Who's on First?

[1] Other examples include "The Baker Scene" (the comedian "loafs" at a bakery located on Watt Street) and "Who Dyed" (the business owner is named "Who").

[1] In the 1930 movie Cracked Nuts, comedians Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey examine a map of a mythical kingdom with dialogue like this: "What is next to Which."

In British music halls, comedian Will Hay performed a routine in the early 1930s (and possibly earlier) as a schoolmaster interviewing a schoolboy named Howe, who came from Ware, but now lives in Wye.

",[1] a performance of which can be heard in an episode of the radio comedy program It Pays to Be Ignorant from the 1940s.

It was a big hit in the fall of 1937, when they performed the routine in a touring vaudeville revue called Hollywood Bandwagon.

[2][1][6] The routine may have been further polished before this broadcast by burlesque producer John Grant, who became the team's chief collaborator, and Will Glickman, a staff writer on the Smith show.

[7] Glickman may have added the nicknames of then-contemporary baseball players like Dizzy and Daffy Dean to set up the routine's premise.

This version, with extensive wordplay based on most of the fictional baseball team's players having "strange nicknames" that seemed to be questions, became known as "Who's on First?"

An abridged version was featured in the team's 1940 film debut, One Night in the Tropics.

The duo reprised the bit in their 1945 film The Naughty Nineties and it is that longer version which is considered their finest recorded rendition.

several times on radio and television (notably in The Abbott and Costello Show episode "The Actor's Home").

[11] At one point in the routine, Costello thinks that the first baseman is named "Naturally": Abbott: You throw the ball to first base.

The skit was usually performed on the team's radio series at the start of the baseball season.

[15][16] Musto would have been 17 when Abbott and Costello teamed in 1936, but a script entitled "The Baseball Rookie," with the names of Costello and Joe Lyons, his straight man before Abbott, dates even earlier, perhaps to 1934, when Musto would have been 15 and Gordon would have been 19.

In 2015, the heirs of Abbott and Costello filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit in the Southern District of New York claiming unauthorized use of over a minute of the comedy routine in the play Hand to God.

The suit named producer Kevin McCollum, playwright Robert Askins, and the promoters as defendants.

routine was in the public domain because the original authors, Abbott and Costello, were not the ones who filed a copyright renewal, but the court did not see the need to make a final determination on that.

[19] (The court did not reach the issue of whether the routine had entered the public domain since the parties had apparently stipulated that they believed its copyright term was coterminous with One Night in the Tropics, where it had first been published for purposes of copyright law at that time).

[21][22] The sketch has been reprised, updated, alluded to and parodied many times over the decades in all forms of media.

Some examples include: On several occasions, players with names phonetically similar to the characters in the sketch reached the appropriate bases as runners, or defended them as infielders: