#BornThisDay: Comic, “Moms” Mabley

Photograph via YouTube

March 19, 1894Moms Mabley:

It’s no disgrace to be old. But damn if it isn’t inconvenient.

As a kid, I would come home from school, let myself in with the key that hung on a chord around my neck, let the dog out, and practice my piano lessons before settling in to watch The Merv Griffin Showor The Mike Douglas Showwhere one of my favorite guests was Moms Mabley. More fun was catching one of her appearances on the subversive The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when that CBS series was the number one television show during the late 1960s. I loved her so much I used to do her routines.

From Detroit Public Library Archives

If you’ve never heard of Mabley, it is easy to understand. There are no DVDs available, and almost no recordings from the first 40 years of her career. Her performing persona was a frumpy, middle-aged woman in a housedress and floppy hat who delivered hilarious, dirty stand-up comedy routines, often with just a pinch of wry political commentary.

In the 1960s, when she was approaching her 70s, she began recording comedy LPs, which were a new thing. She recorded 25 by the end of the 1970s.

There’s something almost insane about how far she was ahead of her time. In the 1920s, Mabley was probably the only female standup comic in the world, decades before Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller began performing, and they are called the pioneers. She was also one of the first openly gay comics anywhere, of course, it was an openness known only by her friends and colleagues. Along with Redd Foxx and Dick Gregory, she was part of the first wave of black standup artists to reach a mainstream audience, and the oldest of them all.

Mabley was so much more than just being brave enough to be the first at things, she is one of the inventors of standup comedy.

Born Loretta Aiken, she was the granddaughter of freed slaves, but she grew up in extreme poverty and segregation. Both her parents were killed in separate accidents while she very young. She was raped twice before she was 15-years old, became pregnant twice, then had to give up both babies for adoption. She was forced to marry an older man that she despised. Mabley:

Abraham Lincoln, he ain’t freed me; Johnny Kennedy freed me.

Mabley’s humor came from remembering her grandmother, the dearest figure of her childhood. “Moms”, the character she adopted from the beginning, with her housecoat, toothless gums, and gravelly voice was a tribute to her grandmother.

“Working Blue” is a comedy expression for routines that are risqué, indecent or profane, and largely about sex. Blue comedy was used to shock and offend some audience members, using curse words and discussing things that people do not discuss in “polite society”. Mabley was so lovable onstage that she could get away with working blue when others couldn’t, let alone a woman. Pretending to be old before she was old allowed her to direct righteous ammo at the status quo without ever losing the lightness that made her funny. She spoke from a long stage tradition of old people saying what they damn well like for laughs.

She joked about her hard life, she spoke about race and sex, of how she had no interest in old men, preferring much younger ones:

Only time you see me with my arms around some old man… “I’m holding him for the police.

Her act always showed her Vaudeville roots by including a few songs and a bit of soft-shoe here and there. The jokes were old even then, but Mabley had a style and a voice, that could make them seem new:

Somebody asked me, ‘What is it like being married to an old man?’ I said, ‘Honey. I don’t know what to say. The best I can explain it, it’s just like trying to push a car up a hill with a rope.

Photo 1933, from the Apollo Theatre Archives

Her early years of performing were at African-American theatres on the Chitlin’ Circuit, culminating with a gig at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the first woman comic to play the famous venue. Mabley was one of the most successful entertainers of the Chitlin’ Circuit, another name for T.O.B.A.(Theater Owners Booking Association), sometimes called the “Tough On Black Asses Circuit”. Despite Mabley’s popularity, wages for black women in show business were meager. Nonetheless, she persisted for more than six decades. At the apex of her career, she was earning $10,000 a week.

Her appearances in the 1960s on The Ed Sullivan Show brought Mabley fans that were younger and whiter, playing Carnegie Hall in 1962.

Her completely serious and melancholy cover version of Abraham, Martin And John was on the Billboard Hot 100 in summer 1969. At 75-years-old, Mabley became the oldest living person ever to have a Top 40 hit.

Offstage she quickly shed her matronly housedress and hat after performances and changed into stylish men’s slacks and shirts.

Mabley is the subject of the Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ To Tell Ya (2013) a documentary film from HBO. The film was nominated for two Emmy Awards. In the film, Norma Miller, a dancer, actor and fellow comic, says:

I met her at the Apollo Theater, and she and I shared a dressing room for two weeks — she and I and her girlfriend. She was real. I mean she was Moms on stage but when she walked off that stage she was Mr. Moms. There was no question about it. We never called Moms a homosexual. That word never fit her. We never called her gay. We called her Mr. Moms.

The documentary includes numerous film clips of Mabley performing on the Vaudeville stage and scenes of her signature standup comic routines from the 1960s and 1970s. It also features private photos of Mabley in what appeared to be the 1930s and 1940s in men’s clothes with short hair.

Goldberg:

See, in that time period it was nobody’s business. And I will assume that when Moms came out of costume, because that’s what the hat and the shoes and the housedress was, and put on that silk shirt with those pants and that fedora and had those women on her arm — I think everybody was like, ‘okay’.

And so I think that she was a woman among men and who was equal to those men. And, they treated her like a man. And I think that is what helped give her the longevity.

When she played Washington D.C.’s Howard Theatre in the 1940s, she would socialize with a circle of lesbian and gay friends in Washington. On one occasion during that period, following her show at the Howard, Mabley organized a gay party at a nearby nightclub that was raided by police.

Mabley bravely  came out of the sloset when she was 27-years-old, but after her death in 1975 at 81-years old, Jet Magazine reported Mabley had three daughters and a son (plus the two she gave up to adoption) and left an estate worth more than a million dollars. So, maybe she was bisexual, but she is still in the LGBTQ spectrum.

I think that it is amazing that Mabley was able to use what people thought she was from her act to say something strong about the harrowing experiences of African-American citizens and the Civil Rights Movement. Mabley was invited to perform at the White House during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations in the 1960s.

Goldberg:

Moms comes along in the late 1920s as a young woman dressed with that hat and the house coat and the big shoes and she takes that persona all the way to 1975. She honed that woman and she grew into that woman at a time when there were no women stand-ups… there were none. There was only Moms Mabley.

She died from heart failure in May 1975.

On the marvelous The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Jane Lynch plays Sophie Lennon, a successful standup comic who relies on shticky gimmicks about her life in Queens and her frumpy appearance, when she is actually a rich Manhattan woman of refined taste who has to wear a fat suit on stage. I think this character is clearly an amalgamation of the great Sophie Tucker and Moms Mabley.

In 2015, Mabley was named as one of the 31 Icons of the LGBT Historical Month by the Equity Forum. she was featured during the “HerStory” video tribute to notable women on U2’s world tour in 2017. She is a Gay Icon, a Black Icon, and she remains a legend in the History of American Comedy.

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By Stephen Rutledge

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