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

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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.

Uh, and I feel like shit today.

Being, 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, We're not, I'm not doing video today, I'm not doing video today, and then you joined my cause.

Oh, Andrew T, our guest, are you feeling like shit today?

I am a little sleepy because I stayed up too late watching TV.

Yeah.

We've got the EPBPs a little bit.

We got the EPBPs.

I was watching

Slow Horses.

Are you a Slow Horses fan?

You seem like you would 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 them.

I I don't know.

I guess I need to see.

It's got to be real different for me to get super, but I watched the first season.

It was fine.

Yeah.

It's not very different.

I will say, I think what I thought was going to happen was it's played as it's maybe going to be more of a comedy and then

a pretty straight ahead spy show after the first 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, yeah.

They get into minimum regular dogs and possibly overdog status pretty quickly.

As 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 the central intelligence.

Whatever.

Whatever people on Twitter are saying this week.

Andrew,

you would,

I, I will say

you would be,

I mean, I guess it's like too too on the nose to have you be a spy.

I think it would just be too like it's more like Sophie, 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 Sophie.

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 going to work, but

I'm hopeful.

I'll figure it out.

Yeah, yeah.

Bruce, if you're listening,

you want to have a beer?

You know?

Yeah.

Seems like a cool guy.

I'm just saying, Sophie, if Sophie just had one job instead of, you know, destroying the left from within, sure.

And as she's doing, yes, absolutely.

Like, it's just easy.

Speaking of evil people destroying something, how do you feel about stand-up comedy?

I, wait, have we not talked about this?

I

know 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.

I mean, listen, I love plenty of stand-up comedians.

Yeah.

But I think the institution of stand-up comedy is so thoroughly poisoned by, at best, sort of reactionary, like

wild structure.

Interesting.

Interesting.

It's interesting that stand-up comedy, you know, as valuable and influential as it is, and we all have a lot of stand-up comedy that we love and has meant stuff to us.

Yes.

It has this weird reactionary tinge that feels like, oh, that's got to be this modern thing.

It couldn't be baked in.

It couldn't be that the literal inventor of stand-up comedy as a discipline was a fascist.

Could it?

I, listen, Robert, if you're going to, this is not only, I, 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 on behind the masters.

And he was like, oh, like, what prep do you do?

And I was like, oh, no, no.

It is always.

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'm excited for that.

Because today,

did you know there was a guy who invented stand-up comedy?

It's always one asshole.

Like a single guy who is credited as being the guy.

That is wild.

It is wild, right?

I would have assumed it would be like,

you know.

apocryphally Aristotle or some shit like that.

You know, there is, there are different people.

And obviously, things that are kind of in the DNA of stand-up comedy have existed probably for as long as people have.

Like things we can be like, oh, you could kind of see that as being, but there is a guy who invented what we recognize as stand-up 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?

That is something a guy came up with.

And that motherfucker's name.

is Frank Faye.

And we're going to talk about him today.

This is amazing.

Oh my my God.

Listen, I've always thrilled to be here, but this one is like, I, I, I can't, I've never been able to articulate why I hate stand-up comedy other than the vibe.

So, this is fucking great.

See, 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 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 hate it.

Stand-ups had a big, I've done stand-up, it's had a big influence on me.

I loved Bill Hicks.

I still do.

A lot of his stuff has aged well.

Some of it hasn't.

Stand-up comedians.

Yeah.

Obviously, I can name a.

Yeah.

Oh, please.

Yeah.

Yes, and

can I improv trauma dump for one second?

Oh, sure.

Fuck yeah.

In my early 20s, 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

God.

And that man.

And like, can I just say that was surprising?

Yeah.

It 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.

Like, that's just mercy, right?

Yeah.

Like, if you're performing improv to an audience of two at a full theater, it's just, 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.

Stand-up comedy.

Let's do it.

No, I was going to say, Sophie, I think it's reasonable, especially, I think if you've been single in your like, let's say, 20s at any point in Los Angeles or New York,

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 bad time.

Yeah.

It's a bad time.

And dating comedians also 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've dated stand-up comedians and me,

and you, my friend.

All right, I think that's enough for the cold open.

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So we're talking about the inventor of stand-up 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 Faye.

Yes.

He's also a bigot, an abusive spouse, and an American fascist activist, par excellence.

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 sorry.

I'm going to hey-oh a lot.

Yeah, no, that's great.

That's great.

Bourne, Francis, Anthony, Donner, or perhaps Donnar, 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've anyway, it doesn't really matter.

Born Francis Anthony Doner on November 17th, 1891 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 because I called it Nevada as like a joke.

And they're like, Robot doesn't even know.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

It'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, they're 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 Faye.

Now, again, that's like 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, you know, he and he and his wife get together and they start traveling around this like 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 like.

do something to contribute to the the company that they're keeping, he starts performing as a very little kid, right?

He's maybe four years old at the at the oldest when he starts performing on stage uh his first glad child labor got worked into this so early oh yeah no they don't give a shit at this no one does because they're working in factories this is like yeah yeah yeah this is nice standards yeah you know early late 1800s child labor um his first stage role is as a potato bug in the play babes in toy land um and his biographers all suggest that he changed his name from Francis Donner to Frank Fay 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 Faye, but it really does look like his dad did, and he just decided to take the dias name his dad did.

Um, but I

don't have like stronger evidence on it than that.

Uh, I mean, I feel like tracking down Carney's real names is gonna be perpetually tough, yeah.

Like, yeah, who cares, right?

I always do my best with this sort of thing, but it's certain these are fucking Carneys.

Who knows what their real names were?

Nobody had a birth certificate, poor people didn't have births in 1891.

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 I'm realizing now most of my knowledge of vaudeville almost certainly comes from Looney Tunes.

Right, Looney Tunes and maybe some families.

Seth McFarlane'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 1800s and up to the early 1900s in the U.S.

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 50 years before Frank's birth.

So we're talking in like the mid-18 early, like the 1840s, 1850s.

It started in France.

And it was originally kind of like a comedy act and like pretty focused on comedic performances, but it changes through in the UK.

There's some like they introduce kind of more stage elements and people start like adding like one-act plays or like they'll do like scenes from famous plays.

So you'll do like a little bit of Shakespeare or something, you know, just a good bit.

Someone do 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 U.S.

in the late 1800s 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?

Yeah.

It's height.

Yeah.

You've got like 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 in, it's him and he'll like come on and introduce the act, but he's not like the draw in the way like Carson was or like Colbert is, you you know, right, right, right.

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 like doing skits, right?

So they'll, you know, pi each other in the face or whatever.

Um, 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 descent from vaudeville, right?

Right.

Like, you know, what it also sounds like a little bit, there's a little bit of like, just America's got talent in there.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is like, 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 U.S., it's become,

it's kind of hard to tell where a circus ends in vaudeville begins sometimes, right?

And there are like circuses that are like vaudeville, basically, 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 U.S.

Because one major popular thing in vaudeville, in the U.S.,

I mean, I'm sure this happened in Europe too, but it's particularly U.S.

thing, are minstrel shows, right?

Am I in 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 15, he had performed in pieces of every single one of the bards' dramatic plays besides Titus Andronicus, which I'm guessing is because a bunch of drunk yokels in the 1890s or 1905 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.

Sounds foreign.

Don't like it.

Yeah.

Now, we know vanishingly little about his early life outside of a stage career, what his parents were like.

I'm going to guess he got abused at least the normal amount physically, right?

Yeah.

It'd be weird if 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 the Miss 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 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?

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?

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.

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.

Like that just like, no, you're a redhead.

That's funny.

Like, it's funny.

You need to be a fucking clown.

Like, nobody wants to see a redhead be fucking Mark Anthony.

Get out of here, kid.

Like,

accept it.

You're comedy.

Yeah.

So as he grows into a young adult, you know, he kind of splits from the family.

It's unclear a little bit exactly when, but he like, he goes off on his own.

He tries to make it.

He's not initially successful because, you know, 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 like comedians of this era.

A lot of the great first generation of comedians also had box because it's like,

yeah, if you're, if you're, if you're.

in the same 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 um Robert, it is crazy to learn that the fucking jiu-jitsu freak stand-up guys also have a historical presence.

Long and proud history.

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, 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 whatever ego it takes to put you in the ring is usually the thing that keeps you from leaving.

No, no, no, no, no.

Just one fight away.

If you have it.

Yeah.

If you have it and you're like, nah, nah, I'm going to buy 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 them.

I love you.

Goodbye.

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That's literally the definition of being an Aries mood.

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That's all it says.

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Get out of here.

I'm a Capricorn Rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable.

Okay.

That is your Capricorn talking.

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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 Faye will carry a set of boxing gloves with him from theater to theater and like put them up in his, you know, office is the wrong word, his like powder room or whatever, to remind him of his origins, right?

Like it's like a, it does it, this is something that like leaves an impact on him, maybe just because of the head injuries.

I don't know.

Yeah, the only impact.

Yeah.

The eternal impact.

So he tries next to make, and he's probably in his late teens, maybe young adult, maybe 18, 19 at this point.

He tries to make a name for himself as a ballad singer next.

And you can find, I'm not going to 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 because he sings in a way that people really don't.

these days, but like he was, 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 want to hear his ballads.

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 Nestorhoff.

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 Faye into showbiz while regularly hustling him in billiards.

Dyer wrote an act in which Faye wore baggy pants, roller skates, and a fake nose, circling Dyer as he made wise cracks.

The eight-minute performance ended with Faye's pants tearing in half.

It was a kind of humiliation Faye vowed never to repeat.

And again, comedy is a very primitive at this point.

You know, we haven't really invented the joke in a proper sense yet.

So it is shit like this.

That is humiliating.

Look at his pants ripped open.

I mean, look, I always argue there's plenty of shit that's not materially better than that that you can find on TikTok today.

No, again, the aforementioned, well, I'm not going to, who needs to shit on various cartoons on television?

You know which ones I'm mentioning.

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 liked 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 gallagers, basically.

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.

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.

Of course.

I mean, like, look, you can't be a good comedian unless you hate yourself.

We all know that.

Yes, right?

We all know that.

And everyone else alone.

And everyone else around you.

There's Bill Burr being the one exception, being the only stand-up comedian to be emotionally healthy.

i think just because he's an he's the only stand-up comedian to be happily married it happened once

uh and stay a stand-up comedian right yes um victoria wilson uh 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 end of that time with what he 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.

He had,

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 this, 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 stand-up because 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 weird yeah they're they're kind of just like little speeches yeah exactly yeah and they're not written they're spontaneous acts of wit right um they're just by guys who happen to be funny and fay admires these men terribly.

He said of his idols, and he's talking about Misner 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, 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 Misner 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, you know, tear into somebody and hurt them, right?

He really is drawn to that, which gives you an idea of the kind of bastard this guy.

We'll cut it, right?

Yeah, exactly.

He doesn't care about punching up or down.

He just likes to punch.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that kind of guy always likes punching down.

Right, right.

God.

So for two years, he struggles to get by as, you know, 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

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 someone, 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.

Because even like the court jester had like a dumb hat.

They've got a dumb hat.

And again, there's still even court jesters usually had other people or like, you know, they're right.

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 an 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 Nestoroff summarizes just how wild the idea of a stage comedian without props was at the time.

Quote, 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?

Ah, he's fucking Charlie Chaplin.

People still know who he is today.

Got to be played by Robert Downey Jr.

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 1915 or 16, 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, 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 monologuist, right?

Which means like he's the crazy monologue.

He's delivering nutty monologues, right?

He's talking about the crazy aspects of modern society.

In other words, it's stand-up, right?

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 stand-up 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 of who's very old when cliff talked to him who had been a minor comedian he comes a little bit after frankie fay so he's a guy like around the 20s he's performing right is when this guy starts and that 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 stand-up 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 stand-up guy, we like we can we can count on you to like keep a secret, to go to prison for us, right?

To do, to do whatever, to whack somebody, like that's a stand-up guy, right?

And a stand-up 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 because people, you know, 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 stand-up comedian means I can trust this guy to hit his time, right?

He's not going to, he's going to do no more and no less than what we want, right?

So that's the likeliest term I've heard for a stand-up comedian.

comedian.

Obviously, it could just be because they're usually standing there, 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, I bring this up now, but the term stand-up comedian, I think 1946, 47 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 monologuist, 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 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.

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 got to 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 have to be a tortured setup that's so.

And in fact, it's people, people find regular life funny you know like right yeah um it's also nice to learn that all you know not not that i guess this wasn't clear and not that obviously like crowd work and that business has not always been part of yeah this type of act but yeah that's it we're just speaking extemporaneously and even if you're not necessarily the funniest you're funnier than everyone else in the room yeah that's all it takes that's it um

so uh victoria Wilson writes, quote, 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, that's what we're seeing here.

Um,

so yeah, cool stuff.

Um, truly, yeah, I mean, 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 to invent this, of course.

Someone had to invent that.

And again, you know, there's pieces of this for forever, but this is, he's inventing it as a profession.

Yeah, and this is, 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 stand-up comedian from what most people know of like the first generation of stand-up comedians credits him.

Milton Burrell says that seeing Frank Faye 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 Faye, right?

Like he was the guy.

And everyone has at least heard of Milton Burrell, right?

He's famous for both being one of the first stand-up comedians, writing a bunch of joke books, and having a comedically huge dick

as opposed to being one like Frank Faye.

I don't think I knew that.

Oh, yeah.

Hung like fucking God, like crazy dick crazy dick hung hung like willem defoe um confoundingly large now another one of frank fay's biggest fans and like 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 100 and he spent 80 years as a stage performer.

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 Faye, he was pretty good.

He had a professional record of five wins and one loss.

So

kind of surprising.

Bob Hope, good boxer.

I guess it's just a certain type of man that

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 19 times, which is more than anyone else ever did or probably ever will.

He also did more than 50 tours for the USO, which is the organization that does performances for U.S.

military personnel around the world.

He starts in World War II 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 stand-up 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 Faye 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, 80 years of experience in this is like the best I ever saw on stage was Frank Faye.

That is genuinely so wild.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like that's a 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 a fellow 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 and it's amazing, right?

Yeah.

So there's an extent like there's not there's not videos of his early stand-up performances obviously you have to trust that like all of the guys who were the funniest people of that milton burl and baba all are all like yeah frank fay was a amazing um so i assume he really was like 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

performers 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 got to have something to do with your hands, right?

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 is 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?

Because 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 S.D., author of the Travelanche blog and a modern vaudeville performer and historian, describes him as looking like Ralph Fiennes.

You can judge that one for yourself.

Sophie 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.

Fiennes, I'm mixed about him because he's got good stances on Gaza, but he's a transphobe.

He's like a real

mixed bag there.

I didn't know that.

So half fuck you.

I like his performances.

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 it back.

You

how many great actors don't have something about them that's like, right?

Like, I just re-watched Tropic Thunder with some friends.

Tom Cruise kills in that.

He's also Tom Cruise.

What do you got to do?

Yeah.

The final stage to Frank's stage presence is his walk.

Frank Fay developed a trademark gait, described by Travasty 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's like a stereotypical, like the way like gay people were portrayed in like a lot of 80s, 90s.

Like, that's how we might, we might describe it today.

They describe it as effeminate.

Then, if you've ever seen Bob Hope walk on stage, that like weird walk he had when he's got like 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 Faye.

But I guess that's also theater, right?

Because it's like, it's like hippie because you're like, you know,

you need to be seen and the movements are.

Yeah, that's 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 like do this kind of like wristwatch like with his hands or looking at his fingers that way, like checking his nails.

Milton Burrell 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 he was that 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?

Oh, weird, weird, weird how that thread has just carried through.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Like, that's always the biggest, I would say, like, the biggest

fucking like red flag of any kind of comedian is like can they laugh at themselves uh yeah you know yeah uh like i can you know theoretically uh 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

um hey

so fay was this is a huge hit he starts around like 19 i think maybe 1915 or 16 it's a little unclear to me when he starts doing the the nutmeg august act but by 1918 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 um now during this period of time when vaudeville still rules entertainment we're talking 1918 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 era, 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 1919, 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.

So, this is, by the way, an exhausting pace, right?

You talk any modern state of 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 1925, Faish sells out 10 straight weeks in a row.

Eventually, his longest spree is going to be 16 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 1919 doing sets.

And right, when he's at the palace, he's part of like a larger show, but like he's the centerpiece of it, right?

Him doing these like 10 or 15 minute sets is like, and he's coming on for other stuff too.

Like, that's the reason people are there.

And he starts, you know, after he's selling out the palace, doing what like a long set for a comedian would be like 10 or 15 minutes.

He starts doing these sets that are more than 20 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 20 or 30 minute set is like wild.

People aren't 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, 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 Faye not only became a bona fide celebrity, but also pioneered the idea of an MC.

For several years, vaudeville used only painted placards with the name of each act to announce who was coming to stage.

Faye changed this common practice, becoming one of the first people to actually MC 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 so.

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 like build him up a little bit.

I need to get the crowd moving so that they'll be happy.

Like, no one had really done that before.

And he is the guy who kind of

creates being an MC, really, in the modern sense.

Like, he's now invented stand-up, in very short order, stand-up comedy and being an MC.

Like, those are the two things Frank Faye gets credited for making.

Huh?

I guess I, I, I, that, 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 94

is basically, I guess I would have assumed there was like a ringleader, like like in a circus type deal.

Yeah, and there had been ringleaders and 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 of the beginning at the end.

Again, the fact that he's doing interstitial bits and that he's kind of paying attention to how is the audience doing what do i need to like change do i need to bring him back do i need to like pull this guy back from the brink and by doing this he's making himself in a way that even like 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 like this is this is this is the proto johnny carson too right like that's this is his show and this is his you know he's putting it on with these folks right even though he's not on stage all the time for every act, he's all he's there in between acts, right?

And that, that's, that is like, it's really interesting that he created both of those things, right?

Yeah.

Um, so at this point, by the mid-20s, Faye is arguably the biggest performer in New York.

He's definitely the biggest performer in New York City.

And he might, he's probably one of the three or four biggest stars of any kind in the country, right?

At least top 10.

He's up there.

He's massive.

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 20s 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 52 weeks a year, right?

He's going, he's doing a lot of performing in New York, but he's traveling all around and everywhere he goes, he sells out shows.

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, I guess they were always kind of, you know, the capacity for crooked evil monsters.

I mean, I guess that's the open question.

Is it in us all or is it just in these dickheads that gets expressed?

Yeah, is it just bad?

You know, it's just

if your job is to be worshipped by a crowd of people,

easy to wind up.

Say more, Robert.

Kind of narcissistic.

Yeah.

Like, obviously, I've never made a mistake.

Ever.

I'm a perfect angel baby.

Like, I can't actually be wrong.

Everyone knows that.

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?

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High key.

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast.

You better listen.

That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon.

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That's all it takes.

Everyone loves me at the cancer.

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is that now you're gonna come for me being an aries and you have a sag moon get out of here i'm a capricorn rising so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable okay that is your capricorn talking

listen to high key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Live in the Bay Area long enough and you know that this region is made up of many communities, each with its own people, stories, and local realities.

I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

I sit down with reporters and the people who know this place best to connect the dots on why these stories matter to all of us.

Listen to The Bay, new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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 Faye 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 Law, 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 Lara 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.

He knows how to work performers' confidences.

Right.

And some of it is like he knows that if he fuck, 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 C.K.'s got this guy's photo in 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 may like 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 like 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 he, when she would come upstage, he'd ask her, good heavens, where have you been?

And he'd have her respond to the beauty parlor.

So he could say, I can see they didn't wait on you, you know?

Like, just to shit on her appearance after making her dress up badly.

Like, 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 weekly.

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 really gets off on the cruelty thing.

He loves to punch down.

Now, I, yeah.

I mean, it is also that's, I mean, this is basically an improv troop, also.

Right, 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 wants 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 And this does not go over well.

The booking office cancels the rest of his scheduled performances and fines him $100.

But Faye 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 $18,000 a week in the 20s.

Oh my God.

Right?

Like,

that's a crazy amount of money.

Yeah.

That's like 300 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.

Or it gets to come out freely.

Right.

Like there's nothing 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 hear Robert's pre-show warm-up, but, you know.

Who do I hate?

Me.

Oh, buddy.

So he quickly drops the name he'd started his act under, the nut monologuist, and starts demanding people call him one of several nicknames.

And he, all of these are nicknames he's given himself.

Nobody gives themself cool nicknames.

And his nicknames are the great Fazy, the king of vaudeville, or just the king, the great Faye, 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

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 Burrell, obviously, I just said, is a great foundational American comic.

He's up there with Bob Hope in terms of guys who influence 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 Burl is Jewish.

Now, the other thing is that Frank is really scared about having his act plagiarized, right?

And that 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 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 get that little Jew bastard out of the wings.

So this happens a couple of times.

You know, they're on at the same shows, and Faye gets angrier and angrier at Burl, and eventually Faye shouts directly at Burl using the K slur for Jewish people.

Like, like, really goes to, like, like, very racist to Milton Burl, 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 Burrell later related, after he calls, Faye calls him a slur, 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 Burrell hits him with a board with metal on it in the the face.

Also,

it's like kind of amazing to be like,

I'm doing this because I am on some level still such a big fan.

Yeah, I'm a huge fan, but I am going to beat you in the face with a board.

Yeah.

This is like divorcing the artist from the art harder than anyone's ever done.

And honestly, it makes me like Milton Burrell a lot more.

I didn't have an opinion on him before this, but that's pretty cool.

Now, Faye is not just a bigot.

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 like it's probably worth like being like, it's also like, what, what, like, when would this be?

Like, the 20s, the 30s?

Yeah, we're in the like the mid-20s.

So he's not, like, super unique.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

If anything, even the stuff that you've quoted, probably soft, all things considered.

considerate.

I say that.

Let's wait.

Let's hold on calling it soft for the period, right?

So

comedian Milt Josephberg, 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 fair, we already know even he knows he's not a good boxer.

Even he knows he's not a 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, you know, Dennis Leary was stealing from 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 like 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 20s.

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 is like, hey man, and calls him the F-sler, right?

You know, just because it's the 20s.

And Frank punches him in the face, like this firefighter.

But my favorite punch-related Frank Faye story happens on stage during a performance.

And this is such a good story to end this episode on.

One of Frank's very few friends was Bert Wheeler.

And Wheeler was one half of a popular comedic duo called Wheeler and Woolsey.

Now, Bert 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 Faye 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 going to 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.

Faye 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 act.

That's a pretty good joke.

I

listen, especially given who the stand-ups are these days, I would love to see more of this.

There's a lot of stand-up comedians I want to get to see hit

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 Stanwick.

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 Faye and Barbara Stanwick, the movie A Star Is Born, is based off of their abusive relationship.

Right.

So that's got to be cool.

Can't wait.

Can't wait.

Can't wait.

Can't wait.

What a table set.

How you feeling, Andrew T?

I feel

I am, as it happens on Behind the Bastards, I am finding myself, at least in part one, more sympathetic in general than I thought I was going to be.

Right.

And typically that is, I guess, how biographies work.

No one starts out as an evil child.

So I get it.

Well, and it's like he's a racist and he's abusive so far, but he hasn't done...

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 and a guy who's a dick.

He doesn't even seem that transgressive for like the fucking 20.

He's not.

This is.

Yeah.

He wouldn't 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?

Can't wait.

But before we get to that, why don't we get to your pluggables?

Oh, I don't know.

Still doing Yo is this racist.

We have a premium show called Yoko We Live.

I don't know.

That's it.

I'm around.

Hey, yo.

Andrew T on places.

Heyo.

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 sucked.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.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.com slash at behind the bastards.

iHeart presents the big three playoffs.

This Sunday, the remaining four teams battle to make their championship in the most physical, fierce, and competitive basketball league in the world.

The action starts with the big three monster energy celebrity game.

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The no-holds ball action starts Sunday at 3 p.m.

Eastern, 12 Pacific, only on CDS.

Hi, I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

In every episode of The Bay, we ask deeper questions, cut through the noise, and keep you connected to the community that you and I love.

Buy new episodes of KQED's The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday wherever you get your podcasts.

I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

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Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

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