a cello, which he plays pretty decently while running through jokes. The next number, called “I Heard” and about the joy of gossipping on the telephone, is performed by a barbershop-style quartet. It turns out to be an ad for DuMont television. Honestly, they fooled me.
To conclude, we have a comedic sketch set on the farm, delivered by the “Silver Swan Players.” The sketch involves a Farmer Jones, his fat son Hezekiah, his daughter Kitty (because she “has a cute puss”, which must have been less obscene-sounding in 1950, although it’s followed by a joke about underwear so who knows.) The whole sketch is performed in pantomime and narrated with a bemused tone. A “grass widower” wants to marry Farmer Jones against his will, but Morey comes on as a travelling merchant and sells her a “mechanical man”, who can “make love 24 hours a day.” Okay, maybe these people are filthy after all.
What I thought: One year and change on from when we last saw it, The Morey Amsterdam Show seems to have settled into itself. There’s an added layer of confidence in the performers, and more use of the visual nature of the medium, from the cut-away images used during the song-turned-phone-advertisement to the speechless gags in the farmer sketch. Jacqueline Susann seems to be gone, off to be a best-selling writer. The show was still far from the best or most popular variety show, but it’s a quick and mostly harmless half hour (well, other than the “harem” dance.)
The advertising for DuMont television seems much heavier than it was earlier. Perhaps by this point it was becoming apparent that starting a television station to advertise televisions wasn’t a foolproof plan, and like all doomed companies DuMont doubled down, or maybe Morey just couldn’t get a paying advertiser. Either way, the advertising seems like the most developed part of this half-hour show.
I also found it interesting how DuMont imagined the audience for its products. The mid-show ad features the customers not in an urban apartment block, or in the kind of rural setting lampooned through the Farmer Jones sketch but in a detached house, presumably in a suburb or residential neighbourhood. The ideal of home ownership was rapidly becoming established, and the television and home phone line were a crucial part of this dream.
In the DuMont advertisement, television and the phone are a way to cross the distances created by single-family homes. The kind of gossiping that would happen through the windows of an apartment building in The Goldbergs now takes place over busy phone lines. You may not be able to make it out from the suburbs to a trendy nightclub, but television will bring you the best approximation of one with the Silver Swan Cafe. In a way, our current locked-down, live-streamed reality is the ultimate realization of this appeal.
Oh, yeah, Morey Amsterdam. Anyway, the show’s okay, although the sketch about the landlady seems needlessly mean-spirited and misogynist to me. I do wish these shows could bring in some more novel acts than the usual singers and comedians. Maybe a contortionist. I’m always a mark for contortionists.
Coming up next: We unhinge our jaws for an extra helping of Lone Ranger.
The Eternal Couch Potato 