24PIONEERING WOMEN GET THE LAST LAUGH
How early female comics paved the way for today’s stars
They were marvelous long before there was a Mrs. Maisel.
And yet, for years, some jokers insisted women were just too nice to do comedy.
“It bothers me,” Jerry Lewis once admitted about females doing standup. “I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator.”
A woman, he insisted, had a far higher calling: “A producing machine that brings babies into the world.”
Lewis wasn’t joking, and he was hardly alone.
But women have been joking and making a living at it for years, no matter what sexists thought. And Shawn Levy’s “In on the Joke: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy” salutes the profession’s pioneers, women who walked onstage armed with nothing but a microphone and their wicked wit.
The book largely focuses on the years before 1970, profiling roughly a dozen performers. It’s a diverse group, ranging from
Elaine May and Sophie Tucker to Minnie Pearl and Totie Fields. Yet, against daunting odds, they all climbed to the top. And they made it possible for the women following them to climb a little faster.
Levy begins his story with Loretta “Moms” Mabley, born in 1897 in North Carolina. Before she was even a teenager, Mabley had been raped twice (and had given up the resulting babies for adoption.) By 23, she had been through a bad marriage and was raising three daughters.
“I asked God how to support them,” she said. “God [told me] to do it in show business.”
Eventually, Mabley landed a gig with a traveling vaudeville show. Booked in primarily Black theaters, Mabley tirelessly crisscrossed the country, doing whatever was required.
“It taught young people to be entertainers,” she said, reflecting on those years. “You had to do everything and learn everybody’s parts, in case someone got sick.”
Mabley would eventually become a Harlem headliner, where she created the character of the frumpy, plain-speaking, middle-aged Moms. She also created controversy with her off-stage fondness for men’s suits and keeping company with chorus girls. Colleagues referred to her, respectfully, as “Mr. Moms.”
Other lines about her sexuality and identification have long been proven to be too hurtful and nasty to bother repeating.
Soon, Mabley was a mainstay at the Apollo, where her jokes had audiences roaring. She told sexual, bawdy jokes, and many would still be unprintable today. Mabley connected best with younger audiences.
“I’m too fast for the old folks,” Mabley noted.
Yet breaking through to white audiences remained challenging. It took Mabley until 1967 to make her TV debut on “The Merv Griffin Show.”
But when she died in 1975, more than 50 years after making people laugh, she was rich and respected. And proof there was a place on stage for funny women.
She also proved how hard it was to claim it. Although male comics could simply walk out and tell jokes, audiences preferred women to hide behind crazy, made-up characters. Smart, conventionally attractive young females seemed to make them uncomfortable.
Phyllis Diller, born in 1917 in Lima, Ohio, proved the point.
Her mother “told me when I was young, I would never be pretty like other little girls, and that I ought to take advantage of anything else I had,” Diller said later. “So she used to teach me jokes.”
That would come in handy in the 1950s when Diller found herself living in the Bay Area with a houseful of kids and a layabout husband. Forced to bring in money, she took a job at a local paper, then an ad agency. She was funny and stylish, and people started to notice — including her husband, who pushed her to try and turn her off-hand jokes into cash.
Diller’s first standup gig was at an Army hospital, performing for four men in traction. Asked back, she played the psychiatric ward. “I guess they figured I had found my true audience,” she cracked.
She eventually found her niche at local nightclubs. Her material was more homey
than hip: “Housework won’t kill you, but why take a chance?” but delivered in the rat-a-tat style of Bob Hope. Because female standups were still a rarity, she encouraged audiences’ laughter by dressing funny — fright wigs, bold geometric dresses.
Although her shtick led Hugh Hefner to ask her to pose for Playboy as a gag, the joke was on him. It turned out those nutty outfits concealed a great body. Boudoir shots of a voluptuous, middle-aged mother didn’t work for Diller’s image or the magazine’s. The feature was scrapped.
But Diller’s success was groundbreaking, taking her from nightclubs to movies, sitcoms, and sold-out shows in Las Vegas. When she died at 95 in 2012, Diller was worth $15 million.
Along the way, Diller had inspired many burgeoning comedians, including Joan Molinsky of Larchmont. In her chic little black dress and calling herself Joan Rivers, the comic spent most of the early 1960s trying to make it in show business. While she admired Diller’s determination, she knew that shtick wasn’t for her.
“If you’re a girl and a comedian, either you’re expected to be the dumb blonde, or a sexy thing who says double entendres, or you come on and make faces,” Rivers observed early on. “They don’t really know what I’m doing yet.”
But neither did she, with many early gigs turning into disasters. One performance at a Westchester country club was so awful that even her parents walked out.
What turned things around was a spot on “The Tonight Show” in 1965. It was a fluke — Rivers was filling in for a last-minute cancellation. By the end, Johnny Carson was crying with laughter. “God, you’re funny!” he said when she finally came up for air. “You’re going to be a star.”
Of course, he was right. The next morning, her agent called, ecstatic after fielding dozens of offers. “You’ll never make under $300 a week for the rest of your life, I guarantee it!” he shouted.
He could have added a few zeroes to that number. Rivers would go on to do TV and movies, publish books and become arguably the biggest female standup of her time.
But there was tragedy, too. When Rivers tried her own late-night talk show in 1986, an infuriated Carson never spoke to her again. When the show was canceled, it sent her husband and business partner, Edgar Rosenberg, spiraling into depression. He later checked into a hotel and killed himself.
Rivers mourned. Then she made it part of her act, joking that Edgar had asked her to “scatter his ashes in Neiman Marcus — that way he knew he would see me five days a week.”
“And that was more or less what she did for the next three decades,” Levy writes about Rivers, who died at 81 in 2014. “Stand in the public eye and tell jokes, sometimes unthinkable, often hilarious jokes; make a spectacle and even a punch line of herself; launch audacious gambits; take punches, get back up, and come back harder.”
Comedy isn’t pretty, and it can be pretty ugly for women. If it is any easier to make it today, it is because these women navigated the way first and never lost their sense of humor.
In retrospect, he was obviously going to go. Never mind that almost everyone he knew thought it was a bad idea. Never mind that Paul Cary — longtime firefighter and paramedic, possessed of a bad back and a walrus mustache — was 66 years old with a health condition, and preparing to drive his ambulance straight from his home in Colorado into New York City to help out at the very height of the COVID surge in the spring of 2020.
At that point, Colorado itself was just beginning to get hit with the virus, but New York City’s case counts were already in the tens of thousands, its death toll in the hundreds. First responders were falling ill; the 911 system was overloaded; people were waiting hours for ambulances only to get delivered to overwhelmed hospitals. One doctor at hard-hit Elmhurst Hospital in Queens described the scene as “apocalyptic.” None of this would have been Cary’s problem except that, like many emergency workers, he felt a calling to be there for people on their worst days. And at that moment, the worst of the worst was in New York.
Cary was part of an extraordinary outpouring of support and sacrifice at the very beginning of the pandemic in America, one that, two years later, feels in some ways like it happened a decade ago. This was when New Yorkers were still leaning out their windows at 7 p.m. to applaud health care workers at shift change, and about 250 ambulances and 500 emergency workers descended on New York City from all over the country — Virginia, Tennessee, Illinois, Colorado — to help relieve the city’s overwhelmed hospitals.
They took grueling road trips in their ambulances to wind up in parking lots at Fort Totten and the Bronx Zoo, ready to shoot out all over an unfamiliar, shut-down city and rescue the sick. And on April 30, 2020, Cary was the first out-of-town paramedic to die in that effort. He died of COVID-19.
Today, as the U.S. hurtles toward 1 million COVID deaths and bitter debates over masking and vaccinations drag out, putting us well beyond the “we’re-all-in-this-together” moment of early 2020, it might seem quaint to remember and elevate people like Cary. But elevating someone like him, who lived and died by America’s best values, is especially essential now, for it reminds us that this country is more than its failures and divisions. Cary’s example can remind us to carry that decency and unity forward.
Cary’s colleagues at a private ambulance company called Ambulnz told me the word went out over the company Slack, sometime in March 2020, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was looking for EMTs and paramedics who could go to New York pretty much immediately. Paul by then was “retired,” kind of — he’d left the Aurora Fire Department where he’d worked for decades before moving to the private sector. Like other such companies around the country, Ambulnz was joining an unprecedented effort to build a new, huge auxiliary emergency service in New York.
Such “mutual aid” deployments, in which emergency workers traveled to supplement local ambulance services overwhelmed by disaster, weren’t unusual for floods and hurricanes. But these disasters were often short-term affairs, the workers offering assistance for an aftermath. COVID was an ongoing disaster, getting worse day after day, and emergency workers were being asked to drive straight into the storm.
Of course Cary put up his hand. He was beloved in the Aurora medical system, where everyone in the emergency rooms seemed to know him, where he asked after nurses’ families and kept an eye on patients he’d brought in. One former colleague of his told me that, in addition to being a “great educator and father figure to most,” he was also a “s—t-magnet”: Somehow he always ended up responding to the worst calls, the gunshot victims, the septic patients.
On shifts, he’d call home for his sons’ bedtime while washing blood off his hands. He knew that in his line of work you couldn’t save everybody, and oftentimes you lost more than you won. What he lived by and taught colleagues was that you still showed up to play.
New York at the height of spring 2020 brought many, many losses. Cary was doing a lot of “hospital decompression,” which meant taking patients from overfull hospitals to slightly less overfull hospitals, or to the Javits Center which the Army Corps of Engineers had turned into a field hospital.
Extreme chaos stalked every corridor and trauma bay he visited. Multiple ventilator alarms would be going off at once, a ghoulish music box accompanying the near-impossible task of getting patients out of a thicket of beds. Still, he kept going. He had signed up to extend his tour, having already served three weeks, when he started to feel sick around April 19. Colleagues told me he was reluctant to go to the hospital; he was supposed to be there helping the sick, not taking up scarce resources by being sick himself.
A few days later, he was on a ventilator, and a few days after that, he was gone.
He is one of thousands of health-care workers, including hundreds of first responders, to have lost their lives serving others in the U.S. during the pandemic. Incredibly, there is no full accounting of the exact number: An investigation by The Guardian and Kaiser Health News found 3,607 total U.S. health-care deaths, but the project stopped last spring.
We do know that COVID-19 has been a leading cause of death among first responders for two years running. We also know that many health-care workers continue to suffer from the trauma of those first disease surges even though the days of cookie and pizza deliveries to ERs are long gone. And we know that hundreds of thousands of health-care workers have simply quit, from stress, from lack of support, from exhaustion.
Though the U.S. has made some notable strides since the pandemic’s early days in protecting its health-care workforce, notably in building up PPE stockpiles and prioritizing frontline healthcare workers for vaccines, the pandemic has exposed chronic underinvestment in the people who save lives, and it won’t be fixed by chanting about “healthcare heroes” or slapping a mural up in Midtown.
It’s telling that the federal government hasn’t bothered to count all the lost healthcare heroes of the pandemic: Americans don’t even know the true extent of their sacrifice. And while Congress recently passed legislation to support mental health in the medical profession, too little is being done to address why members of the profession are suffering a mental-health crisis in the first place. Nurses were begging Gov. Cuomo to address a worker shortage in their field back when it was Mario Cuomo, in 1989.
Maybe if educating future health-care professionals were easier and more affordable, maybe if for-profit hospitals weren’t determined to keep wages down, maybe if state and federal governments would take seriously the need for biodefense resources for our first responders, our “heroes” wouldn’t be overworked and underequipped for an epochal infectious-disease
crisis, and wouldn’t need so many federal dollars for therapy. Maybe more would stay in their jobs, and maybe more would survive them.
On the blustery Thursday when Paul Cary died, his “end of watch” call went out over the radio: “This is a last call for paramedic Paul Cary. Dispatch will now show paramedic Cary out of service, but not out of our hearts and memories...We have the watch from here.” Firetrucks and ambulances lined the route to the Staten Island funeral home, and colleagues stood in the rain to salute as he rode by. He’d known what he and his immediate family stood to lose with his trip to New York, and he stepped up to play anyway.
One lesson of Cary’s story, and that of the many others who gave their lives to help others in the pandemic, is that in a context of institutional failure, individuals can muster astonishing grit and courage against impossible odds. We owe them our gratitude, and they deserve to be celebrated — especially now that our national swell of goodwill for “essential” workers has faded.
But it’s not enough for individuals to step up, and it’s not enough for the beneficiaries to feel thankful. It’s time for institutions to step up too, and make sure that the individuals who continue to protect us, in this crisis and the next, have the odds in their favor. That’s what it would mean to keep the watch from here.
We all know how much we’ve lost in this pandemic and continue to lose. But Paul Cary’s example shows us that even in the face of impossible odds, we can still strive to be healers. Let’s keep the watch for him, and for one another.
Gilsinan is a journalist and the author of the recently published book, “The Helpers: Profiles From the Front Lines of the Pandemic.”