Is Being 39 Still Funny?

Even after turning 80, and shortly before being felled by pancreatic cancer, Jack Benny didn’t appear to be slowing down.

He was still on the road, performing two different types of comedy shows that had been honed and perfected over the years, the same modus operandi he employed back in his days of vaudeville, travelling to a new town every three to seven days.

He came up with a comedic stage routine he guest-performed with symphony orchestras, satirising snooty concert vioinists, at the same time raising money for musicians, concert halls and the orchestras themselves. With modifications, he performed it until the end of his life.

But he also modified his "live" TV act (as opposed to the sitcom format he used alternatively). There was a monologue, a singer, then a duet violin act with a little girl. I'm pretty certain it included an "annoyed" Jack trying to upstage her and retorting "Fool around with me, will you, sister!"

That's the kind of performance he gave audiences for a week in Danbury, Connecticut (the girl in this case was named Sonja, age 11, from Los Angeles). The local Times-News joined the rest of the media in sending a reporter to a pre-rehearsal news conference with Benny. This is the paper’s report, published Aug. 7, 1974. Jack was dead less than six months later.

Jack Benny: ‘There’s no more time for 39’
By Margie Freaney
Modern Living staff
Some jokes just aren't funny anymore to Jack Benny.
The comedian's wry brand of humor made him a winner in vaudeville, movies, on radio and then television. He jumped successfully from one medium to the next.
Now he's appearing all over the world as a "violinist," and audiences like those at Candlewood Theatre in New Fairfield are just as appreciative as ever. But Benny says he's changed his act.
"You have to know when to quit something," he observed at Ramada Inn the other day.
Gags about being 39 years old (he was born in 1894 according to Who's Who), or being stingy, or about his car, "Maxwell," are Benny trademarks. But the comedian retired those jokes to keep himself on stage.
"Being cheap isn't funny anymore," he explained in the bored ironic tones that kept radio and television audiences tuned in for decades.
"And there's no more time for 39 years old. It's all passe, corny. It'd have to be something exceptionally great before I'd say '39' or 'Maxwell,' " Benny added.
He was relaxed and gracious, clearly enjoying the opportunity to discuss his 60-plus years as an entertainer and his enduring reputation as a man who can make people laugh.
He passed up the chance to make fun of his losses in the recently disclosed oil investment swindle that bilked entertainers and businessmen out of millions.
"I didn't even know I was in it," Benny said with his patented "so what?" shrug. "My lawyers were in it. But some really smart businessmen were involved. I don't feel ashamed."
He figures he got back at least part of his $300,000 stake, and as for the rest, Benny said, he might be able to deduct losses from income tax.
Benny admitted a lot of people think he's retired, despite the annual television specials and concert tours. He appears in Europe and Canada, at benefit symphonic concerts — often arranged by violinist Isaac Stern — and small theaters like Candlewood. His act is mostly talk, although he does play the violin.
"I don't try to play badly," he insisted. "The humor is that I try to play as well as I can ... and can't quite make it.”
Benny seems to have almost miraculously updated his appearance along with his material. But when someone asked how he keeps his face and body so youthful, Benny chewed his cigar and looked over the top of his bifocals:
"When did you see my body?" he asked blandly.
And that's about as risque as he gets in concert appearances, although he said "it's easier to be funny" now than it was even seven or eight years ago because of a more permissive society.
Benny, along with his great pal George Burns, started out as a stand-up vaudeville comic playing small towns. Now, he pointed out, any comedian who shows promise is immediately paraded before millions of people on television.
And if you bomb on television, it's all over.
"Unfortunately, today, we have no place to be lousy," Benny said, quoting Burns and doing a fair imitation. "I can't even be lousy in Danbury."
But Benny really doesn't have to worry about being lousy anywhere. Even reporters at the press conference treated him with deference, pausing afterward to pose with him or secure an autograph.
Fans inquire after his television and radio "family" as if they were personal friends — as they must have seemed to those who listened to radio in the thirties and forties and watched his weekly television program for 24 years.
Mary Livingston [sic], Benny's wife of 48 years, stays home in California while he makes personal appearances. And what about "Rochester," the black actor who played Benny's stage valet? The show was later criticized for portraying Rochester as an offensive stereotype of a shuffling, bumbling black man.
"I never heard that." Benny said firmly. "People liked it . . . it was a certain love relationship. Anything that made me angry, and that I blamed Rochester for, always turned out to be something I caused myself." After a slight pause, he added, "He got a fortune of money too, which they don't know."
Most of Benny's memories are on the bright side, anyway, when he cares to look back. But smart showmen don't rest on past hits or yellowed copies of good reviews.
Wouldn't he really like to see the golden age of radio return?
"No," Benny answered quickly, "that's over.
"You have to get into whatever business there is."


Jack’s Dennis Day and Eddie Anderson were on the road that month, too, performing at the Douglas County Fair in Nebraska (adults, $1.50).

TV specials after his series ended in 1965 were different than the sitcom-ish format he adopted in his radio years and carried on into television. They consisted of a monologue, guest stars interrupting (interruptions were a Benny staple from his earliest radio days) and some kind of routine or sketch. He had another one in the hopper at the time of his death. Even then, stories about the Maxwell, 39 and cheapness were remembered with a smile. It may have been corn to Jack, but his fans still laugh at it 50-plus-years later.

Laughing at the Concert

After Jack Benny’s success on radio and TV, he took to the stage again. Not necessarily with a variety revue like he had in the 1940s and ‘50s. He performed benefit violin concerts across North America with symphony orchestras and the world’s greatest violin players. One benefit months before he died in 1974 was to save the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, where he had played on his birthday in 1928. (Yes, that is the same Don Bestor who led the musicians on his show).

How much did Jack raise? Let’s find out from this story from the Associated Press, appearing in papers starting around Jan. 28, 1964 (of course, he had almost 11 more years to go).

Musician Jack Benny Has Made $3.5 Million For U.S. Symphones
By MURRAY CHASS
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Jack Benny, whose comic tightwad image has helped make him rich, draws still more money these days with his violin.
The money, however doesn't go into the mythical vault fictitiously located in the depths of Benny's Beverly Hills home.
Rather, it goes primarily into the treasuries of many of the nation's symphony orchestras with which Benny has appeared as guest soloist in benefit concerts, where he is in as much demand as he ever has been as a comic.
BENNY, WHO played violin professionally as a teen-ager, performs the concerts in complete sincerity. At the same time he is humorous about them.
"I'm not good enough to be a concert violinist," Benny says frankly, "but I'm good enough to do a comedy concert. The playing is as good as I can do—which isn't too good."
"I am only a fair violinist—not even a good one — who would not be able to give a legitimate concert."
Now at 70—far from his legendary 39 — Benny has appeared with most of the major orchestras in the country in the past seven years, receiving no salary for his performances, just expenses.
In all, he has played with about 35 orchestras and has helped raise nearly $3.5 million for various benefits. About half of the money has gone to maintenance and pension funds of the orchestras.
"I THINK I get about as much satisfaction out of this as anything," Benny explained before a recent appearance with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. "I have a lot of fun doing it. It's very much like a stage performance, and I like it very much.
"It's a satire on a world-famous violinist. I'm supposed to think that I am a great violinist.
"The audiences have been great. Some don't know what to expect. The easiest audiences to make laugh are concert-goers because they don't get a chance to laugh at concerts."
The critics have "been great about it," he added. “They've always loved it. I expected just once that some critic would say, 'It's funny, but it shouldn't be done.' But it's never happened. I play as good as I can. They (the critics) wouldn't like it if they thought I was making a monkey of the music. They know I wish I could play better."
THE COMEDIAN does not appear in the first half of the Benny concerts but takes the spotlight after the intermission. He works his colleagues into the act — in Pittshurgh, conductor William Steinberg arid concert master Samuel Thaviu served as his chief straight men, acting more than performing at times.
The program opens with Sarasate's "Gypsy Airs." Benny becomes enraged at the concertmaster for playing part of Benny's solo and has the conductor banish him. Somehow, near the end of the piece, the melody slides over into Benny's famous trademark, "Love In Bloom."
The second item (which varies from city to city) is a condensed version of one of the major classics, during which a couple more distractions occur. Benny and the conductor start heckling each other.
Finally in "Capriccio Espagnol" Benny serves as concertmaster. The music goes faster and faster, and at the end the distraught Benny stalks off the stage. He returns, however, for some informal encores.
THOUGH STEINBERG is a serious-minded director, he was quite taken by Benny.
"I feel that the fact he's so enormously musically makes the whole thing so pleasurable," he said. "Everything he does comes out of the spirit of the music, and that's what important."
Thaviu also admired Benny for his sincerity and his timing.
"When it (the performance) done in the spirit in which does it, it can't be anything but good," said the consertmaster.

A story in the Lompoc Record of Oct. 16, 1974 said Jack had appeared with 88 symphony orchestras as of Sept. 14 (after a show in New Orleans) and had raised an estimated 5.9 million dollars.

The paper advertised an engagement with the Santa Barbara Symphony on Nov. 26. He never made. Cancer had taken told. Jack Benny was dead in a month.

Cheap, Or Not Too Cheap

It’s a shame Jack Benny felt he had to compensate for his radio and TV character. I’ve reprinted a number of articles on the subject and he always sounds a bit resentful. He, at least in my mind, should have just let people think that they’ll think. They’re going to do it anyway.

As it was, he couldn’t satisfy some people.

As intelligent people are reading here, those who are Jack Benny fans know he wasn’t cheap. They know he contributed to charities through concerts and donations. They know he did unadvertised acts of kindness, such as writing to parents of service-members he entertained during World War Two.

Here’s another syndicated column, this time from 1964, on the subject.

Jack Benny Is Really a Spendthrift
By ALAN MITCHELL
North American Newspaper Alliance
NEW YORK, March 6—"When I go to dinner in a large party, I feel obliged to pick up the check," says Jack Benny, who has devoted 30 years to building a reputation as a tight-wad. "Otherwise people may say, 'There goes old sticky-fingers again." I can't leave a normal 15 per cent tip. It's got to be a whopper.
"I pay the top price for everything I buy, even when I know it's on sale somewhere else. Over the year, it has cost me tens of thousands of dollars to prove I'm not really a miser. And every time the cost of living goes up, it gets worse."
Jack, who turned 39 for the 32nd time on Feb. 14, recalled a conversation with a cab driver who took him from New York's John F. Kennedy Airport to his hotel suite. The fare was $5. Jack handed the cabbie a $10 bill and told him to keep the change. "I wish you hadn't done that, Mr. Benny," the driver insisted, pocketing the bill. "Now I'll have to tell my wife you're not really a cheap bum. She'll be disappointed."
On another occasion, during a concert tour, Jack dropped into an all-night diner for a cup of coffee. When it came time to pay the tab, he discovered he had left his wallet it his hotel room. "So you're Jack Benny, eh?" the counterman remarked, watching Jack fumble through his empty pockets. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes." The next day, the comic's accountant dutifully mailed a check for $5.10 (including $5 tip) to the counterman.
Jack recalls that this financial Frankenstein began as a one-line joke on one of his first radio programs, back in 1934. The gag got a loud laugh, so the following week there were two "cheapskate" jokes in the script. Soon Jack's stinginess was such a part of his professional personality that when a bandit, in a radio sketch, warned him “. . . your money or your life,” there was no need for further dialogue. The long pause that followed brought down the house.
Recently the comedian's philanthropies have received sufficient publicity to help eradicate the image. In five years, his off-key concerts have raised nearly $4 million for worthy causes, including the musicians' welfare funds of more than 25 symphony orchestras. He is a heavy contributor to CARE, the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, the United Jewish Appeal and other charities.
But the public guise of a skinflint—on his TV show and elsewhere—still rankles him. "I realize people don't believe I actually have a cigarette vending machine in my living room, or a private vault in the cellar," he said. "But on the other hand, they may think that where there's smoke there's fire."
Not long ago, Jack bought a classic custom-made Rolls Royce for more than $25,000. He rushed to the home of a friend, an antique auto buff, to show it off. But his friend's cleaning woman was unimpressed. "It's terrible for a millionaire like Mr. Benny to be running around in an old car like that," she remarked sourly after he left.
"You see," said Jack, "no matter how much money I spend, I'm still a cheapskate."

By the time this article appeared in print, Jack was in Sydney, Australia for some live performances. That meant his TV shows were on film. The March 3, 1964 episode included an unusual guest star. What looks to be a CBS publicity hand-out appeared in newspapers in advance. (Yes, I know, headline, Beechnut gum).

Zebra in stripe-tease on Benny's program
Kate Smith plays a walk-on part on "The Jack Benny Program" on CBS-TV Tuesday at 9:30 p.m., and doesn't sing a note.
It's not the singing star Kate Smith. It is coincidentally enough a zebra named Kate, whose owner's name is Smith. Thus making her Kate Smith. And she has a claim to fame all her own.
This is the only working zebra in Hollywood. She was shipped to the Mark Smith Stables from her native Africa some nine years ago on a special request.
• • •
"WE FIGURED we could train her," recalls Smith, "but we never realized what a tough job it would be. Zebras are wild animals; we never let ourselves forget that. Where a horse can be gentled to be a friend, and a somewhat domesticated pet, a zebra may turn on you at any given time. She's mighty tricky and we don't trust her a bit."
Both Jack Benny and Joan Staley, who appears in this episode of the Benny show, found out the same thing. While the beast appears gentle for the camera, she was actually kicking up quite a fuss backstage.
"That’s because her buddy isn't here," explained Smith. "Her stablemate is a mule; it's out in the trailer now and when the two of them are separated Kate gets jittery."
• • •
THE SMITHS, who operate stables in the Los Angeles area, figure to import a few more zebras. "Not that there's an overwhelming demand for them to work in Hollywood, but we do get calls for them to make personal appearances. "Because of their scarcity they get more money than horses. And it is easier to work with the real thing than to stripe a horse," he said.

About 25 years earlier, some people had to be assured Jack did not own a polar bear named Carmichael. We hope he wasn't asked the same thing about Kate Smith, the zebra.

No One Laughed at 40

“People wouldn’t stand for any changes in Jack,” insisted the producer of The Jack Benny Program in 1961, one Fred de Cordova.

What we think of as Jack Benny today was something that evolved over a long period of time on radio. When Jack and his writers found something that brought laughs from the audience, they stuck with it as long as it worked.

Freddie was right. Attempts to go against Jack’s type were failures. One was in 1949 when Jack was hit on the head and became a wild spender. The writers hoped to mine a bunch of shows out of it, but gave up on the idea one week later. One said they just couldn’t write a non-cheapskate Jack Benny.

Another was Jack’s age. There was an attempt to push him past 39. It, too, failed. Just like Jack’s Maxwell, which mysteriously re-appeared in the later ‘40s after he gave up it during a war-time scrap drive, the idea was treated as it never happened.

Jack talked about “40” a number of times after the fact. One musing made its way into a column for the Bell Syndicate, published in Sunday newspaper supplements starting July 23, 1961.

39’s Find but 40? That’s Too Far
(Editor's Note: While Margaret McManus is on vacation, her column is being written this week by television comedian Jack Benny. Margaret McManus will resume her column next week.)
BY JACK BENNY
HOLLYWOOD—One way to stay young is simply to stop counting birthdays. I did that a long time ago.
It also is important to "think" young—stay active and surround yourself with young people. I have a friend, a motion-picture producer, who is in his 80s, but still one of the most youthful people I know.
He is vital and alive and he always talks about his next picture — not the one he just made or something that happened 20 or 30 years ago. It's deadly to make a habit of reminiscing: take it from me, there was no such thing as the "good old days."
Dennis Day calls me an "ancient Robert Cummings." You know. Dennis was a carefree bachelor when he joined the show and now he's married and the father of eight. He knows I would never fire an expectant father.
Well, anyway, when I come back on CBS-TV this fall I'll still be 39, and I have to say that sometimes it's a little hard to live up to the legend.
I look into the mirror some mornings and ask myself. "Just who do you think you're kidding?"
Then I shrug and think: "So I don't look 39; I don't look my right age either."
Now you can take that two ways, of course. But take it my way.
NOT HIS IDEA

You know, that joke about my being 39 wouldn't be funny at all if I actually looked my right age (67). Everyone knows by now that I'm not actually 39, but when they see the way I work and get a look at my schedule they can't really be sure exactly how old I am.
Now. I hate to say this, but stopping the clock —deciding to be 39 for the rest of my life—actually was not a stroke of inspiration on my part. I wish I could say that was the case, but it isn't.
The truth is this: My writers and I liked the idea of a fellow being so vain that he would never admit how old he really was, so we made that a part of the "Jack Benny" character I played.
And I'm sure not many of you will remember this: the writers made me 36 first (to tell the truth. I can't remember how old I really was when I was posing on radio as a 36-year-old). Then they made me 37, and I stayed that age for a few years, then I became 38 and finally 39.
When we got to that number, I told my writers, "Fellows, this is it. We go no further."
And that's the way it stood until I made that awful mistake a few years ago and decided to turn 40. I never should have done it, but I guess I was just impressed by all the publicity it would bring the show.
My wife. Mary, tried to tell me I was making a big mistake, but I said I could be just as funny at 40 as at 39.
ASTONISHED AT RESPONSES
Well, we had a big 40th birthday party on one of the shows, and the next day the telegrams, letters and phone calls starting pouring in. I was astonished.
No one wanted me to become 40. They said that, at 39, I had given a lot of encouragement to people over 40 who didn't like to tell their true ages for all sorts of reasons.
One letter, from a woman, said, "Mr. Benny, for years I've been fibbing about my age because I don't look it and I don't feel it. You have given hope to all of us who are long on years but young in spirit for a long time, and now you are going to change it all. I. and thousands of others my age, wish you wouldn't."
I also learned at about that time there were clubs all over the country for "39-year-olds." The idea was that you couldn't get into clubs until you were 39, and you couldn't get any older as far as the club was concerned. And, Brother, did I hear from them!
So I did a lot of thinking and didn't mention "40" for a few weeks. Then I decided, what the heck, I'm a comedian, and nothing I do is supposed to make much sense — so I went back to being 39.
Thirty-nine is a funny and not quite “real” number; when you say you’re 40, it sounds like you’re over the hill. I’ve been 39 for almost 30 years, so I should know what I’m talking about.

Jack's analysis was right. People found “39” funny. They referred it in their own lives. Jack knew that. Knowing what got laughs was why he was on top for so many years.

When Jack Benny Didn't Need His Writers

Command Performance may be the best-known of several variety-request programmes put together stateside for airing on Armed Forces Radio during World War Two.

Movie and radio stars contributed to the war effort, with stage shows at military camps overseas and at home, taking part in Victory Bond and War Stamp drives, dropping in to the Hollywood Canteen, and appearing on Command Performance, Mail Call, Jubilee and other shows aimed specifically at servicemen and women far from home.

Among the stars was Jack Benny. He was a huge success on one Command Performance, as reported by the Newspaper Enterprise Association’s Hollywood columnist. This appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News on Oct. 17, 1944.

Benny ad lib tops Hope, Allen
Raise the hand of Jack Benny as the winner in the ad lib battle of the century. He left Fred Allen, Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante speechless. And that, brother, deserves a special Academy Oscar.
It happened at "Christmas Command Performance USA," Hollywood's Christmas present to Uncle Sam's armed forces overseas. It was the greatest radio show in history and we'll tell you all about it later. But right now you're going to hear how Benny mopped up the stage with Allen, Hope and Durante.
The four comics, plus Jerry Colonna and half a dozen other stars, were called back to the footlights immediately after the show for a group picture with the audience.
The Army photographer was slow adjusting his camera. Somebody had to say something. Hope finally started it with a crack about his profile which caught Benny and Allen flat-footed. There was a moment's pause and then Durante yelled out:
"Hey, you ushers. Stand erect and give this joint a little class."
The audience howled.
Benny still couldn't think of anything to say. Neither could Allen, so he started mugging. Jerry Colonna got a laugh by announcing, “I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to stay out of this. Benny, still at a loss for a smart crack, stuck his hat on his head crosswise and announced, “Well, at least I’ll LOOK funny.” The audience chuckled.
The army photographer was still adjusting his camera and the audience waiting expectantly to see who would score next.
Hope came through with a weak gag about Crosby. There was another few seconds of embarrassing silence. Benny and Allen squirmed. And then Benny let go. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the parking lot ticket for his automobile.
"I don't mind doing this show for free," he announced, "but who the h— is going to pay for this parking ticket?"
The audience roared, then applauded. Allen, Hope and Durante were speechless. They knew they were licked. The ad lib battle of the century was over. Benny grinned happily, the photographer took the picture and everybody went home.
As we started to say, "Christmas Command Performance USA" was the greatest radio show in history. Too bad, neighbor, but you'll never hear it. It was a 2-hour show recorded by the Armed Forces Radio Service for the boys and girls overseas. The record will be played in lonely command posts, mess halls and briefing rooms from the Palau Islands to the western front on Christmas Day.
Bob Hope did the master of ceremony chore. Starred on the show in addition to all the comics we've mentioned were W. C. Fields, Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, Kay Kyser and his orchestra, Dorothy Lamour, Frances Langford, Virginia O'Brien, Dinah Shore, Ginny Simms, Spencer Tracy, Spike Jones, Xavier Cugat, the Ken Darby chorus, Lee J. Cobb and Skippy Honeier [sic], with Ken Carpenter as announcer, Maj. Meredith Wilson conducting the GI orchestra and Sergeant Bob Welch holding the production reins.
Dinah sang "I'll Be Seeing You" and proved why she's a great GI and civilian favorite these days. Ginny sang “Amour.” Spike Jones’ orchestra murdered “Holiday for Strings” with those washboards and auto horns. Durante sang "I'm the Guy Who Holds the Mortgage on the Ranch That Has the Sheep That Supply the Wool for Lana Turner's Sweaters."
Allen and Benny bought each other 57 cent polkadot Christmas ties and in a department store routine, then sang “Jingle Bells,” accompanying themselves on the violin and banjo.
It was a billion dollars worth of talent. No sponsor could have afforded to have paid the bill. Everyone donated their time and talent for Uncle Sam's boys and girls. And it's a show they'll never forget.
Except for losing his ad lib battle with Benny, Hope was in rare form. Carpenter introduced him as "the guy who laid more eggs in the South Pacific than a B-25." His best gag was about a group of GIs in the South Pacific who didn't have a Christmas tree. So they decimated a hula girl. "They've got the only Christmas tree in the world," Hope cracked, "that can wiggle it’s a tinsel."

Yes, the broadcast exists and you can listen to it below.



The first Command Performance (according to the OTRR.org site) was broadcast on March 1, 1942. Jack’s first appearance was on the 12th show, which aired May 7, 1942. The announcer was Paul Douglas, one of Jack’s announcers in the Canada Dry days in 1932. Considering Pearl Harbor was the previous December, the military organised this series pretty quickly.

Below is the schedule for AEF shortwave stations from the first edition of the Army newspaper Yank, published June 17, 1942. This is before the AFRS radio stations were set up at bases overseas. It gives you the idea of the kind of radio shows the troops were hearing.

The Perils of Ken Carpenter

Ken Carpenter had two long-time associations in radio. One was with Bing Crosby, apparently starting when Bing hosted the Kraft Music Hall on NBC in January 1936, and continuing through various shows and networks, carrying on into the early 1960s in a recorded show with Bing and Rosemary Clooney playing records in between heavily-scripted banter.

The other was with Kraft itself. He continued on the Music Hall after Bing left, and other programmes sponsored by the cheese company, including The Great Gildersleeve and a TV show with Milton Berle. He announced regularly on other shows, among them Command Performance, the Edgar Bergan/Charlie McCarthy show for Chase and Sanborn, the Life of Riley and, in the 1950s, The Halls of Ivy and Lux Radio Theatre, just to name a few. And there had been the Packard Show with Fred Astaire and Jimmy Fidler's on-air gossip column for Tangee and Grace Moore's programme for Vick's, all in 1936, and replacing Don Wilson in all of them. Carpenter was, more or less, Wilson’s protégé.

The June 28, 1930 edition of Inside Facts of Stage and Screen announced:

NEW ANNOUNCER
Kenneth Carpenter has been added to the announcing staff of KFI-KECA here. The new announcer at the Anthony stations is married and is 29 years old.

Carpenter was assigned on Oct. 21, 1930 to The Violet Ray Music Box, airing 8 to 8:30 on Tuesday nights on KFI for General Petroleum. The same publication gave the opinion over two issues:

Tinkling music box melodies faded in, Kenneth Carpenter orating two minute plug for gasoline and oil. This boy has a voice that should sell anything.

Again, let us mention the announcer, Kenneth Carpenter. The lad is good, with a friendly, pleasant voice, well modulated and using the proper inflection. This is very rare amongst the fraternity of announcers!

Carpenter had been hired at KFI by Wilson. They both ended up announcing football on NBC’s West Coast network. The Oakland Post-Enquirer of Sept. 23, 1931 squibbed:

The St. Mary’s-U. S. C. game will be handled over KGO by Don Wilson, who made such a hash of the Pageant of Jewels, and Ken Carpenter.

Carpenter's first Rose Bowl was 1934, sharing play-by-play with Don Thompson. Before then, Wilson had been hired by NBC to do sports back east. Of course, he ended up with a 30-plus year career with Jack Benny. In fact, an uncredited Carpenter opened the Benny show on March 23, 1937, as the plot had Wilson in Chicago, so an announcer was needed to throw to the midwest city.


Radio Mirror, in its September 1938 issue, contained a nice profile of Carpenter. We won’t reprint the full article, but will cut out a chunk of career highlights for you, along with the story of Carpenter and the NBC chimes on the hour-long Kraft Music Hall. His ad-lib was a stroke of genius. Radio writers speculated for weeks whether Carpenter would sound them at the half-hour station break.

[Carpenter] might still be knocking on office doors in search of employment — though I seriously doubt it — if his quest hadn't led him to KFI, then an independent radio station in Los Angeles. Since the only qualification he could advance for a radio job was a checkered business past embracing life insurance peddling, iron foundry puddling, commercial photography and the Chicago department store stint, Kenneth Carpenter spent most of his time waiting in the reception room at KFI. He was so tired hotfooting it along the pavement, he just decided to sit and wait. He did that for three weeks at KFI. Then, says Ken, "Finally Don Wilson had to hire me to get rid of me!"
DON, who "sells the stuff" for Jack Benny these days, was chief announcer at the old KFI. Ken doesn't recommend the sit-down system for ambitious young would-be announcers, though. He realizes that Don might have just given him the bum's rush or called a cop.
KFI put him to work broadcasting sports for the Coast networks. He airported track meets, crew races, baseball games and football. He got to be a crack spieler on gridiron goings-on and graduated to the top gridiron event in the nation — the Rose Bowl Game. Ken has four Rose Bowl games under his announcing belt by now, but his first Bowl job lingers longest and most painfully in his memory, which is only natural considering what befell.
It was along in the middle of the third quarter when the stands were on their feet yelling themselves hoarse. One team was about to score close to the sidelines, and the quarterback probably thought Ken Carpenter looked like a weak left end. At any rate, he called the play and several tons of tackles, guards and assorted backs charged down on Ken and his mike. When he woke up, there were cleat marks all over his fair white body and a lot of "dead air" on his particular broadcast. His reputation as well as one of his knees was pretty badly twisted.
It has been like that, it seems, all along with Ken Carpenter. Things pick on him to happen. That's why he timidly asserts today that he has come up the hard way.
There was the time he set up his traveling mike in a downtown jam to report an Elks Parade. As the colors went by the patriotic fervor of the crowd shoved Ken up against a plate glass window and then shot him through into a snappy department store display. The only indications the station had that Ken was on the job were loud crashes of falling glass and some muffled yowls.
He covered a championship baseball series, and a hasty batter slung his bat aside after a hit. Who do you think stopped it with his solar plexus and an "oof!" over the air? That's right — Carpenter. He put on a special air stunt from an orange grove and in the middle a tree decided to unload its fruit on Ken's uncovered top. Once, during a Navy Day review, Ken attempted to hop from one destroyer to another with his talk-box and misjudged the distance. He hung over the deep by a snag in his very best pants until the boys in blue rallied to the rescue.
"So," Ken declared, "you can readily see that the mere fact I am still hanging around and drawing a pay check is some sort of small miracle!"
Of course, Ken Carpenter does much more than just hang around the NBC studio in Hollywood. In fact, he is one of their very ace announcers and always as busy as a bookie on Derby Day. If you're a confirmed dial twister you'll hear his dulcet and persuasive tones over the Marion Talley Ry-Krisp hour on Sundays, as well as the Sunday One Man's Family show and the Wednesday one, too. He announces the Gilmore Circus (Pacific Coast Chain) on Fridays, still does very special events, makes recordings, and in his spare time he comes at you via the movies in Paramount's "Unusual Occupations" short subjects.
But Bing Crosby's battery of station-break bells on the Kraft Music Hall has really sounded out the Carpenter air click in a big way. That started as a rib, and like Topsy, "just growed," like this:
One day at rehearsals Chester Morris, the movie star guest that week, said the station gongs had always intrigued him. Who rang them, Chester wanted to know, what did they look like, how did they work?
"Why," replied Bing, shuffling his script sheets, "have you never heard of Kensington Carpenter — Carpenter the little Father of all the Chimes? Go ahead, Ken, ring 'em for the lad."
But Ken was busy penciling up his plugs and the chimes weren't handy. "Bing," he replied, "I'm just not in the mood!"
"What!" bellowed Bing, in mock severity, "This is a horrible contretemps, Carpenter, a deplorable contretemps!" 'Contretemps' is one of Bing's favorite words, and he rolls it out in a nasal snore more French than the French.
IT went on from there, with Bing exhorting Ken to give with his art and Ken feigning a temperamental indisposition— and all the time a secretary was taking the gag down in shorthand.
Now, it is practically a rule on the Kraft show that all spontaneous gags and impromptu by-play during rehearsals that get a laugh out of the company, go into the finished script. "Off the elbow" stuff, as radio people call it, makes a show sound relaxed — and that is just what Bing's Music Hall show wants above everything else.
Moreover, all guest stars on the Kraft hour are taken aside by the producer and urged to "throw curves" during the show at Bing and Bob — and now, of course, Carpenter — as much as possible. If the surprise "curves" are clever enough to get any one of the three at a loss for a snappy comeback — so much the better.
So that night Ken Carpenter's "temperament" about his station-break chime virtuosity went out on the air. The next Thursday, too, and the next and the next, until it had snowballed into a definite part of the show. Bing carried on his professorial severity and Ken kept up the callow, striving youth pose. They've tried to drop it several times, but somehow it seems to get better each week — and now they can't!
At any rate, whether he likes it or not, Kenneth Lee Carpenter now finds himself a radio comedian. The other day, Lenox B. Lohr, President of the National Broadcasting Company, sent him a set of chromium-plated chimes for his very own, as a sort of official recognition of the fact.
Now they've got him doing all sorts of things — even singing songs. "Which," mused Ken to me, "is a little strange, considering this fact: When I was in college my greatest ambition was to be a singer. It was a very small college and the glee club had fifty members. But my voice was so terrible they kicked me off the glee club the first day. And now I'm warbling from coast to coast! Amazing, this radio!"


Carpenter lost a TV job in 1955, but it wasn’t quite his fault. Among his duties on the Halls of Ivy television show was to warm up the audience. The San Francisco Call-Bulletin of Apr. 19 reported Carpenter was unable to get to the studios at Columbia Square, so a page boy and part-time copywriter named Fred Grimes told Colman he could do it. He did. Next thing, Grimes had the job full-time. (Carpenter told historian and radio man Chuck Schaden he didn’t really like doing it anyway).

As network radio petered out in the first few years of the 1960s, so did Carpenter’s career. Appearances were rare. He made one with Jack Benny, announcing Premiere At The Pavilion, a 1965 KTTV charity special where Benny played a concerto. And he continued his activities with AFTRA and Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters.

Carpenter joked about the situation to Jack Smalley of the Ventura County Star. In a column on June 16, 1969, Smalley wrote:

When asked Ken Carpenter what he was doing now.
“Our grandchildren can’t figure out what I do, either,” said Ken. “They don’t understand broadcasting work, and they wonder what sort of job I have.
“One day we bought a whole flat of boxed strawberries and stopped off at their house. Our grandson came to the door. He looked at the strawberries and a light dawned. “Now I know what you do, grandpa!” he yelled. “You sell strawberries.”

The days of selling Velveeta for Der Bingle had long ended.

The Infamous Horn

The Horn Blows at Midnight may, or may not, have been a lousy movie, but Jack Benny’s writers got an awful lot of mileage out of it. The first reference on the Benny radio show to it was on Jan. 23, 1944. How many others there were, I don’t know, but no less a person than movie mogul Jack L. Warner showed up twice to joke about it (in an appearance on Feb. 20, 1949, promoting a radio version on The Ford Theatre, he got unintentional laughs by butchering the dialogue).

One episode featured Mel Blanc playing a car lot attendant who had his Hollywood career killed by directing the film. Another was a funny episode which ended with the entire patronage of a drive-in theatre zoom away when Horn was announced as a special double-feature (aired Oct. 24, 1954).

Movie studios were notorious for planting BS to promote their films. Whether any other what was reported by the Associated Press in the 1944 story below is true, I can’t tell you, but we’ll pass it along.

Jack Benny Finds He’s No Angel
BY TED GILL
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 12.—(AP)—Comedian Jack Benny is trying his best to be a good little angel—but frankly admits it's a devil of a job!
Benny is appearing in "The Horn Blows at Midnight," in which he's supposed to be No. 4 trumpeter in a heavenly symphony—but the Waukegan wisecracker, whom his arch-rival, Fred Allen, jokingly calls the neanderthal nit-wit of the airways—blithely confesses he doesn't know as much about trumpets as he does about violins—which, he adds, is practically negligible —so they dub in the sound effects.
Next, they had to denude Jack of his pretty white wings, because they were flopping grotesquely in everyone's eyes, and besides, pranksters were habitually plucking out feathers to use as pipe cleaners--so they compromised, and appliqued a small set of wings on Jack's white robe—and let it go at that.
In another scene, Benny's toupee accidentally got knocked off during a rough-and-tumble fracas with some children. Promptly one youngster grabs it up and dashes off, yelling: "Oh, boy, Fred Allen will pay me plenty for this!"
Benny admits he perhaps should have started being an angel a little earlier in life, but adds: "This probably is as close to heaven as I'd ever get, anyway."

The Newspaper Enterprise Association provided this look the same month.

Benny Doesn’t Like Heaven In His Newest Movie
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 1 (NEA)—Heaven isn't all that it's cracked up to be, Jack Benny said.
He was having trouble, he complained, keeping his white robes clean. A man with a bottle of cleaning fluid had to follow him around.
Those gold sandals were breaking down his arches. Lugging a trumpet around all the time was very bothersome, too. The heavenly hours were too long. And he just didn't feel like an angel, Jack said, since the studio wardrobe department clipped his wings.
"All this and heaven, too. It's too much," Jack groaned.
The picture is "The Horn Blows at Midnight." The three principal angels—Benny, Alexis Smith and Guy Kibbee—played their first scene together and their wings got in each other's way. In the middle of the third "take" the tip of Alexis' wing stuck Benny right in the eye and Director Raoul Walsh stopped the scene.
Finally somebody came up with the idea of the angels wearing wings like the boys in the air corps do. So they clipped the wings of the angels and reseed on a pair of bright, red cloth wings on their white robes.
Since then life in heaven has run much more smoothly.
"The Horn Blows at Midnight" is a comedy about an angel sent down to destroy the earth—because there’s so much hate. Angel Benny is elected for the job. He's given a trumpet to blow at midnight, a book of instructions and a modern business suit. Then he's shoved into an elevator and a split second later he's walking down Fifth Avenue.
Fallen Angels
From then on, everybody hopes, there will be lots of laughs. Benny, you see, has been an angel for a couple of thousand years and things have sorts changed on earth. Besides he's a forgetful gent. He loses the instruction book, gets mixed up with a beautiful girl, Dolores Moran, and a couple of fallen angels who know the secret of the trumpet and eventually steal it from him.
Jimmy Kern, who wrote the script with Sam Hellman, was much more enthusiastic about it all than Benny, who is a natural worrier. “It's tailored for Jack," Kern said. "That one scene where he goes to a restaurant and orders a lot of stuff he's never eaten will be terrific."
We had to admit it was a very funny scene. Knowing nothing about earthly food, Benny first orders a banana split. Then he has some kippered herring. He sees someone eating a big dill pickle, so he orders one for himself. He winds up the meal with roast duck and oyster stew.
The unbelieving, astonished waiter, is played by one John Brown, who until a few weeks ago was a member of Fred Allen's radio show. Jack met Brown in New York, liked him and brought him to Hollywood as his protégé. But getting back to heaven, we noticed a large panel of photographs identified as “Fallen Angels." As Alexis explains to Jack, "Fallen angels can never come back here, and there's only one other place for them to go."
Cinema Caution
The photographs, Director Walsh pointed out, were all of people on the set—hairdressers, cameramen, carpenters, etc. There was even photograph of Walsh. Having once been sued for using in a movie the telephone number of a guy in Milwaukee, Warner Bros. studio takes no more chances. There'd probably be grounds for a suit, at that, if a model in New York or a politician in Oregon recognized his photograph playing a "Fallen Angel" on the screen.
We were surprised, though, that Benny, as a gag, hadn't slipped in a photograph of Fred Allen as one of the fallen angels.
"What!" groaned Jack, "and let that guy steal a laugh? I've got enough worries."
As a matter of fact. Jack Benny seemed to be a very unhappy angel.

While Benny and his friends joked about the “mediocrity” of The Horn Blows at Midnight, there was one picture Jack really did not like. He told the Knoxville Sentinel-News on Jan. 2, 1944, in an unbylined story, after a description of Horn:

The idea is an amusing one and Benny's got his fingers crossed.
Last time he heard of an amusing story, he insisted on Twentieth Century-Fox buying it. It was called "The Meanest Man in the World" and it did seem funny, until the experts got through with the script.
"I pleaded with them to throw it away," Benny said. "They had spent about what my salary amounted to and I told 'em I would gladly do another picture free, if they'd only forget this one. The embarrassing thing was that it was my idea in the first place to make it, and I could not talk them out of it."
• • •
Called Worst Movie
WHEN completed the picture was so bad, according to Benny, it could not be released. One of the greatest of the movie makers (who shall be nameless here) went to work on it and finally let loose upon an unsuspecting public a movie. Some critics for whom we have respect, grimly called it the worst movie Hollywood ever made. That is a broad statement. There have been worse.
"Let's just call it bad," said Benny, "and try to forget it.”
It was the only really terrible movie he ever made. The three before it, including "Charley's Aunt," "George Washington Slept Here," and "To Be or Not To Be." were smash hits and Benny has hopes the customers will remember those.

Indeed, To Be or Not To Be received critical acclaim, and Charley’s Aunt was another film seized upon by Benny’s radio writers, including some where Jack dressed in his old woman’s costume (once to escape Ronald Colman, Apr. 25, 1948).

Our Horn trivia: Louella Parsons broke the story on May 19, 1942 that Ida Lupino had been signed to star in the film, then was the first to report on May 11, 1943 that Benny would play an angel in the movie. In the meantime, Lupino bowed out.

Our non-Horn trivia: Jack and his co-star from George Washington Slept Here, Ann Sheridan, were supposed to appear together on the Screen Guild Players' version of Nothing But the Truth on Feb. 21, 1944, but the broadcast was called off and a different one with other stars substituted. No reason was given in the press.

The biggest story involving Jack in Feb. 1944 wasn’t his movies. Newspapers revealed his show would no longer be sponsored by General Foods as of June 11, but by American Tobacco for the coming radio season (the Associated Press didn’t mention specific products while the United Press did). Jack had been getting $22,500 a week to plug the only cereal (I can think of) with a double-plural name, Grape Nuts Flakes. The deal for Lucky Strikes on radio lasted until the end of Jack’s show in 1955.

Before She Was Mrs. Day

Jack Benny’s radio show had plenty of secondary characters, many of them played by the most in-demand actors on the air in the west. People like Bea Benaderet, Sara Berner, Joe Kearns, Frank Nelson, Mel Blanc, Herb Vigran . . .

And others, such as Verna Felton.

Her best-known role was Dennis Day’s mother. Day was new to radio acting when he was hired in 1939 and the veteran Felton was brought in as kind of a comedy insurance policy since he needed a bit to time to develop. She appeared on the first four broadcasts of the 1939-40 season beginning Oct. 9, 1939, missed an episode, returned for the next two, skipped the next episode, then returned twice in December.

After that, she was brought in occasionally. Her final show was May 8, 1955, not many weeks before Benny left radio.

Felton had a lengthy stage career, starting by August 1900, before she was hired to yell “Ahhhhhh shaddap!” at Jack Benny. Hollywood Citizen-News radio-TV editor Zuma Palmer profiled her in three parts, beginning Feb. 25, 1952.

Verna Felton at Home in Television
By ZUMA PALMER
Verna Felton added just as greatly to the quality of the sec[ond] Dennis Day television show as she did to the first.
"Timing," some would say. "Experience," the gray-haired, stoutish actress would declare.
And acting experience she has had. The kind only to be gained in stock where you "were forgetting a play, acting a play and learning a play, all at the same time."
Television is more like the stage than anything else, Miss Felton believes. "It will give newcomers some of the opportunity to learn to act that stock did," she remarked. "They can start out as extras, supers and work up." Miss Felton is a native Californian. It was in our state capital that, as a child, she got her start —with the Jessie Shirley company.
* * *
Every August for 20 years Verna Felton, Clara Allen, her mother, a character actress, and other members of the stock company managed by her father, Dr. H. W. Felton, began a tour of Canada from British Columbia. They gave 10 performances a week, a different play each time. When the company reached Ontario, at least 14 new dramas were prepared for the return. The actors had only Tuesday daytime free. If not performing, they were rehearsing.
Miss Felton, Dennis Day's mother on his NBC television show, said she never had a complete script to study, just her part and cues. The pay for the stars was $50 a week which was thought to be big.
PREPARATION
Before a play went into rehearsal, the director had blocked out on a board in his hotel room every move of every actor. No time was ever wasted in the theater deciding whether, for instance, it would be better for an actor to pass in front or behind another.
Many of the theaters were about the size of the Biltmore. In one building in which they performed, there was not seating for all who wanted to see the show. The emergency was met by selling space on the actors' trunks which had been placed outdoors in front of windows.
* * *
Players who toured in stock usually have some memories which bring a chuckle. Verna Felton is one.
The roll up curtain was in use when she was starring in Canada in plays by Shaw, Ibsen and other famous writers. As she was "dying" in "Camille" one night, the curtain came down too soon, catching in the puffs of the actress bending over her. Then up it went carrying with it the girl's false hair and veil. The audience didn't burst into loud laughter as might be expected, just tittered.
Miss Felton said you know your audience in five minutes. "In 'Camille,'" she related, "we would play it low, keep dropping our voice, until we would hear a rustle of a program, then we would come up.
Lee Millar joined the company. A romance began which continued until his death a few years ago.
Miss Felton and her husband were on Broadway in "Appearances." Mr. Millar then became a director for Leo Dietrichstein who was associated with the Shuberts and Cohen and Harris. He also worked for Walker Whiteside.
TRANSITION
When theater work became more difficult to obtain, the actress suggested radio. "Radio!" Her husband was horrified at the idea. Finally she told him if he wouldn't try to get a job in it, she would. After all, there was a little matter of eating. Mr. Millar went to NBC, met someone he knew, was given a chance to act and found, to his surprise, he enjoyed being in radio. One day he carne home and told his wife Tom Hutchinson had a place for her, too.
After reading her part, which was in "Ramona," the director said, "There's no one in the back gallery." Miss Felton had to forget that before the microphone, she didn't have a farthest most seat to which to project her voice.
Miss Felton has been on numerous broadcasts since 1932 when the pay was $9 a program, in pictures and is now in television, as Dennis Day's mother.
The gifted character actress has a son, Lee Millar, an actor; a daughter-In-law, four cocker spaniels—Mike, Tracy, Hildegarde and Gus Gus, and a Persian cat, Veronica.

Ramona was broadcast on KPO, San Francisco on Monday, Aug. 1, 1932 at 10 p.m. Included in the cast were Bernice Berwin, Dorothy Desmond, Ted Maxwell, Max Waizman, Henry Shumer, J.A. Smythe and Cameron Prudhomme. (A side note: at 6:30 that evening on KGO in Oakland was a half-hour programme starring humourist John P. Medbury and an orchestra led by someone named Phil Harris.

Palmer revealed in her column of Nov. 10, 1939 that Dennis had sat in on auditions for his mother's role. Jack left the decision up to him and, out of the final two actresses, he picked Felton.

Her final appearance as Dennis' mother was on Jack Benny's TV show, June 3, 1962. She died Dec. 14, 1966 at age 76.



Felton has an accomplishment from that era rarely spoken about. It was reported in the Victoria Times, on Sept. 9, 1933.

Verna Felton is NBC Announcer
Verna Felton, popular actress, who formerly had a stock company in Victoria, who has a host of friends among western Canada theatregoers, has gained radio fame in her appointment as the first woman announcer of a sponsored series of programmes over the National Broadcasting Company network.
Word has been received from San Francisco of Miss Felton’s assignment to the new and popular programme “Do You Believe in Ghosts,” heard Thursday evenings at 7:15 and Sundays at 9 p.m. over the coast network. The programme is written by Harold Burdick, former Seattle newspaperman, who is also narrator.
Miss Felton and her husband, Lee C. Millar, have been appearing in NBC productions for some time.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s radio writer, James Adam, caught the first broadcast and commented on Sept. 5, 1933 he didn’t like Hal Burdick's show or Felton. All we can say is “Ahhhhhh shaddap!”

Jack Benny is a Tattletale Grey Bunny

When sound came into theatres, animated cartoons featured piles of celebrity caricatures and parodies. So did radio shows, too. The early Jack Benny show featured imitations of, or jokes about, Garbo, Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, and so. It seems fair, then, that cartoons made fun of Jack Benny, too.

The climax for the animated Benny likely came in the 1959 Warner Bros. short The House That Jack Built, but there were others we detailed in this post. In several, he was depicted as a rabbit named “Jack Bunny.”

One of these was Goofy Groceries, released by Warners in 1941. It was directed by Bob Clampett, who loved tossing pop culture references into his cartoons. Early in this one, “Jack Bunny” introduces himself to us. “Hello again, folks,” he says to us (the real Benny opened his show then with “Jell-O again”), waving a Benny-esque cigar.



The cartoon harkens back to the Harman-Ising days of the early ‘30s, when a villain would grab the heroine in the second half of the cartoon, and the good guys would unite to rescue her. Here, a can-can dancer (yes, she’s a can) is trapped by a huge gorilla.

Bunny sees it and reacts, jumping on a bottle of horse radish. Off-camera, Mel Blanc shouts the name of Benny’s 1940 feature film—“Buck Benny Rides Again.” (The movie’s cast includes Carmichael the bear, voiced on Benny’s show by Blanc, but Blanc doesn’t do Carmichael in the film).



Bunny gets cornered after an axe he is carrying is shrunk by smoke from a Roman candle held by the gorilla.



The gorilla lights another fireworks stick and hands it to Bunny. A blare of trumpets. It's Superguy! He fails to rescue Bunny. Only Clampett would have a super-hero drawn with cross-eyes and buck teeth (it appears Superguy also skipped leg day in the gym).



The gorilla lights another fireworks stick and hands it to Bunny. But the gorilla is stopped by another radio reference. Shouts a female voice from off-camera: “Henry!” “Coming, mother,” shouts the gorilla. You should recognize this from the opening of radio’s The Aldrich Family which filled in for Benny as a summer replacement series in 1939. The mother gorilla is voiced by Sara Berner, who portrayed a number of characters on the Benny radio show.



None of this stops the large firecracker from exploding.



The explosion leaves Bunny blackened into a rabbit version of Jack Benny’s valet. “My, oh, my,” observes the now-Rochester rabbit to the camera, “Tattletale grey!” It’s the same ending Clampett used with a ghost in Jeepers Creepers (1939).



The “tattletale grey” is another pop culture reference.



While Blanc does Bunny-as-Rochester’s voice, Bunny is played by Jack Lescoulie, who hosted The Grouch Club on KFWB radio. In 1939, the show appeared on the Red network's WEAF at 6:30 p.m. Sundays just before Benny. His impersonation doesn’t do anything for me, but I’m in the minority as his version of Benny is heard in several cartoons at more than one studio, and even on the Benny show itself during a programme billed as Jack’s “10th anniversary” on radio.

Benny, his show, and his supporting actors provided plenty of inspiration for writers and directors when cartoons and network radio shared a golden age. You can learn much about this from the ne plus ultra of voice acting experts, Keith Scott, in his two-book set.

Cancelling Jack Benny's Birthday

Jack Benny’s career in Canada was an odd one.

Starting in fall 1944, Canadians had to listen to, or later watch, his show from American border stations. Lucky Strike cigarettes were not sold north of the 49th.

However, Jack was seen on Canadian TV semi-regularly on Shower of Stars, sponsored by Chrysler.

Except once. And it had nothing to do with American Tobacco.

The famous broadcast where Jack celebrated his 40th birthday did not appear in Canada. It was scheduled to air on the CBC at the same time as on CBS—February 13. It didn’t. Then it was supposed to be broadcast two weeks later. It wasn’t. It was replaced it with an episode of Climax, also sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation.

Here’s Bob Blackburn of the Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 20, 1958.

Give Us The Shower They Promised Us
The sponsors snap the whip in this league.
The Chrysler Corp. has decided that we are not to see the Jack Benny Shower of Stars production which, last Thursday night, was aired to mark Mr. Benny's "40th" birthday.
You may remember, this program was scheduled and advertised on CBOT for last Thursday, but was replaced by the Bell Telephone Company's latest episode in their science series.
There was indignation over the fact that this program was put in the place of a special edition of a regular show, which was to be the Benny anniversary show, and it was felt that the science program might have been aired any week, while the Benny show could only have been seen live on that date.
The last word we had from CBOT was that the Benny show would be presented to us via kinescope tonight. At the last minute it was called off, and the reason, we were told, was that the sponsors in Canada had seen a screening of the show, and didn't think it was all that funny. Anyway, they made the decision that the Benny birthday show is not to be seen by Canadian viewers, who will see, in its place, the regular edition of Climax, just as though there had been no interruption.
Now, this is the privilege of the sponsor, who, after all, is paying the shot. Were it not for him, we wouldn't get any of this stuff. Yet I venture to suggest that while the sponsors have designed wonderful cars, they are not noted for their sense of humor. In a matter like this, I would rather see the whole thing thrown up to the viewing public.
We did not see this show originally as we should have, but, on the basis of past experience. I think that any show with Jack Benny in it would be as much worth the sponsor's time and trouble as any play Climax is likely to offer this week or next. It seems to me damnably presumptuous of the sponsor to assume that, whatever he may have thought about the Benny show, he should take it upon himself to decide that Canadians would not be amused sufficiently to warrant telecasting the show as scheduled.
It was a gross error at the time to cancel this show, especially in view of the fact that the kinescope would be a muddy substitute, at best, and the sponsor must have realized this. But, so promise faithfully that viewers would see it a week late and then to renege on that promise without giving the viewers themselves a chance to decide whether they had suffered any loss must surely be considered poor policy.
I'm dwelling on this at such length simply because the issue has aroused such interest originally. Sponsors, it strikes me, have dubious senses of humor and I think that a very bad show built around Jack Benny would be a much more worthwhile experience they any play Climax has aired this season. Good or bad, let's see that Shower Of Stars.

Chrysler may not have liked “bad” shows but it disliked bad publicity even more. The car company came up with an exercise in semanatics which Blackburn brought to his readers on March 20.

I have an apology to make here. The Chrysler Corporation has taken exception to the remarks I made over the matter of the Jack Benny Shower Of Stars show which was displaced last month by the Bell Telephone science program on meteorology.
The remarks made in this column were inspired by information supplied by the CBC I reported, and commented on, that information in good faith. If it was erroneous the Chrysler Corporation is entitled to make a statement in correction.
The Chrysler Corporation wishes to point out that it made no commitment to carry a kinescope of the missing show, and consequently cannot be accused of cancelling the telecast of the kinescope. The Corporation also wishes to point out that the original cancellation of the live telecast of the Shower Of Stars was arranged by the CBC in order to accommodate the special program in question and that the action was beyond any control of the Chrysler Corporation.
This column has not infrequently sung the praises of productions footed by the same sponsor, and it certainly was no intention of mine to blame that sponsor idly. I must say in the light of the sponsor’s letter that no blame attaches to him for the omission of the program in question (Show[er] Of Stars. Feb. 13. 1958, for the record), and I must repeat that the comments made were based on information given by proper CBC authority in the usual manner.

The unanswered question is “Why did Chrysler decide not to air the kinescope?” Certainly it couldn’t have been an un-decision, as the car maker suggested. It had bought the air-time.

Regardless, the idea of Jack-as-40 was a gimmick. It was not met with universal favour. Don Freeman of the Copley News Service equated it to dismantling Jack’s “skillfully wrought character” and wondered what would be left if more elements were stripped away. Freeman wasn’t the only newspaper writer leery about the idea. As it was, 40 was temporary. Writer Sam Perrin admitted to the Atlanta Constitution it was a mistake.

Jack guest-wrote a syndicated column in 1963, saying, “I suppose I should mention the time some of my associates talked me into turning 40. I felt just terrible all the time I was 40—about six weeks. Finally, I decided the heck with it and went back to being 39.”

Despite his chequered career on Canadian radio and TV for a while, when Benny died at age 80 in 1974, he was front-page news in Canada. The Montreal Gazette opened its obit with “Jack Benny, 39, died of cancer early yesterday at the age of 80.”