Willie Howard

[Mike Salovesh]

Barry Popik said:

> WILLIE HOWARD & "COMES THE REVOLUTION"
>
> The NYHT, 13 January 1949, obituary for Willie Howard reveals that he was a
> dialect comedian who possibly put several slang phrases into circulation.  I'll > check his file when the Performing Arts Library reopens.
>
>    From col. 3:
>
>    For each of his classic sketches--"The Quartet," "Mexican Presidents," "I   > Can Get It for You Wholesale," "After the Opera" or "French Lessons"--he had a > different approach.  His famous "Rewolt" routine ("Comes the ravalution, you'll > eat strawberries and like it!") furnished a favorite gag for the depression    > years.

Dear Barry:

At this late hour, I can't judge whether this is or is not right for the
list. OK, let folks on the list hit delete.  I'm sending this to you
because I'm sure it is right for you.  Besides, it's my way of saying
thanks for your very kind words about my reappearance.

Old Willie Howard routines surely must have affected popular language in
their day, and it's wise to check them.  While you're at it, I'd bet that
other comics from stage, vaudeville, and burlesque must have had an impact,
too.  My guess is that those whose routines circulated on phonograph
records are the most likely bet as sources of language.dialect innovation.

The whole point to a classic routine like "Comes the revolution" was that
everybody in the audience knew every line. That's true of routines from
even earlier times: think of the "Arkansas Traveler", for example.

Once a comic bit reached classic status, the audience might have rioted if
so much as a word got changed. That's the performing truth of the scenes in
"The Sunshine Boys". Remember? Two retired vaudevillians, a famous team
that broke up out of repetition, are brought back for a TV special.  One of
them insists on responding to a knock at the door by saying "Enter!"
instead of "Come in!" The genius of a Willie Howard (or his like, from
Gallagher and Sheen at one end to Red Skelton at the other) was that they
could get the audience roaring in laughter even though everyone knew what
the next line would be.

Well, maybe not quite everybody knew every line. Or maybe Willie Howard had
been forgotten by the press and everybody else outside the Borscht Belt
when he died. In any event, the obit in the New York Herald Tribune got it
wrong -- hence this communique from P Triple A C, the Pedantic Accuracy At
Any Cost front.

The beauty of the best of those old routines is that you didn't have to see
the originals to learn all of their lines.  People performed them verbatim
for each other's benefit.  "Comes the revolution" outlived Willie Howard;
we used to do it for each other on and around Chicago's 55th street in the
1950s.

The setting for such shenanigans came when a bunch of theater-oriented
street people took over the premises of an East 55th Street bar.  While the
bar was still a bar, I played piano there for tips.  I don't think my
playing was why they went broke, but it's possible.  As the theater gang
converted the dark precincts of the old bar into a light and airy
cafe/cabaret/improv theater, I just sort of blended in with them. I had to:
when  we finished painting the walls, we ALL blended into everything inside
the place. Paint was everywhere.

The biggest fun with that crowd was throwing bits at each other --
telephone bits, for example.  (Hold up your left hand, with the first three
fingers folded down to yor palm.  Point your little finger at your mouth
and your thumb at your ear and start talking as if your hand was a
phone.)   And, of course, Willie Howard bits, Danny Kaye bits, Laurel and
Hardy bits, and so on.

Who's the "we" who did all those bits?  Lots of unknowns, and lots who
became knowns:  Mike Nichols and Shelley Berman and, I think, Bob Newhart,
to name three of the knowns.  (Those fist-as-phone bits were the genesis of
some of the best solo acts Berman and Newhart ever did.)  Eventually, the
core of the gang moved to the North Side and became Second City.  (Ohne
mich: that was the time when I discovered anthropology.  I knew theater
didn't pay much, and anthropology looked like it could be just as much fun
while showing some chance of bringing in a miserly salary, to boot.  And
that's what I got out of anthropology, too.  Lotsa fun, no money.)

"Comes the revolution" went like this:

Open, on burlesque's classic Fleegle Street.  Crowd (made up of comics,
cops, and strippers with street clothes drawn over their invisible
performing costumes) comes and goes.  For variety, some go and go, or come
and come: exit left, then reenter stage right. Lots of room for pantomime
bits in the crowd, until:

Enter WILLIE HOWARD, carrying a soapbox.  He sets the box down, with some
business about slipping as he starts to mount it. Finally he makes it to a
standing position on top of the box, and starts to orate. (I won't even try
to represent the accent -- give me a phone call some day and I'll reproduce
it for you, as best I can.)

HOWARD: "Fellow workers!"  Crowd ignores him.

HOWARD, louder:  "Fellow workers!!!"  No effect; tummeling continues.

HOWARD: "FELLOW WORKERS !!!"

A dope stops and stares up at the orator.  Howard, blessed with an
audience, albeit with only one member, directs its placement:

HOWARD: "Make a circle, make a circle."

--  yeah, it all comes back to me now.  And I don't care what the obituary
says. The last lines go:

HOWARD:  "Comes the revolution, you'll eat strawberries and cream."

DOPE:  "But I don't like strawberries and cream!"

HOWARD:  "Comes the revolution, you'll eat strawberries and cream and LIKE
it!"

(Lights out.  End of skit.)

See what I mean?  Strawberries alone just don't make it. Saying
"strawberries"  without cream is like saying "enter" when everybody knows
you're supposed to say "come in". It's strawberries and cream or nothing.

-- mike salovesh   <m-salovesh-9 at alumni.uchicago.edu>   PEACE !!!

        IN MEMORIAM:     Peggy Salovesh
        25 January 1932 -- 3 March 2001