Mixed Nuts: America's Love Affair With Comedy Teams From Burns And Allen To Belushi And Aykroyd

by Lawrence J. Epstein

From nineteenth-century vaudeville to contemporary sitcoms, comedy teams have made people laugh. Those teams were masters of the comic craft and gave to the world a particularly American art form. And, more than that, they were funny. Lawrence J. Epstein has written a joyful, celebratory history of America's finest comedy teams from Burns and Allen and Laurel and Hardy through the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the Smothers Brothers and beyond. It's a story of the classics of comedy and, at the moment of the apparent eclipse of comedy teams, of their unexpected rebirth. Although for comedians success is fickle and failure brutal, comedy teams couldn't resist the lure of celebrity and the remarkable explosion of the popular media of radio, film, and television. These were platforms from which to speak to an emerging nation in often troubled times; and when the times were hardest, the nation looked to its most cherished comic teams to cheer it up. Filled with telling anecdotes and hilarious routines, Mixed Nuts is the story of how America created comedy teams and how successive teams reflected America back to its people, meeting its deepest needs, tackling its most sensitive issues and mocking its pomposities. And always for laughs.

Genres: Humor, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2004

Reviews

[Stewart Tame · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely well-researched. If there's a significant comedy team up through the 90's that don't at least get namechecked, it's not for lack of trying.

Epstein relates the history of comedy teams from the days of minstrel shows and vaudeville up through the 1990’s. Obviously whole books can be--and have been--written about just Laurel & Hardy or the Marx Brothers or Monty Python and so on. But it's always nice to see where everyone is in relation to each other from a history standpoint.

I also really liked how Epstein went into some of the social and psychological reasons as to why particular styles of comedy were popular in various decades. One of his arguments seems to be that the age of successful comedy teams is over--at least for permanent teams anyway; there will always be temporary pairings for movies and so on. I agree with him that current economics and popular styles don't favor such a thing, but that doesn't mean that such will always be the case. The future is, as ever, inscrutable.

Fans of the history of comedy will definitely want to read this. Recommended!

[Emily Fortuna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some useful content, definitely a compendium of content you can’t find anywhere else. I wish it had gone deeper into analyzing the specifics of how these comedy teams produced their style of comedy brands.

[Jeremy Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this an interesting and sometimes informative overview, but I noticed at least two important inaccuracies and found some of the sociological analysis questionable (i.e., highly interpretative content presented in a voice of authority, when much of it may be conjecture). There are extensive references, but no footnotes, and I don't necessarily trust everything asserted here, given the factual errors and the fact that some of the analytical theories seemed tenuous at face value.

[Rudj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gradevole sorpresa questo saggio.
Mi aspettavo una semplice raccolta di di biografie e anedotica sparsa, invece l'autore si lancia in analisi assai interessanti sui meccanismi dello humor e sui ruoli comici.
Inoltre tratta anche di personaggi noti in Italia solo per il nome, o del tutto ignoti.
Anche l'editore è da tenere d'occhio, è specializzato infatti in saggi sulla comicità, argomento quasi mai approfondito in studi critici.

[Betsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

My interest in this book was prompted by "The History of Comedy" series on CNN.
A large amount of territory is covered--from burlesque to the beginning of films.
It is thorough and interesting stories

[Bargain Sleuth Book Reviews · Rating 2 out of 5]

For this and other book reviews, visit www.bargain-sleuth.com.

Man, I really wanted to like this book. After reading it, I read through the acknowledgements and all the research done to make this book, and it was clear that the author didn't know how to take all his research and make a cohesive study of comedy teams. The book is sort of chronological, then it turns thematic, then it goes back to chronological. Parts of it are good, when Epstein zeroes in on a specific team like Burns and Allen or Abbott and Costello.

Little is done with the comedians of the 1960's, which was a great disappointment, considering the fact I picked up the book was to read more about the Smothers Brothers. Despite the fact that the author interviewed both brothers, as well as several other comedians of the time, little is done with the information they gave.

Overall, a book that could have been great because of the subject matter, but ultimately disappoints.

[Tim Kadlec · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed Nuts is itself a bit of a mixed bag. It felt that at times he was overly abstract in those discussions. I also felt like he stretched his own definition of "comedy team" a bit too thin in order to include more contemporary pairings—Cheech & Chong, Belushi & Akroyd, etc.—that didn't seem to match the term quite as well. And I do think that the wide breadth of coverage held the book back a bit—he's at his best detailing the success of acts like Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello and I found myself wishing he didn't have to move on so quickly. Still, it was interesting to read the progression of the comedic team and how successive acts built upon their predecessors and Epstein provides several sharp insights throughout the book. Flawed, but a decent introduction.

[Baldurian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Questo saggio mi ha un po' spiazzato, pensavo affrontasse il tema dei team comici statunitensi degli ultimi anni, invece si concentra quasi esclusivamente sul periodo antecedente agli anni '70. La lettura è stata comunque interessante, anche se un po' fine a se stessa, visto che non ho avuto la minima occasione di "vivere" in prima persona la comicità di quegli anni. Consigliato solo agli ultra-appassionati o agli affetti della sindrome di Oe (Imparo, imparo, imparo!).

[Ginger · Rating 1 out of 5]

It had some interesting facts, but unfortunately it read like an 8th grade essay.