30
NOVEMBER 2013
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HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
IT’S NOT UNTIL
almost the end of
Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley
, the Academy
Award winner’s new HBO documentary on the midcentury comic, that you get a real sense
of Mabley’s achievements. In the segment, Mabley performs a cover of Dion’s “Abraham,
Martin and John,” a civil rights–themed anthem, at the
Playboy Mansion, with everyone fromHugh Hefner to
Sammy Davis Jr. looking on in rapt a ention.
Born in the 1890s, Mabley started as a singer,
comedian and dancer on the all-black “Chitlin’ Circuit”
during an era when black stars were o en imitated
but rarely celebrated. Later, she became a regular at
the Apollo in Harlem, performing on “The Ed Sullivan
Show” and “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in
her floppy hat and pa erned muumuus, inspiring a
generation of performers, Whoopi Goldberg included.
“She had a huge impact on me,” Goldberg says. “The
kind of work that I do, the kind of stories I tell, they’re
based on the Moms Mabley tradition.” By that she
means anecdotal but subversive—the kind of gags
that lull you for a moment before whapping you in the
backside with a punchline.
Goldberg has long planned to honor her mentor-in-
absentia, but life got in the way. “You suddenly wake
up and go, ‘Geez, I’m old. I’d be er do this,’” Goldberg
says. “And so that’s what I did.”
Because there was li le biographical material to go
on—and only one surviving family member to inter-
view—Goldberg relied mostly on clips of Mabley’s act
and rallied friends (Eddie Murphy, Kathy Griffin, Joan
Rivers, Harry Belafonte, Bill Cosby, Arsenio Hall) to talk
about the ways Mabley influenced them. The result is
a sort of paean that nonetheless had audiences at this
year’s Tribeca Film Festival in stitches.
“That’s kind of a great testament,” Goldberg says.
“I mean, these jokes are more than 50 years old. And
they’re still funny.” —
JD
NOV. 18
TheMother of All
Documentaries
Whoopi Goldberg’s directorial debut
celebrates the first lady of standup comedy
MOVIES
Scorsese’s
TheWolf of Wall Street
has DiCaprio playing a horrid stockbroker
//
Preteen fisticuffs in
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
TV
The 50th
anniversary of JFK’s assassination sees PBS’s “NOVA” applying forensic techniques to the killing in “Cold Case”
BOOKS
With season four of AMC’s “The
Walking Dead” just out, the obsession with zombies lives on with the release of Vol. 19 of the original graphic novel
//
Patricia Cornwell forensatrix Kay
Scarpetta tackles yet another case in
Dust
THEATER
Ethan Hawke plays Macbeth (“Is this a Tony which I see before me?”) at Lincoln Center Theater
A L S O O U T T H I S M O N T H
The Good Stuff
A few gems from the late, great
Moms Mabley
“Didja hear about the two old
maids walkin’ down the street?
One of them said to the other one,
‘I smell hamburnin’.’ The other one
said, ‘Maybe we walkin’ too fast.’”
[While hugging the host of “The
Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour”:] “Ah, I love to put my arms
around you, son, young and all.
You knowmamma don’t like old
men. No. Anytime you seeme with
my arms around an oldman, I’m
holdin’ him for the police.”
“They was looking for the oldest
man in the world. They went all
over the world, went down to
Mexico, and they seen a little man
up on the mountain all drawed up.
They said, ‘This has got to be the
oldest man in the world. This has
GOT to be him.’ They said, ‘Listen,
pops, will you tell us, what is the
reason for your long life?’ He says,
‘Yes. I run around with women.
When I was younger, young girls.
Drink plenty whiskey. Smoked.’
They said, ‘You done all that and
lived to be this old?’ They said,
‘How old are you?’ He said, ‘35.’”
