In the early 20th century before cinema became the mainstream of entertainment, there were theaters where people with various skills, even those considered weird and useless, found an audience and became stars. The city of New York was home to many such theaters that featured everything from concerts, plays, freak shows, and even the American burlesque. One of these shows was the act of Sober Sue, the woman that everyone found impossible to impress with their jokes.

In the late 1800s, a man named Oscar Hammerstein I built several opera theaters, including Victoria Theater, in New York City. In the hands of his practical and less artistically inclined son Willie, the theater became a vaudeville landmark, earning itself the nickname “the Nut House.”

In the 1860s, 16-year-old Oscar emigrated from Berlin to the USA with a love for theater. Though at first, he did not find any work as a musician, he worked as a cigar-maker, an impresario, then published a trade journal and even became a publicist. He soon began composing music and developed a natural talent for acoustic engineering, earning over 50 patents and enough money to build many theaters across New York where he produced many classical music concerts, operas, and plays.

Being an art-lover did not make Oscar a good businessman as he produced works that he loved rather than what the audience would have loved to see. One of Oscar’s theaters, the Victoria Theater, also known as Hammerstein’s Victoria, which was located at the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, came into the hands of his son, Willie, who turned it into a successful vaudeville theater in 1904.

Vaudeville was originally a French entertainment theatrical genre that included comedy without moral intentions in the 1700s. In the 1880s, it became popular in the United States and Canada and came to feature a wider variety of performers including singers, dancers, comedians, magicians, strongmen, ventriloquists, trained animals, and other “freak” acts.

One of the famous acts at the Victoria was “Sober Sue—You Can’t Maker Her Laugh” which was given a spot in the Roof Garden by Willie. He even announced a prize of $1,000 to anyone who could make Sue laugh, attracting professional comedians who would perform free of charge in an attempt to prove their worth.

Willie had a knack for advertising in a sensational manner to attract an audience to the theater. He would book the front page of tabloids and sports pages to advertise with flashy headlines like “The Singing Murderess” to get the public’s attention. So it was with Sober Sue, and Willie did his best to hype the act. Since Sue didn’t have any other talent or act, he booked her just to sit on stage in the Paradise Roof Garden on top of Victoria and challenge people to make her laugh.

The large prize money would tempt many from the audience who would try to get her to crack a smile at least and failing every time. To keep the profits coming, Willie began to invite professional, high-profile comedians who would take up the challenge to do what their rivals could not. This made the act even more financially successful as he didn’t have to pay the comedians, and the audience would flock to see them perform.

There were speculations and criticism that Sue was probably deaf or partially blind and so unable to understand the jokes the comedians made. However, the widely accepted theory is that she had congenital facial paralysis that prevented her from smiling or laughing.

Sue is believed to have suffered from Moebius, or Möbius syndrome, named after the German neurologist Paul Julius Möbius who described it in 1888. The neurological disorder is a result of badly formed cranial nerves which causes a variety of facial muscle problems including an inability to move eyes, close the eyelids, or form facial expressions. It could also sometimes cause crossed eyes, and the people affected by the syndrome are often mistaken to be intellectually disabled.

For Sue, however, the disorder gave a chance to earn money without doing much, though Willie only paid her $20 per week along with expenses. He made a lot of profit by luring top comedians by as good as conning them with the challenge. The truth about her condition, or at least the story that was circulated, came out after she finished working at the Hammerstein’s Roof Garden.

Little is known about her real life, her real name, or how she looks except for a few small news items about her act, and in one case, an injunction forbidding her from further performing as Sober Sue in 1907.

The motion for injunction was passed on a Susan Kelly, which could have been her real name, and according to the New York Times on July 4, it was adjourned until July 8. It is not known why she was restrained from appearing at the Roof Garden, though it could have been because her act amounted to a scam.

The Sober Sue act became so popular that soon many other female performers would adopt the name and perform the same act. The phrase “it could make even Sober Sue laugh” became a line often used by reviewers to describe exceptional comedy shows.

According to a short notice that appeared in Time Magazine on October 4, 1943, the boyfriend of a performer named Susan Cole with the professional name “Sober Sue” was charged for evading the draft. This Sober Sue was billed at carnivals as “Sober Sue, the Mirthless Marvel,” and the prize money was $100. Another story published in Pennsylvania’s Chester Times on March 10, 1947, stated that the sideshow attraction Sober Sue with prize money of $100 for making her smile and $1,000 for making her giggle got off at the wrong stop, Media, Pennsylvania, on her way to North Carolina from New York.

[Sources: Vaudeville, Hoaxes]