Do Comics Hate Each Other? (1954) 🇺🇸

One of the favorite occupational pastimes of the inveterate theater-goer is turning to the person in the next seat and remarking of two performers on stage: “Actually, you know, they hate each other like poison.” The remark is generally directed either at a pair of romantic leads or a comedy team.

It follows, human nature being what it is, that television viewers, too, have been made suspicious of the actual relationship existing between any two given teamsters. It is smart to be on the inside, and it is always the insider who knows for a fact — if it can be called that — that Desi beats Lucy when they are home, that Burns hasn’t spoken to Allen for 14 years and that Martin and Lewis hate each other with a cordiality that must be seen to be believed. The insider, naturally, has seen it.

Of them all, there is a grain of truth only in the recent Martin and Lewis “feud,” a mild little donnybrook which lasted no more than two weeks and would, in any other community, have been dismissed as a normal fit of pique. A fit of pique in Hollywood, however, automatically assumes the proportions of a misdirected grand passion.

During the filming of their new Paramount picture with a circus setting, Jerry Lewis had occasion to tell the film’s producer that he didn’t particularly go for the script. Backing him up, a little more vehemently, was Dean Martin, who especially didn’t go for it because there wasn’t enough of Martin in it, Jerry, normally a live-and-let-live sort of lad, soon got over his passing display of temper.

Dean, who has a hot temper, took further umbrage under the mistaken notion that his pal and sidekick had gone over to the producer’s camp and was now in favor of the almost Martin-less script. Hollywood’s varied and assorted columnists, ever anxious to liven things up on a dull day, livened this one up to the point where the insider was now sure of his ground — Martin and Lewis, in his definitely wrong book, were sworn enemies.

Opposites, under the ancient law of physics, attract. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis are about as opposite as it’s possible to get without actually going in opposite directions. Dean, at 37, is an easy-going, almost lazy individual whose idea of heaven is a permanent attachment to a set of golf clubs and a round of night clubs. Jerry, only 28, is an undernourished dynamo who must either work or go crazy. The more talented of the two, he is a writer, a director, an idea man — and above all, an actor, be it comedy or pathos. He makes the decisions for the team, right or wrong. Dean generally goes along. When he doesn’t, there’s an argument. And once in a while the argument gets out of hand and into the you’re-a-bum-and-you’re-another stage.

The difference between the two extends even more sharply to their wives. Dean’s wife, the former Jeanne Bieggers, is the blonde bombshell type. Patti Lewis, although a former band singer, is basically the homebody type. The two just don’t hit it off and apparently consider it a waste of both time and effort to try to do anything about their disaffection.

Between the two boys, however, exists a friendship and mutual trust that goes just too deep to be impaired by any normal, now-and-again friction that can and does develop on the surface. They may squabble, but they don’t fight.

For the record, there hasn’t been a two-fisted fighting comic team since the heyday of Laurel and Hardy [Stan Laurel | Oliver Hardy]. These two clowns of the early talking movie days finally reached the point where each resented the other beyond tolerance and each finally walked out on the other.

The oddest relationship among comic teams is perhaps that which exists between Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The greatest of buddies on stage, they seldom socialize and rarely see one another in private life. With them, comedy is strictly a business — and an eminently successful one. When the working day is over, each goes to his own home and that’s that. They sometimes tend to get a little touchy on the subject of whose home is to be used for a picture layout, but diplomatic press agents have long since learned how to divide the honors on that one and trouble only infrequently exists between the two.

Of the married teams, hearts and flowers is the only possible theme. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, in fact, get along far better as a TV team than they did when they were working separately and seldom got to see one another. George Burns and Gracie Allen, married more years than most young stars are old, are as compatible as the comfortably average next-door neighbors. Anne Jeffreys and Bob Sterling just had their first baby. Ozzie [Ozzie Nelson] and Harriet Nelson head up such a typical All-American family atmosphere as to be almost sickening to the cynical insider.

The insider did try to make something of the fact that Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca finally broke up, but the best way in the world to get a hand-tailored pulverized nose from one of them is to say something disparaging about the other. They broke up simply because they inevitably ran out of gas, as a team, after five straight years of 39 shows a season.

Oddly enough, the only real friction existing in any of today’s comedy teams is more a question of frustration than friction. Paul Winchell actually lost a show in his efforts to prove he could stand alone without wooden-head Jerry Mahoney. And Edgar Bergen has for years, in a half-hearted sort of way, tried to effect at least a temporary separation from Charlie McCarthy. In July, he took a fling at the lead in a Kraft Theater production of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a performance which left many older viewers feeling grateful that Will Rogers was never a ventriloquist.

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‘Insiders' whisper TV teams feud violently, but…

Martin and Lewis: they’re just fooling.

Abbott and Costello: friends most of the time.

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Storm signals go up over a Hollywood set

Burns and Allen: this kiss is no act for a happily married pair.

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Laurel and Hardy: when they fought, no holds were barred.

Collection: TV Guide (Pittsburgh), 14 August 1954