Butterbeans and Susie were a comedy duo

Double act

A double act, also known as a comedy duo, is a comic pairing in which humor is derived from the uneven relationship between two partners, usually of the same gender, age, ethnic origin and profession, but drastically different personalities or behavior...

 made up of Jodie Edwards (July 19, 1895 – October 28, 1967) and Susie Edwards, née Susie Hawthorne (1896 – 1963). Edwards began his career in 1910 as a singer and dancer. Meanwhile, Hawthorne performed in African American theater. The two met in 1916 when Hawthorne was in the chorus of the Smart Set show. They married on stage the next year.

The two did not perform as a comic team until the early 1920s. They had been touring with the Theater Owners Bookers Association

Theater Owners Bookers Association

Theater Owners Booking Association, or T.O.B.A., was the vaudeville circuit for African American performers in the 1920s and 1930s. The theaters all had white owners and collaborated in booking jazz, blues, comedians, and other performers for black audiences...

 (TOBA) with a black husband-and-wife comedy team known as Stringbeans and Sweetie May. Upon the death of Stringbeans (Butler May or Budd LeMay), a TOBA promoter asked Edwards to take the stage name "Butterbeans" and for him and his wife to take over Stringbeans and Sweetie May's act. "Butterbeans and Susie" appeared for the first time shortly thereafter.

Their act, a combination of marital quarrels, comic dances, and racy singing, proved popular on the TOBA tour. They later moved to vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 and appeared for a time with the blackface

Blackface

Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky...

 minstrel troupe

Minstrel show

The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....

 the Rabbit's Foot Company

The Rabbit's Foot Company

The Rabbit's Foot Company, also known as the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and colloquially as "The Foots", was a long running minstrel and variety troupe that toured as a tent show in the American South between 1900 and 1950...

. Butterbeans and Susie published several recordings of blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

 songs interspersed with comic banter through Okeh Records

Okeh Records

Okeh Records began as an independent record label based in the United States of America in 1918. From 1926 on, it was a subsidiary of Columbia Records.-History:...

. They later starred in a black-produced feature film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

.

Butterbeans and Susie used their fame and influence to help younger black comedians. After seeing Moms Mabley

Moms Mabley

Jackie "Moms" Mabley, born Loretta Mary Aiken , was an American standup comedian and a pioneer of the so-called "Chitlin' Circuit" of African-American vaudeville.-Early years:...

 in Dallas, for example, they helped her gain acceptance at better venues. Even after leaving show business, they stayed friends with many black entertainers and put up down-on-their-luck comedians in their Chicago home. Stepin Fetchit

Stepin Fetchit

Stepin Fetchit was the stage name of American comedian and film actor Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry....

 stayed with them at some point in the 1950s or 1960s.

In 1926 they made a recording with Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....

's Hot Five, a mildly salacious blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

 number called, "He Likes It Slow".

Comedy act

Butterbeans and Susie's act played up the differences between the two. Susie wore elegant dresses and presented an air of composure and sexiness. Butterbeans, on the other hand, played the fool, with his too-small pants and bowler hat, bow tie, tails, and floppy shoes. He was loudly belligerent: "I'd whip your head every time you breathe; rough treatment is exactly what you need." However, his pugnaciousness was belied by a happy demeanor and an inability to resist Susie's charms.

Whereas Stringbeans and Sweetie May stressed song and dance, Butterbeans and Susie emphasized comedy with content that was frowned on by moralists. The typical act featured a duet, a blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

 song by Susie, a cakewalk

Cakewalk

The Cakewalk dance was developed from a "Prize Walk" done in the days of slavery, generally at get-togethers on plantations in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around"...

 dance, and a comedy sketch

Sketch comedy

A sketch comedy consists of a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches," commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as broadcasting...

. Short bouts of bickering peppered the act. The humor often centered on marriage or, more rarely, black life in general. One of their more popular numbers was "A Married Man's a Fool If He Thinks His Wife Don't Love Nobody but Him". The act could also be risqué at times. One of their more popular comic songs was Susie's saucy "I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll", full of racy double entendre

Double entendre

A double entendre or adianoeta is a figure of speech in which a spoken phrase is devised to be understood in either of two ways. Often the first meaning is straightforward, while the second meaning is less so: often risqué or ironic....

s:

I want a hot dog without bread you see.

'Cause I carry my bread with me.

. . .

I want it hot, I don't want it cold.

I want it so it fit my roll.

The song was accompanied by Susie's provocative dancing and Buttberbeans's call-and-response

Call and response

Call and response is a form of "spontaneous verbal and non-verbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the statements are punctuated by expressions from the listener."...

 one-liner

One-liner

One-liner may refer to:*one-liner joke*one-liner program, textual input to the command-line of an operating system shell that performs some function in just one line of input...

s: "My dog's never cold!" "Here's a dog that's long and lean." "I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll" was one of the few songs that Okeh refused to release.

The act usually ended with a song by Susie that showed that the two really were happily married, then Butterbeans's trademark song-and-dance number, "the Heebie Jeebies" or "the Itch". During this dance, Butterbeans thrust his hands in his pockets and began to scratch himself in time with the music. As the tempo increased, he pulled the hands back out and scratched the rest of his body. According to Stearns, this was the moment when the audience "flipped".