The Flip Wilson Show

By Meghan Sutherland

Analyzes the social, political, and institutional context of The Flip Wilson Show, which ran on NBC between 1970 and 1974.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2008
• ISBN: 9780814335758

Meghan Sutherland

Meghan Sutherland is associate professor of screen studies at Oklahoma State University.

Book preview

The Flip Wilson Show

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski

Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Patricia B. Erens

Dominican University

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Peter Lehman

Arizona State University

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Robert J. Burgoyne

Wayne State University

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Anna McCarth

New York University

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

THE FLIP WILSON SHOW

Meghan Sutherland

TV MILESTONES SERIES

© 2008 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

12 11 10 09 08      5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sutherland, Meghan.

The Flip Wilson show / Meghan Sutherland.

p. cm. — (TV milestones series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8143-3252-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8143-3252-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Flip Wilson show (Television program) I. Wilson, Flip. II. Title.

PN1992.77.F595S88 2008

791.45’72—dc22

2007033339

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Betty and Henry,

whose warmth and love of thought

exceed their keeping, and my telling in turn.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. Instituting Ambivalence: Race, Comedy-Variety, and Seventies TV

2. Entertaining Identities, or the Politics of Variety Performance

3. Variety and the Art of the Audience

Conclusion

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank Annie Martin and Jane Hoehner at Wayne State University Press, and Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, the editors of the TV Milestones Series, for their kindness and continued support of this project. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript and my copyeditor, Kirsten Patey Hurd, for their many helpful suggestions.

To properly acknowledge the teachers, colleagues, friends, and family members who helped make this book possible—some of whom fit into all of these categories at once—would require another book still. Let it just be said that I am deeply indebted to the following people (and many more, to be sure) for their varied expertise in education, provocation, commiseration, and/or celebration: Anna McCarthy, Daphne A. Brooks, Brian Price, Bill Simon, Jeffrey Sconce, Hugh Manon, John David Rhodes, Rob Cavanagh, Racquel Gates, Ceridwen Morris, Sam Lipsyte, Phil Hallman, Mike Graziano, Margo Miller, Elizabeth Nathanson, Ernesto Laclau, Mimi White, Lynn Spigel, Scott Curtis, Bambi Hag-gins, Lucia Saks, Olga Pyrozhenko, Carol Mason, Lindsey Claire Smith, Sam Robertson, Scott Krzych, my comrades in the Stonewall Theory Circle, Sally Mills and Tom Bowman, Lisa and Andrew Hurayt, Betty and Henry Philler, Eva Hurayt, Anna and Matt Hullum, Leslee Shaw and Meredith Bell, the entire Mills-Beach-Bowman-Morgan-Blackwood-Kelly-Philler tribe, and my lovely new colleagues at Oklahoma State University.

A few people who are listed above deserve to be named at least twice. Betty and Henry Philler, to whom this book is dedicated, are inimitable, and to be imitated. Sally Mills, my mother, is surely from another universe, and I am most proud to call myself one of her people—especially if that entitles me to a share of her courage, tenacity, and boundless joie de vivre. Tom Bowman deserves an actual medal for his patience and kindness. Andy and Lisa Hurayt provided steady encouragement. Last of all—and most of all—I must thank Brian Price. Brian Price. Brian Price. Is there anyone else in all the world?

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 racial-political conflict of the period rest, either.

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 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.

Flip Wilson welcomes the studio audience to the debut episode of his show.

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, People can’t relax and enjoy looking at the money, you standin’ there with your hand on the gun. After working the cop’s reflexes just a little more and laughing intermittently throughout the exchange, Wilson sends the officer on his way, looks into the camera, and asks, Now wasn’t that much better than watching a bunch of girls jumping all around on the stage? The applause says yes. With remarkable narrative economy, Wilson has raised the specter of real racial violence, laughed in its face with grand cathartic pleasure, and roused the audience with the prospect of a new kind of star and a new kind of variety show in the process. All without a single dancing girl.

It is hard to imagine a more fitting debut for The Flip Wilson Show. Indeed, it succinctly introduces many of the features that would become the program’s trademarks. Wilson’s high-energy entrance would remain virtually the same throughout the show’s four-year run. His exaggerated facial mugging became the signature of many popular characters in his repertoire, from the no-nonsense Geraldine (played in drag) to the philandering Reverend Leroy. The small, uncluttered stage amidst the sea of the studio audience would likewise remain much the same. Before inviting a revolving group of celebrity guests onstage for a comedy sketch or musical performance, Wilson alone would always command the stage with the comedic storytelling that made him famous, as if all the familiar props and hoopla had been funneled into his own animated body. As many critics note, Wilson and his producers almost entirely jettisoned the spectacular accoutrements associated with seventies comedy-variety shows, from detailed background sets to large ensemble casts.

Big entrance: Wilson almost always began the show by making his way toward the stage through the cheering studio audience.

In this respect, the raw elements for the show’s breakout success were already in place. Wilson’s quick rise to stardom as host of his own comedy-variety program owed much to the collection of outlandish characters he played, as well as to the diverse roster of guests (from Richard Pryor to the Osmond Brothers) featured in the show’s mix of comedy and musical performances. In 1971, The Flip Wilson Show triumphed as the number one variety program on television and received Emmy Awards for Best Variety Show (Comedy) and Best Writing in a Variety Show. By 1972 the Nielsen ratings placed it second only to the hit CBS sitcom All in the Family (1971–79), a show built, significantly enough, around the notorious bigotry of cranky patriarch Archie Bunker. On the auspices of this popularity, NBC was able to charge a nearly unprecedented $86,000 for one minute of the show’s commercial airtime. Meanwhile, Nipsey Russell was promoting a new dance based on Wilson’s moves called Doing the ‘Flip’ in the pages of Jet magazine.² As if to make official what an unprecedented number of television fans spanning races, regions, and generations already knew, Time magazine ran an image of Wilson’s face on its cover and proclaimed him TV’s First Black Superstar.³

The January 1972 issue of Time proclaimed Wilson TV's First Black Superstar.

This last distinction, in particular, has come to sum up Wilson’s significance in American pop-cultural history with little further discussion—and, to some extent, for good reason. Even as Flip Wilson’s show warmed television sets in living rooms throughout the nation’s suburbs, racist zoning and financing policies, such as redlining and restrictive covenants, often kept black families out of those same neighborhoods.⁴Segregationist attempts to boycott network television shows that featured black performers loomed in the very recent past, and schools, firehouses, and police stations in various parts of the country remained segregated into the eighties.⁵ As the first black performer to draw the national audience necessary to attain a top-ranking spot in the Nielsen ratings—and the first black comedian to do so as star of his own television show— Wilson very consciously tried to use the medium of broadcast television to nudge many of those same living rooms toward integration.⁶

However, from this