"Who's on First?" How a Baseball Bit Became a Cultural Artifact

In 1999, Time magazine named "Who's on First?" the best comedy routine of the twentieth century. A gold record of it sits in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where it has been on display since 1956. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry in 2002, placing it alongside the 1937 Hindenburg crash recording and Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" as a sound worth preserving.

The routine runs anywhere from one minute to nearly ten, depending on the version. Bud Abbott plays a manager explaining his baseball team's lineup to Lou Costello, who plays a bewildered peanut vendor. The first baseman is named Who. The second baseman is named What. The third baseman is named I Don't Know. Costello asks who's on first and Abbott tells him. The misunderstanding spirals from there, looping and accelerating and building until Costello is nearly hysterical and Abbott is placidly, maddeningly calm.

Where It Came From

Abbott and Costello did not invent the concept. Wordplay routines built on confusing names had been a staple of burlesque and vaudeville for decades before them. Weber and Fields, a comedy team from the 1880s, performed a routine called "I Work on Watt Street." A British music hall comedian named Will Hay had been performing a schoolmaster bit involving wordplay with place names since at least 1920. By that time, a generic routine built on similar name confusion was circulating through American burlesque houses.

Bud Abbott knew these routines intimately. He had worked burlesque since his teens, first in the box office of a Brooklyn burlesque house and then onstage. Before Costello, he performed a version called "Who's the Boss?" with comedian Harry Steppe. The boss was named Who. His employees were What and Ida Know. Abbott later said that "Who's the Boss?" was the direct ancestor of "Who's on First?"

Abbott and Costello first performed together in 1935 at the Eltinge Burlesque Theater on 42nd Street in New York, after Costello's regular straight man fell ill. They formally teamed up in 1936 and spent the next two years refining the baseball routine on the burlesque and vaudeville circuit. By the fall of 1937, Variety called it the hit of a touring stage show called "Hollywood Bandwagon." What had been a generic burlesque bit was now unmistakably theirs.

The Radio Debut

In February 1938, Abbott and Costello joined the cast of The Kate Smith Hour on CBS radio. They auditioned with "Who's on First?" The show's producer, Ted Collins, stopped them mid-routine and warned them that radio audiences would reject it.

They eventually talked their way past Collins, and on March 24, 1938, "Who's on First?" was performed for a national radio audience for the first time. The response was enormous. The show's writer, Will Glickman, may have helped polish the routine for radio, adding references to real baseball players like the Cardinals' Dizzy and Daffy Dean to set up the premise that players had ridiculous nicknames.

The routine made Abbott and Costello famous overnight. Within two years, they had performed it at the White House for President Franklin Roosevelt, multiple times. They signed with Universal Pictures. They appeared on Broadway. They became the highest-paid entertainers in America during World War II.

The Versions

Abbott and Costello performed "Who's on First?" hundreds of times across radio, stage, film, and television. The routine exists in at least twenty known versions. They could expand or compress it to fit any format, adding or cutting sections at will.

The most famous filmed version appears in their 1945 movie The Naughty Nineties. It runs about six minutes and is the version that plays on a continuous loop at the Baseball Hall of Fame. The longest version is from an episode of their television series, The Abbott and Costello Show, running roughly eight minutes.

Their last known recorded performance of the routine was on The Steve Allen Show on October 7, 1956, during a "Salute to Baseball" episode that also featured Mickey Mantle and Claire Ruth, Babe Ruth's widow. During this performance, Abbott improvised a new joke, calling the pitcher Today and the catcher Tomorrow "brothers." Costello, caught off guard, broke character and said, "Where did this come from?" Even after two decades, the routine was still evolving.

What Keeps It Alive

Most comedy from the 1930s and 1940s does not survive. The references are dated, the rhythms feel slow, the humor relies on context that no longer exists. "Who's on First?" has none of these problems. Its premise is timeless. Names that sound like pronouns will always be confusing. The structure is airtight. And the performances, particularly in The Naughty Nineties version, are so precisely timed that they can make an audience laugh eighty years later without a single word needing to change.

Abbott and Costello copyrighted the routine, though they failed to renew the copyright in 1972 and it fell into the public domain. Milton Berle, the notorious joke thief of mid-century television, performed it without permission while it was still legally protected. The routine has been referenced in dozens of TV shows, adapted into a board game, and played a pivotal role in the 1988 film Rain Man, where Dustin Hoffman's character recites it as a comfort mechanism. In 2007, life briefly imitated art when the Los Angeles Dodgers called up a shortstop from their farm system named Chin-Lung Hu. Vin Scully, on the broadcast, said what everyone was thinking.

Costello died on March 3, 1959, three days before his 53rd birthday. He was 52. Abbott lived until 1974. The routine outlived them both and shows no sign of fading.