Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett

By Jesse Joyce

"Jesse Joyce is, by every definition of the word, a curious man. His love of history and gift for comedy adds up to a book that is a lot of fun to read and educational too.  Relive the murder of America’s most-beloved President and laugh!"  - Jimmy Kimmel

“Jesse Joyce is a fabulously gifted comedian who wrote jokes for me at the 2013 Academy Awards. But don’t hold that against him — this book is fantastic.” - Seth MacFarlane

"Jesse Joyce is an excellent stand up comedian and comedy writer. But it’s my contention that his borderline obsession with researching weird and wonderful events from history has robbed America of a great serial killer." - Jimmy Carr

There is no question that you’ve heard of the fiendish American scoundrel John Wilkes Booth, famously known as the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865. But chances are that you know considerably less about the bizarre story of Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett, the men who killed the man who killed Lincoln. If you aren’t familiar with Booth’s and Corbett’s roles in the course that led to Lincoln’s unfortunate demise and the violent reckoning thereafter, then you’re about to get a doozy of a history lesson.

In Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story about Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett, Emmy-nominated writer and comedian Jesse Joyce, whose historical and political quips can be heard on Jimmy Kimmel Live! as well as global television events like The Academy Awards, breaks down an astonishing moment in America’s past with this riotous and (mostly) historically accurate telling of two parallel lives leading up to the death of a notorious nineteenth-century villain. Featuring trademark humor and irreverence, Joyce relays the life and times of the “other” Booth, Edwin — a renowned actor, forced to grapple with the repercussions of his brother John Wilkes’s seditious actions, as he makes amends with the Union whilst only being interested in saving his own skin — and Corbett, from his journey as a mercury-poisoned mad hatter who castrated himself to his turbulent and action-packed adventures in the Union army to the fateful moment he shot Lincoln’s assassin dead and his wild escape from incarceration.

Amusing, richly detailed, and compulsively readable, Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln is more than just a subplot to the Lincoln assassination that follows two nutty guys. Rather, it’s the story of how that subplot permanently altered the trajectory of the American saga and how history is sometimes made by the unlikeliest of individuals. It’s also an unbelievable story about jealousy, regrettable genital mishaps, a real human skull turned family heirloom, and a dad with a propensity for public nudity (we’re looking at you, Junius Brutus Booth). Jesse Joyce’s interpretation on the ballad of Booth and Corbett is U.S. history as it’s never been heard before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781094460116

Jesse Joyce

Jesse Joyce is an Emmy-nominated and Writers Guild Award-winning comedy writer/comedian. He’s a long-time writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and other TV shows: Comedy Central Roast, The Academy Awards, The Emmy Awards, The Tony Awards, and the ridiculous Guys Choice awards (essentially, the comedy writer’s EGOT). He’s performed on Kimmel, Comedy Central, History Channel, and many others. Jesse lives in LA with a wife, a dog, and two kids, not in that order.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The clammy fog that coiled around Federal Triangle couldn’t dampen the spirits of Washingtonians on what would be one unforgettable night. Every neighborhood in America’s capital crackled with excitement and actual fireworks. It was the start of Easter weekend, but more importantly, after four gory years, the Civil War had just ended on that Sunday, and Washington, DC, had been partying for five straight days. The town was in an unsinkable mood — especially the 1,500 well-dressed ticket holders who negotiated the slick cobblestones toward Ford’s theater to see the funniest comedy 1860s theater had to offer. A show packed with zingers like: I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdologizing old man-trap. (You had to be there. And you had to be there for two hours and ten minutes of setup because that’s how long it takes to get to that joke, which is the funniest one in the whole play.)

However, clunky hilarity wasn’t the reason an audience crammed into Ford’s that spring night, seven score and eighteen years ago. What that crowd was eager to see was President Lincoln himself and his batty wife, their First Lady, Mary Todd. When it was published in all the morning papers that the commander in chief of the newly victorious Union Army would attend to giggle alongside the masses during this particular evening’s performance of Our American Cousin, the box office was besieged with ticket requests. DC residents were desperate to catch a glimpse of their heroic leader, who was finally taking a much-deserved break to see America’s funniest play. Which, it cannot be repeated enough, is not very funny.

The play itself is your classic fish-out-of-water story — a hick from Vermont becomes heir to a British aristocratic family fortune and offends the foppish sensibilities of his new uptight English peers. (Basically, it’s the story behind The Beverly Hillbillies, or King Ralph, or Crocodile Dundee II, which is cold comfort because the events at Ford’s would have gone differently had Crocodile Dundee been onstage, as he famously had a bigger knife.)

But Abraham Lincoln couldn’t resist a production of Our American Cousin. The show hit an exact comedic sweet spot for the sixteenth president. As the nation’s most revered hayseed, Abe was delighted by any gag where a folksy, homespun Yank stuck it to those pompous Brits. Matter of fact, Lincoln’s favorite anecdote that he loved to tell was about the time when the backwoods hero of the Revolution, Ethan Allen, was in England after the war and, as a practical joke, the British hung a print of George Washington inside an outhouse in an attempt to rile Allen. When he came back from using the bathroom, Allen’s snickering English hosts asked him what he thought of President Washington hanging in the can. He replied that it was a great place to put it because nothing will make an Englishman shit quicker than the sight of General Washington. It’s a heroic American shit joke, and Lincoln loved repeating it.

At 8:30 p.m., the play was already underway when the crowd caught sight of the First Lady hustling to her seat in a black-and-white striped dress and bonnet, followed by her loping husband Abe in his black overcoat and signature inconvenient hat. The production stopped, the orchestra struck up Hail to the Chief, and the excited crowd gave a generous standing ovation. (Mostly because he’d just shepherded the nation through its darkest hour… and probably also because they’d seated him in a private box, where his big dumb hat wouldn’t obscure anyone’s view.)

The Lincolns’ guests, young Major Henry Rathbone, who was about to be stabbed, and his date Miss Clara Harris, also settled into the presidential box; they were admiring the festive red, white, and blue bunting around the railing that the theater had probably picked up at a local Party City to decorate for the occasion. It’s worth noting that the happy couple, Major Rathbone and Clara, eventually did tie the knot. But it wouldn’t be the last time he was stabbed. Eighteen years later, he went batshit and killed Clara and then stabbed himself in the chest five times, surviving and ending up in an insane asylum. So, if you’re keeping score, at that moment, the presidential box contained two future murder victims and two crazy people… and then in crept the third.

It was now the second scene of the third act, and comic actor Harry Hawk — who, according to his only surviving photograph, looks a lot like Tim Curry — was onstage in his dirty oversized cousin costume when he bellowed, in his broad bumpkin delivery, in his broad bumpkin delivery, that sockdologizing knee-slapper which always killed. Only this time, it quite literally did.

John Wilkes Booth, a twenty-six-year-old occasional actor at Ford’s theater, knew the play well, in part because his older brother Edwin used to date the actress who wrote it and who also happened to be the female lead that night. Wilkes Booth slithered into the president’s box, wedged shut the door, positioned himself in the dark directly behind Lincoln’s red upholstered chair, and as Harry hit that punchline, Mary Todd, the president, and the whole crowd erupted with laughter. Wilkes Booth squeezed the trigger at point-blank range and fired the single shot that killed Abraham Lincoln, the first American president to be assassinated.

Major Rathbone leapt from his couch and wrestled with Wilkes Booth, who was only five foot eight (just an inch shorter than Martha Stewart) and wriggled free, slashing at Rathbone’s chest with a large, horn-handled dagger. Rathbone defended himself by throwing up his arm, and the knife stuck deeply into the Major’s bicep. The assassin scrambled to the balcony’s railing, and as Rathbone lunged for him, he vaulted over the side. Problem was, Wilkes Booth had a getaway horse waiting out back, and therefore, he was wearing cute lil’ spurs on his lil’ boots. The spurs caught that decorative flag bunting, and he pitched over the balcony and flopped to the ground like a bag of wet laundry. Wilkes Booth was no stranger to eating shit in front of a crowd, but this was different; this time, he shattered the fibula in his left leg. Because he was an unbearable drama queen, the murderer, bloody dagger in hand, limped painfully to center stage, and shouted a line attributed to the assassination of Julius Caesar: Sic semper tyrannis, or Thus always to tyrants. (Which probably came out awkwardly because he wasn’t a very good actor and because his leg was in pieces. More than likely, though, he thought he nailed it, turned, brandished his knife at befuddled Harry Hawk, and hopped off to his waiting horse while the crowd tried to figure out if this was all some baffling part of the show.)

This, however, is not a book about John Wilkes Booth. He was an embarrassingly shitty actor and a despicable racist, a flagrant douchebag, a traitor, a coward, a self-aggrandizing loser who was so pathetically desperate to seem like a big deal that while he was on the run, he exaggerated the price on his head for the murder of the president by 250 percent. He was a dumb guy and a dimwitted student who lived in his well-known family’s shadow and coasted through life based on his looks; there’s never been a published mention of Wilkes Booth that doesn’t gush about how supposedly handsome he was. (There’s no way to measure, but if the Farmers’ Almanac had a Sexiest Man Alive issue, he would’ve been it. But, you know, take it with a grain of salt. He was handsome by 1860s standards — when the qualification for being good-looking meant he didn’t have leprosy and hadn’t been kicked in the face by a horse.) John Wilkes Booth was a wannabe, second-fiddle nobody, insufferable theater kid with a pedophile’s mustache, and there are enough books about him.

What this book is is a story about two very odd guys connected to John Wilkes Booth — in birth and in death. One guy was there when he took his first breath, and the other guy was the reason he took his last….

Both of them were the most famous men in America for a time, and both had severe issues with alcohol. Both also had very weird dicks, and very weird dads, and marriages that fucked them up. Both were born with the name Thomas. Both spent their lives in New York and in Boston, just blocks away from each other. While there’s no proof that the two ever met, both absolutely knew about each other. Both had met and loved Abraham Lincoln and were forever profoundly psychologically damaged by the selfish shithead actions of John Wilkes Booth.

One of these men was John’s brother, Edwin Thomas Booth, and the other was his assassin, Thomas Boston Corbett.

The idea that this book is being written more than 130 years after their deaths would come as no surprise to Edwin, who would probably be shocked that most books these days aren’t about him. Corbett, meanwhile, would probably be pretty astonished and very suspicious that folks would snoop around his life over a century later. And John Wilkes Booth would surely be super pissed that this book really isn’t about him.

Back to that fateful Friday night: As the curtain opened at Ford’s theater for what would be the last time for 103 years — a few hundred miles north, on Tremont Street in Boston, Massachusetts, another chatty crowd of theater lovers crammed into every seat at the Boston Museum to catch a glimpse of the greatest celebrity in America, the Western world’s most beloved actor, Edwin Thomas Booth (hereafter simply referred to as Edwin, so as not to confuse him with his brother, Fuckface).

Edwin strode softly out to his mark onstage in King Claudius’s castle and pitch-perfectly understated Hamlet’s first line, a dusty joke which has also lost most of its hilarity over the centuries: A little more than kin and less than kind. (Here’s why that’s supposed to be funny: It’s a play on words from a saying in Shakespeare’s time, The nearer in kin, the less in kindness, which means our closest relatives are the biggest dicks to us. It’s a sentiment eerily delivered by Edwin just two hours before his baby brother murdered the president using Edwin’s profession as an accessory to the crime.)

The Boston Museum was a

Reviews for Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln

[Diane Cheney · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I learned a lot, I laughed a ton, and I just thoroughly enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would!

[sarahtomandjill · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Heard about this on Keith and the Girl. What a fantastic book. Congrats Jesse!

[Kate Stutzel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a great way to experience history! Jesse Joyce is hysterical

[kat obert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this in one day. Funny, captivating, and I learned a bunch I didnt know

[5g28nbxkmz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Didn’t realize the amount of intrigue and amusement behind the assassination of Lincoln! Bravo Jesse!