Dialect comedy

Hillbilly humor was a somewhat common form of dialect comedy during the radio era, with shows such as Lum and Abner using the genre to full effect.

The 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls included Scandinavian dialect humor in the form of Betty White's Rose Nylund character, a Norwegian-American who fit early 20th-century stereotypes of the good-hearted but dense Swede.

In an article in the May 1936 issue of Radio Mirror, in a piece called "Ghetto guides the Goldbergs", writer Dan Wheeler describes Berg's "double life".

Berg, the successful actress and business woman, takes the reporter to a Jewish Ghetto on New York's lower East Side, where she spends a few hours a week gabbing in Yiddish with the old Yentas of the neighborhood about their children and poring over the vegetable carts that line the streets.

In 1928, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two white performers took their blackface act, Sam N Henry, which they did not have the rights to and changed it to Amos N Andy, which became one of the most popular shows of the time.

In 1948 Variety proclaimed the show “a national habit, almost as familiar as radio itself.” [5] Upon transitioning the show to television, Gosden and Correll took on the role of producers and hired a black cast including Alvin Childress (Amos), Spencer Williams (Andy) and Tim Moore (as King Fisher); Gosden and Correll had appeared as their characters in blackface on-screen in the 1930 talkie film Check and Double Check, which received poor reception.

The show was criticized for its portrayal of the “Mammy” or the happy go lucky black servant who wanted nothing more from life than to serve white folks.

Jewish performers such as George Burns, Jack Benny and Milton Berle had shows that were arguably forms of dialect comedy.

Comedians like Berle and others had come out of the same vaudeville tradition as the minstrel performers and as such did their shows in a classic variety format which included characters who were often based on racial and ethnic stereotypes.