South Bend Comedy: The Performers, the Rooms and the Craft

Comedy — The Performers, the Rooms, and the Craft

South Bend's comedy record is heavier at the top than its size suggests, and its largest name has been hiding in plain sight. Charles Butterworth — born on this ground in 1896, a Notre Dame law graduate and a South Bend newspaper reporter before he was a comedian — became one of the defining comic actors of the studio era, and his name appears in no other file of this record; this section carries him whole. Around him the record runs in the ordinary channels of American comedy, each at its documented size: a raised-here director, Sydney Pollack, whose Tootsie the American Film Institute ranks second only to Some Like It Hot among American screen comedies; two comedy writers of Academy Award standing, George Seaton, born here, and Larry Karaszewski, born and raised here; a teenage sketch-comedy broadcast, Beyond Our Control, that a national association named the best locally produced variety show of its class in 1974; the vaudeville bills of the Orpheum and the Palace, whose own history names Fanny Brice, Burns and Allen, and Amos 'n' Andy on its stage; the burlesque season at the Blackstone that a mayor shut down in 1929; a campus humor line that runs unbroken from The Juggler of 1919 through the Keenan Revue of 1976 to the improv stage of the present; humor in print, from Ring Lardner's apprenticeship on the South Bend Times sports desk to the comics page of Jerry Scott, one of only four cartoonists ever to hold two strips in a thousand newspapers at once; and, in the present century, one standing comedy club whose founding year the record will not fix, and a working scene of local comics beneath it. The minstrel record, the era's popular stage comedy, survives here in an archive and a single documented bill, and prints at exactly that size.