Shark Bytes

I never thought that Abbott & Costello jumped the shark. It it a very funny show. My favorite episode is when Costello Makes dinner for all the characters and they end up eating soap(They think it's cake) and everyone is blowing bubbles all over the place. Very funny show.

A previous poster is correct that Clyde Bruckman, who wrote some episodes of "The Abbott & Costello Show", had previously written gags for Buster Keaton. However, that wasn't the problem. In the 1920s and '30s, Bruckman had also written routines for comedian Harold Lloyd ... who, by the 1950s, was wealthy and retired. All the comedy routines Bruckman had created for Lloyd were now Lloyd's property. By the time Bruckman started writing for Bud & Lou, Bruckman was an alcoholic who had run out of inspiration, so he started recycling his earlier material. When Harold Lloyd saw some of his own (Bruckman-written) routines performed on the Abbott & Costello show, he sued Bruckman as well as Abbott & Costello. Other comedians became chary of hiring Bruckman, for fear he might sell them material he no longer owned. When Bruckman discovered he was no longer employable, he borrowed a pistol from Buster Keaton and killed himself. Decades later, one of the "melon-head" aliens on the tv series 'Alien Nation' was named Clyde Bruckman.

If you're old enough to remember watching the series, it'd didn't jump the shark; in the days when Abbott and Costello were on television, television was new enough that there were either good episodes or not good episodes. With hindsight it's easy to say why it might have jumped the shark, but Abbott and Costello after the first season was still funnier than most of what passes for television comedy today. And, what the purpose of Abbott and Costello's television show? Not to make you think and laught; it was to simply try and make you laugh. And it did a pretty good job of it.

Of course The Abbott & Costello show never jumped. That's because their standards were so low! All they wanted to do was make people laugh. It didn't matter if the plots of the episodes made sense (many did not) if the characters weren't fully in character (this happened as a matter of course) or even if they reused bits from other episodes or their previous routines (probably every single ep). It was all about getting the laugh and far more often than not, they did!

It didn't hurt that they had the prolific and brilliant writer Felix Adler around to script some bits and Bud & Lou were constantly coming up with ways to incorporate more slapstick and hokey jokes into each moment of the series. Heck, I laugh just thinking about this show!

The Abbott & Costello Show was hilarious. There were maybe, only a handfull of episodes which were "clunkers" (not funny), but for the most part it was hilarious ! I found that the livelier, funnier episodes, were the ones with the opening credits accompanied by clips from their movies....then A&C would enter from behind a curtain and talk to the TV audience. I don't think there was a live studio audience....One thing that cracked me up: Mr Fields always seemed to have a brother who was a lawyer or doctor, or dentist or soda shop owner....and his brother was played by Mr Fields himself. Now, I wonder if this was done as a goof, or because it was a low-budget show. A&C NEVER jumped.

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The first of A&C's two seasons is comedy gold. No other show has come close to it for sheer laugh power. Not The Honeymooners, not Seinfeld - nobody!
A&C worked all their routines into the shows and there was a thin plotline holding it all together, but not enough of a plot to interfere with the slapstick laughs! Sid Fields is underrated as the second banana in the surreal laugh-fest. Of course, the most outre character in the history of TV comedy has to be Joe Besser as Stinky. He's far funnier here that in any of his 3 Stooges shorts. The second season was just a standard sitcom - funny at times but nowhere near the insanity of the first season.

This show was a lot better than the movies they did. The movies were too full of stupid musical numbers.

They filled this show with a lot of old comedy bits which they executed perfectly.

If you are a fan of Jerry Seinfeld, he says his greatest influence was these guys.

While the second season was not even half as good as the first, it was still funny, so A&C never jumped.
But the first season was so surreal, it would have been hard for A&C to top it. So many funny bits, like the episode of Lou's birthday - Sid Fields gives Lou a little toy that you look into to see a picture - and the picture is Sid Fields in a bathtub wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit!

A&C jumped in the second season after most of the regular characters were written out. Fortunately for us, the first season was surreal and outlandishly funny. Once seen, can anyone forget Joe Besser as Stinky? Plus Hillary, Sid Fields, Mike the cop and Mr. Bacciagalupe. A&C captured all their best routines in the first season, which may be the funniest season of any comedy show ever broadcast. Luckily for comedy fans, the complete 1st season is available on DVD.

Hellomfw - this is just a testing, dont worry about it

It was on this board I first learned that the second season was written by a guy who wrote Keaton's comedies. Here's my two cents. Mr. Keaton wasn't a comedian really. He was more a physical comic actor. Abbott and Costello were outright comedians and relied on verbal humour rather than physical comedy (though a little physical comedy was occasionally in their routine). In the second season they were left to talk more regularly and do more physical type humour and also have physical humour be all around them and--well really it wasn't quite them. They probably felt weird not being able to do as much verbal humour for season 2 as in season one. As for Sidney Fields well he was a-ok as their landlord but he was nothing really spectacular. Season 2 was a jumper.

It never did. The sad thing was that "the Boys" were shafted all through their careers. These shows were under Lou's direction and the only way that they finally were able to own their material through copyrights. Many people never saw that they we no spring chickens when they did these shows plus the fast pace of 4 movies a year (B movies from a greedy studio) and many personal appearances. Universal was broke when they hired them to 28 movies and from their first starring movie (Buck Privates) they were in the Black. What was a shame were movie subplots and singers (still used as a filler in movies-I call those parts a bathroom break). Only 2 seasons well anymore would have ruined sitcoms forever NO ONE WOULD HAVE EVER MEASURED UP.

Jumped in certain episodes. There was one in which they performed the "Cow's Udder" routine. In their show, perhaps because of budget constraints, they performed it so fast that the timing was off as to where to laugh and for how long. When they performed it in front of a live audience on The Colgate Comedy Hour, however, they took their time and waited for the laughter to die down before saying the next line. That's the main difference between filmed and live Abbott and Costello: an audience. In fact, when they made their first feature One Night in the Tropics, Costello was wondering how they can perform without an audience. The director, A. Edward Sutherland, told Lou that there was an audience: his crew. Sure enough when the team started performing their routines, the director had to stuff his mouth with a handkerchief to keep from ruining the various takes while the crew had to try to stifle their own laughter! Also, since Costello rarely stayed on his marks they ended up using three cameras in order to get all possible angles for maximum enjoyment! One more difference between filmed and live: on the live TV shows whenever ad-libs come to Lou Costello, Abbott laughs al-la Harvey Korman (who incidentally played Abbott in a TV movie with Buddy Hackett as Costello)! Favorite Costello ad-lib: "Don't rush me, I may get an Emmy!"

These guys were Seinfeld before Seinfeld was cool. They did a lot more than just "Who's on First?": their TV show always had me rolling with laughter. It was the original "show about nothing."