By Stuart Nulman
Forty years ago, the late comedian Flip Wilson was one of the most popular entertainers on television. His “Flip Wilson Show” on NBC was a Thursday night viewing habit for millions of Americans, and gave such ratings titans as “All in the Family” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.” a run for their money. And in a January 1972 Time magazine cover story, he was deemed “TV’s First Black Superstar”.
And for all that mega-success as a comedian and TV star, Wilson could thank Clara Barton. That’s right … the same 19th century nurse Clara Barton who helped to establish the American Red Cross over 130 years ago.
It was at P.S. 14 in Jersey City, New Jersey back in 1942 that eight-year-old Clerow Wilson, Jr. stepped up to the plate and volunteered to fill in for the lead role in the school’s production of “Clara Barton of the Red Cross” when the blond girl originally chosen for the role got an acute case of stage fright. Originally selected to play the role of a wounded Civil War soldier, young Clerow gave a new spin to the Clara Barton character, and it marked the beginning of a pioneering career in comedy.
Wilson later admitted that the role as the substitute Clara Barton “was my first gig – playing a girl. The play became a comedy, and it was a smash.”
From there, it was a long hard road to stardom for Flip Wilson, with stops in the slums of Jersey City, air force bases in the Pacific, the back roads of the segregated “Chitlin Circuit” clubs in the South, to the Tonight Show, to the Flip Wilson Show, where his characters such as the sassy Geraldine Jones and the Reverend Leroy of the Church of What’s Happening Now, and his catchphrases “what you see is what you get” and “the devil made me do it” became a big part of the pop culture scene during the early and mid 1970s.
Thanks to the wide popularity of his weekly variety show, which ran from 1970 to 1974, Wilson helped give many Black comedians, musicians and performers national TV exposure that they would not get anywhere else, and helped revive the careers of such comics as Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor and George Carlin. Yet, these days, Flip Wilson and his contribution to the world of comedy has for most part been forgotten (except in the minds of devoted students of comedy). However, Kevin Cook’s recently released biography “Flip” gives the complete story of Flip Wilson’s life and career, and will finally give him the recognition of those contributions to future generations of comedians that is so long overdue.
While reading “Flip”, the reader will automatically get the impression that Flip Wilson’s life was a classic case of someone reverting to comedy as a means out of a harsh upbringing. And Wilson’s childhood couldn’t have been anymore harsher. Born to a family with negligent parents, Wilson and his siblings were broken up by state authorities and put in foster homes, where the atmosphere was even harsher (and the foster parents profited from payments per child courtesy of the state of New Jersey).
However, it was a stint in the U.S. Air Force during the early 50s (where he was stationed in the South Pacific) that Wilson developed his comedy chops. It all began when he was stationed in Guam, and suggested to one of his commanding officers how he can help increase attendance and interest in the base’s mundane monthly Troop Information Meetings. His topic was the sex habits of the coconut crab. His comedy-laced lecture about how the troops can prevent getting STDs not only drew large crowds, but got him a lot of laughs amongst his fellow airmen. It was during one of those lectures (where he spoofed Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”) that Clerow Wilson, Jr. got the name that he would be associated with for the rest of his life, as one of the airmen in the audience shouted at him “He flippeth his lid!” … and Flip Wilson was born.
The book also gives a fascinating, rarely seen before account of the vagabond, yet tight knit world of the Chitlin Circuit of clubs in the Deep South, where Wilson began to develop the characters that made him famous (i.e., Geraldine Jones), which were drawn from the people whom he knew from his early days in the mean streets of Jersey City. The clubs, for most part, were located in backwater areas and were mostly rat traps in nature, and access by any mode of transportation was spotty at best. The hours were long and pay was minimal (if Wilson made at least 90 cents a gig, that was a decent night for him). However, for Wilson, along with other Black comics of that era such as Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley, the Chitlin Circuit presented a fertile training ground for the superstar career that awaited him.
As well, Cook portrays not only how Flip Wilson was a talented and generous man, but also how complex an individual he was after the spotlight was turned off following every performance. Wilson was a serious self-taught student of comedy; his bible was Max Eastman’s book “Enjoyment of Laughter” and Flip studied that book page for page until the pages fell out. This also prompted him to write copious notes on countless pads of note paper, outlining monologues, routines and sketches (which he later incorporated when he had his NBC show), as well as his own principals of comedy, which he later called them “Flip’s Laws of Comedy” (such as “Be interesting, be effortless” and “To be effortless may require 25 years of effort”). And when the spotlight and cameras were turned off, so did Wilson. He was intensely private and reflective, and spent his off hours smoking pot, snorting cocaine, or taking lengthy, spontaneous road trips across the U.S. in one of his many Rolls Royce Corniche automobiles, which he named them “Killer”, after Geraldine’s unseen boyfriend.
After “The Flip Wilson Show” went off the air in the spring of 1974 (in the final episode, Geraldine marries Killer, whom the audience sees for the first time ever, and was portrayed by – ironically – O.J. Simpson), Wilson became a Las Vegas headliner, and did a string of TV specials for NBC (including an animated special that recounted the Clara Barton incident). In 1985, hungering to return to network TV, Wilson starred in his first – and only – sitcom, “Charlie and Company” (which was a glorified knock-off of the immensely popular “The Cosby Show”), which aired for several weeks on CBS during the 1985-86 season. For the remaining 12 years of his life, Wilson was content with riding motorcycles, spending more time with his children, reading Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet”, enjoying his Malibu beachfront home, and vainly hoping that a new generation of viewers would appreciate his contribution to TV comedy through reruns of “The Flip Wilson Show” (which, unfortunately, garnered faint interest from cable TV networks).
“Flip” is an excellent biography of one of comedy’s unsung heroes. It’s a classic rags-to-riches story of how Clerow Wilson, Jr. fought his way through poverty, neglect and racism through comedy, and helped bring urban Black humor from the Chitlin Circuit to large scale mainstream audiences. Hopefully, this book will encourage this current generation of comics – both Black and White – to realize the importance of Flip Wilson and what he brought to the world of contemporary comedy.
Basically, with this book, to quote Flip, “what you see is what you get”. And believe me, you’re going to like what you see.
This review originally appeared in the June 29, 2013 edition of the West End Times.
