SmilerG has a follow-up question to our piece here about cue cards on variety shows…
I'm wondering why physical cue cards are still used these days. I'd think hand-printing them with the required big markers on card stock is "old school."
Electronic prompters have been around for a while and surely could be more quickly created (loaded), with less labor and cost. Newscasters use the version of prompters that are attached to each camera, but aren't there also stand-alone versions? These wouldn't require sketch actors to look right into a camera, as the stand-alones would be positioned differently, more like the traditional cue cards.
I think the main reason we still have cue cards is that some performers simply prefer them…and that alone is reason enough. They find them easier to read than any prompter device they've tried so that's that.
But I can think of other reasons, one being that you don't have to worry about the prompter going down or tech problems. There's a guy standing there with all the lines written on big cards. That's pretty foolproof. On those news shows where someone's reading off the prompter, they nearly always have a printed-out script right in front of them because prompters do fail. A lot of shows think of the cue cards as the back-up for the prompters.
Also, that guy (or gal, I should note) with the big cards can move around easily to just the right position, holding them higher or lower in an instant, more or less moving with the performer who's reading from them. There are stand-alone prompter devices but they're not as rapidly moved…yet.
And sometimes, they want more than one line of dialogue displayed at a time. The cue cards Johnny Carson used for his monologues were not held by anyone. They were laid out side-by-side in front of them so he could decide to jump from the third joke to the fifth or skip one and come back to it. If you watch his old monologues, you can catch him peeking to the right (on your screen) for his first jokes and to the left for his last ones. There are other comics who when they read from cards, want two or more displayed at a time and the cue card holding person knows how to instantly do that.
There's a bit of personal rapport that exists between a performer and his/her cue card person that you don't get when it's coming off a TelePrompter operated by someone who's not right there on his or her feet on the edge of the stage, just three feet away. That may factor into it at times. I remember watching Bob Hope taping a sketch with his eternal cue card guy, Barney McNulty. Barney was to cue cards what Alexander Fleming was to penicillin. He held Bob's cards for something like half a century and every time Bob read a line wrong, he'd blame Barney, and Barney would apologize even though everyone knew it was Bob's fault.
Their relationship was a significant part of the atmosphere on those stages. I'm not sure I can explain why but it wouldn't have been the same without a cue card person there. When it wasn't Barney and Hope fumbled a line, Bob would blame whoever it was and say, "Hey, how come we couldn't get Barney today? He wouldn't have made that mistake."