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The show's effectiveness comes partly from the unusual format designed by Producer Bob Henry, a veteran of variety shows dating back to Nat King Cole in the '50s. "The first time I saw Flip live, he appeared on a small platform with a six-piece orchestra on the side," Henry says. "I thought, 'That's the way to do it—intimacy.' " To get Flip closer to the audience, Henry created a theater-in-the-round and placed emphasis on full-body camera shots. "The head-to-toe selling was important," he observes. "What Chaplin's legs were to him, Flip's body is to his program."
Banned were such clichés as long introductions, phony folksiness and chorus lines with phalanxes of pretty legs flung up into the camera. "The best contribution I can make as a producer is to let the personality shine through on the screen," says Henry. "It's a small tube. If you clutter it up with a lot of people, you lose the most interesting thing in the world—the human face." With simplicity as the keynote, nothing was allowed to overshadow the star—Flip Wilson.
Poor Family. Not being overshadowed is a relatively new experience for Flip, who might stand as the model for a black Horatio Alger character. Born Clerow Wilson in 1933, one of the 18 survivors among 24 children in his family, he was "so poor even the poor looked down on me." His father was a carpenter and sometime tippler who was always looking for work. "Occasionally he'd just stand on the corner with his hammer and saw, waiting for someone to come by who needed a job done," recalls Cornelius Parker, whose family ran a funeral home across the street from where the Wilsons lived.
Flip's mother abandoned the family when Flip was still a youngster, and his father floated from place to place in search of low rents. At one point he moved his brood into a coalbin cellar. "We'd steal buns from the A & P, milk, anything to keep alive," recalls Flip's brother Lemuel, a carpenter in Jersey City. "I used to steal Christmas trees so we'd have one on Christmas." In those days Flip was a quick, thin child with a runny nose and a big appetite; his brothers and sisters called him "Tin Can" because he ate so much. He used to hang around the fire station on his block, gagging it up with idle firemen. "He was always joking, always funny," says Fireman Ed Dawson.
When he was nine, Flip made his stage debut. The girl who was supposed to be Clara Barton in a school play became ill, and Flip, in the grand tradition of understudies, stepped in. No record survives of how his performance went over, but certainly the female role prophetically foreshadowed Geraldine. At about the same time, he sneaked into the old Mosque Theater in Newark to see the two comics who went on before the movie. "I knew then," he says, "that I had to make people laugh too."