The Flip Wilson Show

1. Instituting Ambivalence: Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV

1 CHAPTER 1 Instituting Ambivalence: Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV 1 Long before Flip Wilson stormed the nation on magazine covers and television screens, he traveled it by more traditional means: from one gig to the next, working small black clubs and then the theaters of the Chitlin Circuit. In the copious interviews that accompanied his success, Wilson recalls these early years as a rewarding challenge. “Those black audiences in the little weekend clubs were the toughest I’ve ever played. With all the trouble black people have, they try to forget on the weekends. You’ve got to be good to make them laugh.”1 However, the rewards garnered during this chapter of his life were not limited to winning an audience ’s hard-earned laughter. After an on-air plug from Redd Foxx on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (NBC, 1962–92), Wilson made his first television appearance as a stand-up on the same program in 1965. On the strength of his success there, he was able to storm prime time television one comedy-variety show after another. In addition to his frequent return performances and guest-host appearances on The Tonight Show, Wilson was a frequent guest on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, The Dean Martin Show (NBC, 1965–74), The Carol Burnett Show (CBS, 1967–79), The Ed Sullivan 2 Chapter 1 Show (CBS, 1948–71), and others. During the same period, he released a string of comedy albums that achieved both critical and popular acclaim.2 By the time Wilson made his television debut as a stand-up in 1965, and as a television star in 1970, he was a seasoned performer with a formidable repertoire of characters and vignettes. This gradual, hard-fought ascent to fame resembles the diamond-in-the-rough narrative standard among many talented stage comedians who make it big on television. However , its details remind us that Wilson was not just a talented performer, nor did he strike the nation like a bolt from some blue comedy act. He was a talented black performer, aspiring to success at the grand proportions of broadcast television in a nation that remained deeply divided on the subject of race and largely segregated despite the Supreme Court’s 1964 civil rights legislation to the contrary. To be sure, the networks had already achieved some noteworthy success in marketing black stars to a national audience, particularly Diahann Carroll (Julia, NBC, 1968–71) and Bill Cosby (I Spy, NBC, 1965–68 and The Bill Cosby Show, NBC, 1969–71). Multiracial ensemble shows that advocated an ethos of racial equality , such as The Mod Squad (ABC, 1968–73) and Room 222 (ABC, 1969–74), also had registered in the popular conscience . Despite their popularity, though, none of these shows or their stars came close to achieving the success that Wilson and his show would, either in the ratings or with the cross-racial and cross-regional national audience. To make matters worse, the networks had made frequent but meek attempts to build variety shows around a black star who commanded the stage primarily with his or her own talents and personality, deeming each show a failure at the first sign of a flagging audience. Like The Nat King Cole Show (NBC, 1956), which segregationist audiences hastened off the air, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Show (NBC, 1966) and The Leslie Uggams Show (CBS, 1969) both focused primarily on 3 Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV the musical talents of their respective hosts and lasted only a few months. What, then, made NBC gamble on Wilson, let alone another variety show, when it did? What makes the story of The Flip Wilson Show end so differently within this volatile social moment? As we will see, the show’s unique appropriation of the comedy-variety genre, from its formal structure to its historical associations onstage and on-screen, helped make the show an especially viable response to the economic and sociopolitical challenges that faced the television industry in 1970. However, it was the combination of this strategy with Wilson’s unique star persona that laid the groundwork for the aesthetic of ambivalence—an aesthetic which may just explain the show’s sweeping success with such a wide range of audiences and its larger impact on the industry moreover. From Radical to Relevant In the debut season of The Flip Wilson Show, variety shows ranked...