A very sad debate has raged among very sad people who either have no problems of their own or far too many to face. Namely, is 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein an official entry into the Universal Horror shared universe or a goofy, one-off, stand-alone picture? It’s a question far too many people feel very strongly about.

In high school, I wrote a parody of Who’s on first? based on the rock groups The Who and The Guess Who. I was both Abbott and Costello, and truthfully, aren’t we all? That’s why they were so popular. My in-laws were named Barb and Lou. I called them Bud and Lou. It may have contributed slightly to our divorce. They became annoying after a while. Abbott and Costello, I mean. What age did you outgrow them?
I was drunk late one Saturday night. We’d had sex, Roberta and me, as part of a post-divorce conjugal visit. She wanted to have sex again, but I was too drunk. Still, I couldn’t sleep. I turned on Sir Graves Ghastly, an even more low-budget horror movie host than The Ghoul. He was showing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
I was eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich and wishing I were more sober. I took a couple of hits on a roach in the ashtray. “This movie is just horrible. Mary Shelley’s rolling over in her grave right now. She’s screaming, ‘I didn’t create the monster just so he’d have to endure these two assholes.’”
Post-divorce, I was living in a third-floor attic apartment and sleeping on a sofa bed. I’d laid some old couch cushions on top so the bars of the frame wouldn’t grind against my back. The other room was a kitchen with a small table. A bathroom in between. A door to the second-floor hallway at the bottom of the stairs. A claustrophobic hell-hole, though the bathtub was an old claw-footer with a circular curtain around it, and sometimes I curled back into the womb in there.
“What the fuck are you watching instead of fucking me?” Roberta asked.
“I officially do not like Abbott and Costello anymore.”
“Why did you ever?” she asked. “Laurel and Hardy, I get. But Abbott and Costello? Cheap American knockoffs.”
“Did they ever meet Frankenstein?” I asked.
“They didn’t have to,” she said.
“Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula, all in the same movie. How is anyone going to be scared by the Rat Pack of monsters?”
“Turn that shit off and come back to bed,” she said, though technically I was still in bed, sitting on the edge, squinting at the tiny set. She got up to use the bathroom. Sir Graves interrupted the film to do his usual schtick—painting a face on his chin and singing a song upside down.
I turned the TV off and never turned it on again. Roberta got back on the sofa bed and it rattled and squeaked. “Tell me about Mary Shelley.”
“Now, that’s a story,” I said, and we made love until the sky outside the small boxy windows began to ash its way into dawn. We got the bed rocking, lifting the metal legs of the fold-out contraption off the thin rug and back down again. The noise was indeed monstrous, and even the old Russian couple on the second floor, who knew only five words of English, let their anger show the next morning, deliberately banging on doors to wake up the monster. Roberta herself quickly slipped away, afraid of what we’d brought back to life.

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