Our Inductees: Mom’s Mabley

Biography

Mom’s Mabley was the 13th comedian inducted into the Official National Comedy Hall of Fame®. Loretta Mary Aiken, known by her stage name Jackie “Moms” Mabley, was an American standup comedian.

A veteran of the Chitlin’ Circuit of African-American vaudeville, she later appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

In the 1960s, she became known to a wider white audience, playing Carnegie Hall in 1962 and making a number of mainstream TV appearances, particularly her multiple appearances on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when that CBS show was number one on television in the late 1960s, which introduced her to a whole new Boomer audience.

Mabley was billed as “The Funniest Woman in the World”. She tackled topics too edgy for most mainstream comics of the time, including racism. One of her regular themes was a romantic interest in handsome young men rather than old “washed-up geezers”, and she got away with it courtesy of her stage persona, where she appeared as a toothless, bedraggled woman in a house dress and floppy hat.

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