Yesterday I noted that Time Magazine’s website that lists and shows embeds from TV’s all-time top 100 shows included the classic Abbott & Costello Show which inspired Jerry Seinfeld’s show. Some readers emailed and asked to see a classic A&C bit.
So here is one. The famous “Sloooooooowly I turned…” vaudeville bit that the Three Stooges and many other entertainers did as well. Abbott and Costello used the filming of their show as a way to preserve classic routines that had been done on the stage for show biz history (many of them from their careers in burlesque) and to also copyright them.
This is a great classic bit that was done by many entertainers countless times on the stage. Note the great character-actor comic Sidney Fields who plays both the prisoner and at the end the lawyer. Fields wrote a lot of the A&C TV shows and was Lou Costello’s partner in Costello’s last public performance, after he split with Bud Abbott. Costello died in March 1959 of heart disease at age 52.
Enjoy this — and if you’re a young aspiring or starting comedian you need to study this show…which still holds up as brimming with attitude.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9bvg2yF4DcJoe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.