TFTP Comedy: "The Ed Wynn Show" (Oct. 20, 1949)

Posted to Internet Archive by user 'Emperor'

Ed Wynn was one of the early variety show comedians on television, and his show was the capper to a long career as a stage comedian (about 47 years long, as he explains in this episode). Wynn was a comedian of a type we don't see anymore: clownish in the best possible sense, with a Borscht-Belt-y broad comedic sense (he was Jewish with a birth name of Isaiah Edwin Leopold, his stage name derived from his middle name), and with a highly developed eye for visual touches (as he keeps reminding us in this episode, as he tells Victor Moore, that to be on TV you have to have a crazy costume).

Wynn was also a great link between the much older vaudeville traditions and the newly emerging (at this time) televisual traditions. His tutelage of the even older Moore on how to break into television (which features some incisive barbs about sponsors) includes a comment to Moore about to be on TV all you have to do is decide whether or not you want to be a "cowboy, puppet, or wrestler", showing a perceptive understanding of late-1940s television and its prevalent genres. This episode of Wynn's show features a series of comic and musical segments linked by Wynn's schooling of guest star Moore and including a couple of singing performances by the Merry Macs.

"The Ed Wynn Show" is a great example of early TV comedy: strongly vaudeville-based, a little rough at the edges, attempting to take advantage of the visual properties of TV while remaining largely verbal in nature due to its roots in radio.