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Since his earliest years in the business, Flip has made an intensive study of comic styles. Deeply impressed by Max Eastman's Enjoyment of Laughter, an analysis of what makes people laugh, he began a book of his own, which until recently he carried in a loose-leaf folder and made periodic entries in. Today the distilled contents of that folder are enshrined on four laminated tablets in Wilson's Hollywood house. Written in antique script with illuminated headings, Flip's Laws of Comedy look like a medieval Book of Hours. "Be sudden, be neat," one exhorts. "Be unimpassioned," reads another. "If you are serious about something, leave it out."
His off-the-cuff comments about his craft are more revealing. "Generally," he says, "it only takes one thing that's different to be great. I don't think there's anything that can compare with Charlie Chaplin's walk and remarkable use of the body. With Bob Hope, it's timing; with W.C. Fields it's complete effortlessness. A long time ago, I decided what my thing was and I eliminated everything else. I used to work with a partner, but he'd get drunk and forget his lines. No partner. I eliminated the orchestra because I didn't sing or dance. I used to wear a ratty old coat and a funny hat. I threw those away. No props. Just me. Flip Wilson."
Flip worked at sharpening what he calls his "funny" with the same persistent, singleminded, analytical approach. His Columbus and Isabella routine, which lasts only six minutes and 50 seconds, took three years to perfect. Eventually such effort paid off, and Flip moved out of the small clubs to the "chitlin circuit," the black equivalent of the borscht belt, which included big theaters like Harlem's Apollo, the Howard in Washington and the Regal in Chicago. "When I used to emcee rock concerts in those theaters," says Flip, "I'd come out and the audience would start milling around waiting for these cats to go 'Doo, doo, doo.' They'd yell, 'We want to hear them!' So then I'd say, 'At least you didn't boo me.' And they'd go, 'Boo, boo, boo!' But I would have their attention. The important thing is to get the audience's attention."
The big break came in 1965. when Black Comedian Redd Foxx was a guest on the Tonight Show and Johnny Carson asked him who was the funniest comedian around. Foxx's reply: Flip Wilson. Carson invited Flip to appear on the show, and Flip broke it up with a spoof of a black woman buying a wig ("You sure it don't make me look too Polish?"). Before long, he was a hot item, and in the following years made appearances on Laugh-In and the Carol Burnett and Dean Martin shows, along with many repeats on Tonight and other talk shows.