The Naughty Nineties

Two performers, Dexter and Sebastian, work a showboat on the Mississippi, running through every routine they have. When the boat's captain loses his controlling share in a rigged card game to three gamblers, the pair set about winning it back, which mostly means putting on other people's clothes. Jean Yarbrough's Abbott and Costello comedy uses the show business of the eighteen nineties as an excuse to do the only job it cares about, which is being funny without pause. Its real place is elsewhere, in film history: this is where the longest and best known screen version of "Who's on First" lives. The pair kept performing the routine, in which players' names and question words keep changing places, on radio and television for years, and the version playing on a loop at the Baseball Hall of Fame today comes from this film.