The Flip Wilson Show

3. Variety and the Art of the Audience

Television’s ability to deliver close-up views of a performance into the privacy of the home led many of its early critics to call it an “intimate” medium, a term that still inflects the way we think about many styles of staging and shooting live acts.1 It is difficult, however, to imagine feeling this sense of intimacy while watching a performance televised on The Flip Wilson Show. In its effort to convey the sensation of watching a live theater act, almost every shot of Wilson and his guests onstage includes the studio audience that surrounds the stage in the round. In fact, the show’s shooting style often gives the sea of onlookers a more commanding portion of the frame than it does Wilson, the man they all watch so intently. Furthermore, Wilson’s trademark opening for the program, in which he works his way through the cheering studio audience to reach the stage at its center, only ritualizes for home viewers the reminder of this audience. In other words, watching others watch the show is part of the spectacle. Like so many elements of Wilson’s show, this preoccupation with the audience holds a key place in the generic pro77 CHAPTER 3 Variety and the Art of the Audience 78 Chapter 3 cedures of the variety show, both onstage and on television. For example, Eric Lott describes an engraving of a famous minstrel performance that is remarkably similar to the scene just described: “The crowd has become both background and foreground—it is not too much to say that it has become the spectacle itself, so much is Rice [the performer] dwarfed by the crowd’s interest in its own activities.”2 Similarly, Henry Jenkins writes of vaudeville: “Variety entertainment required that entertainers remain constantly aware of the tastes and interests of their audience and adjust their performances to feedback from the gallery. . . . Performers built upon this intimacy through direct interaction with the audience, moving as close to the edge of the stage as possible to allow for maxThe stage in the round set for which The Flip Wilson Show became famous. 79 Variety and the Art of the Audience imum communication.”3 In comparison to Lott’s self-regarding minstrel gallery, the vaudeville audience that Jenkins describes here engages the performer on more active, communicative terms, actually shaping the show’s acceptable limits. However, both accounts place variety spectators in an active exchange of regard with each other as a group. Their selfawareness situates them and the meanings of the show to which they respond in a shared popular culture. In other words, variety theater’s reputation as a popular medium takes a more literal form in its emphasis on the populace that sanctions and consumes it. The Flip Wilson Show more or less restages this practice for the small screen. That said, it was hardly the first to give its studio audience screen time. Fifties variety shows often included brief cutaway shots to the audience, as did some of the variety shows airing in the late sixties and early seventies. For example, The Carol Burnett Show (CBS, 1967–78) was known for its weekly question-and-answer segments, during which Burnett jettisoned her Bob Mackie armature for a more casual , improvisational—and, indeed, more intimate—exchange with fans. In its final season, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour also shot a few episodes on a stage in the round, a strategy that Aniko Bodroghkozy attributes to the show’s desire to recreate the “nonhierarchical, participatory” folk scene of a coffeehouse, and, at the same time, its desire to reach a “uniformly young and ‘hip’ looking” audience by making it manifest on-screen.4 However, while The Flip Wilson Show’s staging of the studio audience certainly draws on the generic precedents of all these shows, it is crucial to recognize what makes this staging historically, aesthetically, and institutionally unique, too. How does the show’s very deliberate style of staging and shooting the audience relate to its larger aesthetic strategy? What role does it play in the aesthetic of ambivalence that underpinned the show’s institutional politics? And what role does it play in the critical discourse that the show 80 Chapter 3 developed around the subject of racial identity and popular representation? Some answers to these questions are more readily apparent than others. For example, it is clear how the on-screen presence...