Old Gags? Not to Worry

Jack Benny, by various accounts, wasn’t a rollicking humourist when he was off the air. He’d talk about how to be funny on the air, though, in various interviews.

Here’s one from the International News Service’s “Assignment America” column from 1955. It covers a variety of topics. Jack addresses his reputation as a worrier and reveals he never eats kadota figs. I believe he’s the only celebrity that ever mentioned them.

Jack Benny is Serious
By Phyllis Battelle

NEW YORK, May 2 (INS) — Expecting Jack Benny to be funny in the privacy of his hotel suite is something like expecting Marilyn Monroe to quote Tolstoy with accuracy.
It is a vain hope. Just as Marilyn is too shall-we-say busy to make mental notes on the classics, so Jack is too serious to make light of his million-dollar talent.
"You take the long-standing gags about me," he said genially, arms folded solemnly over his plaid smoking jacket, "the ones about my being stingy, and about wearing a toupee, and about my feud with Fred Allen. Those were each stumbled upon by accident, but since they caught on a lot of hard work has gone into them.
"People still want those gags now, but it gets tougher every time—the variations. We've kept these subjects alive for so long (Jack's stinginess, 23 years, the Allen feud, 17) that whenever we mention them now they must either very subtly done, or they must be so wild that we seem almost to be parodying our own jokes."
This was typical Jack Benny talk, off-screen and off-mike. He was once known as a man who dined on coffee and fingernails, but now that he is getting a trifle older he is no longer the No. 1 worrier among comedians.
"That other gag about my being 39," he said, and his deep dimpled chin trembled with droll emotion. "It is not true at all. I am 61. I no longer worry as much as most comedians do. I have, instead, a mere anxiety complex."
Benny, who was in New York for a rare business-pleasure jaunt, still looks at life and his career, however, with the respect of a man who was a poor plumber and an unheralded violinist before he located easy street.
"To remain an individual star for 25 years is not easy," he went on, demonstrating why the life of the clown is serious business. "Especially not now, with television. People are getting so sophisticated, there isn't a small town in the U. S. that doesn't know exactly what the heck is going on.
"You just can't be a gangster [sic] any more. You've got to be an actor, a perfectionist. You've got to be as sharp as the people watching you."
He, himself, is a perfectionist "of the worst kind," Benny says. His sense of dramatic timing, which is legend in radio and screen worlds, causes him to flare up when an actor reads a line without a sense of the rhythm of it.
"I despise myself, and try to hold it in. But I feel like firing people on the spot. It's most unreasonable of me, but I've spent years— with the writers, Rochester, Mary and others— going over every line, to make sure the timing is just right," he remembers.
"With practice like that, you get to know that the addition of one apparently, harmless word in a line will completely kill the gag!"
Jack, who looks slim and trim, says, "I play a round of golf every day and never eat Kadota figs or broiled scrod for breakfast" and who does not wear a toupee "but since people find the idea funny, I don't mind if they think I do," is returning to the West coast this week.
But he will be in Manhattan in mid-July, with wife, Mary, to spend his vacation. Their adopted daughter, Joan, is expecting a baby to arrive here then.
"Imagine spending July in New York," he says, grinning and grunting simultaneously, which is no mean feat. "If Joan weren't mine, I'd fire her . . . timing is lousy."