Ruth Buzzi

One of the great strengths of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was everyone did something unique. Jo Anne Worley was brassy. Goldie Hawn was a ditz. Judy Carne was picked on. And Ruth Buzzi came up with an ugly old maid character and took it all over the TV dial years after Laugh-In was laid to rest.

Laugh-In made stars out of the ensemble cast, but they all had been around the block a few times. Buzzi had shown up on Marlo Thomas’ That Girl series (in another case of being on fewer episodes than one recalls) and, before that, voiced Granny Goodwitch in Linus the Lionhearted.

She passed away yesterday at age 88.

This profile hit the news wires when Laugh-In was in its second season, December 20, 1968.

Ruth Buzzi Is Repulsed by Own Laugh-in Character
By VERNON SCOTT
United Press International
HOLLYWOOD – The most courageous woman in all of show business is Ruth Buzzi, the misbegotten old baggage of “The Rowan and Martin Laugh-In" Show.
The NBC-TV top rated series features Miss Buzzi as a forelorn old maid in futile search for a man—any man.
But even the Boston strangler would recoil at sight of Gladys Ormphby, the character played by Miss Buzzi. By comparison, Phyllis Diller is a bewitching beauty.
Gladys has a face that would top a sundial.
The thought of her in a bikini would sicken a marooned sailor. She is the repulsive female loser, a modern Medusa.
While Miss Ormphby is a real dog, Miss Buzzi is an attractive, charming young lady from Wequetequock, Conn., who frets at the thought viewers think Ormphby is the real Buzzi.
"GLADYS IS SO repulsive I can barely watch her on the show," Ruth said the other day.
"She wears a tight hairnet and is completely stripped of makeup. To make her even more convincing I brush my eyebrows together so they meet above my nose. Then I dress in a baggy dress, a boy's sweater, brown lisle cotton stockings for women over 90 and black oxfords with laces and Cuban heels.
"Gladys Ormphby is utterly without style. And you'd be surprised how many people think that's the real me."
Ruth Invented Gladys when she was playing the role of Agnes Gooch in a road company version of "Auntie Mame" in Pennsylvania. When she appeared on stage for the first time in her revolting costume she stopped the show cold. The audience laughed for 10 minutes.
“I had to turn my back to the audience in every performance to stop the laughter," Ruth said with pride.
“When I left the show I decided to keep the character, but I had to give her a new name. I was working at my desk as a secretary between acting jobs and I dreamed up Gladys Ormphby.
"I played the character a couple of years ago on the old Carol Burnett Show, 'The Entertainers.' But she didn't speak."
RUTH WAS ASKED why, if Gladys is so man-hungry, she repulses the passes of Arte Johnson, who plays the old lech in the park bench sketches on "Laugh-In.”
"Look," Ruth said. "No woman, no matter how desperate, would allow that dirty old man to get near her—not even Gladys."
Ruth confuses viewers who aren’t quite certain whether Gladys and Ruth are separate people on the show because Miss Buzzi frequently appears in routines as herself.
"About 90 per cent of the time I'm Gladys," Ruth said mournfully. "The rest of the time I'm me."
And Ruth Buzzi wants the whole world to know that.

She talked a little less about Gladys in this feature story in the Charlotte News of December 7, 1968. With the American election over, Ruth expressed the same opinion as executive producer George Schlatter about a famous guest shot.

There’s No Hairnet To Be Seen
Boo-Boo Gave Ruth Buzzi Funny 'Laugh-In' Skit
By EMERY WISTER
News Entertainment Writer
HOLLYWOOD— "If Hubert Humphrey had accepted our invitation to appear on the 'Laugh-In' TV show, he and not Richard Nixon would have been elected President."
The speaker was Ruth Buzzi, the plain-Jane girl with the hairnet on her head who yocks it up with the rest of the gang on the NBC-WSOC laughfest each Monday night.
"If Mr Humphrey had done it he would have been elected," she repeated, sipping on her orange juice at a mid-morning breakfast. "We made a pitch to get him. He came out to the NBC studio to tape a newscast. But we couldn't get to him. We couldn't get any farther than his aides and they said no.
"NIXON DID the bit, the sock-it-to-me thing, I mean. But it was done with taste. The fact we had Nixon say 'Sock it to me? as a question made the difference. That made it tasteful."
And the show's publicist, sitting at the table with her, confirmed her opinion by saying that Humphrey's refusal to appear on the new show was "a colossal mistake."
"It's not a very nice thing to think that a simple thing like that could influence the election but with so many people hesitating to go one way or the other, it could have had an effect." he said.
Now, how about the off-screen Ruth Buzzi? Is she the same homely mournfully man-hungry girl she is on the air?
NOT ON your life. She's a short, bouncy lass and though not pretty is decidely on the attractive side. And there's no hairnet to be seen.
"Tell you about that," she giggled as she poured herself another cup of coffee. "I was putting on a net one morning and got it on wrong. But it looked so funny just decided to leave it.
"A lot of men may not know what it is but all the women will. Some people say it makes me look as though I have a bullet hole in the head."
Does she write the funny lines she says on the show? Well— "I have to give the writers credit," she said. "They create the material. But some of the funniest things I have done I thought of myself."
Until the "Laugh-In" came along, practically no one had heard of Ruth Buzzi. She was just another face in the crowds of shows on and off Broadway in New York. She was featured in the production of "Sweet Charity" and wound up in Hollywood mainly because the show closed there.
l YOU WOULDN'T believe her home town.
"Write it down," she said. "It's Wequetock, Conn. That's near New London."
She was in Julius Monk's "Baker's Dozen" show in New York's Plaza Hotel and later worked on the Garry Moore "The Entertainers" and Mario Thomas "That Girl" TV shows. And then came the "Laugh-In."
"We started with a special and then they brought us back for the series," she said. "I thought the thing was sheer bedlam at first but I was never so wrong. I have to remind myself now that it's work.
"Our morale is great. We have so many people no one has to learn very many lines. That keeps us all relaxed. We all had a tight schedule on the Marlo Thomas show and believe me I can appreciate what I have now. I had no life of my own shooting “That Girl.”
WHAT KIND of schedule does she have now? Well, the “Laugh-In” parties are taped each Wednesday at noon. They rehearse on three other days and that’s about it.
“People may think it’s tougher this year since we have parties in the beginning of each half hour instead of just one in the beginning. But the only thing different is we split it up. Before we each had two lines to say in one party. Now we have one line in each of the two segments. So it’s the same thing.
“To make it easier, we have cue card holders off camera to help us with our lines. Actually, we tape from 60 to 65 minutes of material a week. Nothing is thrown away.”
And there’s the thing that the producers call “The Library.”
“That’s when they bring in those celebrities,” she said. “They tape those things at various times. That’s why I’m not working today. We have so much material in the library they gave us the day off. And we have two weeks off at Christmas plus the summer vacation.

When Laugh-In left the air (she and Gary Owens were the only originals remaining besides Rowan and Martin), she turned to cartoons and children's programming. She explained why in this story syndicated by the Washington Post. One paper printed this on Christmas Day 1993.

'Laugh-In' regular joins ‘Sesame Street.’
Ruth Buzzi, long active in children's TV, plays the owner of Finder's Keepers thrift shop.
By Scott Moore
WASHINGTON POST
The image of dowdy Gladys Ormphby may be etched into the minds of many adults, but Ruth Buzzi has found a new identity among viewers too young to remember her many roles on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968-73).
Buzzi, 57, brought on board with seven new Muppets for the 25th season of PBS's Sesame Street, plays the proprietor of the Finder's Keepers thrift shop.
"It's me," Buzzi said of the Ruthie character, who explores the shop's treasures and entertains children and Muppets with her storytelling.
"I love this opportunity to be me. Plus, there's nothing better than being able to be you and also be other characters. Because then, when people see you being a character and being yourself, I think they can enjoy more what you're able to do."
Though she has not been as visible in her post-Laugh-In career as co-stars Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin, Buzzi has been busy with children's programming.
"Agents don't like it, because there's not enough money in it for them, but I always like to do children's shows because to me it's like money in the bank for the future," she said. "The children grow up very, very quickly, and before you know it, you have fans who are adults. I'm not afraid to act like a nut for kids. I love to make them laugh."
In addition to her scheduled 40 appearances this season on Sesame Street (which runs three times a day weekdays and twice a day on Saturdays and Sundays on Channel 12), Buzzi provides the voice of an Neanderthal woman in the Children's Television Workshop-produced Cro. The animated science and technology program airs Saturdays on ABC (8 a.m., Channel 6).
She also has provided voices for Linus the Lion-Hearted, The Beren-stain Bears, Pound Puppies, Paw-Paws and The Nitwits (with Laugh-In's Artie Johnson), and appeared in nine movies. She has won four Emmy nominations along the way.
To teenagers, Buzzi is known as the mother of Screech in NBC's Saved by the Bell. Her picture sits in his dormitory room on the new Saved by the Bell: The College Years.
Buzzi obviously likes the work, though the current Sesame Street role almost didn't come about. "They tried to get me [for a guest spot] about 10 years ago, but my agent at the time said I wasn't interested." Not true, she said.
Luckily, Sesame Street writer Judy Freudberg suggested that they try to get Buzzi for the show's new cast located "around the corner" from Sesame's main street.
"Not only are they giving me a chance to be crazy funny for the kids ... they're also allowing me to do things every now and then that are delicate, and I can show a sweet, easy side of myself," Buzzi said. "I love it when I have a reason to have to put my hand on a little Muppet and feel sorry for it or try to make it understand a point."
That's not to say there is no Gladys Ormphby zaniness. Last month, in acting out a fairy tale about a grouchy princess, Buzzi even incorporated some of Gladys' apparel.
"They asked me if I would be willing to do [Gladys] a couple times on the show. I said absolutely. The original dress is put away, but ... I'm wearing the original shoes and the original sweater, which is getting really, beat up.
"The designers of this show ... are looking to see if they can find me another sweater like the Gladys sweater. What I got originally was a boy's sweater ... but for some reason or another they're just not making brown cardigans for boys anymore. I can kind of see why, can’t you? Who would want to wear one?"

Moo To You

On paper, it looked like a great idea.

Amadee Van Beuren decided to get out of the third-rate cartoon business, and hired Three Little Pigs director Burt Gillett to bring Disney magic to his cartoon studio.

It was a disaster.

The Van Beuren studio didn’t only need Disney calibre artists. It needed Disney calibre characters and stories.

What Van Beuren got was a weak live-action/animation combination, pointless cartoons with parrots, and a new star—Molly Moo Cow.

Molly was kind of a silent character, in that she didn’t talk. She mooed like she was belching and her cowbell was an annoying distraction by clattering half of the time.

And although Van Beuren was assembling a staff of good young artists, the drawings looked pretty ugly at times. Here’s a frame from Molly Moo Cow and the Indians (1935)



Whoever wrote this for directors Gillett and Tom Palmer is going for either drama or pathos in this scene. Molly is in tears, pleading with the Indian to save the lives of the two ducks he wants to eat.



Finally, the Indian throws the hoof-in-mouth Molly out of the scene. Someone should have done the same thing with the footage.



Gillett or someone must have realised things like the Molly, the Parrotville cartoons and the “Toddle Tales” shorts were not entertaining. They were all short-lived. The studio purchased rights to established characters like Felix the Cat (who talked) and the denizens of Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville (including the Trolley).

People on staff like Dan Gordon and Joe Barbera could have developed them into solid characters, but RKO had seen enough. It signed a deal with Walt Disney, effectively scuttling the cartoon studio it partly owned (Van Beuren continued with live-action shorts for another year).
Barbera, Carlo Vinci and others found work at Terrytoons. One of their cartoons featured a very familiar-looking cow.

Don't Ask Bugs Any Questions

There are fine expressions and a mystery surrounding the end of Rabbit Every Monday, a 1951 release from the Friz Freleng unit at Warner Bros.

Yosemite Sam forces Bugs Bunny into an old oven to cook him. The tricky rabbit manages to convince Sam there’s a party with “goils asking for you” inside. He helps the enthusiastic Sam into the oven and slams the door shut. See the glee on Bugs’ face.



“Imagine him fallin’ for a gag like that,” Bugs remarks to us cartoon-watchers.



But then is overcome with regret, which he also tells us. Note the expressions again.



Bugs tells Sam to come out, that the party is only a gag. A balloon floats out of the oven. See the anticipation then the extreme.



Cut to the “inside” of the oven.



Take.



More delight from Bugs, this time as he dives into the party.



Bugs emerges to talk to us one last time in an attempt to explain how his made-up party became the real thing. He indulges in the old Jerry Colonna catchphrase from the Bob Hope radio show: “I don’t ask questions. I just have fun.” And we get more expressions, a wink and a laugh as he goes back into the oven and the iris closes.



The credited animators are Manny Perez, Ken Champin, Virgil Ross and Art Davis. Who isn’t credited is the writer.

The Warner Club News of December 1948 announced Bugs Hardaway’s hiring as a writer for Freleng. E.O. Costello's research has found Hardaway was "laid off" in April 1949. Then the News of May 1949 reported Freleng and Bob McKimson had switched writers, with Warren Foster going to the Freleng unit and McKimson being given Tedd Pierce. This and another cartoon made at this time have no story credit. Afterwards, one Freleng short gave a co-credit to Cal Howard and another had a credit to Hardaway before Foster appears regularly on the Freleng cartoons. (The 1950 Census has no occupation for Hardaway; his wife ran a restaurant).

The story is a little unusual. Someone will correct me, but I think this is the only short where Sam behaves like Elmer Fudd, in that he wants to hunt and eat the rabbit.

Paul Julian painted the backgrounds from Hawley Pratt’s layouts.

Peter Thomas

Childhood was a time of voices.

In the 1960s, television was a big part of life. Television was full of commercials, with admirable announcers who were heard year after year after year. They were anonymous, unless they showed up elsewhere and got a credit; Alexander Scourby comes to mind (among many things, he was the narrator for National Geographic specials, for which he got screen credit).

There were two announcers I heard all the time back then. Their voices were instantly recognisable but for years I had no idea who they were. It was only by stumbling onto industrial films that I learned their names. One was Norman Rose who, I recently discovered, narrated all kinds of children’s records. The other was Peter Thomas.

Thomas was amazing. Or extremely fortunate. Or both. Age changes one’s voice—it did mine—and not always for the better. Thomas was still doing narration at age 90 and sounded the same as he did half a century earlier.

There is a great, almost-one-hour interview with him on the internet. He had an incredible career, starting in his home-town of Pensacola, Florida before he enlisted for war service. The local paper, on October 27, 1940, wrote: “Cub announcer, Peter Thomas, has been added to WCOA’s staff.” The same paper enlightened readers with short biographical sketches of station announcers on June 8, 1941: “PETER THOMAS—Born in Pensacola; is 18 years old; started in radio as an actor on dramatic shows over WCOA; later hired as junior announcer at WCOA; recently promoted to regular commercial announcer; will carry afternoon and late night shift; weight, 135, tall, has a decided English accent.” It left out his starring role as “Dick Denny, American Birdman.”

The paper announced, on August 17, 1941, Peter’s departure from the station to New York. He moved there to attend Stony Brook. Then came the war. Then came television. His early experiences did not include the sombre narration he would become known for. Anything but. His attitude was like Henry Morgan’s at times. The Memphis Press-Scimitar of April 10, 1950 picks up the story.

‘Unhandy Handy’ Peter Thomas, Video Star, Has a Big Role
By ROBERT JOHNSON, Press-Scimitar Staff Writer
Peter Thomas is the sort of fellow who if there is a crack in the sidewalk he will trip on it. Things just naturally happen to Peter. If an accident is waiting around for somebody to happen to, Peter will show up.
It was, perhaps, a bit of an accident that he has become probably the major local personality developed by television since WMCT went on the air. But that engaging, ingenuous personality which has maintained his popularity is all Peter's. There's something encouraging to the average spectator in watching anyone as buffeted by fate as Peter stumble thru adversity like Dagwood Bumstead triumphantly catching a bus.
Peter will be the professor in the college division of "School Days." It is to be hoped that the stage does not collapse.
Son of Minister
WMCT's "Unhandy Handy Man" is the son of English parents. His father, a Presbyterian minister in Pensacola, is an Oxford graduate. Peter, who is only 26 now, began doing juvenile dramatic parts on a Pensacola station when he was 15, began announcing and took over the night shift in 1939.
He entered the Army in 1943, went right on from the invasion thru France, Belgium, Holland and into Germany with the First Infantry Division.
"I made private first class during the Battle of the Bulge," he said.
He was a rifleman, later became a division MP. During the Battle of the Bulge he got a piece of shrapnel in his leg. "It wasn't much," he said, "but it got me a Purple Heart."
After the war, he worked with a Mobile station a year.
Charley Sullivan, WMC's chief announcer, is from Pensacola and an old friend of Peter's. When there was an opening, he arranged a chance on WMC's staff for Peter.
It was entirely chance that Peter became the Unhandy Handy Man. Henry Slavick, the station manager, had seen a program introducing new gadgets on a New York television station. He wanted something like it.
"I just happened to be the announcer on duty that night," Peter explains. The program was called "What's New."
Flustered Demonstration
Peter demonstrated a cheese cutter, a three-piece device. It fell apart on him and he couldn't get it back together. He showed a toy fire truck, activated by pressing a lever. The engine just wouldn't move.
"I got so flustered I didn't know what to do," Peter said. But he kept trying—desperately, and he talked while he tried.
Slavick, watching at home, was devastated. But then the letters and phone calls began coming in. People liked Pete's friendly clumsiness.
"I'm not a comedian," Peter says.
"I'm just not a fixer. I'm no good at all around the house.
"In the Army I always messed up inspection. One time I pulled a grenade pin and I don't know what would have happened if somebody hadn't yelled at me to get rid of it."
Peter began to get sponsors. It didn't matter that he stopped right in the middle of a commercial and muttered—"That's all he paid for." One of his sponsors is Collins & Freeman. Peter referred to Frank Freeman once as "an old goat—but he needs your business." Mr. Freeman loved it, gleefully paid one of his salesmen to let Peter demonstrate a home hair clipper on him. The clipper slipped, and a wide furrow was cut across the subject's tonsure.
Got 'Em Mystified
Right now, says Eddie Frame, WMCT's public relations man, Peter has sponsors backed up for two months. Rhea Smith, who conducts the "What's Cooking" show, says around the station they're always wondering whether to compliment Peter on some piece of business. "We never know whether he planned it or whether it just happened," she said.
He began to get well known. A cop stopped him for speeding, smiled up, 'Hello, Uncle Pete," calling him by the name the children use on "Steps to Stardom."
Two ladies watched him while he was shopping at Lowenstein's. "We're waiting for him to break something," one explained.
Peter and his wife, a Pensacola girl, live at 1927 S. Parkway E. They have a daughter, Stella Elizabeth, one-and-a-half.
"My wife lets me hold the baby," Peter said. That, playing tennis and writing short stories are his major diversions. He has never yet dropped the baby.

Thomas dropped something that year—his job in Memphis. A CBS handout found in Ohio’s Sidney Daily News of Oct. 16, 1954 reported his work in the Tennessee city had financed his education at Memphis State College and Southwestern University. He was then off for New York to record poetry on a series of syndicated programmes for the Hamilton Watch company and won an audition at CBS in 1951. Among his early assignments was announcing Faye Emerson’s TV show. The release sent to newspapers was to publicise he had replaced Dan Seymour as the announcer on the Aunt Jenny radio show (a favourite target of Bob and Ray).

The Pensacola News Journal of May 5, 1957 wrote of some of his network credits.

VOICE OF MELODY
The voice of CBS radio's late evening musical presentation, "Melody in the Night," is one of the top announcers in the radio field. He has been with CBS for nearly six years as a staff announcer and actor, going to CBS in 1950 from WMC-WMCT in Memphis, Tenn. Prior to that assignment, Thomas was an announcer for a year at WALA in Mobile.[...]
Since joining CBS Thomas has handled a number of choice assignments including "Theater of Today," "Young Doctor Malone" plus television announcing jobs on "News on New York" and the "Good Morning Show."
He has handled radio, TV and film assignments for more than 49 advertisers and has done cutting for news broadcasts during his career in broadcasting. Thomas assumed his duties as the "voice" of "Melody in the Night" on Nov. 5, 1956.

It would be impossible to name every company that employed him. You can start with IBM, Exxon and American Express. He narrated all 403 episodes of Forensic Files. He won an Oscar for the HBO documentary One Survivor Remembers. You heard him on episodes of Nova. He was an image voice for cable channels. His hometown newspaper obituary mentioned a wry piece of copy he read for another client: “Sadly, every year, millions of innocent cakes are mangled, mistreated and hurt, but there is something you can do. Go to the freezer section of pick up new Cool Whip topping.”

He was 91 when he died on April 30, 2016

There are likely readers who are not quite sure who I am talking about. Below is one of his many, many commercials. Surely you’ll know the voice.



And he appears on camera in this 1972 industrial film.

Attack of the Sound Waves

The ringmaster of a Dixieland-playing flea circus thinks he hears something inside a barrel in Dixieland Droopy (1954).

He pulls out a cork in the barrel and the sound comes blaring out. Being a cartoon, we have to see the sound, which appears in multi-coloured lines.



The musical fleas are on John Pettybone (played by Droopy, played by Bill Thompson), who jumps out of the barrel and it’s on to the next scene.



One wonders what MGM musical director Scott Bradley thought of being allowed to come up with a Dixieland style underscore instead of having to use ancient favourites of Avery like “My Old Kentucky Home.” (The ASCAP database confirms Bradley wrote the “Dixieland Droopy Signature Main Title” as well as the cartoon’s cues).

Avery’s animators were Mike Lah, Grant Simmons and Walt Clinton. Ed Benedict designed the cartoon with Joe Montell painting the backgrounds.

Fishy Shower

I enjoy some of the absurdity in the early Walter Lantz sound cartoons.

Here’s an example from Let’s Eat (1932). Oswald and an unnamed dog go ice-fishing for food. After a circle is cut in the ice, there’s a cut to an underwater scene when a little fish takes a shower and towels off.



The absurd part is the fish doesn’t need a shower. He’s underwater!

Later the fish gets eaten by a seal. But his skeleton is still alive.

Among the list of artists in the opening credits is Tex Avery. Ray Abrams, Bill Weber, Vet Anderson and Manny Moreno all also credited. I’ve love to know who was responsible for the backgrounds.

Five Years With Jack Benny

When the Jack Benny radio show hit the five-year mark in 1937, it wasn’t the show you may remember. There was no Rochester and Kenny Baker was still the singer. But it had evolved over that time (which included a rather acrimonious change of writers).

Jack got into some of the changes in this feature interview in the St. Louis Star and Times published May 10, 1937. He also explained how he felt comedy had changed in the U.S.

The first phrase of the story isn’t accurate. And Jack vacillated about his place of birth. The How-I-Met-Mary story changed over the years, too (the “seder” meeting, a late addition to the tale, never happened).

The writer quotes dialogue from the April 25, 1937 broadcast. St. Louis listeners would have heard the East Coast broadcast. I’ve never liked this show. I can understand it when the cast gangs up on Jack when they catch him in a lie, and he keeps building on it instead of admitting he’s BSing. In this one, Jack makes an honest mistake (that isn’t his fault; it’s the board operator’s) and even apologises but they keep bashing him throughout the show. This is one time where he doesn’t deserve it. And the Block and Sully routine seems shoehorned in.

When Jack Benny Talks, 27,200,000 Listen
By HARRY T. BRUNDIDGE
HOLLYWOOD, May 10.—His name is Benjamin Kirselsky—Jack Benny to you—and he is the world's number one radio entertainer. His radio sponsors pay him $12,500 a week (not stage money) and out of this he has only to pay the men who write his programs. Paramount Pictures pay him $125,000 in a lump sum for his every production and his 1937 income will top $1,000,000.
Under the system of rating radio stars, now accepted as authentic, he is on the top spot with 34 points; each point represents 800,000 listeners and according to this system some 27,200,000 persons hear Benny every Sunday. On a recent Sunday I went to the little theater in the NBC studio to watch him stage his program, which had been rehearsed for the first and only time an hour before. Benny hates rehearsals, says they take the punch out of a program. "My rehearsals are the worst in the world," he told me. "If they were good I'd be worried about the regular broadcast."
The little theater was packed to capacity. Tickets to broadcasts are not sold; all are given away to applicants, usually weeks in advance. (You apply in January and get a ticket for a May show.) Because tickets are hard to obtain, the visible audience is always one that is highly appreciative, ready to laugh at a joke they heard grandpa tell forty years ago. But the boys and girls on the stage at ALL broadcasts do NOT depend on the spontaneity of the audience. Someone on the stage at EVERY broadcast gives the audience the cue and laughter is turned on and off with a mere wave of the hand.

AS I settled down in the "wings," to watch the performance, Jack Benny, the star; Mary Livingston, his wife; Phil Harris, the orchestra leader; Don Wilson, the announcer, and others of the cast took their places on the stage. Michrophones [sic] were at strategic points. Each member of the cast has a copy of the script because nothing is memorized; everything is read from a script that has been prepared by professional writers, and approved by the advertising agency which represents the sponsor, and by officials of the broadcasting company. Now and then there is some extemporaneous joke or comment, but that is infrequent.
The stage manager, stop watch in hand, watches the seconds tick away. Then, with a long sweep of his arm he indicates that the program "is on the air." What follows — save for the scripts in the hands of the performers—looks exactly like a scene from a musical comedy.
Don Wilson, the announcer, introduces the program by naming it and saying it is starring Jack Benny, with Mary Livingstone and Phil Harris and his orchestra. The orchestra opens the program with "Hallelujah, Things Look Rosy Now."
The number is completed. Wilson steps close to the nearest mike.
WILSON: Spring's the time to wake up and live ... swing into the new tempo . . . go places and do things—"
As the announcement (or plug) is finished and the music fades, Benny reads from his script:
JACK: Hey, Mary, come here. Don't you love the way Phil wiggles around when he leads the orchestra? Look at him.
MARY: Yeah! If he could only see himself. (She giggles.) He sure is cute though, Isn't he?
JACK: Yes, but he doesn't have to show off so much. After all it isn't television.
WILSON: Jack, quiet, your microphone is open.
JACK: What?
WILSON: Everybody can hear you.
JACK: Oh, I'm sorry.
(MUSIC UP AND FINISH.)
CROWD: (Applause.)

THE foregoing is direct quotation from the script. Even the crowd's cue is written in! But why the applause at that point? Ask the script writers—I don't know!
With the broadcast at an end, there was a mad rush of musicians, spectators, electricians and others to gain the street; Benny, his secretary, Harry Baldwin, and I joined the milling mob, battled through the perennial autograph seekers and finally reached the seclusion of a booth in "The Grotto," next door to the Melrose avenue Studio.
"Maybe I ought to feel a little impressed with myself for within a few days—May 2—I will celebrate my fifth year on the air," Benny said. "But as a matter of truth I am far more impressed with radio than with myself. I've made some strides in those sixty months and may be a bit more polished on May 2 when I give my 287th broadcast, than I was on my first, but radio has moved ahead so rapidly that in the same period I feel my own progress has been that of a snail on a treadmill by comparison.
"In common with other so-called funny men on the radio five years ago, most of my stuff was made up as I went along. We didn't spend much time working over a script for we figured that if a joke was bad we could think of something on the spur of the moment that would make it a lot better.

THAT was a fallacy. Many times as we stood before the mike our brains wouldn't think up anything and many times the jokes we did think up were more feeble than those they replaced. That is one of the improvements comedians have made. Scripts are written by experts, far in advance of a program, read, revised, worked over and, usually, revised again after a rehearsal.
"Compare the picture of my first broadcast with the one we did this afternoon. In the first broadcast I had an audience of forty or fifty persons jammed into a small corner of a studio that wouldn't have held twenty in comfort—if everyone breathed right. Then I was in a glass cage, separated from the audience. While radio listeners could hear the suppressed giggles of my visible audience. I couldn't I had to watch the audience through the sheet of glass and wait until they closed their mouths so I could go ahead with the next joke. I got to be a great lip reader, but since I wanted to be a comedian and not an interpreter, I had the glass taken out and the sounds let in. When others found that this idea worked without blasting the microphone off its foundations, they did the same thing, and we haven't been bothered by glass partitions since."
"There were other odd little customs in broadcasting five years ago. The first time I stepped up to a mike I was told that if I so much as moved my head, the listeners would be unable to follow my words. I did a lot of broadcasts with my head glued to one spot in front of the microphone, and I suffered from chronic stiff neck. Today I can stroll all over the stage, virtually go out for a walk during a broadcast, and still be picked up by the small mikes now in use, for they have been made that flexible and sensitive. The NBC trademark letters would have to be made small enough to hang on a woman's charm bracelet to find the mikes we actually use today.
"My hope is that for the next five years radio will decide to amble along at the leisurely pace we comics have taken so that we comics can make the advances that radio has wide."

BENNY, five feet, eleven inches tall, well groomed, with blue eyes, brown hair, and weighing 160 pounds, has a far-away look in his eyes and goes off into day-dreaming trances. In one of these he elbowed me and returned to mere earth with, "I beg your pardon—what were you saying?"

WAUKEGAN, ILL., was my birthplace," said Benny," and the date was 1894. I was a St. Valentine's Day present. Father was a haberdasher in Waukegan and I grew up with a collar and shirt under one arm and a fiddle under the other. It's the same fiddle which Fred Allen has been discussing for weeks — discussing whether I can play it. Pop thought that as a haberdasher's clerk I would make a good fiddler, but orchestra leaders put that thought in reverse, so I decided to go into vaudeville with a monologue and a fiddle. Theater managers, listening to me, decided pop, the orchestra leaders and myself were all nuts because, as a monologist, I was a good fireman or deckhand on a boat. "We got into the war and I left vaudeville flat and joined the navy. I thank the navy. Were it not for the sailor suit they gave me at Great Lakes I still wouldn't have the nerve to try to get away with what I have been getting away with ever since. That sailor suit gave me a lot of confidence because people respected wartime sailors; they were supposed to be hard guys.
"The war ended and I went back into vaudeville. More and more I cheated on fiddling and leaned heavily on nonchalant chatter. It got so I was being paid good money just for idling through fifteen minutes of monologue.
"Eventually I worked up to $2,500 a week and I'm frank to say I was making almost as much or more at $2,500 a week than I'm making now—and that goes for everything I'm making. I do not pay off the stage show out of my income; I pay only my writers. But Uncle Sam with his income tax law is the guy I'm really working for.
"I told you before the broadcast about writers—the important thing is that a writer should know what is bad. If he can select the good from the bad he's a genius. You can take my word for it. The bad material is what hurts.

MOST writers try to be ultra-sophisticated and in the attempt, forget that with the coming of the automobile, the radio, and the motion picture, city limits were all but wiped out. The line between the urban and the sub-urban today is so fine as to be almost indistinguishable. There's no such thing as a 'hick' any more and the 'small' town has vanished. The Missouri Ozarks farmer demands an ever higher grade of entertainment—and a newer joke—than the New York City broker, because the Ozark fellow spends more time at the radio, listening, than does his city cousin and knows all the answers.

"Comedians used to say 'It will be great for the hicks in the sticks but Broadway will give you the horse laugh.' Now the comics assert: 'Broadway and Hollywood will giggle but toss it out—it won't get by in the sticks.' "No longer do the so-called horny-handed sons and daughters of the man with the hoe weep at such songs as ‘You Made Me What I Am Today;’ they're too busy singing Robin and Rainger love songs, and they're swinging about the barn to the tunes of Benny Goodman and Phil Harris and can't be bothered with 'Turkey in the Straw.'

I SHALL illustrate my point. We had a gag that laid them in the aisles in New York. Here it is:
“'Q. Who was the lady I seen you with last night?'
“'A. What were you doing in that part of town?'
"But you should have read the fan mail from the farms, villages, and small towns; letters that topped that gag in 100 different ways, and all old.
"The Burns and Allen program is one of the most popular on the air and it couldn't be that without the warm following of fans in the rural districts. I happen to know that their fan mail shows that one of their most rib-tickling gags was appreciated far more by their rural listeners, than by the so-called city folks. Here's the gag: Milton Watson was leaving the Burns and Allen program and after the usual build up, Gracie told Milton to kiss her goodby. There were a series of torrid kisses and then: GRACIE: Goodbye GEORGE. I'm going with Milty.
"Modern?
"To be successful on the air you have to write up to the small towns and rural districts, not down. The greatest mistake a comedian can make is underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Those who make that mistake don't last long. They're too lazy to dig up new material, or too dumb to understand that people in the 'sticks' also enjoy subtle humor."

MY BIGGEST thrill in radio was when a guy in the Ohio state penitentiary, about to be electrocuted, wrote and told me he was very much interested in my feud with Fred Allen, over the subject of whether I could really fiddle. He wrote that he wanted to know the outcome of that feud before sitting on the hot seat. Allen and I both wrote to him and told him how the feud would end. The next week the guy got a commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment and wrote us the Ohio prison inmates had a hearty laugh on the two of us because they knew all along that our feud was bound to end that way.

MY LIFE has been mostly work. I never did anything last night that the world was crazy about the next day. Nothing I ever said tonight was commented on tomorrow. It has just been a procession of programs. I've spent twenty-five years climbing up the greasiest ladder that was ever greased and believe me, you can slide down a damned sight faster than you can climb up.
"My routine hasn't changed. I'm doing the same thing on the air today I did when I was a master of ceremonies at shows in the Orpheum Theater in St. Louis.
"My most exciting experience on the radio was the night of March 14, in New York. Fred Allen and I had been going after each other for three months and on that night we got together, threw away our scripts and went after each other, tonsil to tonsil."

BENNY, now making his eighth motion picture, was preparing to leave and I reminded him he had told me nothing of Mary Livingstone, his wife.
"Sorry," he said. "I met her in Los Angeles. She was a sales girl in a department store and was pinch hitting for a girl with whom an actor friend had made a date for me, but who failed to show. Mary kept the date and, although I didn't know it, I fell in love and that fact didn't dawn on me until I wrote to her sister and learned Mary was engaged to a guy in Vancouver, B. C. I suggested a trip to Chicago. Mary came to Chicago and I proposed and was accepted. We were married on Friday instead of Sunday because we both figured if we waited until Sunday the wedding probably would never take place.
"Would you believe it, we've been married ten years and six months and it only seems like ten years?"