I Don't Care If You Laugh

"OOO-WAAH-O!" Arms flailing, fingers popping, fanny shaking, honey-blonde Geraldine sashays onstage in her spanking new outfit. Her boy friend, Killer, objects to the cost of it all, and an outraged Geraldine screams at him: "The DEBBIL made me buy dis dress! I didn't want to buy it, but ole Debbil, he MADE me. You don't like it? Well, what you SEE is what you GET. OOO-WAAH-O!" The sly black face next appears supported by a clerical collar. Now it is the Rev. Leroy of the Church of What's Happening Now. "Reverend!" cries an elder. "There's a blue El Dorado illegally parked outside." The good pastor favors the elder with a seraphic grin. "The Lord smiled down on me in last week's raffle."

The hilarious pair, Geraldine and the Rev. Leroy, are one and the same--Clerow ("Flip") Wilson, 36, America's fastest-rising comedian, black or white. Not so long ago, Flip was scratching something like $15 a night out of low-rent nightclubs along the Eastern seaboard. Then he made a one-night stand on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The stocky, moon-faced comic became--quite literally--a star overnight. Now his own NBC-TV variety hour, The Flip Wilson Show, is the most successful new hour in an otherwise dismal fall season.

Deceptive Ease. Variety shows are currently considered prosaic and passe. But Flip and his producer Bob Henry were determined to make this show different. They have succeeded admirably by concentrating on Flip. There are no big production numbers, no lines of chorus girls, no star-spangled introductions, just Flip doing comedy sketches and bantering with such guests as Marcel Marceau or Lily Tomlin. While he occasionally joins them in a number, Flip is careful not to hog the camera. He and Henry have also made a point of spacing Flip's pet routines--the sassy Geraldine and the high-gaited gospel preacher--to ensure that they don't wear out their welcome.

Aware that there had never been a successful Negro-hosted weekly network variety show, Flip began rehearsing more than a month early, working five and six hours a day on his singing and dancing. And he has mastered the deceptive ease of the first-class TV host. After appearing on last week's show, Perry Como reported: "Flip knows the things that make you comfortable."

Congeniality does not come easily to Flip. Born in Jersey City, N.J., one of 16 children, he started on the foster-home circuit when he was seven. He lived with a family of Holy Rollers and a fortune teller. At 16 he lied about his age and joined the Air Force, where a white Southern major took him in hand, tutored him in grammar and diction and sent him to typing school.

Be Effortless. Flip eventually traded his khakis for a bellhop's uniform at San Francisco's Manor Plaza Hotel, where he made his nightclub debut playing a drunk. Soon he was hustling laughs in California saloons and slowly filling a loose-leaf notebook (which he still keeps) with his observations on comedy. Cardinal tenets in the Wilson canon: "Be interesting, be impassive, be effortless." Above all: "Make them remember Flip Wilson as a self-confident man of the world, projecting an 'I Don't Care If You Laugh' attitude."

When he finally made the Tonight Show, he remembered all his own rules as he rendered his version of the discovery of America. Chris warns Isabella, "If I don't discover America, there ain't gonna BE no Ray Charles." Isabella then shrieks in the now-famous falsetto, "Chris gonna FIND Ray Charles." Since then Flip has sharpened and refined his style, which leans primarily on storytelling and body action rather than zingy punch lines. Even with all of the mugging, eye rolling and Negro dialect, Wilson's routines are inoffensive and totally devoid of racial rancor.

Off-camera, he lives in Hollywood Hills in a home that sports a pool and sauna. He swims, bowls, has regular massages and rejects the notion that there is any significance in the fact that he is black. "Why does it have to be a question of black and white? I'm a comic, and my thoughts are reflected in what I do. I don't like to talk politics." But Flip tries to be more philosophical about his relationship with his audience. "I give an honest day's work, and I'm well paid for it. The guy who watches, suppose he's way down, or his wife is in the hospital. If I can take him away from all that for an hour, and at the end of it he says, 'You're great.' That's really fine."

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