7 into 28 is 13: The politics of joke thievery

Bud Abbott screws his landlord out of the rent money with mathematical trickery.

How do jokes get started? Hell if I know, but back in the days of vaudeville, certain successful comedic routines got passed around a lot between different acts, with very little thought given as to attribution. I guess there was a lot of borrowing or just outright stealing in those days. Maybe there were turf wars over the "ownership" of certain bits. These were live performances, of course, and no one was recording them, so what was the harm ultimately? But then a strange thing happened to the entertainment biz. Two strange things, actually: film and television. Suddenly, performances were being immortalized and shown to audiences from coast to coast. And yet, those same hand-me-down vaudeville routines kept popping up on screens both big and small well into the 1950s and beyond. Hey, the material has to come from somewhere. There's a famous quote sometimes attributed to Larry Gelbart and sometimes to Bob Hope: "When vaudeville died, television was the box they put it in." Many decades later, a variation on that line wound up in a Family Guy episode: "Vaudeville's dead, and TV's the box they're gonna bury it in." So even the quote about vaudeville has some miles on it.

There is one routine in particular that shows up with remarkable persistence in old movies and TV shows, performed by a variety of comedians with very little variation in the basic premise or structure. Simply put, one character tries to convince another character that 28 divided by 7 is 13. The first character will "prove" this assertion in three ways: long division, multiplication, and addition. Always in that order. I guess the bit is most closely associated with Abbott and Costello, who went from vaudeville to film to television over the course of their long career. They certainly did this math routine a lot of times. Like this, for instance:

So Bud and Lou sure performed the hell out out of the "28" bit. But the routine was not their exclusive property by any stretch. Ron Ormond's 1951 film, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones is meant as a tribute to minstrel shows, which were already on their way out by then (for good reason). This is the movie from which Ed Wood's producers plundered the Cotton Watts and Chick routine he used in Jail Bait in 1954. Two of the other performers in the original Ormond film are Emmett Miller and Ches Davis, doing their version of the old "28" routine, though they don't get around to it until about two minutes into this clip.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main were doing this same routine in one of their low-budget Ma and Pa Kettle films at Universal. The only difference is that they use 25 and 14 instead of 28 and 13. But the joke is exactly the same, as is the order: division, then multiplication, then addition.

Remember all this before you ever accuse anyone of stealing a joke. Joke-stealing is a proud show business tradition. Comedy could barely exist without it. I mean, who came up with this mathematics routine? Abbott and Costello? Davis and Miller? Ma and Pa Kettle? Probably none of them!

Mill Creek comedy classics #8: "All Over Town" (1937)

Oh, happy day! Olsen and Johnson are back for more in All Over Town.

The flick: All Over Town (Republic, 1937) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.1

Director: James W. Horne (Way Out West, Big Business, and other Laurel & Hardy features and shorts)

Actors of note:

• Olsen and Johnson (Hellzapoppin', Country Gentlemen, Ghost Catchers)

• Mary Howard (The Great Ziegfeld)

• Harry Stockwell (voice of the Prince in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, father of Dean Stockwell)

• Franklin Pangborn (Sullivan's Travels, My Man Godfrey)

• James Finlayson (To Be Or Not to Be, Foreign Correspondent, many Laurel & Hardy features and shorts, and the guy who popularized the expression "D'oh!" later adopted by Homer Simpson)

The gist of it: Olsen and Johnson, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, are struggling vaudevillians ("the last of their tribe, the true vanishing Americans" according to some title cards at the start of the film) living in a $12-a-week theatrical boarding house in Manhattan and trying to make a star of their trained seal, Sally, who can do the usual seal tricks: balance a ball on her nose, play a tune by honking horns, clap, etc. They bring this dynamite act to the "jinxed" Elridge Theater, a grand old place which has been closed since a murder was committed there two years earlier. During rehearsals for the new show, another murder is committed, setting up a climax in which Olsen and Johnson promise to reveal the identity of the killer live on the radio.

Scooby and Shaggy's signature bit.

My take: All Over Town is not terribly fitting as a title for this frantic backstage farce, but it comes close to describing the film's scattershot, all-over-the-place approach to storytelling.

At first, I thought it was going to be one of those "save the orphanage"-type movies with Olsen and Johnson's trained seal act reviving the troubled Eldridge Theater and rescuing pretty young Miss Eldridge (Howard), the heavily-in-debt daughter of the theater's deceased owner, who in turn pursues a chaste romance with an up-and-coming piano player (Stockwell) with big showbiz ambitions.

Then, when O&J actually get to the theater and are menaced by various flying objects, strange echoes, and a raving lunatic who seems to live there, I thought All Over Town was going to be one of those "scaredy cats in a haunted house" stories, like Scooby-Doo and at least a dozen Three Stooges shorts. They even do the classic Scooby/Shaggy bit where one jumps into the arms of the other.

After that, there are some comic misunderstandings which lead everyone else in the movie to believe that O&J are oil millionaires, so I thought the film was going to be a rehash of Country Gentlemen, with the boys as fly-by-night swindlers. Then, when grouchy old Mr. Bailey (who wants Miss Eldridge to sell the theater) is shot by a mysterious figure, I thought the film was going to turn into a comedy whodunnit.

It ultimately winds up as a wacky, anything-goes live-action cartoon in its last few minutes, with a bumbling cop getting tangled in ropes, a brass band dodging gunfire until only a tuba player is left onstage, and lots of fake "theater snow" falling on everyone and everything as Olsen provides a running commentary for the radio audience. I wasn't bored by All Over Town, but I wasn't really satisfied by it either. The film tries a little of everything, perhaps to distract us from the fact that none of it is really all that good. If nothing else, this movie provides a glimpse of the dying days of Vaudeville, a form of entertainment which (ironically) was displaced by the distribution of motion pictures just like this one.

Franklin Pangborn and James Finlayson

Is it funny: Well, it's funny-ish. I'll give it that. All Over Town is certainly more madcap and adventurous than the previous year's Country Gentlemen. I suppose it all depends on how amusing you consider Olsen and Johnson to be. Personally, I can take or leave them. They're zanier and consequently not as relatable as, say, Abbott and Costello or even Martin and Lewis, yet they lack the pure inspiration of wilder teams like the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy at their best.

This film gives them plenty of opportunities to do their trademark schtick, and at least twice, the movie stops dead so that they can do a bit: one is a phony ventriloquist act with Johnson pretending to be the dummy and another is a musical comedy number with O&J shamelessly stalling before they butcher Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C sharp minor.

At one point, they attempt some Groucho/Chico-style verbal humor, with Olsen trying without success to get Johnson to memorize and repeat a single line of dialogue for the show. None of this really catches fire. Fortunately, for you hardcore comedy nerds out there, the supporting cast includes at least two legends. Franklin Pangborn, famous for portraying "prissy" (today we'd say "gay"), uptight characters, is the show's Costumer.

And the radio show's sponsor, Mr. McDougal of McDougal's Mackerels,  is the impatient, always-agitated James Finlayson, usually a foil to Laurel and Hardy. If you've ever derived pleasure from Homer Simpson yelling "D'oh!" (a contraction of "damn" and "oh") after some setback, you can thank Mr. Finlayson, who made that word his calling card. And, yes, he says it at least twice in All Over Town.

My grade: B-

P.S. - Not even a hint of racial stereotyping here, though PETA folks will probably cringe at the treatment of Sally the seal.