Sketch Comedy

Identity, Reflexivity, and American Television

Nick Marx

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253044273
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A history of sketch comedy on American television and analysis of what it says about American culture and society. In Sketch Comedy: Identity, Reflexivity, and American Television, Nick Marx examines some of the genre's most memorable?and controversial?moments from the early days of television to the contemporary line-up. Through explorations of sketches from well-known shows such as Saturday Night Live, The State, Inside Amy Schumer, Key & Peele, and more, Marx argues that the genre has served as a battleground for the struggle between comedians who are pushing the limits of what is possible on television and network executives who are more mindful of the financial bottom line. Whether creating new catchphrases or transgressing cultural taboos, sketch comedies give voice to marginalized performers and audiences, providing comedians and viewers opportunities to test their own ideas about their place in society, while simultaneously echoing mainstream cultural trends. The result, Marx suggests, is a hilarious and flexible form of identity play unlike anything else in American popular culture and media. "An excellent study of a long-neglected area in television/media studies and is part of a larger turn toward the centrality of comedy in post-war U.S. culture." —Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University "A stalwart of television... sketch comedy finally gets the in-depth critical attention it deserves... Marx shows how sketch comedy has fit (and been constrained by) TV's industrial contexts, from live variety shows in its earliest days to movement across media in the era of multiple platforms. These case studies not only chart sketch comedy's past, they provide the theoretical and analytical tools to consider its future." —Ethan Thompson, Texas A&M University Corpus Christi

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FROM RADIO VOICES TO VARIETY CHOICES

The Colgate Comedy Hour and Sketch Comedy in Early Television

THIS CHAPTER INVESTIGATES TELEVISION SKETCH COMEDY’S KEY historical antecedents, as well as its iterations in early American television. It begins with a consideration of how media and cultural studies scholars have analyzed mediated comedy as a site of identity formation based in race/ethnicity, gender, and class. These studies characterize comedy, at least insofar as television sketch comedy is concerned, as a form of low culture with the potential to challenge dominant conceptions of taste and cultural power. As commercial mass media industries in the United States grew in the first half of the twentieth century, long-form comedy with recurring situations became the preferred norm. The vestiges of low culture often operated at a secondary level in sketch-like bits based in vaudeville, radio, and early sound film.

This dynamic would continue into early television vaudeo programs—sketch comedy’s forerunners—where the traditions of vaudeville conflicted with the weekly production demands of live television. In a case study of the vaudeo program The Colgate Comedy Hour, I explore the stakes of the competing ideas producers, performers, and advertisers had for the program’s comedy sketches. Although heavily reliant on former vaudeville stars like Eddie Cantor and Jerry Lewis, Colgate producers reflexively used sketches to mitigate the extent to which its star comedian hosts dictated the creative direction of the show. In doing so, Colgate contributed to the television industry’s subsequent privileging of comedies based in representational performances and recurring, sitcom scenarios in the network era.

In exploring sketch comedy’s various functions for early television, then, this chapter outlines the parameters of sketch comedy as a field of cultural production, one in which various agents struggled for the cultural resources to consecrate their particular interpretation of the nascent genre. The forms of social and cultural capital pursued by the stars and producers of programs like Colgate helped define the types of positions later sketch comedians would take—and react against—within the field. This chapter, then, establishes many of the key concepts—performative modes, cultural identities, and industrial pressures—on which this book’s subsequent case studies will build. The influences of vaudeo television programs and atomistic comedy within long-form comedic texts figure prominently in how later sketch comedy shows on network and cable television, on the internet, and in feature films would negotiate their own reflexive flexibilities. Indeed, part of this chapter’s goal is to demonstrate how sketch comedy is not necessarily unique to a particular time period but is part of a long tradition of mediated comedy that offers a way to see industrial and cultural changes over time. Examining how the format has historically worked against and within industry routines further highlights the constructed nature of how and why so many have used sketch comedy’s malleability and modularity for a variety of purposes.

Television Sketch Comedy Antecedents in Vaudeville, Film, and Radio

The most relevant study to begin a survey of television sketch comedy antecedents is Robert Allen’s analysis of taste and the commodification of burlesque in the late nineteenth century.¹ In examinations of the bawdy comedy and overt sexuality of women stage performers like Lydia Thompson, Allen describes how burlesque entered the American theatrical scene and upset the tastes of legitimate theatergoers. Rather than dismissing burlesque simply as low culture, Allen argues the opposite, suggesting that the form retained much of its transgressive potential because of its differentiation as less than other art forms. As such, Allen’s work suggests that cultural distinctions—such as those based in comedic taste—need not be framed in strictly binary terms, but as providing a fluid framework that variously negotiates, privileges, and/or subordinates myriad cultural and industrial discourses.

The flexible nature of taste and comedy would play out again in burlesque and vaudeville theaters of the early twentieth century, as well as vaudeville comedians’ transition into sound film. As Henry Jenkins notes, the Progressive middle class of the era spurned the indecorous pleasures of vaudeville and espoused a more sophisticated form of comedy based not in carnal laughter but social change.² Despite, or perhaps because of, Progressives’ distaste, ribald humor became ubiquitous at the vaudeville theaters populated by a lower class seeking a quick release from the drudgeries of their work. Invoking French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s framework for the social stratification of taste, Jenkins details the role of middle-class leisure time and how it led to an institutionalization of morality- and story-centric forms of comedy, increasingly marginalizing vaudevillian comedy as low.

In those cultural margins of the early twentieth century, peep shows providing minutes-long spectacles and titillation thrived in ramshackle nickelodeon movie theaters. But with the rise of the vertically integrated Hollywood studio system, cinema also moved into respectable downtown theaters and began to favor longer narrative formats. However, the move threw this industrial norm into flux in the early 1930s with Hollywood film’s incorporation of sound, a transition in which sketch-like comedic bits would play a crucial role. A subset of comedy films attempted to integrate the self-contained sketches of vaudevillian comedic spectacle with Hollywood’s preferred storytelling norms of linear causality and goal-driven characters.³ Jenkins calls these films “anarchistic,” a label referring both to the aesthetic boundaries they broke and to what the breaking of those boundaries meant in their sociocultural milieu. In anarchistic comedies, mainstream and low comedy existed side by side, thereby highlighting the constructed nature of the respective class distinctions of their intended audiences.

Jenkins investigates this dynamic via a case study of the early sound films of comedian Eddie Cantor, who would later become a regular on NBC’s vaudeo program The Colgate Comedy Hour in the 1950s.⁴ Cantor, then a wildly popular Jewish vaudevillian, found himself negotiating the conflicting demands of two moviegoing audiences in the early sound era—coastal audiences in sound-equipped theaters for whom vaudeville was a familiar aesthetic, and hinterland audiences catching up to the unfamiliar sound technologies. Cantor’s comedic persona would gradually undergo a de-Semitization, one manifest in his later films’ privileging of conventional romantic plots over vaudevillian sketch-like comedy bits. Cantor reluctantly adjusted his humor in order to play to what was becoming a national cinema audience, downplaying his Jewish identity and sexually charged jokes. Although early sound cinema utilized sketch-like comedy in attempts to build uniform viewing experiences, flexible, ambiguously expressed ethnic identities persisted in Cantor’s work.

In a similar vein, radio comedian Fanny Brice devised clever ways to use bit-driven comedy both to speak to broad audiences and to maintain a sense of cultural specificity for women. Using what Michele Hilmes calls the “Schnooks strategy,” Brice’s routines relied on a recurring baby character named Schnooks who feigned infantilized innocence as a way to slip in double-entendre and sexual puns.⁵ Like Cantor’s dual address, Brice’s Schnooks was not a mere gag. The character voiced critiques of patriarchal authority and bolstered feminine cultural identities, while at the same time providing an early template for a sketch convention—the recurring character.

Many comedians used sketches and characters from their vaudeville acts to experiment with what would and would not work in film, radio, and television during the first half of the twentieth century. Some particularly struggled to adapt to commercial broadcast media’s advertising demands. One common method, as seen in the Schnooks strategy, was to take an initially one-note character and stretch it out over several appearances of a given program. Indeed, this recurring character approach naturally lent itself, on the one hand, to the recurring narratives—and all of the production routines they entailed—of the situation comedy. On the other hand, the device provided comedians with room to experiment with a unique cultural voice or critique and to discard it if it did not work. Given the flexibility of this sketch comedy device, many worked in some version of the format across the social and cultural realms of mid-century America.

In many cases, however, the mandates of a broadcasting industry seeking predictable production routines mitigated sketch comedy’s early experimental impulses, a dynamic with cultural consequences. Women viewers and discourses of femininity, as Lynn Spigel has noted, were the primary sites through which radio and television sought to tame comedy’s vaudevillian impulses and domesticate them, a process governed by dominant ideologies of ethnicity, suburbanization, and consumerism.⁶ Television’s centrality in the living rooms of post–World War II suburban houses created a seamless overlap between the roles of wife and mother, leisure and domestic labor for women, with consumption as its nexus point. As a result, Americans increasingly left behind their ethnic roots in favor of the cultural logic of consumption more commonly seen in situation comedies.⁷

In other words, more than just the industry’s desire for production stability fueled its eventual move from the sketch-fueled vaudeo programs of early television to the stability of domestic sitcoms that would dominate the subsequent network era. Just as Cantor toned down his Yiddish in-jokes for broader sound film audiences, so too did scores of other vaudevillians adapt their transgressive comedic personas to meet television’s mass audience demands. Lucille Ball’s domestic sitcom I Love Lucy (1951–1957), for example, retained much of the bawdiness of her vaudeville humor, but in ways ultimately deferential to the patriarchal logic of television’s national appeal.⁸ Those who didn’t adapt to the rigors of filmed sitcoms—and all their implicit privileging of whiteness, domesticity, and consumption—largely fell by the wayside, a historical process privileging long-form comedy traditions that subtly overrode sketch-like comedy traditions in early television.

As this brief sampling of sketch antecedents indicates, sketch in the early twentieth century was not yet the coherent entertainment genre we largely identify with television today. Its clearest forebear was the minutes-long comedy bit that entertainers of all stripes had been honing for decades in vaudeville theaters. It is no accident, then, that when mass media like film, radio, and television started or faced technological changes, producers looked to comedians with a stockpile of successful sketches and bits from their stage shows in order to help soothe any growing pains. It is this formal malleability and openness to experimentation that provides sketch comedy its most salient power—the flexibility for performers and producers to figure out just what the hell they are (supposed to be) doing with a given medium. In other words, perhaps sketch’s earliest function for television was helping the medium determine what it could and could not be. As I discuss below, this debate informed many discussions about the creative direction of vaudeo shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour, as it became clear comedy sketches were not enough to sustain it week in and week out. On a larger scale, sketch’s emergence as one thing in early television and reemergence as something else in later eras would have long-term implications for the kinds of programs and audiences television would privilege for decades.

Variety, Vaudeo, and Sketch Distinctions in Early Television

So far I have been reluctant to define sketch comedy’s closest generic kin, the variety show. Generally speaking, we might think of variety simply as the broader parent genre of which sketch comedies are a part. As I discuss below in the case of Colgate and other programs like it, just about all vaudeville comedians on early television worked in variety shows, but not all variety shows were vaudeo programs. A variety show is any mixture of short entertainment segments such as music, comedy, magic, monologues, and/or dance “whose unity lies solely in a time span, a distinctive structure, or in the recurrence of a particular performer or performers across otherwise separate acts and items.”⁹ A grade school holiday pageant might be considered a variety show organized around a Christmas theme, just as the celebrity host and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences serve as the aegis for the variety structure of the annual Oscars broadcast. One manner of understanding a comedy sketch, particularly for early television, is as an “act,” one of many entertainment segments contained within the variety program that is likely unrelated to others.

Where the distinction between sketch and other generic categories matters for early television is in how sketches created short, self-contained narrative ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sketch Comedy and Reflexive Flexibility
• 1. From Radio Voices to Variety Choices: The Colgate Comedy Hour and Sketch Comedy in Early Television
• 2. “. . . and You’re Not”: Saturday Night Live in the Network Era and Beyond
• 3. Brand X: MTV’s The State and Generation X in the Multichannel Transition
• 4. Sketch Comedy’s Identity (Post-)Politics: Inside Amy Schumer, Key & Peele, and Comedy Central in the Post-Network Era
• Conclusion: Sketch Comedy and Cultural Cohesion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author