Bad Comedy Actors - Abbott And Costello

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To me this comedy duo were always the poor-man’s Laurel & Hardy. This might seem unfair as after all, why should I find them unfunny after a quite impressive 38 movie Hollywood career? Both men started out independently as burlesque circuit comedians. Bud Abbot played at the legendary Minskys. There was a basic rule of burlesque comedy in the US. It wasn’t allowed to be too funny. The club proprietors wanted acts involving bad puns and groan inducing slapstick because it would drive the punters to the bar. There was no way the customers would move while dancers took their clothes off, so the in between strippers comedy acts were added to help sales. Comedians like Bob Hope & Mickey Rooney were seen as too good for the burlesque scene, and quickly moved on. Abbott & Costello got similar breaks but took the bad comedy with them. Lou Costello was a burlesque strip-joint warm up man. His act prepared audiences for what would follow, but he yearned for higher billing. Even paired with Bud Abbott, he ended up with his name coming second. He was not comfortable about that. He had also failed to get noticed as a boxer and as a solo-actor. He’d served in Hollywood as a jobbing extra and even as a stuntman for years. By chance, the men ended up paired in a double act routine at a burlesque event, and proved sufficiently popular that Abbot’s wife (who had a managerial hand in her husband’s career) persuaded them to partner up professionally again. Abbott was unhappy with it, preferring to work with more independence. Their rapid fire patter was ideally suited to radio variety, and one of their most famous and genuinely funny routines, Who’s On First?’ about a baseball player called Who, causing confusion with the question of who? fired the pair to overnight stardom. Movie roles soon started to follow. Their routines were essentially vaudeville, rather than acting. Who’s On First was incorporated verbatim into their early movie success, One Night In The Tropics (1940). This set a trend for shoe-horning routines from one medium (burlesque variety stage show comedy) into another (film). Early Abbott & Costello films set their routines alongside a wide variety of artistes offering songs and sketches hung together in a similar tenuous plot. Ella Fitzgerald and The Andrews Sisters were seen singing in early Abbot & Costello movies. The problem was that audiences loving the films for offering a wide package of performance styles and different acts led producers to misjudge the popularity of each act if taken independently. Abbott & Costello were assumed to be bigger names and more widely loved than proved to be the case. In 1941, only the second year into their film-making career, the test audiences for Hold The Ghost noticed something was wrong. There was plenty of Abbott & Costello but no Andrews Sisters. Extra scenes were hurriedly added with the specially drafted Sisters, before the movie was released. This crystalizes what was wrong with Abbott & Costello. They could not hold together a movie without accompanying big name guest stars who quickly overshadowed them. They became cameo players in their own movies. Even later features that boldly added their names to the title with Abbot & Costello Meet … featured other entertainers and stars more easily loved and remembered. This reached its peak with Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, in 1948, featuring the full trio of Universal Picture’s greatest horror monsters, Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman. Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Junior both played their most famous roles themselves, (each for the last time) while the Frankenstein monster role fell to Glenn Strange, who looks more like Herman Munster than Boris Karloff. Watch this movie as a comedy and you are going to be scared as it remains a full on horror movie and quite canonical to the story arcs the three now conjoined monster movie franchises were running. In one astonishing sequence, the Monster picks up the apparent love-interest heroine, (played by Lenore Aubert) and casually throws her through a glass window to her death on the rocks outside the cliff-top castle. This isn’t comedy at all. Bud & Lou looking on in wide eyed incredulity and in chase scenes that inspired later episodes of Scooby Doo, and their intrusive meeting with Frankenstein largely killed the Hollywood horror franchise until Britain’s Hammer studies could resurrect them decades later. Boris Karloff missed the chance to reprise his role as Frankenstein’s finest work in the Creature’s encounter with Bud & Abbott, but he did appear in their 1949 movie, Abbott & Costello Meet The Killer, Boris Karloff. The importance of the big star name to carry their movies was again apparent, but the title is misleading in that while a suspect, Karloff is not the actual killer of the movie. The duo often blamed each other for their dwindling fortunes. Both men were alcoholics by the close of their careers. In 1953, deeply hating each other, and having to sell much of their property due to poor movie sales, Bud & Lou tried to capitalize on the vogue for science fiction with a movie called Abbott & Costello Go To Mars, even though they actually ended up on Venus and still in the red. In one of their last movies, Abbott And Costello Meet The Keystone Cops, filmed in 1954, the duo showed how out of touch with time they were. The studios begged them to rename the film because the Keystone Cops were an antiquated throwback to the silent era, but the boys felt they knew best. Their early films had succeeded for introducing great new recording artists to the World. Now there was just Bud & Lou and a desperate hold onto by-gone nostalgia. Abbott & Costello were never as interesting as what they had going on around them. It was a lesson they never learned. The Youtube is the infamous Frankenstein meet up window scene – remember this was marketed as comedy. Arthur Chappell