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 star was Jody Miller. The episode was directed by David P. Lewis and written by Joe Aaronson, Lee Sands and Amsterdam, and aired at 9:00 pm on Thursday, September 28, 1950 on the DuMont Network. It is available to view on YouTube. (The contents of this episode seem to be stretched across two different dates on IMDb, so I’ll just go with what’s on YouTube.)
What happened: Our announcer welcomes us back to the Silver Swan, where all that’s on the menu is the new DuMont television set models. He tells us a joke he says he hasn’t told in 20 years (these days, they give you a Netflix special for that), then launches into a ditty from the perspective of a troublemaker who steals women’s bathing suits and the like.
After taking a moment to shout out one of his musicians who is leaving for the army, Morey introduces the nightclub’s picture-taker, with one of those new Polaroids that only takes a minute to get a photo. (I’m just old enough to remember when this seemed amazing.) This leads to a pantomime sketch and dance with the first woman who steps up.
Art Carney shows up and tries and fails to balance an egg on his nose. While the show takes its fall break he plans to go on a vaudeville tour throughout the country. His act involves mimicking a television set, with his nose the dial and his ears the volume knobs. Morey tunes him to different stations, allowing for impressions of soap operas and figures like H. V. Kaltenborn.
The next act is Jody Miller, a returning favourite. She sings a nice little song. It’s certainly better than the musical advertisement for DuMont that follows. There’s also a plug for a program on the 1950 college football season which you can get at your local dealership.
Art comes back out as Lord Newton Chiselworth, supposedly a peer of the famous balle dancer Nijinsky. He gives a pretentious, nonsensical speech about the nature of dance. Jody joins him to demonstrate the “dance of happiness.” Chiselworth goes on into a story about the Queen of the Wood Nymphs, and Morey joins in as the handsome fairy prince. Things descend into chaos, as the stuffy Brit tries to make sense of it all. The queen pawns the prince off on her sister (a fat guy in a dress), and we’re all told to go buy DuMont TVs to watch great programs like this in the comfort of our homes.
What I thought: This is the third glimpse we’ve had of The Morey Amsterdam Show, and my impression of it is generally the same as it was in previous episodes: an average variety show lacking in big-name guests, pretty typical of the cash-strapped DuMont Network’s offerings. The conceit that all of this takes place in a nightclub should work better than it does — after all, the initial point of variety shows was bringing New York stage shows into one’s living room. But it always feel like something they’re awkwardly working around, and the actual content doesn’t feel much like a nightclub act anyways (perhaps because there was no possibility of things getting raunchy or off-colour.)
Art Carney is the only name I had heard of prior to watching this show, and in this episode at least he easily stands out as the best thing about it. It’s sort of hard to put into words — there’s a snap and verve to even the corny parts of Carny’s routine that is just lacking with Amsterdam and the guests. He even teases a few dirty jokes that he can’t really get away with on 1950s network TV.
The thing I noticed watching this episode was how much the technology of television was a factor, constantly invoked in jokes and skits. Of course, the DuMont network was invented to sell TV sets, and this episode is just such a program, with every advertisement being for DuMont sets. (One of the problems the network had was that it was so busy advertising its own products it wasn’t bringing in any outside advertising revenue.) And then there are references to Polaroid cameras and Carney turning into a human TV for one of the sketches, physically embodying the new technology.
I’m tempted to wonder how it felt to live in those postwar days, when things were changing so quickly and technology was entirely shifting the average lifestyle. Then again, I’ve lived through plenty of technological change in my three decades on this Earth, and it only feels noticeable when one looks back and realizes that just 15 years ago nobody had a smartphone. When you’re in the flow of time, with all its slow-moving and granular detail, it can be hard to notice the larger trends — they’re just the background noise, the cheap jokes on TV.
The DuMont Network, and its programming, was in a sense a technological experiment, with its programming a guess at what television would be and what viewers would like. (By chance, we are once again in a period where technology companies are experimenting with entertainment, in this case with much bigger budgets.) In time, of course, that technology would pass DuMont and its shoestring network by. The Morey Amsterdam Show would be among the casualties as the network struggled to find hits, never coming back from its fall hiatus and being replaced by The Adventures of Ellery Queen, a TV adaptation of the popular radio series which we will eventually see. I’m not sure if this is the last episode or not, but for our purposes it’s a muted swan song for the Silver Swan Cafe. We’ll see Carney again, and Amsterdam too, but this particular harnessing of their talents was done.
What else was on: The networks hadn’t quite transitioned into their fall schedules at this point, at least as far as this timeslot was concerned, so we have an unusual mixture of variety programs. CBS aired an episode of Starlight Theatre, featuring classical music, which would soon be moved an hour earlier to alternate with The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. Also on the networks were Star Revue on NBC and Holiday Hotel on ABC, neither of which have Wikipedia pages, but seem to also be variety shows. Viewers on New York could also watch wrestling on WPIX, boxing on WOR, or a Western movie on WATV, one of which would probably be my pick, depending on the details. But it also might have been a good night to go out, maybe to an actual nightclub.
Coming up next: KFO concludes its week with Ollie becoming a disc jockey.
The Eternal Couch Potato 