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Moms Mabley
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Loretta Mary Aiken
19 March 1894 – 23 May 1975
"The teenagers aren't all bad. I love 'em if nobody else does. There ain't nothing wrong with young people. Jus' quit lyin' to 'em."
~Moms Mabley
Lillian Gish has the longest movie career of any actress, having debuted as a 19 year old in An Unseen Enemy (1912), and making her last appearance in Whales of August (1987). Miss Gish was born in 1893.
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One the most successful entertainers of the Black vaudeville stage, also known as the Chitlin Circuit, was Jackie "Moms" Mabley, born Loretta Mary Aiken in 1894. At the apex of her long career, she was earning $10,000 a week at Harlem's Apollo Theatre. Mabley focused on conventional topics such as family and others not normally covered by comedians of the era, white or Black, such as infidelity, poverty, welfare, and inebriation.
Billed as the Funniest Woman in the World, she adopted her original stage name from a boyfriend, Jackie Mabley, and began her career at 14. A teenage runaway, she joined the Negro troupe of Henry Bowman and Tim Moore and, in a short time, became a success. Quick-witted and quick-tongued, Mabley's unorthodox, self-assured routines as an outspoken grandma while wearing bag-lady clothes--old-fashioned print dresses and floppy hats--was a favorite with Black female audiences, particularly when she was lampooning the psychology of men. Her career spanned five decades, although white audiences did not know of her until the early 1960s. Mabley played Carnegie Hall in 1962. Mainstream TV appearances in the 1960s included variety appearances on shows hosted by Flip Wilson, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" (1967), and "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" (1968). She was an inspiration for irreverent female comics of that era, including Phyllis Diller and, in her final years, Mabley poked fun at the president and other government officials.
"A woman is a woman until the day she dies, but a man's a man only as long as he can."
~Moms Mabley
"There ain't nothing an old man can do for me except bring me a message from a young one."
~Moms Mabley
"Love is like playing checkers. You have to know which man to move."
~Moms Mabley
"Life is like a game of poker: If you don't put any in the pot, there won't be any to take out."
~Moms Mabley
I always loved Moms Mabley. She was amazing. She could say the most outrageous things and get away with it. If anyone else had said things like that on the air they would have been banned from TV.
- Opossum Sally
