Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars

by Kliph Nesteroff

Author Fritz Stern observed in his 1961 book, The Politics of Cultural Despair, that societies often “mistook change for decline, and, consistent with their conception of history, attributed the decline to a moral failing.”

After campaigning for Alabama segregationist George Wallace in 1968, Weyrich distanced himself from the John Birch Society, but he retained their political philosophy. With a massive handout from Joseph Coors of the Coors beer dynasty, Weyrich developed an elaborate Culture War infrastructure. He founded the Heritage Foundation with Coors in 1973, the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell in 1979, and helped establish the Christian Coalition with Pat Robertson in 1989. Each organization crafted a series of bogeymen meant to divide and conquer the body politic.

Lenny Bruce was arrested for saying the word “schmuck” onstage in Los Angeles in 1962. George Carlin was arrested for vulgarity in Milwaukee in 1972. Richard Pryor was arrested for swearing in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1974. Andrew Dice Clay was threatened with arrest in Dallas, Texas, in 1990. The harassment of comedians was far more serious when they were up against the law.

Now ninety-one years old, Ernest Chambers is surprised to hear current complaints about a lack of freedom in comedy. “There’s no question there’s now more freedom of expression in comedy today,” says Chambers. “I mean, having been through the Smothers Brothers situation—what we could and could not say fifty years ago compared to now? It’s no comparison. People just don’t know their history.”

As early as 1848, abolitionist Frederick Douglass referred to blackface comedians as the “filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and to pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”

Vaudeville shows in the post–Civil War era were informed by the old minstrel shows. For that reason, comedians were criticized as old fashioned and unoriginal. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote in October 1877, “Hitherto … the form of amusement we call comedy has not changed much. We meet the same types every day played by the same men who pictured them twenty years ago. Indeed, the traditions of the stage have preserved the old men and maidens of the earliest times.” Immigration would change it. Jewish immigrants, Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, and formerly enslaved African Americans took to the stage and established the roots of modern American showbiz. They did so because there was nowhere else to go. Xenophobia shut them out of the traditional workforce.

Accused of spreading immorality and crime, performers were often assaulted and run out of town. Vaudevillian Sam Devere fought an attacker and beat him to death with his banjo. Vaudeville comic Eddie Foy was tied to a horse, dragged through town until his limbs were raw, and dumped face-first into a water trough.

Anthony J. Comstock was the king of such anti-sex campaigns. He founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873 and started rounding up anyone involved in sex. Comstock said masturbation was “dangerous” and “embracing” was pornographic. “If almost all of America’s young men are addicted to this lethal practice,” wrote Comstock, “what hope remains for America?” Comstock was skeptical of reading. “It breeds lust,” he claimed.

Noah Webster of Webster’s Dictionary published a new abridged version of the Bible, explaining, “Many passages are expressed in language which decency forbids to be repeated in families and the pulpit.”

Ruining the lives of authors and artists, Comstock was targeted for revenge. While escorting an arrest, he was stabbed in the head. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “The blow was instantly repeated, the dirk this time cutting a fearful gash in Comstock’s face, extending from the temple to the chin, and laying the flesh completely open to the bone. Four of the facial arteries were severed. With the blood spurting from his wound, Comstock seized the prisoner … and presenting a revolver, threatened to shoot him if he resisted.”

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle concluded, “Sensitiveness under such conditions may very easily be carried to extremes. The stage abounds in racial types of which a multitude are frankly caricatures. The violent objection … is a spirit that reveals a regrettable absence of the sense of humor.” In their opinion, ethnic minorities were selfish for wanting to eliminate stereotype comedy when it was enjoyed by so many: “A few may seriously object, from rooted prejudice to racial caricature. But more enjoy and applaud, and they have rights that are at least worthy of consideration.”

In an editorial from 1910 titled “Racial Caricature Out of Date,” the paper argued, “It is high time racial caricature on the stage or in the press should be reformed altogether. Everything about such caricatures is so ancient, so pointless, so devoid of reason, art, legitimate fun, that their complete retirement would please all.

“There is to be no more offensive racial reference or caricature in the theaters of the United States. An understanding to that effect has been reached by A.L. Erlanger and Lee Shubert, the respective heads of the rival booking offices, which are now working in harmony by agreement. Offensive racial reference is any reference in story, dialogue, joke, gag, or song that would be held offensive by the members of the race it was aimed at. For instance, Jewish people object, and rightly enough, to tales about members of their race starting fires to collect insurance, Irish folk do not like to hear their countrymen depicted as living with pigs in their parlors.”

The Philadelphia performance went ahead. Black patrons sabotaged the performance. During a scene in which characters are shown enjoying slavery, a man hurled an egg at the stage and a police riot erupted. “Two or three policemen was instantly upon him knocking him senseless with the first blow,” reported a journalist with the Broad Ax newspaper. “And there upon the seat, helpless, these angels of hell vied with each other to see which could wield his club fastest and hardest … I am informed [they] beat him as they were carrying him out. This display of brutality was no doubt intended as a determent to others who … resent the portrayal of himself as the brute, a rapist.”

Even after the war critics of foreign policy were imprisoned. Cartoonist Art Young was charged with conspiracy for an editorial cartoon in which he called the war a “satanic bloodbath embraced only by big-bellied profiteers.”

Racism upset Black filmgoers, but white filmgoers focused on vulgarity. A minor scandal ensued when lip readers discovered that silent film actors, instead of mouthing dialogue, were mouthing profanity as a prank.

The anti-jazz crusade was anti-Black, but Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company switched it up and made it anti-Semitic. One of the pamphlets he distributed through his Ford dealerships was titled “Jewish Jazz … the Moron Music of the Yiddish Popular Song.” Ford wrote, “Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation.”

Mae West played vaudeville nonstop from 1910 through 1926. She had a cult following, but mainstream acceptance eluded her. She cowrote most of her own material, and when she and playwright Adeline Leitzbach put together a play called Sex, it made West the most talked about actor in America. Sex was an action-comedy about a Montreal prostitute. It portrayed gangland slayings, corrupt policemen, seduction, and suicide. Billboard called it a “disgrace to all those connected with it.” The Daily Mirror headline declared, “Monstrosity Plucked From Garbage Can—Destined to Sewer.” And the New York American pleaded, “Wipe Out Those Evil Plays Now Menacing Future of Theatre.” A protagonist whore was too much for New York preachers and police. After forty-one consecutive weeks on the Broadway stage, the NYPD raided the production. The cast was arrested and charged with “giving an immoral performance and maintaining a public nuisance,” stagehands were booked for “corrupting the morals of youth,” and the stage manager faced three years in prison.

Mae West was found guilty on all counts. The next night she was transferred to Welfare Island’s women’s workhouse and served ten days hard labor. Upon release she was offered one thousand dollars for a story about her jailhouse experience. She accepted and donated her payment to establish a prison library.

Sidney Howard, the Gone with the Wind screenwriter who would be crushed to death by a tractor four months before the movie’s premiere.

Even innocuous political comedy was out of the question. CBS radio comedian Phil Baker rattled off the ages of the Supreme Court Justices, “62, 68, 72, 75,” and then yelled, “Bingo!” The censors scolded him, “You can’t make passes at dignity over the radio.”

Despite the tremendous controversy, NBC sensed it was part of an orchestrated campaign and not an indication of listener consensus. Too many of the letters they received were written with identical language for it to be a coincidence. “It was like a great wave of witless drivel that broke upon our shore, rolled foaming up the beach and flowed out again,” said one NBC executive. “What coincidence, or as yet undiscoverable force, activated these variant minds and set them thinking along identical channels …”

Comedian Eddie Cantor called Father Coughlin a phony opportunist. “Father Coughlin is a great orator but I doubt he has a sincere atom in his entire system,” said Cantor. “We Jews have nothing to fear from good Christians. We are their brothers and sisters. But I am afraid of people who pretend to be good Christians.”

Texaco Oil considered Eddie Cantor a problem. After the comic emceed several rallies for the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, Texaco pulled their sponsorship, and the program was canceled. Six months later, Texaco chairman Torkild Rieber resigned after he was exposed for secretly supplying oil to Hitler and providing classified information about American shipping routes to the Nazis.

NBC and CBS had no problem broadcasting a Nuremberg rally, but references to Hitler were forbidden in “song parodies, comedy skits [or] dramatic productions.” The novelty song “Even Hitler Had a Mother” was banned in England because British censors had a firm rule: “No head of state should be ridiculed.”

Chaplin’s anti-fascist satire The Great Dictator was banned by Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, and the police in Chicago.

Many of the best comedians were deployed overseas, either as servicemen or as entertainers. It left a domestic vacuum that was filled by mediocre, lackluster talents. Broadway producer Billy Rose noted an ironic trend of racist comedians filling the vacant spots. “Before the war, most of them didn’t work two weeks in fifty,” said Rose. “During the war, these brassy, not-so-classy comics got their chance.”

“The classic vaudeville dialecticians did not tell the truth about my father’s generation,” said Levenson. “If they had presented the whole picture, then perhaps there would have been room for some dialectical kidding, but when every Jew is presented as a pawnbroker or his next of kin, I say good riddance … It is dated at best.”

“These jokes not only make me mad—they make me sleepy. I laughed at them 20 years ago. I yawned at them 10 years ago. I winced at them five years ago. Today they nauseate me.”

characters.” Senator William J. Keenan of Massachusetts called for government action. In a speech delivered in January 1951, he said, “It is about time for us to see that we get decent shows that do not make parents blush in explaining double meaning gags to their children.” He proposed “a year’s imprisonment” for any television comedian “deemed immoral or tending to corrupt morals.”

I Love Lucy was the most popular television comedy in America. When its star, Lucille Ball, was expecting a baby in real life, a storyline was proposed about Lucy Ricardo being in a family way. Desi Arnaz, who produced the show and played the Cuban bandleader-husband, received immediate resistance from the sponsor, Philip Morris. “There’s no way you can do that,” they told him. “You cannot show a pregnant woman on television.” “She’s pregnant,” Arnaz insisted. “There is no way we can hide that fact from the audience. We have already signed the contracts. This is the number-one show on the air. There is only one way to do it—Lucy Ricardo will have a baby.” Getting nowhere, Arnaz wrote a letter directly to Alfred Lyon, the UK-based chairman of Philip Morris. He reminded him that I Love Lucy had made huge profits for the tobacco company, and now his American underlings were putting that at risk. Lyon sent a directive to his American representatives, “To Whom It May Concern: Don’t fuck around with the Cuban.”

Corporate sponsors were far more likely to placate bigots than Black viewers. Southern racists possessed greater purchasing power than the average African American, and as such, their considerations were more important to advertisers.

“The best pictures I did were not popular,” Griffith told him. “The lousy ones, like The Birth of a Nation, only a cheap melodrama, were popular.” Recalling the protests Griffith said, “According to the Constitution, you are allowed to say anything you please, but you are responsible for your speech and conversation by law and may be so punished. No one is really allowed to say what he pleases.”

The American Gas Company deleted all references to Nazi gas chambers in Rod Serling’s teleplay for Judgement at Nuremberg. “It mattered little to these guys that the gas involved in concentration camps was cyanide, which bore no resemblance physical or otherwise to the gas used in stoves,” said Serling. “[It was] an example of sponsor interference which is so beyond logic and so beyond taste.”

As the hostility turned to death threats, Steve Allen contacted the FBI. Eighteen months after the first letter arrived in Sherman Oaks, the FBI interrogated a former playwright named Myron C. Fagan. Fagan had a grudge against show people ever since his Red Scare play A Red Rainbow was trashed by drama critics in 1950. Theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Mr. Fagan believes that he is helping to save America. That leaves us with an unworthy thought: Who is going to save America from Mr. Fagan?” Fagan wrote Richard Nixon a series of fan letters in the early 1950s, praising his anti-Communist record, but in a private memo Nixon warned that Fagan was “a Fascist and will pop up again six years from now.”

George Carlin was a brand-new comedian when he appeared on a black-and-white episode of The Merv Griffin Show and mocked the John Birch Society. Carlin delivered his monologue in character: “Thanks very much, the name is Lyle Higgly. I’m the head of the local chapter of the John Birch Society … That’s the New York chapter that takes in New York, New Jersey—and parts of Idaho … At this time I was going to have a guest speaker for us tonight. I had invited the head of the Ku Klux Klan, the Grand Imperial, Almighty, Omnipotent, Invincible Stomper. However, his wife won’t let him out of the house tonight. In his place we have the supply officer in charge of sheets and robes … He’s just been acquitted of murder for the sixth time.” Carlin’s performance went over well. He walked to the panel and Merv Griffin said, “Geez, George. You don’t usually do little things with a sting.” Carlin agreed, “No, usually it’s nonsense stuff, but I just thought it was topical and … why not give it a little try?”

Rockwell was mentioned in Bob Dylan’s latest composition, a satirical song called “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Dylan was booked on The Ed Sullivan Show, but CBS got nervous when they learned he was going to perform the song. “Dylan went through it,” recalls The Ed Sullivan Show director John Moffitt. “Ed said, ‘That’s fine by me.’ And CBS said no. Usually they left Ed alone because he censored the show himself and was very strict. It was the only time they ever overruled him.”

“Those satires on American history Bob Newhart indulges in on his weekly NBC-TV series have drawn the ire and fire of letter-writers described by an NBC-TV source as ‘extreme right-wingers,’” explained Variety. “The writers take issue with Newhart’s irreverent fun in the satires and charge that he is ‘un-American’ and ‘must be Communist-tinged,’ the net executive said.”

A letter to the editor in the Cincinnati Enquirer from July 1957 warned of a hex placed on those who dared badmouth Elvis: “Creep!!! Goon!!! We have warned you before of the horrible, dire consequences if you kept talking against the great Elvis Presley. Now you have done it again, oh, foolish one! Beware, oh, stupidest of men! We hold the midnight teenagers black mass over everything you write against the great Elvis! Smeared with the famous Hound Dog Orange, it is consumed in sulphurous flame as the litany of destruction is chanted!”

When kids of all races poured from the grandstand to dance together at a Fats Domino concert in Houston, police intervened and announced over the loudspeaker that only white kids were allowed to dance. Fats Domino said fuck that noise: “Man, I could not go for those happenings as my people made me—and to play for a jim-crow dance would hurt me all over the country.”

The City of Tampa outlawed the twist because it was “unwholesome for children and teenagers.” The Texas Liquor Control Board banned it because it was “vulgar” and “lewd.” A civic official in Huntington, West Virginia, said he forbade the twist because “the youngsters put a little too much twist into it.” The manager of the Roseland Dance Hall in Times Square disallowed the twist because it was “lacking in true grace.” He predicted the fad would quickly fade “because a girl likes to be held while dancing.” The twist was banned in Mexico, the Isle of Formosa (Taiwan), Egypt, and Iran. Syria outlawed it for being “sexually provocative,” and riot squads arrested dozens of Lebanese twisters in downtown Beirut.

The St. Catherine of Siena Church in Indianapolis organized a “Beatle bonfire” that spiraled out of control. Flames jumped from a pile of Help! soundtrack albums to neighboring homes. When the fire department arrived to extinguish the flames, churchgoers pelted them with rocks.

“General Motors last week was applying all the pressure it could muster in an attempt to force NBC-TV to shelve a ‘Bonanza’ episode,” reported Variety. “General Motors raised its objections on the premise of not wanting to whip up national anxieties during the current integration crisis.”

“When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line,” said a young Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell. “Integration would destroy the white race.”

As ratification of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 neared, a man in blackface stormed the US Capitol Building. UPI reported, “Clad in black from head to foot and wearing blackface minstrel makeup, he pranced and grimaced before the stunned House members, shouting, ‘I’se de Mississippi delegation.’ He waved a large, unlit cigar and wore a jaunty, slightly crushed top hat. A fur loincloth hung from his waist. Capitol policemen, caught unaware by the bizarre invasion, surged onto the floor … He later was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct and released after forfeiting a $20 bond … Chairman Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y., of the House Judiciary Committee said he was irked at the relative lightness of [the] fine. He said he would have ‘thrown the book’ at the intruder … It seemed incredible that a man so dressed could have obtained entrance into the Capitol at all.”

“I’m losing my ass,” the club owner confessed. “I’m paying this guy a thousand bucks a night. And look at the [empty] house … I had him here about three years ago and made good money. He was doing more straight comedy then—not so much of this political nonsense. A year later he was deeper into the political thing and I just broke even. This time he’s knocking everything—religion, the colored, even the dead Kennedys. It’s a disaster. People are calling up to complain.” Asked about his drastic shift in personality, Gardner said, “Well, everything grows and events change too. For ten years there I was paralleling the Civil Rights Movement. I’m a Southerner, so I’m not gonna change that accent to appease ignorance. You dig it? I never had a demonstration against me anywhere. We got off the colleges because we saw this thing building.” King joined Gardner at his home for a lengthy interview. As the tape recorder rolled, Brother Dave dismissed Bob Hope and John Wayne as too left-wing.

Harry Dolan graduated from the Watts Writers Workshop and sold a script to The Partridge Family. In his episode, the Partridge Family’s multicolored bus breaks down in a Black neighborhood. They’re confronted by an unwelcoming pair of Black Panthers, portrayed by Lou Gosset Jr. and Richard Pryor, but the family wins them over. By the end of the episode, a young Danny Bonaduce is gifted a black beret and made an honorary Panther.

Sgt. Barry Sadler’s unlikely one-hit wonder, “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The square-jawed veteran with no previous music experience said his five-minute, undanceable pro-war record about “fearless men who jump and die” was “written in a whorehouse in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, while I was on leave.”

Sgt. Barry Sadler was hailed as a hero, but in the rush to find a noble advocate for the war, the press failed to look into his background. “If you didn’t know him, you would have gotten the impression that he was an extreme kind of Nazi and anti-Jew,” said one of Sadler’s friends. “He admired the German soldier mystique and Hitler’s use of discipline.” As sales of his hit single neared one million copies, Sadler spent his royalties on vintage Nazi memorabilia.

“Police have charged Barry Sadler, known for his rendition of ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets,’ with the murder of a songwriter,” reported the Associated Press in June 1979. “Sadler, 38, is charged with second degree murder in the Dec. 1 shooting death of songwriter Lee Emerson Bellamy.” Eleven years after the murder charge, Sadler was sitting in the back of a taxi in Guatemala when an unknown assailant pressed a gun against his temple and shot him dead.