Fort Wayne Comedy: Comedians, Stages, Comedy Clubs and Humor in Print

Comedy · The Performers, the Rooms, and the Craft

Comedy is the subject this history was missing, and its Fort Wayne record is heavier at the top than anywhere else. The city produced the defining screen comedienne of the 1930s — Carole Lombard, born on Rockhill Street, whom Life magazine named America's Screwball Queen — and a Hoosier humorist, Herb Shriner, who built a national radio and television career out of monologues about Indiana small-town life. It produced two sitcom leads a generation apart, Dick York of Bewitched and Shelley Long of Cheers, a character actor, Herb Vigran, whose face filled three decades of American comedy, and a singer-actress, Marilyn Maxwell, whose comedy record is her partnership with Bob Hope; Jenna Fischer of The Office carries a birth tie only, and is printed at that size. At home, the comedy ran through the era's ordinary channels: blackface minstrelsy in the nineteenth-century halls, treated here at exactly the size the surviving record supports; vaudeville bills at the Palace and the Emboyd, where the Embassy's own history places Bob Hope's first emcee job; a Fort Wayne-raised eccentric juggler, General Lavine, whom Debussy set to music; children's-show hosts who worked as clowns on local television; and then, from 1984, the stand-up club era — Snickerz and its successors — which built a local scene that by the 2010s had its own promoters, a festival, and a Fort Wayne-bred writer on a network sitcom's staff. In print the record is local in scale: one newspaper column, Betty Stein's "By the Way," ran in the News-Sentinel for thirty-six years, and no Fort Wayne humorist with a syndicated national footprint verifies — a negative this section prints plainly rather than padding around.