Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Reiner & Brooks, it seems like some of the best comedians working in the classic era worked as duos. Nowadays, almost all of the top standup comedians seem to be working alone and the classic straight man/funny man combo seems all but obsolete.
The duo still seems alive in sitcoms (Rick & Morty), sketch (Key & Peele) & performance (Garfunkel & Oates, Penn & Teller) but I can’t think of a single contemporaneous standup comedy duo.
What is it about the comedy duo that made them increasingly rare in the modern comedy landscape?
I was lucky enough to see one at the Rivieria in Vegas about 10 years ago or so; I cant remember the names but it was a blind Asian with a Jim Belushi-type fatish white guy exchanging wisecracks off each other onstage. They were OK it wasn’t the greatest set Ive ever saw but it was unique watching them play off each other to achieve punchlines.
Even better a fire alarm broke out in the middle of their set; they had zero improve skills to capitalize on it, sad to say.
The comedy team was a leftover from vaudeville; most of the successful ones are those that got their start there, or who followed in their footsteps.
But comedy changed. In the 60s, observational comedy became the norm, where people didn’t just tell jokes or do routines (defined here as pretending to be a character), but started making comments on life. George Carlin was one of the many pioneers in this; he started out doing routines (the Hippy Dippy Weatherman) but deliberately stopped and began telling a different sort of joke, one where he made a series of funny observations as himself. Carlin – and people like Lennie Bruce and Richard Pryor – revolutionized comedy.
And that slowly became the style of comedy that was expected. Nowadays, comedians don’t play characters (at least, not more than a joke or two); they talk about their own experiences. That’s hard to work into a double act. The closest to style is Jeff Dunham, whose ventriloquism allows for a second character.
I also suspect that comedy clubs pay so badly when people are starting out that it’s hard for more than one person to keep at it. Splitting $50 a gig kind of makes the idea of setting off on your own more attractive.
You’re right about potential duos moving toward sketch comedy. It allows for more elaborate skits than what can be done in standup.
For 20 years Australia was blessed by the talents of Lano and Woodley. They did live stand-up, theatre stage shows and made many TV appearances. They had their own comedy TV show The Adventures of Lano and Woodley which featured their talents in a sitcom format. Most episodes featured some of Frank Woodley’s slapstick skills. Plenty of their stuff is on youtube.
There is the Sklar Brothers, but they don’t have the same straightman/punchline dynamic as the duos you cited from back in the day. The ebb and flow from one to the other is hilarious, though.
With few exceptions, one partner did all the heavy lifting and figured out pretty quickly he didn’t really need the other partner. Which is why Garfunkel and Oates are so brilliant!
Perfect Strangers with Mark Lynn-Baker and Bronson Pinchot.
Whereas in Abbot and Costello the bumbling idiot is the perennial victim, Perfect Strangers turned it around so that Larry’s scheming ways fall apart and Balki’s innocence prevails.
A single stand-up comedian is cheaper than a duo, so it’s probably harder for a duo to get work unless they are in high demand, and unless they can get work, they won’t be in demand. They’d have to somehow be able to perform for a while at the same pay that a single person makes to be marketable.
Or, they have to have some other kind of hook. Penn and Teller were primarily thought of as magicians who distinguished their act with comedy, than comedians who did magic, which is what they are now, and they do a lot of stuff that has little magic in it sometimes, like their show Bullsh!t. Magicians usually came with an assistant, so a magic act that was a duo wasn’t a big deal.
Another thing about Vaudeville is that it often was a family business. A lot of the duos were relatives-- married couples, brothers, father and son, or sometimes more distant relatives when they’d started out as something closer, then someone else had stepped in (that is, a brother act became an uncle and nephew when a son stepped in for one of the brothers). When the whole family traveled the vaudeville circuit together, they stayed together (the father and son might have a comedy duo, while the mother played piano, and the sisters sang), but when the members of the duo weren’t related, and left family behind while traveling, things became more strained, and duos broke up into singles more often.
My grandfather was a newspaper reporter, and while his main beat was crime, he occasionally covered entertainment with factual articles (he wasn’t a reviewer), and had a big library of books on entertainment, especially things like vaudeville and circus, as well as early film, and I got a lot of his books after he died. I have several books on Vaudeville, and a lot of vintage true crime books. The latter are really fascinating.
Besides changing tastes and money for starting comedians, another factor might be inability to get along. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin might be the most famous. Abbott and Costello developed problems as time went on. Weber and Fields were the basis for “The Sunshine Boys”. Nick Altrock and Al Schacht broke up nastily, the one interview I saw with Schacht late in life he made a brief mention of “the other fellow”. It’s a business that breeds insecurities
Are you sure he was Asian? That may sound like a stupid question, but I used to do stand-up, and I got to know a lot of acts as we crossed paths. There was a duo named O’Brien and Valdez. Valdez was blind.
Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding. They’re probably best known for their TV show The Mighty Boosh, and Fielding spent a rather long time as a team captain on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, but when they do tours with the Mighty Boosh gang, they still do a traditional stand-up shtick to start the show. They’ve been performing together since at least the late 1990s, and it took them a rather long time to learn how to be on stage together without standing on each other’s shoes. They even refer to their friendship as a “double act”.
The rise of the truly modern standup comedian makes the due seem dated. Modern standup is about personal/social commentary and self-depreciation, and that’s what people expect from a standup now. The duo lends itself more to sketch comedy, which is a different beast, and is easier to do with MORE than two people.
So in the 1960s/1970s, with standup comedy developing as an art form, you also had the rise of sketch comedy on stage and, God help us, improv. Comedy split, more or less, into comedy as an individual exercise - the standup comedian, the purest of comedy art forms, which has the appearance of rawness and honesty - and sketch comedy, which is more the traditional scripted play approach. It kind of blew the sketch duo out of the stage industry.
Obviously, however, the duo continued to fare well in film, because there you can still have two funny people who work well together but have the advantages, where needed, of additional cast members as need be. The magic of filmmaking can make a comedy duo look modern and fresh in a way having them stand on stage usually looks dated and vaudevillian, though I’d point out there are exceptions; Rowan Atkinson and Angus Deayton have done incredible work.
