Abbott and Costello: How "Who's on First?" Works

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were the most successful comedy team of their era. Abbott, born in 1895, was the straight man: tall, slim, fast-talking and impatient. Costello, born in 1906, was the comic: short, childlike and endlessly confused. They teamed up formally in 1936 and went on to radio, dozens of films and television.

The straight man and comic structure is one of the oldest in comedy, and they perfected it. The straight man represents logic and patience. The comic represents the audience's confusion, pushed to the extreme. The comedy lives in the friction between the two.

"Who's on First?" did not appear out of nowhere. Comedians in vaudeville and burlesque had used wordplay routines built on confusing names for years, and a version based on baseball was already circulating before Abbott and Costello polished it. They refined it on stage in the late 1930s and performed it nationally on radio in 1938.

The best-known filmed version appears in their 1945 movie The Naughty Nineties. In 1999, TIME magazine named it the best comedy sketch of the twentieth century, and a 1938 radio recording was later added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.

The premise is simple. Abbott is explaining the lineup of a baseball team whose players have unusual nicknames. The first baseman is named Who, the second baseman is named What, and the third baseman is named I Don't Know. Every time Costello asks a question, the answer sounds like either a question or a refusal to answer.

What makes the routine brilliant is that both men are right. Abbott is giving perfectly accurate answers. Costello is asking perfectly reasonable questions. Neither can see the problem, and neither can escape it. The audience can see both sides at once, which is the source of the pleasure: you understand the misunderstanding better than the people inside it.

The routine works because it builds. It starts with mild confusion, moves into frustration, and climbs to full exasperation, with the rhythm getting faster as Costello gets angrier. The repetition is the point. Each time the same names come back, the audience laughs harder, because they know exactly how the next exchange will go wrong.

This is the callback and the rule of three working at full power. Once the pattern is set, every return to it is funnier than the last. Costello's growing anger gives the routine its arc, and his final line ties the whole thing up neatly.

You will often read that Abbott and Costello were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. They were not. In 1956, a gold record of the routine was presented to the Hall of Fame, and newspapers at the time wrongly reported that the pair had been made members. The record is displayed in Cooperstown, and a film clip of the routine is one of the museum's most popular attractions.

The real story is honor enough. A comedy routine earning a permanent place in a sports museum shows how deeply it entered American culture. Generations of fans who never saw the original films still know the names Who, What and I Don't Know.

Misunderstanding comedy works best when both sides are sincere. If one character is clearly being difficult on purpose, the joke becomes a contest. If both believe they are making sense, the audience gets to enjoy the gap. The waiter and knock-knock jokes on this site use a small version of the same idea: a word or phrase that means one thing to one person and something else to another.

If you want to try it, start with a word or name that sounds like something else, give one character the literal meaning and the other the expected one, and let them talk past each other. Keep both characters reasonable, and build the frustration slowly. That is the whole formula, and almost nobody has ever done it better than Abbott and Costello.