Comes the Revolution

Willie Howard gives a revolutionary speech to an audience of one in this soundie.

A soundie was a three-minute movie meant to be played on a video jukeboxes, produced by Mills Novelty and available in bars and similar venues. For a dime, the audience got a choice of eight three-minute shorts projected on a ground-glass screen. The vast majority of them seem to have been musical. This is the first one I have seen that wasn't.

Modern viewers may think that Howard is indulging in fantasy with his accent, that the way he tells this joke is pure stereotype. Me, I think he sounds a lot like my grandfather, who was a Marxist.

Borscht-Belt trouper Willie Howard, noted "dialect" comic, in a classic routine that certainly struck a chord with urban Jewish audiences of the 20s and 30s. Often called "Dutch" comics, largely due to sounding not quite German, Yiddish, Polish, or Russian, but having elements of each (defaulting to Yiddish), the style has not aged well, now seen as a sort of eastern-European minstrelry. Fritz Feld is probably the best known of these comics today.

Fanny Brice, immortalized as "Funny Girl", also parlayed elements of this style of comedy into a radio career, radio being the medium where dialect comedy went to die, with shows like "The Goldbergs" hitting the end of the line in the mid-fifties.