The Flip Wilson Show

INTRODUCTION

For viewers tuned in to the debut of The Flip Wilson Show on Thursday, September 22, 1970, at 7:30 p.m., it must have been an uncanny sight: onstage stood a black man, smiling and running his hands over a large stack of money, and standing next to him was a white police officer, grimacing and running his hand over a holstered gun. The uneasy truce between the two figures does not directly invoke the racist police brutality that came to a head during the civil rights demonstrations of the sixties. Nor does it refer decisively to the bloody day of demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, five years earlier, or to the violent television news footage of white police officers assaulting peaceful marchers with fire hoses, dogs, and batons that day produced. In 1969 police killed noted Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark after years of armed clashes with the Black Panther Party, but nothing in the exchange between the two men indicates a specific correlation with this violent encounter. And yet, nothing in the scene lets any of these references to the racialpolitical conflict of the period rest, either. xi INTRODUCTION Despite such heavy connotations, this opening scene begins in the highest of spirits. Flip Wilson—the man who will later worry the officer, but for now is simply the star of the show—bounds through the audience to a stage in the round, high-fiving and hugging all the studio-audience members he meets along the way. He grins and bugs his eyes out like the famous black vaudevillian Mantan Moreland. He dances and sways as if “Pigmeat” Markham’s “Here Comes the Judge” act were playing on a loop in his head.1 Well before the cop and the money appear onstage, Wilson greets the audience and delivers an upbeat monologue about the show itself, his name towering above him in lights on one side of the theater: “FLIP” in arrow-shaped letters. Wearing a blue three-button suit with a hot-pink shirt and tie, he confides to the camera, “For quite a while now everyone’s been xii Introduction Flip Wilson welcomes the studio audience to the debut episode of his show. stopping me and asking me what The Flip Wilson Show’s gonna be like. Yesterday a guy ran into my car at an intersection , and said, ‘I stopped you because I want to ask you what The Flip Wilson Show’s gonna be like.’” He pauses to laugh and continues, “I decided the best way to put it would be to say . . . watch out!” Framed in a wide-shot that captures his whole body alone onstage, Wilson skips to the side to accentuate this warning and the audience members howl. If the nature of the warning remains unclear, hovering somewhere between a threat of razor-sharp satire and a killer dance move, they choose to revel in the blur between the two. With the crowd warmed up, Wilson brings matters back to the show at hand: “Since this is the first program, everyone figured we should open with a big production number, you know something really fancy, lots of great scenery, beautiful costumes, dancing girls, the works.” Again, Wilson dances in a tight but swaying circle—presumably in place of the absent girls—then abruptly stops moving and recalls, “We found out that the opening number we had planned would cost $104,000. I said, ‘Gentlemen, this is ridiculous! Everyone’s seen those fancy production numbers on the other shows. But how many people have ever seen $104,000?’” Both Wilson and the crowd crack open with laughter, and he concludes, “So I decided we’d open the show by showing you what $104,000 looks like.” Without further ado, the armed police officer carrying the money joins Wilson onstage. Wilson takes the money from the officer and presents the smallish stack of bills to the crowd: “This is it, ladies and gentlemen . . . and $500 of it’s in cash!” As the studio audience surrounding the stage laughs noisily, Wilson begins the exchange with the officer onstage. First, he furrows his brow and demands to know, “What’chu doing with your hand on the gun?!” Then he quickly refers the conflict to the multiracial studio audience, complaining, xiii Introduction “People can’t relax and enjoy looking at the money, you standin’ there with your hand on the gun.” After working...