The Milton Berle Show, featuring Olsen and Johnson in “Hellzapoppin’” (Milton Berle Productions, NBC-TV, aired April 24, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Eventually, after Charles got home from work I ran the last item in the videos I had got of the crazy hell-bent-for-leather comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, a 1956 attempt by Milton Berle to reproduce a shortened version of their legendary Broadway revue Hellzapoppin’ on his regular TV time slot on April 24, 1956. NBC was ballyhooing the new “compatible color” system they had just introduced and had got the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to make it the national standard. They announced that it was coming from NBC’s “Color City”: studios in Burbank and even showed a closeup of an RCA (NBC’s parent company and also one of the sponsors of the show, along with Sunbeam – an appliance maker that, unlike a lot of the sponsors of 1950’s television, still exists) color TV camera with the words “Color Television” emblazoned in chrome on its side.

Alas, the only record we have of this show is a black-and-white kinescope (a machine that essentially took a film of a TV show as it was being aired live, though it had to have a “tele-cine” converter to change the 30 frames per second of TV to the 24 of sound film; the kinescopes were rush-printed and flown out to the West Coast so the shows could air in the same time slot as the East Coast, but at the cost of a significant degradation in image quality; this was why Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz insisted on doing I Love Lucy on film, so they could stay in Hollywood instead of having to move to New York and so the show could be run simultaneously everywhere in the U.S. with the same image quality) which has some serious nitrate burns early on. We’ve seen silent films in condition this poor but we’re not used to looking at 1950’s TV in such wretched shape – though since the kinescopes were considered disposable it’s lucky we have any records of 1950’s TV at all!

By this time Milton Berle’s show was airing somewhat irregularly – usually only once every three weeks, alternating with Bob Hope and other star hosts – and this was the first show he’d done since the really weird one he’d done on location in San Diego April 3 aboard the USS Hancock with Elvis Presley, Esther Williams, Harry James and Buddy Rich as his guests. The final credits promised Elvis again (though he didn’t turn up until the season finale on June 5), to the expected excited squeals from the younger members of the studio audience. On the Hancock show with Elvis, Berle had done a weird bit posing as Elvis’s twin brother “Melvin Presley” (one wonders how Elvis, who’d had a stillborn twin named Jesse and was haunted by the tragedy all his life, felt about a New York comedian mocking him for having a twin!), and on this episode – after a bizarre bit in which Olsen and Johnson mock Berle for wanting them to do more subtle forms of humor and demonstrate that such old slapstick standbys as aiming seltzer bottles at people and pushing pies in their faces are still funny – the show opens with a rock ’n’ roll version of the Hellzapoppin’ theme song (though it’s really just a big-band number with an electric guitar and a drummer playing backbeats – it reminded me of the finale of the film Rock, Rock, Rock!, a mock-rock number by a blg band fronted by former Duke Ellington tenor saxophonist Al Sears, and when the teenager played by Connie Francis is astonished that her father actually likes the music, I joked that he should have said, “Why shouldn’t I? It sounds just like the big-band swing your mom and I listened to when we were dating!”) and Berle comes out and imitates Elvis at the end.

The show features a skit from the original 1938 Hellzapoppin’ with Olsen and Johnson sharing a bed in a sleazy ultra-cheap hotel which plays very differently today than it did in 1938 or 1956 – especially in the climax, in which Johnson dreams that he’s being seduced by Rita Hayworth and he wakes up and realizes he’s kissing Olsen! The film also includes some quite good musical numbers, including a song by Chic Johnson’s daughter June and a great pseudo-gospel sequence featuring Black singer Jeanette Williams (who has no other credits on imdb.com and I haven’t been able to find out any information about her online – the only listings that come up for “Jeanette Williams” are for two white women, a politician in Washington state and a bluegrass singer from the 1990’s) and a dance troupe called the Ten Covans (one wonders if they were descendants of the Four Covans, the spectacular Black dance act from the 1929 musical On With the Show). It seemed a bit weird to be watching this pseudo-gospel production number on 1950’s TV just after watching and listening to the real gospel of Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe on YouTube, but it was still one of the best numbers on the show and evidence that even Olsen and Johnson realized that audiences needed a respite from the madcap assaults of humor and so there ought to be some music to rest the audience’s funnybones.

The show ends up with Berle movingly joining in Olsen and Johnson’s famous curtain lines – “May you live as long as you want to, and may you laugh as long as you live.” Olsen and Johnson had less than a decade to live when they made this show, but they certainly knew how to make their audiences laugh and have a good time themselves doing it. Much of their humor dates rather badly, but some of it is still hilarious and even when you know what the gag is going to be (like when Berle complains that Olsen and Johnson have dropped so many stuffed birds on his stage and when are they going to drop a stuffed cow … do I really need to tell you what happens next, though i’ll add that the “cow” is obviously just a stuffed teddy bear-style replica), it’s still hilarious when the payoff arrives. Olsen and Johnson influenced Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In in its run from 1968 to 1975 (Dan Rowan admitted as much in an interview; he said he’d seen the original Broadway run of Hellzapoppin’ as a kid and had wanted for years to do something similar) as well as the original Saturday Night Live and much of the sketch comedy we’ve seen since.