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Smith & Dale

Smith and Dale were a famous American vaudeville comedy duo. The two performed together for more than 70 years.

Early life and work

Joe Smith (born Joseph Sultzer on February 16, 1884 - February 22, 1981) and Charlie Dale (born Charles Marks on September 6, 1885 - November 16, 1971) grew up in the Jewish ghettos of New York City. Many of the famous comic performers of vaudeville, radio and movies came from the same place and the same era, including Gallagher and Shean, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel and The Marx Brothers. Sultzer and Marks met as teenagers in 1898 and formed a partnership. They named their act "Smith and Dale" because a local printer gave them a good deal on business cards reading "Smith and Dale" (intended for a vaudeville team that had dissolved). Joe Sultzer became Joe Smith, and Charlie Marks became Charlie Dale.

By 1902 they joined two singing comedians, Irving Kaufman (later a popular singer) and Harry Godwin in a team known as The Avon Comedy Four. The act became one of the most successful comedy turns in vaudeville. For over 15 years they were top-of-the-bill performers on Broadway and appeared in a 1916 show, Why Worry? The foursome made commercial recordings replicating their stage act, as in a 1917 restaurant sketch:

SMITH: One cheese sandwich! The cheese should be neutral.
DALE: One sandwich, with American cheese.

SMITH: Where's the manager?
DALE: He's not here, he went across the street to a good restaurant.

By 1919, the act had run its course, and the Avon Comedy Four broke up. Smith and Dale took up where the foursome left off, playing Broadway and vaudeville (including the Palace Theatre, considered the pinnacle of stage venues). Both used a heavy Jewish dialect, with Smith speaking in a deep, pessimistic voice and Dale in a high, wheedling tenor.

"Dr. Kronkheit and His Only Living Patient"

During the 1920s, they became famous for their signature sketch "Doctor Kronkheit and His Only Living Patient," which like "Who's on First?" for Abbott and Costello, became one of the famous comedy sketches of the 20th century. Dr, Kronkheit (played by Dale, not Smith as is sometimes reported) is greeted by skeptical patient Smith:

SMITH: Are you a doctor?
DALE: I'm a doctor.
SMITH: I'm dubious.
DALE: I'm glad to know you, Mr. Dubious.

Most of the sketch has Dr. Kronkheit trying to determine the patient's problem:

SMITH: It's terrible. I walk around all night.
DALE: Ah! You're a somnambulist!
SMITH: No, I'm a night watchman.

SMITH: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
DALE: Don't do that.

DALE: The whole trouble with you is, you need eyeglasses.
SMITH: Eyeglasses?! I suppose if I had a headache, I'd need an umbrella.

Dr. Kronkheit's fee is ten dollars.

SMITH: Ten dollars! For what?!?
DALE: For my advice.
SMITH: Doctor, here is two dollars, take it. That's my advice!

In 1951 the "Dr. Kronkheit" routine was filmed for posterity (in color) for the RKO Radio Pictures musical Two Tickets to Broadway.

Other film appearances

Smith and Dale made several short comedy films in the late 1920s during the talkie boom. Their comedy relied on verbal interplay and timing, however and they typically made changes to their act slowly. As a consequence, their material was quickly exhausted by the medium of the short film, and they never became big film stars.

Their act can be seen (to excellent advantage) in the feature film The Heart of New York (1932). Based on David Freedman's stage success "Mendel, Inc.," they play a pair of professional matchmakers, constantly bickering back and forth, They also ran through some of their sketches in Paramount Pictures and Vitaphone short subjects. Their "firemen" sketch, in which Joe and Charlie are lazy firemen who hardly pay attention when someone reports a fire, was filmed as The False Alarm Fire Company.

In 1938 Smith and Dale starred in a pair of two-reel comedies for Columbia Pictures, both produced and directed by comedian Charley Chase. Smith and Dale adapted surprisingly well to Columbia's fast-paced format, but they made no further films for the studio; executive producer Jules White didn't care for their dialect shtick and didn't renew their contract.

Smith and Dale also made three Soundies in 1941. In a rare exception to Soundies' all-musical policy, Smith and Dale did spoken-comedy routines.

Longevity

Smith and Dale continued working as a team in stage, radio, nightclub, film, and television productions. They were frequent guests on New York-based variety shows like Cavalcade of Stars (doing the "firemen" sketch on live television, with Art Carney as the frantic fire victim) and The Ed Sullivan Show. They were still performing in the 1960s, including an appearance at New York's Donnell Library Center.

The partnership, known among entertainers as the longest in show-business history, endured until Charlie Marks's death at age 89, on November 16, 1971. Sultzer continued to perform, mainly in guest appearances on television sitcoms, until his death on February 22, 1981, at the age of 97.

The comedy team in Neil Simon's play and film "The Sunshine Boys" is said to be inspired by Smith and Dale. Although the act and the material are similar, the backstage hostility was actually based on another team, Weber and Fields (Joe Weber (vaudevillian) and Lew Fields).

Book

Gordon Lish's Extravaganza: A Joke Book (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989) is an avant-garde novel inspired by Smith and Dale's act. Using Smith and Dale's style of dialogue delivery in a manner similar to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Lish added surreal twists to expand their routines beyond the confines of comedy, as noted in a 1989 review by Robert F. Moss:

The gags themselves are mostly gross-out humor, with dead animals, blasphemy, bodily excretions and anal preoccupations figuring prominently as subject matter.

But that's not all. A few pages into the book, the curtain goes up not only on Smith and Dale but on a trunkful of post-modern literary props as well: abrupt juxtapositions of the grotesque and the mundane, arbitrary outbursts of obscenity, non sequiturs and opaque vignettes, a fragmentary structure and a solipsistic point of view. Gradually the tone darkens, as horrors pile up, identities dissolve into one another and death approaches. The authorial voice regresses into shards of nursery rhymes, like Hal, the lobotomized computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Jokes may abound in Extravaganza, but Mr. Lish makes sure that existential despair keeps whistling through the cracks.

Gordon Lish seems to dream of creating mysterious and profound works of art and slipping into the ranks of literary celebrities. In Extravaganza, he grabs at Samuel Beckett's coattails (Smith and Dale are made to evoke Estragon and Vladimir), just as he tried to lash himself to Capote and Norman Mailer in his first book. Throughout Mr. Lish's work, however, the reader consistently encounters more mystification than mystery, more artifice than art.