Pioneer Women. 3.

Here are some more.
Each, in my mind, funnier and more pioneerish than Phyllis Diller.

Totie Fields:

I've had extensive encounters over the years with Totie Fields.
I found her to be very much the genuine article.
She was what you saw.
Her act was basically an extension of her personality.
Phyllis Diller's wasn't.
You knew nothing about Phyllis Diller from what you saw on stage.
I was once at a gathering of comedians.
Contemporaries of hers.
She did not open her mouth the entire evening.
She was like a sponge. Listening, and drinking it all in.
This was surprising, and certainly not the Phyllis Diller I knew.

Totie Fields, on the other hand, was always who you expected her to be.
Brash, loud, warm, attention-getting, and most of all, funny.
Maybe she wasn't as much of a pure one-liner stand-up as Phyllis Diller.
But she was genuine.
And genuinely self-deprecating.
She had a lot to work with in this in this regard.
She was short, fat, dumpy-looking, and not particularly feminine.
Her act consisted of a lot of special material, because she sang well.
And she mostly told stories.
Very funny stories, that were funnier because of the way she told them.
She was kind of a short, fat, dumpy, Jewish version of Danny Thomas.
(That's right. Danny Thomas WASN'T Jewish.)
I always looked forward to seeing her on TV.
For one reason: She always made me laugh.
In a way that Phyllis Diller did not.

Kaye Ballard:

Kaye Ballard was perhaps the direct antecedent to Carol Burnett and Dorothy
Loudon. And,to some extent, Totie Fields.
Kaye Ballard was around, working clubs and stage a good seven or eight years
before any of the others I've mentioned so far.
Very musical. A great singer.
Very brash, very sophisticated.
Don't judge her work by what she did on "The Mothers-In-Law"
She was pretty funny in that too, but it really only showed one side of her.
There's some really good YouTube stuff of Kaye Ballard's cabaret act.
She does a tribute to E.Y. Harburg, the great lyricist, and is accompanied on
the piano and vocally by the late Arthur Siegel, who was extremely gifted and wrote some wonderful songs his own self.
Kaye Ballard was often a riot.
Phyllis Diller was never a riot.


Betty Hutton:

Betty Hutton, you ask?
Every generation or so, someone from a younger generation will ask someone from
an older generation "What was the deal with (fill in the blank)? Why on earth was
this person a star?"
In my case, it was me asking this to my father about Betty Hutton.
I think it was right after I saw "The Greatest Show On Earth", certainly the worst
movie to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture.
And it contained the worst performance by someone who was considered a star,
Betty Hutton.
My father's response was "I don't know....she was peppy."
I wasn't buying.
Then, I saw the movie "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek".
It immediately became my favorite movie, and Betty Hutton was terrific in it.
And wasn't even particularly peppy.
It was the difference of having Preston Sturges rather than Cecil B. DeMille direct
you. One was an actor's director, one was not.
Betty Hutton's movie career then crashed, and she played nightclubs, Vegas, and
the stage. She did a lot of special material.
I've seen some of it on YouTube.
A lot of it was pretty peppy.
And I'm sure she talked to the audience between numbers.
She was around earlier than any of the previous ones mentioned, so she was
certainly more of a pioneer, and with hard evidence to back it up, genuinely
funnier than Phyllis Diller.

A few more miles to go before I sleep.

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