Time Magazine offers this GREAT LIST complete with embedded videos.
This is TMV’s MUST VISIT site of the day — and you’ll have hours of fun and enjoyment going through the list.
Lo and behold, yours truly who is a student, fan and practitioner of comedy (some say especially in the posts I try to write seriously on TMV) went to this site and found one of my FAVORITE shows.
For years I have told anyone interested in comedy to go back and study the 1952 Abbott & Costello TV show. TIME essentially says the same thing and echoes what I told someone this week:
The earliest TV shows were oddly assembled transitions between old genres that were (theater, vaudeville, etc.) and the TV that would become. Abbott and Costello, which debuted in 1952, was one of the most distinctive and acerbically funny of these video lungfish. The loosely connected skits conjured a seedy, hilariously cutthroat world in which there are two kinds of people: the one getting over and the ones getting gotten over on. Straight man Bud Abbott and whiny hustler Lou Costello combined their slapstick and pratfalls with a gleefully misanthropic sensibility; no one could be trusted, even, or especially the kids, as embodied by Stinky, the bratty urchin played brilliantly by The Three Stooges’ Joe Besser. Larry David would make a living out of this attitude decades later, but as Abbott and Costello would say, they were on first.
I recently showed some of these shows to a high school student. He loved them. In terms of “attitude,” A&C on their TV show were way ahead of their time — and Jerry Seinfeld later credited their two seasons of programs with inspiring his TV show. You can buy the shows on DVDs here.
Joe 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.