Lou Costello, of the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, always talked about being raised in Paterson, New Jersey. It was his hometown and he was proud of it. Returning the favor the town of Paterson is tooling up to celebrate what would have been Lou's 100th birthday with a big Lou Costello celebration. This article will tell you all about it. [Warning: It's one of those sites that will ask you for your age and sex and zip code.]
One correction to the article: Lou most definitely did not write the team's signature routine, "Who's on First?" It was an old burlesque routine that they cleaned up and polished and made their own. It's also, as has been noted by several scholars of comedy, one of the most contrived bits of all time, founded as it was on the dubious premise that "they give baseball players odd names these days." Really? Was there ever a baseball player named Who? Or anything remotely like that? The piece actually made more sense when the satire troupe called The Credibility Gap parodied it and had a rock promoter deciding that at his concert, he was going to put The Who on first. There really was a rock group called The Who.
But of course, logic doesn't matter when they're laughing, and people laughed long and hard at Bud Abbott and Lou Costello arguing about an infield peopled with interrogative pronouns. Costello, when he was on target — which wasn't all the time — was a great comedic performer, and Abbott was one of the best straight men ever in comedy. They were probably better than a lot of their movies, most of which I find a lot more tedious now than I did when I was eleven.