BRANOVER’S FOLLY

The American comedy duo of Branover and Goff was formed by two brothers, Samuel and Nathan Buchman, who assumed a pair of characters: Allen Branover, a passionate and prolix dreamer, always cooking up an outlandish scheme; and his brother-in-law, George Goff, an insurance salesman and placid straight man. The Buchmans grew up poor in Queens and in their teen years spent summers working as roustabouts for an upstate circus. They patterned their act on the Yiddish duo of Hy and Matty, but their popularity soon exceeded that of their precursors. Branover and Goff attained their fame in the theater and appeared frequently on the radio, though today they are probably best remembered for occupying two vertices of the famous Vaudeville Love Triangle, the third vertex of which was Nettie Geelhoed, better known as Auntie Swain of the Swain’s Swine Farm Variety Hour. Samuel met her first, and courted her for years, but she fell in love with Nathan. Such was the strength of the bond between the brothers that Samuel, still nursing his broken heart, served as Nathan’s best man at his wedding. Branover and Goff guested on several early television shows and made one successful foray into film, in the naval spoof Norway We Go, but finding scripts that suited their sensibility proved too difficult. In their mid-forties, both men were diagnosed with cancer, Samuel with liver cancer after a lifetime of drinking, Nathan with lung cancer having never touched a cigarette. They died within six weeks of each other, neither having had children. Geelhoed, as a widow, returned to her first love, science, and became a prominent embryologist who was instrumental in using adult somatic cells to create cloned organisms. She was awarded a share of the Hotchkiss Prize for her work on nuclear transfer and live clone birth. Last year, she undertook her most ambitious project yet, endeavoring to replicate both Branover and Goff. Last Friday, her work came to fruition when the two men appeared at the Bertens Theater. Their snappy repartee and almost stichomythic rhythm was stll very much in evidence, as well as Goff’s talent for delivering a killing blow in the form of a benign retort, which earned him the nickname “The Amiable Assassin.” One key example will suffice. Late in the show, Branover gets it in his head that he is near to discovering an entirely new form of artwork. “I approaches this in the spirit of a subversive,” he says, hands waving, hat donned and doffed repeatedly for extra jazz. “Good riddance to tradition! Good riddance to convention! Good riddance to naturalism and symbolism both! What is the central spirit of the thing? Can we teach it to sing its own purpose, to take responsibility as a thing-in-itself? I see myself, and you, and the rest of us gingerly circling this close controversy, afraid to approach but equally afraid to depart.” A bubble of silence swells momentarily in the hall. “Branover,” Goff replies. “That’s just a hot dog.”

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas