A Comparison Of Bud Abbott And Lou Costello

Picture a short, round, confused man, standing next to someone tall, slick, and intellectual, and you have a duo that brought laughter to numerous audiences. Together Bud Abbott and Lou Costello formed a team with great chemistry; by using their natural abilities and deep backgrounds they produced a successful career that carried on throughout three decades. Steve Allen agrees, "Only a very talented team like Abbott & Costello could have survived the transition from burlesque and vaudeville to radio to films to television to night clubs, over a period of twenty-two years" (qtd. in Costello xii). Obviously from the beginning of Abbott and Costello's careers, these two comics were indeed talented. Before Costello, Abbott had previously
Although these two comics started their careers during the burlesque days, a time in which comics began to base their material on sexual humor and the degrading of women, Bud and Lou refused to use such comedy in their acts (Allen, 285). The main sources of their comedies were derived from clean acts from vaudeville and the burlesque era. As result of this choice, Abbott and Costello produced comedies that could be viewed and related to by everyone, such as family audiences. Their energetic personalities of an intellectual man and child-like man produced a humor that a majority of the audiences could understand; essentially creating a common form of humor. Golden describes their style as being: more akin to that of boisterous, roughhousing comics such as the Ritz Brothers and the Three Stooges, who also numbered among their biggest fans adolescent boys and bumptious GIs. Their humor sprang from the roots of burlesque, from Webber and Fields: broad characterizations (the impatient Abbott, the nervous Costello), puns and wordplay, slapstick, and pretty young women in distress. ("Abbott, Bud and Costello,