TODAY, when we look at the international achievements of Hollywood film productions, we realize why — apart from the colossal amount of serious films people cherish — the very fabrication of something like movies could become such a major factor in the happiness of modern societies. The movies — not just Hollywood, but European and even classic Bollywood productions — provided the opportunity for uplifting comedy teams to lighten and stimulate audiences with their inventive situations and perceptive language. Hollywood comedy teams like Abbott & Costello, Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, The Three Stooges, and European comedy teams like the Carry On Crew, or individuals like Norman Wisdom and Peter Sellers, by exaggerating our fears and defects, our behaviour patterns and thought processes, found creative ways to make people aware of their human imperfections, while revealing the frequent foolishness of their proud assumptions and vain attempts at cleverness.
At least half the effectiveness of these comedy films was ideally conveyed and felt by the collective presence of audiences in cinemas, where people could appreciate each-other’s exhilarated reactions and understanding of what was happening on screen, thus raising the social value of human foibles presented, much more than if one were watching such films alone, or with a small group of friends or family before a TV set.

Abbott & Costello
One of the best of these movie comedy teams was Abbott & Costello, whose fabulous black-and-white films, throughout the 1940s and 50s, stand out as brilliant, funny paradigmatic parodies of various social misunderstandings and linguistic misinterpretations. The significant power of Abbott & Costello exists in the opposing attitudes and viewpoints of the duo: Chubby, baby-faced Abbott, and slim, poker-faced Costello.
Whereas Abbot may be childish, sentimental, and illogical, Costello is rational, boldly confident and optimistic. However, it is precisely Costello’s apparent rationality which often backfires by becoming confused with Abbott’s ability to misinterpret or select a response that is an example of serious foolishness.
With such frustrating and contrary situations, Abbott & Costello were able to parody both the foolishness of individual misinformation and misinterpretation, as well as social situations which keep generating their own ‘raison d’etre’ by endless bickering without resolution. Nothing exemplifies this sort of exasperating knot of runaway misinterpretations than a famous Bud & Lou comedy routine, usually called ‘WHO’S ON FIRST?’ The phrase actually refers to a first batter in the game of Baseball, but in Bud & Lou’s hands, the entire familiar routine turns into a lesson in linguistic subversion.

‘Who’s On First?’
The basis of their routine is that the pronoun, ‘Who’, is used by Lou as a noun, or the name of a person, while Bud can only see it as the questioning pronoun it really is. The routine, though not exactly reproduced here, goes something like this:
LOU: Who’s on first.
BUD: That’s what I want to know.
LOU: I just told you.
BUD: What’s his name?
LOU: I just told you!
BUD: Well, who is it?
LOU: Right, Who’s on first.
BUD: Don’t ask me, I’m asking you!
LOU: No, no! Look, I said, Who is on!
BUD: That’s what I want to know! Who?
LOU: I just told you, Who!
BUD: Now, wait a minute! You’re asking me or telling me?
LOU: I’m telling you, Who’s on first.
BUD: Well, go ahead and tell me!
LOU: Who’s on first.
BUD: There you go again! Will you tell me!
And so they go on, round and round, until they both give up.

Bud & Lou’s great writers
The Abbott & Costello films deliver a great kick due to their writers’ ability to learn from prior classic Hollywood comedy scenarios, and also the trick of putting the duo in specific environments where their behaviour is affected by this obvious environmental change.
For instance, they go West in ‘RIDE EM COWBOY’; live in a haunted house in ‘HOLD THAT GHOST’; accidentally solve a murder mystery in ‘WHO DONE IT?’; go to Mexico in ‘MEXICAN HAYRIDE’; go to Arabia in ‘A & B IN THE FOREIGN LEGION’; go to Alaska in ‘LOST IN ALASKA’; meet the monster, Frankenstein, in ‘A & B MEET FRANKENSTEIN’; enter the US Army in ‘BUCK PRIVATES’, etc, in a huge amount of ‘B Films’, since one contract had them make three films a year. To sustain originality with such a schedule was no easy feat.

Bud & Lou’s skill
The duo was like no one else; Bud, the chubby one, connected with children and teenagers especially. For example, it was probably in ‘Buck Privates’ where Bud, when induced into the US Army, refuses to give away his pet bird or leave it behind, and in one scene where the bird sits on his shoulder during a Sergeant’s line-up inspection, Bud invokes a linguistic paradigm by hiding his real bird in the crotch of his breeches, with his other ‘birdie’ down there.
During the stern Sergeant’s inspection, Bud, of course, cannot stop squirming, and even dances from the bird’s tickles, and the noticing Sergeant says: “What’s the matter with you!”
BUD: “Oh, ah, um, ah nothing Sergeant.”
SERGEANT: “Well, cut it out!” Easier said than done! as the cinema audience howls.
Lou, on the other hand, though seemingly normal, generates much of the hilarity Bud delivers, and it is always their different use and response to language which produces this foolishness. In one film, Lou brings Bud an urgent request to come to the phone while Bud is in a swimming pool. As Bud swims towards the steps out of the pool, his elastic swimsuit is caught in something, converting his body into a stone in a catapult.
Lou tries to inform him of this new development, but of course, Bud thinks it’s the same message he’s trying to deliver again, so he brushes him off with:
“Yeah, OK, I’m coming!”
LOU: “Ah, no, look…”
BUD: “Yeah, I heard. I’m coming!”
LOU: “No. Look, it’s…”
By the time Bud has reached the steps, climbs it, then lets go of the rail at the top, he is catapulted right back into the pool. The whole scene, of course, is paradigmatic of winning and losing.
Of the countless other memorable scenes in A &B’s films is the one where the duo has to share a very small bed which can really hold only one person, so they decide to sleep one at a time, using an alarm clock set one hour ahead.
Of course, Bud, the first one who has to wait, decides to reset the clock to go off in ten minutes, waking Lou, who says:
“I can’t believe I slept an hour!”
BUD: “Well, look at the clock. You were very tired.”
Lou, of course, also figures out the same trick, as though Bud really hadn’t done it first, and the duo goes round and round until they get no sleep, and are so tired they can hardly wind the clock; so both jackasses fall asleep.
The relevance of such paradigms to personal, social, political or governmental competition and rivalry is obvious, and those who fall prey to such satirical scenarios probably never had the chance to recognize the folly of themselves in Abbott & Costello’s brilliant comedy movies of serious foolishness.