Olsen and Johnson
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Olsen and Johnson were zany comedians of vaudeville. radio, the Broadway stage, motion pictures, and television. Their shows were well known for their crazy blackout gags and orchestrated mayhem ("anything can happen, and it probably will"). Their most famous concept, Hellzapoppin', has become show-business shorthand for free-wheeling, anything-goes comedy; it enjoyed a lengthy run on Broadway and even spawned a movie version.
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[edit] Overview
Ole Olsen (1892-1963) and Chic Johnson (1891-1962) were musical entertainers: Olsen played the violin and Johnson played ragtime piano. They met in 1914, when Olsen hired Johnson to replace the pianist in his quartet. Ole and Chic hit it off immediately, and joined forces for a vaudeville act. No joke was too old, no song too corny for Ole and Chic, and the two engaging comics became a minor sensation in the midwest. They soon became an early and regular attraction on radio, which enlarged their audience, and this in turn led to appearances in early-talkie movies for Warner Bros., and two more minor features for Republic Pictures.
The movies of the 1930s were much too confining for Olsen and Johnson's special brand of "nut" humor. Ole and Chic recited their lines and played off each other well, but their scripts were too formal, leaving the team little room for their nonsensical comedy.
Comedy teams traditionally had a straight man and a comedian. If one had to choose who the straight man was in this case, the slightly more sober Olsen would probably get the decision. However, Olsen and Johnson both behaved in about the same manner, good-naturedly chuckling their way through the steady barrage of gunshots, explosions, props plummeting to earth, intrusions from other performers, and intrusions from the audience.
Olsen and Johnson continued their stage and radio work. In 1938 they mounted their own revue, Hellzapoppin'. Sophisticated Broadway audiences were unprepared for such a shambles: stray props came out of nowhere; comic characters were planted in the audience and disrupted the action; Olsen and Johnson dashed on and off the stage in crazy costumes and indulged in cheerfully earthy humor; chorus girls lost their skirts, and vaudeville acts did their trick specialties. The show never played the same way twice. On some nights, songs would be pre-empted by jokes, and on others, jokes would interrupt the songs.
In 1941 Universal Pictures bravely decided to commit Hellzapoppin' to film, with plenty of crazy and sometimes innovative gags. A cab driver literally goes to hell, with Olsen and Johnson as his reluctant passengers. A serious song by Robert Paige and Jane Frazee is interrupted when a title card crashes on the screen, advising one Stinky Miller to go home. Man-chasing Martha Raye pursues Mischa Auer, who finds himself suddenly stripped down to his underwear and running a mock track meet. The film goes out of frame, and Olsen and Johnson try to correct the problem themselves. Despite Universal's insistence on a then-customary romance and a "serious plot," somewhat diluting the Olsen and Johnson onslaught, Hellzapoppin' is still fresh and funny today. Unfortunately it's rather hard to find; copyright issues involving the original stage production have forced the film version out of general circulation.
Universal made three more comedies with the team. Crazy House (1943) had Olsen and Johnson running amok through the Universal studio and evacuating the staff, including Universal regulars Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Johnny Mack Brown, and Andy Devine. In Ghost Catchers (1944), Ole and Chic help singer Gloria Jean make her Carnegie Hall debut, despite strange happenings in a spooky old house. See My Lawyer (1945) was a patchwork of vaudeville acts, with Olsen and Johnson noticeably absent from most of the proceedings. After completing this last film, Olsen and Johnson resumed their stage career, mounting variations of Hellzapoppin'.
[edit] Television
In 1949 NBC Television hired Olsen and Johnson to star in an ambitious variety show, Fireball Fun for All. It was hard to adapt Olsen and Johnson's unpredictable, prop-laden humor to a rigid time slot. Surviving kinescopes of the expensive, short-lived show demonstrate just how hard everyone tried to recapture the old, large-scale Hellzapoppin' magic under primitive video conditions. At least the series reflected on the stars' achievement: they had now performed in every form of popular entertainment.
Olsen and Johnson continued to preside over rowdy revues into the 1950s, mostly in Las Vegas. In the late 1950s illness forced Johnson to retire from the hectic show-business lifestyle, while Olsen continued to work as a solo performer. When Milton Berle was hosting NBC's Jackpot Bowling, Ole Olsen was on hand to play straight to Berle's antics. This was really a surprise for Olsen, as his comic routine on live television was interrupted by Ralph Edwards and a This Is Your Life tribute. The flabbergasted Olsen greeted family and friends, with frequent breaks for time-honored O & J sight gags. The final guest was Chic Johnson, who ran on-camera in his familiar stage costume and joyfully reunited with his old friend and partner.
Johnson died in 1962; Olsen less than a year later. The two partners had always been close, and fittingly enough, their final resting places (in Las Vegas) are adjacent.
Olsen and Johnson's comedy style has often been imitated (most successfully by Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In) but never duplicated. In 1972 a one-shot revival of Hellzapoppin' on ABC co-starred Jack Cassidy and Ronnie Schell. Jerry Lewis secured the stage rights and NBC planned to telecast his version of Hellzapoppin' live, in 1980. The show closed prematurely, however, and never aired on television.
See also the individual Wikipedia entries for Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson.
[edit] Book
- Maltin, Leonard. Movie Comedy Teams. New York: Signet, 1970, revised 1985. (Chapter about Olsen and Johnson)
