Benny, Writing and Ratings

We’ve been talking a bit about writers of old-time comedy/variety shows as of late, so let’s delve into the subject one more time.

Jack Benny talks about his writers in this 1959 TV Key syndicated column. But a couple of other subjects spring out a little bit more.

It’s incredulous that Jack would say he’d been trying to get out of the 7:30 time slot since 1939. Setting aside the fact that his show was on radio through the ‘40s and ‘50s at 7 p.m. Eastern (and 9:30 on the West Coast), it’s hard to believe a star of Benny’s magnitude couldn’t get a time slot he really wanted, especially after jumping to CBS in 1949. The trades in the early ‘40s pointed out Benny was powerful enough to fend off an attempt by his sponsor to switch to Grape Nuts from Jell-O earlier than it happened.

And Jack seems unwilling to accept the possibility his ratings were slipping because people wanted to watch something new, and then dismisses the ratings altogether. Ratings are a funny thing. When they say you’re number one, you don’t disagree with them. But when they say you’re number four, you find all kinds of reasons why they’re wrong.

Whether Jack was merely putting on a good face about the time change is unclear. He didn’t hesitate in 1963 to publicly complain when CBS (well, Jim Aubrey, to be precise), moved Red Skelton back a half hour and put Petticoat Junction as his lead-in.

This column appeared in papers on September 30, 1959.

Jack Benny To Shift Time Spot
By CHARLES WITBECK
Jack Benny is moving into the 10 p.m. spot on alternating Sundays beginning Oct 4. The network, CBS, is a little worried about the change, but Jack isn't.
"For twenty years I've been trying to get out of my 7:30 p.m. time slot," said Benny in Hollywood. "But no one would listen to me."
Jack isn't running from "Maverick." "Listen, I think good weather hurt me much more than "Maverick." When it gets light in the spring back in Chicago I lose viewers."
"Funny thing about "Maverick," he continued. "I checked the ratings once and found both of us in the first ten. Explain that."
'Like the Fella'
Jack thinks "Maverick" will keep going when many other westerns die out. He says comedy is much harder to keep going. "As for a western, a bad one is not much different from a good one. No issue is involved. But you get a bad comedy show and you're in trouble flight away. I think it's very important too in a western for the fans to like the fella. If they like the fella, it's hard to do a really bad show."
Benny slides the same comparison over the show. He says one reason why his programs don't suffer much is because fans like his cast of Mary Livingston, Rochester, Dennis Day and Don Wilson.
"And with his familiar cast and alternate week shows, at least I have a chance to be meticulous," Jack went on. "I sit in with my writers and we throw around ideas maybe for two days before we put one on paper. If it were a weekly show we'd have to grab the first few ideas that came up."
Jack says he's more of an editor than a writer. He wrote better years ago in vaudeville than he does now. "If I did a lot now." Jack said, "and you met me in the street, I'd be thinking so hard I wouldn't recognize you."
Sits in With Writers
Jack is really pleased because his four writers including oldtimers Sam Perrin and George Balzer want him to sit in with them. Jack can smooth out switches so that even if the jokes don't play too well, it won't be embarrassing.
"We have a lot of laughs together," Benny said. This is where he gets his kicks. Jack doesn't press his writers either. There's no set time for work and when the men get together none of them worry about topping last week's show.
"All I say is try not to write a lousy show," Benny remarked. "And don't try to write a great show." When it gets down on paper, editor Benny can usually feel how good a show it is. "Take our first show on the fourth with Jimmy Stewart and his wife, Gloria," Benny said. "We have a very funny thing about to come off. If it works it win be a very good show."
Benny qualifies this by laying that both he and the writers always think their shows are better than they are. They're an appreciative audience. Benny is more nervous with a good show than a bad one because he wants to get the most out of it.
Jack doesn't keep check on ideas used on Sunday. He says he can't remember after a show which writer suggested what. "I can't even remember ideas I thought up," he added. "Not long ago Ed Sullivan wanted me on for a bit. I was thinking of something to do when I remembered a bit I was going to do on the Perry Como Show. Goodman Ace, an old friend, was the writer on the show, so I called him up to see if I could use it. Goody laughed when I told him and said, 'Go ahead; it was your idea anyway.' So help me, I can't believe it was mine now."
Editor, part time writer, violin player and comedian, Benny does take credit for two things he learned in his old vaudeville days and he offers the message to aspiring comedians. "One," says Jack, "if you do a monologue, talk on a subject. Use oneliners and you're due for trouble. Two, work out situations where you're frustrated. Also try to be different. Don't be afraid of this life. I'd be bored stiff in a situation comedy."
Many of the things Jack has grown famous for have started by accident, like his feud with Fred Allen in the days of radio. One night on Allen's show a ten-year-old boy got up and played "The Bee" on his violin. When he finished all Allen said was "Jack Benny should be ashamed of himself."
Feud Grows
"Next week I picked it up," said Jack. "Then Fred brought in three or four stooges from my home town to prove I couldn't play the violin. In my next show I have my stooges on.
"Well we're into the feud for over half a year before Fred and I even talked to each other about it. There was nothing rigged before-hand."
Beany paused. "I tell you if Fred were alive, the feud could last forever because we didn't do it every week.
"Me, I can only take bows for knowing what to leave out And I'm sure I've taken out good things and replaced them with something not so good. We make mistakes. But we're meticulous and I think we know enough to keep a show from stinking up the air."

A Pencil, A President and Others By Allen Swift

His voice wasn’t evil. It was creepy evil.

Simon Bar Sinister was provided a perfect voice by Allen Swift. He wasn’t ravingly mad. His even, intense tone was, well, sinister. Swift’s performance was riveting to young cartoon-viewing me.

“Underdog” was the first place I remembered hearing Swift but, pretty soon, I could pick out his voice in all kinds of commercials. For a few decades, Swift may have been the most wanted spot voice on the East Coast because he could do straight reads and characters.

Swift had a diverse career. He hosted a children’s show on television in New York. He produced a documentary. He operated a playhouse. He appeared on Broadway. He even recorded a tune for the Jubilee label in 1955 called “Johnny Podres Has A Halo ‘Round His Head.”

“Merchandising your talent ... is almost as important as having the talent,” Swift once said. And Swift knew how to sell himself. He caught the ear of all kinds of newspaper columnists in New York, and there was a stream of feature stories from either a paper or wire service or syndicator about Swift seemingly every year from the mid 1950s. In fact, I’ve found two completely different stories from the Associated Press’ New York bureau from early 1969. He sent blurbs to columnists about the commercials he had just voiced. He sent them one-liners they could use as comedy filler.

I’m going to present only four stories about Swift. It’s a case of first-come, first-serve. I restricted myself to the ‘60s and these are the first four I found. So you’ll miss Earl Wilson’s column about him from 1960. I’ll post a fifth one next week dealing with landing commercial roles. He got lots of ink in the ‘70s, too.

Sorry, animation fans, but there’s little about his cartoon work here. One sloppy newspaper somehow thought he was in a show called Thunderdog. A neat title, actually, but the Associated Press columnist had it correct in the original write.

Two things: it’s interesting to read Swift talking about being willing to work for scale. That may sound like cheapening yourself out, but Swift was a smart businessman. The real money in commercials isn’t in getting paid to read it; the money is in the residuals. Voice talent keeps getting a pay cheque if the spot keeps running. Swift knew overpricing himself meant potentially not getting his foot in the door, and getting his foot in the door was all he needed for a potential, eventual big payday.

There’s also a reference to I Am Curious (Yellow), a controversial-for-its-time movie from 1967.

This story was published in March 21, 1964.

His Voice Is Tops, His Pay-Minimum
By JOAN CROSBY
National Enterprise Association
New York—To Allen Swift a scale is not something to weigh yourself on or a musical exercise. It is something to work for.
Swift, 40 and a native New Yorker, is billed as “the man with a thousand voices.” As such, his tones — all one thousand of them — have been in televiewers living rooms as a piston, a monkey wrench, a rubber plunger, a pencil, a pen, a lamp, a germ (a bad one), tooth decay, a clam fish, a mail box and lots of dogs.
All this hardware animal and piscine life has appeared in television commercials. Swift, one of the top voice-over men in the commercial field, has made over 12,000 of them. His annual income is in the six-figure neighborhood, a nice place to live. But he doesn’t have exclusive contracts with any companies. And his fees are as modest as a actors union allows.
“I would rather work for scale — that’s the minimum wage set by the union — than to have only one or two clients whose assignments would leave me half my time here to play golf.”
BECAUSE Swift is recognized as a prestigious talent in his field, the fact that he works cheaply is a surprise to many agency men.
“I heard someone at a cocktail party say, ‘You should have gotten Allen Swift,’ the answer was, ‘We couldn't afford him.’ I set that man straight in a hurry.” Swift has not been seen on camera in several years. The back of his head appeared on That Was The Week That Was as President Eisenhower. He also provided the voice of Eisenhower in “The Longest Day.”
Proving his versatility he once dubbed some lines in a movie for David Niven and has been sports stars Pancho Gonzalez, Don Carter and Cary Middlecoff for commercials when those athletes found the reading of lines less than easy.
The son of a lawyer, Swift’s early interest was art. “But I think my love for acting superseded my desire to be a painter. I never really had the opportunity to be a serious actor. There were always other fields in show business where I could make an easier living.”

Next up, July 6, 1965. I have not found a copy of this column with a byline. Swift told a similar story about Godfrey and the clueless client to Earl Wilson, revealing he also imitated Godfrey’s basso announcer/sidekick, Tony Marvin, in the same commercial.

Voice Specialist Well Paid For Imitating Men, Things
NEW YORK (UPI)—One of the more wonderful characters in the modern show world is the voice specialist. A good one—and there are fewer of them than you have fingers — can earn $200,000 a year or more. A chap like Mel Blanc or Allen Swift for example.
Blanc is well known for his impersonations of many Hollywood shows and the Jack Benny television show and for his peculiar scrambled vocal effects.
Allen Swift, who is younger and works in New York, is not as widely known but he earned a quarter of a million dollars last year mainly by doing voice specialties on television commercials.
Swift a native New Yorker who started out to be a stand up comedian only to see that phase of show business fade out about the time he was beginning to arrive, also imitated the voices of famous personalities.
He imitated President Eisenhower’s voice in a feature film, for example.
Bit of Flim Flammery
“On another occasion, I imitated Arthur Godfrey’s voice. This was a bit of flim flammery,” he chuckles. “A certain advertising agency had a client that wanted Godfrey for a show.
“The client wanted Godfrey to audition but Arthur doesn’t audition for anybody, so they got me to imitate Arthur for the audition and kept the client happy.”

Much of Swift’s work is in devising original vocal effects for commercials. “I have done vocal effects that made me appear in commercials as a penguin, a peanut, a sparkplug, a pencil or a piston for example.” he said.
Another of his recent jobs was as Harvey Spooner, the guy who goes all to pieces if he doesn’t get Campbell’s soup for dinner.
In a career of not too much over a decade, Mr. Swift, who looks a bit like a younger Peter Ustinov, has done 12,000 radio and television commercials.
“For an actor to do commercials well he has to like doing them,” Swift said. “He has to think like a merchant as well as like a performer and copywriter. If he can’t project himself into all three mental roles, his commercials won’t ring true.”
Talent Most Important
Merchandising your talent in special effects is almost as important as having the talent but not quite, Swift said. If you don’t have a native and special talent in the first place, all the training and merchandising skill in the world won’t put you over.”
Swift discovered his talent when he was eight years old. It was at a performance of Maurice Chevalier to the film ‘The Beloved Vagabond’ in Philadelphia, he recalls.
“I discovered I could mimic Mr. Chevalier, whom I regard as the greatest entertainer of our times, quite well. From that moment I determined to become an entertainer.”
A lot of Swift’s assignments are emergency work. “Just the other day one of the big networks had to make an emergency change in a taped show. One of the performers whose lines had been changed at the insistence of top network officials wasn’t available to speak the new lines. I was called on to imitate his voice in patching the tape; this saved a lot of time and money.”
For this kind of work, which pays well, Swift has to be on tap so fast that a telephone answering service isn’t sufficient. He carries around with him a little “beep box” radio for which he pays Radio Relay Service $19 a month.

The first of a pair from the Associated Press. This one is from May 26, 1968.

Swift Is a Fast Change Artist In Voice Disguise Department
By JERRY BUCK
NEW YORK (AP) — A few years ago a struggling young actor named Allen Swift went down to one of the networks to audition for a job as staff announcer. He was handed four of five pieces of copy to read, and afterwards, the producer came out of the control booth in hysterics. Swift, it turned out, had read each announcement in a different voice.
“That's great. Simply great,” the producer told him. “But sorry, we want all our announcers to sound alike.”
That may have been a temporary disappointment for Swift, but it didn't hold him back. You can’t turn on a television set or radio today without hearing his voice—and likely as not it's different each time.
Swift, a man who is seldom seen, does more commercials than anyone else. He has more than 400 playing at this time, and in all he’s done more than 20,000. Because of his great facility for voices and dialects, Swift is said to be the only one in the business allowed to make commercials for competing products.
SWIFT, 44, WHO with a blond moustache and a spade beard looks remarkably like Peter Ustinov, is the voice of the Jello Zodiacs, the duck for Drake's Cakes, the peanut for M&Ms, the Herring Maven and all of the voices for “Tom and Jerry,” “Underdog” and other cartoons.
“From such a thing you make a living,” he admits with a smile.
He is the announcer for the presidential campaign spots for Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, D-Minn.—the same function he served with Adlai Stevenson.
He was the voice of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in the motion picture “The Longest Day.” And when a sports figure can’t put enough sell into his endorsement, Swift steps in. He has even substituted for other announcers — using their voice.
“I CAN’T SAY that I’ve made a special study of dialects, but I listen constantly.” He says, “I don’t keep any kind of book, but it gets stored away and I can call on it when I need it.”
Lighting up a cigar, Swift said he takes no special precautions to preserve his voice. “I think use strengthens it, just like exercise.
“I was doing dialects and funny voices even as a kid and my mother was always telling me to stop talking like that or I’d ruin my voice," he said. “You know, I’ve heard my wife telling my son the same thing. He just finished an engagement with the road show of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’.”
Swift got into commercials in 1954 when he was the voice of all the puppets on the “Howdy Doody Show.”
“One day an advertising agency called up NBC and asked who was the voice of a certain puppet,” he said. “The network told them it was Allen Swift and they hired me for a commercial.
“Later they called again and asked who was the voice of another puppet and again the network told them it was Allen Swift. So I did another commercial and one just led to another after that.”
SWIFT SAID THE anonymity is something that would have bothered him as a young man, “but today I'm grateful for it. I have two little girls and I can take them into the park and nobody knows me.
“After a Mike Douglas show I was recognized everywhere I west, it seems, and I didn’t care for it at all. What happens to well-known people? They can’t go out on the streets.”
Swift’s voices have their uses outside television. When his secretary’s away, he answers in her voice. And once when an artist friend didn’t get paid for a piece of work, Swift used a British accent in a bit of subterfuge to collect the commission.
THE BIG THING IN the future is a television interview show he has created called “A Date with Genius.” He has taped several pilot shows in a studio he converted from an apartment.
“We interview great men on contemporary problems and they answer in their own words,” he said. “For instance, Mark Twain speaks out on the problems of youth, and Nicolo Machiavelli talks about Vietnam and the political situation.”
William Redfield is the interviewer and Swift does all the other parts with the aid of make-up and costume. “I like to play roles where nobody recognizes me,” he said.

And, finally, from March 29, 1969.

Monsters Seen Invading Future TV Commercials
By JERRY BUCK
AP Television-Radio Writer
NEW YORK (AP) – Would you buy a used car from Count Dracula? That may be the coming thing in television commercials.
“The next big thing is monsters.” Allen Swift puffed quietly on his cigar until the guffaws subsided. “I’m serious,” he said. “You're going to see a lot of monsters in commercials.”

Swift, a round-faced man with a ginger-colored Van Dyke, should know what he’s talking about. He’s been the voice on more commercials than anyone else. At last count the number had passed 30,000.
“I did a movie with Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller called ‘The Mad Monster Party’ and I did all the other monster voices,” he said. “I guess it was Karloff's last movie.
“I don’t know if this is sparking it or what. But in two or three months you’re going to see these monster commercials.”
Slipping into an Inner Sanctum voice, he said, “Welcome to the Ford torture test. We’ll take your car and put it through all kinds of torture—you know, things like that. Another company is building a whole food product around monsters.
“It seemed like I do at least one a day,” Swift said. "Listen, you have no idea how funny it is. You’d think everybody is tapping everybody else’s telephone lines.
“There are three advertising agencies after this one account. One’s got it and is trying to hang onto it and two others are trying to get it away from them.
By coincidence I did the presentation commercials for all three —and, can you believe it, all three came up with virtually the same kind of monster approach.” He laughed. “The thing I’m afraid of is they're going to blame me for leaking it to each other.”
Asked about the increasing use of sex in commercials, he sighed and said, “Sex in commercials will grow in direct proportion to the lowering of barriers. Let's put it this way: I refuse to do nude commercials. I’m not curious, I’m just yellow.”

Dachshund Meets Hare

Not only does Herman Goering goose-step in Herr Meets Hare (1945), so does his dog.



Here are the drawings in one foot of film where the dog spots something that turns out to be Bugs Bunny burrowing underground.



You know Bugs’ line.



Gerry Chiniquy gets the rotating animation credit on this. Paul Julian is the uncredited map-maker.

Jerry Mouse Gets Caught

Why can’t Tom make up his mind? First he wants to kill Jerry. Then he doesn’t. Witness this scene in Trap Happy (1946). Tom’s hired an exterminator who has succeeded in catching the mouse. As usual, the animation tells the story. And, as usual, there are always fun poses.



Mike Lah, Ken Muse and Ed Barge are the credited animators.

Trap Happy was reissued a couple of times by MGM. It appeared in theatres again starting in June 1954. The ad to the left plugs a re-release in the 1963-64 theatrical season, running simultaneously with the new cartoons being made by producer Walter Bien and director Chuck Jones.

Writers and Network Radio

Note: This is the first of a two-parter on radio writing in the 1930s. Part two is next week.

Jack Benny’s former writer Harry Conn spent most of the last half of the 1930 complaining—especially to the media—how underappreciated and underpaid he was while being the real brains behind the Benny show. Conn proved otherwise when he managed to convince one of the networks to make him the star of a radio-variety show...and then he flopped in 13 weeks. He showed the world, alright.

Conn certainly wasn’t a hack. And he can be credited with helping to mould the Benny show in the early ‘30s and start Jack off on a long and fruitful career on the airwaves. Conn simply took an old theatrical concept—the master of ceremonies kibitzing with other acts on the bill—and expanded on it. But words are nothing without the right actor. And Jack Benny got to the point where critics noticed his scripts weren’t all that great on paper, but were funny once they got out onto the air.

Radio Mirror decided to give writers of radio comedy shows some well-deserved credit in its November 1938 issue. Conn’s quoted in it; one wonders if he didn’t plant the idea for the story in the heads of the publication’s editors. The story builds up writers as if they’re solely responsible for a show’s success—until the last sentence, where the star gets credit, too. After all, this was a fan magazine. It wouldn’t have been wise to tear down the stars altogether. Perhaps the story simply proves that radio is a collaborative effort, with writers, actors, musicians and technicians working together to entertain the audience. And it only works when everyone jells.

LAUGHTER BY THE YARD
That's how radio's gagmen sell it! They spring to attention when a comedian cries "Quip Watson!"
By JERALD MANNING
IT takes four people to make gentle, lovable Gracie Allen crazy. It takes at least six people to make Jack Benny funny each Sunday. It takes two people to make Paul Whiteman, officially not a comedian, interestingly sophisticated. Sure, it takes all these people to make a comedian—but it is the comedian who takes the checks with national-deficit-like figures written on them.
Eddie Cantor knew what he was talking about when he once said that a comedian is only as good as his material. If you listen to Jack Benny, say, and remark: "Gee, Benny wasn't so funny tonight," you don't mean that Jack suddenly stopped being a comedian. He still knows how to time a joke, how to read his lines. Jack wasn't funny because his material wasn't funny. And it isn't Jack who makes the lines funny or unfunny. It is the gag-men—the gentlemen behind the scenes who can make or break a comedian with the material they supply.
There isn't a comic in radio who can do without one or more gag-writers. Fred Allen comes closest to doing a solo job. But even he has help. The reasons are simple. Ed Wynn once calculated that the gags used in four half-hour programs would provide enough material for a full-length Broadway play. That's one good reason. The other is that several of radio's funnymen are swell actors but they're not funny all by themselves. They become comics only when somebody else has written something funny for them to say.
And this business of writing something funny for somebody else to say isn't particularly nice work even if you can get it. The strain is great. Two of the most important gag-writers—Dave Freedman and Al Boasberg—have died of heart trouble within the past two years. Freedman, beginning with Cantor, wrote for practically every one of the big-time comedians. Boasberg was working for Jack Benny when he died. Both were men on the young side of fifty.
What's in it for these creators of funny-men? Their pay ranges from about $70 to $1500 a week. Their creations are aired at the rate of $1500 to $15,000 a broadcast. Harry Conn reached the all-time high in salaries for "humor-writers"—he asks not to be called a gag-writer. When he left Benny in 1936 he had a contract with Jack which arranged for him to receive 25% of the comedian's salary. That's when Jack was making $7000 a broadcast.
After that, Conn did the unheard-of. He was hired by Joe Penner's sponsors at $1500 each week—exactly the same salary as the broadcast's star. That trick has never been duplicated.
The average weekly salary for a good gag-man is $500—less than one tenth the income of a good comedian. What's more, the radio scene has changed in the last few years. A gag-man is no longer just that.
In 1931, Ken Englund, now writing humor for the Chase and Sanborn show, sent Phil Baker two jokes. This one, written at the height of the depression, got him a job:
"Things are so bad in Hollywood now that King Kong has gone to work for an organ-grinder."
Remember it? Well, that is what is officially known as a "gag". But nowadays Englund can't make a substantial living from radio by creating jokes like that. He and all the other top-flight humor writers must be able to supply situation ideas, funny dramas and character creation.

Harry Conn is credited with leading the way to the new type of radio comedy. Before Benny went on the air, the accepted comic show went on its weary belly-laugh way—every laugh came from a gag.
Conn helped change all that. More than six years ago he wrote the first Benny show. He was contributing material to the new Burns and Allen program then and George recommended him to Jack. The first Benny broadcast wasn't so good. But the new ideas began to creep in with the successive ones. One important gem was the comedy newsreel. Fred Allen is still using it.
Then Harry really started something. He began to write other members of the program into the script. The entire show was unified and all of a sudden George Olsen and Ethel Shutta, musical stars of that series, became comedians. The idea was good—the character of Mary Livingstone was created, Frank Black learned how to get laughs and Don Bestor's spats made history.
Most of the important comedians are using the situation type of script now. But those two hardy perennials —Pick and Pat (they also masqueraded as Showboat's Molasses an' January)—still stick to the gags that mother and dad told each other when they were riding on a bicycle built' for two. Twenty-nine-year-old Mort Lewis wrote their material until a few months ago. At different times he has written jokes for Burns and Allen, Eugene and Willie Howard and Ben Bernie.
It is his contention that people like to hear old songs—so why shouldn't they like to hear old gags? He puts a new twist on them but they're still the old reliables. He keeps a file of several thousand jokes. Running alphabetically from Africa to Zulu, they are what he calls his "reserve."
The biggest share of Eddie Cantor's gag budget goes to Phil Rapp, who got into radio in 1931 and began selling humor to Beatrice Lillie and Burns and Allen. Also on the Cantor comedy pay-roll is a young man who sent the comedian jokes while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Eddie financed him through school and now has him on his regular staff.

THE four people required to make Gracie Allen crazy are her Georgie-Porgie, Willie Burns, Harvey Helm and John P. Medbury. The price of her sanity is $10,000 each week. Out of that the writing staff gets $1200. George is in complete charge of the script and okays or furnishes the ideas. Grade's only worry is to read her script the way George thinks best.
Usually, the three assistants work independently of each other. About three weeks before the program a meeting is held. All contributions are lumped together and George builds a radio program.
Jack Benny always has six or seven writers surrounding him and his program. The financial experts say that he gets $12,500 for each of his programs and that approximately $2,000 of that goes to his writers. Back in the old days when Jack first became public comedian number one, Harry Conn was the only one working on the scripts and he got 25% of Jack's salary. Now Eddie Beloin, Bill Morrow and their cohorts head the staff.
It is Conn's claim that when he was writing the show, Benny rarely bothered with the script until the first rehearsal. Nowadays, though, Jack works hard on them.
But the gentleman who really works on his scripts is Fred Allen. Every line that you hear him or his stooges say has been written by him. As soon as his Wednesday night program is over, Fred begins work on next week's show. He spends the entire week doing it—his only time off is one night a week when he takes Portland to a movie or a play.
Despite the fact that Allen works harder than any other comedian in radio and despite the fact that he writes every line, he still has two gagmen on his staff. It is the duty of Arnold Auerbach and Herman Wolke [sic] to supply ideas for skits and make suggestions if Fred gets stuck.
Allen, however, is the exception that proves the rule. Edgar Bergen, for instance, started out by writing his own double-talk. Now the task is too great and little Charlie is the wooden mouthpiece for the efforts of approximately three men.
One of the best examples of what a writer can do for you is Milton Berle. Up until his Community Sing Show two years ago, Milton had been a complete flop on the air. He had always been incomparable on the vaudeville stage but radio had already begun to outgrow that type of comedy.
BERLE, playing a theater in New York, was in the throes of negotiating his Sing contract. It was a Wednesday and VARIETY, show-business's newspaper, was out. On one of the pages there was an ad which read:

"IRV S. BRECHER
Positively Berle-proof gags—
Gags So Bad Even Milton Berle
Won't Steal Them"
And Brecher, who was working for his uncle, manager of a movie house, got a call from Berle. He began working for the comedian at $35 a week. Then Milton went on the air for Community Sing at $1500 a week and soon Brecher was getting $300 of it.
At first Brecher, just turned 23, shared the burden of writing the show with Berle. But gradually his ideas began to take the lead. Quickly, he erased Milt's old vaudeville-type comedy, and substituted situation and characterization a la Benny and Conn. Milton's salary began to rise and so did Irv's. The series ended with Berle never seeing the script that Brecher wrote until the first day of rehearsal. It also ended with Milt's salary at $2500 a week and Irv's at $700. The surest signs of their success were the movie contracts that both received: Berle as a screen comedian; Brecher as a dialogue writer for M-G-M. He writes most of the gags for the Good News program.
Brecher's method is one way of breaking into the gag-writing business. Another way was that used by Carroll Carroll. Carroll used to write for "Judge", the humor magazine. The agency which produces the Bing Crosby program noticed his work and now Mr. Carroll is responsible for that feeling of good fellowship and most of the laughs on Bing's show.
But don't get the idea that all you have to do to be a successful radio comedian is invest $1,000 or $1,500 a week in gag-writers, audition and get on the air. Granted that poor material makes a comedian very unfunny. Granted, too, that up to air time the gag-writers are the most important spoke in the wheel. But it's still the comedian who makes people laugh—with his talent and ability to get the most out of his materials.

Transitioning in the Unicorn in the Garden

Characters remain stationary while the background changes in the UPA cartoon Unicorn in the Garden (released 1953). Psychiatrist I. Ego doesn’t move as he’s transported from his office into the home of an evil wife done in by her scheme to have her mild-mannered husband committed to an insane asylum.



The Oscar-winning short Gerald McBoing-Boing did the same sort of thing. It also used colour for mood. This cartoon does the same. The interior of the house is dominated by the psychopathic wife. It is dark. But toward the end of the cartoon, when the husband enters, the home suddenly become bright. Why? Because the wife is in a straight-jacket about to meet the fate she schemed to give her husband.



The meek guy suddenly smiles at the end. He’s rid of his abuser. And there’s another transition from indoors to outdoors.



Bill Hurtz directed the short with animation credited to Phil Monroe, Rudy Larriva and Tom McDonald.

Gruesome, Isn't It?

Who doesn’t like this gag from “The Shooting of Dan McGoo”?



Johnny Johnsen did the backgrounds for Tex Avery in this one, with the story by Heck Allen.

Memorials to Jack Benny

If social media and multiple TV news channels existed when Jack Benny died in 1974, they might still be doing stories about him.

Benny was so loved, admired and respected that newspapers didn’t just punch out a wire service obit when cancer claimed him. Many papers had multiple stories, and continued coverage for several days, something highly unusual at the time. They analysed his comedy and his place in the world of show business. There were personal remembrances. And there was mourning, too, in the regular pages, in the editorial section and in the entertainment columns. That’s how big he was.

The San Bernadino County Sun ran two Benny stories on one of its pages in the December 30, 1974 edition (the rest of the page was taken up by movie and lounge act ads). Let’s pass on both of them. Part of the story from the National Enterprise Association was incorporated from the syndicate’s archives and published in 1970. Both are different in focus but both capture something of Jack Benny.

Jack Benny in appreciation
By TOM GREEN
Gannett News Service.
Dammit, Jack Benny's gone.
Benny was our best comedian for four decades. Of all the great stand-up comics who came out of the 1930s, including his good friends Bob Hope and George Burns, Benny endured perhaps better than any of them. The times and the audiences changed, but Benny kept on being funny.
Jack Benny was in a restaurant across from NBC's Burbank studio one October afternoon in 1970. It was a lunch break midway through a day of rehearsing for what was his 20th anniversary television special. Timex, the watch company, was sponsoring the show.
"Frank Sinatra sent me this Timex watch last year and said it has a battery in it and you don't have to do anything to it. It'll run for a year. I can't wait until it quits running because I'm going to send it back to him and tell him to buy the battery."
He paused for just a second.
"No, I'll send him a bill. He'd keep the watch." Benny grinned, completely satisfied with that extra fillip on his story. He plunged ahead with the interview, which wasn't an interview at all. It was Benny finding relaxation in simply talking spontaneously.
"When I play the violin," he said, "it's like I just had a nap. I wish I could get to the point where I just do concerts. Just with symphony orchestras."
Several weeks later, I talked to George Burns about Jack Benny. Burns, who met Benny while dating Gracie Allen, flipped the ashes from his cigar. "I don't know why he does it. He just loves the business."
Another drag on the cigar and Burns was into the story of how he and Benny became friends. Benny had started dating a girl who was rooming with Gracie.
"The first time I met him, actually, was on the phone and we were disconnected. That made him laugh. Up until then, I didn't know I was a comedian."
Burns inevitably gets to the violin.
"He's mad about it. The other things he does are just a sideline. His big therapy is the violin. There's nothing that Heifetz has that Jack doesn't have, but when they play, it's an entirely different matter."
After lunch that October afternoon, Benny stood in the center of Rehearsal Hall 5 absently drawing on the strings of his violin as the cast and crew sauntered back from their break.
"Jack, I have to tell you this," said one of the writers on the show. "At lunch today, somebody asked how old your Stradivarius is. I said, oh, it's about 250 years old. Jack bought it when it was new."
The writer broke up. "Maybe we can use that," he said.
Benny smiled. "I think I've heard that before. Only more subtle." Pretty soon everybody was rehearing again. The old Benny gang from radio had turned out for Benny's 20th anniversary television show. There was announcer Don Wilson, who had been with Benny since 1934; Eddie Rochester Anderson, Benny's man since 1938, and all the others—Benny Reuben [sic], Frank Nelson, Dennis Day, and Mel Blanc. Only Phil Harris was missing.
Wilson hadn't had an opportunity to introduce Benny on television since their weekly TV series had left the air in 1964. It was now six years later.
"Never a phone call," bellowed Wilson. "Not one. I gave that man the best years of my life and he drops me like a hot potato." On the sidelines, Benny smiles broadly, loving it.
"There's no other comedian living who would allow himself to be knocked like this," whispers Reuben. "And it's his idea."
"Even after all these years," Wilson said later, "it's fun. They don't have this type of humor anymore. It's Americana. Just great entertainment. No message. Just good solid fun."
Wilson stood and watched Benny working for a moment. "Isn't it fantastic? A man of his age. He's so young at heart." That year Benny would give two concerts in Israel, be toastmaster at dinners for Johnny Carson and George Jessel, do two weeks in Las Vegas, four days at Lake Tahoe, and play London.
He would also do another television special, but I remember that he sensed that his television days were about over. Not because of his age he was 77 then but because he knew he wasn't invincible in that all-consuming medium. "I could have one of the best half-hours on television and then along comes a piece of junk. Suddenly people say we've seen Benny, let's watch this . . . Why would I want to take a gamble? . . . How am I going to buck the whole country?" He was probably right. And now he's gone.

Despite Other Successes, Benny Was Shrewd Creation of Radio
By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
New York Times News Service
NEW YORK — Although he was successful on television, in nightclubs and even on the stage in "one-man" shows, Jack Benny was perhaps the most enduring and astonishingly shrewd creation of radio. For anyone growing up in the 1930s and 40s, Sunday night at 7 meant Jack Benny and "the gang."
Week after week, the cast regulars went through a series of thoroughly predictable routines. Week after week, listeners at home laughed along with the studio audience. The brilliantly calculated Benny persona, offering magnanimous displays of the hilariously petty, was being fixed securely in the public's affection.
His radio years began in the Depression. Radio was concentrating on entertainment. There were very few regular news formats in those days. Not surprisingly, the center of the entertainment spotlight was held by veterans of vaudeville. In addition to Jack Benny, there were Eddie Cantor, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Al Jolson, Ed Wynn and Phil Baker.
By 1937, Jack Benny had edged out Eddie Cantor for top position in the "Hooperatings." In 1950, a couple of years before the television explosion, he was still No. 1 in the ratings. Meantime, he had used radio to develop a national character of rare longevity.
The vehicle consisted of nothing more than sound and, with the Benny sense of faultless timing, silence. The old Maxwell auto sputtered and coughed. The endless series of locks protecting the cellar bank vault squeaked and clanked. The pay telephone and cigarette machine in the living room noisily consumed coins. The immediately recognizable Benny family was created by a group of performers standing in front of microphones.
The effect was a combination of intimacy and elusiveness, a combination still unique to radio. The disembodied voices became personal friends, perhaps vaguely linked to faces in press photographs. The contexts and settings were constructed in the imaginations of the listener. The very lack of visual literalness expanded the possibilities for radio.
All of that changed, of course, with television. The new medium proved considerably more devouring than the old. Seeing the old Maxwell was not quite as funny as hearing it. Seeing it a second time was not nearly so funny as hearing it for the 100th time. The quality of elusiveness was lost.
The Benny program and other radio formats did have respectable runs on television, but the medium was bestowing its "blockbuster" successes on more "visual" material—Milton Berle's mugging, Sid Caesar's skits, the pandemonium of "Laugh-In." But the blockbusters, too, were eventually devoured. None were as long-lived as the old-time radio favorites.
The Benny persona, however, survived. It did not depend on one-line jokes or energetic physical routines. He could still show up on his own specials or as a guest star getting incredible mileage out of his penny-pinching routines or deadpan silences.
On one of his last television appearances, in an Anne Bancroft special called "Annie and the Hoods," he played a psychiatrist listening to the silly prattle of a patient. He didn't utter one word. He didn't have to. The radio character had become a national institution.