"Who's on First?" is a comedy routine made famous by American comedy duo Abbott and Costello. The premise of the sketch is that Abbott is identifying the players on a baseball team for Costello. However, the players' names can simultaneously serve as the basis for questions (e.g., "Who is the first baseman?") and responses (e.g., "The first baseman's name is Who."), leading to reciprocal misunderstanding and growing frustration between the performers. Although it is commonly known as "Who's on First?", Abbott and Costello frequently referred to it simply as "Baseball".
In 1956, a gold record of "Who's on First?" was placed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. A video (taken from the team's 1945 film The Naughty Nineties) plays continuously at the Hall.
In 1999, Time named the routine Best Comedy Sketch of the 20th Century.
An early radio recording from October 6, 1938, was placed in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2002.
Contents
History
"Who's on First?" is descended from minstrel and turn-of-the-century wordplay sketches. One of the most famous was developed by Weber and Fields and called "I Work On Watt Street". Other examples include "The Baker Scene" (the comedian "loafs" at a bakery located on Watt Street) and "Who Dyed" (the business owner is named "Who"). In the 1930 movie Cracked Nuts, comedians Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey examine a map of a mythical kingdom with dialogue like this: "What is next to Which." "What is the name of the town next to Which?" "Yes." In British music halls, comedian Will Hay performed a routine in the early 1930s (and possibly earlier) as a schoolmaster interviewing a schoolboy named Howe, who came from Ware, but now lives in Wye. By the early 1930s, a "Baseball Routine" had become a standard "bit" in burlesque in the United States. Abbott's wife recalled him performing the routine with another comedian before teaming with Costello.
Bud Abbott stated that it was taken from an older routine called "Who's the Boss?", a performance of which can be heard in an episode of the radio comedy program It Pays to Be Ignorant from the 1940s. After they formally teamed up in burlesque in 1936, he and Costello continued to hone the sketch. It was a big hit in the fall of 1937, when they performed the routine in a touring vaudeville revue called Hollywood Bandwagon.
In February 1938, Abbott and Costello joined the cast of The Kate Smith Hour radio program and the sketch was first performed for a national radio audience on March 24 of that year. The routine may have been further polished before this broadcast by burlesque producer John Grant, who became the team's chief collaborator, and Will Glickman, a staff writer on the Smith show. Glickman may have added the nicknames of then-contemporary baseball players like Dizzy and Daffy Dean to set up the routine's premise. This version, with extensive wordplay based on most of the fictional baseball team's players having "strange nicknames" that seemed to be questions, became known as "Who's on First?" Some versions continue with references to Enos Slaughter, which Costello misunderstands as "He knows" Slaughter. Another reference was to Bob Feller, where Abbott asks, "Feller pitching?" and Costello responds, "Of course there's a feller pitching!" By 1944, Abbott and Costello had the routine copyrighted.
Abbott and Costello performed "Who's on First?" hundreds of times in their careers. Although it was rarely performed precisely the same way twice, the routine follows a definite structure. They did the routine for President Franklin Roosevelt several times. An abridged version was featured in the team's 1940 film debut, One Night in the Tropics. The duo reprised the bit in their 1945 film The Naughty Nineties and it is that longer version which is considered their finest recorded rendition. They also performed "Who's on First?" several times on radio and television (notably in The Abbott and Costello Show episode "The Actor's Home").
Sketch
The names given in the routine for the players at each position are:
The name of the shortstop is not given until the very end of the routine and the right fielder is never named. In the Selchow and Righter board game, the right fielder's name is "Nobody".
At one point in the routine, Costello thinks that the first baseman is named "Naturally":
Abbott's explanations leave Costello hopelessly confused and infuriated. At two points in the routine Costello appears to parody Abbott by saying what appears to be gibberish to him, but inadvertently gets it right:
And finally,
That is the most commonly heard ending. "I Don't Care" and "I Don't Give a Damn" have also turned up on occasion, depending on the perceived sensibilities of the audience. (The performance in the film The Naughty Nineties ends with "I Don't Care".)
The skit was performed only twice on the team's radio series. (It was heard more often when they guested on other shows.) On their April 17, 1947 show, it serves as a climax for a broadcast which begins with Costello receiving a telegram from Joe DiMaggio asking Costello to take over for him due to his injury. Since DiMaggio played center field at the time, Costello ostensibly would be the center fielder, moving Because to right field.
Writing credit
"Who's On First?" evolved from earlier wordplay sketches but it is not known who transposed the basic wordplay to baseball, although numerous people have claimed or been given credit for it. Such claims typically lack reasonable corroboration. For example, a 1993 obituary of comedy sketch writer Michael J. Musto (1919–1993) states that, shortly after Abbott and Costello teamed up, they paid Musto $15 to write the script. Several 1996 obituaries of songwriter Irving Gordon (1915–1996) mention that he had written the sketch. Musto would have been 17 when Abbott and Costello teamed in 1936, but a script entitled "The Baseball Rookie," with the names of Costello and Joe Lyons, his straight man before Abbott, dates even earlier, perhaps to 1934, when Musto would have been 15 and Gordon would have been 19.
Copyright infringement case
In 2015, the heirs of Abbott and Costello filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit in the Southern District of New York claiming unauthorized use of over a minute of the comedy routine in the play Hand to God. The suit named producer Kevin McCollum, playwright Robert Askins, and the promoters as defendants. The defense claimed that the underlying "Who's on First?" routine was in the public domain because the original authors, Abbott and Costello, were not the ones who filed a copyright renewal, but the court did not see the need to make a final determination on that. The court ruled against the heirs, saying that the use by the play was transformative.
On appeal, the Second Circuit affirmed the district court in 2016 but for the other reason. The one minute of the routine used in the play did not constitute transformative fair use, since it was a significant portion and was taken word for word. But that was moot since the court also found that the heirs had failed to establish that they owned the copyright. (The court did not reach the issue of whether the routine had entered the public domain since the parties had apparently stipulated that they believed its copyright term was coterminous with One Night in the Tropics, where it had first been published for purposes of copyright law at that time).
The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on the case in 2017.
Derivatives and references in popular culture
The sketch has been reprised, updated, alluded to and parodied many times over the decades in all forms of media. Some examples include:
The comedy troupe The Credibility Gap (1968–1979) did a rock group variation on this routine involving a promoter, played by Harry Shearer, and a newspaper advertising salesman, played by David L. Lander, confusing the night's acts as proper nouns. The acts were The Who, The Guess Who and Yes.
Eugene Levy and Tony Rosato performed a variation on this theme on the TV series SCTV (1976–1984/S3E19 810123), with the rock groups The Band, The Who and Yes. The final punchline changed to "This is for the birds (The Byrds)!" "Ah, they broke up long ago!"
Episode six of the fourth season of WKRP in Cincinnati (1981) is entitled "Who's on First?". It revolves around Mr. Carlson being mistaken for a hospitalized Herb Tarlek, and to "prove Andy wrong"Les Nessman is then convinced to act as Mr. Carlson. When a thug named Dave shows up to confront Johnny Fever about an unpaid gambling debt, Johnny claims Andy Travis's identity, while Mr. Carlson refers to Andy as "Johnny" ... with painful consequences for Andy.
The biography of Lou Costello written by his daughter Chris is titled Lou's on First (1982).
In the mid-1980s, Johnny Carson's spoof of then-president Ronald Reagan preparing for a press briefing included "Hu is on the phone", a reference to fictional Chinese leader Chung Dong Hu (there would eventually be a real Chinese leader Hu Jintao). Reagan also misunderstands references to Secretary of the Interior James Watt (misheard as "what") and PLO leader Yassir Arafat (misheard as "Yes sir"). The "Hu" interpretation was also done in the Family Guy episode "Extra Large Medium", in which Peter Griffin, in his medium routine, claims to "possess" the spirit of Costello inside him, and quickly falls into the routine with police officer Joe Swanson when it is revealed the victim in question is named Melvin Hu. They take too long to recover his body in time to deactivate the bomb strapped to him, and upon it exploding Peter immediately concludes the routine admitting he was not actually psychic.
Real-life parallels
On several occasions, players with names phonetically similar to the characters in the sketch reached the appropriate bases as runners, or defended them as infielders:
On October 3, 1920, Allie Watt played one game at second base for the Washington Senators so that, for a brief time, "Watt's on second".
During a May 31, 1966, game against the Minnesota Twins, relief-pitcher Eddie Watt of the Baltimore Orioles led off the 5th inning with his only career double, again creating a "Watt's on second" situation.
In September 2007, Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Chin-Lung Hu, a late-season callup from Las Vegas, got his first major league hit against the Arizona Diamondbacks, a single; Dodgers announcer Vin Scully said "Shades of Abbott and Costello, I can finally say, 'Hu is on first base.'"