A local comedy team did “Who’s on First?” at the Orientation session of my daughter’s high school (a college of the visual and performing arts). There was no one in the auditorium who didn’t laugh hard throughout the sketch. This included myself, and I’ve seen it done many times.
It’s one bit that every comedy team bothers to learn, since members of the audience invariably whisper “Oh, good! They’re going to do ‘Who’s on First?’” when they realize what’s happening.
I don’t follow sports at all, and I’m British, so baseball is a total mystery to me. I could be completely wrong, but the entire premise of the sketch doesn’t make much sense. Do baseball players, or did they at the time, really have nicknames like “who” and “I don’t give a damn” and so on?
Apparently they have throughout the history of the game:
I don’t think it matters how realistic it is. (Also British, also couldn’t tell you what baseball players call themselves). It’s a basic “failure to communicate” gag. (See also the “What does a yellow light mean?” scene from sitcom Taxi). It’s not particularly plausible that players would be called “Who”, “What”, “Tomorrow” etc. It’s also not plausible that the two characters go for so long without working out what’s happening - after all, the joke only works if we, the audience, catch on straight away so it’s clearly not that difficult to understand.
But once you buy in to the necessary premises and just sit back and watch them go round and round getting more and more frustrated - and savour the way the writers introduce more and more variations on the same basic gag - then it’s very funny.(Everyone has their own individual thresholds for suspension of disbelief, so if it doesn’t work for you it doesn’t work.)
Arguably the problem with Unforgiven is the casting. Whether the viewer can overcome Eastwood. Whether Eastwood overwhelms the script. To me he does.
Eastwood’s image is even more cliched than John Wayne’s was. And look, he’s winning the gunfight, just like always. Takes me out of the movie.
Problem is, by that point you can’t make a Western without Eastwood. A couple of decades earlier, maybe you could. Too late at that point.
That’s a good point. Yet, I thought no one but Wayne could do The Shootist. Where Unforgiven is a deconstruction of the Western genre, The Shootist is a deconstruction of John Wayne.
There’s some awareness (and deconstruction) of Eastwood’s cliched image throughout the film. (For instance, the Schofield Kid wears a constant Eastman-esque squint, but it turns out he just has bad eyesight.)
Yep. Which is why it was important that Eastwood was in the role - he was deconstructing that for which he became famous.
It never gets old.
There’s even a direct homage/deconstruction of the scene in Josie Wales “who do you shoot first” conversation. Wales had a whole logical path; Munny just shoots. “I was lucky in the order, but I’ve always been lucky when it comes to killin’ folks.”
Ok, not awful, but not iconic, either. I don’t buy the innovative deconstruction angle, either, as the western hero was taken apart (by Eastwood himself) in High Plains Drifter and in earlier movies.
The problem with the final shootout is that the rest of the movie is meant to be realistic, but they went over the top at the end. In all the real western shootouts, something like this almost happened, once. Shootouts like this belong in a Star Wars or John Wick movie, not in a western meant to be taken seriously.
“Who’s On First” has also spawned a number of homages over the years, such as this Pearls Before Swine comic strip:
My favorite is this one that Johnny Carson did back in 1982
Hersheys referenced the routine in two commercials for their Whatchamacallit candy bar. One of them had comedians reprising Abbott and Costello’s roles. The other used kids
That’s part of what makes the film so interesting to me. High Plains Drifter deconstructed the earlier, John Wayne-era westerns, presenting themselves as a more “realistic” take on the genre - but it wasn’t, it was just as unrealistically stylized, just with a different aesthetic. Unforgiven starts off as a deconstruction of Eastwood’s earlier Western films, once again saying, “That’s not how it really was; this is how it really was.” Except, it’s still not - once again, it’s a stylized depiction of what we (in the late '90s) imagined the West was “really” like. The gunfight at the end is the film deconstructing itself, acknowledging that Unforgiven is still a fantasy, no less than High Plains Drifter or Rio Bravo.
Going back to iconic but awful TV Shows:
Cheers. Cannot watch it. Every character on there, I would run over in the streets of Boston if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away.
Now, Frasier, I liked, at least for the first five seasons. Mainly because Frasier Crane is away from all those horrid characters that you hoped would all die in a bar fire. Even going back to see him on the first show, he’s like a hor d’oeuvres in a bowl of potato chips.
I think bell bottoms, disco music, avocado green colored walls and shag carpeting - all iconic representations of the late 70s to early 80s - were awful.
And another take on the “Who’s on first?” routine, the Credibility Gap featuring David Lander and Harry Shearer:
I remember hearing this on the radio back when and thinking it was funny. The timing doesn’t seem to great now but it’s still a good routine.
I remember similar sketches that were based on something similar, like how’s (Howe’s) on first, for the first person to perform in something (a play?), and then they ask where and why, with Wear and Wye being the towns that made the joke.
Morecambe and Wise is the one that comes to mind for me, and it’s a fairly strong memory, but memory is fallible - they’re just the type to have done it. But if not them, then someone like them. It’s not the kind of TV show that was preserved for all time and I think most of it’s gone.
I would have been maximum 7 years old when I saw it on Morecambe and Wise or whatever it was, and don’t think I’ve seen it since. But there are similar routines.