Those Happy-Go-Lucky Poor Folks: “A Couple of Swells”

[Image: “Schell’s Hobo Band,” formed in 1948 as a side project of Schell’s Brewery in New Ulm, Minnesota. The band itself has been successful enough that it now has its own Facebook page.]

[Don’t know what this is? See the series introduction here.]

Pop culture has always offered plenty of examples of our “Happy-Go-Lucky Poor Folks” theme. Some of these examples cross over into racial stereotyping, for obvious reasons: race and social class (at least in the U.S.) are all bound up together. What better way to assuage our cultural guilt about slavery than to claim that its victims are somehow not doing that badly after all?

But then there’s the old image of the hobo — the tramp — as a figure of fun. And it had nothing to do with race, only with the character’s hilariously déclassé lot in life. He (it was almost always a he) just seemed so unsophisticated, so silly, y’know? This stereotype was reinforced by much older cultural symbols, particularly that of the circus or stage clown.

Think Emmett Kelly, both father and son: even though they appealed to the audience’s sympathy, their first objective was laughter (however soft and gentle). “Look at the hobo,” the subtext went, “trying to sweep the spotlight off the stage! Doesn’t he know you can’t do that?”

A little weirdly to our eyes and ears, maybe, one thing which seems to have struck people as especially amusing “back in the day” was the very fact of the hobo’s poverty. That they didn’t have two coins to rub together — gosh, how could we possibly take them seriously?

Consider Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover at right (click to enlarge to full cover). This tramp probably (despite his belly size) hasn’t eaten pie for years. But look — he can steal a freshly baked one! And look — the baker’s dog will bite him on the bottom! What fun! (You could almost imagine this fellow sitting at fireside in a clearing in a forest, sharing the pie with his friends and regaling them with the comical story.)

(Yeah, I know: the geometry/physics here seem more than a little off: the dog shouldn’t be perfectly horizontal, even if he’s holding on tightly enough to be flying along behind the running tramp.)

Critically, though, this cover appeared in the Post in August, 1928 — just a little over a year before the onset of the Great Depression. Thereafter, with “real people” suddenly reduced to the social stature of hobos, coincidentally the jokes fell flat. These weren’t random outliers in the populace: they were friends and family…

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The Depression eventually went away, of course. Poor people didn’t go away, but we could tuck the issue of poverty back into its useful niche: as a subject for mass entertainment, especially in Hollywood.

For the most part, making entire films — especially musicals — about the poor just felt maybe a little too tacky. But the “fun” side of poverty, the amusingly empty pockets… sure, that could be played up in larger-scale light entertainments. What better way to achieve the proper tone than to have middle-class and well-to-do characters masquerade as hobos… who themselves dreamed that they could be middle-class and well-to-do?

By the way, note how the language used to describe these allegedly carefree souls affects our visceral response to them. As one source cited here puts it, “The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders and the bum drinks and wanders.” Once the term the homeless became common, though, all humor drained from the discussion — even though what the term stood for hadn’t actually changed.

So then, Easter Parade: the 1948 musical starring Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Peter Lawford, and Ann Miller as the characters respectively named Hannah, Don, Johnny, and Nadine. Don and Nadine are a successful vaudeville dance team, which breaks up when starry-eyed Nadine decides she’ll garner even more success as a solo act.

Both Don and Johnny eventually fall in love with Hannah — the girl to whom Don turns as Nadine’s replacement. She’s a pretty awful dancer, but boy can she sing… and play a role…

Don and Hannah’s real stage debut (after a false start or two) gives them several numbers to perform, together and separately. “A Couple of Swells,” here shown in a nicely-captioned YouTube clip, is maybe the most famous. Garland and Astaire are costumed as — yes — bums, fantasizing about the glamorous life they’d lead… if only… if only…

It’s a delight to watch, no? But only because we’re used to willingly suspending at least two disbeliefs (aside from the main one built into appreciating movie musicals: that people do much singing and dancing in real life):

• that Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, hard as they may have worked to get to where they were professionally in 1948, might seriously be portraying performers at the start of their careers; and
• that the bums in Hannah and Don’s musical characterizations might indeed lead more cheerful lives by dreaming of the ones they’ll never have — tennis courts, tea with the Vanderbilts, a yacht sailing up the avenue, a live horse…

Makes you want to don a battered top hat yourself, eh?