The Monstrel Minstrel Show

Over the years, I've studied with interest the various survivals of the "Minstrel Show" -- originally perfomed in blackface makeup, and one of the most popular forms of American entertainment from the 1850s until shortly after WWII. The postwar and civil rights eras made the format uncomfortable -- and increasingly less visible -- but by no means did it disappear; in the UK, the "Black and White Minstrel Show" stayed on the air until 1978!

In the US, it seemed, it had vanished long ago, or had it? I had a childhood memory of seeing something on the old Sonny & Cher show, which I'd recalled as a sort of "Monster Jamboree" with the hosts and cast in monster makeup, but looking over the surviving show synopses, scripts, and YouTube videos, I could never seem to track it down -- until now. The skit starts in at roughly the ten minute mark in this video.  

The opening song is a loose adaptation of "Alexander's Ragtime Band," after which Cher throws a line to the tall fellow in the middle (not Sonny), the first of many bad jokes, beginning with "Tell me, Mr. Underlocutor" -- a riff on Interlocutor, which was always the title of the man in the middle of a Minstrel lineup. That same person then asks for a joke from "Mr. Moan" (Sonny), which is no less bad -- he's one of the "endmen," originally known as Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones (in this skit, Cher is "Madame Bones"). This segues into a separate skit, "Stabbit and Ghostello," a rather bad version of the "who's on first" routine. A still more sorry dance sequence, with Sonny donning a huge turban and dancing with a sort of "Igor" figure, comes next. We then go back to the main stage, followed by an "invisible man" gag, after which Cher sings, descending a skeletal staircase, as "Vampira." A finale -- "When you're dead" -- closes out the show.