SHE doesn't walk onstage. She insinuates herself. Rotary-drive hips, and fingers that were probably snapping out rhythms in the cradle. Overstuffed bosom beneath a Pucci dress, $450 shoulder-length brown wig, and eyelashes long enough to rake a lawn with. She coolly surveys the scene and lets fly with a sassafras falsetto: "Whoooo-eeeee! Watch out, honey! Don't you touch me! Don't you ever touch me!" Or: "When you're hot, you're hot; when you're not, you're not." Or her trademark: "What you see is what you get."
Nobody who watches television needs to be told who she is. She is Miss Geraldine Jones, the No. 1 character of TV's No. 1 comedian, Flip Wilson. Geraldine and her creator are like nothing that has ever appeared on a top-rated weekly variety hour. It is not simply that both are black, although that is significant enough. It is that Geraldine is pure ghetto caricature. Half the fun of her characterization comes from the clichés of the black experience that she embodies, the other half from put-ons of conventional white attitudes toward that experience. Five years ago, any network executive worth his Valium would have sworn that these were not the ingredients of mass entertainment.
Like Flip Wilson, Geraldine represents a fresh twist on traditional themes. The name is borrowed from a childhood crush of Flip's, a little girl in the grimy ghetto streets of Jersey City. The personality owes something to Sapphire, the endearingly bossy housewife on the Amos 'n' Andy radio show of the 1930s and '40s. The voice is derived from the Delta screech of Butterfly McQueen, the eye-rolling, stereotyped black maid in Gone With the Wind, and of so many other Hollywood oldies. What is different and up-to-date about Geraldine, says Flip, is that "she demands respect. She is not a loose woman. She always has some meaningful employment, and she's never asking for favors. Geraldine's liberated—that's where she's at. Everybody knows she don't take no stuff."
For that matter, none of the characters that Wilson plays take any stuff. "Like Geraldine, they're all in complete control," says Flip. "They're all alive, exciting, and in tune with whatever is in." There is, for example, the Rev. Leroy of the Church of What's Happening Now. The Rev, as Flip calls him, is a hot-gospeling preacher whose collection cup runneth over—into his pockets. There is Freddy the Playboy, the swinger with a quick eye for an ebony leg and an even quicker line of honeyed jive. There is Sonny, the White House janitor, Henry Kissinger's Doppelganger and the only sane voice in the Washington Establishment.
Narrative Gift. On his show, as well as on his records, Flip Wilson spins out these impersonations in anecdotes, not one-liners. His gift is for dialect and narrative, not gags. The laugh track of a Bob Hope or a Milton Berle is a crescendo to climactic punch lines. Flip's graph would be all hills and valleys, zigs and zags. He puts his material over gently, through sheer likability—and considerable body English. Though only 5 ft. 6 in., he has an amazingly elastic physical grace, and a repertory of motions that recalls the masters of silent movie comedy.