by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Last night I looked for something by comedians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson to watch and I picked a DVD called The Olsen and Johnson Collection as our “feature.” There are several excerpts from surviving TV shows featuring Olsen and Johnson on the disc, but the main one is an episode of something called All Star Revue from the early 1950’s that was essentially a comedy version of the Four Star Theatre. It had rotating hosts, including Danny Thomas, Jimmy Durante and Ed Wynn. As is all too typical of early TV, almost none of the episodes survive, but this one, originally aired February 2, 1952, made it through and turned out much like the one surviving episode of Olsen and Johnson’s own show, Fireball Fun-for-All (1949): a series of relentless comedy sketches interspersed with songs.
The songs included the very appealing country singer Rosalie Allen covering Patsy Montana’s “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” (recorded in 1935 and the first hit country record ever by a solo woman singer) and also singing “He Taught Me to Yodel”, and boy opera singer Chet Allen doing the lachrymose “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. (Chet Allen had become an instant star singing the part of Amahl in the NBC telecast of Giancarlo Menotti’s one-act opera Amahl and the Night Visitors – the visitors being the Three Wise Men on their way to Bethlehem to see baby Jesus – but his voice, though reasonably good for a boy treble, cracked on a couple of Rodgers’ big high notes.)
The Olsen and Johnson routines included a Wild West spoof with Olsen as a bartender and Johnson as notorious outlaw “Black Bart Johnson”, who shoots at least two local sheriffs (off-stage, this being a comedy show) and collects the reward money for turning himself in – and immediately loses it to a woman pickpocket despite his insistence on her grabbing his ears as they kiss because “I want to see where both your hands are.” The funniest point is when one of the characters, about to get shot, is defended by a mysterious hand that comes out of a hole in a painting on the wall and shoots his assailant – only when the man congratulates the hand by shaking it, he pulls it out of the wall as a disembodied arm. There was also a bedroom sketch featuring Marie Antoinette and making some surprisingly racy jokes for a 1952 TV show, and a mock-Shakespearean scene (he’s not listed in the cast, but I thought I recognized Hans Conried as one of the ham actors in this sequence) that turns into an integrated commercial for Snow Crop frozen orange juice, one of the show’s three sponsors.
There’s even a mascot, “Teddy Snowcrop,” who wanders in and out of the action (obviously played by either a little person or a child inside the costume), and of the three sponsors – Snow Crop, Pet evaporated milk, and Kellogg’s cereal – Kellogg’s is the only one still in business today. As I said of the surviving Fireball Fun-for-All episode Charles and I watched earlier, All Star Revue with Olsen and Johnson is funny but also oppressive – the sheer relentlessness of the gags gets wearing after a while, especially since some of them are hilarious and some are either only mildly amusing or downright off-putting. Apparently Olsen and Johnson didn’t take the care that Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers did, carefully honing their humor so they did only the funniest bits and gave the audience a chance to rest between laughs – as much as Leonard Maltin ridiculed the “suits” at Universal for throwing so many musical guest stars into their films there, the more I think about it the more I get the impression the reason was to give the audience a chance to rest and relax between comedy onslaughts (plus a lot of the musical guests, like Count Basie and Nat “King” Cole, were huge talents in their own right).
