Amos And Andy Quotes

I notice Catherine’s ceramic collectibles for the first time, really see them in a blinding flash of lightning. They’re scattered around the house, but here in the dining room, they have a dedicated hutch. They’re all blackface caricatures. Mammy and Pappy saltshakers, skin the darkest black, aprons the whitest white. Ashtrays that are only pitch-black heads, mouths open to swallow the detritus. A blond-haired, black-skinned baby eating a slice of watermelon twice his size, his face so gape-mouthed that he appears more fish than human. An Amos and Andy plate.

The way the mail works, someone told me once, the only reason you get anything at all, is that in the end it’s easier to just deliver it instead of dumping it down a manhole. And that was a guy who worked for the United States Post Office.

In the mid-twentieth century, the image of the masculinized Black woman found an identity in the form of “Sapphire,” a character in the Amos ’n’ Andy radio and television shows. By then, the stereotype had evolved into a rancorous nag—the stock angry Black woman.31 Sapphire doesn’t know a woman’s (submissive) place and is therefore emasculating and repellent to men.

Others who found their way to the air via Atwater-Kent were Frances Alda, Josef Hoffman, Louise Homer, and Albert Spalding. Fees to the Met alone ran $25,000 a year. By 1930 Frances Alda was the regular soloist. That year, the first that reliable ratings were compiled, Atwater-Kent had a 31.0, finishing third behind Amos ’n’ Andy and The Rudy Vallee Hour. An offshoot of sorts was Atwater-Kent Auditions, the first talent scout show, heard in 1927 and culminating in December that year. Local competitions were initiated around the country: the five winners from each division (male and female) competed for $5,000 prizes in the finale. Donald Novis and Thomas L. Thomas came out of Atwater-Kent Auditions, but Kenny Baker—who also went on to a notable radio career—never got past the local level. Graham McNamee announced the show.

One of my incidental tasks at the radio station was to hire talent to build up the programs. One evening a couple of fellows who called themselves Sam and Henry came in to audition. They gave me their routine, a few songs and vaudevillian patter. Their singing was lousy but the jokes weren’t too bad, so I hired them for five dollars apiece. They kept working on their characters and developed a Southern Negro dialogue that was a huge success. That team went on to make show business history, later changing the name of their act to Amos and Andy.

The Four-Star Playhouse was developed for NBC, partly to help counter the CBS talent raid that had lured Jack Benny, Amos ’n’ Andy, and Edgar Bergen away from the older network. The NBC response was predictable: a barrage of new shows with big-name Hollywood talent. It didn’t work: by then there were so many similar shows on the air that the public didn’t care, and most of the new NBC shows soon vanished.

This is the only sixty-minute episode in the program’s history. The purpose of this special broadcast is primarily to promote NBC shows returning to the air for the new season. Bob Hope’s comment, “There’s only a few of us left,” refers to The Jack Benny Program, Amos ’n’ Andy, and other shows which had moved to CBS.