Not Our Miss Brooks

Eve Arden enjoyed a huge success starring in Our Miss Brooks. It was one of the shows that transferred from radio to television quite well, despite the fact Dick Crenna was far too old to be playing a high school student. Arden had an earlier venture on radio that, well, isn’t remembered today.

The Sealtest Village Store originally started out as a variety show starring Rudy Vallee with Joan Davis as a Vera Vague type who chased after him. When Vallee left in 1943, Davis took over and the show became a sitcom called the Sealtest Village Store. She was soon joined by Jack Haley. Davis quit in 1945, and Arden was signed as her replacement. Haley departed in 1947 and was replaced with Jack Carson. The store was closed the following year.

Herald Tribune syndicate reviewer John Crosby caught Arden and Haley. It was around Christmas time, but his opinion of the show wasn’t holly or jolly. Some of the humour is really painful. Here’s what he wrote on December 26, 1946.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY
Another Village Store
Jack Haley and Eve Arden, an ill-assorted pair of comedians, may be heard once a week in what professes to be comedy (NBC 9:30 p.m., EST, Thursdays) and, if you hear them any two weeks in a row, you have no one to blame but yourself. Years ago, when she was a very bright young thing on the musical comedy stage, Miss Arden was one of my favorite comediennes. She had a cool and devastatingly feminine manner of delivering comedy lines and, though it wasn't necessary, more than her shake of food looks.
Over the air, you can't see the looks and the style has flattened considerably due to repetition, or possibly because Miss Arden's material is pretty dreadful. Mr. Haley, who at one time was in danger of becoming a permanent juvenile of the musical comedy stage, escaped by diving into radio where he is no better and is possibly a little worse. So much for the principals of this comedy series.
* * *
Mr. Haley and Miss Arden are, respectively, proprietor and employee of the Village Store in which they spend as little time as possible and apparently do little business. A village store, I guess, just sounded like a good idea to the writers when this series started, which must have been a long time ago. Mr. Haley and Miss Arden do not sound as if they ever saw a village much smaller than Manhattan or would remain in it longer than it takes to buy gasoline. Nevertheless, through some whim of their sponsor (Sealtest Ice Cream), they are marooned in this Village speaking in their imperturbably metropolitan accents the devious and aged jokes which are cast into their laps. What the villagers think of all this, I cannot say since they never appear.
In a recent sketch, Mr. Haley was feeling the spirit of Christmas in a dim way. "Always at Christmas time I try to remember people who work for me,” he tells Miss Arden. “You’re Eve Arden, aren't you?"
“Yes,” says Miss Arden tremulous with expectation.
"See, remember you."
However, the joke is not allowed to rest there. Mr. Haley hands her a large box; reminding her coyly that she has always expressed a wish for pearls. Overwhelmed at the thought of such a large box of pearls, Miss Arden plans to open it Christmas morning but Mr. Haley advises her to get right at it. "It'll take you a week to open 300 oysters,” he says.
However, my favorite example of Haley and Arden pitter-patter occurred some weeks back. Miss Arden is parading around the store in a bare midriff dress. "Is that dress a fuchsia?" asks Mr. Haley.
"I don't know if it's got a fuchsia,” says Miss Arden gaily. "But I've always done well with it in the pash."
As an example of the skits these people get themselves into, let’s consider a recent one. Haley is mixed up in some sort of Christmas songfest on the village green. Who should walk in but Lauritz Melchior. There is an immediate and painful case of mistaken identity, despite the fact Mr. Melchior is the most recognizable singer anywhere with the possible exception of Frank Sinatra.
"I’m Scandinavian."
“Are you Swedish?"
"No."
"Are you Finnish?"
“No, I just started."
Finally, Mr, Melchior is unmasked for what he is and is prevailed upon to sing "Silent Night" which was almost worth all the beating around the bush.
* * *
They do this tame sketch with minor variations again and again at the Village Store. Not long ago, Mr. Haley was running opera night or some such thing and needed a good orchestra to accompany a Metropolitan Opera singer. He wound up with Spike Jones, who massacred a couple of numbers. The guest stars practically keep the Village Store running.
Mr. Jones was also forced to say to Miss Arden, presumably against his will: "I've met many women in my life, but you're head and shoulders over all of them."
"You mean I'm so beautiful?"
"No you're so tall."
There is also a sort of running joke you're likely to bump your head against every time you enter the Village Store. It goes like this: “I consider you two nit wits."
"Now, look here." . . .
“Just a minute, nit. I'm speaking to wit."
Any other questions about Miss Arden and Mr. Haley? Christmas is over, and we may all speak our minds frankly.

Critic Crosby had better things to say about the comedy game show Can You Top This? It was sedate compared to It Pays to Be Ignorant, where old vaudevillians mangled the English language and pitched horrible puns in answer to listener’s far-too-easily answered questions.

Dialect jokes are passé at best these days, but none of the ones mentioned below require one, with the exception of the one that makes fun of people who believe in racial stereotypes. The syndicate sent out this column for publication on December 24.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY
Can You Top This?
“Can You Top This?" (NBC 9:30 p. m. E. S. T. Saturdays), which has just celebrated its seventh anniversary on the air, is a sort of "Information, Please" of jokes. It originated on WOR In 1940, and New Yorkers can still hear it over this station at 8 p. m. Wednesdays as well as the NBC presentation on Saturdays. The three wits on this program know as much about jokes as John Kieran about birds or Franklin P. Adams about the lyrics of old songs. In fact, many of the jokes are as old as the songs. These are not the newfangled one-line type of joke: there are few topical allusions in them; they are rarely ever distinguished by brevity; they go on and on and on and are, in spite of it all, very, very funny.
What makes them so is the extreme skill with which they are told by Harry Hershfield, Senator Ford and Joe Laurie jr., all old vaudevillians, toastmasters and storytellers from way back. So expertly do they sling these yams that many a lame duck of a joke sounds like a whistler swan.
* * *
The format of the show is simplicity itself. Listeners send in jokes which are told and highly embellished by Peter Donald, a specialist in all types of dialect. Even when a joke doesn't require dialect, Pete usually provides one just to exhibit his repertoire. The object of the experts is to top whatever figure Pete gets on the laugh meter. Since Pete almost invariably can dress up even the weakest joke well enough to get 1,000, which is tops, it’s impossible for the exports to get better than a tie, but they almost always manage that.
Here is a listener's joke, which earned 1,000 on the laugh meter. I won’t attempt to duplicate the Irish accent.
"Paddy, we’ve been friends for long time. I been observin' you and notice you always drink milk with your eyes open; you drink water with your eyes open; but you always drink whisky with your eyes shut.”
“Well, I’ll tell you why that is. I see that beautiful whisky there in the glass and it makes my mouth water. And I don't like to drink it diluted.”
The way Pete told it, it went on for minutes and the Gaelic brogue made the windows rattle. They had barely ceased rattling when Harry Hershfield was on his feet with his own drinking joke. It may be an oldie, but I never heard it and I think It's worth 1,000 on anyone's laugh-meter.
A drunk, lurching down Fifth Avenue, bumps into a passerby. “Shay,” he says. “Can you direct me to Alcoholish Anonymush?"
"Why?" inquires the passerby. “You want to join?"
“No, I wanna resign.”
* * *
Here’s another listener joke about jobs which was told in an almost vanished German dialect that was very popular 30 years ago. One German immigrant bumped into another on the street and asked him how he was doing in the New World.
“Fine!” says the immigrant. “I’m a diamond cutter now."
"That’s great. It must be a highly paid job."
“Oh, no!"
“Why, a diamond cutter is a highly skilled profession. It ought to be a highly paid profession. It takes years and years of apprenticeship to learn the trade. The pay ought to be very high."
“You misunderstood me. I mean I cut the grass in a ball park.”
Then there was the one about Mrs. Popilicoff, who went to an adult class to learn some of these new ideas about nutrition. The lecturer kept harping on proteins, fats and carbohydrates and a lot of other words Mrs. Popilicoff couldn't understand. At the end of his lecture he asked her what were the three things she had to eat to keep healthy.
"Breakfast, lunch, and supper," said Mrs. Popilicoff promptly.
This provoked from one of the experts one of the numerous and presumably authentic Madame Chiang Kai-Shek stories that you may have heard before. Before she was well known in this country Madame Chiang attended a dinner where she was pestered by a woman next to her who insisted on talking to her in pidgin English.
“You likee country? You likee dinner?"
Madame Chiang ignored her and rose later to deliver a speech in her best Wellesley English After he sat down she turned to her neighbor and said brightly: “You likee speech?"
* * *
“Can You Top This?" is a good-natured show if you like that sort of joke. It sounds likr a stag dinner after the speeches are over and the boys have settled down to tell the one they heard on the way to the Cleveland convention. The only difference is that these jokes are as clean as a hound's tooth.

The other Crosby columns for the week:

Monday, December 23, 1946: Two painful two-somes. You may have heard of Sweeney and March.
Wednesday, December 25, 1946: Christmas programming highlights.
Friday, December 27, 1946: The Arkansas Traveller, Bob Burns.

Click on them to read them better.