De-Corning America

At the start of network radio comedy, you had Ed Wynn pulling off routines he had done in vaudeville. Almost 20 years later, at the start of network TV comedy, you had Ed Wynn doing them all over again.

Fred Allen certainly thought comedy was retrograding and griped about it in the early ‘50s. But Jack Benny didn’t think so. He felt just the opposite. He might have been right.

Wynn’s show didn’t last terribly long on television. Even the King of Television, Milton Berle, wore out his welcome after a few years. The loud, hyper Jerry Lester was dumped from late night TV and eventually replaced with the calmer, more intellectual Steve Allen. New people with a different way of expressing humour were coming along: Nichols and May, Bob Newhart.

Ironically, Benny was one of the old-timers who stuck around but his show depended on situation and characters than old comedy banter.

Here are his thoughts in a syndicated column from 1950.

Americans Getting Smarter About Jokes, Benny Says
By PATRICIA CLARY
Hollywood, Sept. 6. Americans are getting smarter all the time, Jack Benny said today. They don't think mother-in-law jokes or Benny's nickel tips are funny any more. Audiences have been decorned, Benny said, since he started in radio 19 years ago.
"We're a lot more sophisticated than we used to be. We know all about everything. We demand new and better entertainment," he said. "The mother-in-law joke was practically the foundation of radio. Now it's just corny.
"I used to use jokes about my leaving a nickel tip when I should have left a quarter. Now I've established the stingy character, and it's still funny, but we have to be subtle about it."
Benny took his wallet out of the deep freeze and took us to lunch at Romanoff's, the most expensive place in town, where everything's gold-plated from the customers to the rest rooms.
He's not really stingy. He didn't wince a bit at thawing out $3 for a plate of hash.
Benny himself had an egg. He's watching that waistline. Benny will go back on the radio Sunday over C.B.S. for his 19th straight year--the longest stretch of any radio comic. What people think is funny has changed so much since then, he said, that his first show would smell from here to Cucamonga.
"Hello, folks," he introduced himself in 1932. "This is Jack Benny. There will be a slight pause for everyone to say, 'Who cares?'"
The comics who got all the howls in those days romped on stage, said, "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the studio," and fired jokes as if they were reading straight out of Joe Miller.
"People were used to that and had to be educated to accept anything better," Benny said. "A few of us led the way with situation comedy. Now they don't like the corny old jokes. They've been decorned, you might say."
Benny's first shows were so new they kidded the sponsor and satirized commercials.
"I did everything Henry Morgan 'introduced'," he said, "except get fired."
After kidding talking commercials, he kidded singing commercials. This year, keeping pace with the public, he kids television commercials.
It’s tough figuring out what's going to be funny each year and sometimes a guy gets a bit ahead. Like the time 20 years ago Benny appeared on the London Palladium stage wearing a business suit.
“They'd never seen a comedian who didn't wear baggy pants,” he said. “The show was half over before they caught on I was funny anyway.”