Mixed Nuts : America's Love Affair with Comedy Teams from Burns and Allen to Belushi and Aykroyd

by Epstein, Lawrence

• ISBN13: 9781586481902
• ISBN10: 1586481908
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-12
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

From nineteenth-century vaudeville to contemporary sitcoms, comedy teams have made people laugh. Those teams were masters of the comic craft and gave to the world a particularly American art form. And, more than that, they were funny.Lawrence J. Epstein has written a joyful, celebratory history of America's finest comedy teams from Burns and Allen and Laurel and Hardy through the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the Smothers Brothers and beyond. It's a story of the classics of comedy and, at the moment of the apparent eclipse of comedy teams, of their unexpected rebirth.Although for comedians success is fickle and failure brutal, comedy teams couldn't resist the lure of celebrity and the remarkable explosion of the popular media of radio, film, and television. These were platforms from which to speak to an emerging nation in often troubled times; and when the times were hardest, the nation looked to its most cherished comic teams to cheer it up. Filled with telling anecdotes and hilarious routines,Mixed Nutsis the story of how America created comedy teams and how successive teams reflected America back to its people, meeting its deepest needs, tackling its most sensitive issues and mocking its pomposities. And always for laughs.

Author Biography

Lawrence J. Epstein is an English professor and the author of The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. He frequently lectures on American popular culture and lives with his wife and family on Long Island, New York.

Table of Contents

Musty theaters and asbestos curtains : the rise of Burns and Allen	p. 1
Wild gags and murdered English : the birth of comedy teams	p. 16
An explosion of stars : the first classic comedy teams	p. 31
"In this country we're only permitted one husband" : comedy teams on radio	p. 50
Comedy comes to the big screen : Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy	p. 80
"I shot an elephant in my pajamas" : the Marx Brothers	p. 106
Anarchy let loose : other comedy teams of the 1930s	p. 119
"Who's on first" : Abbott and Costello meet the 1940s	p. 129
The road to temporary teams : Hope and Crosby	p. 151
Loco boys make good : the Three Stooges	p. 163
"The playboy and the putz" : Martin and Lewis	p. 178
"Helloooo, Ball" : comedy teams of the 1950s	p. 189
"Mom always liked you best" : comedy teams of the 1960s	p. 218
Vanishing stars : final acts and the death of comedy teams	p. 238
The stars return : the unexpected afterlife and enduring legacy of comedy teams	p. 261
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