Background
William Alexander Abbott was born on October 2, 1896 in Asbury Park, New Jersey, United States, the son of Rae Abbott, a bareback rider, and Harry Abbott, an advance man for the Barnum and Bailey Circus.
(*** 1978 METACOM AUDIOCASSETTE RELEASE ONLY ***)
*** 1978 METACOM AUDIOCASSETTE RELEASE ONLY ***
https://www.amazon.com/Abbott-Costellos-Whos-1st-Approximately/dp/0481928782?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0481928782
(Buck Privates: Bud Abbott and Lou Costello play con artis...)
Buck Privates: Bud Abbott and Lou Costello play con artists who accidentally enlist in the U.S. Army to avoid going to jail and stumble through basic training. Duck Soup: The Marx Brothers - Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo - are at their very best in this political satire which is often regarded as the comedy legends’ funniest and most popular film. Road to Morocco: Bob Hope and Bing Crosby star as survivors of a shipwreck who are Morocco-bound in this rollicking comedy that pairs them with the beautiful Dorothy Lamour. My Man Godfrey: This landmark screwball comedy, nominated for 6 Academy Awards, follows the antics of a ditzy debutante (Carole Lombard) who stumbles upon a “forgotten man” (William Powell) at the city dump.
https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Spotlight-Collection-Privates-Morocco/dp/B0088XQAXW?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0088XQAXW
( Who's on First? - On a team where the first baseman's n...)
Who's on First? - On a team where the first baseman's named Who, the second baseman's named What, Idon'tKnow is on third, a woman finds it difficult to make her husband understand that the answer to his question, "Who's on first?" is Who. This work could also be called "The Relationship" because there is not a couple alive that has not had a discussion or three like this. Enjoy!
https://www.amazon.com/Whos-on-First/dp/B00B9GRKFM?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00B9GRKFM
(Get ready for big laughs with Abbott and Costello, undeni...)
Get ready for big laughs with Abbott and Costello, undeniably the most popular comedy team of all time! Now, the classic films of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are available on DVD in this hilarious collection.The wildly popular comic duo has entertained audiences since 1931, conquering vaudeville, radio and the silver screen in nearly 40 films. Enjoy these side-splitting hits like Buck Privates and Hold That Ghost in this collection of eight full-length features. The Best of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello: Volume 1 will have you laughing out loud again and again!One Night in the Tropics (1940)Bud and Lou get mixed up in a "Love Insurance" scheme. Buck Privates (1941)The duo accidentally enlists in the U.S. Army to avoid getting arrested!In the Navy (1941)Bud and Lou are sailors bound for duty on the high seas in this musical comedy.Hold that Ghost (1941)The boys inherit a haunted house formerly owned by a mobster.Keep 'Em Flying (1941)Bud and Lou enlist in the Army Air Corps and get caught up in a love triangle.Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942)The duo head to the Lazy S ranch to hide after Lou accidentally proposes to an Indian girl.Pardon My Sarong (1942)Bud and Lou travel to the South Seas where Lou is mistaken for a legendary god!Who Done It? (1942)The boys are suspected of murder while being targeted by the actual killer.
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(Who Done It? Reproduction Poster Print Style A 11 x 14 In...)
Who Done It? Reproduction Poster Print Style A 11 x 14 Inches - 28cm x 36cm Pop Culture Graphics, Inc is Amazon's largest source for movie and TV show memorabilia, posters and more: Offering tens of thousands of items to choose from. Customer satisfaction is always guaranteed when you buy from Pop Culture Graphics,Inc
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(Double feature film DVD starring Abbott & Costello.)
Double feature film DVD starring Abbott & Costello.
https://www.amazon.com/Abbott-Costello-Africa-Screams-Beanstalk/dp/B00005QAQ0?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00005QAQ0
(Abbott and Costello, an American comedy duo whose work in...)
Abbott and Costello, an American comedy duo whose work in radio, film and television made them the most popular comedy team during the 1940s and 50s. Thanks to the endurance of their most popular and influential routine, "Who's on First?"-whose rapid-fire word play and comprehension confusion set the preponderant framework for most of their best-known routines-the team is, as a result, featured in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. After working as Allen's summer replacement, Abbott and Costello joined Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on The Chase and Sanborn Hour in 1941, while two of their films (Buck Privates and Hold That Ghost) were adapted for Lux Radio Theater. They launched their own weekly show October 8, 1942, sponsored by Camel cigarettes. The Abbott and Costello Show mixed comedy with musical interludes (by vocalists such as Connie Haines, Ashley Eustis, the Delta Rhythm Boys, Skinnay Ennis, and the Les Baxter Singers). Regulars and semi-regulars on the show included Artie Auerbach ("Mr. Kitzel"), Elvia Allman, Iris Adrian, Mel Blanc, Wally Brown, Sharon Douglas, Verna Felton, Sidney Fields, Frank Nelson, Martha Wentworth, and Benay Venuta. Ken Niles was the show's longtime announcer, doubling as an exasperated foil to Abbott and Costello's mishaps (and often fuming in character as Costello routinely insulted his on-air wife). Niles was succeeded by Michael Roy, with announcing chores also handled over the years by Frank Bingman and Jim Doyle. The show went through several orchestras during its radio life, including those of Ennis, Charles Hoff, Matty Matlock, Matty Malneck, Jack Meakin, Will Osborne, Fred Rich, Leith Stevens, and Peter van Steeden. The show's writers included Howard Harris, Hal Fimberg, Parke Levy, Don Prindle, Eddie Cherkose (later known as Eddie Maxwell), Leonard B. Stern, Martin Ragaway, Paul Conlan, and Eddie Forman, as well as producer Martin Gosch. Sound effects were handled primarily by Floyd Caton.
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William Alexander Abbott was born on October 2, 1896 in Asbury Park, New Jersey, United States, the son of Rae Abbott, a bareback rider, and Harry Abbott, an advance man for the Barnum and Bailey Circus.
Dropping out of school after the fourth grade, Abbott began his real education at the Coney Island amusement park, where his father got him a job selling candy. He went on to have considerable success serving as a shill for the park's concessions. By age sixteen he had graduated from the carnival world.
Abbott worked his way up the ladder of offstage jobs, beginning as a ticket seller and eventually producing his own shows. He spent as much time as he could backstage, where by carefully observing such stars as W. C. Fields and Bert Lahr he eventually absorbed a deep knowledge of the slapstick, gags, crosstalk, and other burlesque forms of humor that made people laugh.
By the 1930s, Bud was a very successful comedy straight man, earning top dollar at Minsky's Republic Theatre in Times Square.
In 1936, he teamed up with Lou Costello, and the two began a meteoric rise that would make them successively headliners in vaudeville, radio stars, and the most successful comedy team in the movies during the 1940s. Their characters remained the same throughout their long collaboration; Bud was the selfish, shifty, fast-talking, scheming city slicker, and Lou was the naif, the innocent, incompetent put-upon with the high squeaky voice whom Bud constantly manipulated.
Abbott and Costello appeared regularly on the radio for thirteen years. They began to do a regular comedy segment on the "Kate Smith Show" in 1938. Listeners wrote in to complain that they could not tell who was speaking and who was answering during the routines because Abbott's and Costello's voices sounded so much alike.
To solve this problem, Costello created the high-pitched voice for which he eventually became famous. The team's success with Kate Smith led to appearances on the "Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, " and eventually to their own "Abbott and Costello Program, " which began on October 8, 1941, and was one of radio's top fifteen programs for the next six years.
Their routines in the 1939 musical-comedy revue The Streets of Paris, their only Broadway show, attracted the attention of Universal Pictures film studio, which brought them to Hollywood to appear in the movie One Night in the Tropics (1940). Although their job was merely to provide comic interludes in a romance plot that featured two pairs of lovers, critics agreed that Abbott and Costello had stolen the picture. Universal executives realized they had a potential box office bonanza in their midst, immediately signed the comedy team to a multipicture contract, and set about crafting a tailor-made vehicle for Abbott and Costello.
Their next film, Buck Privates (1941), established the model for all subsequent Abbott and Costello films. Here the pair are drafted into the army, where Abbott does his best to conform, but is constantly thwarted by Costello, for whom he has been made responsible. After many mishaps the two incompetents become heroes.
The audience's sympathy switches from one to the other throughout the picture, though never really concerned with what happens to either of them. Buck Privates was a huge commercial success, earning more than $4 million at the box office, more than any previous Universal picture, and enough to make it the third-highest-grossing picture of 1941.
Their third film, In the Navy (1941), had the same plot but a different service environment, as did their fifth film, Keep 'Em Flying (also 1941), which put the team in the army air corps. Eventually the team was sent out West, to the South Seas, to a harem, to Africa, to Alaska, and even to Mars.
They also made a series of comedy-horror pictures: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Boris Karloff (1949), The Invisible Man (1951), The Mummy (1955), and so on. Altogether, the team made thirty-six films in seventeen years, their last being Dance with Me, Henry, a 1956 flop that marked the end of their association.
The plots of these films were simplistic for their time, and seem even more so now. One film may parody jungle adventure movies, another murder mysteries, and still another Foreign Legion adventure films, but there is a remarkable lack of real variety in the team's output. Indeed, the modern viewer is hard-pressed to understand what made the team and their films so popular in the 1940s.
Perhaps it was the very predictability of their films that made them so successful. An audience made anxious by a war and its uncertain aftermath took comfort in going to an Abbott and Costello film because they knew what to expect. Or perhaps the team's success can be attributed to their devoted maintenance of the slapstick tradition; certainly, their many comedy routines in the films were polished by many years of burlesque, vaudeville, and radio performance.
The most famous of these routines, one that epitomizes the team's comic style, is the dialogue "Who's on first? , " performed hundreds of times by the team before it became part of their film The Naughty Nineties (1945). Abbott is the tormentor who begins this baseball dialogue in which all the players' names are homonyms for common expressions: one player is named "Who, " another is "What, " and a third is "I don't know. " Costello plays the increasingly frustrated and exasperated questioner who simply wants to know what the names and positions of the various players are.
When Costello asks "Who's on first?" Abbott simply replies, "Who. " Each of Costello's questions seems, to him at least, to be answered by another question, and each tormenting answer that appears not to be an answer drives him to higher and higher levels of excitement. Simple in design, brilliant in execution, "Who's on first?" is one of the sublime routines in American comic history.
As the comedy team's film career wound down, they managed to hold onto fame for a while by taking their act onto television. Just as their movie career had recycled comedy routines from their burlesque and vaudeville years, their television career recycled film bits as television sketches.
They frequently hosted and performed on the "Colgate Comedy Hour" from 1951 to 1954, and in 1952 and 1953 they had their own program, the "Abbott and Costello Show, " for which they filmed fifty-two half-hour episodes. Although the critics hated their show and it quickly passed from the scene, it has had an immortal afterlife in reruns ever since it went off the air.
After breaking up with Costello in the mid-1950s, Abbott tried a solo act in Las Vegas, but it was unsuccessful and he retired from show business. Although he made millions during his career, Abbott died a relatively poor man in Woodland Hills, California.
In 1960, Abbott began performing with a new partner, Candy Candido, to good reviews. But Abbott called it quits, remarking that "No one could ever live up to Lou. " The following year, Abbott performed in a dramatic television episode of General Electric Theater titled "The Joke's on Me". A few years later, Abbott provided his own voice for the Hanna-Barbera animated series The Abbott and Costello Cartoon Show, with Stan Irwin providing the voice of Lou Costello.
Abbott died of cancer at the age of 76 on April 24, 1974, at his home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean.
( Who's on First? - On a team where the first baseman's n...)
(Who Done It? Reproduction Poster Print Style A 11 x 14 In...)
(Get ready for big laughs with Abbott and Costello, undeni...)
(Abbott and Costello, an American comedy duo whose work in...)
(Buck Privates: Bud Abbott and Lou Costello play con artis...)
(Double feature film DVD starring Abbott & Costello.)
(*** 1978 METACOM AUDIOCASSETTE RELEASE ONLY ***)
Abbott was a compulsive gambler and a dramatically unsuccessful investor who got himself into serious trouble with the Internal Revenue Service for failure to pay his taxes.
Still, he was greatly admired by people who knew him.
Quotes from others about the person
"Abbott was the greatest straight man ever. " - Groucho Marx.
Abbott married Jenny Mae Pratt on September 17, 1918; they adopted two children.