SYMHC Classics: Moms Mabley

This 2022 episode covers Moms Mabley, whose career lasted more than six decades. She was hugely influential, and inspired so many comedians and other performers who came after her.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Coming up this week, we have an episode
on Somebody who is going to get a name drop
in Today's Classic. We will leave that upcoming episode who
it's about as a surprise, but today's classic is on
Moms Mabley. This originally came out on February ninth, twenty
twenty two. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,

(00:27):
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I really
enjoy the TV show The Marvelous Missus Masel. If you
are not familiar with this show, it is about a

(00:48):
Jewish woman named Midge Masel who tries to build a
career as a comedian starting at the end of the
nineteen fifties. There are various performers who appear as characters
on this show. Some of them have real world inspirations,
but they're fictional characters, and there are other ones, like
Lenny Bruce, who are fictionalized representations of a real person. Uh.

(01:13):
In an episode from the show's third season, Missus Mazl
performs at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and ahead of
her on stage is Mom's Mablie, who was played wonderfully
by Wanda Sykes. If my own age and background were
a little different, or maybe if I had grown up
watching reruns of old variety shows, I would have already

(01:36):
known who this was. But I did not. So I
did what I always do when a new performer shows
up on The Marvelous Missus Masel, and I googled so
Mom's Maybey. Yes, was a real person, but I had
some doubts about being able to do this episode. Because
her career lasted more than six decades, she was hugely influential.

(01:57):
She inspired so many comedians and other performers who came
after her. She's really one of the founders of stand
up comedy in the United States. But outside of her work,
a lot of the details of her life are kind
of a mystery, and there are some contradictory accounts of
a particularly traumatic part of her early life. Heads up

(02:17):
that talking about those contradictions is that's going to involve
some discussion of rape and other trauma. And I also
think if I were part of an adoption triad, there's
some part of this that I would probably also find
particularly troubling. Moms mabley was born Loretta Mary Aiken on
March nineteenth, probably eighteen ninety seven. In the nineteen hundred census,

(02:40):
her age is given as three, but in the earliest
years of her career, when people might have thought she
was too young to be out on her own, she
gave her birth years eighteen ninety four. Later in her
life she was not forthcoming about her age at all,
and to add another layer of confusion, her grave marker
lists her day of births March nineteenth, eighteen ninety nine.

(03:03):
Loretta's parents were James and Mary Magdalen Smith Aiken. James,
who was known as Jim, was the son of Jane
Aiken Hall, and his father was her enslaver. Jim was
born in eighteen sixty one, and normally that would have
meant he was considered enslaved from his birth, but it
seems that his father considered him to be free. According

(03:26):
to moms Mabley's later accounts, his mother made a particular
point of telling both him and Loretta that they had
been born free. Loretta also had a great grandmother, Harriet Smith,
who she described as Cherokee, who was a big part
of her early life and a big influence on her
The family lived in Brevard, North Carolina, which is southwest

(03:47):
of Asheville on the edge of what is now Pisga
National Forest. In nineteen hundred, it had a population of
under six hundred people. It is easy to imagine that
a black family in a small town is the North
Carolina Mountains in the early twentieth century was living in
severe poverty, and a lot of current descriptions of Moms
Maybley's imply that her early childhood was one of extreme

(04:11):
hardship and that she fled Brevard and never looked back.
But in interviews later in her life, mably talked about
western North Carolina with just enormous fondness. Stud's Turkle recorded
an oral history with her in nineteen sixty one, and
she did joke that you had to take a buggy
from Asheville to get to Brevard, but she also called

(04:32):
it one of the greatest and healthiest places on earth.
She spoke of her grandmother and her great grandmother with deep,
deep love and respect. Interviews that other people gave after
her death also described her making frequent visits home and
maintaining her connection to the North Carolina Mountains. She also
described her father Jim Aiken as a great man. He

(04:55):
was a successful businessman who had started out selling gingerbread
and cier and worked his way up to owning a
store along with a bakery, slash cafe, and a barber
shop that catered to white customers. He also ran a
dre service which carried both passengers and freight, along with
carrying the mail into and out of town. Although Mabley's

(05:16):
oral testimony describes Brevard as not being segregated, it did
have segregated schools. Her father was a big part of
getting a new school for black children established in Brevard
in early nineteen oh nine, and a newspaper article about
that effort noted his involvement and then said, quote, what
Jim undertakes generally goes. I love that quote. Tragically, though,

(05:42):
Jim Acin died when Loretta was about twelve. In addition
to everything we just mentioned, he was a volunteer firefighter.
At this point, most fire trucks were chemical engines. They
carried tanks of bicarbonate of soda and acid, which were
added to water on the scene to produce a stream
of fire suppress. Something went wrong while Aiken was responding

(06:03):
to a call in nineteen oh nine and the tank
exploded while he was tried to attach the hose. Jim
was killed instantly and multiple other firefighters were seriously injured.
Jim Aikin's death was a profound loss for the entire
community of Brevard. His funeral was held at the White
First Baptist Church because that was the biggest church in

(06:24):
the area. An editorial in the French broad Hustler described
him as quote one colored man who left the world
better than he found it. The Brevard News wrote, quote,
the death of James P. Aikin is a distinct loss
to our town. He was the most widely known colored
man in western North Carolina. He was a successful and

(06:45):
enterprising businessman whose store on Main Street is well patronized.
He was a member of the Baptist Church in several
benevolent societies. Was a member of the fire department, where
William E. Breest Junior was chief, and was always among
the first to respond to the call of the fire bell,
and one of the hardest workers at every fire in
the history of the town. He was in every way

(07:08):
a responsible Negro, honest, energetic, industrious, and reliable. He had
a wide influence among the colored race in this mountain section,
besides having many friends among the white people, all of
whom will be shocked to learn of his sudden death. Obviously,
racism is threaded through both of these quotes with the
idea that Jim Aiken was exceptional considering his race, but

(07:33):
they do also speak to how prominent he was within
the community. Loretta's mother, Mary, was the executor of her
late husband's estate. She also took over the store while
Loretta's grandmother helps to take care of her and her siblings.
They did have a big family. She was one of
at least nine children. Mary eventually got married again to
a man named George Parton, and from that point her

(07:55):
name appeared in advertisements for the store as Mary aikin Parton.
It appears that she kept the store going until nineteen
twelve or nineteen thirteen, at which point she sold the
building to Parton and the couple moved away from Brevard,
first to Washington, d c. And then to Cleveland, Ohio.
A lot of more recent articles about moms maybly say

(08:17):
that her mother was killed just a couple of years
after her father, after being hit by a truck while
crossing the street on Christmas Day. That's all very sensational,
but it does not seem to be correct. Mary and
George are listed in the nineteen forty census as living
in Cleveland, with George's occupation at the time listed as waiter.
It is possible that Mary was killed after being hit

(08:40):
by a truck. Tracy was not able to confirm her
cause of death, but if she was, that happened in
nineteen forty six or nineteen forty seven, and not when
Loretta was still a young girl. However, in addition to
her father's death, Loretta's life took a traumatic turn when
she was still quite young. Multiple sources say that she

(09:00):
was raped by two different men before she turned fourteen,
and that both times she became pregnant and arranged adoptions
for her children or someone arranged those adoptions for her.
Other accounts, though, say that it wasn't really the arrangement
of a formal adoption. That Loretta had left her children
in the care of two women who later moved away

(09:21):
and disappeared, and she didn't get to see her children
again until they were adults. Yet, other accounts say that
Loretta's father or stepfather either forced her to marry a
much older man or pressured her to do so and
that is why she left home as a teen. But
there's no documentation of a marriage, although there is some
reporting in Brevard News about a court case in nineteen

(09:43):
thirteen that was State versus Bunyan Mills. This was a
seduction under promise of marriage case in which the prosecuting
witness was named Loretta Aiken. This case was introduced in August,
but dismissed in September when it was found that there
had been no formal marriage contract. In her conversation with Studs,

(10:04):
Turkle Mom's Mayble also talked about working as a wet
nurse in Asheville at the age of just fourteen and
having to deprive her own child of milk so that
she would have enough to feed the baby that she
was nursing. This recording is truly heartbreaking, with Maybe talking
about telling her baby daughter, who she calls Lucretia, not

(10:25):
to cry because she was stronger than baby Lois, who
she was being paid to care for, so Lois needed
more to eat. Maybee talked about loving Lois like her
own baby and how much it hurt not to know
what happened to her after her employment had ended. This
interview stresses that Lois started to feel like her own child,

(10:46):
But at least to me, it doesn't seem to imply
that she had also lost contact with her daughter. Lucretia
maybe also talked in multiple interviews about being pregnant and
having her baby with her at the start of her career.
But when Moms Mabley died in nineteen seventy five, obituaries
and memorials listed four children among her survivors, but none

(11:09):
of them are named as Lucretia or are old enough
to have been born when Moms was fourteen. Yvonne, the
oldest daughter, is described as fifty eight at the time
of her mother's death. That means that her mother would
have been about eighteen when she was born. Yvonne's younger
siblings were listed as Christine, Bonnie, and Charles, with some
sources noting that Charles was her brother's child who she adopted.

(11:32):
So some accounts conclude that Yvonne and Christine were the
children who were reunited with mably as adults, and others
conclude that those were just two different people. Yeah. There
are also a bunch of family trees that list Christine's
middle name as Lucheria, which is not the same as Lucretia,

(11:53):
but is close enough that has made people wonder, like,
was was this the same baby? Was she calling the
baby by a middle name? And like the spelling has
gotten garbled somewhere. If so, that means the years are
also garbled. There's a bunch that's unclear, but whatever the
exact circumstances are, the young Loretta Mary Aiken left home

(12:14):
at the encouragement of her grandmother, who thought that she
should see the world beyond Brevard. And we will get
to that after a sponsor break. In that nineteen sixty
one oral history with Stud's Turkle, Mom's Mabley talked about

(12:35):
her family's deep religious faith. When her grandmother sometimes this
is also she says, it was her great grandmother, it's
a little blurred, encouraged her to leave Brevard. She told
her to quote, put God in front and go ahead,
and this became a motto for Mom's Mabley's life. The
timeline for that life is tricky to piece together, though,

(12:56):
because there are plenty of things like advertisements for her performances,
but otherwise a lot of the time there's not a
lot of concrete documentation. Sometimes Mabley's interviews contradict each other
or they contradict the documentation that does exist, so these
like census records. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that
she was intentionally deceptive with any of this. She gave

(13:17):
a lot of these interviews in the last couple of
decades of her life, and I know, I don't remember
exactly when things happened in my childhood versus other events,
so who knows. It does seem that after her mother
moved to Cleveland, Moms Maybley, still known at that time
as Loretta Aiken, went there to join her. She was

(13:41):
pregnant at that time as the result of a rape,
and she had planned to go from Cleveland to Detroit
to terminate that pregnancy, but something told her not to.
She told Studs Turkle that when she was fifteen, trying
to work out a way to support herself and her child,
she prayed for guidance and heard of voice that said
quote go on the stage. In Cleveland, Loretta lived with

(14:06):
a pastor and his family, and the house next door
was a boarding house that was home to a lot
of performers, one of them, Bonnie Bell Drew helped her
get a start in show business. Mabley's daughter, Bonnie, who
was born in nineteen twenty, was named Bonnie after Bonnie
Bell Drew. Loretta Aiken got a job with the Theater
Owner's Booking Association, which was a vaudeville circuit for black

(14:28):
performers that was established in the nineteen twenties with venues
primarily in the southern and Midwestern states. Its performers gave
it nicknames like Tough on Black actors. The schedules were
very grueling the pay was low, but Mably later said
that anyone who got to the end of the circuit
had a solid foundation in all kinds of fundamentals, including singing, dancing,

(14:50):
and comedy. This was in part because every performer had
to learn every part in case somebody got sick or injured,
or just dropped out of the show. Other performers who
got their start on this circuit included Gertrude ma Rainey,
Josephine Baker, and Sammy Davis Junior when he was still
a child. In her later life, Moms Mabley told a

(15:12):
story about being sick while working this circuit and an
older fellow performer named Leroy came into her room to
check on her. Police raided the hotel after an unrelated
altercation and searched all of the rooms, and when Leroy
was found in the room of the teenage Loretta Achin,
they were forced to get married, but according to Mabley,

(15:33):
there was no marriage license, no formal paperwork associated with
this marriage, and Leroy was more like a father figure
to her than a spouse. Loretta was traveling through deeply
segregated parts of the US, many of which were also
well known for racist violence. She was earning only about
fourteen dollars a week, which was not enough to support

(15:53):
herself and her child, so her mother was sending money
to help with food and lodging. But then another of
black performers took notice of her and helped her move
into higher paying gigs. Those were Jody and Susie Edwards
aka Butterbeans and Susie, who were a song and dance duo.
Their act was very comedic with a lot of double entendre.

(16:15):
Their best known song was I Want a Hot Dog
for My Role. You can find recordings of this from
the internet if you want. Honestly, if you've never heard
any of Moms Maybley's comedy. Just pause this and go
to YouTube. It's so funny. It's extremely funny. At multiple

(16:40):
points while doing research, I stopped what I was doing
and watched some Moms Mayby anyway, Loretta moved from the
Theater Owners Booking Association, where most of the venues were
white owned, to the Chitlin Circuit, which was kind of
its successor. Those theaters were primarily black owned and operated,
and sometime during this period she started performing under the

(17:01):
name of Jackie Mabley. Mabley herself told multiple stories about
where this name came from. One was that jack Mabley
had been a boyfriend and that quote he took a
lot off me, and the least I could do was
take his name. Another was that the Jackie part was
her own invention, but Mayblee was the last name of
a young man she had been engaged to, but that

(17:23):
didn't work out because he was a Canadian and neither
of them wanted to move to the other country. Regardless,
her motivation for changing her name seems to have been
that her oldest brother thought her stage career was disgracing
the family. Not all of her family shared that opinion,
though she had a younger brother Eddie Parton, who helped
write some of her material. She was being billed as

(17:46):
Jackie Mabley by nineteen twenty five, and she had established
Jackie as an on stage character. She was in her twenties,
but she imagined this character as in her sixties, patterned
after her grandmother Jane. As Jackie Mablee, she would sing, dance,
and tell jokes and stories. She eventually made her way
to New York, where she was featured at Connie's Inn

(18:07):
in Harlem after it opened in nineteen twenty three. Like
the Cotton Club, where Mabley also went on to perform,
Connie's Inn featured black performers for an all white audience.
As her reputation grew, Maybley kept getting better and more
lucrative bookings. She also claimed that she discovered Pearl Bailey
during these years. She said it in a nineteen seventy

(18:27):
four interview quote, I taught Pearl Bailey everything she knows.
She was a blues singer, and I said, girl, you're funny.
You should be a comedian. While Maybley's stage career initially
included a mix of singing, dancing in comedy, over time
she was focused more and more on stand up before
that term was even coined. In her stage persona of

(18:49):
Jackie Mabley, she helped establish the conventions of stand up
comedy as an art form. She was billed as Jackie
Mabley for several years before other performers gave her the
name of Moms. In her own words quote, even though
I was young, they would always bring their problems to
me to settle. She was a mothering presence. She was

(19:09):
someone that other performers could turn to for support and
who would help people get money for rant or a
ticket home when they needed it. Moms mably blurred a
lot of lines with her gender and sexuality, both on
and off stage. In her on stage persona, she wore
a baggy house dress, sagging socks, slippers or beat up

(19:29):
house shoes, and a floppy hat. Often these clothes aggressively
did not go together. She had a stooped posture on
the stage, and as she got older and started wearing dentures,
she would perform with her teeth out. This persona wasn't
exactly androgynous. The character was a woman who went by Moms,
but it was blurry enough that various people wrote into

(19:52):
newspaper question and answer columns over the course of her
career to ask if Mom's Mayby was a man or
a woman. As far as her appearance and her demeanor went,
Moms Maybley's stage persona could come off as almost sexless,
but at the same time her comedy could be very
risk gay. She did not swear. Nothing was sexually graphic

(20:16):
in a way that if somebody said, that's really risk
guy like today, you would imagine something quite different. There
was a lot of double entendre, though, and one of
Mom's running themes was about her attraction to young men
and the uselessness of old men unless an old man
was bringing her a message from a young man off stage.

(20:37):
People who performed with Mayby have talked about her openly
having relationships with other women. In some photos, she's shown
as elegantly attired in address and pearls, and in others
she's in handsome suits that are more androgynous, are almost
aggressively masculine. In the twenty thirteen documentary Whoopee Goldberg Presents
Moms Maybly, dancer and comedian and Norma Miller said quote,

(21:01):
we never called Moms a homosexual. That word never fit her.
We never called her gay. We called her mister Moms.
That's carried over to her comedy and to the venues
where she performed as well. For example, in April of
nineteen thirty four, the U Bangy Club opened on the
former site of Connie's Inn. One of its frequent headline

(21:24):
acts was Gladys Bentley, who was an openly lesbian performer
who wore men's attire and was sometimes backed up by
drag queens. The Ubangy Club became known for both performers
and clientell who we would probably describe as LGBTQ today,
and one of its performers was Mom's Maybley. We will
get into Moms Maybley's later career after we paused for

(21:47):
a sponsor break. A lot of Moms Mabley's comedy career
was really unique for the time. Most women working in
comedy or on the stage at all were as part
of a duo with a man, but Mably was a

(22:09):
solo act. In nineteen thirty nine, she became the first
woman's headline at the Apollo Theater as a solo comedian.
For decades, she was really the only black woman doing
solo stand up, and again this started before that term
was even coined. She was also appearing on Broadway in

(22:29):
the nineteen thirties, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.
At this point, there were several Broadway productions with all
black casts, but they often had white directors and producers,
and they were tailored for a white audience. But the
shows Mably appeared in were developed and directed by black people,
or they were otherwise focused on the black experience. In general,

(22:50):
these shows did not run for long. They're often described
as not appealing to white audiences and critics. In nineteen
thirty one, she was in Fast and Fury, a colored
review in thirty seven scenes at the New Yorker Theater.
In addition to being part of the cast, Maybly worked
with author and anthropologist Zorneil Hurston to develop some of

(23:10):
the sketches, and Hurston appeared in this show as well.
Then she was in Max Rudnick's Blackberries of nineteen thirty two,
a Sepia musical review. This ran at Liberty Theater west
of Broadway on forty second Street and it ran for
twenty five performances. Then there was Swing in the Dream
in nineteen thirty nine, which I am just desperately curious about.

(23:34):
This was a swing musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream,
with a cast that included Butterfly McQueen and Louis Armstrong.
It ran for thirteen performances. Reviews of it were not great.
And I cannot imagine why this sounds incredible to me.
I mean, I can't imagine why. The answer why is racism.

(23:55):
But I'm still right, this sounds incredible to me. Most
of the script has been lost, which is one of
the reasons I'm just desperately curious about it. We'll put
it on the time machine list. It's one of the
stops we'll make. Mainly had some small film roles during
these same years. Like her Broadway roles, these were in
films that were made by and four black people, a

(24:17):
genre that became known as race films. One of these
was Emperor Jones, which came out in nineteen thirty three,
starring musician, actor, and activist Paul Robison. Her film work
continued into the nineteen forties, including playing her comedic persona
in Killer Diller, which came out in nineteen forty seven.
In nineteen forty eight, she played a boarding house matron

(24:38):
in Boarding House Blues. In which the boarding house's residents,
who are all performers, put on a show to save
Moms and her boarding house from bankruptcy. The thing that
she became the most known for during these years was
her comedy on stage. She booked longer and longer contracts
at the Apollo, ultimately appearing there more than any other

(25:00):
entertainer and earning as much as ten thousand dollars a week.
She constantly changed up her acts that would continue to
appeal to returning members of the audience, and soon she
was nicknamed the funniest woman in the world. As the
civil rights movement evolved in the nineteen fifties and sixties,
Mabley's comedy started to include more and more social satire
and commentary about racism, sexism, and politics. This continued as

(25:25):
white audiences became more aware of her with the evolution
of comedy albums. Mabley recorded her first album, Funniest Woman Alive,
before a live audience in Chicago in nineteen sixty, and
it was released by Chess Records. It was a hit,
and she went on to record nineteen more comedy albums
during her career, many of which made the Billboard two hundred.

(25:47):
Her nineteen sixty one, Moms Mable at the un hit
number sixteen on the Billboard charts, which was the highest
ranking comedy album by a woman, and that record stood
for the next decade. As Mably became more well known
to white audiences, she used her disarming stage persona to
make social and political commentary that probably would have been

(26:08):
impossible without it. Her sets included fictional conversations with world
leaders where she set them straight on various wrongs. She
made pointed observations about the realities of racism and segregation.
For example, on her nineteen sixty three album I Got
Something to tell You, she said, quote, you know the
first thing I would do if I was president, I

(26:30):
would give a certain Southern governor a job as ambassador
to the Congo and let him go crazy looking for
a men's restroom with white on it. Throughout the nineteen
sixty she also did benefit performances to raise money for
causes like Southern Students Freedom Fund, which provided aid for
students who had been arrested for their civil rights activism.

(26:50):
She did a show at the Apollo Theater to raise
money for the March on Washington, and she sold photographs
during some of her shows to raise money for the
Selma to Montgomery March. She was also a member of
the NAACP, and she attended the White House Conference on
Civil Rights in nineteen sixty six that inspired her album
Mom's Mayblely at the White House. She also gave multiple

(27:12):
performances at prisons all over New York, including Sing Sing
and Riker's Island. Maybley's television debut was also connected to
all of this. In nineteen sixty seven, Harry Belafonte produced
A Time for Laughter, a look at Negro humor in America.
Bellafonte described this as an effort to both demonstrate black
people's humanity for the white world and to inspire joy

(27:36):
and laughter within the black community. That was the first
time Mom's Mabley was on TV. Mayblee had long talked
about seeing her audiences as her children, and when she
started doing television, she said, quote, the only difference I
found when I started doing TV was that instead of
looking at the audience as my children, I looked at
the world as my children. She appeared on multiple televised

(27:59):
comedy programs and variety shows, including The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,
The Carol Burnett Show, The Ed Sullivan Show and The
Flip Wilson Show. These television appearances introduced her to a
larger white audience than her albums had, and that fed
into bookings at venues like the Kennedy Center. But at
that point she'd been performing and famous among black audiences

(28:22):
for fifty years. In nineteen sixty nine, Moms Mabley's cover
of Abraham, Martin and John, which is the song about
the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln Martin, Luther King Junior, John F. Kennedy,
and Bobby Kennedy, hit number thirty five on the Billboard Charts.
She performed this song as Mom's, but it was a
completely serious and audibly grief stricken performance. In the nineteen seventies,

(28:46):
Mabley's comedy included her opposition to US involvement in the
Vietnam War, and in a nineteen seventy two interview, she
said quote, I've shed many a tear over those boys.
I wanted to go over there, but the government said
I was too old. But if I'd gone over there,
I'd have said, come on, children, let's go home. Also
in nineteen seventy two, she supported past podcast subject Shirley

(29:09):
Chisholm's election campaign and appeared at a Stars for Shirley fundraiser.
In nineteen seventy four, Moms Maybly made her last TV
appearance as a presenter at the Grammy Awards with Christofferson.
At the time, Christofferson was thirty eight, and the two
of them played up Mom's attraction to young men. Mayby
asked him the name of the song he wrote, and

(29:30):
after he replied, help me make it through the night,
answering quote, if you can make it for half an hour,
it'll be all right with me. Their banter went on
for a full five minutes before announcing the award that
went to Gladys Knight in the Pips and Maybely took
her teeth out in the middle of it. It's amazing.
You can see this on YouTube, also so good. Also

(29:51):
in nineteen seventy four, Maybly had her first lead in
a feature film. This was called Amazing Grace, and she
played Grace Teesdale Grimes. It's about a woman who goes
up against a corrupt politician, and its posters read quote
Who's coming to put an end to dirty tricks crooked politicians?
And Lyon Mayers who America's most glamorous, sexiest female superstar,

(30:15):
Mom's Mayby. It's About Time. Mably had a heart attack
during the production for this film. She returned to the
set after having a pacemaker implanted. She used her publicity
for the film to promote voting, but this was her
last appearance on screen. She died on May twenty third,
nineteen seventy five, in White Plains, New York, at the

(30:35):
age of about seventy eight. She was survived by four children,
five grandchildren, two sisters, and three brothers, including her brother
Eddie Parton, who had helped write some of her material.
She had spent her last years living with her daughter Bonnie.
At least five hundred people attended her funeral, and the
marquis at the Apollo Theater was changed to read Harlem

(30:58):
Morn's Mom's Maybly. Comedian Dick Gregory gave a eulogy in
which he said that if she had been white, she'd
have been known fifty years before today. Moms Mabley is
known as one of the founders of American stand up comedy.
A lot of later comedians have cited her as an inspiration,
including Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor Wanda Sykes, Arsenio Hall, and

(31:20):
Whoopi Goldberg, who, as we said, made a documentary about
Moms in twenty thirteen, originally called I Got Something to
tell You, before it was picked up by HBO. In
the nineteen eighties, Clari's Taylor worked with playwright Alice Childress
to write a play called Moms, which debuted at the
Astor Place Theater in nineteen eighty seven. The character of

(31:41):
Granny Clump in Eddie Murphy's The Nutty Professor is also
a tribute to her man in Moms. Maybley's own words,
her influence was more pervasive than all of that quote,
there's not a comedian in show business that hasn't stole
material from moms, not white or black, as fast as
they steal him. God gives me some more. I love

(32:02):
her genius, and as I said, I had multiple times
just stopped what I was doing and watched some I
watched Mom's mably on YouTube, and I also watched Wanda
Syke's appearance as her on Marvelous Missus Maisel. I watched
that three or four additional more times, potworking on it.
So yeah, I think a lot of her comedy definitely

(32:27):
holds up. I have not listened every to every single
album she has ever done, so I don't think I
can make a blanket statement that every mom's mable joke
has weathered the year's well, but a lot of it
is still hilarious. Thanks so much for joining us on

(32:50):
this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
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