Slowly I Turned

We're still doing vaudeville 100 years later

We explore a classic comedy routine to see why it’s still done today. . . scroll down to find out why it matters.

Whether you're a musician, dancer, or actor, there are always some basic pieces of repertoire you're trained on, that you study, that you perform for years if not throughout your whole career. A tap or swing dancer knows the shim sham. A musician knows the blues. And a comic actor knows the "Slowly I Turned" skit, aka "Niagara Falls."

This classic sketch is attributed to comic Joey Faye, born in the thick of the Vaudeville era in 1909 and hailing from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Niagara Falls Reporter notes "He was in 36 Broadway shows, including Man of La Mancha as Sancho Panza, and dozens of movies. He had his own series, The Joey Faye Frolics, in 1950, and appeared as well in other television shows, such as The Real McCoys, Perry Mason and Maude. His most recent claim to fame was as the green grape in the Fruit of the Loom underwear commercials. He continued to work until well into his 80s and died in 1997."

Vaudeville itself seems to have originated as a counter to the male-oriented burlesque shows common in the 1880s. An entrepreneur named Tony Pastor wanted to make a clean version of these variety shows (with a name like that, of course he did). They became so popular that soon entire theater chains were created based on this form of entertainment.

I first saw Slowly I Turned on a rerun of I Love Lucy show when I was a kid. The premise of the skit is this: a downtrodden guy (or girl) sees a stranger "with a kind face" and recounts a sad and violent tale wherein his wife was stolen away by some scoundrel. He pursues them as they travel from city to city, always just missing them, until the day he discovers the rogue in Niagara Falls.

As the Stranger With the Kind Face responds to the tale with sympathy, every time the words "Niagara Falls" are uttered the betrayed spouse is triggered into a blind rage, during which he reenacts his encounter with the scoundrel by beating up the kind-faced stranger. "Slowly I turned...step by step...inch by inch..." Over the years various towns have been substituted for Niagara Falls and twists were made to the plot, but they all conform to the same basic premise.

When I first saw the routine on I Love Lucy, even though I hadn’t seen it before I instinctively knew it was a bit of classic repertoire. Lucille Ball was one of our great comic actresses and Slowly I Turned was right up her alley. Instead of "Niagara Falls" the trigger word is the name of the runaway wife, "Martha."

In another broadcast, this time for CBS Opening Night in 1963, Lucy switches roles (Quel virtuose!) and this time plays the crazed hobo, while Phil Silvers plays the Stranger With the Kind Face.

Before there was television, movies or even radio, the primary form of entertainment in the US was vaudeville. It first appeared in the late 1800s and lasted through the 1930s. The shows featured anywhere from 5 to 15 different acts, including singers, dancers, acrobats, magicians, comics and trained animals.

Which reminds me of a joke…what’s the difference between a musician and a trained seal? Answer: the seal gets paid more.
ba-da-BOOM!

Performers who got their start in vaudeville include Bob Hope, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. Judy Garland began her show business career as a Vaudeville star with the Gumm Family. Former vaudevillian Joey Faye may have invented the Slowly I Turned sketch, but it lives on as part of America's comic repertoire.

Sid Caesar did the sketch with Imogene Coca on his TV program Your Show of Shows in the 1950s. Considered an "avant-garde" comic actor at the time, he used techniques like body language, accents and faking foreign languages. His show attracted the best comic writers of the day; both Mel Brooks and Neil Simon got their big break by writing for Caesar.

Although he grew up doing comedy routines with his brother to entertain family and friends, Caesar actually started his professional career as a jazz saxophonist.

"When Teddy Napoleon was playing piano with Gene Krupa's band, his sister Josephine was the vocalist, and Sid Caesar, later to become the famous comedian, was playing saxophone. They were driving through New Jersey to a gig in Pennsylvania and were stopped by a cop for speeding. Teddy was driving, and Gene was sitting next to him. Josephine was in the the back seat with Sid Caesar. When the cop saw Teddy's licence he said,

"Napoleon?" and Sid began to laugh. The cop said,

"What are you laughing at?" Sid said,

"He's Napoleon and I'm Caesar!" The cop frowned at him.

"Caesar and Napoleon, eh?" He looked at the girl in the back seat. "And I suppose you're Josephine?"

"Yeah, how did you know?"

--from the preface to Jazz Anecdotes by Bill Crow

Jazz musicians are trained on the Great American Songbook. Those songs by Gershwin, Porter, Kern, Berlin et. al. are now known as "standards." There are also "jazz standards" composed by the jazz musicians themselves, like Thelonious Monk, Benny Golson or Dizzy Gillespie. Just as a fledgeling jazz player learns Well You Needn't, Killer Joe and Night in Tunisia, a comic learns Slowly I Turned, or Lamb Chops by Burns & Allen.

Words we use today like "flop" (the show was a flop) or "gag" (that gag is pretty dated) come directly from vaudeville. Vaudeville musical licks like the "Minsky Countoff" (aka “Minsky Pickup”–Billy Minsky's was one of the big vaudeville theaters) or "Shave and a Haircut" have likewise become cliches that are part of popular American culture.

Minsky Count Off

Shave and a Haircut

Just as jazz musicians make quotes in their solos that refer to other songs (or licks by the masters), comedians also make quotes. Here's a Slowly I Turned quote from the Cosby Show, where Gilbert Gottfried goes berserk anytime the name "David Letterman" is mentioned:

Classic comedy skits like Slowly I Turned are so revered that even Errol Flynn, a romantic and dramatic leading man, wanted to try his hand at it.

Other well-loved versions of Slowly I Turned are those by The Three Stooges.

It’s even referenced years later on the Mike Douglas Show when Moe Howard is a guest. Abbott and Costello reprised their version several times throughout their career.

It’s a crying shame when today’s young performers don’t know the history of their art. It’s important for a number of reasons. First, we need to know the basic repertoire of our craft in order to build upon it. Otherwise we’re either reinventing the wheel and thinking we’re geniuses, or we’re making mistakes that don’t need to be made because other people already made them.

It also has to do with knowing history. Why do we need to know history? Besides being condemned to repeat it if we don’t know it, we also won’t recognize the jokes! For instance, recently there was a news item about a guy who stole a Tesla car. The perpetrator’s name was Edison! (It’s said that history doesn’t repeat itself exactly but it often rhymes. Well, in this case, it repeated itself exactly.)

Another reason for knowing the history of the art is that we can mine it for material. Probably someone could (or already has) come up with a postmodern version of Slowly I Turned by doing exactly that.

We also study literary, dramatic and musical structures of the past so we can understand how and why they work. Why are songwriters still writing song structures of 32 bars? Because it works. It’s not the only thing that works, but it does work. Then if you want to get into why it works, that opens up a whole world of existential and spiritual insights about human beings. For starters, we could do a lengthy meditation on how groupings of 8 bars correlate with the human nervous system.

Novelists write on the universal themes of life. One writers’ website posted a graphic on the idea that in literature we train ourselves to recognize the basic theme underlying the plot. We don’t want to be so distracted by the plot, which can unfold in unlimited ways, that we fail to see the basic premise tying one novel to another whose author developed the same theme in an entirely different way.

Jorge Luis Borges believed that we write not on themes, but on symbols. That’s why in his writing you see a constant return to symbols like Time, the mirror, and the labyrinth. Paintings are full of symbols. So are advertisements. I would argue that even instrumental music contains symbols. . .

Dig deep friends. Cozy up as close to the source as you can. That’s where the gold is.

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More on Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs in this article. And speaking of the I Love Lucy show, a future article will explore its fascinating history, including some industry inside info I’ve just discovered. Stay tuned.