Jack Benny, Gone For 50 Years

Jack Benny died 50 years ago today.

The intervening time has taken away many of his fans. Time also brings new fads and stars to popular culture, pushing out the old. Network radio, at one time the principal medium of home popular culture, has been gone longer than Benny. But the two are really inseparable.

On the air, Jack Benny gradually evolved. His initial popularity was sparked by parodies of films, and making gentle fun of his sponsor and the general stuffiness of radio commercials. Later, Benny regularly lampooned movie western serials, with characters breaking character and the “real world” intruding on the playlets.

Over time, Benny built a cast whose characteristics and personalities assigned to them on the broadcast mixed and meshed well with each other. Eventually, the standard variety show premise gave way to a situation comedy about people ON a variety show. Benny’s radio career could have carried on longer had the sponsor money put into radio not been transferred to television. Such was inevitable. Popular culture was changing.

By then (1955), Benny had been on the home screen, too, with his own show and appearing periodically on The Shower of Stars for several seasons. When his series ended in 1965, he was still wanted for occasional specials. One was in production at the time of his death.

The reason for the longevity (not even including his vaudeville career in the 1920s) is simple. People liked Jack Benny and the people he surrounded himself with.

Benny’s death was a stunning event. It brought forth a cascade of grief and remembrances. Columns in many newspaper editorial sections contained tributes to, and nostalgia about, Jack Benny. Always positive. They treated him like an old friend. Considering he had been in living rooms for decades, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

We’ve published a number of these editorials over the years. The one we’ve picked for today has a different perspective. It was from Stanley Reynolds’ column in the Arts section of the Manchester Guardian, Dec. 28, 1974. The English loved Benny as much as the Americans, though it appears his TV series didn’t air there. Reynolds’ perspective of Benny comes from the years of the Battle of Britain. The U.S. was attacked once at Pearl Harbor. The Brits had to deal with Nazi bombers over their homes on a daily, continual basis. As Winston Churchill inspired them, Jack Benny cheered them.

HERE HE IS walking home alone at night. His footsteps ring with that lonely nighttime sound and to keep his spirits up he starts humming. The song of course is Love In Bloom which is his theme song like Hope’s is Thanks For The Memory. Suddenly a bandit steps from the bushes and demands:
“Your money or your life.”
And then there is a long, long pause. The only sound is the audience falling about.
“Well?” the bandit finally says.
“I’m thinking it over,” says the oh so very familiar exasperated voice of Jack Benny.
How he used to milk that simple gimmick about being tight-fisted. And how difficult it is for us to believe he is dead. We know that so many of the great comics have gone. But there they are, Ollie and Stan on TV on Christmas morning and our own children know their routines by heart. Harpo and Chico are also alive and well in a double bill on BBC-2 on New Year’s Day.
Jack Benny will be less alive than the others. Not because he was any less a master of comedy but because he did his best work on radio. His films were few and his television appearances rare: usually as the guest star on someone else’s show, or topping the bill at the London Palladium.
Still, the few films that Benny did make were so good that he will survive as a character actor. I am particularly fond of To Be Or Not To Be, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with Benny playing opposite Carol Lombard. They were supposed to be in a troupe of travelling actors who suddenly found themselves trapped by the Nazis in Poland. The film is probably unique in Worlds War II comedy because it makes fun of Hitler’s anti-semitism and the Gestapo, which is referred to as Der Hotfoot Department. This was, you see, 1942 and no one really knew how bad things were; when they found out good taste prevented any further comedy of this sort. But Benny is marvellous in the film and the satire on Hitler and his Nazi elitism so keen and on the mark that you know it is a classic which will someday come into its own again.
Probably Benny’s greatest success as a film actor was with Ann Sheridan in George Washington Slept Here in 1942. This was the film version of the Broadway hit, one of the modern classics of the American stage, and Benny showed what a fine character actor he could have been if he had not made so much money making people laugh on the radio.
Which leads me to what is probably the most important thing about Jack Benny. He was unlike any, other comic. He was not, for example, either a clown or a buffoon or even a mocker. I think it was Kenneth Tynan in his drama critic days who first pointed out that Benny was basically a straight man. The great Groucho was the eternal mocker, an aggressor doing battle with a boringly sane world. But Benny was simply a fellow who suffered at the hands of the world, usually in silence, arms folded across his chest, vain1y rolling his bright blue eyes heavenward.
He would plead his innocence to Mary Livingstone to Rochester, his gravel-voiced valet, to the US Treasury Department, and anyone else who wanted to take his money from him. Clownish enemies and aggressors surrounded him, all after his money or, like Fred Allen, his arch-enemy of the old radio days, simply trying to get the better of him comically. And Benny would simply react to their blows. Usually the reaction was a long silence, followed by a long drawn out “Well, I’ll tell you” or “Now look here.”
He had, of course, gimmicks galore—the avariciousness, the appalling fiddle playing, the ancient Maxwell motor car, his feud with Fred Allen, and his age (he was 38 for years and then became 39 and stayed there)—but his greatest gimmick was that long silence. This was his alone, perhaps because no other comic had Benny’s sense of timing. Even such masters as Hope and the great William Claude had to keep saying things; Benny could get a laugh just staying mum.
I suppose this was the most unusual sort of talent to be let loose on radio—especially American radio which has always been a bit frantic and where silence is “dead air time” and could be used to sell somebody something. I am well aware of my own failure here really to give anyone, especially the young, a good idea of this great idiosyncratic underplaying of Benny’s. He belonged to the radio in the great days of radio, of the depression and the war years. He was listened to all over America and was, in an era of some truly wonderful radio comedy shows, the most popular of the lot. His radio show was also heard here during the war years and much appreciated as were his many appearances at the London Palladium.
His voice for those of us who were small children then was familiar as a household object. We knew it like we knew the giant hands of our fathers and mothers — eye-level objects of childhood. When I hear the name Jack Benny it is a long ago winter night, and a schoolday in the morning, and I and my sister have been shushed off to bed but we leave the bedroom door open and listen, sometimes stealing out to the hallway to hear the radio better, for Jack Benny is on.
The world had gone mad and we children were well aware of it. If we were geographically 1ucky enough not to have bombs falling on us, well we had nightmares about it just the same. But here was this extraordinary man who lied about his age and hated spending money, and was silly in a most extraordinary way for a grown-up to be silly. Somewhere the grown-ups had gone mad and were killing children but Jack Benny was on the radio with Rochester, and Mary Livingstone and Dennis Day, and he was getting in a terrible state about having to spend money to buy Christmas presents and it seemed all very peaceful and calm,” sealing off thoughts of school and the real world outside.

Much more could be said about Benny. How he spent time during World War Two to write to families of soldiers he had visited in war zones. How his concerts starting in the 1950s raised money for orchestras, musicians’ pension plans and perservation of old theatres, including the Orpheum in Vancouver months before his death.

Suffice it to say, Jack Benny made people happy for several generations. Despite changes in popular culture, many of his radio shows are on the internet. He still makes people happy today.