Based on a Broadway show produced by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.. "Whoopee" opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York on Monday, December 4th, 1928 and ran for 407 performances. Unfortunately, Ziegfeld lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929. At the time, "Whoopee" was still playing to full houses on Broadway. To bail himself out, Ziegfeld closed the show on Saturday, November 23rd, 1929 and sold the movie rights to Samuel Goldwyn. It is believed that the Broadway show could have run for another year.
Unfortunately absent from this film version of the 1928 Broadway musical is Ruth Etting. In that show, she sang her signature torch song "Love Me or Leave Me" (music by Walter Donaldson, lyrics by Gus Kahn). No film is known to exist of Etting performing the song. Doris Day portrays Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me (1955).
In the United States, "Whoopee" was the highest-grossing film of 1930.
Eddie Cantor reprises his role from the original 1928 Broadway show. Many film cast members were also in the original show, including Eleanor Hunt, Ethel Shutta, Paul Gregory, Jack Rutherford, Spencer Charters, Albert Hackett and Chief Caupolican. Appearing in the original play, but not the film, was Buddy Ebsen, best known to today's audiences as a cast member of TV's The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) and Barnaby Jones (1973).
Jacques Cartier and Joyzelle Joyner were announced for a specialty dance during the "Song of the Setting Sun" number, but even if this was filmed, it does not appear in the final print.
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