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
