Abbott and Costello
How Two Vaudeville Men Took Over Radio
The story of Abbott and Costello on radio is really the story of two men who came up the hard way and never entirely left where they started. They first crossed paths in 1929, when Lou Costello was booked into a neighborhood theater and Bud Abbott happened to be working the box office. Abbott stepped onstage as Costello's straight man, and something clicked. They didn't make it permanent until 1935, when Costello's regular straight man fell ill and Abbott — then cashiering at a burlesque house — stepped in at the Eltinge Burlesque Theater on 42nd Street. By 1936 they were a full-time act, grinding through vaudeville and burlesque during the Depression years, refining the formula — Abbott the stern taskmaster, Costello fumbling his way through life — that would eventually make them stars. From the start, Costello insisted joint earnings be split 60-40 in Abbott's favor, recognizing what a good straight man was worth.
By 1938 they were performing at Loew's in New York when Ted Collins, the man behind Kate Smith's career, caught their act. Collins signed them, and for two seasons beginning February 3, 1938, Abbott and Costello were regulars on The Kate Smith Hour. They also turned up on Edgar Bergen's Chase and Sanborn Hour and landed roles in the 1939 Broadway revue The Streets of Paris. Radio liked them, though there was an early problem: their voices were similar enough that listeners couldn't always tell who was speaking during the rapid-fire repartee. Costello solved it by affecting a high-pitched, childish voice for the microphone — a choice that ended up defining how millions of people heard him. Universal signed the team in 1939, and their low-budget films helped pull the financially troubled studio out of the red. The radio show returned the favor, boosting ticket sales for Buck Privates, In the Navy, and Hold That Ghost.
The Shape of the Run
The show's time on the air breaks into three distinct chapters. The first was a summer run on NBC, filling in for The Fred Allen Show from July 3 to September 25, 1940 — a Wednesday 9 p.m. slot sponsored by Sal Hepatica. That was essentially a tryout. The real run began October 8, 1942, when the show returned to NBC with Camel Cigarettes as the sponsor. By then the duo's combined film income had reached $790,000, and they came back as full-fledged movie stars; their first Camel season pulled a 20.5 Hooper rating, and by fall 1942 they had topped the popularity polls of Radio Daily and Radio Guide. They held that NBC berth until June 27, 1947, starting Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. and settling into a 10 p.m. Thursday slot from 1943 onward.
When the NBC run ended, the show moved to ABC and ran from October 1, 1947 to June 9, 1949 — first on Wednesdays at 9 p.m., then shifting to Thursdays at 8 p.m. The ABC years were sustained, meaning no sponsor, though beginning in 1947 the programs were recorded and made available via transcriptions to stations outside the regular network. Alongside the main program, ABC also carried The Abbott and Costello Children's Show on Saturday mornings, running December 6, 1947 through March 26, 1949. That companion program featured top juvenile talent — child vocalist Anna Mae Slaughter, child announcer Johnny McGovern, plus quizzes and games — and awarded $1,000 savings bonds to outstanding youngsters each week. It was also unsponsored. Costello's relapse of rheumatic fever in 1949 prevented ABC from renewing for another season, and that was the end.
The Company They Kept
The supporting cast around Abbott and Costello was substantial. Mel Blanc, Frank Nelson, Sid Fields, Iris Adrian, Martha Wentworth, Sharon Douglas, and Verna Felton all had roles, with Adrian playing Costello's sometimes-girlfriend Lena Genster and Fields turning up as a character called "Melonhead." Costello's real-life brother-in-law Joe Kirk played the recurring Mr. Bacciagalupe, an excitable Sicilian immigrant who frequently heckled Costello, and Artie Auerbach played Mr. Kitzel. Announcer Ken Niles took on regular comedic parts rather than just reading copy, with Elvia Allman as his wife, Mrs. Niles. Wally Brown, John Brown, Kent Rogers, and Benay Venuta filled out the semi-regular bench. Later announcing chores passed to Michael Roy, Frank Bingman, and Jim Doyle.
Vocalists Connie Haines and Marilyn Maxwell handled the musical portions, with Amy Arnell, Ashley Eustis, Susan Miller, and Marilyn Williams also taking turns at the microphone; vocal groups included the Delta Rhythm Boys and the Les Baxter Singers. The orchestra changed hands often — Leith Stevens led in 1942, followed across the run by Skinnay Ennis, Will Osborne, Jack Meakin, Charles Hoff, Matty Matlock, Matty Malneck, Freddie Rich, and Peter van Steeden. Behind the scenes, Martin Gosch produced. The writing staff included Howard Harris, Hal Fimberg, Don Prindle, Ed Cherkose, Len Stern, Martin Ragaway, Paul Conlan, Parke Levy, and Ed Forman, who served as head writer from the mid-1940s. Floyd Caton handled sound effects. That's a sizable operation for a show built around two performers whose core material came straight from the stage — but keeping Abbott and Costello fresh week after week required real infrastructure, and the staff turned out skits that, as Vincent Terrace later observed, often revolved around Bud and Lou's efforts to succeed in some business venture or another. The recurring "Susquehanna Hat Company" sketch — Abbott and Costello as the hapless owners of a struggling hat shop — was typical of the formula.
The Sketch That Needed No Introduction
The baseball routine known as "Who's on First?" was created for the stage, but it proved nearly perfectly suited to radio. Ted Collins, of all people, didn't think so. When the team auditioned it in his office, he cut them off mid-stream: "They'll hiss you off the air if you do that." He was wrong. The bit was first performed for a national radio audience on March 24, 1938, on The Kate Smith Hour; no copy of that broadcast is known to survive. The earliest surviving recording is the second performance, also on Kate Smith, from October 6, 1938 — the version the Library of Congress added to the National Recording Registry in 2003. John Grant, an ex-burlesque producer hired soon after the team joined Kate Smith, helped polish the sketch and may have helped expand it before its radio debut.
By the fall of 1937, Variety was already calling "Who's on First?" the hit of a touring stage show, and Abbott and Costello performed it at the 1940 White House Correspondents' Dinner — one of several command performances for Franklin Roosevelt. Oddly, the sketch was performed only twice on the team's own radio series; it turned up more often when they guested elsewhere. On the April 17, 1947 broadcast, it served as the climax of a story in which Costello received a telegram from Joe DiMaggio asking him to fill in due to injury. By 1944 the routine was formally copyrighted. In 1956 a gold recording of it was placed on permanent display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown — a fact that has fed a persistent misconception that Abbott and Costello themselves are inducted members. They aren't; the recording is. Time named "Who's on First?" the Best Comedy Sketch of the 20th Century in its December 26, 1999 issue, and in 2005 the line landed on the American Film Institute's list of the hundred most memorable movie quotes.
The duo's broader comedy formula translated just as cleanly. Abbott played authority and competence, however strained; Costello played chaos and incomprehension, punctuated by his catchphrase — "I'm a baaaaad boy!" — whenever he got caught doing something wrong. Another tagline, "I'm only three and a half years old," got picked up and quoted endlessly in Looney Tunes and in Tex Avery's MGM cartoons, and Bugs Bunny's "Ain't I a stinker?" was borrowed straight from Costello. At the height of the duo's fame, Warner Bros. produced three cartoons featuring thinly disguised versions of them as cats and mice named Babbit and Catstello — including Bob Clampett's 1942 A Tale of Two Kitties, which happened to introduce Tweety. Their slapstick especially connected with younger audiences, which is part of what made the Saturday children's program a natural extension. For about a decade, that formula kept them near the top of the entertainment world. During a 1942 national tour they sold $85 million in war bonds in 35 days, and through World War II they were the highest-paid entertainers in the world.
The Night It Became Something Else
The most documented moment in the show's run has nothing to do with comedy. In March 1943, at the peak of the radio show, Costello was stricken with rheumatic fever. Abbott refused to continue without him. Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore were brought in to fill the gap.
Costello came back in the fall of 1943, and during dress rehearsal for his return episode he was called away. His one-year-old son, Lou Jr., had fallen into the family pool and drowned. The baby was two days short of his first birthday; Costello had asked his wife to keep him up that night to hear his father on the radio for the first time. The team's manager, Eddie Sherman, drove Costello home to deliver the news in person — no one wanted to tell him by phone. Mickey Rooney was brought in to read Costello's lines at the rehearsal. Then, around 6 p.m., Costello called Abbott and said he was coming back to do the show. For 30 minutes he performed, fighting back tears, while guest star Lana Turner — according to Bob Thomas's dual biography of the pair — was so distraught she could scarcely deliver her lines above a whisper. When Ken Niles read the sign-off, Costello broke down on the air. Abbott stepped forward and told the stunned studio audience what had happened. Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, and Red Skelton all reached out afterward to offer help.
It's a story that stays with you because it runs so completely against the grain of what the show was. Costello had already earned the nickname "Hard-Luck Lou" for his personal tragedies, and this was the worst of them. Maxene Andrews of the Andrews Sisters later said he was never quite the same — that he didn't seem as fun-loving and as warm, that he seemed to anger easily. That he went on the air that night says something about the man, and Abbott's refusal to carry on alone during the illness said something about their partnership.
How It Ended
The radio show ended as the medium changed around it. Slapstick faded along with radio, and by June 1949 the run was finished. The team kept going, though. In January 1951 they joined the rotating hosts of The Colgate Comedy Hour on NBC — Joe DiMaggio actually turned up on one broadcast to perform "Who's on First?" with them. From fall 1952 to spring 1954 their syndicated television series ran on more than 40 local stations through MCA, 52 episodes over two seasons. Decades later, Entertainment Weekly named it one of the 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time, and Jerry Seinfeld pointed to it as the direct inspiration for Seinfeld — a comedy about funny situations rather than life lessons. NBC celebrated the connection in a 1994 special, Abbott and Costello Meet Jerry Seinfeld. In 1967 a Hanna-Barbera animated series put Bud Abbott back on television voicing himself.
The partnership officially ended on July 15, 1957. Costello died of a heart attack on March 3, 1959, at age 52; a shattered Abbott served as a pallbearer. Abbott — born October 2, 1895, reportedly in a circus tent, into a family of circus performers — outlived him by fifteen years and died April 24, 1974, in Woodland Hills, California. Both men died nearly broke. Despite earning as much as two million dollars annually at their peak, IRS troubles in the early 1950s had forced them to sell their homes and the rights to some of their films, and an eight-year audit of Abbott's back taxes left him a pauper. What remained was the body of work — the NBC years with Camel backing them, the ABC years sustaining on their own momentum, the Children's Show running Saturday mornings in between, and one baseball sketch sitting under glass in Cooperstown.