When eager Americans gathered around their radios each week to listen to “The Amos 'n' Andy Show,” they leaned in to hear voices that performed exaggerated ideas of blackness. Lott says that blackface minstrelsy was as much about the desire to appropriate an exaggerated idea of black performance as it was in socially repressing and demeaning those communities it emulated. In his landmark study, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, scholar Eric Lott argues that familiar practices of racial crossdressing and public performance emerged from colonial carnivals, election day festivals and the theatrical distractions created by Irish American working class men in mid-19th century New York City. However, its revenants have persisted and evolved well into the 21st century. On-stage, blackface minstrelsy was most popular immediately following the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, when the country was trying to grapple with reforming itself and adapting its social hierarchy following the end of race-based slavery. Based on mythic or exaggerated ideas of ethnic and cultural difference, they also have painful performative origins deep in American history and culture. With faces covered in brown makeup and dreadlocked wigs buck-toothed “ninjas” wielding fake nunchakus “bad hombres” wearing bandoliers, serapes, and sombreros and “Indian maidens” in beaded buckskins, feathered headdresses, and moccasins, these insensitive choices make masquerade of whole groups of people and their ancestors. Unidentified artist, NPG, gift of an anonymous donorĮvery Halloween, amidst the year’s annual parody of political figures and pop-culture heroes are the less welcome costumes. “The Amos 'n' Andy Show” became a precursor of the situation comedies that would soon come to dominate non-musical radio programming and, later on, much of television as well. (Surviving episodes of “The Amos 'n' Andy Show” are in the public domain and are available for streaming.) In so doing, “The Amos 'n' Andy Show” became a precursor of the situation comedies that would soon come to dominate non-musical radio programming and, later on, much of television as well.
While pre-radio minstrelsy featured a variety of vaudevillian segments including songs and dance performances, with their radio show, the two men stressed the oral aspects of form, since in the visual, physical and stage-bound components could not be accommodated by radio’s aural format.
He wears a comedic, hangdog expression, frowning as though deeply weary from the unfair trials that the world has repeatedly set before him.īegun as a local 15-minute show out of Chicago before being picked up by CBS and then NBC, which lengthened it to 30 minutes, the aural format of the “The Amos 'n' Andy Show” allowed Gosden and Correll to transform the comedic component of traditional minstrelsy performance into something new. In contrast, Correll, is dressed in shirt sleeves and a vest, threadbare trousers and boots. Gosden’s eyes peer haughtily down his nose from beneath the bowler hat that completes his all-business outfit of suitcoat, collared shirt and tie.
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A cigar is clamped tightly between his teeth and his free hand rests authoritatively on the shoulder of Brown, who dejectedly sits beside him on a barrel. Both men have covered their faces and hands with black makeup made of burnt cork, taking care to outline their lips in bright white paint, and each wears a wooly black wig that mimics an African American hair type.
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In a professional studio photograph from around 1935 and now in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Gosden stands at right, one hand gripping the lapel of a slightly rumpled suit coat worn over shabby, wide legged pants. Correll wrote and performed “The Amos 'n' Andy Show.” As many as 40 million people-over half of the nation’s radios-tuned in each week to hear the adventures of Amos Jones (Gosden) and Andrew Hogg Brown (Correll), the hapless proprietors of the “Fresh Air Taxicab Company of America, Incorpulated.” At the onset of the Great Depression, a time when financially distressed Americans eagerly sought entertaining escapes from their economic woes, a radio program based in 19th-century stage traditions of blackface minstrelsy became a favorite broadcast over the country’s airwaves.įor more than 30 years, between 19, white comedians Freeman Fisher Gosden and Charles J.
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