What did the film stars of the 1920s-1930s make of the 1950s-1960s?

[Inkstainedwretch]

Anybody can work dirty. A little girl can say 'poop poop' and her friends will laugh. Comedians always go for the easy laugh, or the desperate laugh but it soon loses effectiveness. So then you have to think up something dirtier. Now we have witless so called comics who couldn't do a clean act at any price, and whose best audience is a room full of drunks. You can have them.

Ironically, the cleanest comedy act of modern times was Bill Cosby's.

 

[Stanley Doble]

It's possible to be funny without being vulgar if you have talent. The guy who 'discovered' Abbott and Costello in burlesque thought they were very funny but feared they were too 'blue' for radio. He asked if they had anything suitable for radio, and they gave him 'Who's on first'. Yes, they could be funny without being dirty. I suppose every radio and TV comedian went through the same thing.

Burns and Allen might be the only ones who never had to clean up their act. Gracie Allen's stage persona had a flighty innocence and they quickly learned than any double entendre or vulgarity fell flat with the audience. I never heard of them having trouble with censors.

 

[Fading Fast]

While he used plenty of double entendres and sexual insinuations, Seinfeld - both his TV show and live act (I've been told, I've never seen him live) - is pretty clean (for our times) and, overall, pretty funny. It's something I respect about him.

That said, I did see Eddie Murphy when I was in college in the early '80s and he was as filthy as could be and absolutely hilarious. He didn't use filth / vulgarity as a crutch, but dove head first into "taboo" topics and found original humor in them. I have no idea what he does now, but his material then was smart, original, funny and, as noted, shockingly graphic and dirty.

 

[Doctor Strange]

There's a very worthwhile HBO special from a couple of years ago called "Talking Funny" where Jerry Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais sit around discussing the art of standup comedy. One of the things that's striking about it is how Seinfeld comes off as such a traditionalist - more from the Alan King or Robert Klein school than the post-George Carlin/post-Steve Martin generation that he's actually part of. Compared to the others - all known for being "edgy" - he seems like a bit of a square. And his "clean" approach is certainly part of his old-school method.

http://www.hbo.com/comedy/talking-funny

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's possible to be funny without being vulgar if you have talent. The guy who 'discovered' Abbott and Costello in burlesque thought they were very funny but feared they were too 'blue' for radio. He asked if they had anything suitable for radio, and they gave him 'Who's on first'. Yes, they could be funny without being dirty. I suppose every radio and TV comedian went through the same thing.

Burns and Allen might be the only ones who never had to clean up their act. Gracie Allen's stage persona had a flighty innocence and they quickly learned than any double entendre or vulgarity fell flat with the audience. I never heard of them having trouble with censors.

Most of the acts that started solely on radio as opposed to moving into radio from the stage were clean out of necessity -- the Easy Aces, Fibber McGee and Molly, Stoopnagel and Budd, Lum and Abner, Amos and Andy, and such acts weren't just clean, they were squeaky clean and advertised as such at a time when radio was being invaded by theatre veterans with a reputation for Sophisticated Humor.

Eddie Cantor had to really tone down his act when he came to radio from the stage -- he had gone in heavily for eye-rolling innuendo on stage, but there was no place for that on the air. He did, however, manage to be the only comedian to turn his personal virility into a running gag that lasted for years -- by constantly boasting about his five children.

Aside from Burns and Allen, there were a couple of other stage comics who didn't really have to change their style for radio -- Ed Wynn was doing the same kind of silly, pixie-like humor on the air in 1932 that he was doing on Broadway in 1912. And Joe Penner, who had come out of burlesque of all things, was the rare burlesque comic who had never worked blue. His radio show was very popular with children thruout the thirties, due to his weird child-man persona that sounds today like Pinky Lee crossed with Pee Wee Herman. But he never did any suggestive gags.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Ironically, the cleanest comedy act of modern times was Bill Cosby's.

I always admired that about Cosby. That, and he never played the race card.

 

[FedoraFan112390]

Most of the acts that started solely on radio as opposed to moving into radio from the stage were clean out of necessity -- the Easy Aces, Fibber McGee and Molly, Stoopnagel and Budd, Lum and Abner, Amos and Andy, and such acts weren't just clean, they were squeaky clean and advertised as such at a time when radio was being invaded by theatre veterans with a reputation for Sophisticated Humor.

Eddie Cantor had to really tone down his act when he came to radio from the stage -- he had gone in heavily for eye-rolling innuendo on stage, but there was no place for that on the air. He did, however, manage to be the only comedian to turn his personal virility into a running gag that lasted for years -- by constantly boasting about his five children.

Aside from Burns and Allen, there were a couple of other stage comics who didn't really have to change their style for radio -- Ed Wynn was doing the same kind of silly, pixie-like humor on the air in 1932 that he was doing on Broadway in 1912. And Joe Penner, who had come out of burlesque of all things, was the rare burlesque comic who had never worked blue. His radio show was very popular with children thruout the thirties, due to his weird child-man persona that sounds today like Pinky Lee crossed with Pee Wee Herman. But he never did any suggestive gags.

Ms. Maine, I wanted to ask:
You are a veritable fountain of knowledge about a great many things from the 1910s through 1940s it seems. I should like to know as much as you do, and truly immerse myself in this period of time - the era of TR through the end of WWII - Could you recommend me any books I should read, or any films I should watch, to help increase my knowledge about this time; particularly the social upheavals of the 1910s, '20s, and '30s?

Any music from this wide period - 1900 to 1945 - you may also recommend would be doubly appreciated.

I thank you in advance, and also for your many wonderful posts in this thread - They are all informative and fascinating to read, and have led me to re-examine my preconceived notions about the 1920s and 1930s. Outside of the Bonus Army and the overall hardship of the Depression, I had no idea there was so much turmoil and unrest in the 1930s. I also had no idea that the 1920s were so "free." I always figured that the 1960s came solely out of the 1950s and were a byproduct of the what's been called the "conformity" of the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, and also the turbulence of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement with influences from the Beat and Bohemian movements of the '50s. I had always viewed the 1960s' freedom - especially the sexual and artistic freedom of the period - as being something inherently new and shocking. The media portrays the 1960s as such - that it was the best of times and worst of times - a new era of freedom as opposed to the stifling first half of the century. The Baby Boomers act as if they invented culture, freedom and sexuality in the '60s. In my opinion, the late 1960s are an overly romanticized period of time. The things you mention, about women's freedom and the sexual freedom of the 1920s have been kind of forgotten - lost under the romanticism surrounding the "Gatsby Era" - Bathtub gin, Jazz, and Blues. The social upheaval of the 1930s is kind of buried under the New Deal and the economic woes of the time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Better than books or films or music, you should read contemporaneous sources -- as many as you can, dug as deep as you can. Read newspapers -- not just excerpts or clippings, but the whole thing, every page, front to back. And don't just read the ones that are easy to find. Every library has the New York Times, which is about the least useful paper there is for finding out how real people really thought. Read the gutter papers. Read the tabloids. Read the Daily News and the Daily Mirror and the Daily Worker and the Daily Forward. Read the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier. Read every cheap pamphlet and broadside and tract put out by every group you can find. Read Father Coughlin and Judge Rutherford and Elijah Muhammad. Read New Masses, Social Justice, Consolation, the Townsend Weekly, the Hobo News, Sexology, Our Sunday Visitor, the Birth Control Review, and the Poultry Tribune. Read trade magazines. Read the Billboard and Boxoffice and Broadcasting and Zit's Theatrical Weekly. Read Super Service Station and Casket and Sunnyside. Read Radio Guide, Radio Digest, and Radio Retailing. Don't think you're getting the whole story from Life. Read Look and Click and Pic and anything else you come across.

Music? Listen to Fats Waller and Ben Bernie and Jimmie Lunceford and Lawrence Tibbett and Kay Kyser and Dwight Fiske and Paul Robeson and Abe Lyman and the Barry Sisters and Bumble Bee Slim and Gertrude Lawrence and Harry Reser and Wilf Carter and Roy Acuff and and Rise Stevens and the Hoosier Hot Shots and Ray Bourbon and Eddie Cantor and Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt and everything else you find in piles of old, dusty 78s.

The Era wasn't just one perspective. It was hundreds and hundreds of perspectives, all happening at once. Don't make the mistake of thinking you can understand it by just considering a narrow, single slice.

 

[FedoraFan112390]

Better than books or films or music, you should read contemporaneous sources -- as many as you can, dug as deep as you can. Read newspapers -- not just excerpts or clippings, but the whole thing, every page, front to back. And don't just read the ones that are easy to find. Every library has the New York Times, which is about the least useful paper there is for finding out how real people really thought. Read the gutter papers. Read the tabloids. Read the Daily News and the Daily Mirror and the Daily Worker and the Daily Forward. Read the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier. Read every cheap pamphlet and broadside and tract put out by every group you can find. Read Father Coughlin and Judge Rutherford and Elijah Muhammad. Read New Masses, Social Justice, Consolation, the Townsend Weekly, the Hobo News, Sexology, Our Sunday Visitor, the Birth Control Review, and the Poultry Tribune. Read trade magazines. Read the Billboard and Boxoffice and Broadcasting and Zit's Theatrical Weekly. Read Super Service Station and Casket and Sunnyside. Read Radio Guide, Radio Digest, and Radio Retailing. Don't think you're getting the whole story from Life. Read Look and Click and Pic and anything else you come across.

Music? Listen to Fats Waller and Ben Bernie and Jimmie Lunceford and Lawrence Tibbett and Kay Kyser and Dwight Fiske and Paul Robeson and Abe Lyman and the Barry Sisters and Bumble Bee Slim and Gertrude Lawrence and Harry Reser and Wilf Carter and Roy Acuff and and Rise Stevens and the Hoosier Hot Shots and Ray Bourbon and Eddie Cantor and Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt and everything else you find in piles of old, dusty 78s.

The Era wasn't just one perspective. It was hundreds and hundreds of perspectives, all happening at once. Don't make the mistake of thinking you can understand it by just considering a narrow, single slice.

Thank you. Where would you suggest finding these lesser known sources (the gutter papers and other newspapers you mention)?

Also, a couple of social questions:
1) Was there any generational gap (I mean in terms of the '60s 'generation gap') between the Edwardian Era generation (say someone born in 1880) and his child born circa 1920?

2) Why, generally speaking, was the GI Generation more socially conservative than the 1920s generation? Like, this seems to be the generation that looked down on the changes of the 1960s...And yet their parents or older brothers and sisters were flappers and Prohibition era partiers?

 

[LizzieMaine]

You won't find them all in one place. You've got to dig -- second hand bookstores, library discard sales, junk shops, eBay, the city dump, attics and cellars and abandoned warehouses. It's taken me over forty years to accumulate all the sources I've got packed into my shelves and closets. When I die, there'll be a big yard sale, but otherwise, all I can say is keep digging.

And to answer your questions --

1. There has been a generation gap in every generation that existed. The moustached old walruses of 1910 looked at the rising generation and saw a lot of flaccid, whey-faced epicenes who needed a good war to shake them out of their enuui. Unfortunately, that's just what they got.

2. People tend to get more conservative as they get older. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but it applies generally. The same kids who screwed around in the thirties dancing the shag to Artie Shaw, swallowing goldfish, circulating antiwar petitions, and feeling each other up in the rumble seats of rusty Model A's grew up to be the disapproving middle-aged parents of the 1960s, the same way the Boomers grew up, got old and crusty, and started sneering at the millenials.

Pretty much everyone over fifty is embarassed by the stupid stuff they did as teenagers, and the generation raised in the Era is no different. Nobody in my family told me that my grandmother "had to" get married until I asked her if her firstborn was a preemie, since he was born six months after the wedding. She turned dead white and threw me out of the kitchen, but that didn't change the fact that she was hot-to-trot in 1933. Nor did that change the fact that *her* mother had "had to" get married in 1911. When an older person starts telling you how Rinso White everything was when they were kids, don't believe a word of it.

 

[Fading Fast]

...
2) Why, generally speaking, was the GI Generation more socially conservative than the 1920s generation? Like, this seems to be the generation that looked down on the changes of the 1960s...And yet their parents or older brothers and sisters were flappers and Prohibition era partiers?

One argument I've read is that after having endured the Depression and, then, WWII, the GI Generation craved the stability and security their childhood and teenage years had lacked.

Hence, what many now look back on as the buttoned-up / conforming / stifling '50s was a relief to many of those who had just lived through the Depression and WWII.

Thus, when the second half of the '60s exploded into social, civil and cultural change, some of the GI Generation saw it as a threat to the stability and security they thought they had built up after WWII.

To be clear, while I see some validity in this argument - all my mom wanted was safety after growing up very poor and very scared in the Depression, she wasn't actively against the '60s, but was scared by it as she didn't want to lose what little stability she had had for the last 20 years after WWII - I've learned from Fedora Lounge and other sources that there are no simple all-encompassing explanations.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Thank you. Where would you suggest finding these lesser known sources (the gutter papers and other newspapers you mention)?

Also, a couple of social questions:
1) Was there any generational gap (I mean in terms of the '60s 'generation gap') between the Edwardian Era generation (say someone born in 1880) and his child born circa 1920?

2) Why, generally speaking, was the GI Generation more socially conservative than the 1920s generation? Like, this seems to be the generation that looked down on the changes of the 1960s...And yet their parents or older brothers and sisters were flappers and Prohibition era partiers?

If you survived a depression and a few polio scares, worked your way through college, fought a war, got a job, built a house, got married and had a family all before you were 30 your outlook might be different from someone whose biggest accomplishment was his skill at video games.

 

[BlueTrain]

I watch next to no television now. My wife prefers British TV and I can't understand the language. I also barely watched any of Seinfeld. Although the show typically opened with him doing a stand-up routine, the odd thing about the show was that he was really the straight man most of the time.

As has been alluded to a few times, different people have different perspectives. Likewise, the different decades were all quite different, both socially and economically, except that they don't always neatly change every ten years. The 30s might be said to begin in 1929. The 1950s ended in 1963, while the sixties ended in 1974, at least in some way. In fact, the decades even seem to overlap a little.

There are movie stars and there are actors and actresses. Life is pretty good for the stars until they burn out. But for the rest of the Hollywood, acting is their day job. They are the lesser known players, some of whom had a kind of star status (like, say, in the B-westerns) but they weren't up there with Bogart. Nowhere near. Some were grateful to have been part off the story, such as it was, and some were especially conscious of their fan base, even though it may have been elementary school boys. They enjoyed it while it lasted. I've never read many critical comments about the past from any of them, although I've read comments that the old westerns used a lot more horses and that was only ten years earlier. I suppose it was economic factors that forced changes like that, the same ways that big bands eventually became untenable at some point after WWII. Rock and Roll didn't help, even though present day rock stars supposedly earn a lot of money.

There was mention of the entertainers of the past starting young. Although some forms of entertainment no longer exist (vaudeville and variety shows), many entertainers still get their start very early, both here and in Europe. That's how they polish their delivery and stage presence and eventually go on to win talent contests and get offers. One of our neighbors when I was in grade school were entertainers. They produced few recordings but did a lot of personal appearances and even had their own local television show. But they kept their day jobs. Another thing, I think, is that no matter what variety of music is involved, from pop to gospel, it is equally and highly competitive.

 

[Stanley Doble]

If you want to get the feel of a certain era hit the second hand book stores and look for books from that era, non fiction are good but you can find out how some people were thinking from fiction too.

 

[Fading Fast]

If you want to get the feel of a certain era hit the second hand book stores and look for books from that era, non fiction are good but you can find out how some people were thinking from fiction too.

Agreed. It wasn't until I read the 1929 novel "Ex Wife" by Ursula Parrott that I learned that 1. people were jogging for their health back in the '20s, 2. there were tracks for it built on rooftops of apartment houses and 3. women - not just men - were doing it. Also, the novel shows that women were working and not just in "women's jobs" but as reporters, as copy writers for adverting agencies, etc. back then.

Contemporaneous novels are a great way to pick up on things that history books / social commentary books miss because they tend to focus on the big things and not the little details that round out life.

 

[BlueTrain]

Some of the older books that I've read as published in the 1930s suggest that teenage boys usually had cars. That wasn't the case in my neighborhood, although it may have been on the other side of town.

The concept of a woman's job is really a little difficult to pin down. To some, factory work is woman's work, although not necessarily a car factory. A factory that makes small electrical appliances, perhaps. And chances are, that is true everywhere in the world, since small electrical appliances no longer seem to be made here. There were two "factories" in my small hometown. One was a Maidenform factory that produced whatever they sell. Chances are, most of the employees were women.

The other factory was never referred to as a factory (neither is a shipyard). It was called "the shops," and it was a railroad yard and shops. They did manufacture rolling stock from scratch, too. Around a thousand men were employed there and maybe a few women. It was essential work during the war but I don't know if women ever replaced any men. I had uncles and cousins that worked there and they never served in the armed forces. Sometime in the 1970s the operation was moved to Roanoke as a result of all the mergers in the railroad industry.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Women made up the majority of factory line workers in quite a few industries in the Era, notably electronic assembly -- pretty much any radio from the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s was assembled by women, who had the necessary dexterity to work quickly with small parts in confined spaces on a chassis. Women workers were also the majority in the garment-making, food-processing and canning industries. And there were over a hundred thousand women who belonged to the United Auto Workers -- not an auxiliary, the actual CIO union.

There were a great many women in positions of authority in the broadcasting industry during the 1930s -- the director of programming for NBC was a woman, as was the network's chief censor, several women were prominent directors and producers on the creative side of radio, and this went all the way down the line to small stations, where women were very commonly found as traffic managers and continuity writers. There were even a few women holding first-class FCC tickets as engineers.

No matter how you look at it the common iidea that women spent the Era raising kids, vacuuming the drapes, and playing bridge -- and that they couldn't wait to stop being Rosie The Riveter after the war -- iis very much a revisionist trope. When Elizabeth Hawes surveyed the women of the UAW after WWII, she found that the majority of them wanted and intended to keep their jobs after the war.

 

[BlueTrain]

I have the idea, possibly false, that people were less likely to marry during the pre-war period and for several reasons. I feel certain that the pressure to marry was greater after the war, particularly during the 1950s. I likewise believe that the 1950s were more conformist than conservative, which is not to say they were exactly progressive.

At one time, there were more men living in communities where there were few eligible women. They lived in logging camps, mining camps and so on. There also seems to have been a reluctance on some fathers to allow their daughters to marry. That is reportedly the case in my wife's family and I have no idea why. But eventually some did marry, though a remarkable number of family lines simply died out due to a lack of descendants. One never hears of old maid aunts or bachelor uncles living in another city that gave large holiday parties any more. That is, I don't think one does. But perhaps that also reflected the large families that used to exist before the war and really before the depression. That also tended to force people to marry later as well.

 

[Fading Fast]

One reason why some families discouraged a daughter, or at least one of their daughters, from marrying was so that she would be around to take care of the parents as they aged.

To some of your other points - some of those unmarried aunts and uncles were gay so, fortunately, today they can pair up, but then, many of them chose not to marry, but also, not to live openly gay. There was a cousin of my mother's who lived alone and the general belief in the family was that she "liked women." It's funny looking back, but the view in my family toward her was definitely not derogatory, but almost "sad," recognizing that her desires left her with few options.

She was invited and came to all the family stuff (my small immediately family rarely went to these things as my father didn't like, well, almost anyone, in my mother's family) and, looking back, was probably gay as she had some of the artsy / quirkiness that today we'd recognize as usually (not always) associated with one being gay.

Another thing, and this is just MHO, there seemed to be a narrower window for marrying, especially for women, as if they didn't get married in their 20s, it was a cultural perception that their opportunity had past. To be sure, many women married later than that, but if it is a cultural norm, it does reduce the odds.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My great-grandmother got married at 17 because her boyfriend -- a man considerably older than she -- got her pregnant.

My grandmother got married at 22 because her boyfriend -- a man a few years older than she -- got her pregnant.

My mother got married at 20 because her mother had told her she'd kill her if she slept with her boyfriend before getting married. So she went ahead and married the louse, which turned out to be a very big mistake, one she still regrets.

The first two marriages cited above happened in 1911 and 1933, the third in 1959, when the "THE FAMILY IS AMERICA'S BULWARK AGAINST ALL UNSPEAKABLE EVIL" propaganda was at its peak. Such propaganda was far less prominent in the first half of the twentieth century, especially among the working class, where common-law marriage, cohabitation, and premarital sexual activity were far more common than those of us born after WW2 have been led to believe. But the social stigma against illegitimacy was very very strong, which pushed many couples into marriage much earlier than they might have liked.