Shark Bytes

I am fortunate to own many episodes of Amos and Andy on VHS. This show was a riot! Unlike the radio version, Amos wasn't featured very prominently in the television version. He mostly did occasional narration and appeared briefly in most episodes as a taxi driver. The show could more aptly be called "Kingfish and Andy".

Tim Moore was marvelous in the role of the Kingfish. His facial expressions and old-style slang were hilarious. His get-rich-quick schemes seemed to be the foundation for many episodes. Usually, Andy (played for big laughs by Spencer Williams) was the dupe for these schemes. Ernestine Wade played Kingfish's shrewish wife, Sapphire, to perfection. The viewer knew that sooner or later an argument would ensue between the two. The insults that would fly were hysterical and reminiscent of the ones that Fred Sanford would throw at Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son. Priceless moments!

The cast was rounded out by an unscrupulous lawyer named Algonquin J. Calhoun (Johnny Lee), who would generally become a conduit for the Kingfish that enabled him to put his phony schemes into practice, and Sapphire's mother (known simply as 'Mama'), who was the bane of Kingfish's existence and traded insults with him frequently, again, much as Aunt Esther did with Fred Sanford. The only other character that recurred on the show, albeit infrequently, was a slow-witted, slow-moving, slow-talking character ironically called Lightnin' (Nick Stewart), who usually came into play whenever the 'Mystic Knights of the Sea' lodge was involved in the plot.

As has been mentioned, Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher (of Leave it to Beaver fame) were the main writers. Yes, it is a shame that the overly-sensitive political climate of today has rendered this classic comedy as politically incorrect, as it is truly a very funny show, and I completely agree with those who say that many modern television shows portray black Americans in a far more negative light than Amos and Andy ever did. Such is the folly of the PC world we are forced to endure.

Peace.

A&A never jumped.
Political correctness may have removed it from the airwaves but it was a hell of a funny show.
Great actors performing memorable characters using a (usually) hilarious script - what's racist about that?
There are bootleg DVD of the show out there but this great show really deserves to be digitally remastered and presented to the public in all its glory!
The horrible stuff on UPN and BET presents black folk in a far worse light than Amos & Andy ever did.

A&A was the first TV show to get shot down by the odious PC censorship movement. I haven't seen it since the early 60's, when CBS bowed to pressure and pulled it from syndication availability, but what I remember about it was that it was a hilarious show, that usually centered around the scheming Kingfish and Andy, his willing accomplice in his various get rich quick schemes, not too different than Ralph and Ed in "The Honeymooners" [If memory serves correctly, Amos served as the narrator, introducing the story and the coming back at the end to wrap it up.]

Actually our Dad was the was who got us watching this, it was on reruns on one of the local channels around 6Pm or something, he probably wanted to watch something other than than Popeye or Huckleberry Hound. He used to tell us that this was a big show on radio when he was young, which made no sense at all at the time. But during a period when the only blacks on tv were playing maids, butlers, chauffers or janitors, the characters of A&A were independent people in their world, not subservient to whites.

And they were hilarious!

The only funny show featuring African-Americans that wasn't racist, in my opinion. Have you seen the minstrel shows they have on now? Every female is sexually loose and mouthy, every male is an egomaniac and con artist, every child is an annoying sociopath who can't shut up. And they say Amos and Andy was racist? Watch it and see how much better it was than today's shows where everyone is a home boy and every woman is a baby momma!

Interesting the mentions of Sanford & Son. The actor who played Amos was on one of the first episodes of Sanford & Son as a minister. Anyways, how come no one ever complained about Lum&Abner, which portrayed white people as dim witted hicks?

Amos & Andy was the FIRST TV series to feature a cast with NO Caucasian actors. It's characters included professional people, middle-class working people, homemakers and, YES, some real characters. In fact, a true cross-section of America. It was warm and funny, sometimes sad, but always a real reflection of Americans regardless their ethnic origin. If you want to target an insult to people of color check out Sanford & Son, one of the most insulting/degrading series I have ever seen

I too grew up with people who spoke like Amos and Andy. What are they trying to say Black folks don't have a since of humor? The black people that I know sure the hell do.

Amos and Andy was racist to a degree, but no more so than Sanford and Son. The problem with A & A was that at the time it came on TV, it was the only thing you could see which involved blacks. It has been said. . .and is true. . that it also portrayed AA's in a positive professional light. But, unfortunately, that aspect was overshadowed by the cartoonism of Kingfish, the gullibleness of Andy, and the plain dimwittness of Lightning. If the show came on today as an unheard of entity, it might just be a smash hit. It was the funniest show on the air. In an era where people know that these few characters don't represent an entire race, it would be accepted

I bought the entire DVD collection.
I am 51 and the TV show I remember lies right on the edge of my earlies memories. I remember AMOS the taxi Driver but not any of the other characters.

I finally had to find out what the fuss was about. I am a liberal white and have lots of friends from diverse backgrounds including a lot of African Americans.

I cant understand why this show would be considered any more offensive to blacks than Sanford and Son. Tell me old Fred Sanford isn't a Kingfish like contemporary, and that every major character on A&A has a contemporary analog on S & S. Andy brown is one of the greatest straigt men I have ever seen.

I don't get it. I hope the powers that be will allow all Americans black and white to enjoy the comic genius of this show, possibly in a new incarnation.

DO THE NAME RUBY BEGONIA RING A BELL?
A&A can't be found today, which is a crying shame because it is hystericlly funny. Far from being racist, it showed black folk as professionals, business owners and laborers. Of course the show revolved around the Kingfish and his get-rich-quick schemes, most of which involved fleecing the ever-credulous Andy. Amos really didn't figure heavily into the plot most of the time. Great characters like Sapphire, Mama and Lightnin', the janitor at the Mystic Knight Of The Sea lodge, made the show a comic masterpiece.

This show was a microcosm of the 1930s but lets just face it. It didn't put a good face on black America, all the characters were so outlandish and cartoonish that Gosden and Correll should have foreseen they were going to be crucified for it. The radio show was more cleverly written and had a little more brains behind the characters while the tv show allowed the actors to create more over the top personalities that just wasn't politically correct even before there was a word for it.

What a lot of people do not realize is that the average Black family in the '60s did not think Amos 'n Andy was a bad show. What happened was that as some Black people moved "up the ladder" they were afraid that they would be associated with the type of people that Amos and the Kingfish were. They felt that the new lifestyle was threatened and so they worked together to have the show cancelled.

This was one of the funniest shows ever on TV. It ranks right up there with The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy and All in the Family. I saw all the shows as reruns in the late fifties. Although I haven't seen an episode in over 40 years, I can still recall scenes from a half a dozen shows and still laugh about them today. I remember the house with only a facade that Kingfish talks Andy into buying, the one where Kingfish is convinced Sapphire is trying to kill him, the one about an alarm clark that doesn't work,the one where Kingfish drives Andy around Central Park six times telling him he his taking him on a tour of Yellowstone Park, and Lightning warning Kingfish to watch his step "because the steps are... (then Kingfish falls) and Lightnin' blurts out the last word "slippery." There isn't another TV show where I can remember so many episodes. I can't even remember what I saw last week. I can only think of one episode that I didn't think was particularly funny and that was the Christmas episode which I think was meant to be more serious anyway. Even I Love Lucy had some duds. Anyway, it's too bad that future generations may never see comedy at its best because the NAACP had it banned. Maybe someday they will reconsider and see it as not at all racist but just plain funny.

I agree that this was a very funny show, but it did depend on certain stereotypical characters and situations for its humor. The question is: Were these stereotypical characters and situations "racist." A few years ago I encountered a film (either "Juke Joint" or "Dirty Gertie From Harlem USA") that was made in the late 1940s and which featured Spencer Williams ("Andy" in the TV show), who also directed the film. I was a little surprised to realize that the characters in this film, which was aimed expressly at a black audience, were essentially the same "racist" stereotypes that appeared in the "Amos 'n' Andy" TV show. They were clowns, buffoons, and figures of fun, and certainly not meant to be taken seriously by ANY audience. The big problem with "Amos 'n' Andy" was not in portraying black men as comic figures (certainly common enough today), but simply that in the early 1950s, comedy was just about the only entertainment genre in which black performers appeared on U.S. television (aside from musical performers like Nat King Cole, the Mills Brothers, and others in various variety shows). Although Hollywood films began to portray a few "serious" black characters in dramatic films during World War Two, U.S. television had only Amos 'n' Andy, Beulah, and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson for most of the '50s and early '60s. It was the lack of context for white audiences -- especially those who had little or no contact with African-Americans in their daily lives -- that made "Amos 'n' Andy" so offensive to some black Americans and their spokesmen (i.e., the African-American press and the NAACP, principally). These people had a legitimate gripe, I think. As a white child growing up sheltered in the South of the 1950s and 1960s, I did not know any black men very well (black women I knew, because they worked in my household and the households of my mother's friends). I was almost an adult before I began to realize that the black men I saw portrayed in the films of the 1930s and 1940s, which I enjoyed on the Late Show, were not "actual" black men of those decades, but merely Hollywood clowns. (Steppin Fetchit was a great clown, a great and very funny character, but again there was no context of "serious" black characters in the 1930s against which to compare him.) For too many whites, the black clowns (and I use that word admiringly, not disparagingly) represented ALL black men. I do not wonder that the NAACP was displeased. But it would be nice for certain "sensitive" individuals today to realize that those bad old days are mostly in the past (at least on today's politically correct media) and allow Spencer Williams, Tim Moore, and the other black performers who made us laugh in "Amos 'n' Andy" their due praise.

This was one of the funniest shows ever. The Kingfish was the greatest wanna be con artists ever. This put Blacks in a better light than anything that's on UPN. Here they were educated and were owners of businesses. They were professionals and laborers. They all walks of life on this show and it was insanely funny. Amos was always the voice of reason but Andy was easily swayed by the Kingfish. And don't forget Calhoun - the greatest TV lawyer ever. I am glad this show lives on VHS and DVD. Without it we would be stuck watching reruns of crap on UPN! ugh!