Article
Who's Who and What's What: A History of Who's on First"
by Diode (Dr. Ether's Nephew)
The comedy routine "Who's On First" is firmly associated in our collective consciousness as being the product of the team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Yet, although the duo refined the routine, and made it a centerpiece of their career as a team, the beginnings of "Who's On First" were contrived sometime in the late 1800s.
In the days prior to film and radio, live performances were the main form of entertainment. One form of live performance was the burlesque show, which, unlike the latter day counterpart which we associate only with striptease, featured lots of the female forms, but in a sort of "naughty" rather than an overtly sexual context. Along with the girls, burlesque shows also featured parody, pastiches of well known plays and fiction and, quite often, word play along the lines of puns and witticisms. Probably the best way to categorize burlesque is that it was an adult form of entertainment in word, setting and action, while vaudeville, which came along a little later, was more family oriented and had the trappings of a variety show.
Although the records don't exist as to where many of the standard burlesque routines originated, it is known that around the turn of the century, the type of word play that would later make up "Who's on First" was popular. One routine, "The Baker" (or "The Baker Scene"), involved a bakery shop on Watt Street and the ensuing confusion over its location. An English variant concerns a young school boy named Howe who lives in Wye. Other routines of the same type followed with endless variations and twists and these were incorporated into radio skits and vaudeville performances. The comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey even brought a variation of the routine to their 1930 film Cracked Nuts, where they examine a map with town names such as What and Which.
"The Baseball Sketch" was another twist on this homophonic conundrum that gained popularity alongside the growth of baseball as a spectator sport. Exactly where it began, no one knows, but the basic sketch revolved around the names, and nicknames, of popular players. The team of Abbott and Costello added it to their repertoire shortly after they began working together in Burlesque in 1936. The routine became quite popular for the duo and they kept it in their act when they toured as a part of a Vaudeville revue in 1937. In February of 1938, Abbott and Costello joined the cast of the Kate Smith Show and, according to the majority of sources, performed "Who's On First" for the first time on radio in March of the same year. Their popularity on the show led to more radio work, movies and their own radio show which ran from 1942 until 1947.
How the sketch changed over time is not known, nor is there firm information on who worked on refining the sketch. There appear to be very few text transcriptions of the routine and recordings of early versions of the sketch seem to be non-existent (which is why we have chosen to present the 1944 version on KWTNL). Reportedly, the routine was performed in different versions over time with many of the twists and turns dictated by the amount of time the duo was given to perform. Probably the biggest change done on air was on the December 4, 1943 broadcast of Command Performance (Command Performance was a variety show produced by the War Department for broadcast to the troops overseas). In this performance, Costello substitutes the word "damn" for "darn" at the end of the routine, assumedly because he was performing for a military crowd. A darker interpretation is possible, however, since Costello had just returned to performing a month earlier after a bout of rheumatic fever: a return that was darkened by the drowning death of his infant son on the same day as his return. Although it is not documented anywhere, might this have been Costello voicing his feelings about the sketch in light of what he had just experienced?
A great deal of original work must have gone into the routine, however, because Abbott and Costello were granted a copyright to "Who's on First" in 1944. The duo continued to perform the sketch in films, radio and television for the remainder of their careers and, as mentioned above, the routine made its way into our popular culture. References to "Who's on First," as well as to Abbott and Costello, can be found in films and television up to the current day.
And, just to set the record straight:
A gold record of "Who's on First" is on display in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, but neither Abbott or Costello were ever inducted into the Hall as members.