"Who's on First?"

 

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello's performance of "Who's on First?" in "The Naughty Nineties" (1945) is considered the quintessential version of the routine, and the clip is enshrined in a looped video at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. The laughter that can be heard faintly in the background during the routine belongs to the film crew and director Jean Yarbrough. After numerous re-takes trying to eliminate it, Yarbrough just couldn't get the crew - or himself - to stop laughing during the routine, no matter how many times they heard it. So he just gave up and left the giggling in.

 

The "Who's on First" sequence was added after the rest of the film was shot and edited. Universal executives thought the film didn't have enough laughs, so they wrote in the routine, which Abbott and Costello had been performing for years on stage and radio, as well as a much shorter version in their first film, "One Night in the Tropics" (1940).

 

"Who's on First?" is descended from turn-of-the-century burlesque sketches that used plays on words and names. Examples are "The Baker Scene" (the shop is located on Watt Street) and "Who Dyed" (the owner is named "Who"). In the 1930 movie "Cracked Nuts", comedians Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey examine a map of a mythical kingdom with dialogue like this: "What is next to Which." "What is the name of the town next to Which?" "Yes." In British music halls, comedian Will Hay performed a routine in the early 1930s (and possibly earlier) as a schoolmaster interviewing a schoolboy named Howe who came from Ware but now lives in Wye.

 

By the early 1930s, a "Baseball Routine" had become a standard bit for burlesque comics across the United States. Abbott's wife recalled him performing the routine with another comedian before teaming with Costello.

 

Abbott stated that it was taken from an older routine called "Who's The Boss?", a performance of which can be heard in an episode of the radio comedy program "It Pays to Be Ignorant" from the 1940s. After they formally teamed up in burlesque in 1936, he and Costello continued to hone the sketch. It was a big hit in the fall of 1937, when they performed the routine in a touring vaudeville revue called Hollywood Bandwagon.

 

In February 1938, Abbott and Costello joined the cast of "The Kate Smith Hour" radio program, and the sketch was first performed for a national radio audience on March 24 of that year. The routine may have been further polished before this broadcast by burlesque producer John Grant, who became the team's writer, and Will Glickman, a staff writer on the radio show.

 

Abbott and Costello performed "Who's on First?" numerous times in their careers, rarely performing it exactly the same way twice. In 1956, a gold record of "Who's on First?" was placed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

 

"I'm a wistful little guy, you know what I mean? I'm the underdog, the guy nobody pays much attention to until something happens to him. I'd be way out of place trying to play some guy like a big hero or something like that. I've been doing comedy for maybe 30 years now. People know what I look like and what kind of little guy I am. They wouldn't accept too much different from that, would they?" (IMDb/Wikipedia)

 

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When you think about  it, this might go a long way to explain why variations in Karate occur!