Comedy history is usually organised by venue. There is a better organising unit, and it is the circuit — the set of rooms an act can actually get booked into. Circuits decide who has a career. And for roughly three decades, Black American performers had one.
The name is the argument
The Chitlin' Circuit was a network of venues across the eastern, southern and upper-midwestern United States that gave African-American musicians, comedians and other entertainers commercial and cultural access during segregation. It sustained Black performers from the 1930s through the 1960s, succeeding the white-owned Theatre Owners Booking Association formed in 1921.
The name comes from chitterlings — boiled pig intestines — and the record is explicit that it is also a play on "Borscht Belt", the Catskills resort circuit that was simultaneously training a generation of Jewish comedians. Two circuits, both built by communities excluded from the mainstream, both named after the food that exclusion left them. Only one of them is routinely described as a golden age.
The dish itself carries the point. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is cited suggesting it symbolised acquiring a taste out of necessity and eventually coming to like it.
Mabley
Loretta Mary Aiken was born in Brevard, North Carolina, on 19 March 1897, one of sixteen children. Her childhood was violent: she is reported to have borne two children from rapes before the age of fourteen, both placed for adoption. Her father was killed when a fire engine exploded while he volunteered as a firefighter; her mother was later killed by a truck coming home from church on Christmas Day.
At fourteen she ran away to Cleveland at her grandmother's encouragement and joined a travelling vaudeville-style show. Told by her brother that stage women were no better than prostitutes and that she disgraced the family name, she took the stage name Jackie Mabley from a former boyfriend. She remarked in a 1970 *Ebony* interview that he had taken so much from her that taking his name was the least she could do.
She became one of the most successful entertainers on the circuit. Her record notes flatly that as a Black woman her wages were nonetheless meagre. Being the biggest draw on a circuit does not set your fee; the people who own the rooms do.
In April 1939 she became the first female comic to perform at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
The persona as a licence
She came out as a lesbian in 1921, at twenty-seven, and through the 1920s and 30s performed in androgynous clothing and recorded routines that addressed it — which makes her one of the first openly gay comedians anywhere.
In the 1950s she adopted the character the world remembers: "Moms", a toothless, bedraggled woman in a housedress and floppy hat, a name drawn both from the maternal role she filled for younger comics on the circuit and from her grandmother. She used the non-threatening persona to get at material too dangerous for almost anyone else at the time — racism, sexuality, and widowhood — with a running bit about preferring handsome young men to old washed-up geezers.
That is a technique, not an accident. Give the audience a character they cannot feel threatened by, and the character can say things the performer could not. Comedians still do this, usually without knowing whose invention they are borrowing.
Crossing over, at sixty-five
White audiences found her late. She played Carnegie Hall in 1962, appeared repeatedly on *The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour*, and in July 1969 her cover of "Abraham, Martin and John" reached No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 — by most reckonings making her, in her seventies, the oldest living person to have a US Top 40 hit.
She died in 1975, after roughly fifty years of work.
The circuit that carried her closed as segregation ended, and it did so without ever paying her what she was worth. When people describe a comedy scene as a golden age, the useful question is who was collecting the door.
Sources
- Wikipedia, \"Moms Mabley\" — the 1897 birth, the stage-name origin, the April 1939 Apollo debut, the meagre Chitlin' Circuit wages, the 1921 coming out, the 1950s \"Moms\" persona, and Carnegie Hall in 1962 - Wikipedia, \"Chitlin' Circuit\" — the TOBA background, the circuit's span from the 1930s to the 1960s, and the explicit derivation of the name as a play on \"Borscht Belt\" - Wikipedia, \"Apollo Theater\" — the Harlem venue's history and role - Wikipedia, \"Jean Carroll\" — a contemporary woman working the mainstream circuit, for comparison
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