The MasterVoices Podcast

Strike Up the Satire!

• MasterVoices • Season 1 • Episode 2

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When the first version of Strike Up the Band closed in Philadelphia in less than a week, its author George S. Kaufman famously quipped, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”  But what is satire, anyway? Join host John McWhorter and celebrated New Yorker cartoonist and editor Bob Mankoff as they trace the arc of satire from Aristophanes to Jon Stewart, and ponder its eternal attempt to rid us of our (equally eternal) human foibles. 

Also discussed:

• vaudeville, and other important stops on the comic development train.

• are the Marx Brothers still funny?

• humor is its own reason for existence, like music.

• when did “sense of humor” become a thing?

• John does a mean Mrs. Draper!

ARTIST BIOS

JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, and has written a weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

 BOB MANKOFF has been the driving force of comedy and satire at some of the most honored publications in America, including Esquire and The New Yorker, where he was Cartoon Editor for 20 years. He has devoted his life to discovering just what makes us laugh. He founded Cartoon Collections, parent company to CartoonStock.com, a new spin on the Cartoon Bank, the world’s most successful cartoon licensing platform that he founded in 1992. His life at the magazine was the focus of the 2015 HBO documentary Very Semi-Serious. Mankoff is currently the cartoon editor at the weekly online newsletter Air Mail.  bobmankoff.com

SHOW NOTES/REFERENCES


The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (previously The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.

Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to the Master Voices podcast, where we invite a diverse range of masterful voices to explore subjects ranging from music and language to history and culture. This pod is a project of the New York City nonprofit Master Voices, formerly known as the Collegiate Chorale, which, then as now, is dedicated to the unique power of the human voice to connect, unite and inspire. In the next three episodes, linguist New York Times writer and Gershwin enthusiast, john McWhorter, delves into the world of the Gershwin and Kaufman musical Strike Up the Band. You'll hear from theater historian Lawrence Maslin, new Yorker cartoonist and editor Bob Mankoff, maestro John Malceri and Master Voice's own maestro and artistic director, ted Sperling, as they unpack the many unique facets of the wholly unique Strike Up the Band. And now, without further ado, sit back and enjoy the Master Voices podcast.

Speaker 3:

Greetings all. I am John McWhorter and we're going to talk about the 1927-1930 musical Strike Up the Band, which will be given a wonderful performance by Master Voices on October 29th. And today's podcast is going to be about Strike Up the Band in the context of satire, specifically satire in the 1920s and 1930s, which was a more novel element in American humor at the time than we might think today, in what is often called the age of irony. And to talk about that, given that I'm not sure I know what satire is yes, I'm being coy is Bob Bancroft, who I'm sure all of you know, even if you think you don't know, as the New Yorker magazine cartoonist and the editor of New Yorker magazine cartoons for a good 20 years. He has edited many volumes and that's just the beginning of his oeuvre. But Bob does know what satire is. And I just want to open up by saying that as we engage Strike Up the Band, we have to remember that when we're going back this far, it's basically 100 years.

Speaker 3:

A Broadway musical in 1927 was, by our standards, piffle really, and I say that as a great aficionado of the form. I would give at least half of my earnings to spend a week in, say 1925, and go to the theater coughing in the cigarette smoke just to see what these things were like, but basically cigarette smoke just to see what these things were like. But basically musical theater meant that you had about 14 songs. The songs were usually either about love, dancing or something of the sort rarely anything very specific and a script was written that just got you from song to song. There was a love couple, then there was another usually younger love couple who did a couple of numbers dancing in front of the curtain while they changed the set and that was pretty much it. Most of the shows are completely forgotten, justifiably, because that's all they were. And even the shows by the big boys like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin really didn't get past that level.

Speaker 3:

Here we are in 1927, and after several musicals like that, the best of their form. Just like there are very good hot dogs and bad ones, this is like the Hebrew National of musicals in many ways. They did many of those. Then they get to 1927. They want to try something different and they actually try to do American Gilbert and Sullivan, and it's the beginning of a trio of satirical musicals that the two of them did. There were Of the Eye Sing and Let Him Eat Cake, which was a sequel of that one, but before them was Strike Up the Band, and here Master Voices gets to strike up the band. Having already done Of the Eye Sing and Let Him Eat Cake, and Bob, I want to ask you first, before we get a little more specific with this fascinating property, what's satire?

Speaker 1:

Well, satire is sort of a shapeshifter, it takes over many different forms. You know, if you go back to A Rape of the Lock, which I will not go back to because it would be just tedious to read, you know it could be. You know a poem that ridicules, you could go back which I am a little bit more interested in to Greek comedy, old Greek comedy, aristophanes, where it's entertaining ridicule and it's ridicule with some sort of purpose, some sort of intent. Now, the intent could be it's got a moral point of view between good and bad and it's going to situate saying this is bad, not really saying what's good, but this is bad, and we're going to make a lot of fun of it. You know, aristophanes makes fun of all people.

Speaker 1:

Socrates, you know, socrates is there in the thinkery. He's basically teaching the young how to think their way out of anything, bilzeo or whatever. And you know, in the play it doesn't end well. And you know, in the play it doesn't end well, you know. For you know Socrates. So satire is that has a more, a moral intent. It's supposed to laugh folly out of existence. It didn't. It hasn't seemed to be very successful at that. Right. But when we say that it's when I say it's a shapeshifter. It can take the form of a Tom Lehrer song Right, so long, mom, I'm off to drop the bomb. It can take the form of a broadcast Saturday Night Live right, it can be Jon Stewart who is giving us the news, or John Oliver. So it's in many, many different forms, and my view of it is that it has zero in terms of its ability to reform or change minds. It has zero effect.

Speaker 3:

So it's basically an entertainment. But would you say actually that today satire has become a default kind of humor that we as Americans, if we're going to be made to laugh, we're going to expect that there is a satirical element, and if there isn't, then especially the more you know, quote unquote enlightened among us, think of it, as you know, somewhat backwards we expect the satire. For example, saturday Night Live is now default American humor, not the edgy thing that it was even in 1975. Would you say that that might be the case?

Speaker 1:

I think satire is a way to show that you're smart and funny, right, that you know something. It's about the events of the world, okay, it seems to make a comment about them. I mean, even in, you know, when we're looking back to strike up the band and, uh, you know the outrage of fletcher that Switzerland is objecting to the tower based on. They can't do that. It's the Monroe Doctrine, right? Well, even then you have to know something a little bit about. Yeah, that's by George Madison, right? So you know, it's not George Madison.

Speaker 1:

You know James Madison, but satire demands very superficial knowledge. That's how it works 1927 version.

Speaker 3:

That actually makes me laugh, and it's the kind of satire you mean where you're supposed to be in on the joke. And so in 1927, new Yorkers would have been familiar with a policy where city kids were sent to spend, say, the summer in the country, the idea being that it was purer in the country. But Mrs Draper, our kind of Margaret Dumont Dowager, is thinking of something just in the reverse. She has no idea I'm going to imitate her in a way that's going to be extremely annoying. But this is a very brief passage in it.

Speaker 3:

But Mrs Draper the Dowager says mercy, mr Fletcher, have you ever stopped to think of our children? And Fletcher says I beg your pardon, when I say our children, I of course mean merely children. Oh, say our children, I of course mean merely children. Oh. And then Mrs Draper says, and particularly Mr Fletcher, those poor children who are doomed to spend their childhood out in the country. That's why I'm starting the city air movement for country children. I feel that, for the sake of itself, every country child should have two weeks a year in the city. That's something that presumes that you know about the policy in question, and so that's Strike Up the Band. Considering itself satire, I would think.

Speaker 1:

But yeah, I should say for this morning's performance. John will be playing the part of Miss Fafner. I will be playing the part of. Elvin.

Speaker 3:

Okay, there's a part of me that wants to be her. I'm not sure why?

Speaker 1:

And actually that's a joke, okay, that's a joke, okay that's a joke. It's a switcheroo, right? You can imagine that as a skit. It's not real, it's not really a bad idea. And you could see that in a completely different kind of joke, in a cynical way. It's more like I would think about it in that, you know, I, I don't like to go outside. I'm an endorsement, so am I? You know, I don't like to travel. When people ask me for travel advice, I say don't go.

Speaker 3:

I don't want to admit that. I'm kind of similar.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so this kind of Kaufman-esque ideas, I think. You see, in that, I think that satire is ultimately a kind of clever cynicism, mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:

You know clever cynicism, you know, and cynicism always seems smart. This is the way the world really works. We're revealing, you know, we're revealing something here, but I do think it edges over now. One of the things is that when I look at humor over the course of the New Yorker, or even historically, which I'm interested in, just like music, it's constantly evolving form that always has strength. So it starts off as okay, it's satire, it sort of looks like satire. Then it just becomes irony, a kind of detachment. It's unmoored from any moralistic idea that the world should change, right, it's saying we're wised up to it, we're wised up to it and we're at a distance from it. And because I think part of that comes out of the realization, you know, as I wrote, is that clearly, absolutely, it is not going to change the world.

Speaker 1:

Right, right, it's hard enough to change the world in any other way. We think we can change the world. We think we can change the world. Right that you're going to listen to Jon Stewart and somehow, or this whole idea of speaking truth to power. Power never picks up that call.

Speaker 3:

Right, and that's something that it can be hard to realize, even with the passage of time. But that actually leads to another question. It's 1927. And you know everybody's smoking, everybody's going to die of blood pressure, and you know they're at 59, you know there's a very different world. There's no penicillin, movies, silent. How did satire fit into the culture then, like, for example, do you think that Kaufman, in writing his satirical book to this, not to mention the straight plays that he had had hits with, did he think he was going to change the world? Was it a time when that was a fresher idea or did he already know that he was just having a good time? And, in general, satire in 1927.

Speaker 1:

I think, see, I think I'll get back to Calvin in a minute, but I don't think anybody on Saturday Night Live is a satirist. They're a performer.

Speaker 3:

What about the writers?

Speaker 1:

Even the writers. Once you could really be funny for money, could really be funny for money. That changed the equation and that starts with vaudeville. And vaudeville is the first. Of course it's comedy. Before then, but getting rich in comedy for a lot of people there was no such thing, no. But vaudeville it starts to happen, it's a medium.

Speaker 1:

For the first time you have something called material. Okay, there's material. Okay, that's written for you, it's a commodity. See, now it's changed in terms of how we think people are funny. But then you buy material, you buy jokes, okay, and maybe you want to buy satire, and Saturday night that lie becomes in satire. Does that mean that Lorne Michaels, that what, what his opinions are about the world? You can use it as a mode, you can use it as a performance. So I think it becomes a default way of being smart, but more importantly, it becomes a way of making money. Now I would say with someone like John Oliver it's different. You're looking at someone who has a moral point of view and it's interesting when he does his satire. It's mostly not satire, it's mostly actually didactic performance.

Speaker 3:

Common commentary. There's actually an interesting kind of nexus, though, between vaudeville, which is people throwing their hats around, a lot of kicking each other in the butts Vaudeville was about kicking each other in the behind and all the broad physical humor and then the satire that starts coming in in the 20s, and in fact we have discussed a peculiar and crucial book. Why, what's it called? Why are pistachios? What makes pistachio nuts? What made pistachio nuts? What made pistachio nuts.

Speaker 1:

No one can see it there it goes.

Speaker 3:

It is, it's wonderful, it's this peculiar book from about 30 years ago, but it still has wonderful insights where it basically demonstrates how vaudeville shaded into what we now see as satire right Vaudeville where vaudeville started to have an influence on theater and movies and there were two very different aesthetics.

Speaker 1:

And there were two very different aesthetics. And the aesthetic of vaudeville was I just watched the clip on YouTube of Donald O'Connor with Make them Laugh Make them Laugh, a genius, yeah. And which is the audience is right there. You're not waiting till the curtain for them to laugh, you're interacting with them immediately. That, I think, shifts over in that the. I don't think the legitimate theater, the legitimate here, at one time and board will thought of themselves as very separate, but these audiences were going to both.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

And they were expecting both.

Speaker 3:

So these bits in Strike Up the Band where you essentially have performance, and that also you see in all, you mean in Strike Up the Band, where you have the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough and a lot of what they do when they come out is stick that they didn't even see the need to write down in the script because everybody knew the sort of stuff that they did and that was part of a Broadway musical and maybe changed from night to night.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I and it and that's what people were expecting in the original written post and I originally probably shouldn't say this. When I originally read the script I said maybe it closed on Saturday night because it stung. But now, now that I've read it three or more times and actually understand that it, I think, think Kaufman was in some sense right, because they were not ready when Kaufman said that satire, satire is what closes on Saturday night, and that was in reference to Strike Up, the band's first incarnation, closing in Philadelphia.

Speaker 3:

Right, but your point.

Speaker 1:

I don't think. I don't think in the end he's a real satirist. I don't think that's his initial Kaufman. I don't think that's his grounding. He wants to entertain. He has all these musicals before that. Now, anybody who's comic and intelligent eventually thinks they might have something to say beyond that. That's an enormous mistake, I think.

Speaker 3:

Did they just stick with the jolly being that they started?

Speaker 1:

I'm not actually interested in Jon Stewart's opinions. I mean he's a smart guy, right. But you see, whenever you actually go from your satire to what you say, you actually have to make an argument that will convince someone. A joke is never an argument, and it's, I mean, I think, where satire first of all satire is fun. Humor is its own reason for existing. It's just like music. I don't have to justify it, but it does conceivably open up the discussion. You know what I mean. But I think the reason it's used now is knowing the most people. Where people said most people get their news through Jon Stewart is because otherwise it's boring. So he makes it not boring and you get the information that way, such as it is.

Speaker 3:

You know I actually it's interesting with Strike Up the Band and satire because I find that it's a fascinating look at how these things evolve. And so here it is as a piece of satire. And what's interesting is that in the Pistachio book, one of my favorite pages is where they discuss how in these goofy, early talky satirical films quote unquote comedies with Wheeler and Woolsey and people like that.

Speaker 2:

When they were making them.

Speaker 3:

They didn't think of them as satire. They knew they were kind of about politics or something, but they thought they were just doing the same old thing. And I think satire in the culture ends up entrenching itself gradually and what was really hot then, smart then, can't help but be less now In the same ways. During the pandemic I thought I was going to, I ended up watching every episode of the Jeffersons. It almost hurt by the end of it. I thought I was going to do it with Get Smart because everybody says oh, get Smart, and I was a little too young to really watch it.

Speaker 3:

And I found Get Smart is a great little show, but Airplane did it better, and Saturday Night Live now does it better, and does it better, and 30 Rock does it better. That was the state of the art then, but nevertheless there are things that strike up the band where I genuinely laugh. I'm going to read one more passage. And don't worry, neither one of these people are a woman, so it's not going to be so stupid. But this is Fletcher and he's the. And then he has this younger assistant and the younger assistant is discussing with him Sloan right, how things are going. And so Sloan says I have some of the reports here from the Middle West, if you care to hear them. There was a very large celebration in Des Moines, Iowa, a big cheese town. The parade was led by two naked girls symbolizing law and order, and was followed by the entire male population of the city.

Speaker 1:

That shows how popular the cheese is. That's funny, See. I read it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think that is genuinely funny and it is a kind of-.

Speaker 1:

You're right. I like the way it starts with jokes. There's lots of jokes. Then he talks about the world the record for cheese that it's eight and a half pounds.

Speaker 2:

No credit.

Speaker 1:

No credit, but not a record, but not a record, and every time I think about it I say that's interesting, that's the 20s In the 20s, people are, you know, sitting on flagpoles.

Speaker 3:

But this man is going to start a war, which I think is hilarious.

Speaker 1:

This man is going to start a war. And there are, there are. I guess one of the things is that satire now is often self knowing. So here you have the situational irony. None of these people think they're making jokes.

Speaker 3:

I know what you mean.

Speaker 1:

Right, and that also relates to how humor evolved in the New Yorker magazine. If you look in the 30s and 40s, we're viewing a scene we're seeing a baseball game from 1947. A woman is looking at her watch and she's saying why didn't they tell us there would be an extra animal? She is not making a joke.

Speaker 1:

And 20 or 30 or 40 years later, a woman is saying I started my vegetarianisms for moral reasons, then health concerns, now just to annoy people. She is making a joke. People, she is making a joke. The cartoons now are often influenced by people growing up with sitcoms, bringing up with people within the frame, are making the joke, looking into it, and so in the same way, here we, but. But it's different, different here, and that also goes back to that book, because the the, the vaudeville aesthetic is you're getting the laugh, you're getting the laugh from the audience. The theatrical aesthetic is you're waiting till the end. Okay, but, but, but, but. But. Calfman is playing it both ways. He's starting off funny. He's starting off giving us some jokes that I think the people would be laughing at.

Speaker 3:

Right Now, of course, in duck soup. If we're talking about satire in this era, they know that they're making jokes and I think that's part of why it's so ahead of the curve. Sometimes it's hard to believe that duck soup was as early as it was. They know right.

Speaker 1:

Well, groucho knows, because he's Groucho, and that's what. When Groucho is talking to DeMond he is rattling off a series of his performance jokes. Don't think it's like some precursor? I think it's. That that's vaudeville. Vaudeville is um, vaudeville is I mean I, I I'm going to do my rapid fire jokes. You're going to stand there and then, and then, like the crazy that's interesting, just like here, where all of a sudden take a card, any card.

Speaker 3:

It's almost as if bringing that vaudeville style of performance and presentation into a narrative book becomes satire, because you're supposed to at least be pretending something real is going on and instead you know Harpo's, you know leaving his leg in people's arms and ground.

Speaker 1:

Harper would be the clearest example of vaudeville. It almost has. And I must say, growing up I loved the Marx Brothers. Marx Brothers made me laugh. They don't now. You know, that's just the way it is. And I do think that I have a sort of jaundiced eye about a lot of the things we revere, or that it's just maybe there's so much luck or happenstance, the Marx brothers rather than the rich brothers. You know, retrospectively you say, well, oh, it must have been, it must have been. Shakespeare must have been so much better. I mean, there's a great New Yorker cartoon where where a guy is saying I like everything Shakespearean, just so long as it's not Shakespeare, right.

Speaker 3:

You know the Ritz brothers. I'm glad you brought them up because it also it helps me to clarify when I say that the Marx brothers knock about stuff becomes satire, I mean that in bringing that into a story, like they're doing that in a mansion with Margaret Dumont who doesn't know she's making shows, just standing there, that means that they are shaking their fists in a way against the common order. Now in vaudeville they were just doing stuff, but if that's in a mansion on Long Island, then they're in a way they're making a comment in a way that the Ritz brothers and for those of you who by some chance might not, know who they were they were just shitty marx brothers.

Speaker 3:

There were these guys that happened to get a good contract at 20th century fox and you know, the action would stop and they'd come out and do some dumb stuff, and that was what the marx brothers were better then, because they were always kind of in quotation marks, and so that's what I mean by it was proto I.

Speaker 1:

who are the Marx Brothers? I mean a friend of mine, steve Kamper, wrote a whole bio of them. Who are they? I knew, steve. They're not very educated, they're brilliant performers and they're coming out of vaudeville. They intersect somehow with an intellectual environment that puts this frame on them. Yeah right.

Speaker 1:

Somehow the TS Eliot wants to talk to them and you know and we put a frame on it because that we analyze it that they're anarchic, that they were against the social order, that they were this and that I don't think they were. I think they were vaudeville performers who were intelligent, and this is something I think that Groucho is smart. You can see in the letters that he's written and stuff, and you bet your life and his interviews?

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so he's smart and he's clever. I think one of the things that changed about satire, you know, in the in, in, uh, even from kaufman. Now, kaufman is certainly smart, but he's not really educated either. Right, he doesn't go, he's not in the current, not in the modern, not in the current thing. All of our satirists now went to the top schools. Okay, that how it changed in a way that you had people who actually had harvard lampoon lots of an education brown, harvard, princeton they start to infiltrate comedy.

Speaker 1:

And I think, and and not only that, when we're looking at Kaufman okay, he is collaborating right. Who is John Oliver collaborating with? He's got a whole team, okay, lot of smart people who went through the educational system in this to make a really really a different quality kind of joke. But I think it's in some way it's sterilized because it's commercialized, but in some way it's also clearly of higher quality. When you see Colin Jost and these people, it's you know, and these people they've got a team behind them creating this stuff.

Speaker 3:

You're making me think, bob, because this is something I've never admitted in public because I thought it meant that I'm not intelligent. The Marx Brothers have never done a thing for me either. I find them historically interesting. I've seen all the films but maybe one and a half of them, I think. I've read two books about them because I find them fascinating, including one that really just takes them all from infancy, practically. You know records when they went to the bathroom. To the end I forget the title. They're very interesting figures but I've never found them funny at all and I always thought I wasn't finding them funny because I found their battle against current realities and their battle against the man witless. I always thought I get where they're going, but frankly they're not doing it in a way I find very interesting.

Speaker 2:

You're saying that really.

Speaker 3:

It's just that I don't find knockabout vaudeville from 110 years ago. Funny.

Speaker 1:

And who does. And 100 years from now. And 100 years from now, people are not humorous. Aware that does not last very well. I mean, I've given talks sometimes and I've said you know, someone will say but this is humorous. In Plato's dialogue I said really, come on, not really. I mean not really, or Shakespeare, for that matter no, you're only laughing in quotation marks.

Speaker 1:

Yeah you're laughing in quotation marks at it and the uh. You know when I have done these various anthologies, you know I'm eliminating a lot of this stuff to pick the one from 1938 that still works, you know. You know, you know works for us. So I did as I found. Uh, as a kid I was born in 44, in the 50s, when I saw the marks brothers, basically as a a young, young teenager. They were funny to me, as was I Love Lucy, okay, but I think it appealed actually to a juvenile aesthetic and if I would look at that I would say that is the aesthetic that it appealed to there, in that our you know, the sense of humor and our idea about the comic.

Speaker 1:

First of all, the sense of humor is a fairly recent concept. If you look at a Google N-gram and you look at the term sense of humor, you'll see it only really starts to occur in the 1860s. Before that it's a sense of the ridiculous or a sense of ridicule. A sense of humor starts to mean something deeper and is important to us now, not simply because what we laugh at but what we laugh with. And a sense of humor is somehow also the ability to cast yourself out and see yourself numerously, and that's relatively recent, and that's why Donald Trump, who's funny, does not have a sense of humor. And one of the things I thought of here, which is not my thought, but what's the actual most important effect of our recent times? Ridicule. What is the most consequential effect? It's Obama's roast of Trump at the White House dinner, which is what stimulated Trump to run.

Speaker 3:

That's interesting, that. It's definitely true that, say, andrew Jackson, george Washington, did not know of going somewhere, paying and having somebody come out and make their diaphragm titter. That did not exist. Of course, there was such a thing as laughter, people had jokes, but it wasn't about performance. And one thing is that, starting in the early 1800s, the closest thing to a stand-up comedian was a clown Circus. Clowns would come out and talk about the issues of the day and say funny things and then take a pie in the face or something like that. But the stand-up comedian doesn't really exist until the 20th century and not at the beginning of it.

Speaker 1:

That's an important point, I think in vaudeville you have the monologue. You have something like that. You have jokes, you have material and if you look at as I did some research on it like what are you going to do with the monologue? First of all, it's not a narrative You're going to create a set of index cards where you're going to have essentially jokes. You're going to go so you do have something like stand up.

Speaker 3:

You mean in say like, like, even in say 05 or something like that, a monologue would be recognizable to us.

Speaker 1:

I think in the 1880s, 1890s you already have it's called. Just one person in front of a curtain.

Speaker 3:

Right.

Speaker 1:

And often this happens, like with Fred Allen and WC Fields, they're jugglers at the start, Right.

Speaker 3:

But they also say things.

Speaker 1:

Juggling, you drop things, you say funny things, but then material starts to get written. Material starts to get written and it starts to get bought it starts to get bought and jokes get told, and there's all sorts of other kind of bits. There's one I saw which essentially is things like there was a comedian, norm Crosby, whose whole act was malapropisms.

Speaker 1:

So, here you will have something called the German senator, and what does it mean? He's German and he mangles language and he talks about the issues of the day. He gets all of the things a little bit mixed up and I actually was looking at some. You really can go down a rabbit hole. But but all of it is so fascinating because of the history of it, never so fascinating that I'd actually want to do the work of a historian. Let me make that clear because that's hard. But it's there, it's all there. The history of you can go up. Now you can see an Eddie Cantor routine from the 20s, straight out of vaudeville where he's essentially doing stand-up. It's just one joke. It's one joke after other. It's different than when I was growing up. What I first of all, stand-up, didn't exist. There's a term, there were comics. Stand-up is actually a term. Google engram is great for this. You can go. Hey, when does the term actually? They're comics, they're on the show, and the Ed Sullivan show, of course, is vaudevich Right, oh, complete.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I'm really thinking about these differences. You talk about comic. Old radio didn't have comics, and so even that I know what you're talking about with the monologues, um, and I'm imagining, I'm imagining that that sort of thing, where the person comes out in front of the curtain and they're a character, and like even Eddie Cantor and his character, I recommend something to this audience, actually, in terms of somebody coming out and making remarks about the issues of the day with a certain wry quality that we would recognize. There's a guy named Jack Osterman and I think you can find it on YouTube O-S-T-E-R-M-A-N. He's a guy who comes out and makes remarks and you think to yourself wow, this is like Seinfeld's great-grandfather.

Speaker 3:

And then Frank Fay was supposed to be somebody who started doing that, but then also folks to get a sense of what Strike Up the Band actually looked like, and it's really lucky that we have this for something in 1930, the second version. There is also on YouTube this wonderful little five-minute thing where somebody actually went backstage and they actually show Gershwin accompanying a rehearsal of the number Mademoiselle in New Rochelle with these two knockabout vaudeville comedians, bobby Clark and Paul.

Speaker 1:

McCullough.

Speaker 3:

And you get a look at what it looked like. And one thing is, Bob, that you listen to Bobby Clark. I never thought you could hear his voice until I saw this.

Speaker 2:

Bobby.

Speaker 3:

Clark is sitting there with his painted on glasses and you're wondering what's so funny. And he does his banter with Gershwin, which I'm sure was partly scripted, and you can see the tone of voice like why those two people who in photographs look so hopelessly uninteresting were funny. Because Bobby Clark's patter is actually entertaining. I highly recommend seeing that.

Speaker 1:

But go ahead. I did. I went, I looked at some of these movies. You can see their talent. Okay, at some of these movies you can see their talent. So much of the talent also is physical. They've learned from vaudeville. Of course there's Will Rogers also and Mark Twain, so there are people you know. You mentioned, you know Seinfeld, and Seinfeld's an interesting show because to me it was a kind of perfect clockwork comedy. It's just very different in that no one is breaking out of character to tell the joke, right, right. And this is in that book where it's a question of does it interrupt the narrative as gags do, or is it a part of the comic event?

Speaker 3:

Exactly, and that kind of thing takes time. But Strike Up the Band is something that I think we have established is a very interesting part of a historical timeline and if we're thinking about a musical satire now, frankly a great many musicals have a satirical tone and we think nothing of it. My favorite recently, if recently is 22 years ago, was Urinetown, which was a purely satirical musical set to great music, closed for chance reasons but is now about to get a revival. But Strike Up the Band is the beginning of that tradition for the American musical in any substantial way, and it's set to music. That is absolutely splendid. And in the next edition of this podcast we're going to talk to maestro John Malceri, who conducted not one but two recordings of Strike Up the Band the 1927 version and the 1930. And so he knows not only milk, as the score says, but music. And so we're going to discuss the music in Strike Up the Band. But, bob, do you have any closing thoughts about this magnificently beautiful and also peculiar musical?

Speaker 1:

I really wish I would get you, would have had the chance to play Spelvin. I'd be a great Spelvin. Really, Spelvin is the little. I could even do the narch dance from his drapery.

Speaker 3:

You could make up the narch dance.

Speaker 1:

It's been fun and I guess tickets are available. I could actually see this if I wanted, right.

Speaker 3:

Something tells me that they will make sure that you see it. I certainly intend to be there. That is this coming October 29th. Folks Strike Up the Band in a one-night performance with full orchestra and even fuller chorus conducted by maestro Ted Sperling.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for listening to the Master Voices podcast. To learn more about Master Voices, visit mastervoicesorg. You can discover our rich history, read chorus member spotlights and buy tickets to upcoming performances. You can go there to support our work by making a tax-deductible donation. Your gift will allow us to continue our mission to spark greater human connections by reimagining what the choral experience can be. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to like and subscribe. Wherever you listen to podcasts.