Why We Need Jack Benny

Quite a number of young people in the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll era, I suspect, thought of Jack Benny as old and outdated. Tastes, however, change over time, and the people who were teenagers and young adults some 50 years ago are Benny fans today.

Back then, one newspaperman wrote an editorial about why America needed someone like Jack Benny. I’ll get to it in a moment, but I want to post another article from the same period about the Benny Appeal.

The entertainment writer for the Copley News Service indulged in that necessity amongst columnists—reusing old material when the well is dry. You can read the original column from 1963 in this post. Seven years later, it was dredged out of the water, given a new coat of paint (how’s THAT for mixing metaphors?) and put on display in print once again.

This appeared in paper starting around December 5, 1970.

Benny in separate class
By DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD — Twenty years of television, two decades rich in comedy, and how many years was it on radio before that? And before that in vaudeville?
For Jack Benny, still 39 at heart, it's been a remarkable career.
Aside from his incredible longevity, Jack Benny is a rarity among the funnymen, a comic who has never to my knowledge cracked a joke in public.
WHAT JACK BENNY has created, along with his characterization of the lovable but petulant skinflint, is an enduring, irrepressibly fresh comic spirit. Jack Benny—the sight of him, his walk, stare, his manner and attitude, the way he has of mirroring our own petty failings—makes you feel good. Jokes don't necessarily do this.
Once, in an interview, I asked Benny about the wellspring of his public character, with his stinginess and vanity, this endearing composite of all the human frailties.
Benny nodded thoughtfully. "You know," said Jack Benny, "there's a lot of everybody in Jack Benny."
But such a comic character, an archetype that is also inimitably original, can never be manufactured.
As Benny said, "You can't say, ‘Look, fellas, let's invent this cheap, vain guy who drives a Maxwell, keeps his money buried in a vault and has a butler named Rochester and wears a toupee’—actually, it would be funnier if I really wore a toupee, which I don't. But all of this adds up to ‘Jack Benny.’
IT ALSO ADDS UP TO more than 50 years of laughter and, as I say, a special kind of humor that creates affection and warmth along with the laughs.
The laughter always stems from character. One of the longest laughs in Benny’s career, for instance, flowed from the situation but even more than the many years of our acceptance of Benny’s character.
In this one, an example of pure radio humor, Benny is confronted by a holdup man [played by Eddie Marr] poking a gun in his ribs.
Holdup Man: "Your or your life."
Benny: (Long pause).
Holdup Man: "Quit stalling. I said your money or your life."
Benny: I’M THINKING IT OVER!"
ONLY JACK Benny could have won 20 seconds of studio audience laughter—and that’s a sizeable amount—with the following bit, from an old TV show, with Mary Livingstone:
Mary: “Jack, why don’t you stop being so stingy?”
Jack: “Mary, I’m not stingy and you know it.”
Mary: “You’re not, eh? Last year when you were going to have your appendix removed, you wanted Rochester to do it.
Jack: “I DID NOT. I merely asked him if he knew how.”

Jack explained the logic behind his humour, and an editorial writer explained why it was needed. Granted, the writer in The State of Columbia, South Carolina, of March 10, 1971, seems to echo what some people say today—that comedy was so much better in the “good old days” when you could make the same old jokes about minorities, instead of soulless corporations or anything to do with that sinful s-e-x.

However, Jack’s humour in the “good old days” was the same until the day he died—directed at human foibles wrapped up in a fictional version of himself. Fred Allen’s humour was different. He loved puns, some extremely clever, others wincingly bad, and took shots at needless ridiculousness and hypocrisy, mainly involving the industry that made him a fortune. It’s still the kind of humour (setting aside the contemporary times aspect of Allen’s targets) that can work today.

‘Tain’t Funny, McGee
JACK BENNY, whose violin solos began as part of his comedy routine, now plays for concert audiences, raising money for good music. No matter how much money he raises for musical charity, it can never match his priceless contribution to humor. When there was little to laugh about in America, Benny and Fred Allen and other truly funny radio comics made us keep our sense of humor.
The kind of hilarity Jack Benny represented is one of the greatest contemporary needs. We have, as a nation, almost forgotten how to laugh, except in a sick, almost pathological way. Ethnic humor, for example, an important constituent in the comedy of melting pot, has become a grievance to be redressed by civil rights groups; we only laugh nowadays at double-entendres or when Don Rickles kicks us in the gut.
To laugh in this way is to laugh without purging the spirit. We laugh, not despite our anxieties, but because of them. Air pollution makes us sick, and we worry about the environment; we thus are gratified when Johnny Carson takes a swipe at Con-Edison. But are we amused? Not really. We laugh because it pleases us to imagine the loathsome enemy writhing in pain.
Man needs to laugh. He needs to laugh most when it is hardest to do. That is why great comedians like Jack Benny are such an asset, and why the nation owes Benny and his Depression-era colleagues a debt it can never pay, and why it almost makes you cry to hear imitation today’s funny-men work over an audience.

Rickles, today, does not get a free pass for his insult humour from some younger people. It is a tribute to Jack Benny that he can still attract fans, and inspire other comedians, almost 50 years after his death. Many aspects of his humour are timeless. How many former vaudevillians could say the same thing?