[Ads-l] African golf

[James A. Landau]

I am not familiar with the phrase "African golf" meaning a craps game (or anything else), but I did find an interesting item about the stereotype (no longer current, I hope) of African-Americans as craps players.

Milt Joseberg _The Jack Benny Show_  New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1977, ISBN 0-87000-347-X, pp 83-85

about the Jack Benny Show broadcast on February 5, 1950:
     "It was now Thursday, with only three more days to the broadcast date, and the few remaining healthy members of our staff had written nothing but an introduction and an opening page of jokes.  Then Jack's personal secretary, Bert Scott, remembered a script that Jack had done in New York almost exactly ten years ago.  A copy of this script was dug up, updated, and shoved in as an emergency measure."

a selection from the script follows, showing a lengthy gag about Rochester playing craps

     "We had hardly signed off the air when the network's switchboard lit up like a computer gone berserk.  Jack, a gentle soul, was amazed at the unfavorable reaction.  He remembered that when the material had been done ten years previously it had caused hardly a ripple.
     "Jack was hurt by the uproar that the rerunning of this routine cuased, for he would rather lose laughs than hurt any individual, much less any ethnic group, and he was proud of his record in this regard."

the author continues with a neologism:

     "some time after World War II, columnist Walter Winchell launched a column crusade against comics who got laughs at the expense of minority groups.  <snip>  those who got their laughts at the expense of racial minorities by denigrating Italians, Jews, Negroes, and others were on his enemy list.  Winchell invented a word, as he was salways inventing words, to describe these tasteless comics.  He called them 'Vomics'."



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