The Irritating Jack Carson

Jack Benny evolved a “gang” type comedy and a character in the early 1930s that others were stealing more than a decade later.

One of them was Jack Carson, a Warner Bros. contract actor who is pretty much forgotten now. He managed to hold out on radio until 1956, doing a 25-minute show on weeknights in his final season. Carson has a star for television on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but he didn’t exactly have a long career on the tube. He died in 1962.

To be honest, there wasn’t a great deal of originality in comedy on the radio, as John Crosby pointed out in his syndicated column of November 4, 1946. The most interesting thing about the column is one of radio shows he felt should be made has the same plot as The Pruitts of Southampton, Phyllis Diller’s 1966 sitcom that nine-year-old me adored.

The episode Crosby is reviewing is from October 30, 1946. The hypochondriac character was played by Irene Ryan, who performed the same character on Bob Hope’s radio show a few years later. The “South American tamale” is an uncredited Veola Vonn. She is supposed to be from Brazil, but she speaks Spanish. On this episode, to add to the Benny connection, he has jokes about both the May Company and Jell-O. And Del Sharbutt’s spots always talk about “table butter.” Is that different from ice-box butter?

The Narrow Circle
Radio In Review
BY JOHN CROSBY
Jack Carson, a great broth of a fellow in the movies, is somebody else entirely in radio. On his radio series, (CBS 8 p.m. E. S. T. Wednesday), Mr. Carson, is as stingy as Jack Benny and as unsuccessfully rakish as Bob Hope. His laughter is as raucous as the Great Gildersleeve’s and he is the butt of most of the jokes like, well . . . any radio comedian.
Carson's a character, in fact, is as skillfully blended as the Campbell Soup he advertises; it contains all the successful ingredients.
Besides Carson's composite personality, you get Arthur Treacher of the movies, who acts as his a butler and severest critic, just like Mr. Benny’s Rochester; Tugwell, Carson's radio nephew, who has Henry Aldrich’s personality but performs Mary Livingston's function, and a lot of the minor characters that wander in and out of small town comedy series such as Fibber and Molly and Gildersleeve.

The Carson show is a particularly irritating example of the inbred nature of radio because it happens to be a darned good comedy series. It is leisurely, well-directed, and extremely well acted. But virtually every bit of it has been borrowed from somewhere else. Mr. Carson, a much more likable fellow in radio than in the movies, has borrowed not only Mr. Benny’s stinginess but also his method for projecting it. The other night, for instance, Mr. Treacher asked him about the coke situation—that’s the drink, not the fuel—for a party Mr. Carson planned that evening. Did he think two bottles would suffice six people? “Yes—I think so. . . . We have plenty of straws.” The resemblance to Benny was acute not in what was said but how it was said, with a long, expert, laugh-provoking pause between the first and second sentences.
It doesn’t come over very well in print, but it was sound character comedy. Stinginess, as Harry Lauder demonstrated, can amuse a lot of people over an indefinite period of time. But aren’t there any other traits in human nature that could be exploited in radio? As a matter of fact, comedy of character is far more suitable for radio than gag comedy. Radio burns up gags by the barrel and, after all, you can only say so many things about the meat shortage and even the Sinatra gold mine is going to run out sooner or later. Comedy of character is infinite but it hasn’t begun to be exploited.
When you look, around there are only about four characters in radio—misers, flighty teen-agers, bumble-headed Gildersleeves, and wide-eyed young men like Alan Young. Radio script writers must have a limited acquaintance. I’d like to introduce them to an engaging, middle-aged couple I know who have upheld the appearance of wealth with great good humor since 1929 (when they lost it all) in a vast, draughty apartment on Park Ave. To my knowledge they haven’t any money or any income at all, but they have successfully outwitted the landlord, charmed their bill collectors, and amused themselves by a sort of necromancy which I find considerably funnier than Gildersleeve’s laugh.
Or, if you boys would drop into my Third Ave. saloon, I’d like you to meet a frayed but still elegant Englishman who has contemplated the same lady for 22 years without ever managing to determine whether her virtues, which are manifold, outweighed her defects, which are also manifold, to the extent where his family, which he hasn’t seen for 27 years, would approve of her as his wife. The lady in question has enough comedy quirks to stock a dozen radio series.
Or, if you're looking for comedy domestics, I know a maid who covers herself with cellophane to keep out witches and another girl . . . well, let’s cut out the wishful thinking and get back to Mr. Carson.
Besides the characters enumerated, the program boasts a couple of reasonably original characters. One of them is played by Norma Jean Nilsson, who is 8 years old, but whose comedy is extraordinarily elevated for her years.
When she meets a South American tamale of the sort that says in broken English, “You American men are so amusing," her comment is: “Hmmmmm," which is exactly what mine was. There is also a spinster named Miss Bryan [sic], who runs a novelty store and whose special quality is hypochondria. Unless I am mistaken, she is the first hypochondriac in radio. One of the writers must have done some prowling around outside his normal, limited circle.

Perhaps the most interesting columns of this week by Crosby were two on the “growing obsolescence of top radio stars.” The problem, as Crosby saw it, the stars had been stars for too long and were becoming too old. He made several interesting proposals. Of course, television soon came along and many radio stars simply ran their course as time progressed, Bob Hope and Jack Benny being notable exceptions. These columns were published on November 6 and 7.

It seems every executive in media—radio networks, ad agencies, electronics manufacturers—had an opinion about the future of television in 1946. Innumerable articles were written. Crosby’s column of November 8 quoted NBC vice-president John Royal, who had been shuffled out of his job in charge of radio programmes in 1940 and banished to an outpost job dealing with shortwave, fax and television programming. Few expected television would grow, but it did and Royal ascended again within NBC.

The November 5 column deals mainly with the Dick Haymes show. Crosby also talks about an improvement in the Phil Harris-Alice Faye show, into its second season for Fitch. The columns will grow when you click on them.