Terms Which Have Disappeared

[Bigger Don]

Radio comedians were supposed to do a new show with new material every week, thrity-nine weeks out of the year, and the better ones did. Hope's 1938-40 stuff is excellent, because he was willing to experiment. He stopped experimenting once he became "Mr. Army Camp." It may have cemented his place in the hearts of GIs everywhere, but it was tedious, mediocre, even lazy comedy. Even Hope himself finally realized this, completely shaking up his radio format after the war, but it was too late to really recapture his prewar momentum, and by the fifties he'd stopped trying.

Vaudeville performers used the same routines, week after week. When they went to radio, they needed new material each week. That is driven the repetition-rate the attendant audience will endure, i.e. how often a given audience will listen to or watch the same routine.

In short, road shows are different than weekly shows. If I saw Jerry Seinfeld in a comedy venue a couple of times a year I would expect the show to be 90% or more the same material, although his sitcom would be written fresh for each week. Even over a number of years, George Carlin's routine continued to have some repeated routines. Heck, same thing happens in music. Musical performances, whether rock/pop "stars" or locals or philharmonics or Sousaphonic marchers, use familiar material in each performance.

IOW, the insinuation than the troops failed to "catch on" seems a false canard cast upon them.

 

[Zombie_61]

For me, Hope's best work is his pre-WW2 radio shows...But his TV work from the fifties forward started out mediocre -- you could see him skimming the cue cards on TV all the way back to 1950 -- and by the 70s they were unwatchable. I used to feel embarrassed for him, and by the mid-80s, I couldn't bear to even look at his shows.

One of the reasons they stopped filming Mr. Hope's "specials" from Hawaii was that he insisted on filming outdoors as much as possible so that home viewers could enjoy the scenery. The problem was that his eyesight was failing, and the cue cards eventually got so large that the microphones were picking up the sound of them flapping in the winds.

 

[2jakes]

Earlier I mentioned that Bob Hope came to visit us while we were stationed
overseas during a very stressful time in our lives.
That's all.
You can dissect the man, write volumes of what he was, wasn't and
what he became.

I wouldn't know.

All I know is that he made us feel good, even if only for a short while.
I was there.

Were you?

 

[LizzieMaine]

As those who have actually listened to them know, Hope's broadcasts from stateside army camps between 1941 and 1945 were not vaudeville shows. They were part of his regular Tuesday night NBC series for the Pepsodent Company, and followed a standardized format from week to week: Hope would do a monologue for about seven minutes, followed by a crosstalk routine with Jerry Colonna, followed by a song by Frances Langford or Skinnay Ennis, followed by a Pepsodent commercial by Wendell Niles, followed by a ten-minute routine featuring a guest star, another commercial, and a variation on "Thanks For The Memory" as a sign-off.

The overall quality of these broadcasts declined steadily during the war era -- Hope's comedy characterization, which had been quite sharp in the years before the war, began to blur as he tried to shoehorn in topical jokes whether or not they were consistent with his characterization, and often resorted to Berle-like mugging to get a rise out of the live audience, to the puzzlement of the listeners at home. He began to depend more and more on Colonna's stooging for laughs, and his guest-star bits took on a tedious sameness from week to week. If the guest star was male, there would be jokes about how much ruggeder that star was than Hope. If the guest star was female, there would be leering innuendo designed to appeal to horny soldiers. The fact that the show was playing before an audience of servicemen desperate for entertainment resulted in a serious compromising of the actual quality of the comedy -- and to a definite and obvious laziness on the part of Hope's writers, who simply stopped trying to do anything new or original. They figured they could get loud, easy laughs without having to work especially hard to come up with new, different material, so why bother to work any harder than necessary? Hope might have been an indefatigueable USO entertainer, but as a comedian he was lazy, and it showed.

Hope's popularity waned severely after the war -- when he had to go back to performing his weekly broadcasts before civilian audiences, he found they were much more discriminating and critical than the GIs, and he had a difficult time adjusting to the changing tastes of the postwar audiences because he hadn't kept up with comedy trends. He began to go thru writers like they were corn chips, but no matter what he did he couldn't recover the level of popularity he had achieved between 1942 and 1944. He coasted on the reputation he achieved during those two years for the rest of his life.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was there.

Were you?

I'm talking about his radio work in the 1940s, which I've listened to, and written about professionally, and which I've examined within the context of other work being done by other comedians at the same time. I'm interested in his comedy *as comedy*, not in Hope-as-USO-icon, which is an entirely different topic. His biographers have much to say about that part of his career, but it's not something that's of special interest to me.

Some might suggest that Hope's comedy techniques should be judged by a different standard because he entertained the troops -- but I submit that if his material was being broadcast as entertainment for listeners at home, then he must be judged by -- and was judged by the radio critics of the time by -- the same standard as any other comedian on the air: the quality of the entertainment received by the listener at home. That's what Pepsodent was paying him for.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's nothing more painful than watching a comedian who is past prime: it's like watching an over the hill boxer climb into the ring and get pummeled by someone nearly half their age. Timing is everything in comedy, and when it's gone, it's gone.

I remember going to a college "Marx Brothers Night" and seeing a silent short that Chico and Harpo Marx did about 1960: all I could think about was how the rapid fire gags and puns flew decades before when they really were part of the Marx Brothers. In their prime they were in a class by themselves. By the time that they made that short feature, they were just a couple of sad old men. The night was supposed to be about laughs: I left the auditorium early, trying to hold back tears.

One of the saddest things I ever saw was the night Milton Berle hosted "Saturday Night Live." I have never been a particuar Berle fan -- his radio work seldom had much to reccommend, and his early TV work is often loudness and abrasiveness substituting for decent materlal. On his "Texaco Star Theatre" shows I often find Sid Stone's "Street Corner Pitchman" commercials far more amusing than anything Berle himself does. But even with that said, seeing Berle as an old man completely out of his element trying to upstage a bunch of performers half his age who were products of a technique entirely alien to him was genuinely painful. I felt bad for Berle, and I was angry at Lorne Michaels for putting him, and the rest of his cast, into such an obviously hopeless situation. The only -- *only* -- funny thing in the whole show was Belushi, Murray, Ackroyd, and Morris impersonating the Texaco Quartet at the very beginning. The rest of the show wasn't just unfunny, it was *cruel.*

On the other hand, maybe the one comedian who ever lived who never lost his skill with age was George Burns, whose timing was just as sharp when he was in his 90s as it was when he was in his 40s. When he was working with Gracie, he was funnier as a straight man than a lot of comics were as comedians, and he didn't lose a single step working as a solo, at an age when many of his peers were retired or dead.

 

[BlueTrain]

Vaudeville entertainers didn't have to have new material for every town they stopped in and probably couldn't have even if they had to. Not only did they not need to, it enabled them to polish their act and get it down pat. This is still true for live, travelling shows today, although there aren't many. I guess travelling circuses are one of the few. Anyway, when television came along, it became difficult to be fresh in a performance and I suppose it still is.

 

[tonyb]

In a similar vein ...

Anyone catch the Tony Bennett tribute on TV a couple three nights back?

The pretext was a 90th birthday celebration, although old Anthony Dominick Benedetto reached that milestone some months ago. The performances were, on balance, better than I feared they might be, having witnessed so many similarly star-studded extravaganzas live down to my expectations.

It was a real relief to hear that he can still sell a tune. As a longtime fan, I really, really didn't want to feel embarrassed for him. I didn't.

In one pre-recorded vignette Bennett reminisced about being "discovered" by Bob Hope, who caught him at a venue in Greenwich Village, and who invited him to perform on his road show. Hope suggested he shorten his name. Make it fit on the marquee, he counseled.

 

[2jakes]

T

I'm talking about his radio work in the 1940s, which I've listened to, and written about professionally, and which I've examined within the context of other work being done by other comedians at the same time. I'm interested in his comedy *as comedy*, not in Hope-as-USO-icon, which is an entirely different topic. His biographers have much to say about that part of his career, but it's not something that's of special interest to me.

Your knowledge of his earlier work in the context of others of the time and your
lack of interest in the "Hope-as-USO-icon" which is an entirely different topic
to which I was making reference to, has been noted.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Vaudeville entertainers didn't have to have new material for every town they stopped in and probably couldn't have even if they had to. Not only did they not need to, it enabled them to polish their act and get it down pat. This is still true for live, travelling shows today, although there aren't many. I guess travelling circuses are one of the few. Anyway, when television came along, it became difficult to be fresh in a performance and I suppose it still is.

When Fred Allen did his first radio show, he sat down afterwards and said to himself "What am I going to do now? I've used up my entire life." He worked himself nearly to death for the next eighteen years trying to keep ahead of the answer to that question. It's not without reason that he called his autobiography "Treadmill To Oblivion."

The better comedians found ways to live with radio's demand for new material. Allen emphasized satire, ensuring he would never run out of material as long as people in authority continued to do stupid things. Jack Benny emphasized characterization. Correll and Gosden had a continuing storyline that carried them along for fourteen years without ever having to depend on jokes. Henry Morgan ridiculed sponsors, which is something listeners never got tired of. Eddie Cantor emphasized "new talent," constantly presenting new cast members. Red Skelton camouflaged the triteness of his material by wrapping it up in outrageous characters. Radio was an uncompromising medium, and those who couldn't adapt to it -- Berle, George Jessel, Jack Haley, Joe E. Brown -- had to move on to something else.

 

[Zombie_61]

Just to be clear, I've already mentioned the fact that I don't care for Bob Hope, but there are a lot of performers from every decade/era that are in that category for me. That doesn't necessarily mean I don't have respect for them. And one of the reasons I keep trying to see what everyone else sees in Mr. Hope is because of his USO work. He could just as easily have stayed home and did whatever he wanted, but he went out of his way to let U.S. troops know someone was thinking of them and I respect that.

Conversely to Miss Lizzie's Milton Berle experience, years ago I attended one of the Comic Relief shows produced by HBO to raise money to help the homeless here in the U.S.. The first half hour of the show was fairly lackluster despite the various comedians' best efforts, and then they announced Don Rickles. Now, I'd seen Mr. Rickles in various movies but had only seen a few of his live routines on shows like The Tonight Show, so I wasn't sure what to expect. And some of the audience around us actually groaned and made comments in reference to "this old guy?". But Mr. Rickles showed them all how it's done, and within 10 seconds had the audience laughing and cheering and energized to a degree that would have seemed nearly impossible only minutes before. The "old guy" was in charge, and played the audience like a musical instrument. It was brilliant, impressive, and just the kick in the pants the show needed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've seen Rickles in person as well, and yes, he's another performer who can dominate a stage by sheer force of will. I've never cared for him on television, because I think he's too "hot" a performer for a "cool" medium, but seen live he's the real deal. He played our local big summer event about ten years ago, and came swaggering out onto the stage, sneered at the crowd with contempt and spat into the microphone "Jeeeezuz Christ. Sixty years in show business, and where do I end up? The Maine F***ing Lobster F***ing Festival."

And the crowd was his from that moment forward.

As for Hope and his USO persona, if I'm having to constantly remind myself "what a great guy he is for doing this and that" when I should be laughing, from a comedy perspective there's something wrong with the situation. It's the same problem I have with a lot of Eddie Cantor's later work -- by the 1940s, he was, to much the public, what Hope seems to be to some people here -- a Saintly Figure Above All Possible Criticism Because He Does So Much Good In The World.

Well, that's all very nice. I support, myself, a lot of the same causes that Cantor did during his lifetime, and I think he was a very gutsy man to take some of the stands that he did at the time that he did. He was, what you might call, a premature anti-Fascist, and he paid for it by losing sponsors but he didn't back down. He had principles, real principles, and refused to compromise them. Good for him. He pushed the March of Dimes harder than anyone who ever lived. He encouraged the kiddies to love their mamas and eat their vegetables and study hard in school. All very nice. But when he turns on the water works and wallows in the schmaltz at the end of his broadcasts, I turn it off. I don't like cheap emotional manipulation from comedians, especially when they make it a dominant part of their public persona in lieu of actually making me laugh.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^^
I'd wager we've all known many a fine human who wasn't particularly good at his work. And we've known a few really rotten characters who surprised us with genuinely decent gestures. I certainly have. Hell, I was downright chummy with a couple of guys who committed homicides during the times I willingly and happily associated with them.

 

[ChiTownScion]

All very nice. But when he turns on the water works and wallows in the schmaltz at the end of his broadcasts, I turn it off. I don't like cheap emotional manipulation from comedians, especially when they make it a dominant part of their public persona in lieu of actually making me laugh.

I've gotten into similar discussions recently regarding what I've always thought of Red Skelton and his Pledge of Allegiance pontifications. Lest I get too political here, I'll let it go at that. Make me laugh, he did. But that didn't give him the right to lecture others on love of country- as if only he and those of the same mind as him are entitled to that same love.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One of the worst people in show business was a comedian by the name of Frank Fay -- he was an arrogant egotist who was viciously cruel to his various stooges on and off the stage, he was a brutal drunk who mercilessly beat his wife -- who happened to be Barbara Stanwyck -- and he was a devoted white supremacist and anti-Semite who in the 1940s became an out and out Fascist sympathizer.

And yet he was also one of the funniest men on the stage in the 1920s, specifically cited as an inspiration by Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and many other lesser lights of the time. Every single person who ever crossed his path absolutely hated his guts -- and every single comedian in the Era was in awe of his talent. He is still spoken of in hushed tones by comedy enthusiasts who find it hard to comprehend how such a monstrous creature could be so immensely funny.

 

[Bigger Don]

But that didn't give him the right to lecture others on love of country- as if only he and those of the same mind as him are entitled to that same love.

Seems to me he had as much right as Norman Lear had to proclaim his organization was the "People for the American Way", a name indicating anyone who disagrees with him are against the one and only American way? Sure, Mssrs Skelton and Lear exercised the same right. It's the same right the Dixie Chicks exercised, as well as those who criticised them. It's the right defended by the ACLU for the Nazis when they wanted to march in Skokie, as well as the one that some say should be limited when people speak out on one side or another of certain topics now. It's freedom of expression, protected by the First Amendment.

 

[tonyb]

Seems every collection of partisans wishes to hijack the flag as theirs alone. Hell, by all outward indications, some think they alone own the language. "Freedom," for instance, is only what they say it is.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Freedom?" That's easy. It's a town 30 miles from here, just a few minutes outside of bustling downtown Brooks, and well known as one of our region's most outstanding producers of hay.

 

[2jakes]

According to Google, "Freedom" is about 630 miles from
Arlington National Cemetery.

 

[Zombie_61]

...Eddie Cantor...But when he turns on the water works and wallows in the schmaltz at the end of his broadcasts, I turn it off...

That's the one problem I have with Don Rickles. I've seen him perform live twice, and at the end of his act both times he apologized to anyone in the audience that he might have offended. I imagine he began doing this because he'd had a confrontation or two with some knucklehead who couldn't take a joke, but even after the fact it took all of the impact out of his act.