Part One: Frank Fay, The Fascist Who invented Stand Up Comedy

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part One – Frank Fay, The Fascist Who Invented Stand Up Comedy

Podcast Information:

• Title: Behind the Bastards
• Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
• Episode: Part One: Frank Fay, The Fascist Who Invented Stand Up Comedy
• Release Date: August 12, 2025

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Introduction

In the premiere episode of "Behind the Bastards," hosts Robert Evans and Andrew T. delve into the life of Frank Fay, a pivotal yet controversial figure in the history of stand-up comedy. The episode explores Fay's groundbreaking contributions to the comedic arts alongside his deeply ingrained bigotry and abusive behavior, painting a complex portrait of a man who was as innovative as he was villainous.

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Early Life and Vaudeville Beginnings

Frank Fay, born Francis Anthony Donner (or Donar) on November 17, 1891, in San Francisco, emerged from a family of traveling performers. His mother, Mary, was a stage actress, and his father, William, a poet and versatile entertainer known as Chicago Billy Fay. Growing up in the vaudeville circuit, Frank began performing at a young age, participating in a variety of acts alongside his family.

Robert Evans narrates, “Frank Fay starts performing as a very little kid, maybe four years old” [00:01], highlighting his early immersion in the world of entertainment. Vaudeville, the dominant form of American entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, provided a diverse platform that shaped Fay's multifaceted performance style.

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Innovations in Stand-Up Comedy

Frank Fay is credited with pioneering the modern stand-up comedy format. Unlike his contemporaries who relied heavily on props, costumes, and supporting acts, Fay introduced a minimalist approach. He performed solo, dressed in professional attire, and focused on delivering observational humor without the crutches of physical comedy or sidekicks.

At [05:20], Evans states, “He created stand-up comedy as we recognize it today, where a guy walks up wearing normal clothing on stage and just starts telling funny stories." This approach was revolutionary, emphasizing personal narrative and sharp wit over slapstick antics.

Fay's performances became a staple at prestigious venues like The Palace in New York City, where he set records by selling out multiple-week runs and transforming the role of the emcee. According to Evans, “He pioneered the mc and made him important” [54:50], showcasing his ability to engage and manipulate the audience, thus laying the groundwork for future late-night hosts.

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Abusive Behavior and Racism

Despite his professional success, Frank Fay's personal conduct was marred by racism, sexism, and abusive behavior. Fay frequently used slurs and openly expressed his bigoted views, particularly targeting Jewish performers. This antagonistic behavior often led to violent confrontations, most notably with Milton Berle.

At [73:16], Evans recounts, “Frank Fay referred to other comedians as 'Jew bastards,' leading to multiple fistfights.” One significant incident involved Fay attacking Berle with a stage brace after verbally abusing him, an act that nearly ended Berle's career and underscored Fay's ruthless nature.

Fay's treatment of his female colleagues was equally abusive. Patsy Kelly, a member of his stock company, described Fay’s harsh treatment, including onstage insults and demanding spontaneous performances without scripts [67:12]. These behaviors highlight the toxic environment Fay cultivated within the entertainment circles he dominated.

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Conflict and Rivalries

Fay's abrasive personality fostered numerous conflicts within the comedy community. His rivalry with Milton Berle not only revealed his deep-seated prejudices but also demonstrated his willingness to physically assault peers who crossed him.

At [72:58], Evans explains, “Fay gets into fights all the time with Jewish performers because he calls them slurs.” Another notable altercation involved Fay's attempt to sabotage Bert Lahr's career, reflecting his strategy of undermining colleagues to maintain his own status.

Despite his antagonism, Fay's influence on contemporaries like Bob Hope and Milton Berle was profound. Berle, inspired by Fay’s innovative stand-up style, initially admired him but ultimately retaliated against his malicious behavior [43:16]. This complex dynamic illustrates how Fay's brilliance in comedy coexisted with his morally reprehensible actions.

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Legacy and Impact

Frank Fay's legacy is a paradox of groundbreaking contributions to comedy and his destructive personal conduct. He is acknowledged as a foundational figure in stand-up comedy, influencing legends like Bob Hope and Milton Berle. Fay's minimalist approach to comedy and his role as an emcee reshaped the landscape of American entertainment.

However, his racist and abusive behavior complicates his legacy. As Evans concludes, "Fay was both innovative and groundbreaking, and also an abusive dick," [78:08] emphasizing the duality of Fay's impact. This complexity serves as a cautionary tale about separating artistic genius from personal villainy.

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Conclusion

Part One of "Behind the Bastards" offers an in-depth look at Frank Fay, a man who fundamentally transformed stand-up comedy while embodying many of the worst traits explored in the podcast series. His story is a testament to the intertwined nature of creativity and morality, leaving listeners with a nuanced understanding of a figure who was both a pioneer and a tormentor in the world of entertainment.

Stay tuned for Part Two, where the hosts will explore Fay's tumultuous relationship with his wife, Barbara Stanwyck, and how their toxic bond influenced Hollywood history.

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Notable Quotes:

• Robert Evans at [00:01]: “...the first one to go I'm not doing video today..."
• Robert Evans at [05:20]: “...there is a guy who invented what we recognize as standup comedy... Frank Fay, and we're going to talk about him.”
• Victoria Wilson at [43:16]: “Hope saw Fay one time alone on a darkened stage... one of the funniest acts I ever saw.”
• Robert Evans at [54:50]: “...pioneered the mc and made him important.”

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References:

• The Comedians: A History of American Comedy by Cliff Nesterhoff
• Interviews and anecdotes by various comedy historians and contemporaries

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This summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from the first part of the episode, providing a comprehensive overview for listeners who have not tuned in.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call zone media oh my goodness gracious gosh golly jeepers it's behind the bastards a podcast about the worst people in all of history and today the worst people in all of history are me and sophie because even though this podcast has a video version that some of you listen to we're not going to be on video this week which will not affect the vast majority of our listeners and you're like why why are you telling it to us because some people watch this on youtube and we're going video off why because i look like shit today and i feel like shit today i was going to say you're just being sympathetic to me but yes well no no because i was the first one to go i'm not doing video today i'm not doing video today and then you joined my cause andrew t our guest are you feeling like shit today.

[Andrew T.]

I am a little sleepy cause i stayed up too late.

[Robert Evans]

Watching tv a little eepy yeah i.

[Andrew T.]

Got the eepie beepies a little you.

[Robert Evans]

Got the eepy beepies yeah i was.

[Andrew T.]

Watching slow horses are you a slow horses fan you seem like you would.

[Robert Evans]

Be i watched the first season of it and i love commissioner gordon or whatever that guy's real name is and he's lovely in it i'm kind of over spy shows i guess i used to love him i don't know i guess i need to see it's gotta be real different for me to get super but i watched the first season it was fine yeah it's not very.

[Andrew T.]

Different i will say i think what i thought was gonna happen was it's played as it's maybe gonna be more of a comedy and then a pretty straight ahead spy show after the first.

[Robert Evans]

Bit yeah i was totally it's a different kind of spy thing no they're just doing spy stuff they're just like the underdogs i guess but by the end of the season they're just like other spies it's fine it's fine yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah they get into minimum regular dogs and possibly overdog status pretty quickly as.

[Robert Evans]

A cia agent myself you know i've just had enough of that in my day job destroying the left from within as an agent for you know the central intelligence whatever whatever people on twitter are saying this week andrew you would.

[Andrew T.]

I i will say you would be i mean i guess it's like too on the nose to have you be a spy i think it would just be too like it's more like sophie.

[Robert Evans]

Obviously is in the cia sophie's definitely in the cia well yes of course obviously there's never been any doubt in my mind about that yeah why are we telling people about this because so.

[Andrew T.]

Many people are daring them to listen.

[Robert Evans]

I was a fan of the show burn notice i wasn't really but i like bruce campbell and i feel like if you get burned because your spy identity gets revealed i might get to meet bruce campbell i'm not really sure how this is gonna work but oh i'm hopeful i'll figure it out yeah yeah bruce if you're listening you wanna have a beer you know yeah seems like a cool guy i'm just saying.

[Andrew T.]

If sophie just had one job instead of destroying the left from within sure.

[Robert Evans]

As she's doing yes absolutely just easy speaking of evil people destroying something how do you feel about stand up comedy wait have we not talked about this no we haven't actually i have gone we have which is why i was like when i realized what the topic was i was very excited for this.

[Andrew T.]

I mean listen i love plenty of standup comedians yeah but i think the institution of standup comedy is so thoroughly poisoned by at best sort of reactionary like wild huh like structure interesting yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Interesting it's interesting that standup comedy you know as valuable and influential as it is and we all have a lot of standup comedy that we love and has meant stuff to us yes has this weird reactionary tinge that feels like oh it's gotta be this modern thing it couldn't be baked in it couldn't be that the literal inventor of standup comedy as a discipline was a fascist.

[Andrew T.]

Could it i listen robert if you're gonna this is not only okay actually so the little tiny peek behind the garden is i was having lunch with my friend and i told him i had to leave because i had to be behind the basterds and he was like oh like what prep do you do and i was like oh no.

[Robert Evans]

No it is always that's not the.

[Andrew T.]

Idea yeah the guest comes in and i'm just like i'm hit with it this is going to be by far not that the other episodes i've been on have not been illuminating and educational i think this might be directly useful to my life oh good well i.

[Robert Evans]

Always look for that because today did you know there was a guy who who invented standup comedy it's always one asshole like a single guy who is credited as being the guy that's always.

[Andrew T.]

A dude bro that is wild it.

[Robert Evans]

Is wild right i would have assumed.

[Andrew T.]

It would be like you know apocryphally aristotle or some shit like that you.

[Robert Evans]

Know there is there are different people and obviously things that are kind of in the dna of standup comedy have existed probably for as long as people have like things where you can be like oh you could kind of see that as being but there is a guy who invented what we recognize as standup comedy where a guy walks up wearing like normal clothing on stage and just starts telling funny stories generally based on observations about the world right yeah that is something a guy came up with and that motherfucker's name is frank fay and we're gonna talk about him.

[Andrew T.]

Today this is amazing oh my god listen i'm always thrilled to be here but this one is like i can't i've never been able to articulate why i hate standup comedy other than the vibe so this is fucking great see.

[Robert Evans]

That'S how i feel about improv but it's probably because i've had to go to so many people's improv shows improv is yeah improv is actually evil but the improv people know this this is not we're not we're not breaking new ground for them my dear friends know about my extreme loathing of improv and whenever it's brought up they look at me and they go we won't talk about it because it's that bad i love you stand up said a big i've done stand up it's had a big influence on me i loved bill hicks i still do yeah a lot of his stuff has aged well some of it hasn't stand up comedians yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Can i obviously i can name yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Oh please can i yeah yes and can i can i improv trauma dump for one second oh sure fuck yeah in my early twenties i once had a boyfriend take me to say i have a special surprise for you and i'm thinking oh what could that be i'm girly pop and then it was he took me to a improv show where we were the only people in the audience and it was oh no and it was and i hate improv and that man and like can i.

[Andrew T.]

Just say that was surprising yeah it.

[Robert Evans]

Was bad i feel like it should be legal in that instance i feel like it should be legal to kill the people on stage not to be mean not as an act of cruelty that's just mercy right yeah if you're performing improv to an audience of two at a full theater it's just kinder to die and they just kept including us in the bits of course of course they have no other idea what a nightmare what hell it was almost as bad as the relationship hey oh comedy let's do it no i was.

[Andrew T.]

Gonna say sophie i think it's reasonable especially i think if you've been single in your like let's say twenties at any point in los angeles or new york improv is improv is a weirdly big part of that yeah i think a lot more people think it's a good date than it's not it's a.

[Robert Evans]

Bad time yeah it's a bad time and dating comedians also a real mixed bag let me tell you that's just i've never done it i've been the comedian but based on the experiences of the women i've known who have dated standup comedians and me bad idea badly and you my friend all right i think that's enough for the cold open this is an iheart podcast.

[Danielle Fishel]

Ice cube's big three is the surprise hit of the summer this saturday four pm eastern on cbs with playoff elimination on the line the most physical fiercest and competitive basketball in the world miami's michael beasley and lance stevenson must win to make the playoffs and breakout star dwight howard of the la riot will battle gary payton's boston squad in a do or die match for both teams six teams are allowed for four spots and all must win there's no crying in the big three and the no holds barred action starts saturday at four pm eastern one pm pacific presented by iheart time.

[Unknown]

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[Robert Evans]

Ah come on why is this taking so long this thing is ancient still using yesterday's tech upgrade to the thinkpad x one carbon ultra light ultra powerful and built for serious productivity with intel core ultra processors blazing speed and ai powered performance that keeps up with your business not the other way around whoa this thing moves stop hitting snooze on new tech win the tech search at lenovo dot com lenovo lenovo unlock ai experiences with the thinkpad x one carbon powered by intel core ultra processors so you can work create and boost productivity all on one device.

[Unknown]

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[Robert Evans]

And we're back so we're talking about the inventor of standup comedy he also invented being an mc like he's the first actual mc this guy's crazy influential this guy's a nightmare yeah frank fay yes he's also a bigot an abusive spouse and an american fascist activist par excellence the holy trifecta he's everything you know joe rogan before joe rogan joe rogan mc comedian fascist yeah he did it all he did it all he's killed tony he's joe rogan he's everybody you know he's everybody so hey oh i'm gonna do it i'm sorry i'm gonna hey oh a lot this year yeah no that's that's great that's great born francis anthony donner or perhaps donar d o n a it's either d o n n e r or d o n a r there's both on some documents and i anyway it doesn't really matter born francis anthony donar on november seventeenth eighteen ninety one in san francisco california his parents were what you might call small time traveling performers also as a note in an episode recently someone called me out for mispronouncing nevada cause i called it nevada a as like a joke and they were like grauder doesn't even know fuck you fuck that's a bit go to hell i say nevada right fuck off anyway his mother mary was a stage actress at the start of her career his father william was a poet and also just about everything else these people are like theater kids right they're proto the er theater kids you know so much so that they like travel around doing theater with like a traveling group to make a living a bad living they're not doing well so his father was a lyric poet who prior to meeting his mom who was a stage actor his dad had been like a poet and a conductor on the southern pacific railroad he'd fought indians he'd prospected in a mine but it was as an actor and a comedian that he came to be known as chicago billy fay now again that's not i think the name he's born under i think it's a stage name that he adopts although it's a little unclear to me at any rate frank starts he and his wife get together and they start traveling around this traveling vaudeville show and we'll talk about vaudeville but basically it's a traveling variety show right and they're performing doing different kinds of bits going all around the country while their little boy is a small child and because everybody has to do something to contribute to the company that they're keeping he starts performing as a very little kid right he's maybe four years old at the time the oldest when he starts performing on stage glad child.

[Andrew T.]

Labor got worked into this so early.

[Robert Evans]

Oh yeah no they don't give a shit at this no one does cause they're working in factories this is like ethical life standards you know early late eighteen hundreds child labor his first stage role is as a potato bug in the play babes in toyland and his biographers all suggest that he changed his name from francis donner to frank faye because it read better on a marquee at some point in his childhood i don't think that's true the scant genealogical evidence i can find from wikitree suggests his father was born as william fay although his dad may have taken that name because we know that he was born as donner so it's a little unclear did his dad adopt faye as a stage name and so frank started using faye as a stage name his mom's last name was tynan i don't really know everyone seems to say he picked the name frank fay but it really does look like his dad did and he just decided to take nadia's name his dad did but i don't have stronger evidence on it than that.

[Andrew T.]

I mean i feel like tracking down carny's real names is gonna be perpetually.

[Robert Evans]

Tough yeah who cares right i always do my best with this sort of thing but these are fucking carnies who knows what their real names were nobody had birth certificate poor people didn't have birth certificates in eighteen ninety one like there's no record of these people everyone's an alias you think these fuckers got social security cards so the family sprint frank's childhood crisscrossing the nation as part of a fairly popular vaudeville act now i mentioned that earlier let's talk about what vaudeville was do you know anything about vaudeville andrew i mean i guess.

[Andrew T.]

I'M realizing now most of my knowledge of vaudeville almost certainly comes from looney.

[Robert Evans]

Tunes right looney tunes and maybe some family seth macfarlane's obsessed with it so it winds up in all of his shit too yeah yeah vaudeville was the number one form of entertainment from like the late eighteen hundreds and up to the early nineteen hundreds in the us like during kind of like the victorian era and a little after like vaudeville is the big all over the west and it had started about fifty years before frank's birth so we're talking in like the mid eighteen early like the eighteen forties eighteen fifties it started in france and it was originally kind of like a comedy act and pretty focused on comedic performances but it changes in the uk there's some like they introduce kind of more stage elements and people start adding one act plays or they'll do scenes from famous plays so you'll do a little bit of shakespeare or something just the good bit some of like mark antony's funeral oration or whatever and by the time it's migrated to the us it's everything right it's almost it's essentially kind of like a quasi circus style act right yeah and probably the closest modern equivalent to what vaudeville was when it kind of hits its height in the us in the late eighteen hundreds would be like the modern late night show or maybe to be more accurate like late night in like the era of johnny carson right at its height it's a little bit of everything it's a little bit of everything there's not like a main host most of the time like sometimes there'll be a guy and it's him and he'll come on and introduce the act but he's not like the draw in the way carson was or like colbert soon to be late show right but it is like a late night show in that you've got a bunch of different things a little bit as you said a little bit of everything so you'll have comedians coming up and doing skits right so they'll pie each other in the face or whatever you'll have actors do bits of plays sometimes you'll have one act full one act plays performed you'll have musicians come on and do songs in between acts you'll have stunts you'll have trained animals there's a little bit of like even like a morning show right that kind of there's some of that dna in there right there's like you could like fucking the view is in the line of dissent from vaudeville right you know what it also.

[Andrew T.]

Sounds like a little bit there's a little bit of like just america's got.

[Robert Evans]

Talent in there right yes absolutely yeah yeah this is the primordial ooze from wherein like almost all modern entertainment kind of comes out of is vaudeville right and yeah by the time it hits the again it's different in every country in the west but by the time it hits the us it's become it's kind of hard to tell where circus ends in vaudeville begins sometimes right and there are like circuses that are like vaudeville basically right right there's a lot of saturday night live you know or a lot of vaudeville dna in saturday night live right because often these comedy skits do kind of lean political too now there's a lot of racism baked into vaudeville in the us because one popular thing in vaudeville in the us i'm sure this happened in europe too but it's particularly us thing are minstrel shows right m i n s t r e l i've run into zoomers who don't understand who think i'm talking about menstruation very different thing that would be a really different show this is minstrel shows are white people dressing in blackface and pretending to be racist caricatures of black americans right it's just super racist that's all we need to say about it right now the best thing i can say for young frank is that i don't think he performed in any of these maybe he did right as a kid there's a decent chance he wound up doing something like just because everyone does a little bit of everything but i don't find any of that written in his backstory instead he's really drawn from a young age to dramatic acting which separates him his father is a comedic actor and frank really likes doing shakespeare you know from as soon as he can he's doing every shakespeare when they're doing these segments from shakespeare plays he estimates that by the time he was fifteen he had performed in pieces of every single one of the bard's dramatic plays besides titus andronicus which i'm guessing is because a bunch of drunk yokels in the eighteen nineties or nineteen oh five don't really want to see titus fucking andronicus yeah let's get drunk on moonshine and watch fucking titus andronicus oh man none of us can read but sure.

[Andrew T.]

Sounds foreign don't.

[Robert Evans]

Like it yeah now we know vanishingly little about his early life outside of a stage career what his parents were like i'm gonna guess he got abused at least the normal amount physically right yeah it'd be weird if he did just assuming we would know about it yeah but not enough that like he said anything about it or that it was a particular like although again he has no dedicated biographers really so it may just be that this was also a time when men didn't talk about the shit that happened to them as kids especially guys like frankie faye what we do know is that he never spends much time in school at best he has maybe a fifth grade education and i don't even know if it would really be accurate to say he had a fifth grade education like it's said that he never made it past the fifth grade they're traveling constantly he has odd classes but he's a very smart kid and he teaches himself to read and write again he has basically all of shakespeare's dramas memorized his whole life right so this is a smart kid and this is a kid probably didn't really need much in the way of formal education he's an autodidact right right he also there's not i mean there are theater schools but he doesn't benefit from that he is living in and around these actors and performers and he learns from them and from just his own he's got instincts he learns how to perform so he's basically his whole childhood is theater school right right as he gets closer to being an adult his ambition again he wants to be a serious actor he wants to be a stage actor somewhere like broadway you know performing trotting the boards but this is not to be and years later he would blame his failure to break through as a serious actor on the fact that he was a redhead quote for that reason neither the public nor the managers take me seriously when i claim i would be a great dramatic actor and i think this is actually true that just like no you're a redhead that's funny it's funny you need to be a fucking clown nobody wants to see a redhead be fucking mark antony get out of here kid accept it you're comedy yeah yeah yeah so as he grows into a young adult he kind of splits from the family it's unclear a little bit exactly when but he goes off on his own he tries to make it he's not initially successful because and he flits around different shows traveling shows stage shows just doing the only thing he knows how to do he does try his luck as a boxer which is weirdly common for comedians of this era a lot of the great first generation of comedians also had box because it's like oh my god yeah if you're performing in the same kind of places it's also where they do bare knuckle boxing right you might as well see if you're good at it robert it is.

[Andrew T.]

Crazy to learn that the fucking jiu jitsu freak stand up guys also have a historical precedent long and proud history.

[Robert Evans]

He was not good at it by his own recollection quote i was a pugilist at one time and what a ham i was so poor that i myself realized i was no good and when a boxer knows he is no good he is terrible yeah which is like yeah that's pretty true when the guys with head injuries for a living know that they can't they're not good boxers well it's like like whatever ego.

[Andrew T.]

It takes to put you in the ring is usually the thing that keeps you from leaving no no no i'm.

[Robert Evans]

Just one fight away yeah yeah if.

[Andrew T.]

You have it and you're like nah.

[Robert Evans]

Nah i i suck something else you know what else sucks andrew oh hit me not buying the products and services that support this podcast in fact if you're not buying these products and services like i don't believe in simulation theory but you're a simulation of a real person because real people buy from our sponsors is this a good idea sophie does the audience like it when i do this i don't really care at this point fuck em i love you goodbye this is an ad by betterhelp these days it feels like there's advice for everything cold plunges gratitude journals screen detoxes but how do you know what actually works for you with the internet and all the information overload about mental health and wellness out there it's not always easy to know what you ought to do to take action for your mental health and one thing you can do is therapy and if you're considering therapy you might want to look into betterhelp with over thirty thousand therapists worldwide betterhelp is the world's largest online therapy platform having served over five million people globally and and it works with an average rating of four point nine out of five for a live session based on over one point seven million client reviews it's convenient too you can join a session with a therapist at the click of a button helping you fit therapy into your busy life plus you can switch therapists anytime as the largest online therapy provider in the world betterhelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise talk it out with betterhelp our listeners get ten percent off their first month at betterhelp dot com behind that's betterhelp dot com behind time for a sofa upgrade.

[Unknown]

Visit washablesofas dot com and discover annabe where designer style meets budget friendly prices with sofas starting at six hundred ninety nine dollars annabe brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly perfect for both small and large spaces anabe is the only machine washable sofa sofa inside and out say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy liquid simply slides right off designed for custom comfort our high resilience foam lets you choose between a sink in feel or a supportive memory foam blend plus our pet friendly stain resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years don't compromise quality for price visit washablesofas dot com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a thirty day money back guarantee get up to sixty percent off plus free shipping and free returns shop now at washablesofas dot com offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply the reviews and.

[Danielle Fishel]

Ratings are in and ice cube's big three is the surprise hit of the summer this saturday four pm eastern on cbs with playoff elimination on the line the stars will be flocking to los angeles to witness the most physical fiercest and competitive basketball ball in the world miami's michael beasley and lance stevenson must win over houston to make the playoffs reeling from last week's savage beating at the hands of chicago's possessed montrez harold last time these teams met miami beat houston but they are a dangerous team having their manhood at stake then breakout star dwight howard of the la riot will battle gary payton's boston squad in a do or die match for both teams will la avenge their previous shocking loss to perennial basketball boston rivals to survive six teams are allowed for four spots and all must win don't miss the big three the three on three basketball league everyone is talking about there's no crying in the big three and the no hold spot action starts saturday at four pm eastern one pm pacific followed by two games on vice starting at six thirty eastern presented by iheart.

[Robert Evans]

Lenovo is built for creators who don't wait for inspiration they chase it with inventive tech built in ai tools and seamless performance lenovo devices powered by intel core ultra processors are designed to bring your wildest ideas to life faster that's the power of lenovo with intel inside enjoy flexible financing rewards on every purchase and free shipping and students get special offers when you create an account at lenovo dot com lenovo lenovo and we're back so he's a bad boxer but the experience does seem to have left a mark on him for the rest of his professional career even after he makes it big frank fay will carry a set of boxing gloves with him from theater to theater and put them up in his office is the wrong word his powder room or whatever to remind him of his origins right this is something that leaves an impact on him maybe just because of the head.

[Andrew T.]

Injuries i don't know the only impact.

[Robert Evans]

The eternal impact so he tries next to make and he's probably in his late teens maybe young adult maybe eighteen nineteen at this point he tries to make a name for himself as a ballad singer next and you can find i'm not gonna play you his old timey singing but he has a nice singing voice right he's known for having a nice singing voice it sounds weird to us cause he sings in a way that people really don't these days but like he was considered very good and for a time he teamed up with another balladeer but the act ran into a problem which is that people don't like ballads and they didn't wanna hear his ball so he broke up the act and the next thing he does is he gets together with an older performer named johnny dyer and dyer is a vaudeville comedian like frank's father had been the way frank would later tell it like he'd been pigeonholed because of his hair color and this is just him like bowing wearily to the inevitable because he needs money like i guess this is the thing i'm destined to do i can't do better than comedy this guy johnny wants to take me under his wing i'll try it now one of my sources for these episodes is the book the comedians which is a history of american comedy by cliff nesterhoff and it does a good job of describing what a miserable existence this act was for frank at first quote veteran comic johnny dyer goaded fay into showbiz while regularly hustling him in billiards dyer wrote an act in which fay wore baggy pants roller skates and a fake nose circling dyer as he made wisecracks the eight minute performance ended with fay's pants tearing in half it was a kind of humiliation faye vowed never to repeat and again comedy is very primitive at this point you know we haven't really invented the joke in a proper sense yet so it is.

[Andrew T.]

Shit like this that is hilarious look.

[Robert Evans]

His pants ripped open.

[Andrew T.]

I mean look i would argue there's plenty of shit that's not materially better than that that you could find on tiktok today no.

[Robert Evans]

Again the aforementioned well i'm not gonna who needs to shit on various cartoons on television you know which ones i'm ment so basically every credible source agrees that faye hated this act and fucking wants to kill himself the whole time he's doing this right he is embarrassed about performing with dyer for the rest of his life he wouldn't quite deny he'd ever worked with the guy but he clearly like this is a thing of deep shame for him and the primary lasting consequence of this period working with dyer seems to be that frank fay develops an almost pathological hatred for comedians who wear outlandish outfits or use props which is the only kind of comedy at this period of time right there are no comedians who just show up in their clothes and like tell jokes they're always wearing costumes they're always using props they're nearly always with other comedians they're usually doing skits right and part of the joke is look at him he's a man in woman's clothing you know or he's got face paint on he's dressed as a black man right like those are the jokes right like it's a whole world of carrot tops and gallaghers basically oh my god except for they don't even have the courage to be carrot top or gallagher alone they've always got to have other guys on right it's just you know it's primitive we haven't invented being funny.

[Andrew T.]

I have to say the thing that is bumming me out is i do very much sympathize with the guy in comedy who fucking hates comedy of course.

[Robert Evans]

Of course i mean like look you can't be a good comedian unless you hate yourself we all know this yes right we all know this and everyone else a little and everyone else around you bill burr being the one exception being the only standup comedian to be emotionally healthy i think just because he's the only stand up comedian to be happily married it happened once and stay a standup comedian right yes victoria wilson who is his wife who we'll talk about later's biographer not his but who is the closest he has to a real biographer because she's a good biographer and he's a big part of her life she writes that he had already developed an obsession by kind of the point that he's working with dyer near the end of that time with what he considers considered smart comedy right which is what he wants to be doing and one of his idols is a guy named wilson misner misner was a playwright and a general performer who was also a severe opium addict and an adventurer as well as like an entertainer and he's not really he's not performing in front of like normal audiences but he gets invited to the lambs club which is this like social club and restaurant in new york and he's like yeah he writes plays and other stuff and sometimes he'll deliver monologues at the lambs club that are like kind of funny right and again this isn't a standard performance he's not like selling tickets he's just like coming up because he's a guy who's known for other things and he'll give some like little monologues and they're kind of funny and faye really likes it right and faye really thinks that he's smart and really together and there's some other guys doing kind of similar things where it's not quite similar stand up cause the purpose isn't they're there for like an event and they're just kind of like showing up to open this like benefit or whatever they're not really like a normal performance but he sees he gets from this the idea that like this is actually kind of a good idea just a guy coming up and like talking to the audience and being funny right right yeah now these are not that's weird.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah they're kind of just like little.

[Robert Evans]

Speeches yeah exactly and they're not written they're spontaneous and acts of wit right they're just by guys who happen to be funny and faye admires these men terribly he's said of his idols and he's talking about mizner and a couple of other guys none of whom there's a lot about online quote they never went after anyone but if you got in their way or tried to outsmart them lord help you you were dead right because they're kind of talking with the audience and stuff and that's really noteworthy because one of the things about faye is from an early point in his career he doesn't just see comedy as a way to earn a living or a thing that's meant to make people laugh comedy is always also for him a tool to attack and damage people he doesn't like right that's a big part of what draws him to comedy and the greatest thing he admires about mizner and some of these other guys that he's kind of taking on his idols is the way they can cut an enemy down to size and do it with ease right the way that they can tear into somebody and hurt them he really is drawn to that which gives you an idea of the kind of bastard this guy yeah exactly he doesn't care about punching up or down likes to punch yeah yeah.

[Andrew T.]

I mean that kind of guy always likes punching down right right god so.

[Robert Evans]

For two years he struggles to get by as you know with with dyer as the kind of comedian that he's come to hate right where he's wearing these pants that rip he's like fucking roller skating around it's making him want to he's miserable he sees his colleagues who are other types of comedians clinging to these props which he sees as like totems that that symbolize a lack of confidence in their own comedic skills right if you need to dress up if you need another actor on stage like if you need these these are crutches right so he doesn't immediately start taking to the stage what he starts doing is backstage in between acts he starts just talking shit to the people around him about the bad acts on stage right and speaking his mind about them and he's funny and like his his like colleagues backstage are like laughing as he's shit talking other performers and he comes to like fuck maybe this could work maybe i'm just funny and i could just get up and be funny in front of an audience right so he's taken from these experiences and from these early idols of his this very simple idea that a comedy performance doesn't have to have pies in the face or any of this physical comedy shit it could be you could just have a man get on stage wearing normal clothing and talking about how he feels to an audience right cause even.

[Andrew T.]

Like the court jester had like a.

[Robert Evans]

Dumb hat they just got a dumb hat and again there's still even court jesters usually had other people or like you know there's other shit they're doing there's props it seems like an obvious idea that just like a guy would get up it'd be funny but this is kind of revolutionary and it's a big risk right people don't even think about this as the idea that you would get up alone without just naked basically to try to make an audience entertained is wild to people in an article for wfmu's beware of the blog comedy historian cliff nesteroff summarizes just how wild the idea of a stage comedian without props was at the time even those without gimmicks rarely appeared on stage alone comedians had their punchlines set up by another person a straight man to be a comedian meant you performed without the help of a costume or an instrument or another guy a comedian without a prop can't click said actor wesley ruggles i learned that back in the days when i pushed props around for charlie chaplin great pantomimist that he is chaplin realizes the necessity of props so again even like charlie chaplin best in the business right he's fucking charlie chaplin people still know who he is today got to be played by robert downey junior has to have props and other people he can't keep an audience on his own right and so it's ballsy what faye's about to do sure and around nineteen fifteen or sixteen we don't know exactly he makes his first performances where he is just coming on stage wearing a professional tailored tuxedo which to us is not normal clothing but is pretty normal formal wear for the time right for like a nightclub where he's the kind of place he's performing it's what like the people in the audience are wearing right so he's dressed more or less the way a man would be dressed and he shows up on stage he's got no straight man he's got no props and he's just performing alone he's talking and he starts performing under a stage name the nut monologist right which means like he's the crazy he's delivering nutty monologues right he's talking about the crazy aspects of modern society in other words it's standup right yeah now the term doesn't exist yet and it doesn't get coined for him we don't really know exactly why we call it standup comedy there's one plausible theory the most plausible theory probably comes from and this is a guy i think cliff nesteroff interviewed a dude who's very old when cliff talked to him who had been a minor comedian he comes a little bit after frankie faye so he's a guy like around the twenties he's performing right is when this guy starts and this guy says the term stand up comedy came from mob lingo right because the first big venues the nightclubs and the casinos especially since like what becomes standup is being invented during prohibition largely they're all owned by the mob right so everyone who is an entertainer is to some extent working for organized crime you know even if they're not involved in other aspects of it and within the mob the term stand up guy means something it means you're a man who can be counted on right if you're a standup guy we can count on you to keep a secret to go to prison for us to do whatever to whack somebody that's a standup guy right and a standup comedian is a comedian you can trust to deliver their act in the allotted time and to not go over even by a minute right because most of these acts are at casinos there's gambling and the act is there cause people it'll keep people there longer but if you go over for every second you go over time people aren't back at the tables gambling right so a standup comedian means i can trust this guy to hit his time right he's gonna do no more and no less than what we want right so that's the likeliest term i've heard for a standup comedian obviously it could just be because they're usually standing there but they're standing up but so is every performer so is every performer i think that sounds really credible right well there's no way to know for sure but it makes sense to me if that's the case the term bring this up now but the term stand up comedian i think nineteen forty six forty seven is really the first time people start using it so it doesn't people aren't calling it yet right i'm getting ahead of myself because again frank is the only guy doing this at this point and he's going under the stage name the nut monologist right and he's talking he's lampooning daily life and pop culture in a way that we'd see as very modern and he's not really writing bits right he's kind of performing a new thing every time he goes up he's really good on on the fly he's just sort of like living his life and making notes about shit during the day and then coming up on stage and like joking about them and he would tell people that in his opinion the only thing you needed to do to make this is what he says about how to make good comedy quote all anyone has to do is stand in the subway station and watch people right he's inventing observational comedy as a discipline oh man again people have like made jokes about daily life forever as long as there have been people in daily life right but he is inventing it as like a discipline right where he's like being no all you gotta do is go out in the world watch people find out what's funny find a funny way to talk about it and then go talk about it right it doesn't have to be some sort of like you know big elaborate bit with a pie right right right it doesn't.

[Andrew T.]

Have to be a tortured setup that's.

[Robert Evans]

So and in fact it's people find regular life funny you know like right yeah it's also nice to learn that.

[Andrew T.]

All you know not that i guess this wasn't clear and obviously crowd work in that business has not always been part of this type of act but yeah that's it or just speaking extemporaneously and even if you're not necessarily the funniest you're funnier than everyone else in.

[Robert Evans]

The room yeah that's all it takes that's it so victoria wilson writes on stage faye talked about things people did that were recognizable he would talk about his uncle the string saver who was working his way up to rope or his aunt agatha a paper bag putter awayer everyone knows string savers and paper bag putters away faye would remark that's why those people are funny to the rest of us talk about those people and everyone laughs take the mustache fixer you've seen him twist his mustache for half an hour or so at the end of that time and it looks worse than ever but because you have seen the mustache fixtures you laugh when i talk about it that's all there is to being funny you know oh my god like he's literally like yeah yeah like this is there's a direct line between that and like you know black people walk like this white people walk like this this kind of like you know observational comedy right you know like that's what we're seeing here so yeah cool stuff truly yeah i mean.

[Andrew T.]

And it does make sense i don't you know what i think i'm realizing i'm picturing is fucking probably like a sketch from like history of the world part one where it's just like a roman doing this right yeah someone had.

[Robert Evans]

To invent this of course someone had to invent that and again you know there's pieces of this for fore but he's inventing it as a profession yeah and this is going to i mean there's not really any debate among comedy historians or the first generation of comedians that comes after him that frank fay is the guy who started this right every major standup comedian from what most people know of like the first generation of stand up comedians credits him milton berle says that seeing frank fay made him immediately put away his props and completely change his performance after seeing faye for the first time right burl is like i became a stand up comedian because of seeing frank fay right like he was the guy and everyone has at least heard of milton berle right he's famous for both being one of the first standup comedians writing a bunch of joke books and having a comedically huge dick as opposed to being one.

[Andrew T.]

Like frank ferrer i don't think i.

[Robert Evans]

Knew that oh yeah hung like fucking god like crazy dick crazy dick hung like willem dafoe confoundingly large now another one of frank fay's biggest fans and a guy who will say frank fay as soon as i saw him i knew that's what i wanted to be he completely inspired how i did comedy was bob hope right if you know anything about comedy you know what a big deal that is right right if you're gen z maybe you haven't heard of this guy bob hope was the most famous comedian on earth for like fucking half a century right he lived to be one hundred and he spent eighty years as a stage perform like he is crazy big as a comedian he was also a boxer at one point although weirdly enough i didn't know this about bob hope unlike frank fay he was pretty good he had a professional record of five wins and one loss so kind of surprising bob hope good boxer i mean i guess it's.

[Andrew T.]

Just a certain type of man that.

[Robert Evans]

Loves both these things sure getting in the ring and proving yourself yeah now over the course of his remarkable career bob hope hosted the oscars nineteen times which is more than anyone else ever did or probably ever will he also did more than fifty tours for the uso which is the organization that has performances for us military personnel around the world he starts in world war two and he continues up to desert storm in short he's one of the most influential and well known performers in history he has a massive impact on standup comedy and how it becomes a profession and the fact that he is like frank fay was my model and not only that he's like frank fay was the best stand up comedian i ever knew you know like that's how bob hope described him decades later he called faye the most economical comedian he ever watched he said that he had quote complete audience control so again bob hope eighty years of experience in this is like the best i ever saw on stage was frank fay that is genuinely.

[Andrew T.]

So wild yeah yeah like that's a.

[Robert Evans]

Big if you know anything about comedy that's a really big deal yeah yeah and i'm not idolizing i don't think bob hope was a great person but like he's undeniably a massive figure in comedy yeah yeah here's how victoria wilson describes hope's recollections of a particularly impactful set by faye quote hope saw faye one time alone on quote a darkened stage with the spotlight on him for the longest time faye just stood there he said absolutely nothing and he did absolutely nothing then he said i think i'll go play the piano he walked slowly across the stage to the other side as he got there the spot which had followed him showed a piano with a stool and othello sitting on it frank just looked at it and then just as slowly walked back to exactly where he had been standing there's somebody there that was the whole thing said hope but it was one of the funniest acts i ever saw and you have to just like imagine like yeah it's all presence right it's performance it's timing you know it's the way he does it we've all know comedy like that where it's like if you describe the bit you don't get it you see it it's amazing right yeah so there's an extent like there's not videos of his early standup performances obviously you have to trust that all of the guys who were the funniest people of their milton berle and bob are all like yeah frank fay was fucking amazing so i assume he really was i have no reason to doubt this almost everyone agrees that his greatest strength was that he has this unique understanding of how to use his hands and obviously if you're a performer what do i do with my hands is like the quintessential question stage performers have to ask right like what the fuck do i do with my hands here right there's this inherent awkwardness there which is a big part of why props and costumes had been such crutches for comedic actors you gotta have something to do with your hands right sure right right right of course right like even fuck it like robin williams and his water bottles right you can see it like people need something you know frank never did george burns who was another great famous comedian in his own right declared to johnny carson that quote frank fay had the best hands in show business another colleague later recalled he could give you an inferiority complex just watching him light his cigarette right cause just he's just effortlessly funny and it's again this kind of thing i can't describe you just have to trust that these people are not they have no reason to lie about this right he must have been now he's also a dynamic performer and it doesn't hurt that he's considered handsome trav sd author of the travelanch blog and a modern vaudeville performer and historian describes him as looking like ralph fiennes you can judge that one for yourself so if you can pull up a picture of him rafe oh come on fuck it i like ralph i don't know he's handsome get his name correct fines i'm mixed about him cause he's got good stances on gaza but he's a transphobe he's like a real mixed bag i didn't know that that hurts so half fuck you i like his performance he was good in that conclave movie he's good in everything he's never been bad at anything he's an amazing actor but ew yeah well whatever you know how many i take him back you can call him ralph how many great actors don't have something about him that's like right like i just rewatched tropic thunder with some friends tom cruise kills in that he's also tom cruise what are you gonna do yeah yeah the final stage to frank's stage presence is his walk frank fay developed a trademark gait described by travesty as quote distinct swishy and almost effeminate right he has a lot of like ladylike gestures particularly the way he walks which are we might say today he's kind of like acting as if he like a stereotypical like the way like gay people were portrayed in like a lot of eighties nineties like that's how we might describe it today they describe it as effeminate then if you've ever seen bob hope walk on stage that weird walk he had when he's got his golf club on bob hope is doing and admits that his entire walk is based on frank fay so if you've ever seen a bob hope performance that's what he's doing he's doing a frank fay but i guess that's also theater.

[Andrew T.]

Right cause it's like hippie because you're like you know you need to be seen and the movements are yeah that's.

[Robert Evans]

So weird but that's also we see it now as like well that's a theater thing no one else is doing this he starts this and everyone copies him right like this particular kind of affectation is so common and so copied by the people who come after him that they get their own nickname wristwatch comedians because he would often do this kind of wristwatch with his hands or looking at his fingers that way checking his nails milton berle explained he always worked a little effeminate he had a hauteur about him but he talked to his audience in a way that made them feel like what he was talking about could happen to them he never did jokes in which he was the butt right which is also interesting to me he does not have a sense of humor about himself right sure oh.

[Andrew T.]

Weird weird how that thread has just.

[Robert Evans]

Carried through yeah yeah right that's always the biggest i would say like the biggest fucking red flag of any kind of comedian is like can they laugh at themselves yeah you know like i can you know theoretically obviously there's nothing funny about me i'm a very serious you know journalist who does only serious journalism i don't just write about random assholes on the internet using other people's work that would be fucked up heyo heyo so faye was this is a huge hit he starts around like nineteen i think maybe nineteen fifteen or sixteen it's a little unclear to me when he starts doing the nut monologues act but by nineteen eighteen he's a major star right so in a very short period of time he went from no one is doing this to this is the biggest thing in vaudeville right is this specific motherfucker he's got immediately people trying to copy him right but nobody's as good as frank fay now during this period of time when vaudeville still rules entertainment we're talking nineteen eighteen the absolute peak of success for a performer in the vaudeville world is getting to play the palace which is a legendary venue in new york city i think it still exists i don't know if it's under the same name but the palace is like the that's the that's that's headlining saturday night live in this area right or madison square garden which i also think exists but like the same thing if you're a comedian today you can sell at madison square garden that's the top of stand up comedy basically i don't think there's really anything bigger than doing that right now the palace is that in this era frank gets booked there for the first time in nineteen nineteen and he sells out multiple days worth of shows a huge act at the time might expect to run for a week at the palace doing two shows a day this is by the way an exhausting pace right you talk any modern stand up community doing two shows a day like you're fucking draining yourself so if you can do a week and sell out a week worth of two a days at the palace you're a major success in nineteen twenty five feij sells out ten straight weeks in a row eventually his longest spree is going to be sixteen straight weeks no one will ever equal or exceed this right like this is the best anyone ever does at this now when he's not performing at the palace he starts in nineteen nineteen doing sets and when he's at the palace he's part of a larger show but he's the centerpiece of it right him doing these ten or fifteen minute sets is like and he's coming on for other stuff too that's the reason people are there and he starts after he's selling out the palace doing a long set for a comedian would be like ten or fifteen minutes he starts doing these sets that are more than twenty minutes at a time a half hour right we're closing in on what we now consider to be like a normal full not like a tight five but like a full kind of like you know netflix special right like an hour we're not there we're not in an hour yet but like at that period of time doing a twenty or thirty minute set is like wild people just aren't doing that on their own you're alone on stage for that much time right so again at first he's kind of he's headlining he's the big guy but there's multiple things going on but he starts experimenting pretty early on with something new as cliff nesteroff writes it was at that venue frank fay not only became a bona fide celebrity but also pioneered the idea of an emcee for several years vaudeville used only painted placards with the name of each act to announce who was coming to stage fay changed this common practice becoming one of the first people to actually emcee a show his role as an introducer and extroducer was another revolutionary shift in stand up he wasn't just introducing but entertaining as he did show if the previous act bombed he warmed the crowd back up and if the momentum was good he just kept the show going abel green editor of the trade paper variety said faye pioneered the mc and made him important and this people had done this before he's not the first mc but he's the first really good one because he's like he's not just i'm not just there to say and now coming up i am there to notice the audience didn't like that one or like i need to get this guy off early or i need to start telling some jokes that were not planned because that went so badly or i can tell this next guy's kind of nervous i want to build him up a little bit i need to get the crowd moving so that they'll be happy no one had really done that before and he is the guy who kind of he creates being an emcee really in the modern sense he's now invented stand up in very short order stand up comedy and being an emcee those are the two things frank fay gets credited for making huh i.

[Andrew T.]

Guess i mean it makes sense i guess i would have assumed there was like again i'm realizing all my knowledge of showbiz pre i don't know fucking ninety four is basically i guess i would have assumed there was like a ringleader like in a circus type deal.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah and there had been ringleaders in circuses in the uk there had been performances that had guys kind of trying to do this yeah but frank a big thing is like previously it had been maybe the most you do is you'd have a guy come up to introduce everybody and he'd have like a set at the beginning at the end again the fact that you that he's doing interstitle bits and that he's kind of paying attention to how is the audience doing what do i need to change do i need to bring back do i need to pull this guy back from the brink and by doing this he's making himself in a way that even circus ringleaders won't he's the center of the show and so he's also created kind of being like a late night host right this is the proto johnny carson too right this is.

[Andrew T.]

His show and this is his you know he's putting it on with these.

[Robert Evans]

Folks right even though he's not on stage all the time for every act he's there in between acts right and that is like it's really interesting that he created both of those things right yeah so at this point by the mid twenties faye is arguably the biggest performer in new york he's definitely the biggest performer in new york city and he's probably one of the three or four biggest stars of any kind in the country right at least top ten he's up there he's massive cause he first off movies not nearly as big a thing as they're going to become very soon they're starting movies are not nothing right obviously the twenties is when film is really getting its legs under it but this is a period of time in which you are a big if you're a big live performer you could be bigger than the biggest movie stars and he's up there with the biggest movie stars at least right and he's touring basically fifty two weeks a year right he's doing a lot of performing in new york but he's traveling all around and everywhere he goes he sells out show he is at least equivalent to a guy like charlie chaplin right like very much so you know we don't remember him now as well but at this point in time it would be fair to say he's about at that level and success goes to his head immediately right this guy becomes famous and successful as a comedian and he becomes a crooked evil monster right away obviously you know yeah i mean.

[Andrew T.]

I guess they were always kind of you know the capacity for crooked evil monster i mean i guess that's the open question is it in us all or is it just in these dickheads.

[Robert Evans]

That gets expressed yeah is it just bad you know it's just if your job is to be worshiped by a crowd of people yeah easy to wind up say more robert kind of narcissistic yeah like obviously i've never made a mistake ever i'm incapable you're perfect angel baby i can't actually be everyone knows that yes and you know who else can't be wrong wow so good at your job this podcast sponsored by little miss little miss can't be wrong that's a song right i don't remember which song that is anyway we're done is that spin doctors is that the spin doctors who knows who cares use ads.

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[Robert Evans]

We'Re back i remain having never made a mistake in my entire life all my pronunciations are right i've never fucked up a fact or anything like that obviously just like frank fay because this is behind the heroes a podcast about men who never do bad things so frank fay is hugely successful now and once he's a star his first instinct is to use his newfound position of power and influence to mock deride and belittle his less powerful colleagues because it's fun to him and he likes being cruel one of his peers is bert lahr who you probably don't know by name unless you're a real film nerd he is at this point a comedic actor he will become a movie star and he is best known today because he's the cowardly lion in the wizard of oz movie right so like pretty successful guy right you know like people still watch that fucker today you know and he's pretty popular and well liked as a live performer at the time but he's the kind of comedian who wears silly costumes as part of his act and so faye fucking hates him both men often performed in the same shows and when passing lar and the wings faye developed a habit of asking well well well what's the low comic up to today and he did this he would do this right as lar was going upstage and his goal is to make him upset and sabotage his act right he loves he doesn't just i mentioned how he'll like try to set people up for success or like bring people back he also will try to fuck people over if he doesn't like them right.

[Andrew T.]

He knows how to work performers confidences.

[Robert Evans]

Right and some of it is like he knows that if he f if he makes someone perform badly then he can come in and save it and look better right right he's a big fan of undermining his fellow performers and one thing he likes about him seeing is that it provides him with subtle opportunities to insult people he doesn't like and destroy their careers when they're trying to get them off the ground victoria wilson explains quote he would simply introduce the act by saying with a slight smile and a soft voice the next gentleman is very very popular they say that he's very funny then he would raise an eyebrow the act didn't have a chance with the audience right he's just so good at this that he can just destroy your career with like raising an eyebrow like i mean yeah and he just does this for fun if he gets bad vibes from somebody he'll just ruin them as a bit to laugh at their failure faye develops a reputation as a man who likes watching people suffer and when he destroys someone's career on stage he'll do it with a smile on his face i probably don't need to say this but he is particularly abusive to his female colleagues obviously a man in stand up comedy being abusive to women wow he's another pioneer louis ck has got this guy's photo and a locket over his heart one performance he put together during his vaudeville period which may have been the first he may have also this performance he does may be the first stooge act ever involved him telling the audience that he needed volunteers to do a card trick and then he'd bring up a trio of his performers who were hidden amongst the audience including volunteers and one of those performers was a woman who worked for him named patsy kelly so he's having them up come up to do card tricks to them right and these ringers that he brings up they're all dressed like shit they look like they haven't showered they're in bad clothes they're meant to look like yokels right so that faye can make fun of them as he's like walking them through these card tricks right and he is especially cruel to kelly one of the things he would do when she would come upstage he'd ask her good hepatitis where have you been and he'd have her respond the beauty parlor so he could say i can see they didn't wait on you just to shit on her appearance after making her dress up badly he's making her do these lines he really likes insulting her appearance on stage kelly and her two colleagues made up faye's stock company they were the pinch hitters that he could bring on for any sketch or bit that he needed someone else for and she recalls his tutelage as being valuable like she learns a lot from him while also admitting that he could be cruel as wilson recounts he didn't want her to wear makeup he would yell at her on stage he fired her weakly faye never had a script and would just spring lines on me she said he might start talking about anything from pairs to presidents it always seemed to me that i was standing on the stage with my hand out waiting for my cue to drop i lid with my chin because my knees were helpless so like you don't know what to expect with him but he's always just going to be mean and insult your appearance if you're like he just he really gets off on the cruel he loves to punch down now i.

[Andrew T.]

Mean it is also i mean this is basically an improv troupe also right.

[Robert Evans]

Right oh god so faye helps to pioneer being a huge asshole celebrity too during one performance at the orpheum in brooklyn shortly after his career gets big he does like he's like four minutes late to the show because he's fixing his tie in the green room and he can't get it right and so the stage manager runs back and is like the audience is like really pissed off like what the fuck when are you going to get on you have to hit your mark right and he's like the audience is getting frustrated and faye snaps back let them wait and this does not go over well the booking office cancels the rest of his scheduled performances and fines him one hundred dollars but fey doesn't give a shit he is in demand everywhere and he has completely lost his mind as a result of that and the sheer amount of money flying at him from all sides at the height of his days doing the palace he's taking home eighteen thousand dollars a week in the twenties.

[Andrew T.]

Oh my god right like that's a.

[Robert Evans]

Crazy amount of money yeah that's like three hundred grand a week when he's performing at the palace so he starts to become a narcissist before each if he hadn't been one previously he gets more before each performance it gets to.

[Andrew T.]

Come out freely right like there's nothing.

[Robert Evans]

Holding it back anymore before each performance he would look into the mirror in his dressing room and ask loudly who do i love before answering me he's just the most that guy he could possibly be i mean you guys didn't.

[Andrew T.]

Hear robert's pre show warmup but you.

[Robert Evans]

Know who do i hate me oh buddy so he quickly drops the name he'd started his act under the nut monologist and starts demanding people call him one of several nicknames and all of these are nicknames he's given himself nobody gives themself cool nicknames and his nicknames are the great fazee the king of vaudeville or just the king the great fae and broadway's favorite son and he makes people call him that and introduce him that way there's only one king and his name is lebron james you're right you're right lebron james who sung some of my favorite rock and roll songs obviously suspicious minds just a great musician lebron james not as good at dunking as elvis presley but you know a fine fine performer it's good we're not filming right now now the thing about like it's obvious to everyone that he has a massive ego and that these are names he's given himself but audiences love it because his ego works with the character he's performing his character is this sarcastic mocking figure who's smarter than everyone and above it all right so it does kind of fit with who he's performing as it's just that the people don't necessarily realize that's also the real frank and the real frank is not just a narcissist and not just a bully but racist as fuck particularly i assume he was racist against black people but we don't really get a lot about i don't really get much of that in the history he hates jewish people he is the anti semites anti semite right milton berle obviously i just said is a great foundational american comic he's up there with bob hope in terms of guys who influenced the development of the vocation and he is an obsessive fan of frank fay patterns his whole early career in frank's image and frank gets really angry about this because milton berle is jewish now the other thing is that frank is really scared about having his act plagiarized right and this is a common fear in the business then and today and as a result because comedians don't want to get plagiarized it's considered bad bad form to watch a colleague from the wings before going on yourself right people do this all the time but it's considered bad form by some performers and faye is one of them and so one night while performing faye catches burl watching and so he calls to a stagehand and tells him get that little jew bastard out of the wings sir so this happens a couple of times you know they're on at the same shows and fay gets angrier and angrier at burl and eventually faye shouts directly at berle using the k slur for jewish people really goes to very racist to milton berle right basically stop stealing from me you slur yeah now burl again admires faye tremendously he's patterned his career off of this man but he's not going to take this racism lying down milton berle later related after faye calls him a slave i waited until he had finished for the night i was ready for him as he cut around behind some flats on his way to the dressing room i had picked up a stage brace they're made of wooden metal and they're used to hold the scenery together and as he went by me i reached out and spun him around before he knew what was happening i hit him right across his face with the brace it ripped his nose apart he has to go to the hospital milton berle hits him with a board with metal on it in the face also could have killed him.

[Andrew T.]

It'S kind of amazing to be like like i'm doing this because i am on some level still such a big.

[Robert Evans]

Fan yeah i'm a huge fan but i am going to beat you in the face with a board yeah this.

[Andrew T.]

Is like divorcing the artist from the art harder than anyone's ever done and.

[Robert Evans]

Honestly makes me like milton berle a lot more i didn't have an opinion on him before this but that's pretty cool now faye is not just a bit he is the kind of bigot who feels no compunction against dropping slurs in public he loves dropping slurs in public at social events i do feel.

[Andrew T.]

Like it's probably worth like being like it's also like what what like when would this be like the twenties the.

[Robert Evans]

Thirties yeah we're in the like the mid twenties so he's not like super unique no no no no no no.

[Andrew T.]

If anything even the stuff that you've quoted probably soft all things considered don't.

[Robert Evans]

Say that let's wait let's hold on calling it soft for the period right sure sure sure comedian milt joseph berg who you might guess is a jewish man one of frank's contemporaries later claimed quote faye referred to other comedians as jew bastards and this regularly like so this is like a common thing to him he says this socially at like parties and stuff yeah this regularly leads to fist fights in fact one of the things faye is most known for is getting into fights all the time with jewish performers because he calls them slurs right now let's be fair to faye he gets into fist fights with a lot of people it's not just jewish performers he loves punching people and you know what to be even more.

[Andrew T.]

Fair we already know even he knows.

[Robert Evans]

He'S not a good boxer even he knows he's not a good good boxer now faye is also a chain smoker he lights up regularly throughout his act he's like a proto dennis leary in that or dennis lear stealing from fucking bill hicks but he's one of these guys right so once he gets rich and famous he buys a gold cigarette case which he would bring on stage so everyone could see it when he lights up and during one performance when he's backstage there's a no smoking sign because of the fire codes because it's a dangerous building to have anything light in and they don't want to kill everyone in the venue because it's the fucking twenties and it's such a threat that the venue had hired a firefighter to make sure people followed the rules and the firefighter sees frank light up and the firefighter's like hey man and calls him the f slur right you know just cause it's the twenties and frank punches him in the face like this firefighter but my favorite punch related frank fay story happens on stage during a performance and this is such a good story to end this episode one of frank's very few friends was burt wheeler and wheeler was one half of a popular comedic duo called wheeler and woolsey now burt admired faye and described him as having the fastest mind in the business but he also knew that his friend had a cruel side and that whenever fay brought a performer on stage with him it was to mock them and so wheeler doesn't want to be on stage with his friend necessarily because he knows he's going to get insulted really badly so one night wheeler gets the feeling that faye is going to bring him on stage to like do this and is like he begs his friend he's like hey man don't bring me up after i finish my act i just i really don't need this today right like i just i don't want to be laughed at in the way that i'm gonna be laughed at if you bring me on stage victoria wilson describes what happens next faye honored wheeler's plea until one important performance a matinee when the talent bookers were in the audience with stopwatches in hand to time the laughs wheeler finished his act to great applause and left the stage faye came on as he had throughout the show and called wheeler back on stage for whatever reason faye began to talk to the audience at wheeler's expense fay was calm controlled he spoke in a soft easy slow delivery with his deadpan stare wheeler stood on the stage unable to think of anything that he could say to equal or top faye's sarcasm finally wheeler said frank you're a very funny man but i predict i'm going to get the biggest laugh ever heard at the palace faye said oh really bert how are you going to do that wheeler pulled back and hit faye in the face the audience laughed thinking this was part of the answer act that's a pretty good joke.

[Andrew T.]

Listen especially given who the standups are these days i would love to see.

[Robert Evans]

More of this there's a lot of standup comedians i want to get to see hit on the face in the face on stage right yeah so i think at this point we've established that this guy is both innovative and groundbreaking and also an abusive dick and a racist but frank fay is about to be so much more in part two we're going to talk about his marriage to his wife a woman you may know barbara stanwyck and these two are going to embark on a relationship so abusive and poisonous that it would become a piece of hollywood history this is like the archetypal toxic abusive hollywood relationship frank fay and barbara stanwyck the movie a star is born is based off of their abusive relationship right so that's gonna be cool can't wait can't wait.

[Andrew T.]

Can'T wait can't wait what a table.

[Robert Evans]

Set how you feeling andrew t i.

[Andrew T.]

Feel i am as it happens on behind the basterds i am finding myself at least in part one more sympathetic in general than i thought i was gonna be right and typically that is i guess how biographies work no one starts out as an evil child so.

[Robert Evans]

I get it well and it's like he's a racist and he's abusive so far but this is not behind the bastards level stuff quite yet right like this is like this honestly feels this is just kind of an asshole right like i wouldn't just do an episode on a guy who's a dick he.

[Andrew T.]

Doesn'T even seem that transgressive for like the fucking twenties he's not he wouldn't.

[Robert Evans]

Be canceled today yeah right like right like today he would be a popular right wing comedian who we would be annoyed by but i would not do an episode on yes we're getting to the stuff that's like behind the bastards worthy right i can't wait but before we get to that why don't we get to your plugables oh i don't.

[Andrew T.]

Know still doing yo is this racist we have a premium show called yo can we live i don't know that's it i'm around hey o andrew t.

[Robert Evans]

On places hey o all right everybody this has been behind the bastards i've been robert evans come back in part two where we are going to hear some real fucked up shit about a guy who you sucked behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iheartradio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts behind the bastards is now available on youtube new episodes every wednesday and friday subscribe to our channel youtube dot com slash at behindthebastards.

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