Gagster, Not Gangster

Gangsters were big in the 1930s—Warner Bros. put them on the big screen, people followed their exploits in the papers, Gang Busters was on the radio. It, therefore, isn’t a surprise that a writer for Silver Screen magazine used an FBI metaphor to get into a feature story about Jack Benny.

(Jack had his own run-in with G-Men when he was picked up for smuggling jewelry into the U.S. But that’s outside the scope of this post).

The writer of the article praises Jack’s brand of comedy which rejected old-hat vaudeville and burlesque shtick like funny clothes or accents. But even in vaudeville Jack’s act, going back to his teenage days with Salisbury and Benny, was a classy act. Jack, in a way, didn’t need those clichés because he invented his own—he became a character with so many well-known attributes. He was at the forefront of a change from rowdy stage comedy to situation radio comedy.

The article also refers to “Buck” Benny, the Western parody persona he adopted in a series of sketches on his radio show. So known and liked were they that his writers concocted a feature film called “Buck Benny Rides Again.”

And there’s a reference as well to Jack’s fixation with the violin. You have to wonder if his failure to become the concert violinist his parents wanted ate at him for years and manifested itself in all those symphony appearances in later years.

This story appeared in the July 1937 issue. It’s a shame the cast picture got caught in the page gutter as Don Wilson is blocked out. Between Wilson and Mary Livingstone is Tom Harrington, Jack’s producer for Young and Rubicam.

Jack Benny, Public Comedian No. 1, Makes 100,000,000 People Laugh Every Sunday Night.
He Also Is Brightening Up The Screen.
Head Man OF THE Air Waves
By Laurence Morgan
IT IS a mere question of time now until Mr. J. Edgar Hoover will be free to disband his force of G-Men and retire to the peaceful life of a country gentleman. You ask, "how come?" Well, M'sieurs et Mesdames, it's thisaway: In another month or so, maybe sooner, it is very doubtful whether there'll be enough enemies, either public or private, left for him to fool around with. And, if by any chance there are a few left lying around loose, they will either be in such a maimed condition or in such a state of abject terror as to render them quite harmless. For the criminal has not yet been born who is tough enough not to blanche and quail at mere mention of that dread threat . . . BUCK BENNY RIDES AGAIN!
Robin Hood was a Girl Scout compared to this young man who has come thundering out of the West— if Waukegan, Illinois, can be properly termed the West— with a smoking six-gun in one hand and an equally smoking script in the other.
Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Black Bart doubtlessly turn over in their graves with a shudder every Sunday night at eight-thirty Pacific Standard Time as Jack (Bucky, to his pals) Benny takes to the ether and stalks Cactus Pete to his lair.

But all gags aside, Jack Benny, the gentleman from Waukegan, has definitely proven himself to be one of the foremost, if not the foremost comedian gracing both the radio and pictures today. Recently, here in Los Angeles, where actors and comics come, admittedly, a dime a dozen, a large down-town department store displayed in their window a life size cut-out of Jack Benny dressed in his regalia of Ol' Eagle Eye Buck. The Terror of the Plains. Now, there's nothing out of the ordinary about a life size cut-out— we've all seen dozens of them in front of theaters.

This particular one showed Jack in a ten-gallon Stetson, a very dapper sports jacket around which was buckled a business looking cartridge belt, a six-shooter dangling nonchalantly from one hand, a cigar clenched between his teeth and the famous Buck Benny leer in his cool gray eyes. Nothing at all for the uninitiated to become excited about. But from early morning until late at night that display window had a laughing, milling crowd in front of it. One of the store managers told me that this cardboard figure had created more attention and comment than any other window display they had ever before attempted. And the funny part of it was-they weren't advertising anything. That seems to prove something, doesn't it?
Anything of a biographical nature but the sketchiest of outlines would be superfluous here, Jack having kidded his earlier background so consistently on the radio. So, with Mr. Benny's kind indulgence, we'll just skip over the fact that he was born in Waukegan, Ill., having already mentioned it twice. Or how his days as a clerk in his father's department store were brought to an abrupt close when he resolved that life held no further allure unless he became, as quickly as possible, a concert violinist. And we'll omit that part of his career when the smell of grease-paint became overwhelmingly strong, when the call of the theater was vibrant within him . . . when he became doorman of Waukegan's only showhouse. In like manner we'll pass quietly over that cross-section of his life that brought him nearer and nearer the ever beckoning rostrum . . . when he became the ticket taker, a property boy, and finally a violinist in the pit orchestra.
"Those were the days," Jack sighs, reminiscently. "That was the hey-day of the truly great violinists. Ah, I can see them now . . . Mischa Elman, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and, yes . . . Jascha Benny."
Naturally, there may be some divergence of opinion as to whether Jack did the right thing by posterity when he deserted the concert stage to become a comedian, but, as he says, the field was becoming cluttered up with second rate geniuses and he thought he'd better branch out into a medium which allowed for more expression of the soul.
"My sense of the aesthetic was so often offended," he explains, by what came out of that darned violin. Maybe it was the brand of resin I used, I don't know. Anyway, I decided to become a comic instead.

So he did. His rise to the top of the heap of the vaudeville comedians was only a little short of meteoric. Followed long years of trouping from the rock bound coast of Maine to the sunny shores of California, playing every town enroute that boasted anything with a stage, than which there is no tougher business in the world. Ask anybody who's done it. Cold dressing-rooms, unlooked-for lay-offs. (Sure, even headliners have lay-offs) the loneliness that show people know, having thousands of acquaintances and few real friends. It takes all that to reach the top via the vaudeville circuit— all that and a little more. And it is that "little more" that Jack Benny possesses in large copious quantities.
It was while playing in Los Angeles a few years ago that he was spotted by some very important people from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio. "What did I tell you?" boasted one v. p. to the other v.p. "You're right," was the reply. "Where's that contract?" And that's how Jack happened to be signed to do a part in one of the first musicals to be produced in Hollywood, "The Hollywood Revue of 1929." Following that he appeared in "Chasing Shadows," and "The Medicine Man."
But the stage, with its live audience, still beckoned and he returned to New York to accept one of the leading roles in Earl Carroll's "Vanities." After that show closed Jack was a little undecided whether to return to Hollywood and pictures or to accept a very enticing offer to play another vaudeville circuit. "You know how it is," Jack explains, diffidently, "I'd done so much trouping I often wondered if my parents weren't holding out on me and were really Gypsies, after all." He pauses to light a cigar and then dreams quietly ... a far away look in his eyes. "Sometimes," he sighs, "I'm just a vagabond ... a wild, untamed thing."
However, he didn't have to make a choice after all because, as it happened, a famous columnist invited him to appear on his radio program one night as a guest artist and Jack gladly obliged. Two weeks later the happily amazed Mr. Benny was handed a long term radio contract of his own, complete with microphones and sponsors. Today this overworked young man has two bosses . . . Paramount Studios and his original radio sponsors who, by the way, have just signed him to a new three year contract. To a great many people attempting both picture and radio work this has often caused a lot of trouble and hard feeling on both sides. But not so in Jack's case. Fortunately, for all concerned, Paramount and NBC have worked out an arrangement whereby neither his picture nor radio engagements conflict, although, in so doing, he garners an occasional ticket for speeding from one studio to another. And so everybody is happy, especially Jack. And Mr. and Mrs. Public.



Any attempt to analyze whatever quality it is that makes Jack Benny's style of comedy stand out from all others, like the proverbial sail on a submarine, would be well-nigh impossible. But stand out it does, and to such an extent that, in comparison, he makes the great majority of alleged comics appear about as funny as a Vassar Daisy Chain. There is an old saying among show people that straight comedy is the most difficult thing in the business.
"Straight" comedy means, in the parlance, not to employ any of the standard "props" of the comedian, such as bizarre facial make-up, misfit clothes, heavy dialects etc. But without these "props" about nine out of ten of the funny-men drawing down tremendous salaries would find it necessary to go back to clerking in the corner cut-rate or to driving a bakery wagon. Which, by the way, doesn't seem like a bad idea, now that I mention it.
Jack, though, has never had any use for make-up of any kind except, of course, the standard grease paint necessary for moving picture photography. And as for clothes, instead of getting a laugh from some outlandish misfit suit. Jack is recognized on and off the stage as one of the best dressed men in Hollywood or New York. And when it comes to a dialect . . . well, old Buck Benny just naturally doesn't use one, unless you can call almost perfect diction a dialect.

No, Jack relies on nothing but his matter-of-fact, conversational tone of delivery to get his laughs. That and a marvelous sense of timing. The definition of “timing” is a subject that has been discussed and argued pro and con probably more than any other one point of comedy technique. However, all definitions boil down to the same thing. It is the manner of delivery by which a master of "timing" can produce a belly-laugh instead of a mild chuckle out of a very ordinary gag. That about sums it up. Naturally, all comedians who are worth their salt must have a certain sense of timing, but only one in a hundred possess "it to such a finely marked degree as Jack Benny. That's why Jack can take the most mediocre line and make it sound excruciatingly funny. It's like the timing of a boxer's punch, only instead of hitting you on the jaw-bone, Senor Benny smites you on your funny-bone.
Take the matter of Jack's voice, his stock in trade, one might say. Where so many comedians have to resort to synthetic foreign dialects or some other form of vocal affectation (especially those who kill themselves with their own gags), Jack's chief charm lies in the quiet, unruffled mariner in which he puts over his best punch lines. He seldom, if ever, raises his voice. And it comes as a very definite relief after hearing the laugh-getting tactics employed by some of our very best (?) gagsters. You've heard them, those priceless wits who have a violent case of hysterics before, during, and after the telling of their own jokes.
And so, in a nutshell, that has been the rise of Jack Benny, Public Comedian Number One. His has been no sudden overnight rise to fame and popularity but rather a long, gradual climb which, after all, is the surest way to achieve anything worth while.

He lives quietly in Beverly Hills with his wife, Mary Livingston, who, by the way, is a comedienne of no mean ability herself, and between pictures makes sporadic forays on New York for a few radio programs. He shuns all forms of violent exercise like the plague, his favorite sport being to watch the nags run themselves into a lather out at Santa Anita, where his unerring ability to judge horseflesh sometimes nets him the staggering sum of four or five dollars clear profit. He staunchly denies being superstitious but always whips out his own cigar lighter when anyone offers him the third light from a match. "You know how those things are," he says, "why take foolhardy risks?"
And if you should happen to want to find Jack Benny and he's in New York at the time, you can most likely find him at the Friars Club placidly devouring a large plate of cold asparagus. Or, if he's in Hollywood, first take a peek into the studio cafeteria where, in all probability, you can also find him placidly devouring a large plate of cold asparagus.