Abbott and Costello, Part 1

The comedy team of Abbott and Costello created some of the most memorable sketches in history. Their perfectly balanced energy catapulted them from burlesque and vaudeville stages to radio, and eventually Hollywood.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And back
when we did our episode on Lucy a Ball, which,
as listeners may recall, was a sponsored episode brought to

(00:22):
you by CNN, on the short list of comedians that
we proposed for that episode was Abbott and Costello. We
ended up going with Lucy, but I haven't been able
to stop thinking about Budd and Leeu ever since, and
I've really wanted to talk about their story. Yeah, we
were not kidding when we were like, here is our
giant list of people in comedy history we would love
to talk about. I have a long list of comedy

(00:43):
people I would like to talk about. So these were
two men who really defined in many ways the comedy duo.
They weren't the first, nor were they the last, but
they were really a pretty significant payer in terms of entertainment.
And their work is quoted literally all the time, sometimes
of people who know the lines but could not tell
you where they came from. Like I have watched people

(01:04):
do that I'm a bad Boy and you go, oh,
you're into Abbot Costello and they look at you with
the blank face. They don't know they got it from
a cartoon like they did. They don't know that it
actually came from two people who were amazing comedians. Uh.
And the relationship between Bud Abbott and Lou Costello was really,
really complex. They were two very different people that ended
up bound together for life because of their partnership and

(01:26):
the way their story unfolds is really fun at times
and really tragic at others. Uh. And heads up going
in first, there is a bit more info on Lou
Costello here than Bud Abbott, and that is because Lu's
daughter Chris wrote a really lengthy biography of her dad,
which is complete with interviews of friends and family. It
is very thorough. There is not really a comparable biographical

(01:48):
account for Bud Abbott, probably at least in part because
he was a much more private person. Uh. Second, this
is a two partner because there's a lot of ground
to cover, and even with two longish episodes, there is
still plenty that had to be left out for time.
So while it would be great to do a comprehensive
twenty two part episode on but Eva and Lucastellope. I

(02:09):
imagine by the end I'd be the only person still
in it. So we'll start with some biographical information about
each of them. But Abbott was born Bob Abbott on
October two and asked very Park, New Jersey. And he
was born to a circus family, uh which always delights me.

(02:30):
His mother, Ray Fisher Abbott, was a performer as a
bareback horse rider, and his father, Harry Abbott, was an
advanced man. He was one of the people who would
arrive at a location before the Traveling Circus Act to
scout and book shows and make arrangements once a deal
was struck. And I want to point out right out
of the gate that that is a contested year. There

(02:51):
are allegedly documents that stayed his birth year is eighteen
ninety seven, but often it is told as so uh no,
that that's a disputed fact, and it is one of
those two years. But after Bud was born, Harry and
Ray decided they were going to leave behind the itinerant
circus life and they settled at Coney Island. Harry was
actually instrumental in the establishment of what came to be

(03:13):
known as the Columbia Wheel. Also known as the Columbia
Amusement Company. And so the Wheel, which started in nineteen
o two, was actually the first burlesque circuit in the
United States. It was a professional organization that booked act
to tour in rotation. That's where the term wheel comes
from to theaters that were on the circuit. But started
working with his father at Coney Island as a teenager,

(03:35):
and he left school to do so. Thanks to his
father's connections, he got a job at the Casino Burlesque
Theater in Brooklyn, working as treasurer, and that meant that
he collected money and complaints and he relayed both of
them to the management. Yeah, I like that, UM Often
in looking back at these old accounts, the cashier was
called the treasurer, which sounds a little bit more important

(03:58):
at least to today's year, or maybe just mine. But
so in nineteen eighteen he became treasurer at the National Theater,
which was a Detroit burlesque theater. And I should point
out there's a little gap here. And I found this
interesting factoid but was never ever able to um validate
it or find any additional information. There were two different biographies,
both online that I saw that had this little throwaway

(04:21):
line that he was kidnapped and taken to Norway when
he was fifteen. But I never found any anything to
substantiate that. So that may have been what happened in
between his time at Coney Island and when he moved
to Detroit Um, but we don't know. But it was
in Detroit that he met the actress, dancer and comedian
Betty Smith, and Bud and Betty Smith, who had been

(04:44):
born Jenny May Pratt before she changed her name to
Betty Smith for show business, fell in love and they
were soon married. Bud continued to work at the National
Theater after he and Betty got married, and he was
eventually promoted from treasurer to manager in ninety four. His
work at nash L included a new role, straight man.
Betty had noticed that Bud would watch the show from

(05:04):
the wings, and he eventually confessed to her that he'd
like to try out the stage for himself. She encouraged
him to do so, so he started appearing as a
straight man, first with his wife Betty as a duo
called Bud and Betty, but Betty realized that her husband
soon had a lot of options for partners quote, Bud
played straight man and I was the comic. It soon

(05:25):
became obvious to me as we toured the circuit that
all the comics wanted to work with Bud, and I
knew my days were numbered as his partner. Bud was
so good that he quickly built a name for himself
when was asked to appear with various vaudeville performers, and
some of them much better known than he was. It
became a common practice that if someone was sick and
couldn't do a show, that Bud was the person who

(05:47):
would fill in. And after the nineties ended, Bud and
Betty decided that they would move from Detroit to New York,
and Bud spent the early thirties working for a number
of theaters and burlesque shows on the circuit. We'll move
over to the young life of lou Costello, who was
born Louis Francis Cristillo in Paterson, New Jersey, to his
parents Sebastian and Helen Crystillo, on March sixth, nineteen o six.

(06:11):
He was the second of three children. His brother Anthony
was three years older, and his sister, Marie Catherine was
six years younger Lou was a really outgoing kid who
made easy friends with a lot of children from an
orphanage that was across the street from the family home,
and he would often sort of loan his athletic skills
to the orphanage sports teams when they would compete with

(06:32):
UH teams from other organizations. And he also got into
his fair share of trouble as a kid. At one point,
he accidentally set fire to the family Christmas tree when
he was trying to show a friend how a magic
lantern his new magic lantern projector, which required a candle
to operate. There's a funny story in his daughter's biography
of him where his siblings saw him walking back and

(06:53):
forth from the kitchen with just a glass of water,
progressively more and more quickly carrying just a glass of
water each time before they realized he had started a fire. UH.
Nobody was hurt, although they did lose their beloved family piano,
as I recall. And another time he got in trouble
because he and one of his friends wrote the F
word all over the upholstery in the family living room.
That would be problematic at my house. Unlike Bud Abbott,

(07:17):
Lou Costello didn't come from a family of performers, but
he knew that was the life he wanted. From a
very early age. He envisioned himself first as a traumatic
actor and then, inspired by Charlie Chaplin, as a comedian.
He tried out various musical instruments, and he learned to
sing and dance as well. At the age of twelve,
he promised his mother, mom, one day, I'm going to

(07:37):
be a movie star and make you proud of me.
Just wait and see. You'll be the most famous mom
in the world. He was also a good athlete in
a number of sports, and as a teenager he also
boxed under the name of Lu King without his family's
knowledge or permission. But one night his dad went with
a family member to see a fight and he saw
Lou in the ring. The following morning, loose secret was

(08:00):
outed over the family breakfast. His mother was not pleased,
and despite the fact that he was really seen his
a rising star in boxing, lu never stepped in the
ring again, although he did go to the fights as
a spectator for the rest of his life. He also
saved a nine year old young girl's life on the
beach at Asbury Park this child had gotten farther into
the water than she could handle, and when Lou and

(08:21):
a friend heard screams for help, they spotted her and
retrieved her. A lot of the onlookers thought that she
was surely done for, but Lou was able to administer
mouth and mouth resuscitation and revive her. As medical professionals arrived,
he slipped away from the scene because he was embarrassed
by all the attention. Yeah, it's kind of funny because
he seemed to want attention in a lot of ways,

(08:43):
uh for being a clown throughout his life, but he
was also a very generous and kind man in many
ways and seemed to want to downplay that a little
bit more. When Lu's brother Pat had a measure of
success in the entertainment business through his jazz band Pat
Cristillo and his gondolier Errs, it made the acting hopeful
Lou sort of envious. He stayed in school in accordance

(09:05):
with his parents wishes, but all he wanted was to
run away to Hollywood. When in nine seven, Lou, who
was then a young man of twenty one, told his
parents that he wanted to go to Hollywood, his father
thought he was talking about on a vacation, and it
became clear that it was an acting career and not
a visit that was being discussed. Lou's father was completely

(09:26):
against the idea. After a lot of haggling and his
brother Pat offering to send Lou money to keep him
afloat while he got on his feet, the family finally agreed.
Lou's father actually took out a loan of two hundred
dollars to pay bus fare for his son, but Lou
alternated between hitchhiking and taking busses to stretch his cash.
He got to Hollywood and he got work on the

(09:47):
MGM lot as a laborer, and at that point he
depended on the kindness of some friends for places to
sleep until he had enough money to get a small apartment.
And when he finally did get himself a place, that
was all that he could afford. He could not pay
for utilities or luxuries of any kind, so he scraped
by in the most meager of ways until he could
save enough money to have his utilities turned on. By

(10:09):
being on the right set at the right time, which
was when a stuntman did not show up for work,
Lu did manage to get into pictures and tiny roles.
He was hoping that as talkies became more popular and
some actors found themselves unable to make that transition, there
would be more opportunities. But after a year of that
he was not getting anything other than bit parts. He

(10:32):
finally took the advice that actress Eileen Pringle gave to
him to return to New York, work on his acting
and wait to be discovered on the stage. Yeah, at
that point, it was kind of a more common thing. Remember,
Hollywood was still sort of in its infancy. Uh, it was.
It was much more common for scouts to go to
New York and watch plays and try to find actors

(10:53):
that they thought they could bring out to California. But
Lou never made it to New York. He only got
as far as St. Jose of Missouri before he ran
out of money, and he ended up working there as
a comic in a burlesque theater for a year, making
sixteen dollars a week before a dispute over a requested
race finally reignited his desire to get back to the
New York New Jersey area, and it was during this

(11:15):
period that he transitioned to the last name of Costello
from Cristillo, which his brother Pat had already done. After
a vaudeville producer saw Lou performing his comedy act and
a bar in Paterson, he offered him a job as
a comic at the Orpheum Theater. After that show wrapped,
Costello moved on to working at a theater in Passaic,
New Jersey, that showed movies and then had comics perform

(11:37):
in between the features. He teamed up in his first
comedy duo with a longtime friend named Al Williams, but
the partnership came to an abrupt end when Williams died
of a heart attack only after only a few shows together.
And Lou continued to work as a comedian, and it
was while he was trying to make a name for
himself as a comic in New York that he met

(11:57):
a chorus girl named an Battler, originally from Providence, Rhode Island.
Costello eventually won over the young woman. She wasn't interested
in him at first, but he was wild about her,
and after a brief courtship, the two were married on
January nineteen thirty four, and they both continued to work
in burlesque shows together until Anne actually broke her neck
in a car accident that was caused when Lu fell

(12:19):
asleep driving them both home from a late show. She recovered,
but her dancing career was over while the Costellos were
expecting their first child, Patricia, who was born on September
nineteen thirty six. Lose career changed forever, and we will
talk about that after a quick word from sponsor. So

(12:41):
now we're to the point where these two lives meet up.
But there are a number of different versions of the
story of how Bud Abbott and Lou Costello actually began
working together. One of them goes like this. In ninety
six and act called Lions and Costello were booked for
an appearance at the Casino theater where Bud worked, but Why,
who was playing the straight man to Costello's antics, was

(13:02):
sick and couldn't make the show. The crowd had already
filled the theater when news of a Lion's illness reached
the venue. Costello was basically at his wits end when
somebody told him that the guy who worked as the
theater's cashier had some experience as a straight man. So,
according to this version, the desperate Lou Costello asked Bud
Abbott to fill in for Lions, and that night history

(13:24):
was made. There was a perfect balance between the two performers,
and the duo was an instant hit. The crowd loved
the pairing, but the reality was a little less centered
around one particular moment. According to Costello's biography penned by
his daughter, Budd and Lou had met each other on
the entertainment circuit before that night, and they had become friends.

(13:44):
They would uh work on silly skits together between shows,
just backstage, sharing stories and bits that they had learned
from other comedians and even developing some new ideas together.
But they were both already performing separately on different comedy acts,
but had been working with a comic named Harry Evanson regularly,
and Lou at that point was teamed up with Joe Lyons,

(14:06):
but they would boatht sub in for each other's partners
as needed. Eventually, Budd decided to move on from his
act with Evanson. He wrote to Lou, who was working
on the road at that time, to suggest that when
his current engagement had wrapped up, they should meet. We
wrote back, quote, don't do anything but until I get there.
Once Costello's previous booking with Lions was done, they officially

(14:27):
teamed up as Abbott and Costello. So that second sort
of less lightning in a bottle version makes a lot
more sense, even if it is less thrilling. The fact
was that at this point, at least on the burlesque
and vaudeville circuit, Bud had already gotten a reputation among
performers as a really stellar comedic straight man by the
time that he and Lou had become an X, So

(14:49):
it actually would have been really weird if Lou Costello
had never heard of him and someone was like, wait,
there's a guy in the in the cashier's box that
could do this. Like that would be bizarre. It would
suggest as a random person, but it would suggest complete
blinders and lack of knowledge of his own industry on
the part of Lou Costello. Regardless of how it all

(15:09):
really played out, the two comedians were a perfectly balanced act.
But Abbott was a tall, lean man with a serious demeanor,
and Lou Costello, who was eleven years younger. I never
quite realized that there was that much of a disparity,
was short and stocky. He was lively and Silly. Abbott
and Costello started getting bookings immediately as an opening act

(15:30):
for burlesque shows, and they toured both burlesque and vaudeville theaters.
They actually only continued to play in burlesque theaters, at
least in New York for a year after they started together,
and that's because in May of nineteen thirty seven, New
York's reformist mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia shut down all the
burlesques in the city as part of an action against
what he felt were morally corrupting elements. As the future

(15:53):
of burlesque looked uncertain, Abbott and Costello were offered a
gig in Atlantic City. Bud, who had been working in
burlesque the her since he was a teen, was reluctant
to abandon the circuit, especially as the two had a
regular booking on it, but Lou was adamant that they
could be seen by important people in Atlantic City. Yeah,
there was definitely a concern that as New York had gone,

(16:14):
so would the rest of the burlesque circuit, and that
they would all quickly be out of jobs. And it's
been speculated in some retellings of their lives that this
was where the famed sixty forty split of their take
came from, with Costello offering Abbott the bigger share as
part of the effort to convince him to go to
Atlantic City. But in reality, it was already pretty customary

(16:36):
for burlesque comedy teams to split the take in favor
of the straight man because it was considered a harder job.
Lou Costello once said, comics are a dime a dozen
good straight men are hard to find. But that sentiment
on loose part would change a little bit. Over the years.
They were staying busy with bookings, but they weren't getting
the same rates they had on the burlesque and vaudeville circuit. Fortunately,

(16:59):
in their second year together, the comedy duo was booked
on The Kate Smith Radio Hour, which was a popular
show at the time. It was the first big exposure
the two comedians had outside the touring circuit, as the
Kate Smith Radio Hour was a national broadcast. Yeah, it
was a big shift because it was kind of going
from this like regional touring area where where they had

(17:20):
names but they were definitely big fish in small ponds
to being exposed to the entire country, and they were
actually recommended for that job by comedian Henny Youngman, who
wanted to get out of his contract with the radio
show to take a job with Paramount Pictures. Initially, Ted Collins,
who was the producer of the Kate Smith Radio Hour,
was not interested. He thought the Abbott and Costello act

(17:42):
really needed to be seen and that it wouldn't translate
to the non visual medium of radio. He was also
concerned that putting a burlesque act on the show was
risky to its reputation. A lot of people pressured Collins
to rethink his position, noting that their act was clean,
so the burlesque excuse was not really valid, and that
people really responded to their comedy and their timing. Collins

(18:04):
finally caved, figuring and he could put them on once
and if they crashed and burned, it would hurt them
more than it would hurt the show. And that first
show actually went well enough that they got asked back,
but they also were asked to do one particular thing
to get back on. Either Bud or Lou it did
not matter, which would have to change his voice according

(18:25):
to Colin's direction. Apparently, radio listeners had difficulty telling the
two men apart, and this is when Luke Costello adopted
the higher pitch to his voice that would become so
much a part of his stage persona. As their appearances
continued on the radio program, the audience really fell in
love with Abbott and Costello. At times, the cheering and
laughter of the radio studio ate up so much time

(18:48):
that the act would run long Collins would have to
urge them to wrap up so that Kate could perform.
They became regulars on the show. They wound up with
a salary that even subbed in for Kate when she
took a vacation. Perhaps most important to the producers, they
helped propel The Kate Smith Hour, which aired on CBS,
to the number one position in its time slot, which

(19:08):
was no small achievement. They had all always before that
point fallen behind Rudy Valley on NBC. And in the
midst of this early blossoming of Abbott and Costello's career
in radio, lou and his wife Ann welcome their second child, Carol,
on December twenty three. We'll talk about their most famous sketch,

(19:29):
but we have to do a quick sponsor break before
we do This early stage in the career of Abbott
and Costello is often cited as the time that spawned
their most famous bit, a wordplay sketch that they co
wrote with a comedy writer named John Grant that was
titled Who's On First. Most of our listeners have probably

(19:52):
heard it. If you haven't, I will include a link
to it in the show notes. It is a classic.
But there are also accounts that really into Kate that
they were actually working on this bit before they ever
even became an act together. So that period of time
we talked about before, when they were hanging around backstage
at shows and kind of playing off each other for fun. Uh.
And there's even a write up in a ninety three

(20:14):
issue of the Chicago Tribune that suggests that this bit
was long before the Kate Smith Radio Hour. That particular
article was written to bust myths about the two performers,
so hopefully their information was accurate. One of the interesting
pieces of trivia about that bit is that Ted Collins
allegedly saw Who's On First when he was scouting the

(20:34):
pair for Kate Smith's show. He wasn't really wowed by
it was one of the sketches he felt could never
translate to the radio, and he kept shooting it down
every time they pitched it for the show as long
as they were regulars. Finally, in a bit of manipulation,
Lou Costello got the sketch on the radio by pretending
that he and Bud just had like writer's block and

(20:56):
had no new material one week, which was an outright lie.
The two of them were constantly coming up with stuff,
and he suggested that maybe they should just skip that show,
which was the complete bluff. Ted Collins, knowing that Abbott
and Costello were a huge part of the show's success
at that point, told Luda just used that baseball sketch
he'd been pitching forever. That night, the sketch killed. The

(21:18):
studio audience loved it. People call the networked rave about it.
As for the bits co writer John Grant, he became
a salaried part of the writing staff for the show.
He continued to write for and with Abbott and Costello
for years. Lew and Budd ended up working on Smith's
show for weeks so a little over two years, and
during that time Kate Smith really kind of took them

(21:41):
under her wing. She coached them on how to handle
all of the attention, pressure and expectations that came with
being in the public eye. Because she saw that they
were probably going to be super famous, she helped them
pick out clothes, and she also just gave them tips
on presenting themselves in public. From Kate Smith's radio show,
Abbott and Costello star rose very quickly onto n nine.

(22:04):
They debuted on Broadway and a musical review titled Streets
of Paris. Their work on the show got fantastic reviews,
and they became the darlings of Broadway. The next obvious
step was for the team to transition to pictures, but
they faced an interesting hurdle there. So while there was
definitely some interest from Hollywood, there were also concerns among

(22:25):
studio heads that Evan Costello were radio players and that
they would not be able to transition to the visual
medium of film. Given that this is the reverse of
the concern that Kate Smith's producer had when he was
booking them for radio off of the burlesque circuit in
the first place, this is somewhat hilarious now, but at
the time it was very frustrating for the two performers. Nevertheless,

(22:48):
they remained interested in striking a studio deal, and their
agent at A. Sherman, was instructed to keep on working
at it. In the meantime, Streets of Paris was staged
once again, this time at the New York World's Fair,
and Ud and Lou were once again engaged as part
of the cast. They performed the show an exhausting four
times a day during the World's Fair, and they were

(23:09):
also booking additional gigs for their comedy act on off
days and late at night. Yeah, their schedule sounds so
grueling to me at this time, Like it's one of
those things where you always hear people touted as the
hardest working man in show business. They were seriously working
so hard, because can you imagine doing four shows a
day and then when you're done, you run off and
do like a midnight comedy show and you know, do

(23:32):
that for an hour and that I would be so
wiped out. But they were hustling. Uh. Their first Hollywood
studio offer ended up coming from MGM, but that offer
was twenty dollars to appear in small roles in a
couple of big musical pictures. But being billed as one
act of many really didn't suit them and GM debated
over making a better offer, but while they ruminated on

(23:54):
the situation, word had gotten out that they had made
a bid to put Abbott and Costello under contract. An
executive at Universal named Maddie Fox heard about mgm s
offer and set up a meeting. He too was offering
them a chance to be members of a large cast,
but he offered more money, thirty five thousand dollars and
promised that the pair would be featured performers. So Lew

(24:16):
and Bud took that deal, and in ninety the comic
duo were signed at Universal Studios. And that's where we're
gonna end this episode, uh, with the promise of an
exciting film career ahead of these two comedians, and then
we'll pick up with with They're really really intense and
fast rise to wealth and fame, uh and kind of

(24:37):
what happened after that on our next episode. Do you
have listener mail for this one? I knew I have
some listener mail. This one is from our listener Bethany,
and she writes, Dear Tracy and Holly, I love you
your work. She writes nice things about us that I'm
always too awkward about reading to do so, and she's
writing us about the bombing of the Atlantic Temple, and
I will pick up in the middle of her her email,

(24:58):
she says, I tend to let episodes build up, and
then I listened all in one gulp. So I know
this is a bit late, but I was especially interested
to hear about the episode of the Atlanta Temple bombing.
As soon as I finished it, I had to send
a note about the episode to my mother, who was
also included on this email, and the information here is
presented with her permission. Uh. It was the synagogue that
she attended as a child, and in fact was the

(25:19):
synagogue my parents were married in. My mother was six
when the temple bombing occurred, and it affected her profoundly.
She listened to the podcast as well and said that
it brought back a lot of memories. The following segment
is from her, and this is the part her mother wrote.
I was six, my oldest sister was ten. We had
already left her religious school beforeward got to us about

(25:40):
the bombing, and since the only phones folks had at
that time where landlines, we had no idea what was
ahead of us. When we arrived at the temple, there
were so many people there, just standing around looking at
the space where beautiful hand carved wooden doors had stood.
There were broken bricks and glass everywhere. I remember fragments
of the many conversations that stemmed from that moment, my

(26:00):
mother and father wondering if the bomber intended for the
bomb to go off. Once the children were in school,
their friends wondering as standing up for civil rights was
worth this Rabbi ross Child speaking from the pulpit and
in the classrooms, the fear I began to feel that someone,
someones hated me because well, I didn't know why. In
this I remember, And then she relays, uh friends at

(26:21):
school who called her pejorative slurs. Uh. My mother also
remembered that Jews weren't allowed in the public pool or
allowed to join the Girl Scouts. She wrote, so many
people speak wistfully of the past, how lovely it was,
how civilized, how moral. I'm glad the past is the past,
and I wish it was dead, but it's not. She
then wrote something that Jews say frequently whenever we talked

(26:44):
about slavery, oppression, and especially when we talk about the
Holocaust and ceremonies such as those surrounding passover and on
Yamashawa we retell what happened, and then we say never again.
My mother wrote, never again, never again, not for my children,
not for African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, lgbt Q women, anyone

(27:06):
anywhere made to feel small and ugly and less than than.
Then Bethany writes, thank you again, and I hope that
the podcast taught a lot of people about the bombing
and why it happened. Uh, and then she gives us
permission to read this. I'm totally choked up. It's so
sweet that she shared this with us. If you would
like to write to us, you may do so at
History Podcast at howset works dot com. You can also

(27:28):
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(27:48):
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and in form for quite some time. If you would
like to visit us online, you can do so at
missed in history dot com, where we have our kive
of every single episode of the podcast has ever existed,
all the way back to the beginning, long before Tracy
and I were here. You can also find show notes.

(28:09):
Those used to be on a separate page from the
show page, but now we have consolidated those together, so
things are are a little bit more streamlined going forward.
And you can also just you know, tootle around and
visit us and see what things we've we've put there
as well as our show notes in our episodes, because
sometimes there are other little gems hidden there, and you
should indeed come and visit us at mt in history

(28:30):
dot com and how stuff Works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics because it how
stuff works dot Com.