"Cross-Talk": Language, Space, and the Burns and Allen Comedy Film Short

The Oxford English Dictionary traces two historical trajectories for the use of the term "cross-talk" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One derives from theatrical stagecraft. The earliest example cited by the OED is a reference in 1909 to a "carefully rehearsed 'cross-talk' dialogue between two knock-about artistes of the Variety firmament". ¹ "Cross-talk" of this kind has roots in the nineteenth-century minstrel show olio, which featured a "cross-fire" passage in which an interlocutor, placed centermost in a line of blackface performers, served as the straight man for a rapidly paced series of jokes delivered by the "end man". The OED flags this earlier usage when explaining the related term, "cross-talker", citing a 1907 reference to "those pioneer cross-talkers, the Christy Minstrels". A common term for a particular kind of two-person comic routine (or "two act") by vaudeville performers in the early twentieth century, "cross-talk" also survives in critical commentary on later theatrical forms influenced by vaudeville or music hall traditions, as in references to the "cross-talk" in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. ²

The second definition of "cross-talk" identified in the OED concerns processes of electrostatic induction. As early as 1887 the term was employed in telegraphy to refer to unwanted "noise" produced by currents passing through a neighboring circuit or channel, a form of interference later also applied to telephony and radio broadcasting. According to the OED, by 1910 the likening of electrostatic "noise" to human speech - to a kind of "talk" - came more literally to include "conversation over one telephone circuit overheard in the telephone of another circuit". A shared or "party" phone line, we can surmise, was particularly vulnerable to this kind of inadvertent cross-talk, in which not simply wires but private conversations crossed paths, arriving at unintended destinations. As a term of stagecraft, according to the OED, vaudeville "cross-talk" also acquired more popular, colloquial applications, as in P.G. Wodehouse's reference in his 1923 novel, Adventures of Sally, to everyday conversation "as brisk and snappy as any cross-talk between vaudeville comedians", or the observation in the Times Literary Supplement of 27 March 1930 that "some of the crosstalk of the American shop-girls is entertaining". In the latter instance, private conversations by young female shop workers, overheard by colleagues or customers, are treated as a social performance, available for the amusement of the attentive listener in a public setting.

In this essay I argue for the utility of these different but related notions of "cross-talk" to understanding the comic strategies of George Burns and Gracie Allen in the short comedy films they made for Warner Bros. and Paramount between 1929 and 1933, a brief period overlapping with their last years as vaudeville headliners and their initial forays into radio. Focus falls on three films: Burns & Allen in "Lamb Chops" (1929), their debut comedy short, based on their popular vaudeville act, made by Vitaphone for release by Warners, and Fit to Be Tied (1930) and The Babbling Book (1931), their first and seventh Paramount releases, respectively. Examined chronologically, these films illuminate a wider trend in short film production during these years, in which dialogue-driven, two-act sketch comedies were opened up to ensemble casting and fuller narrative development. The tonalities and cadences of the voices of Burns and Allen, honed in vaudeville cross-talk and providing a quasi-musical dimension to their delivery of dialogue, now became complemented by the voices of other actors. The comic exchanges unfolded in more fully appointed sets, and sometimes across two or more settings. The frontal staging of the act yielded to analytical editing, which was timed to the flow of conversation and on occasion pointed up a punch-line. In all of these respects, the Burns and Allen comedy short follows broader trends.

These films repay attention, moreover, because of the ways in which their comic wordplay - involving puns, riddles, false syllogisms, and syntactic and semantic reversals - is attuned to spatial relations. On stage and screen, Burns and Allen developed a...