Who's on First?

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Who's on First? (Eng .: "Who is on the first [base]?" / "Who is on the first [base]?") is a famous baseball sketch by the American comedian couple Abbott and Costello from 1938. The sketch was Awarded the best sketch of the 20th century by Time magazine in 1999 .

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In the roughly six-minute sketch, Bud Abbott plays Dexter Broadhurt, the manager of the fictional St. Louis Wolves club, who tries to explain the names of the players to the peanut seller Sebastion Dinwiddle ( Lou Costello ). The joke is that the nicknames of the players ("Who", "What", "I Don't Know" / "Who", "What", "No idea") are all interpreted as queries or evasions instead of answers can be.

Dinwiddle casually asks Broadhurt "who / who" is on first base. Broadhurt then confirms that (a player named) "Who" is actually on first base. Dinwiddle, however, feels ridiculous because he takes this answer as a question (who?). When he repeatedly only gets answers like “Who / Who”, “What / Was” and “I Don't Know” to his questions, he becomes more and more impatient and angry and accuses the manager of not hitting his own players while the latter patiently repeats the names of the players and doesn't seem to notice the misunderstanding. Dinwiddle then tries to use paraphrases like “What is the name of the player on first base?”, But is immediately corrected by Broadhurt with “No, what / what is the name of the player on second base!”, And whenever Dinwiddle Broadhurt replied, annoyed, to Broadhurt's supposed questions with "I don't know", replied that he was on third base. This running gag is continued with all other field players (basemen, outfielders, throwers and catchers) who also have ambiguous names. When the confusion peaks, Dinwiddle yells "I Don't Give a Damn", to which Broadhurt gently replies that this is the name of the shortstop.

Baseball team name

  • First base: Who ("Who")
  • Second base: What ("Was")
  • Third base: I Don't Know
  • Left Field: Why
  • Center Field: Because
  • Pitcher : Tomorrow ("Morgen")
  • Catcher : Today ("Today")
  • Shortstop : I Don't Give a Damn (“I don't give a shit”) or “I Don't Care” in the version of the film One Night in the Tropics

The name of the rightfielders is not mentioned. In addition, Costello assumes in the course of the sketch that the name of the first baseman is "Naturally", which is just another misunderstanding on his part.

The puns are difficult to translate into German, because in English the pronoun “Who” can be used both for “Wer” and colloquially instead of “Whom” for “Whom” and “Whom”. In addition, “Whose” and “Who's” (for “Who is”) sound very similar in English, and in German they are translated into the dissimilar “Wessen” or “Who is”.

meaning

“Who's on First?” Achieved cult status among baseball fans and went down as a winged word in everyday American language. B. reveals that a previous conversation was full of misunderstandings and one talked past one another.

Because of its cultural and historical significance to the United States , the first surviving broadcast version of Who's on First? Listed by Abbott and Costello in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress on January 27, 2003 "as an example of Americana and timeless comedy ."

Honors

In 1999, Time magazine named “Who's on First?” The Parrot is Dead by Monty Python and Rope Tricks by Will Rogers as the best sketch of the 20th century and praised for “perfectly staged absurd confusion”. A video of the sketch can be seen continuously in the Baseball Hall of Fame to this day. In 2003 a radio recording was archived by the Library of Congress with the reference "all time best of recorded comedy".

"Who's on First?" Was published as a board game in 1978 , with the rightfielder being christened "Nobody". The aim of the game is to find out all the player names of the opposing teams in the shortest possible time.

Real events

Tributes and parodies

  • The sketch is often in multiple Oscar-winning film Man Rain by Dustin Hoffman cited that the autistic portrayed Raymond Babbitt. Every time Babbitt is overwhelmed by his environment, he recites the sketch as a defensive mechanism. In contrast to his brother Charlie ( Tom Cruise ), Raymond escapes the joke of the puns, and the viewer is conveyed that the autistic person simply cannot recognize verbal humor.
  • Another movie quote can be found in Rush Hour 3 when Chris Tucker asks the master and his assistant for the name in a combat school.
  • The sketch has been translated into over 30 languages. Tributes and parodies include a version by Johnny Carson , who satirized the sketch politically, and puns with Chinese leader Hu Yaobang ("Who"), Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ("Yes, Sir") and US Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt ( "What") produced. For the presidency of Hu Jintao in the People's Republic of China , this resulted in a fictional dialogue between George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice with the same play on words ("Hu is the new leader of China?").

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Who's on First? at the National Recording Library. Retrieved August 10, 2017 .
  2. ↑ The Best Of The Century , TIME Magazine, 1999.
  3. ^ Who's On First and Vin Scully Got to Call It , opednews.com
  4. ↑ Entry on baseball-almanac.com