The Flip Wilson Show

2. Entertaining Identities, or the Politics of Variety Performance

For critics of The Flip Wilson Show, both today and in the seventies, Wilson’s performance style is often the most troubling aspect of the show’s aesthetic. His exaggerated facial expressions and the stereotypical outlines of many of his recurring characters summon both implicit and explicit allusions to the racist culture of the minstrel stage in their accounts. The disturbing similarities between a 1971 Good Housekeeping layout of Wilson’s “many faces” and a pictorial showcasing the vaudeville team Williams and Walker’s “facial stunts”—the latter of which appeared in an issue of Variety from the dawn of the twentieth century—underline the difficulty of viewing Wilson’s aesthetic as anything but retrograde.1 As I have already explained, though, this aesthetic echo calls up more than just the potency of minstrelsy’s legacy. It also recalls the critical tradition of black comedy-variety performance that grew out of that legacy in an effort to change the terms minstrelsy set for popular images—a tradition that has since developed another legacy that is much harder to categorize in terms of black or white or good or bad.2 In33 CHAPTER 2 Entertaining Identities, or The Politics of Variety Performance 34 Chapter 2 An undated pictorial feature from Variety for the vaudeville team Williams and Walker. Courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 35 Entertaining Identities A photo spread of Wilson's “many faces” from the April 1971 issue of Good Housekeeping bears an eerie similarity to images from another time. 36 Chapter 2 deed, like Williams and Walker, Wilson faced the professional and mortal challenge of forging an opening for black comedians in an institution of American popular entertainment that was famous for its racist imagery, while also reforming it in the process. The performance strategy that Williams and Walker developed to dismantle tropes of minstrelsy on the vaudeville stage—a particular blend of mimicry , pastiche, and other reflexive techniques common there—thus presents a particularly good model for examining the critical dimension of The Flip Wilson Show and its successors on television. A critical examination of one complete episode of Wilson’s show and several additional sketches demonstrates how Wilson refined a similar blend of familiar vaudeville techniques—emphasizing mimicry in general, but pastiche and drag, in particular—to critique the codes of racial representation on early-seventies television. This blend of techniques certainly incorporates many of the same tropes of minstrelsy that Williams and Walker attempted to dismantle almost seventy years before, and, in this much, it bases its aesthetic on the same dichotomy that already structured black comedy-variety in the vaudeville era. However, approaching the show from this angle offers a crucial perspective on how Wilson adopted the more liberatory performance traditions of the comedy-variety genre, and, in turn, why the genre has remained an important one for so many black comedians. In this respect, such an approach affords a detailed understanding of how the seldomconsidered “better half” of the aesthetic of ambivalence works in the show. Furthermore, it offers a historical primer on exactly what it means to talk about exploding or deconstructing stereotypes—phrases that are as easy to take for granted as they are difficult to pin down. Although an examination of Wilson’s studied appropriation of vaudeville strategies cannot transcend the institutional paradigm of political ambivalence that so thoroughly shaped the show and its re- 37 Entertaining Identities ception in the press at the time, it can help work through the critical impasse this paradigm has since produced. That is, it can detail the rich and innovative ways that Wilson worked, through an ostensible discourse on something as harmless as performance, to address and even undercut those politics. And this latter discourse, to be sure, appears in tones far more nuanced than black and white. Critical Mimicry from Vaudeville to Primetime The March 2, 1972, episode of The Flip Wilson Show began unlike any other, but the long scene that replaced Wilson’s usual opening monologue attests very well to the prominent role that vaudeville-style mimicry played on the show throughout its run. The scene begins with the camera trained on featured guest Sammy Davis Jr., who trots down the main aisle through the sea of studio audience members. He sidesteps , slaps hands, does a few steps from “Pigmeat” Markham’s “Here Comes the...