The smarter, meaner, thinner half of one of the top comedy teams of the 1940s, Bud Abbott was the son of a circus advance man and a bareback rider, grew up on Coney Island and was shanghaied to Norway as a teenager. Returning to the U.S., he organized burlesque shows. The duo of Abbott and Costello was formed when Abbott, selling tickets at a burlesque theater, was pulled in as a last-minute substitute for Costello's indisposed straight man. Their blend of bickering cross-talk and zany slapstick got them a regular berth on Kate Smith's radio show and parts in a Broadway revue, "Streets of Paris" (1939)
Universal Pictures came calling, seeing in the team a modern Laurel and Hardy (though their appeal was more akin to Wheeler and Woolsey or Clark and McCullough). The team made more than a dozen films during the WWII years, mostly for Universal (and some on loan-out to MGM). They were light as air, mindless entertainments for wartime, and though critics lambasted them, the public flocked to see films like "One Night in the Tropics" (their first, 1940), "Buck Privates" and "Hold That Ghost" (both 1941), "Pardon My Sarong" (1942), "It Ain't Hay" (1943) and "Lost in a Harem" (1944). The team's classic "Who's On First?" routine was featured in the film "The Naughty Nineties" (1945). In the best of these films, the boys played good-natured, bumbling schemers and con men, caught up in circumstances beyond their meager control. Good leads and supporting casts (e.g., The Andrews Sisters, Martha Raye, Joan Davis) helped also.
With the end of WWII, the team's popularity slipped. This was not helped by the fact that they were put into increasingly juvenile, low-budget films for both Universal and on loan-out (twenty films from 1946 to the end of their career). In their better vehicles, the pair cavorted and double-talked through "Buck Privates Come Home" (1947) and "Mexican Hayride" (1948). But mostly, the titles told it all: "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1952), "Abbott and Costello Go to Mars" (1953), and so on.
By the time of their last, "Dance with Me, Henry" (1956), Abbot and Costello were as tired of each other as their audiences were of them. They split acrimoniously in 1957, and Costello died two years later. In 1961, Abbott tried a new act with partner Candy Candido, but it did not go over.
Abbott and Costello found a renewed audience on TV; not only were their films popular in reruns, but they briefly had their own "Abbott and Costello Show" (syndicated, 1952-1953). This show itself went into endless reruns, and Abbott supplied the voice for a cartoon version in 1966. Abbott and Costello also appeared on "The Colgate Comedy Hour" (NBC, 1951-1954). The two were tearfully reunited in a segment of "This Is Your Life" shortly before Costello's death. Abbott himself retired in the late 60s after a series of strokes and died in 1974.