Harry Steppe - Career

Career

Known to theater patrons as "The Hebrew Gent," Steppe was billed as a Hebrew, Jewish-dialect or Yiddish-dialect character comedian. One of Steppe's alter egos Ignatz Cohen became a recurring and popular character based on an ethnic Jewish stereotype. Many of Steppe's variety shows featured musical revues and olios with dancing girls, comedy sketches and specialty acts. One performance of Steppe's "Girls from the Follies" featured "eight cycling models with thrilling stunts on wheels," operatic songs, ballroom dancing and chorus girls.

Phil Silvers and others credited Steppe with "introducing the phrase "top banana" into show business jargon in 1927 as a synonym for the top comic on the bill. It rose out of a routine, full of doubletalk, in which three comics tried to share two bananas." Silvers further popularized the term "Top Banana" in his 1951 Broadway musical and 1954 film of the same name. Steppe also claimed to have coined the phrase "Second Banana."

Steppe's sketches were performed by such well-known comedians as Phil Silvers, The Three Stooges, and Abbott and Costello. Steppe created the original "Lemon Bit," a skit built around a shell game that used lemons instead of peas. Abbott and Costello performed the "Lemon Bit" in their movie "In the Navy" and in their television program "The Abbott & Costello Show."

Although Steppe had penned the "Pokomoko" (aka Niagara Falls) Routine ("Slowly I Turned, step by step, inch by inch...")" and performed it with The Three Stooges, other writers, including fellow Vaudevillians Joey Faye and Samuel Goldman each laid claim to the skit, too. "Lifting" routines from another performer was standard operating procedure in the early-to-mid 20th century, and the famed routine was performed, without originator credit, by...

• The Three Stooges in the movie Gents Without Cents (1944)
• Abbott and Costello in the movie Lost in a Harem (1944)
• Lucille Ball in the TV show I Love Lucy (1951), Season #1, Episode #19 ("The Ballet")
• Abbott and Costello on TV in The Abbott and Costello Show (1952–1953)