Moms Mabley

Moms Mabley’s career lasted more than six decades. She was hugely influential, and inspired so many comedians and other performers who came after her. But outside of her work, a lot of the details of her life are a mystery, and there are some contradictory accounts of a particularly traumatic part of her early life.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I really
enjoy the TV show The Marvelous Mrs Mazel. If you

(00:22):
are not familiar with this show, it is about a
Jewish woman named Midge Mazel who tries to build a
career as a comedian starting at the end of the
nineteen fifties. There are various performers who appear as characters
on this show. Some of them have real world inspirations,
but they're fictional characters, and there are other ones, like

(00:43):
Lenny Bruce, who are fictionalized representations of a real person. Uh.
In an episode from the show's third season, Mrs Mazel
performs at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and ahead of
her on stage is Moms Maybe, who was played wonderfully
by Wanda Sykes. If my own age and background were

(01:06):
a little different, or maybe if I had grown up
watching reruns of old variety shows, I would have already
known who this was. But I did not, so I
did what I always do when a new performer shows
up on The Marvelous Mrs masl and I googled so
Mom's Maybe yes was a real person, But I had
some doubts about being able to do this episode. Because

(01:27):
her career lasted more than six decades. She was hugely influential.
She inspired so many comedians and other performers who came
after her. She's really one of the founders of stand
up comedy in the United States. But outside of her work,
a lot of the details of her life are kind
of a mystery, and there are some contradictory accounts of

(01:50):
a particularly traumatic part of her early life. Heads up
that talking about those contradictions is that's going to involve
some discussion of rape and other trauma. And I also
think if I were part of an adoption triad, there's
some part of this that I would probably also find
particularly troubling. Moms Mabley was born Loretta Mary Aiken on

(02:11):
March nineteen, probably eighteen. In the ninet hundred census, her
age is given US three, but in the earliest years
of her career, when people might have thought she was
too young to be out on her own, she gave
her birth year is eighteen ninety four. Later in her life,
she was not forthcoming about her age at all, and

(02:32):
to add another layer of confusion, her grave marker lists
her date of birth as March nineteen, eighteen ninety nine.
Loretta's parents were James and Mary Magdalen Smith Aiken. James,
who was known as Jim, was the son of Jane
Aiken Hall, and his father was her enslaver. Jim was

(02:52):
born in eighteen sixty one, and normally that would have
meant he was considered enslaved from his birth, but it
seems that his five are considered him to be free.
According to Mom's Mabley's later accounts, his mother made a
particular point of telling both him and Loretta that they
had been born free. Loretta also had a great grandmother,

(03:14):
Harriet Smith, who she described as Cherokee, who was a
big part of her early life and a big influence
on her. The family lived in Brevard, North Carolina, which
is southwest of Asheville on the edge of what is
now Pizga National Forest. In ninet it had a population
of under six hundred people. It is easy to imagine

(03:34):
that a black family in a small town in the
North Carolina Mountains in the early twentieth century was living
in severe poverty, and a lot of current descriptions of
moms Mabley's imply that her early childhood was one of
extreme hardship and that she fled Brevard and never looked back.
But in interviews later in her life, Mayblee talked about

(03:55):
western North Carolina with just enormous fondness. Studs turn Icle
recorded an oral history with her in nineteen sixty one,
and she did joke that you had to take a
buggy from Asheville to get to Brevard, but she also
called it one of the greatest and healthiest places on earth.
She spoke of her grandmother and her great grandmother with deep,

(04:16):
deep love and respect. Interviews that other people gave after
her death also described her making frequent visits home and
maintaining her connection to the North Carolina mountains. She also
described her father, Jim Aiken, as a great man. He
was a successful businessman who had started out selling gingerbread
and cider and worked his way up to owning a

(04:38):
store along with a bakery, slash cafe, and a barbershop
that catered to white customers. He also ran a dray
service which carried both passengers and freight along with carrying
the mail into and out of town. Although Mabel's oral
testimony describes Brevard as not being segregated, it did have
segregated schools. Her father was a big part of getting

(05:02):
a new school for black children established in Brevard in
early nineteen o nine, and a newspaper article about that
effort noted his involvement and then said, quote, what Jim
undertakes generally goes. I love that quote. Tragically, though, Jim
Akin died when Loretta was about twelve. In addition to

(05:22):
everything we just mentioned, he was a volunteer firefighter. At
this point, most fire trucks were chemical engines. They carried
tanks of bicarbonate of soda and acid, which were added
to water on the scene to produce a stream of
fire suppressant. Something went wrong while Aiken was responding to
a call in nineteen o nine and the tank exploded

(05:42):
while he was trying to attach the hose. Jim was
killed instantly, and multiple other firefighters were seriously injured. Jim
Achin's death was a profound loss for the entire community
of Brevard. His funeral was held at the White First
Baptist Church because that was the biggest church in the area.
An editorial in the French broad Hustler described him as

(06:05):
quote one colored man who left the world better than
he found it. The Brevard News wrote, quote, the death
of James P. Aikin is a distinct loss to our town.
He was the most widely known colored man in western
North Carolina. He was a successful and enterprising businessman whose
store on Main Street as well patronized. He was a

(06:26):
member of the Baptist Church and several benevolent societies. Was
a member of the fire department, where William E. Breece Jr.
Was Chief, and was always among the first to respond
to the call of the fire bell, and one of
the hardest workers at every fire in the history of
the town. He was in every way a responsible Negro, honest, energetic, industrious,

(06:49):
and reliable. He had a wide influence among the colored
race in this mountain section, besides having many friends among
the white people, all of whom will be shocked to
learn of his death. Obviously, racism is threaded through both
of these quotes, with the idea that Jim Aikin was
exceptional considering his race, but they do also speak to

(07:10):
how prominent he was within the community. Loretta's mother, Mary
was the executor of her late husband's estate. She also
took over the store while Loretta's grandmother helps to take
care of her and her siblings. They did have a
big family. She was one of at least nine children.
Mary eventually got married again to a man named George Parton,

(07:31):
and from that point her name appeared in advertisements for
the store as Mary Achin Parton. It appears that she
kept the store going until nineteen twelve or nineteen thirteen,
at which point she sold the building to Parton and
the couple moved away from Brevard, first to Washington, d c.
And then to Cleveland, Ohio. A lot of more recent

(07:51):
articles about moms maybe say that her mother was killed
just a couple of years after her father, after being
hit by a truck while crossing the eat on Christmas Day.
That's all very sensational, but it does not seem to
be correct. Mary and George are listed in the nineteen
forty census as living in Cleveland, with George's occupation at
the time listed as waiter. It is possible that Mary

(08:15):
was killed after being hit by a truck. Tracy was
not able to confirm her cause of death, but if
she was. That happened in nineteen forty six or nineteen
forty seven, and not when Loretta was still a young girl. However,
in addition to her father's death, Loretta's life took a
traumatic turn when she was still quite young. Multiple sources

(08:36):
say that she was raped by two different men before
she turned fourteen, and that both times she became pregnant
and arranged adoptions for her children, or someone arranged those
adoptions for her. Other accounts, though, say that it wasn't
really the arrangement of a formal adoption. That Loretta had
left her children in the care of two women who

(08:56):
later moved away and disappeared, and she didn't get to
see her children in until they were adults. Yet other
accounts say that Loretta's father or stepfather either forced her
to marry a much older man or pressured her to
do so, and that is why she left home as
a team. But there's no documentation of a marriage, although
there is some reporting in Brevard News about a court

(09:19):
case in nineteen thirteen that was State versus Bunyan Mills.
This was a seduction under promise of marriage case in
which the prosecuting witness was named Loretta Aiken. This case
was introduced in August, but dismissed in September when it
was found that there had been no formal marriage contract.
In her conversation with Studs, Turkle Moms Maybe also talked

(09:42):
about working as a wet nurse in Asheville at the
age of just fourteen and having to deprive her own
child of milk so that she would have enough to
feed the baby that she was nursing. This recording is
truly heartbreaking, with Maybe talking about telling her baby do her,
who she calls Lucretia, not to cry because she was

(10:03):
stronger than baby Lois, who she was being paid to
care for, so Lois needed more to eat. Maybe talked
about loving Lois like her own baby and how much
it hurt not to know what happened to her after
her employment had ended. This interview stresses that Lois started
to feel like her own child, but at least to me,

(10:23):
it doesn't seem to imply that she had also lost
contact with her daughter. Lucretia. Maybe also talked in multiple
interviews about being pregnant and having her baby with her
at the start of her career, but when Mom's Maybe
died in nine. Obituaries and memorials listed four children among
her survivors, but none of them are named as Lucretia

(10:47):
or are old enough to have been born when moms
was fourteen. Yvonne, the oldest daughter, is described as fifty
eight at the time of her mother's death. That means
that her mother would have been about eighteen when she
was born. Yvonne's younger siblings were listed as Christine, Bonnie,
and Charles, with some sources noting that Charles was her
brother's child who she adopted. So some accounts conclude that

(11:11):
Yvonne and Christine were the children who were reunited with
maybe as adults, and others conclude that those were just
two different people. Yeah. There are also a bunch of
family trees that list Christine's middle name as Lucheria, which
is not the same as Lucretia, but is close enough
that has made people wonder, like, was was this the

(11:33):
same baby? Was she calling the baby by a middle name?
And like the spelling has gotten garbled somewhere? If so,
that means the years are also garbled. There's a bunch
that's unclear, but whatever the exact circumstances are the young
Loretta Mary Aiken left home at the encouragement of her grandmother,
who thought that she should see the world beyond Brevard.

(11:55):
And we will get to that after a sponsor brig
In that nineteen sixty one oral history with Studs Turkle,
Mom's maybe talked about her family's deep religious faith when
her grandmother. Sometimes this is also she says it was

(12:17):
her great grandmother, Little Blurred encouraged her to leave Brevard.
She told her to quote, put God in front and
go ahead, and this became a motto for Mom's Mabley's life.
The timeline for that life is tricky to piece together, though,
because there are plenty of things like advertisements for her performances,
but otherwise a lot of the time there's not a

(12:38):
lot of concrete documentation. Sometimes Mabley's interviews contradict each other,
or they contradict the documentation that does exist, so these
like census records. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that
she was intentionally deceptive with any of this. Uh. She
gave a lot of these interviews in the last couple
of decades of her life. Uh. And I know I

(12:58):
don't remember actually when things happened in my childhood versus
other events, So who knows. It does seem that after
her mother moved to Cleveland, Moms maybe still known at
that time as Loretta Aiken, went there to join her.
She was pregnant at that time as the result of

(13:19):
a rape, and she had planned to go from Cleveland
to Detroit to terminate that pregnancy, but something told her
not to. She told Studs Turkle that when she was fifteen,
trying to work out a way to support herself and
her child, she prayed for guidance and heard a voice
that said quote go on the stage. In Cleveland, Loretta

(13:42):
lived with a pastor and his family, and the house
next door was a boarding house that was home to
a lot of performers. One of them, Bonnie Bell Drew,
helped her get a start in show business. Mabley's daughter, Bonnie,
who was born in ninety was named Bonnie after Bonnie
Bell Drew. Loretta again got a job with the Theater
Owners Booking Association, which was a vaudeville circuit for black

(14:05):
performers that was established in the nineteen twenties with venues
primarily in the southern and Midwestern states. It's performers gave
it nicknames like tough on Black actors. The schedules were
very grueling the pay was low, but Maybe later said
that anyone who got to the end of the circuit
had a solid foundation in all kinds of fundamentals, including singing, dancing,

(14:27):
and comedy. This was in part because every performer had
to learn every part in case somebody got sick or injured,
or just dropped out of the show. Other performers who
got their start on this circuit included Gertrude Ma Rainey,
Josephine Baker, and Sammy Davis Jr. When he was still
a child and her later life Mom's Mayblie told a

(14:48):
story about being sick while working this circuit and an
older fellow performer named Lee Roy came into her room
to check on her. Police rated the hotel after an
unre related altercation and searched all of the rooms, and
when Leroy was found in the room of the teenage
Loretta Aiken, they were forced to get married, but according

(15:09):
to Mablie, there was no marriage license, no formal paperwork
associated with this marriage, and Leroy was more like a
father figure to her than a spouse. Loretta was traveling
through deeply segregated parts of the US, many of which
were also well known for racist violence. She was earning
only about fourteen dollars a week, which was not enough

(15:30):
to support herself and her child, so her mother was
sending money to help with food and lodging. But then
another pair of black performers took notice of her and
helped her move into higher paying gigs. Those were Jody
and Susie Edwards a k a. Butter Beans and Susie,
who were a song and dance duo. Their act was
very comedic with a lot of double entendre. Their best

(15:52):
known song was I Want a Hot Dog for my role.
You can find recordings for this on the internet if
you want. Honestly, if you've never heard any of Moms
Mabley's comedy, just pause this and go to YouTube. Extremely funny.

(16:15):
At multiple points while doing research, I stopped what I
was doing and watched some Moms Maybe anyway, Loretta moved
from the theater Owner's Booking Association, where most of the
venues were white owned, to the Chitland Circuit, which was
kind of its successor. Those theaters were primarily black owned
and operated, and sometime during this period she started performing

(16:37):
under the name of Jackie Mablely Maybe herself told multiple
stories about where this name came from. One was that
jack Mayblee had been a boyfriend and that quote he
took a lot off me, and the least I could
do was take his name. Another was that the Jackie
part was her own invention, but Maybe was the last
name of a young man she had been engaged to,

(16:59):
but that didn't work out because he was a Canadian
and neither of them wanted to move to the others country. Regardless,
her motivation for changing her name seems to have been
that her oldest brother thought her stage career was disgracing
the family. Not all of her family shared that opinion,
though she had a younger brother, Eddie Parton, who helped

(17:19):
write some of her material. She was being billed as
Jackie mable by five, and she had established Jackie as
an onstage character. She was in her twenties, but she
imagined this character as in her sixties, Patterned after her
grandmother Jane. As Jackie Mablee, she would sing, dance, and
tell jokes and stories. She eventually made her way to

(17:41):
New York, where she was featured at Connie's Inn in
Harlem after it opened in ninety three. Like the Cotton Club,
where Maybe also went on to perform Connie's in featured
black performers for an all white audience. As her reputation grew,
Maybe kept getting better and more lucrative bookings. She also
claimed that she discovered Pearl Bailey during these years. She

(18:02):
said in ninety four interview quote, I taught Pearl Bailey
everything she knows. She was a blues singer, and I said, girl,
you're funny. You should be a comedian. While mayblee stage
career initially included a mix of singing, dancing in comedy,
over time she was focused more and more on stand
up before that term was even coined. In her stage

(18:24):
persona of Jackie Mablee, she helped establish the conventions of
stand up comedy as an art form. She was billed
as Jackie Mabley for several years before other performers gave
her the name of Moms. In her own words quote,
even though I was young, they would always bring their
problems to me to settle. She was a mothering presence.

(18:45):
She was someone that other performers could turn to for
support and who would help people get money for rant
or a ticket home when they needed it. Mom's Maybe
blurred a lot of lines with her gender and sexuality,
both on and off stage. Her on stage persona, she
wore a baggy house dress, sagging socks, slippers or beat

(19:06):
up house shoes, and a floppy hat. Often these clothes
aggressively did not go together. She had a stooped posture
on the stage, and as she got older and started
wearing dentures, she would perform with her teeth out. This
persona wasn't exactly androgynous. The character was a woman who
went by Moms, but it was blurry enough that various

(19:28):
people wrote into newspaper question and answer columns over the
course of her career to ask if Mom's Maybe was
a man or a woman. As far as her appearance
and her demeanor went, Mom's madly stage persona could come
off as almost sexless, but at the same time her
comedy could be very risk gay. She did not swear.

(19:51):
Nothing was sexually graphic in a way that if somebody
said that's really risk gay like today, you would imagine
something quite different. There was a lot of double entendre, though,
and one of Mom's running themes was about her attraction
to young men and the uselessness of old men, unless
an old man was bringing her a message from a

(20:12):
young man off stage. People who performed with Maybe have
talked about her openly having relationships with other women. In
some photos she's shown as elegantly attired in address and pearls,
and in others she's in handsome suits that are more androgynous,
are almost aggressively masculine. In the documentary Whoopie Goldberg Presents

(20:34):
Moms Maybe, dancer and comedian Norma Miller said quote, we
never called Moms a homosexual. That word never fit her.
We never called her gay. We called her Mr. Moms.
Let's carry it over to her comedy and to the
venues where she performed as well. For example, in April
of nineteen thirty four, the Ubangie Club opened on the

(20:56):
former site of Connie's. In One of its frequent headline
acts was Gladys Bentley, who was an openly lesbian performer
who wore men's attire and was sometimes backed up by
drag queens. You Bangie Club became known for both performers
and clientele who we would probably describe as LGBTQ today,
and one of its performers was Mom's. Maybe we will

(21:20):
get into Mom's Mabley's later career after we paused for
a sponsor break. A lot of Mom's. Mabley's comedy career
was really unique for the time. Most women working in
comedy or on the stage at all were as part

(21:42):
of a duo with a man, but Mabley was a
solo act. In nine she became the first woman's a
headline at the Apollo Theater as a solo comedian. For decades,
she was really the only black woman doing solo stand up,
and again, this started before that term was even coined.

(22:04):
She was also appearing on Broadway in the nineteen thirties,
at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. At this point,
there were several Broadway productions with all black casts, but
they often had white directors and producers, and they were
tailored for a white audience, but the show's mainly appeared
in were developed and directed by black people, or they
were otherwise focused on the black experience. In general, these

(22:27):
shows did not run for long. They're often described as
not appealing to white audiences and critics. In nineteen thirty one,
she was in Fast and Furious, a colored review in
thirty seven scenes at the New Yorker Theater. In addition
to being part of the casts, Maybe worked with author
and anthropologists Orneil Hurston to develop some of the sketches,

(22:48):
and Hurston appeared in this show as well. Then she
was in Max Rednecks Blackberries of nineteen thirty two, a
CPIA musical review. This ran at Liberty Theater west of
odd Way on forty two Street, and it ran for
twenty five performances. Then there was Swinging the Dream in
ninety nine, which I am just desperately curious about. This

(23:11):
was a swing musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream,
with a cast that included Butterfly McQueen and Louis Armstrong.
It ran for thirteen performances. Uh. Reviews of it were
not great. And I cannot imagine why this sounds incredible
to me. I mean, I can't imagine why. The answer
wise racism, but I'm still it's this sounds incredible to me. Uh.

(23:36):
Most of the script has been lost, which is one
of the reasons I'm just desperately curious about it. We'll
put it on the time machine list. It's one of
the stops will make mainly had some small film roles
during these same years. Like her Broadway rules, these were
in films that were made by and four black people,
a genre that became known as race films. One of

(23:57):
these was Emperor Jones, which came out in three starring musician, actor,
and activist Paul Robeson. Her film work continued into the
nineteen forties, including playing her comedic persona in Killer Diller,
which came out in nine. In Night, she played a
boarding house matron in boarding House Blues, in which the
boarding houses residents who are all performers, put on a

(24:20):
show to save moms and her boarding house from bankruptcy.
The thing that she became the most known for during
these years was her comedy. On stage, she booked longer
and longer contracts at the Apollo, ultimately appearing there more
than any other entertainer and earning as much as ten
thousand dollars a week. She constantly changed up her acts

(24:42):
that would continue to appeal to returning members of the audience,
and soon she was nicknamed the funniest woman in the world.
As the civil rights movement evolved in the nineteen fifties
and sixties, Mabley's comedy started to include more and more
social satire and commentary about racism, sexism, and Paula ticks.
This continued as white audiences became more aware of her

(25:04):
with the evolution of comedy albums. Maybe recorded her first album,
Funniest Woman Alive, before a live audience in Chicago in
nineteen sixty and it was released by Chess Records. It
was a hit, and she went on to record ninety
more comedy albums during her career, many of which made
the Billboard two hundred. Her nineteen sixty one Moms Maybe

(25:26):
at the u N hit number sixteen on the Billboard charts,
which was the highest ranking comedy album by a woman,
and that record stood for the next decade. As Maybe
became more well known to white audiences, she used her
disarming stage persona to make social and political commentary that
probably would have been impossible without it. Her sets included

(25:48):
fictional conversations with world leaders where she set them straight
on various wrongs. She made pointed observations about the realities
of racism and segregation. For a example, on her nineteen
sixty three album I Got Something to tell You, she said, quote,
you know the first thing I would do if I
was president, I would give a certain Southern governor a

(26:09):
job as ambassador to the Congo and let him go
crazy looking for a men's restroom with white on it.
Throughout the nineteen sixties, she also did benefit performances to
raise money for causes like Southern Students Freedom Fund, which
provided aid for students who had been arrested for their
civil rights activism. She did a show at the Apollo
Theater to raise money for the March on Washington, and

(26:31):
she sold photographs during some of her shows to raise
money for the Selma to Montgomery March. She was also
a member of the n double A CP, and she
attended the White House Conference on Civil Rights in nineteen
sixty six that inspired her album Mom's Maybe at the
White House. She also gave multiple performances at prisons all
over New York, including Sing Sing and Riker's Island. Mabley's

(26:55):
television debut was also connected to all of this. In
nineteen sixty seven, Harry Belafonte produced A Time for Laughter,
a look at Negro humor in America. Bellefonte described this
as an effort to both demonstrate black people's humanity for
the white world and to inspire joy and laughter within
the black community. That was the first time Mom's made

(27:17):
Lee was on TV. Maybe had long talked about seeing
her audiences as her children, and when she started doing television,
she said, quote, the only difference I found when I
started doing TV was that instead of looking at the
audience as my children, I looked at the world as
my children. She appeared on multiple televised comedy programs and
variety shows, including The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Carol

(27:40):
Burnett Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Flip Wilson Show.
These television appearances introduced her to a larger white audience
than her albums had, and that fed into bookings at
venues like the Kennedy Center. But at that point she'd
been performing and famous among black audiences for fifty years.
In nineteen sixty nine, Mom's Mayblee's cover of Abraham, Martin

(28:04):
and John, which is the song about the assassinations of
Abraham Lincoln Martin, Luther King Jr. John F. Kennedy, and
Bobby Kennedy, hit number thirty five on the Billboard Charts.
She performed this song as Moms, but it was a
completely serious and audibly grief stricken performance. In the nineteen seventies,
Maybley's comedy included her opposition to US involvement in the

(28:26):
Vietnam War, and in the nineteen seventy two interviews she
said quote, I've shed many a tear over those boys.
I wanted to go over there, but the government said
I was too old. But if I'd gone over there,
I'd have said, come on, children, let's go home. Also
in nineteen seventy two, she supported past podcast subjects Shirley
Chisholm's election campaign and appeared at a Stars for Shirley fundraiser.

(28:51):
In nineteen seventy four, Moms Mayblie made her last TV
appearance as a presenter at the Grammy Awards with Chris Christopherson.
At the time, Stofferson was thirty eight, and the two
of them played up Mom's attraction to young men. Made
asked him the name of the song he wrote, and
after he replied, help me make it through the night,
answering quote, if you can make it for half an hour,

(29:13):
It'll be all right with me. Their banter went on
for a full five minutes before announcing the award that
went to Gladys Night In the pips and Maybley took
her teeth out in the middle of it. It's amazing.
You can see this on YouTube. Also good also in vour.
Maybe had her first lead in a feature film. This
was called Amazing Grace and she played Grace Teasdale Grimes.

(29:36):
It's about a woman who goes up against a corrupt
politician and it's posters read quote, Who's coming to put
an end to dirty tricks, crooked politicians and lion mayors?
Who America's most glamorous, sexiest female superstar moms. Maybe It's
about time. Maybe had a heart attack during the production

(29:56):
for this film. She returned to the set after having
a casemaker implanted, and she used her publicity for the
film to promote voting. But this was her last appearance
on screen. She died on May five in White Plains,
New York, at the age of about seventy eight. She
was survived by four children, five grandchildren, two sisters, and

(30:19):
three brothers, including her brother Eddie Parton, who had helped
write some of her material. She had spent her last
years living with her daughter Bonnie. At least five hundred
people attended her funeral, and the marquis at the Apollo
Theater was changed to read Harlem mourns Moms Maybe. Comedian
Dick Gregory gave a eulogy in which he said that

(30:39):
if she had been white, she would have been known
fifty years before today. Mom's Maybe is known as one
of the founders of American stand up comedy. A lot
of later comedians have cited her as an inspiration, including
Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Wanda Pyke's, Arsenio Hall, and Whoopie Goldberg, who,
as we said, made a documentary about Moms in originally

(31:02):
called I Got Something to Tell You before it was
picked up by HBO. In the nineteen eighties, Clary's Taylor
worked with playwright Alice Childress to write a play called Moms,
which debuted at the Astor Place Theater in the character
of Granny Clump and Eddie Murphy's The Nuttie Professor is
also a tribute to her man in Mom's Mable his

(31:23):
own words, her influence was more pervasive than all of
that quote. There's not a comedian in show business that
hasn't stolen material from moms, not white or black, as
fast as they steal them. God gives me some more.
I love her genius. Uh and, as I said, I
had multiple times just stops what I was doing and

(31:45):
watched some I watched Mom's mainly on YouTube, and I
also watched a Wanda Psyke's appearance as her on Marvelous
Mrs Maisel. I watched that three or four additional more
times working on So yeah, I think a lot of
her comedy definitely holds up. I have not listened every

(32:06):
to every single album she has ever done, so I
don't think I can make a blanket statement that every
Mom's mainly joke has weathered the years well, but a
lot of it is still hilarious. UM. I have listener mail.
It's from Christine and it's it's actually an Instagram message.

(32:28):
Christine said, I just had to send this to you
considering you just said an episode on the history of
unicorns and I don't remember this being mentioned. Have a
great day. Several folks have sent us this video and
the video just went up yesterday, I think as of
when we are recording this, and it is a video
called did Unicorns Exist? And it is talking about the

(32:49):
extinct animal Elastmotherium sibericum also called the Siberian unicorn. What
one of the things that the video talks about is
that it is believed to have gone extinct at least
a hundred thousand years ago, but there's radio carbon dating
that suggests it was more like thirty nine thousand years ago,
so this animal would have existed alongside prehistoric humans. Maybe

(33:13):
this is the origin of unicorn myths. Here's the thing though,
this video has like the most horse like illustration of
this animal most of them, it looks much much more
like a rhinoceros with an almost buffalo like hump um
very rhinocerosy, and also they were twice as big as

(33:36):
rhinoceroses are. Um, it's not impossible that people in Eastern
Europe and Central Asia, where the where these lived um
had some kind of oral tradition relating to them. But
there's a way clearer progression from the Indian subcontinent through

(33:56):
Greece and Rome into Europe, which is what we we
traced on that episode. So thanks to everyone who has
sent us that video. If you would like to write
to us, we're a history podcast at i heeart radio
dot com and we're all over social media at miss
in History's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on the I

(34:17):
heart Radio app and anywhere else that you like to
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