Comedian Jimmie Walker played many of the venues when he first started. “I did the tail end of the Chitlin’ Circuit. Blacks were not allowed to go to the same theaters as white people. Due to the fact they couldn’t participate, they decided to make their own entertainment. There were a series of big, majestic theaters, a whole circuit of them—in D.C., Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago—and the anchor was the Apollo in New York.”
Black comedians aspired to the Apollo the way vaudevillians had once aspired to the Palace. The most famous Black theater in the world had once been a “whites only” establishment. From 1914 through 1928 the Apollo was a racist burlesque hall. After closing in disarray, it reopened in 1934 as “The New 125th Street Apollo.” It turned into the preeminent showcase for African American show business and went on to present “America’s Smartest Colored Shows.”
The two biggest comedy stars in the early days of the Apollo were Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham. Mabley was the first female comedian to play the venue and one of the only female stand-ups in the country. In the 1930s, while still a young woman, she adopted the persona of a wisecracking, sex-crazed senior citizen, a hip, all-knowing matron with an incredibly gruff voice. “Jackie Mabley, always good for a laugh, delivers several, although some of the old standbys she tells should be buried,” read a December 1934 review. “The slightly off-color gags she pulls hit the mark with her audience.” Mabley’s targets were interesting. She joked at the expense of bigots and “damned old men.” With a benevolent voice she criticized the South and the empty promises of white liberals in Washington. From the 1930s through the 1950s Mabley was comedy’s primary voice of the Civil Rights Movement.
Markham and Mabley were aligned in the public consciousness, but far apart in social consciousness. Like Mabley, Markham was already a bit of a legend when he first did the Apollo in 1934. He toured the Chitlin’ Circuit performing sketches with various partners. Being Markham’s straight man meant absorbing his physical abuse. His act closed with a bizarre climax in which he would assault his straight men with a cow’s bladder, smacking them across the head with a loud splat again and again. Markham explained, “It’s a real bladder. I can’t tell you where I get them, but someone at a slaughterhouse picks them up for me. I tried many things, but this is the only thing that gives me that real good sound when it crashes on someone’s head. Pig bladders don’t get the effect of the beef bladders.”
Markham was a controversial figure in the Black community for his use of blackface. The practice was inspired by Ziegfeld vaudevillian Bert Williams, who had applied burnt cork from the beginning of his career. It was an odd thing, an African American darkening his face as if he were a white minstrel, but it was standard procedure in the days of vaudeville. By the 1930s the use of blackface was increasingly considered distasteful and most Black performers stopped using it. Markham was the exception. He insisted that the use of blackface was an integral matter of “tradition” even as the NAACP objected and fellow Black comedians asked him to stop. The reality was he was insecure without it. As long as he was getting laughs, he wouldn’t change his approach.
Timmie Rogers was one of the first African American comedians to forgo broad caricature after World War II, taking to the stage in a tuxedo without the use of props or gimmicks. Rogers was one of the young comedians who confronted Markham about his old-fashioned ways. He told him, “You don’t need blackface to do the act, man! That’s passé. You don’t need to be in blackface to get a laugh.”
Markham was forever defensive. “A lot of people have pointed out that my comedy is not exactly high-class . . . I won’t argue with that. And a lot of others say my characters . . . do not represent the modern Negro; that they are caricatures. Well, I won’t argue with that, either, [as] long as we admit they’re funny . . . I was born and raised black. I learned my comedy from black comedians. The earliest skits and bits I did on stage or under a tent were invented by black men. The audiences I learned to please . . . they were mostly black, too.”
Black comedy had changed, however, and Markham’s stubbornness relegated him to the fringe. Show business evolved in the wake of tuxedo acts like Timmie Rogers and, several years later, progressive comics like Dick Gregory. “It wasn’t a case of Pigmeat himself having faded out,” says his manager, Dick Alen. “It was a case of Black sketch comedy [having] faded out. I guess that’s what his problem was—he was at the end of that era. It was old-timey. His time just ended.”
Bumming around the Apollo in the late 1940s were two street hustlers—John Sanford and Malcolm Little. Nicknamed Foxy and Detroit Red, they sold dime bags to musicians at the Savoy Ballroom. They were close friends, but drifted into separate worlds under their new chosen names—Redd Foxx and Malcolm X.
Together they ran a number of scams. “There was a girl who worked in a cleaners,” said Foxx. “She liked me, so she left the store window open. Malcolm and I went in that night and took about a hundred suits off the racks and put them on the roof. We’d sell one or two of them a day. We never got caught.”
Foxx played roughshod nightclubs around Baltimore and Newark in the late 1940s. He subsidized a nonexistent stand-up income recording rhythm and blues records for the Savoy label, but it was pot dealing that paid the bills. He was busted at a “Creole Burlesk” gig in Delair, New Jersey, in September 1949 when he sold reefers to an undercover cop. His car was searched and police found two pounds of high-quality dope in the trunk. A local paper reported, “Fellow entertainers often wondered how John Elroy Sanford, a small-time comedian, could afford to drive a Cadillac. Last week they got their answer. Sanford, better known as Redd Foxx, was growing marijuana in his Newark backyard. Federal agents found a quantity of reefers in his coat pocket and also in the Cadillac. Both he and his wife, Evelyn, are under five thousand dollars bail.”
Foxx fled his criminal record and landed in Los Angeles, where he found a booster in Johnny Otis, an important rhythm and blues disc jockey and tastemaker. Otis introduced Foxx to fellow comedian Slappy White and brought them on air for late night rap sessions. The two became a team, and Foxx & White took to the Chitlin’ Circuit. They got a break when Dinah Washington hired them as her opening act. She brought them to the Apollo in October 1951. Variety said of the engagement that they “display more care with their delivery than in their choice of material. Gags hinging on marijuana smoking and Harlem prostitution are in bad taste and don’t score here.”
Foxx & White booked themselves at the ailing Palace Theatre. The former vaudeville venue had seen better days and was mostly utilized for new Hollywood films and minor presentation shows. “We bombed so hard at the Palace,” said White. “It was our first shot at a downtown white audience. It might have been the first shot for any black act. They just weren’t ready for uptown comedy.”
They broke up when they returned to Los Angeles. Foxx tried to get work at Maynard Sloate’s Strip City. “I remember going over for an audition at Strip City. I couldn’t even get in because it was all white.” Sloate says racial factors had nothing to do with it. “The final thing I did before I left Strip City was turn it into an all-Negro burlesque, with Redd as the comic. He had no taste whatsoever. When he was dirty, it was obscene. He would do subjects that were just disgusting. When I talked to him about it he said, ‘Man, that’s my integrity.’”
The most successful of the new Black comedians in the 1950s was Nipsey Russell. He was a master of the ad-lib and a marathon talker. He held court on his WLIB radio program, on which he improvised nightly for several hours. He mastered stand-up at a small Harlem nightclub called the Baby Grand and was one of comedy’s best-kept secrets throughout the decade.
Jack Krulik’s Baby Grand was located at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. It offered a menu of high-end Chinese food, and its 180 seats were full more often than not. “Nipsey was the poet laureate of Harlem,” says Hank Garrett, his neighbor and fellow comic. “He was at the
Baby Grand for sixteen years as the house emcee.” It was an integrated destination. The New York Times described the setup: “The walls are painted a dingy red, there is a mural of two huge, kissing fish overhead and on two of the walls are garish panels featuring peacocks. The floor show includes an organist, a jazz combo, a girl singer, a boy singer and an ‘exotic’ dancer who does a joyless striptease. But the chief attraction is Nipsey Russell.”
Russell had his own record label, called Humorsonic, for which he cranked out low-budget comedy records with labored laugh tracks. He clocked thousands of hours of stage time, but still could not find work beyond Black venues. Although Steve Allen didn’t hesitate to book Black musicians, he seldom used Black comedians. Allen claimed, “White audiences would not appreciate general interest jokes by Negroes.” That attitude changed when Jack Paar took over The Tonight Show. Russell did two stand-up shots that were so successful Paar hired him as a regular in June 1961. A production company even packaged a spin-off for Russell—a late night talk show to be called Point of View—but it wasn’t able to find a sponsor or network that would back an African American host.
Russell was outspoken about the disparity between white and Black comedians. He contended that the average salary of a white headliner in 1960 was $300,000 and the average salary for an African American comedian between $10,000 and $20,000. Show business employed more African Americans than other fields, but inequity was deep. “Why are Negro comedians left out?” asked Pigmeat Markham. “The Negro is an original performer. Whites have stolen much of his material. It is much easier for white comics to reach their people. Most club owners today would rather hire white comics, even if they are second-rate talents.”
Basin Street East, located at 525 Lexington Avenue in New York, was the first white venue to consistently book African American comedians. Its impresario, Ralph Watkins, had a long history in nightclubs. He was leader of the house band at Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee, New Jersey, during the 1940s and had managed a number of jazz clubs—Kelly’s Stable, Bop City, the Onyx Club—all on 52nd Street. In 1959 he opened Basin Street East, taking over Xavier Cugat’s failed Casa Cugat. He hired every African American comedian on the scene: Redd Foxx, Stu Gilliam, George Kirby, Moms Mabley, Timmie Rodgers and Nipsey Russell.
Redd Foxx played Basin Street East in 1959 and was terrified of its audience. “I went in with Maynard Ferguson’s orchestra and [rhythm and blues group] the Treniers. I was scared shitless because I didn’t know how far I could go with that crowd. I felt I couldn’t say things like, ‘This is a great band. Look at those initials on the music stands—MF!’ My timing was off. On the third night, one of the Treniers said, ‘Man, why don’t you just do your thing, like you do?’ So it just happened that night Ethel Merman was in the crowd and she was loud. So I really read [ridiculed] her, and I read somebody else that bugged me. I came on strong, just opened up and let myself be Redd Foxx. I was in the men’s room after the show and heard some cat on the phone saying, ‘You get down here and catch this guy; he’s the dirtiest son of a bitch I ever heard!’”
Just being yourself was easier said than done. There were issues when a Black comic landed in front of a white crowd. Timmie Rogers spoke of the logistical problems. “White comics can insult their audiences freely. But Negroes can’t insult white people. The Negro comic works with wraps on, always behind the cultural ghetto.”
The civil rights era brought opportunity for a new generation of Black comics like Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Cosby and Flip Wilson, but veterans like Mabley and Markham were essentially too old to capitalize on the new world. “Mabley was too strong for society at the time,” says comedian Pat Cooper. “Her era was too early. When it happened, it was too late for her.” By the late 1960s Markham and Mabley were welcome on mainstream television shows like Music Scene and Laugh-In. But age had slowed their careers and their bodies—and they had time enough only to take a bow.
Redd Foxx was one of the most influential comedians of the twentieth century. He was responsible for what became one of the biggest trends in the early 1960s—comedy records. Billboard reported in November 1961 that comedy on vinyl was “the brightest aspect of the album business.” Comedy records furthered the careers of Shelley Berman, Lenny Bruce, Nichols & May, Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, the Smothers Brothers and Jonathan Winters. Hundreds of comedy records were released during the height of the craze—1959 through 1966. It was abnormal if a comedian didn’t have a record. In the first half of the twentieth century there were occasional comedy recordings like Cohen on the Telephone—a novelty record with a Yiddish inflection—and the best-selling sketches of Sam ’n’ Henry, an Amos ’n’ Andy precursor. The early 1950s had novelty recordings by Stan Freberg, Homer & Jethro and Spike Jones & His City Slickers, but it wasn’t until Foxx came along in 1956 that comedy recordings featured straight up stand-up. Foxx released the first authentic recordings taken from the nightclub stage.
Dootsie Williams was the African American record executive in charge of Dooto Records. Located at 9512 South Central in Los Angeles, the label had one of the biggest hits of the doo-wop genre—“Earth Angel” by the Penguins. The money it made turned Williams into a successful businessman and gave him the freedom to sign new acts. He saw Foxx perform at the Oasis at 38th and Western and thought, “This guy can sell.” Foxx was resistant. He told Williams, “If I record it they won’t want to see me live.” The next day Foxx realized he had no money. He went over to Dooto Records and said, “Hey, what was that you were saying last night about recording?”
Williams signed Foxx as the first stand-up comedian on vinyl. There was little promotion, but word of mouth propelled it. “I had no idea that the first album would sell like it did,” said Foxx. “I had some pretty bad material, but the sales were fantastic.”
Laff of the Party was released in mid-1956, and after a year and a half it had sold one million copies. Riding the wave, Dooto released fourteen full-length Redd Foxx comedy records and another ten EPs before decade’s end. However, due to their suggestive material they seldom got mention in the mainstream record biz periodicals. Dootsie Williams and Redd Foxx invented comedy records as we know it—but like so many groundbreaking Black talents of the recording industry, they never got the credit.
Dooto signed Chitlin’ Circuit comics Don Bexley, Allen Drew and Dave Turner after Foxx’s initial success. Comedians Billy Allyn, Sloppy Daniels and George Kirby followed. Rudy Moore, later known as Rudy “Ray” Moore of the Dolemite movies, was emceeing at the California Club in South Central when Williams signed him to do the record Below the Belt. The contracts Williams offered these desperate comedians were always skewed. He paid each comedian a total of one hundred dollars regardless of sales. “I should have never signed,” said Dooto comic Richard Stanfield. “It was the most horrible contract.”
The records were also influential. Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong credited the albums for his own trek into comedy: “Redd had a big influence on me right out of the gate. It was the first comedy record I had ever heard.”
Dooto pressings became so profitable that bootleg versions flooded the market. Williams offered a reward for any information leading to the apprehension of Redd Foxx bootleggers. Dooto’s profit margin inspired the industry. Decca, Capitol, Verve and Warner Bros. all signed comics, and by the early 1960s everyone was in the game. Comedy records were a national phenomenon.
Mort Sahl at Sunset was a comedy record released by Fantasy Records in October 1958. It had been recorded in 1955, but it was believed there was no market for it, and it was shelved. Dooto’s sales changed minds at the company. Although the album sold poorly, Sahl has the distinction of being the first white stand-up comic to appear on vinyl.
Woody Woodbury was one of the next. The lounge comedian had been telling risqué jokes in Fort Lauderdale obscurity when Fletcher Smith, a former Hollywood effects wizard, came backstage. “After the show he approached me,” says Woodbu
ry. “He asked if I would like to put my act on a record. I said, ‘You mean just record jokes? That’s ridiculous. They’ve heard my jokes. They won’t want to hear them again.’ Fletcher said, ‘If you just record them I’ll pay for everything. I’ll bring the technicians in from New York. I’ll take care of all the distribution.’ I thought he was nuts. I said, ‘People aren’t gonna buy comedy records!’” Recorded in 1959, Laughing Room was released in February 1960 and charted immediately.
Rusty Warren was a Jewish lounge comedian specializing in double entendre. Referencing the female bustline was her trademark. Too ribald for television, she found an audience on vinyl. The record label that signed her, Jubilee, was following the same doo-wop-to-comedy path as Dooto. Jubilee’s president, Jerry Blaine, was essentially forced out of rock ’n’ roll when he was implicated in the payola scandal that destroyed disc jockey Alan Freed. It hurt Blaine’s reputation in the rock scene, but payola didn’t mean a thing in comedy.
“I was on a tour of the Midwest,” recalls Rusty Warren. “The Pomp Room, a little piano bar. We went in the liquor room and plugged into the sound system with an Ampex tape machine. I told these women [in the audience] to stand up and get their boobies up and I came up with the ‘Knockers Up March.’ Jerry decided to name the album Knockers Up! And people said to him, ‘You wouldn’t dare call it that! How are you going to sell it? Where are you going to put it? No one is going to take it!’ He did—and it blew me out of the world. Knockers Up! was on the charts for a full year.”
Blaine used payola to get the records distribution. While competing recordings of sexual double entendre by Belle Barth were under the counter, Warren’s recordings were on prominent display. “Jerry Blaine was a great businessman,” says Warren. “Where did they find me? They went in the store and I was in the comedy section. It wasn’t under the counter. I had sales you wouldn’t believe. Payola? Listen, those were the times.”
The Comedians Page 23