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Mixed Nuts: America's Love Affair With Comedy Teams From Burns And Allen To Belushi And Aykroyd

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The Smother Brothers were one of the most important influences on me in my formative years. By the time I was in the sixth grade I had all of their albums and the last television show I watched before we flew to Japan to live there for several years was "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." I went to school proudly wearing my "Mom always like you best" button and still have my autographed photographs of Tom and Dick. Not only did I learn all of their routines and to sing both parts of their arrangements, but from the Brothers Smothers I got my love of satire, parody, political humor, folk song, and two-part harmony. I even got to tell this to Tommy Smothers once upon a time when I ran into him in a Minneapolis hotel and was able to inform him of his personal responsibility in making me the person I am today.

Of all of the comedy teams discussed in "Mixed Nuts: America's Love Affair and Comedy Teams from Bruns and Allen to Belushi and Aykroyd," the Smothers Brothers are the only ones still performing. I saw them perform just this summer and their opening number is entitled "We're Still Here." In this book Lawrence J. Epstein looks at the great American comedy teams of the 20th century. Epstein started off his research for this book in order to explore why the classic comedy teams disappeared and ended up advancing the idea that the importance of these comedians was in how they helped American survive the trying times in which they lived. The author of "The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America," Epstein obviously takes comedy seriously.

The focus here is primarily on the great comedians of the movies, with chapters being devoted to Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby, the Three Stooges, and Martin and Lewis. However, the volume begins with Burns and Allen playing the Palace for the first time and by the time television replaces the movies in the 1950s and 1960s, Burns and Allen are on television. In between a lot of things have changed, and there are chapters devoted to particular mediums (e.g., radio) and decades (e.g., 1930). With television forcing comedians to be funny every single week we have a move towards ensemble comedy. At the heart of "I Love Lucy" and "The Honeymooners" you will find Lucy & Ethel and Ralph & Norton, but Ball and Gleason do routines with other cast members and guest stars as well. Eventually we get to the ensemble casts of classic situation comedies from "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "All in the Family" to "M*A*S*H" and "Friends."

However, you need to be forewarned that just like the real things, "Mixed Nuts" is going to leave you wanting more. You cannot toss in "The Password" routine from "Horse Feathers" and not immediately thinking about other choice verbal duels between Groucho and Chico Marx. Fortunately Epstein includes the entire "Who's on First" routine as performed in "The Naughty Nineties" or I would have had to take the book and throw it against the wall. But while Epstein does revisit several of the best-loved comedy routines from the previous century, that is only part of his purpose here. He also wants to look at the personal stories on how these groups came together, and how each team was shaped and were shaped by their respective eras. So be prepared to be tantalized by those snippets of favorite routines and wish for there to be much, much more. For the Smothers Brothers we get their short little "Moron" routine, but nothing about their masterpieces, like the way they took "I Talk to the Trees" over the years to the point where they got laughs when Tommy did not come in or the way they they can milk Dick's glare for multiple laughs in "Cuando Caliente el Sol."

In the end the key thing is that Epstein makes the case for his thesis. Weaving in lesser known comedy teams, from Gallagher & Sheen and Amos & Andy to Nicholas & May and Rowan & Martin, is more important than providing a comprehensive look at any given team. Epstein wants to define the uniqueness of each group and establish their place in the era they helped to define. Besides, there are plenty of books out there about the Marx Brothers and the cast of "Saturday Night Live," and if Epstein wants to leave the door open for somebody else to write a definitive history about the lives and comedy of the Smothers Brothers, I am certainly not going to be complaining on that score. Epstein is justified in keeping "Mixed Nuts" lean, because that way his thesis is not lost in the laughter. Now, you have to excuse me because I suddenly need to watch "A Night at the Opera" again.

In my review of The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America, I share Epstein's concluding observations that "the comics who emerged from this Jewish background were not aware of psychological or sociological theories. As George Burns noted, they were not hungry for recognition; they were hungry for food. They did not question their humor but rather just recognized and used it. Nevertheless, the roles comedians played and most particularly the contributions of Eastern European Jewish culture shaped the personalities of these comedians and lay, either hidden or not, in their minds." I then explain that, for me, a Gentile, it is impossible to determine to what extent Jewish comedy became assimilated within American society, and, to what extent Jewish comedy helped American society became assimilated with Jewish values. My suggestion then and now is that we call it a tie and consider ourselves that much the better for it.

In this volume, Epstein focuses his attention on "America's love affair with comedy teams from Burns and Allen to Belushi and Aykroyd" as he explains how and why the greatest comedy teams became so popular in films, on radio, and then on television. Sharing much in common with marriages, not all comedy teams survived (e.g. Martin and Lewis) whereas many of those which did succeeded despite significant differences between the partners. Epstein suggests that these differences help to explain the appeal of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges, and Hope and Crosby. I especially appreciate Epstein's insights concerning George Burns and Gracie Allen. Early on, Burns realized that -- contrary to his prior background and training -- audiences required him to be her straight man, feeding her carefully crafted cues. Indeed, most of the great comedy teams demonstrate this symbiotic relationship between "an authority figure" and a "rebellious spirit." The former was not necessarily one of the team's partners. For Laurel and Hardy, Jimmy Finlayson served that purpose as did Margaret Dumont for the Marx Brothers (especially for Groucho) and Audrey Meadows (Alice) for Jackie Gleason (Ralph) and Art Carney (Ed). True, over time, traditional comedy teams seem to have lost much of their appeal, as have stand-up comics. However, as Epstein notes, there was "the uncharted course of their enduring afterlife, reflected in such forms as contemporary situation comedies" which include M*A*S*H, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, Friends, and Frasier.

For Epstein, the essence of a team is suggested by the following exchange between the Crane brothers:

Frasier: Dinner?

Niles: Perfect. No place fancy, I'm sure neither of us wants a heavy meal with lots of wine and expensive desserts.

Frasier: Oh, it's your turn to pay, isn't it?

Niles: You know me so well.

All of the great comedy teams knew each other so well. As Epstein explains, "It is a feeling all of us need, and that is why we will continue to treasure the enduring contributions of comedy teams. They, after all, created characters that reflected our private dreams, suppressed longings, and most bedeviling fears. And, most importantly, as we remember their routines and their friendships, we find ourselves laughing."

This is a brilliant and eloquent as well as highly entertaining book which enables its reader to increase substantially her or his understanding and appreciation of the great comedy teams. As I read the final chapter, I felt like Charles Chipping ("Mr. Chips") who, in his imagination, is re-visited by all the boys whom he had taught throughout his career at Brookfield. Thanks to Lawrence Epstein, I have been able to reconnect with so many beloved entertainers whose talents enriched my life in ways and to an extent I am unable to express now.

If you're a Baby Boomer like I am you have been exposed to just about all of it. When we were growing up in the 1950's and 1960's the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy and of course The Three Stooges were all staples on TV. In the early 1970's, the antics of Groucho, Harpo and Chico enjoyed a remarkable revival and at colleges and universities all over America Marx Brothers film festivals were all the rage. We enjoyed the antics of Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance and lived through the controversary surrounding the Smothers Brothers. And we howled at the comic genius of John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. That is why I was so excited when I came across "Mixed Nuts: America's Love Affair With Comedy Teams From Burns and Allen to Belushi and Aykroyd".

Lawrence Epstein has succeeded in chronicling the history of comedy teams in his exciting new book. I enjoyed it from cover to cover. Epstein tells the remarkable story of comedy teams from their earliest days in vaudeville. He introduces us to names we probably never heard of but who were nonethless influential in the history of team comedy. He cleverly intersperses bits of some of the classic routines into his narrative. And he attempts to explain the political, social and cultural reasons why certain acts were wildly popular while most others fell by the wayside. It is quite obvious that Epstein is a big fan of comedy teams. And in the end, he offers reasons why they have all but disappeared from the American scene. Whatever your age, you are sure to enjoy this informative and extremely well written book. Highly recommended.

The great comedy teams are not gone! They live on in Lawrence J. Epstein's book, Mixed Nuts. Epstein carefully analyzes what made each team tick, why the teams appealed to the America of their day, and why their humor has endured until the present. The book includes some wonderful routines, including classics of Burns and Allen, The Marx Brothers, Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, Stan and Ollie and many more. There's also a complete rendition of "Who's on First" from the famous Bud and Lou. Expertly written and continually entertaining!

In his highly readable book Mixed Nuts, author Lawrence Epstein tracks the history of the comedy team from its origin in minstrel shows, through vaudeville, radio, and film, to its current incarnation in television sitcoms. Along the way Epstein discusses a host of old favorites--from Burns and Allen to Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby to Martin and Lewis--as well as many teams readers will probably never have heard of. The book provides brief accounts of the teams' backgrounds and history, sometimes quoting material from their acts (Epstein provides, for example, a version of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First," which was a pleasure to read), and explaining the teams' appeal given the social milieu of their eras. Gracie Allen's likeable character, for example, a non-threatening woman who maintained her dignity despite her trademark illogic, was "a perfect symbol for women caught between Victorian morality and modern mores." Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden, struggling to afford the accoutrements of middle-class life in the post-War period, appealed to an audience that was striving for, or had only recently achieved, similar goals. Comedy teams were affected not only by the historical circumstances of their times, of course, but more specifically by technological change. The advent of radio, free entertainment for the masses, is said to have killed vaudeville, but old vaudeville stars who could adapt to the new medium--whose rate of delivery was right for performance on air, whose humor did not depend on visual cues and appealed to a broad audience--teams such as Burns and Allen, thrived in radio.

Epstein's account of the comedy team is a quick and absorbing read. Though it is the product of a mountain of research, including dozens of interviews (with the likes of Jerry Stiller, Sid Caesar, and Soupy Sales), the book wears its erudition lightly. Mixed Nuts is filled with interesting bits of information, from the poignant--the tragic death of Lou Costello's infant son--to the just plain neat: Homer Simpson owes his "D'oh," for example, to Laurel and Hardy. Most importantly, however, in tracking the development of the comedy team, and in identifying for readers the strands that link current comedy teams--such as Frasier and Niles Crane of the sitcom Frasier--to their comic forbears, Epstein enriches our appreciation of comedians present and past.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Mixed Nuts: America's Love Affair With Comedy Teams From Burns And Allen to Belushi and Aykroyd isn't the typical biography of a single comedy act but an all-embracing set of memoirs of America's love affair with comedy teams as a whole, from Belushi and Aykroyd to Burns and Allen. Analyses include portraits of rises and falls in popularity, departures from traditional comedy team norms, the changing world of comedy as it moved from stage to the big screen, and more. Author Lawrence Epstein is an English professor who frequently lectures on popular culture, with Mixed Nuts bringing a scholarly, yet accessible, atmosphere to a fine history of American comedy interests.

Mixed Nuts is a vastly entertaining book about comedy. Most of us could use a few good laughs, and those guffaws and chortles will be readily available to you when you read Mixed Nuts.

The book's format is an especially useful one for the subject of comedy. Each team is described in terms of their background, how the team developed, the style of humor they used, the origins of their style, how audiences reacted to them, and how they ended up as a team and as individuals. I especially enjoyed the extensive examples of dialogue that are included for each team. So even when I didn't know a team's work, I could get a good sense of what they were about.

The main stars will probably be familiar to you. These include Burns and Allen, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby, the Three Stooges, Martin and Lewis, Jack Benny and Eddie Anderson, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In and Friends. But you will also be pleasantly surprised to read about teams that you probably don't know as well such as Jim and Marion Jordan who did Fibber McGee and Molly, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll who created the radio version of Amos 'n Andy, the seminal humor of Weber and Fields, and the pioneering work of Miller and Lyles.

Comedy is difficult to write about without stepping all over the material. Mr. Epstein has done a remarkable job of developing several major themes in the book in ways that will help you appreciate the success of each team. His discussions of the role of the "straight man" are especially insightful. He is also excellent in analyzing the role of physical humor and the different ways it can be successfully employed. I especially enjoyed his discussions of the evolution from Vaudeville and Burlesque into comedy acts, radio shows and television programs. His discussion of how sitcoms descended from comedy teams is also helpful to consider.

Naturally, anyone who wants to know more about his or her favorite stars will be rewarded to finding out about their backgrounds and secret pain. I doubt if you could learn much more by reading a whole book on each person described here.

If you read only one book about the great American comedy teams, you would do well to select this one.

This book is wonderful. Love reading about Burns and Allen. And all the other comics. It is a really wonderful book.

Who would have ever thought that the birth, evolution and eventual demise of comedy teams would present an insight into America's changing psyche? Author Lawrence Epstein did and we have him to thank for this interesting, insightful book on some of the most famous names in American entertainment including Weber & Fields, Burns & Allen, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello and Martin & Lewis.

Epstein's book is sub-titled 'America's love affair with comedy teams,' an appropriate heading since the American audience embraced each of the various comedy teams in turn, loving them for what they brought to the public and then moving on to the next, new funnymen. Most people probably never bothered to rationalize WHY they enjoyed a particular comedy team; they just enjoyed the laughter of the moment. Luckily for us Epstein's probing insights help reveal much about why, for instance, Abbott and Costello was just what America needed during World War II. It's fascinating stuff but you also get to laugh along the way as Epstein includes some of the classic comedy lines and routines from the teams.

A good read!

Though the subtitle suggests that great comedy teams lasted at least into the 70s-80s and the cover's inclusion of a couple characters from <u>Friends</u> would suggest they lasted in the 90s-00s, the reality is that they were pretty much through by the end of the 50s, but what a run they had. Though the heyday of the teams came in vaudeville, Golden Age movies, and early television, those of us in the Baby Boom generation -- especially those of us born later on, who grew up with television -- were probably more thoroughly exposed than any other demographic group and seem most likely to love this book. We got to watch The Little Rascals, Three Stooges, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and even Amos 'n Andy in syndication every afternoon when we got home from school. Abbot and Costello was a Sunday morning staple and Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Hope and Crosby's Road movies made perfect cheap filler for non-network broadcast stations. There were enough variety shows still going that older teams and solo comedians would still show up from time to time. We may not have gotten all the jokes, but we spent an awful lot of time laughing at their varied antics. In <u>Mixed Nuts</u> Lawrence J. Epstein treats us not just to a history of these acts but a sociological dissertation on American humor. The anecdote and joke-filled history, though brisk and though it extends several decades too far, is informative and fun, but it's the context he adds that makes the book fascinating.



No one will agree with all his analyses, and sometimes he's obviously reaching in order to give comedy acts a significance they just don't warrant, but the text is so rich in ideas and so thought-provoking that the few misfires are easily forgiven. Consider, for example, this discussion of George Burns and Gracie Allen:
[C]omic timing was a crucial part of their professional craft. In comedy, the straight man's "timing" refers to his ability to wait to speak until the laughter has peaked, receded, and finally stopped so that audiences can hear the next line, but not wait for so long after it has stopped that audiences might get confused or bored. The comic's timing refers to the response after the straight man has finished a line. The term "beat" is used to measure the pause between lines, and it and the "pace," or speed of the delivery, had to be perfect. The comic in the team needed an appropriate appearance and funny lines. Both the straight man and the comic needed rhythm.



Burns and Allen were experts at all of this. They knew which words to emphasize. They learned to control their voices. The staccato rhythm of their delivery was perfect. Other performers would have spoken too slowly or too fast or fallen out of the rhythm, which had to be maintained with each line and each silence. They even used pauses well. Gracie would giggle, an infectious sound and a prompt for even further audience laughter. George's repetition of much of the material was also crucial to the pacing, allowing the audience to grasp the premise precisely and be set up by George for the line to follow. It was impossible for Burns to be a comedian in such a structure. Any joke he interjected would break the patented Burns and Allen patter.
Note how deftly he establishes the general concepts he'll need throughout the book, but illustrates with a specific team, describing what made them masters of the form.



Likewise, here he discusses an irony that I've always found especially delicious, that two of the most conservative men in Hollywood politically were also the great innovators of post-modernism, years before academics and intellectuals imagined they were inventing a new phenomena:
Beyond creating an alternative to classic teams, Hope and Crosby signaled the decline of the traditional comedy team in two ways. First, they helped erase the line between the two worlds created by classic comedy teams. They developed the fourth and final model of the relationship between reality and the comic world created by teams, which negated the three previous models developed by Burns and Allen, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello. In this new model, there was no necessity for one member of a team to have a tenuous hold on reality while another character brought the team back to the real world, or for the team to create a fantasy world in which the team members banded together to overcome a strange, hostile reality represented by an outside straight man, or a team in which a straight man represented a tricky world seeking to con us.



Hope and Crosby developed a realistic humor that mocked the illusory world their movie producers had arranged for them. [...]



[I]f you didn't take the real world too seriously there was no great need to create a fantasy comic world. Such an approach required a lack of sentimentality, an ability to avoid so strong an attachment to any person or place that you couldn't face the inevitable disappointments inherent in those people and places.
The earlier portion of that is bang on, but by the end seems quite wrong. Rather it is precisely because we are realistic about the inevitability of being disappointed by people and places that we can find the disappointments comic when they come, rather than tragic. Therein lies the secret to the notion that all comedy is conservative.



Let's end with one more, a look at Ralph Kramden that let's us see The Honeymooners in an almost religious context:
The character goes through a transformation in each show -- but then returns to his old form for the next show, only to be transformed again. Audiences wanted to see that transformation -- that change from the angry loser, the guy with a thousand get-rich ideas that all fail, that yells at his wife and his neighbor, that never seems to get ahead -- to the Chaplin-like, sad and sympathetic soul who is touched by love and, in Gleason's view, by grace and somehow finds the means to express it. As an episode was about to close, he often gazed lovingly at his wife and said, "Alice, you're the greatest."



Audiences saw in Ralph's transformation hopes for redemption in their own marriages and lives.
That's good stuff. Even if you disagree you're forced to grapple with what you think is wrong about it, an edifying exercise in itself. I suspect though that as you read you'll find more you agree with than disagree, and while it would have been better to end the story before we get to the point of considering Rowan and Martin and Cheech and Chong to be peers of the greats, all of it worthwhile.