They Had Two Shows

One of countless minor running gags on Jack Benny’s show was that Dennis Day had two shows. Beginning in 1946, he starred in ‘A Day in the Life of Dennis Day.’ But Dennis wasn’t the only Benny supporting player to get his own starring sitcom that year. So did bandleader Phil Harris. And so did the Man of a Thousand Voices, Mel Blanc.

Ask old-time radio fans which is the best of the lot, and they’ll likely pick Harris. He had a fairly well-defined character and excellent supporting players in Elliott Lewis and Walter Tetley. Day’s show ran for a number of seasons while Blanc was off the air by the following summer.

1946 also marked the debut of New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby. He reviewed all three of the new shows and found them all lacking. Let’s look at what he had to say.

‘The Mel Blanc Show’ debuted September 3, 1946. The following May 17, Colgate-Palmolive announced it was withdrawing its sponsoring ship on June 24. The review is from September 19th.

RADIO IN REVIEW
The Voice of the Chameleon
By JOHN CROSBY
Mel Blanc could only have happened in the last two decades, of the 20th century. In the 19th century, he would perhaps have been a ghost writer. Today, with the decline in popularity of the printed word and the simultaneous rise of the radio and the movies, he is a ghost voice. The requirements for a ghost voice are about the same as those for a ghost writer. You must have great assimilative powers, enormous versatility but no fixed personality.
Though you may never have heard of Mel Blanc you have unquestionably heard his voice. Out of his skilled larynx have come the voices of the train announcer on the Jack Benny program, Pedro on the Judy Canova show, Hubert Peabody on the Jack Carson program and Bugs Bunny and Porky the pig in the animated movie cartoons. He was also Private Snafu in those Army training films and did more performances for the Armed Forces Radio Service than anyone else.
After supporting virtually everyone in prominence in radio, Mr. Blanc now has his own program (CBS, 7:30 p.m., Tuesdays) in which he operates a fix-it shop. (“You bend it—we mend it.”) I’m pleased to see Mr. Blanc break into the big time but I advise him to hang on to his other contracts.
PERSONALITY LACKING
Mr. Blanc has thrown himself so wholeheartedly into the portrayal of Porky the Pig and his other voice characterizations that he doesn’t seem to have any personality of his own. He reminded me of a certain great actress who was seated at dinner one night next to a producer I know. The next day the producer complained that the lady seemed to have no personality and employed instead bits and pieces from her various stage roles.
“During the soup course, she was the Duchess of Malfi,” he said. “When we got to the filet mignon, she’d become Candida. For desert she played one of those cockney guttersnipes.”
It was a magnificent performance, he said, but he suffered from acute indigestion for three days.
In addition to schizophrenia the Mel Blanc program is afflicted by most of the cliches of radio comedy. As a fixiteer, Blanc is a sort of helpless pawn of society, whom I wouldn't trust with an electric toaster. He has a girl named Betty who is just everyone's kid sister. Somewhere along the way the night I listened, he was assaulted by a burlesque queen named Fifi.
VOCAL CHESS GAME
“Come on, sugar boy,” is Fifi’s approach to the male sex. In other words, the Mae West gambit.
“Ba hup ba hup ba hup,” stutters the male in question, which is known as the Bert Lahr return to the Mae West gambit.
“We’re all alone and after all you’re a man and I’m a woman,” was Fifi’s next move. That play is optional. Some students of this pastime prefer “Come up and see me sometime” or even “Beulah, peel me a grape.” Frankly, I’m not qualified to express a preference one way or the other. I haven’t seen a burlesque show since 1931 and I have only the dimmest recollection of what they’re like. Maybe burlesque queens act that way.
Later on, Mr. Blanc tangles with an efficiency expert who messes up his fixit shop in what sounded like one of Bert Lahr’s old revue sketches. Among the other worn characters on this program is Uncle Rupert who has all the characteristics of Uncle Amos in the comic strips and talks like the Great Gildersleeve.
“Look at the cigar butt on the floor, Uncle Rupert. That’s yours,” says Blanc sternly.
“No, you saw it first,” says Uncle Rupert genially.
I don’t object to a certain amount of kleptomania in radio shows but the Mel Blanc program has much too much of it. The authors have tried to cram too many old ideas in one half hour instead of being content with just one or two. About all I can say for the show is that it’s good-natured and that the sound effects were wonderful.

The F.W. Fitch Company had sponsored two shows in the 1945 radio season, one being a Sunday night musical show called ‘The Fitch Bandwagon’ that NBC tried cancelling before the season began. After the season began, the sponsor doesn’t appear to have been happy. A check of its magazine ads shows Dick Powell was moved from ‘Rogue’s Gallery’ during the season to front the ‘Bandwagon.’ The following year, Fitch went a different direction, and Phil Harris and Alice Faye were signed to do a domestic sitcom, and sing a couple of songs over the music of Walter Scharf. It debuted September 29, 1946. Critic Crosby found it a little too domestic for his liking. The Faye-Harris review is from October 3rd.

Radio Review
PHIL HARRISES AT HOME
By JOHN CROSBY
If the domestic felicity of Phil Harris, his wife, Alice Faye, and their daughter, whom they refer to as Baby Alice, as presented in a new comedy series (NBC, 4:30 p m. Sundays) is a reasonably accurate portrayal of what goes on after dark in Hollywood, we've all been grossly misinformed by the movie magazines.
I was under the impression, gained largely from a national movie magazine, that the movie folk spent most of their evenings at immense parties where they wore funny clothes and threw one another into the swimming pool. According to this new and intensely conjugal radio program it isn’t like that at all.
In the new series, Harris kissed Mrs. Harris with a great deal of noisy enjoyment about 12 times.
Virtually every line exchanged between this devoted couple ended with the words “lover,”
“baby” or “honey.” Harris favored “honey” almost exclusively though Miss Faye used all three impartially. “You ain’t givin’ honey,” murmured Phil after one of the early kisses. So they tried it again.
This marital concupiscence so stimulated Miss Faye that she sang “They Say It’s Wonderful.”
"Oh, honey, it’s wonderful,” breathed Harris.
"Look honey, something awful has happened," exclaimed Miss Faye, getting the plot into motion.
BREAKING THE ICE
She explained that, in a moment of flagrant carelessness, she had run over Ingrid, Baby Alice’s deeply beloved doll, and smashed it to bits. The task of breaking this news or somehow talking their way out of it was turned over to the man of the house. Hams shouldered the responsibility and went looking for Baby Alice, who was in the back yard making mud pies.
“Hello, Baby Alice,” he said carefully
“Hello Daddy.”
After beating around the bush a bit, Daddy told Baby Alice her dollie had fallen sick and had gone to the hospital. “When Ingrid comes home from the hospital, will she have a little dollie?” inquired Baby Alice.
“Why . . . no.”
“Well, when Mummy goes to the hospital . . .”
“That’s not the same thing,” cried the desperate father.
The crisis was averted only temporarily. Baby Alice insisted on talking to her dollie in the hospital. A subterfuge was arranged but the clever child detected almost immediately that she wasn't talking to the nurse at the hospital but to Mummy on the upstairs extension.
BIG PROBLEM UNSOLVED
The scene switched to dinner which Miss Faye apparently cooked and served with her own hands (Don't worry. They’re probably heavily insured). From the grunts of enjoyment emitted by Harris it must have been quite a feed. But the problem of Ingrid still remained, and after dinner Mr. and Mrs. Harris repaired with heavy hearts to the nursery, where a child’s music box played softly in the background.
“How are my little girls tonight?” asked Miss Faye. (Don’t ask me how that plural crept in. I don’t know).
“Fine, Mummy,” said Baby Alice.
To postpone the news about Ingrid just a moment longer, Harris told the story of Jack and the Beanstalk with minor variations, though nothing that would upset any modern child. After that the deed couldn’t be postponed any longer.
“Baby, I have a confession to make,” said Harris “Ingrid, your little dollie, is not in the hospital.”
SHE’S SOME KID
“I know,” said the child casually. “I just didn’t want Mummy to feel badly.”
“Awwwww,” said Alice, deeply moved.
“That’s my sweet little girl,” cried Phil, overwhelmed.
“Good night, Mummy! Good night, Daddy!”
“Good night, you little rascal you!”
That was about all. Alice and Phil, each busy with his or her separate thoughts, returned to the flickering fireplace. Alice, knowing full well what the answer would be asked Phil how he would like to spend the evening.
“I’d just like to sit here with you,” replied her husband. “Let's get cozy.”
There was the sound of a lingering kiss, the first one in 15 minutes, and the music rose to a throbbing crescendo.
Has anyone got a handkerchief?

Colgate-Palmolive announced in July 1946 it was replacing Bob Burns with Dennis Day, who debuted October 3, 1946. The company maintained sponsorship of his show into the early ‘50s. It’s interesting Crosby’s review of November 12th compares Day to non-singing, non-mimicking Alan Young, who was on the air for rival Bristol-Myers, but it was for good reason.

Radio Review
Innocence Their Forte
By JOHN CROSBY
Somewhere in the first minutes of the new Dennis Day program (NBC, 6:30 p.m., Thursdays), Day, who works in the drugstore in Weaverville, gets the rat poison mixed up with Mrs. Anderson’s cough medicine.
“Which one will make me stop coughing?” asks Mrs. Anderson.
“They both will,” say Day.
“Young man, I never expected to see such stupidity in this store.”
“You couldn't help it. I’m here all the time.”
Dennis Day is, of course, that nice, under-paid tenor who has been pushed around these many years on the Jack Benny program. From the scrap of dialogue above, you’ll observe he hasn’t changed a great deal on his new program. (Incidentally, the word “new” is used in the sense that anything less than five years old on the radio is new. Mr. Day has been around for some time.)
PATTERN IS RIGID
"A Day In the Life of Dennis Day," a title which I suppose was inevitable, follows a pattern as rigid as the Greek unities and almost as old. Mr. Day plays the part of a dewy-eyed, open-hearted young man whose innocence perpetually gets him into trouble, something like the Victorian heroines of yore, though naturally the trouble is of a different nature. The same formula is used with varying success on the Alan Young show, the Eddie Bracken show and a number of other radio series whose names I can’t at the moment recall.
Assisting Mr. Day into and out of his difficulties are Mr. Willoughby, the druggist; Mrs. Anderson, the strong-willed mother of Dennis’ girl; her weak-kneed husband, and a villain named Victor. The last time I paid attention, Dennis was involved in trying to get a room in Mrs. Anderson's boarding-house. After that rat poison incident, Mrs. Anderson was naturally reluctant to have him around. Somehow Dennis got talked into climbing a ladder into Mrs. Anderson’s room, leading to one of those P. G. Wodehouse situations of misrepresented identity. Mrs. Anderson mistakes him for a burglar and tries to rouse her husband to combat.
COMEDY SAMPLE
“Let’s not be hasty, dear,” says that unfortunate. “He may be armed.”
“Oh, no, sir!” says Dennis.
“You stay out of this,” snaps the husband.
That's a fair sample of the comedy which is intermittently funny. Besides a pretty flair for comedy, Day has a couple of other assets. One is a knack for imitations, which is worked into the script as often as is decently possible, and the other is a pleasant tenor voice, a refreshing change from all the baritones on the air.
Like all these programs, the Day show could stand a touch of tartness to counter-balance all that sweetness and light. The writers ought to take a trip out to Weaverville sometime and meet some of the unpleasant people like old Ben, the sourpuss who runs the store, or Harrigan, the bartender who hates everybody.
If you listen closely, you can detect about one degree of difference between the Alan Young show (NBC 8:30 p.m., Fridays) and the Day show. Mr. Young got there fast and his program is tuned a little more sharply. Its nonsense is more outrageous than the Day program and consequently funnier. It also boasts the presence of Herbert [sic] Updike III, a Harvard snob, with an intense distaste for the lower classes.
GEE WHIZZ SCHOOL
“Alan, hand the butler your hat and coat so he can boil them,” he’s likely to say. “I want you to meet Mother and Dad. They’re out in the garden letting the orchids smell them.”
Young, one of the younger and more promising comedians in radio, adheres to the “Gee whizz” school of comedy and is just as guileless as Day or any of the rest of those young men. He’s a very good comedian, however, and his program is an amiable half hour, if you don’t hear it too often.
These programs are all more or less interchangeable like some car parts and there isn’t much point in listening to more than one of them. In fact, if something happened to Mr. Young unexpectedly, I imagine Mr. Day could be rushed into his place at a moment’s notice without anyone outside of the studio audience detecting the difference.

Fortunately for Crosby, the Harris show evolved past the saccharine lovey-dovey stuff, and started figuring out the direction it wanted to go in, with Lewis and Tetley added to the cast before a switch of sponsors and then writers.

The reason the Harris show succeeds for me (though I still have some problems with Phil’s “domestication”) because is it built on the Harris scenario from the Benny show, not just the character. If Harris were to have his own show, we’d expect a retired-from-pictures Alice there. And a boozy, dumb Frank Remley. And they’re there, so the show has a familiarity from the start. Day is like he’s in an alternate universe. I’d love to have heard a show including Verna Felton as his mother and built around that. Instead, he’s in a different town, with a different occupation, with a bunch of radio clichés as supporting characters. Crosby hits on the problem with Blanc’s show. Blanc’s character is a zero. You know a show’s in trouble when it has to open by reminding the audience the star is a funny guy. There’s not a lot for Blanc to do than his accents and cartoon voices, and this show isn’t the framework for it. Supporting characters are tired, one-dimensional types heard everywhere on radio comedies, including Alan Young’s show.

Oh, there was someone else connected with the Benny show to get his own show in 1946. We’ll look at that failure in another post.

George Pal and Sex

A couple of months ago, we posted about George Pal, maker of the imaginative Puppetoons released by Paramount in the 1940s. I’ve dug out another newspaper piece on Pal, this one from 1945. It was written about the time a new season of shorts was hitting theatres, beginning with ‘Jasper and the Beanstalk’ on October 19.

Producer Pal Explain How Wooden Puppetoons Work
By VIRGINIA MACPHERSON
Hollywood, Oct. 25. (BUP)—Producer George Pal is our candidate for the man who works harder than anybody to put sex in the movies.
Usually it’s a simple thing for an actress to wiggle her torso. But when Pal’s ladies do it that means 25 extra wooden figures.
Pal is the ex-architect who turns out Pal’s Puppetoons, those little three-dimensional people.
It takes, he explained today, 14 different puppets to show one step.
Just the same. Pal thinks he’ll keep on using his bosomy ladies with the shapely legs.
“I tried one out in one of the Jasper puppetoons,” he said. That was the first time we’d ever had a fling at wooden sex. And she seemed to go over quite well.
And he makes that statement, he grinned, just a few days before the Hollywood chamber of commerce will present him with a bronze plaque (we still think it should, be wooden) commemorating his five years in Hollywood and his long record of clean entertainment.
“But when I say I’m going to keep sex in I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” he explained. “Because every puppetoon we turn out has to be passed by the censors first.
Started in Hollywood
Pal has been working with “his little blockheads” for about 12 years now. He started out in Holland as an architect. Then he decided drawing animated cartoons would pay better.
“But it didn’t,” he said. “At least, not much. So I started carving out my puppets and making three-dimensional cartoons of them.
The puppets went over big with the advertising companies.
“Then five years ago, I got an offer from Hollywood,” he said.
“Then one day I, was sort of doodling away,” he said, “and I hit on the idea of a little colored boy. We called him Jasper. Then we got a colored scarecrow and perched a crow on his shoulder.”
From there on in Pal was in business. Right now he’s turning out a new puppetoon every six weeks.
It takes about 3,000 different puppets for a seven-minute short, and about 22 weeks to draw whittle, shoot and record it.

Someone knowledgeable about Puppetoons can comment about what short involving a “bosomy lady” he’s talking about. I wonder if it’s ‘Hatful of Dreams,’ released earlier in 1945. Boxoffice magazine gave it a “superior” rating in its review.

One of the most colourful and imaginative of the series to date, this subject shows how Punchy, a pathetic little ragamuffin in love with his unattainable Judy, is given a magic hat by a cab hose. The hat’s magic transforms its wearer into whatever he or she secretly dreams of being. Thus, the spavined, knock-kneed nag becomes a Derby winner. Punchy becomes Superman, and others who do the magic skimmer undergo a surprising change. After many complications, the nag gets back his hat, Judy gets her Punchy and Punchy gets—more Punchy.

The Winter 1985 edition 14 of Animator had a nice article about Pal. You can read it HERE.

Moo Moo Moo! Baa Baa Baa!

I still laugh every time I watch Drag-A-Long Droopy and see the scene where the steer goes “Moo, moo, moo! Baa, baa, baa!” to the wolf. It’s just so silly. But it makes perfect sense. How else would a bull communicate that sheep eating all the landscape are coming?



Oh, that’s right. He can communicate in English. “Sheep, ya durned fool!”



Give Tex a Western setting and he’ll come up with a funny cartoon. It’s the Law of the West, you know.

Here’s the Johnny Johnsen background just before the bull enters, running in perspective at an angle along the road toward the camera.



A fine team of animators worked on this one—Mike Lah, Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons, Bob Bentley and Ray Patterson, on loan from the Hanna-Barbera unit. Tex himself plays the wolf and the steer, with Bill Thompson as Droopy.

Canned Feud Zap

One of Sylvester’s best acting jobs is in “Canned Feud,” where he’s desperate to eat anything but needs a can opener that a sadistic mouse won’t let him have. There are great drawings all over the place.

Sylvester gets shocked with electricity in one scene. It starts out with drawings on twos. None are really a take because they aren’t seen long enough to establish. Combined, they show Sylvester being flung all over the place.







Then the fur fries off him on ones. Finally, all that’s left is the white poof at the end of his tail. And after just enough time, the poof goes ‘poof.’



Five animators get credit on this one—John Carey, Art Davis, Ken Champin, Virgil Ross and Manny Perez. Evidently Sid Farren was an assistant on this because his name is hidden in the title card, over which is played Raymond Scott’s ‘Huckleberry Duck.’

Tell it to Groucho

Groucho’s always been my favourite of the Marx Brothers (sorry, Zeppo) and he had the longest career, thanks to hooking up with producer John Guedel and starring in one of the funniest radio/TV game shows ever. “You Bet Your Life” had a perfect (and necessary) mesh of components—Groucho’s one-liners, a duck falling from the ceiling, a “secret woid,” smooth and friendly George Fenneman to lend a bit of sanity, and contestants who were either uncomfortable or unintentionally funny, but always real people the audience couldn’t help but like.

Death comes, as it does to all television shows, and so it came to “You Bet Your Life.” Guedel shrewdly repackaged the old shows as “The Best of Groucho” and successfully launched them in the syndication market. In the meantime, the original show was dismantled and put back together again. But the perfect mesh was no longer there, so viewers watched something else.

But, as you can tell in this article by the Associated Press in 1962, there were high hopes for it. And as Groucho used a quiz show as a springboard for his comedy, so the AP’s entertainment writer used a quiz show to get Groucho’s feelings about television comedy, which makes for a better story.

He's Bringing Back Some Chuckles to Sensitive TV
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
NEW YORK, Jan. 21 (AP)—After one of the shortest retirements from weekly television on record, mustached Groucho Marx has come back with a new show, “Tell It to Groucho.”
Well, it’s sort of a new show. Its name is new, it’s on another network — CBS — after 11 years on NBC, and as Groucho explains, “We’ve discarded some of the things associated with the old shows — the duck, the secret word and George Fenneman, our announcer — but it’s recognizable.”
It’s still a game show with nominal amounts of “money” at stake, but Groucho’s game has always been a flimsy, unimportant framework to support his humor, and the contestants have always been human walls off which the comedian bounces his irreverent, sometimes fierce and always distinctive shafts.
“I never intended to stay away,” remarked Groucho during a recent visit to New York. “I’ve saved my money, sure, but you must have a dominant force if yon want to be happy and not get bored. And with me, it is working.
“I read a lot, but you can’t spend all your time reading. I don’t have any flair for wood carpentry and there are no power tools in my cellar—to be truthful, I don’t even have a cellar. I never play cards, and although I like golf, I couldn’t make a career out of it. So—I work.”
Marx is a thoughtful, pleasant man of 66 who, like most top comedians, does not feel the compulsion to perform off-camera as well as on. A performer for more than 50 years (He started as a soprano in a boy’s choir and graduated at 11 to a vaudeville troupe), Groucho believes that no comedian should do a show on his own every week—about once a month at the very outside.
“It’s entirely different in my case,” he added, lighting a fresh cigar. “Because I’m working with the help of the format of the show—the contestants coming in with ridiculous problems and we can discuss them facetiously.”
Groucho, like all the other performers with sharp wit and opinions of their own, is concerned about the steadily shrinking freedom in TV for the play and flash of humor and satire.
“There’s so little left that you can satirize in television,” he mourned. “The theater is the only place left where it can really be done—it’s the only place left where they aren’t scared, where they don’t care if some toes get stepped on.
“Way back in the 1920s when Franklin P. Adams was writing his column he complained that the only thing you could attack without fear of protest was the man-eating shark. Today, I imagine, there’s a society to protect the reputation of man-eating sharks.
“I doubt very much whether Fred Allen could get away with his characters in ‘Allen's Alley’ today—he’d surely hear from the South about Sen. Claghorn. And I remember I had some words with Fred once about Mrs. Nussbaum—I didn’t like it because I thought he was portraying a Jewish woman as a caricature.
“On one of my shows I had a plumber, and, of course, I made some jokes about forgetting his tools. I immediately got all sorts of angry letters, including one from the head of the plumber’s union. I even got angry letters after mother-in-law jokes.
“But now I feel that comedy is losing a great deal because of these restrictions. They are confining the whole field. I think, perhaps, that I can get away with it—perhaps a little better than most. I’ve been around for a long time, people are accustomed to laughing at outrageous things I say so—once in a while I can sneak a truth or a bit of real satire in.
“One of the things is that people don’t remember the bad things you do for any length of time—they remember the good things. That’s what permits us to survive.”
The show staff scouts for people with light-hearted problems—a woman so tiny she fits only into children’s clothes, including underwear; a woman with a husband who snores; a widow who lives alone and has no one to pull up back zippers.
Filming the show occupies Groucho one evening a week at the studio from 7:30 to 10:30 firing questions and wisecracks. Before that he works over his material. Although he does not meet the contestants ahead of show time, he knows something about them, and anticipates what they’ll be saying.
The show, in its final half-hour form, represents a heavily-edited version of the interviews—the good material is left, the lesser stuff deftly excised. Thus, out of every five minutes worth of dialogue, the home audience sees perhaps two or less.

“Leave it to Groucho” debuted on Thursday, January 11 (9-9:30). By May, The New York Daily News had announced its cancellation and the last show was scheduled May 30 (some stations delayed it and ran it on weekends). One critic of the day summed up the problem: the first show featured a mother and daughter who were both looking for husbands, ones who had to cope with their 13 cats. There were only so many of those kinds of people around. The critic avoided mentioning the fact that the amateurish young lady who was now performing Fenneman’s old role was little more than decoration for the male audience, something evident whenever she opened her mouth.

Groucho was replaced by “Brenner,” which had already failed on the network twice. And his AP interview proved to be amazingly psychic. People don’t remember the bad TV show Groucho did. “Tell it to Groucho” is long-forgotten. Instead, they remember his wit in those brilliant movies of the ‘30s and an 11-year quiz show. It’s why Groucho is still loved today. You can bet your life on that.

Go On And Hiss

Plenty of cartoons were made with characters or things coming right at the audience. It seems that half of the Harman-Ising shorts for Warner Bros. had Bosko or someone running with an open mouth to the camera and “swallowing” it.

Leave it to Tex Avery to do it in reverse in the great “Blitz Wolf” (1942). Look at the arc on 12 frames.














Animation credits go to Ray Abrams, Irv Spence, Preston Blair and Ed Love. Mark Kausler tells me this is a Love scene.

Elmer Fudd Itch

Today’s stretch in-betweens are brought to you by the unit of Bob Clampett, who seems to have given animation credits only to Bob McKimson and Rod Scribner around this time (1943).

“An Itch in Time” is best-known for two things—the song ‘Food Around the Corner’ (even sped-up, you can tell Sara Berner is singing as the flea), and the dog’s hyper remark to the camera as he stops dragging his butt for a moment. But there are a couple of animation effects that I like. One is how the dog turns becomes brushed lines of colour between two drawings, and another is the bit near the end when the flea has evidently jumped from the dog to Elmer Fudd, judging by the way Elmer is scratching and twists from pose to pose (being a Clampett cartoon, a butt is involved in this as well).

This is where the stretch in-betweens come in to make the movement quick and fluid. Observe.















And then the dog when he realises he’s no longer flea-bitten.





I’ll leave it to the experts to suugest who was doing this type of drawing for Clampett about this time.

The Perturbation of Jack Benny

It seems impossible there could be an interview with Jack Benny that didn’t talk about being cheap, bad violin playing, age 39, driving a Maxwell or Mary Livingstone. But all of this was an invention (over time) of Jack and his radio writers, starting in 1932. Jack had a fairly lengthy career in vaudeville prior to that and none of this was part of his persona. He was thought of an easy-going stand-up comedian by the end of the 1920s.

That’s how we find him in a rare interview in 1930 by a writer for the National Enterprise Association, a feature service for small newspapers. I don’t know whether he was interviewed any earlier. Broadway columns (and those out of Hollywood) generally consisted of little squibs about people and places, not a profile of one individual. But here’s one.

IT’S EASIER TO AMUSE WOMEN
Jack Benny, Talkie Comedian, Thinks an Audience of Men Is the Coldest Proposition in the World
By DON ROBERTS
HOLLYWOOD, March 31 — Women are easier to please than men —particularly from a comedian’s standpoint.
This is the theory of Jack Benny, for years one of vaudeville’s best known comedians, who now is making a name for himself in this audible picture racket.
“If I had my way about it, I never would play before anything but a mixed audience.” Benny declared. “But if I had to choose between masculine and feminine, I would take the women every time. There is no audience in the world tougher than a strictly stag aggregation.”
As a rule Jack is just as funny off the stage as he is on—maybe a little funnier. But he wasn’t yesterday as we sat in the Brown Derby. He was perturbed, trying to make up his mind whether to accept a vaudeville engagement in New York or to stay here for a legitimate show and take his chances on getting a picture at the same time. Now that he has gotten a pretty good start in pictures, he doesn’t like to get 3,000 miles from the center of things.
Getting the Gags
“I wish I could just press a button and make myself funny,” Benny remarked. “But I can’t. I’m not in the right mood I couldn’t pull the funniest gag in the world so that it would get a laugh.”
“Where do you get the gags for your monologue, Jack?” we inquired.
“I write most of them myself,” replied the actor. “Occasionally I get some from a man with a really good sense of humor. I think most of my own gags are pretty terrible so when I do write one that sounds good to me I generally can depend upon it going over. Once in New York I bought 15 joke books, hoping to get something new for my routine but I didn’t find a single gag I could use.
“Naturally all comedians can’t use the same type of material. A gag with which someone else could make an audience howl would fall absolutely flat if I tried to use it.”
Benny came out here under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to act as one of the masters of ceremonies in “The Hollywood Revue.” Following that he made “Chasing the Rainbow” [sic] with Bessie Love and Charles King. That was the first picture in which he really played a part, his role in it being that of a wise-cracking stage manager. Now he is free lancing, which is the reason for his perturbation. When he gets two offers simultaneously he never can make up his mind which to accept. And that worries him.

His comedy philosophy here is interesting, considering how his career developed. His feeling that certain routines work for certain people likely prompted him to craft his character on his radio show. And his assessment proved to be correct. There are things that Jack Benny came to do that no other comedian would have been able to get a laugh with. In a way, that was a hindrance to his movie career, as audiences expected to see something akin to his Benny character on the screen.

Of course, it never hurt his overall career. In 1965, people knew who Jack Benny was. Charles King wasn’t so lucky.

Trigger Joe

You can probably divide the cartoons of the Golden Age of Animation into two categories—theatrical and non-theatrical. Theatricals are, of course, Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, Popeye and so on, seen on TV by several generations. Non-theatricals are more obscure because, conversely, they have never been seen on TV by several generations. Some are industrial films, like some of the lovely and amusing cartoons from the John Sutherland studio paid for by companies or institutions to push their particular point of view. And then there are cartoons designed strictly for military use, especially during World War Two.

The ‘Snafu’ series is probably the best-known, brought to light by fans of the great Warner Bros. cartoons who wanted to see how their favourite directors and animators handled instructional subjects for a military audience. But there were others, some of which were made by the military itself in the First Motion Picture Unit studio at the old Hal Roach studio.

One series of these starred Mel Blanc as “Trigger Joe”. At least some were directed by Frank Thomas of the Disney studio and the animation staff included John Hubley, Bill Hurtz and Willis Pyle. Hurtz describes Joe as “kind of based on Bill Bendix, a heavy Brooklyn type” (Enchanted Drawings, Charles Solomon); Bendix was best known as the star of “Life of Riley” on radio.

Interestingly, “Trigger Joe” was featured in the Hollywood column in papers subscribing to the National Enterprise Association. It was a bit of wartime propaganda itself, with a message to people who felt that if you weren’t a G.I., you were an unpatriotic slacker.

In Hollywood
By Erskine Johnson
(NEA Staff Corespondent)
Hollywood—The screen has a new feminine star—a streamlined, glamorous lady called the B-29.
We’ve just seen her first starring picture, “Target Tokyo,” and she’s a killer-diller.
You fly with her on the world’s longest bombing mission — 10,000 miles—from Grand Island, Neb., to Tokyo. You see how men are trained to fly her and to man her guns.
No other wartime motion picture has seen quite as exciting, or timely, with wonderful scenes of these giant Superfortresses in formation flight, landing on Saipan’s airstrip, flying over Iwo Jima and dropping bombs on the heart of Tokyo.
History of the first B-29 group to bomb the Jap capital, the film is another Army Air Force documentary filmed in the manner of “The Memphis Belle.” Eight Army cameramen and two writers made the 10,000-mile trip to get the celluloid story, which you’ll be seeing soon in your neighborhood theater.
We saw the picture after signing our life away at a guarded gate and putting on a big “VISITOR” badge at the 18th Army Air Forces Base Unit (Motion Picture Unit) at Culver City, Calif.
Comedy Center
Before the war this base unit was the Hal Roach studio, home of slapstick comedy. Last time we sat in a projection room there we saw Stan Laurel throwing a custard pie at Oliver Hardy. There were photographs of girls in bathing suits on office walls and members of the “Our Gang” comedy studied in a little red schoolhouse next to Stage 3.
Now the Army boys there have produced 230 training and documentary pictures since October of 1942—more than any other Hollywood studio. The bathing suit photographs on office walls have been replaced with photographs of guys wearing oxygen suits and of airplane wings and motors and machine guns.
The B-29 is the current big star of the lot. She just completed another role in a movie a half hour longer than “Gone With the Wind.” You will never see it, though. It’s a maintenance-instruction film for B-29 mechanics and crew members only. There’s so much to learn from the picture that it is being shown as a six-part serial.
But speaking of stars, the studio boys won’t let you overlook “Trigger Joe,” an animated cartoon character dreamed up by the studio for “position firing” training films. “Position Firing” is the latest wrinkle in air combat, but it is so intricate that Army instructors were taking 14 days to teach its finer points.
Time Slashed
The Air Corps brass hats said this was much too slow, so the Motion Picture Unit dreamed up “Trigger Joe” and starred him in a 12-minute instruction film. What took 14 days to learn is now learned in 12 minutes.
Naturally, most of the work done by the Motion Picture Unit is secret. Some of the Hollywood lads have taken a ribbing for fighting the war on a sound stage in Culver City. But brother, when a little thing like “Trigger Joe” can cut a training schedule from 14 days to 12 minutes, the boys behind the camera are helping win the war, too.

We can’t postulate how entertaining Joe was, but he certainly was effective. A study was done in 1947 comparing instruction using the Trigger Joe cartoon, a 50-page pocket-sized manual and a half-hour lecture with 19 slides made from illustrations in the manual. Tests on cadets showed Trigger Joe was far superior in teaching position firing than the other two media. And, to quote one source:

Amusingly enough, when Trigger Joe was put in the ten-cent viewing machines in the Fort Meyers commissary, soldiers preferred watching it to the Dinah Shore films that were also available.

A shame it isn’t readily available for animation fans to see.