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Moms Mabley
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Loretta Mary Aiken
19 March 1894, Brevard, North Carolina
23 May 1975, White Plains, New York
"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.
Jackie "Moms" Mabley (March 19, 1894 – May 23, 1975) was an American standup comedian and a pioneer of the so-called "Chitlin' Circuit" of African-American vaudeville.
Mabley was born Loretta Mary Aiken into a large family of twelve children in Brevard, North Carolina in 1894. Her father, James P. Aiken, owned and operated several businesses while her mother, Mary, kept home and took in boarders. Her father died a sudden accidental death when she was eleven. By the age of fifteen Mabley had reportedly been raped twice and had two children that were given up for adoption. After being pressured by her stepfather to marry a much older man and encouraged by her grandmother to strike out on her own, she ran away to Cleveland, Ohio with a traveling minstrel show where she began singing and entertaining.
She took her stage name, Jackie Mabley, from an early boyfriend, commenting to Ebony in a 1970s interview that he'd taken so much from her, it was the least she could do to take his name. Later she became known as "Moms" because she was indeed a "Mom" to many other comedians on the circuit in the 1950s and 60s. She came out as a lesbian at the age of twenty-seven, becoming one of the first triple-X rated comedians on the comedy circuit.
During the 20s and 30s she appeared in androgynous clothing (as she did in the film version of Emperor Jones starring Paul Robeson and recorded several of her early "lesbian stand-up" routines, and was one of the top women doing stand-up in her heyday, and eventually recorded more than 20 albums of comedy routines. She appeared in movies, on television, and in clubs and performed at the Michigan Women's Festival shortly before her death in 1975.
Mabley was one of the most successful entertainers of the Chitlin' circuit, earning US$10,000 a week at Harlem's Apollo Theater at the height of her career. She made her New York City debut at Connie's Inn in Harlem. In the 1960s, she become known to a wider white audience, playing Carnegie Hall in 1962, and making a number of mainstream TV appearances, particularly her multiple appearances on the Smother Brothers Comedy Hour when that CBS show was the number one show on television in the late 1960s, which introduced her to a whole new Boomer audience.
Mabley was billed as "The Funniest Woman in the World", and she tackled topics too edgy for many other comics of the time, including racism, one of her regular themes was her romantic interest in handsome young men rather than old "washed-up geezers", and regularly got away with it courtesy of her on stage persona where she appeared as a toothless, bedraggled woman in a house dress and floppy hat. She added the occasional satirical song to her jokes; her version of "Abraham, Martin and John" hit #35 on the Billboard charts in the summer of 1969. At 75 years of age, Moms Mabley became the oldest person ever to have a US Top 40 hit.
She had four children (aside from the two who were adopted when she was a teenager) and five grandchildren.
Mabley died in White Plains, New York from heart failure and was survived by her children, Bonnie, Christine, Charles, and Yvonne Ailey. She is interred at Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York.
Had four children: Bonnie, Chriistine, Yvonne and Charles.
Profiled in book "Funny Ladies" by Stephen Silverman. (1999)
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
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"A woman is a woman until the day she dies, but a man's a man only as long as he can."
"There ain't nothing an old man can do for me except bring me a message from a young one."
"Love is like playing checkers. You have to know which man to move."
"Life is like a game of poker: If you don't put any in the pot, there won't be any to take out."
"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."
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