Sunday 19 November 2017

Listening to Benny

“Did you hear Jack Benny’s show tonight?” Fred Allen would ask on the air to Portland Hoffa, and then proceed to use Benny’s own material to set up jokes that left his audience laughing in recognition.

CBS moved Allen’s show to Sunday nights after Benny on March 8, 1942, and so long as Allen had a show on the radio, that’s where he remained (Allen’s last broadcast was in 1949). And he kept a close ear on Benny.

The Chicago Times’ Don Foster evidently sat in on one of Allen’s listening sessions. He wrote about it in the second of a two-column series dealing with Allen that appeared in the paper on November 12th and 13th, 1947. Here are the columns.
NEW YORK.—It’s Fred Allen’s gag about vegetarians living to be 90 and then getting run over by a meat truck. The payoff is that Fred himself is now a vegetarian. The comedian is going meatless, has quit smoking and spends all day Monday in bed (the latter on doctor’s orders) to try to get ahead of his high blood pressure.
Fred is also autoless---has never owned one, in fact, and doesn’t expect to own one, even though he’ll be working for an auto sponsor starting Jan. 4. He insists there’s nothing unusual about this.
“I was on the air for Sal Hepatica for years,” he reminds you, “but I never took Sal Hepatica. Do you think all the people who work in the vegetarian store where I buy my food are vegetarian? I go into a Radio City drugstore and see most of them sitting at the counter eating hamburgers.”
A fellow TIMES columnist, Earl Wilson, and this radio reporter were discussung various and sundry topics with Allen after his NBC broadcast Sunday night. The topics which Allen took up and disposed of in devastating order included a couple of Allen’s pet gripes—radio ratings and studio audiences. We asked him how he was bearing up under his new Hooper rating, which has him in a tie with Bob Hope for first place.
“Ratings don’t mean anything,” said Fred. “They call a couple of guys in Minneapolis and that determines your standing. I’ve been doing the same kind of show for 15 years. Why should I suddenly be at the top?
“We simply try to do an intelligent program week after week because we assume that the radio audience has some degree of intelligence.”
ALLEN has no patience with comedy shows that go in for school boy slapstick in an effort to wow the audience. They’re an insult to the listeners’ intelligence. Furthermore, the practice of tailoring shows to please the people in the studio has all but ruined radio comedy, Allen believes.
It has ruined it for the whimsical type of humor that Stoopnagle and Budd were once famous for, like the time Stoop and Budd were taking inventory in a yacht store and found they had only three yachts left. This type of whimsy depends for its laughs entirely on situation and dialogue, and Stoop and Budd turned the yacht episode into an extremely funny comedy sequence without resorting to any form of slapstick, said Allen. By the same token a medium that has become so conditioned to studio-audience reaction has shut the door on the writer of the James Thurber brand of whimsy. Radio comedy, Allen believes, was never meant to be played before a visible audience.
He recalled the broadcast on which he appeared with Knute Rockne just before the great Notre Dame coach took off on the flight that was to end in his death. Allen and Rockne were guests on John B. Kennedy’s program originating from a Broadway theater. A glass curtain separated the principals on stage from the theater audience. The audience could hear the program on a loudspeaker in the theater’s auditorium but the audience’s laughter and applause was not audience on stage and did not go out over the air. “It was an eerie thing,” said Allen, “to look out and see those people laughing and applauding without being able to hear them.”
But that is the way he believes it should be. If a comedian must have an audience to play to let it be a silent audience as far as the performer and the listening public are concerned. If he can’t hear the applause and the laughs, the comic won’t be so tempted to try to get bigger and better laughs by mugging his way through the program.
The comedy show that is “must” listening with Allen before he goes on the air Sunday nights is the Jack Benny program. But more about that tomorrow.
NEW YORK.—The first order of business on Sunday evenings for Fred Allen and his cast of funmakers is to gather in one of NBC’s audition rooms on the eighth floor of Radio City and listen to the Jack Benny program from Hollywood. This is at 7 p.m., New York time, an hour and a half before Allen himself goes on the air.
Allen thus keeps track of what he fellow feudist is up to and in case Mr. Benny tosses off a wisecrack about Mr. Allen the latter can return the favor with an appropriate jest on his own program at 8:30 (EST). But it’s not entirely a matter of checking on Benny. The Allenites listen, as much as for any other reason, because they seemingly enjoy the Benny program. It elicits some hearty chuckles from the Allen case, including the Chief Wit himself.
Last Sunday night when we were on hand to listen with them the first arrivals were the two secretaries whose job at this stage is to keep a watchful eye on the Allen scripts. One by one the denizens of Allen’s Alley drifted in: Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald), Senator Claghorn (Kenny Delmar), Mrs. Nussbaum (Minerva Pious), Fred and Portland arrived 10 minutes after Benny went on and Peter Donald gave Fred a quick fill-in on what had gone before.
FIRST the boss of the Alley shed his topcoat and suit coast and seated himself at the head of the long mahogany table in shirt-sleeved splendor, the only male in the room in this state of working comfort.
The belated arrival of Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly), the program’s sound effects man, and the two producers—one from NBC and one from the advertising agency—completed the gathering.
In the opening of the Benny script, Benny, Phil Harris and Dennis Day were at a drugstore counter trying to decide what to eat. Dennis’ crack, “I’ll have a dish of ice cream with a strip of bacon on it,” evoked a laugh from the Allen cast, as did this bit of dialogue: “Do you,” asked Jack, “have any hot chocolate?” Waiter [Mel Blanc]: Here’s a Hershey bar and a match.
The comedy situation on the Benny program was this: Phil and Dennis decide to frame Jack by having Dennis, impersonating Ronald Colman, invite Benny and his lady friend [Sara Berner] to a masquerade party at the Colmans. Benny, attired in full cowboy regalia, and his companion come pounding on the Colman door after Ronnie and his wife have retired. After letting the party-goers in the Colmans decide to slip out the back door and leave the home to Benny and his girl friend. The situation up to that point had developed some hilarious possibilities, but from there to the finish, nothing happened. The ending was rather lame in view of the promising beginning.
THE consensus of the Allen cast was that the Benny program got off to a good start but dissipated the effect toward the finish.
“The beginning was very funny,” commented Fred, “but it’s hard to sustain.” He spoke as one comedian who understood what a fellow comedian was up against in his efforts to keep the program funny from start to finish.
Then the Allen cast, grouped around the table with Fred, got down to the business of giving their own script a final reading. The guests for the evening—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy—were not present, so Peter Donald read their lines as well as his own. The script reading out of the way, the cast sat around and chinned for a while.
Peter Donald, engaged in picking dog hairs off his blue serge suit, inquired: “Does anybody know where I can get a dog with blue serge hair?”
The talk turned to show business and of one individual, who isn’t exactly rated as a Boy Scout in money matters, Allen observed: “They’re going to bury $100,000 with him just to test it—to see whether you can take it with you.”
Allen continually moaned about having a studio audience, yet he played to them, too. He’d refer, or talk, to them occasionally in ad-libs. And then there was the time he had Jack Benny’s pants removed on stage, solely because he knew the audience would scream uncontrollably, and make the routine funnier. (Though I must admit I don’t know how Benny could possibly have stayed completely on mike while stooges were taking off his clothes. Wouldn’t he have moved around a lot?).

As for the “weak finish” on the Benny broadcast, the writers didn’t have much of a choice. They logically ended it with the Colmans invading the Benny home in a case of turn-about.

My thanks to Kathy Fuller Seeley for supplying these columns.

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