Milking the Milk Bottle Gag

Tex Avery made a few “don’t-make-noise” cartoons but Deputy Droopy was a little different than the rest because he had two guys trying to avoid being loud, so he could milk his gags longer. One guy is the centre of the gag, then the next guy follows.

You know how this works. The sheriff is having a nap in his office. The bad guys want to rob his safe. Droopy tries to get the bad guys to make noise to wake him. In this sequence, Droopy places a lobster (convenient, isn’t it) on the chair of one of the bad guys. The other bad guy captures the noise in a milk bottle and lets it loose on a nearby knoll.



Gag’s not done, son. The second bad guy shows up to milk it.



Walt Clinton from Avery’s unit animated this, along with the Hanna-Barbera unit (Ed Barge, Ray Patterson, Ken Muse and Lew Marshall). No doubt this was the result of Avery’s unit being laid off in March 1953. Tex stayed behind for a bit to finish up what cartoons he had in production.

Singing, Van Beuren Style

Aw, come on. You just love those conjoined mouths in Van Beuren cartoons when a trio or quartet sings. Like this one in the Tom and Jerry cartoon Pencil Mania.



Here are the tomato, potato and banana singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in harmony and a couple of frames as they get closer together.



Conjoined mouths and zooming heads are Van Beuren specialties, though we’re spared a zooming head in this cartoon.

You’ve got to love the meandering story in this 1932 cartoon. It starts with a dancing cow (does anyone know the name of song in the background?) and somehow morphs into drawings of fruit coming to life as humans and playing out an 1890s melodrama. But, it’s a Van Beuren cartoon, so does it matter? There are some nice morphing gags and an engaging score by Gene Rodemich.

Cerfing With Jack Benny

Columnists always seem to be so chummy with the stars. It might have been true. In New York, show biz writers and the stars seem to have hung out in the same drinking spots.

Bennett Cerf was a high-power publisher in New York. He supplanted Hal Block as the resident punster for years on What’s My Line. He penned a syndicated newspaper column. And he seems to have known Jack Benny well enough to have a few rounds of drinks with him (Jack, I understand, was a light drinker at best).

Here’s Cerf’s column (it was called, sigh, “The Cerfboard”) of August 2, 1953 consisting of a smattering of short pieces involving Jack and the questionable caricatures you see below (Hope looks like Jolson, Burns looks like Mel Brooks and Eddie Anderson resembles Hal Smith).

BENNY IN BLOOM
JACK BENNY entered the CBS broadcasting studio in Hollywood recently with his bag of golf clubs slung over his shoulder. "Oho," quipped Georgie Jessel, "I see you've got a date with Eisenhower." Jack thought this was very funny and laughed. That established him immediately as practically unique. Very few important comedians laugh at other important comedians. Very few, in fact, even bother to listen.
The two comics who break up Benny by merely opening their mouths are George Burns and Danny Kaye. Rochester slays him, too. Like the day after the Walcott-Marciano fiasco, on which Rochester lost a bundle. "Do you think Walcott will ever fight again?" asked Benny. "Boss," answered Rochester, "he will if I run into him."
JACK was still sawing away on his fiddle in the two-a-day when he first met Mary Livingston toiling in a Los Angeles department store. For years, the details of their swift romance have been built into a running gag on their radio program, with the name of the store repeated over and over again.
This is the kind of publicity for which most outfits would pay thousands. A rival emporium, in fact, told them they could set their own price for substituting its name for the one where Mary actually had worked. They refused, of course. Mary's former boss, however, remains blissfully unaware that he hasn't exactly overwhelmed the Bennys with appreciation.
He even complained to an associate, "Imagine that Jack Benny not being able to give me tickets at the last minute to his TV show after all the times he's mentioned my name on the air!"

BOTH MARY and Jack are balmy over golf. They take lessons from Ben Hogan at the new Tamarisk Club in Palm Springs. I hope they'll do Mary more good than the course in automobile driving for which she and Barbara Stanwyck once enrolled. When the two girls felt they had achieved a certain degree of proficiency, they arranged to drive toward each other, and meet halfway for a victory luncheon. The traffic proved heavy, however, and neither dared stop in the midst of it. Nor did they feel equal to making a U-turn until they reached traffic circles.
Result: they passed each other three times without being able to do a thing about it, and utterly frustrated, put their cars away and signed up for additional lessons.
THOUGH Jack Benny's fanatical nursing of a buck is wildly exaggerated in his radio characterization, his sense of values has never been upset by great success. At a fancy night club in New York, a bill for $57 for a single round of drinks sent him moaning into the streets. His companion was even more completely undone. "What are you kicking about?" demanded Jack. "I paid the tab, didn't I?" "I know," agreed the companion (who happened to be myself), "but I reached for it."
One old crony who really stopped Jack cold borrowed two dollars from him at the stage door of the Roxy, promising to return it promptly. Six months later, Jack received this note from him:
"I've really hit it rich, Jack. Got me a great job and am engaged to a banker's daughter. Happy days are here again. Am enclosing one dollar. Will send the other as soon as possible."
THE LAST STRAW. Jack Benny not only laughs at his confreres, but cues them into repeating their best stories. It was at his insistence that Jesse Block, of the famous team of Block and Sully, told us of their appearance at the London Palladium, where Miss Sully suddenly discovered that her necklace was missing. "Don't worry," soothed Block. "There are no gangsters over here. All we have to do is summon Scotland Yard."
In due course, exactly the kind of character they were expecting turned up from the Yard complete with walrus mustache, derby, rolled umbrella and black notebook. They heard nothing from him for 24 hours. Then Block was told he was calling. "What did I tell you?" he exulted.
When he returned to the dressing room, Miss Sully demanded, "Has he found my necklace?"
"On the contrary," answered Block glumly. "He's lost his umbrella." – BENNETT CERF

The Appeal of Quincy Magoo

You can talk about Gerald McBoing Boing and “Rooty Toot Toot” all you want, but UPA’s biggest success was an almost blind old man.

Mr. Magoo had remarkable staying power. During his theatrical life, he starred in TV commercials for G.E. and a couple of beer companies, as well as a public service message. In the ‘60s, he moved into TV syndication, headlined the first television cartoon Christmas special, and then appeared in series in both prime time and Saturday mornings.

After a while, the misreading-sign/mistaking-things-due-to-blurry-vision gags got really, really tiresome. But in his early theatrical days, Magoo could be entertaining. Many of the reasons are elucidated in this article in the British publication Picturegoer dated November 1, 1952. One big reason that doesn’t get mentioned, as it is focusing on art and animation technique, is the voice work of Jim Backus. Magoo is a little grumpy in the earlier cartoons, buoyant and optimistic as the ‘50s wore on.

The scan of this issue wasn’t very good, but the fuzzy cartoon frames are kind of appropriate for a guy who has trouble seeing.

MR. MAGOO Can’t be Ignored
Even without circuit support the latest cartoon character is catching on. And all because he is good at making mistakes
By ALAN BRIEN
The latest thing in screen heroes—he’s already a cult in America and must by now be blushing with the number of bouquets he’s picked up in Britain—is a dignified, jocular little man, inquisitive, far from handsome and almost fatally short-sighted.
He’s as far removed from the conventional screen idol at the Volga is from the Mississippi. His name is Mr. Magoo, and he is the drawing board creation of thirty-three year old, Canadian-born Stephen Bosustow and a steadily growing cartoon unit called United Productions of America. Though established as a top cartoon star among United States picture-goers, who have formed Magoo Clubs up and down the country, Mr. Magoo is known over here more by reputation than by acquaintance.
For the little man’s adventures—the first arrived in local cinemas about eighteen months ago—rely on bookings from independent British cinemas. There has been a West End season of Magoo films; thirty or so London and home counties cinemas have opened their projection-room doors to Mr. M.—yet the big three circuits have ignored him.

In many American circles you are thought too slow to bother with unless you tell of mistaking a Picasso portrait for a mirror, or the patter on a girl’s blouse for a bus map, in typically Magoo manner.
And in spite of limited distribution on this side, Columbia says that a sizeable Magoo fan mail is being received at its London office. Which rather indicates that, given wider showings, Mr. Magoo could become Britain’s pet gag of the fifties, just as the Little Audrey joke was the fashion of the thirties.
What is there about Mr. Magoo that makes him as something original and exciting, something more than a passing fancy? Well, visually he’s one-dimensional, yet he seems real—a little fellow with believable habits and tastes.
Like many active oldsters, he looks slightly ridiculous in holiday shorts, sun hat and golfing shoes. Especially when he shakes hands with a water pump and, as it creaks protestingly, mutters to his nephew, “Quaint sense of humour these mountain folks; very dry and droll” (that’s in Grizzly Golfer).
Or when he hopefully shouts, “Foot fault,” to the tennis-playing walrus in Fuddy Duddy Buddy, It is typical of his good-tempered philosophy that when he is told he has been playing with a walrus he is downcast for only a moment, then says: “A walrus, eh? Well, I like him . . . I like him.
We feel we should call him “sir” as, with homburg hat, velvet-collared coat, gouty foot and stout cane, he limps on to a swinging girder and, when he has been lowered dangerously to earth, observes to the operator: “How often have you been working a lift, son?”
His creator began cartoon-drawing in the Disney studios, was responsible for the first animations of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and did the story of Bambi. He was unlucky in the Disney economy drive of 1941, formed United Productions of America in 1945. Then he had a staff of six; now it is a hundred plus.

He believes that the startling success of U.P.A. in the United States is due to a policy of “allowing freedom of artistic expression, which has attracted a staff of outstanding craftsmen.”
He has created a new cartoon idiom, strangely enough, by being both conservative and experimental in technique. He is conservative in his return to the early Disney method of emphasizing the flat unreality of his drawings. While Disney now strives for a three-dimensional, photographic realism, Bosustow exaggerates and distorts to emphasize the comic essence of his cartoon personalities.
Mr. Magoo and his colleagues do not move in the smooth, articulated manner of live stars, as Disney characters do. They jerk and leap, as only animated drawings can. The technical difference is that Disney has one animation of each frame, Bosustow has one to every two or three frames.
Bosustow and his associates, John Hubley and Art Babbitt, have experimented and evolved a lively, modern style that makes any single frame as gay and inventive as a “New Yorker” cover. In the Oscar-winning Gerald McBoing Boing, for example, the screen is a canvas on which only the most important details are sketched, with a flowing, witty line, enriched by bold yet subtle washes of colour.
The eye is drawn by the composition of the lines and patterns, and held by the sudden blossoming of shapes in the primary colours against delicate pastel backgrounds. When this draughtsmanship is linked with the galvanic activity of the figures, the movement of the camera, an extraordinary effect is created—as though Van Gogh had got mixed up with Felix the Cat.

U.P.A. characters are about people more real than some of those in many a “B,” live-action film. Subjects touch upon are adult and intelligent, yet the atmosphere is never ponderous, always lighthearted, often impudent.
Apart from a number of Mr. Magoo pictures, Columbia is releasing shortly Rooty Toot Toot, a lively folk-tale based on the Frankie and Johnny ballad, which was talked about at this year’s Edinburgh’s Festival; Popcorn Story, a satirical story about the inventor of popcorn; Family Circus, the story of a little girl who is the terror of her home until her father discovers that jealousy of her baby brother is the reason for her behaviour. This line-up illustrates the point about Bosustow and U.P.A.: they have evolved a formula for animated shorts that are meant for thinking adults yet also are a great delight to the children.

The $20 Gold Piece

“Put a $20 gold piece on my watch chain, so you can let all the boys I died standing pat” wails the singing spectre in the Betty Boop cartoon Snow-White (1933). And the spectre enacts it for the audience.



The singing of Cab Calloway, the musical score, the animation by Doc Crandall and the wonderful backgrounds by the anonymous artist in the St. James Infirmary scene make this one of the great cartoons of the 1930s.

Jerry Mouse Gets His

Much like Saturday night baths and boys being forced to wear short pants until a certain age, giving someone castor oil seems to belong to a distant era. I’ve never seen a bottle of the stuff and don’t know anyone who was forced to take it. In the 1940s, I’m sure it was different, so we get a castor oil gag in the Tom and Jerry cartoon Baby Puss.

Apparently it’s maid Lillian Randolph’s day off because some obnoxious girl is running rampant, infantilising a cat. Between the girl, the unnecessarily tormented Tom, and smugly gleeful Jerry Mouse, this cartoon is grating. However, Jerry gets his in the end. About bloody time.

As usual, the MGM animators give the cat and mouse lots of expression. Here we are when the annoying child shoves castor oil into Tom for, well, for being abused.



And what’s that saying about he who laughs last? Jerry isn’t laughing for long but the satisfied audience is watching the mouse get what he deserves.



I won’t attempt to identify the voices or fine vocal group (the falsetto Carmen Miranda impression by the short stout cat is a lot of fun), but the credited animators are Pete Burness, Ray Patterson, Irv Spence and Ken Muse.

The Sounds of Stan

If you had to pick an occupation for Stan Freberg during the 1950s, it’d impossible. He started the decade working on a puppet show and ended it operating his own ad agency. In between , he starred on two radio shows, signed a recording contract with Capitol and ran into executives deathly afraid he’d cut into corporate profits by offending someone.

The British music newspaper Disc profiled Freberg in its issue of January 24, 1959.

He ‘honours’ the stars with his satire
Pop music could, if we were to let it, become a very serious business indeed. We get a daily stream of rock, cha-cha, and every type of rhythm, plus a host of good and not so good ballads; the platters spin, the cash registers tinkle, and we are sometimes apt to lose our sense of perspective and, most of all, our sense of humour.
Of all the artistes who have attempted to put humour on record, none has done it so consistently nor so successfully as Stan Freberg. I say attempted for nothing is more difficult to do that put comedy on wax. To stand up to several playings the humour has to be exceptional.
But Freberg has mastered his medium and, knowing that actual gags will not stand the test, he has turned to satire.
That satire is usually directed at well-known songs and, such is Freberg’s brilliant mind, he is able to find comedy where one would never have believed it possible.
Some of his hits have followed soon after the initial success of the song, and while some disc fans object to the Freberg treatments, the artistes who find themselves satire are usually delighted and flattered.
If the star has become famous enough to be honoured with a Freberg satire, then he can really claim to have achieved public prominence.
New ‘Line’
I remember the delight of Lonnie Donegan when, just starting to make a big name for himself, Stan Freberg decided to record a delightful version of “Rock Island Line.” There was hardly any doubt at all who Freberg was satirising. Additionally, it gave the “Line” a new lease on life, and made people aware of the Donegan version if, by chance, they didn’t know it.
I know that I for one have become interested in an original disc through a Freberg waxing. When I first heard Freberg’s “Sh-Boom” I hadn’t heard the original disc. Through it I soon made it my business to hear The Crewcuts’ record, and other versions. Freberg, apart from delighting me, had served an additional purpose.

Stan, of course, does not make every disc a take-off of a well-known recording. Many of his records are special productions, the figment of his own very imaginative mind.
His “John and Marsha” is a case in point. Freberg took a song and, by using only the two names throughout the whole disc, made it into a fantastic seller, and a most unusual recording.
It seems hard to imagine that such a record could cause any sort of a storm, yet many people took exception to it, including the B.B.C., because of the many inflections of voice which Stan Freberg used on those two innocent-sounding names.
Much of Freberg’s success, apart from his tremendous sense of humour, can be attributed to his talent for mimicry. This particular facet is the result of long experience in the entertainment field, and a natural flair for observation.
Such attributes have taken Stan Freberg successfully through many spheres, including that of satirist, writer, actor, lyricist, composer and, more recently, commercial advertiser.
A stooge!
This six-foot, sandy-haired entertainer was brought up in Pasadena. Says Freberg, “I was brought up in Pasadena, suave, aloof, and awesomely elegant. The town, not me! Even now the place cannot get used to the idea.”
For a man full of surprises, it came as no surprise to me that Stan’s father was far removed from the world of entertainment. In fact, he is a retired Baptist minister.
However, a conjurer uncle seems to have intrigued Freberg at an early age. When only 11, Stan was helping his uncle load up his coat with the many objects which conjurers seem to be able to stow there.
This done, Stan would hurry round into the audience and offer himself as a stooge when required!
Like so many in American show business, Uncle Conray suffered badly in his chosen profession and had to take a humble job on the staff at one of the major broadcasting stations.
Young Stan soon followed his uncle. “Not through any particular loyalty,” said Stan, “but because I wanted all the free passes to radio shows that my uncle could get hold of.”
Stan Freberg devoured radio entertainment. He returned for show after show, every aspect of broadcasting intriguing him and exciting his passion for mimicry.
Another thing that Stan enjoyed about uncle’s new position was the freedom it afforded him to rummage through the waste paper baskets! Not for money, but for any discarded radio scripts.
Every find in this direction was taken home, studied and acted out in solitude in the family garage at home. It was through these performances that Stan found he could imitate any voice demanded of him.
Still at school, this talent brought him distinction and so, when he fixed a job for Stan as a petrol station attendant, the obedient son took it.
However, his career in petroleum was to last only three days. The boss caught him filling a petrol tank with a smoking pipe in his mouth and fired him.
Drawing himself up to his full height, and with all the dignity he could muster, Stan said, “That’s all right with me, buster. I happen to be in show business.” Nothing was in sight in this direction, but, so certain was Freberg that he had a future in this sphere, he soon became an entertainer.
‘Coffee Time’
With only the press cuttings of his school triumphs, Stan Freberg made the rounds of the agents. Says he, “I saw many receptionists, but very few bosses.” However, Cliffie Stone saw him and offered him a job on a morning show, “Coffee Time at Harrmony Homestead.” The salary? His fare from Pasadena to Hollywood and home again! To live he had to drive a laundry truck around town in his off-duty time.
The “Coffee Time” show was an early morning interview one, and few people ever arrived to make up the audience. Day after day, Stan would remedy this situation by being all the people who hadn’t turned up!
Cliffie Stone would interview Freberg who, on the spot, would become a mid-western tourist, a housewife, a businessman, or even a child on holiday from school! Behind the interviews an effects disc would put in the necessary atmosphere noises.
Through Stone, Freberg undertook his first solo show on radio, and a nervous 18-year-old was out on his own before he knew where he was.
During the same year, 1944, Stan Freberg went to Warner Brothers studio where his ability to supply voices put him in demand for cartoon films. Not only did Warners use his services this way, but he also supplied a tremendous amount of different voices for Paramount, Columbia and Disney.
Many shows
His career well under way, the army claimed him in 1945. However, during hiw two years’ service, he was never moved from California. During this time, it was not surprising that he wrote and staged many shows for the boys of Fort McArthur. Additionally he made many contributions to a couple of service newspapers.
His return to show business was rapid, and one of his first shows was as a disc jockey. Stan wrote the show, acted in it, and presented the records.
A further job was in a network radio show for children called “Tell It Again.” Stan got the job by assuring the producer that he could make monkey sounds! He spent all afternoon at the zo to make sure that he could do it.
Later he was responsible for Black Beauty’s whinny, the miaowing of Ulysses’ cat and a host of other strange noises.
Anxious to widen his experience still further, Stan answered an advertisement in a theatrical paper, “Wanted, comedian to travel with small band.” At the audition Stan did all that he knew. Tap dancing, impressions, and his improvisations. Said bandleader Red Fox, “That’ll do all right. Now what instrument can you play? Out comedian has to help out with the band.”
Stan couldn’t play any instrument, but this didn’t prevent him from asking “What instrument do you need?” Having been told that a guitarist was wanted, Stan replied “You’re in luck, that happens to be the instrument I play best.”
With that he went straight out, bought a guitar and an instruction book, and learned to play sufficiently to get by in the band. “Fortunately,” says Freberg, “the band always played loud, so they hardly knew whether I was playing or not.”
One of the biggest breaks in Freberg’s career came in 1949. He was signed for a long series called “Time For Beany” and, for five days a week, he entertained children with comedian Daws Butler until he resigned five years later in 1954.
Meanwhile, Stan had made his first disc, “John and Marsha,” and through this had acquired an even wider popularity.
From then on, alongside his personal appearances, a succession of Freberg discs hit the market.
They are now too numerous to mention in one feature, but perhaps I can remind you of a few of them. He scored in a big way with two saucy satires, “St. George and the Dragonet” and “Little Blue Riding Hood.”
Great LP
“C’Est Si Bon” was another gem, somehow reminiscent of the Eartha Kitt recording. “The Yellow Rose Of Texas” was another Freberg classic that rocked us on both sides of the Atlantic, as did his Les Paul and Mary Ford take-off in “The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise.” “Heart Break Hotel” was another sparkling satire, this time on—guess who?
So they’ve come at us in a steady stream. Ever welcome, and always extremely clever.
More recently, Capitol have issued two wonderful LPs called “Stan Freberg—The Best of his Shows,” (Vols. 1 and 2). This, like all his previous releases, is a “must.” My colleague Ken Graham extols them on another page.
May many more Stan Freberg records spin their way on both sides of the ocean. For, as I’ve said earlier, we can take our daily entertainment far too seriously. Doug Geddes

We Now Pause

Tex Avery and his gagmen (generally Rich Hogan or Heck Allen) used routines over and over until even Tex got to the point of wondering if they were still funny.

One that surfaced a couple of times in Tex’s early days appeared in Dangerous Dan McFoo (1939). A trio is singing that vererable old melody “The Quilting Party” when it stops and mugs for the camera. Tex holds the pose for 46 frames before the characters resume singing. He pulled the same gag the previous year in The Penguin Parade.



The song concluded, for some reason Avery has the singers thrust their crotches at the camera (accompanied by a timpani) before scooting out of the cartoon in mid-air.



The story in this cartoon is by Hogan. Avery’s animators around this time included Virgil Ross, Sid Sutherland, Ham Hamilton and Paul J. Smith.

Odds Fish

If I had to name a favourite line of dialogue from Mike Maltese, I couldn’t. But one in Rabbit Hood would be in the running.

Bugs clobbers the Sheriff of Nottingham on the head. The dazed sheriff exclaims “Odds, fish! The very air abounds in kings.” And it does, too.



If I had to name a favourite cartoon writer, that would be easy. It’s Mike Maltese.

The Contradictions of Benny

No introduction is needed for this fine piece on Jack Benny and his show from the March 1948 pages of Radio Best magazine, a publication based in New York. The only observation is I somehow find it tough to believe that a small town boy circa 1910 growing up with a Lithuanian immigrant father said “Gee whiz, Pop.” The article was accompanied by some very nice NBC publicity photos but the on-line scanned version of the magazine is poor so they haven’t all been reproduced.

THE DOUBLE LIFE of Mr. J. Benny
By Flavius Friedman
A long time ago, when the Jack Benny of today was still little Benjamin Kubelsky, he was minding his father's haberdashery shop in Waukegan one evening when a stranger walked in and handed Benjamin some money. Kubelsky pere, seeing the cash in the register later, asked his offspring what he had sold.
"Nothing," said his son "He just gave me some money on his account."
"But what was his name?" insisted Mr. Kubelsky.
"I don't know." said Benjamin. "Gee whiz, Pop, do you have to have his name, too?"
Not long afterwards a customer came in and purchased some ties, handkerchiefs and shirts and departed without leaving any cash.
"But it's all right," Benjamin told his father later, "he told me to charge it to his account. And this time I got his name."
"Name!" the old man screamed. "That fellow has no account in my store!

Jack Benny, at 53, according to his intimates, is only a little less naive than the youthful Benjamin Kubelsky who could be flimflammed so easily by a smooth-talking sharper. "Benny," said Ed Beloin, one of his former writers. is probably the most unsophisticated man I know."
Yet Jack's radio self-portrait of a sport-jacketed, Beverly Hills Simon Legree, who makes Dennis Day mow his lawn as well as sing for his $17.50 a week, is taken as pure gospel by the 25,000,000 people who listen regularly to his Sunday night half-hour over NBC. Benny's mail still bristles with indignant letters demanding that he pay Rochester a living wage. (Rochester gets over $1000 a week.) Even Mr. Whiskers once fell for the Benny myth, when the WPB, a Government war-time agency, sent Jack a business-like letter requesting that he turn in his legendary Maxwell to the scrap drive.
Strangers still turn their heads when Jack lunches or dines in Romanoff's or the Brown Derby, curious to see if he will leave either a nickel or a dime tip. Benny always overtips lavishly, both because that is his nature and because he is almost pathologically sensitive about his penny-squeezing "reputation."
The truth is, no one knows the real Jack Benny—no one, that is, outside of Jack himself, and he is only a shade more voluble than the late Calvin Coolidge. Millions of words have already been printed about this man who is the highest-paid comedian in radio. His scrap book, if he kept one, would in sheer stacked-up wordage make the Sears, Roebuck catalog seem like something marked "Reading Time: 10 Seconds," yet Benny still remains one of the most elusive, paradoxical figures in show business.
Benny is a fabulous personality, not so much because of his stratospheric Hooper rating, or his individual brand of humor or because he virtually revolutionized the pattern of radio comedy. Jack is radio's most intriguing figure because he has for more than 15 years succeeded brilliantly at the business of manufacturing laughter when he himself is anything but a funny man.
To an observer watching Benny prepare his Sunday program, he looks for all the world like a harried, cautious Seventh Avenue garment manufacturer worrying about his next Spring's line.
There is nothing uncomplimentary in this. The creation of a Benny broadcast is an arduous, painful, seven-day-a-week task, worth every penny of the reported $22,500 weekly check Jack gets from the American Tobacco Company. Benny's product comes from the sweat, toil and savvy of The Boss himself, from a quartet of the highest-priced writers in radio and a superlative surrounding cast whose talents all mesh like the jewelled gears of a Naval Observatory chronometer. Jack's competitors—Fred Allen, Danny Kaye, George Burns and other—frankly admit that when it comes to judging comedy material, Benny tops them all.
People, meeting Jack for the first time, stand around hopefully waiting for him to let loose with a barrage of boffolas. They go away disappointed. Jack gives strangers a limp handshake, a shy, almost distant "Hello" and seems eager to evaporate the next moment.
On the other hand, Jack can be the greatest audience in the world during rehearsals, howling with laughter, pounding the floor in glee over a line, while his cast, sits there dead-pan.

And yet Benny, as George Burns says, "is the greatest editor of material in the business. He's got the knack of cutting out all the weak slush and keeping in only the strong punchy lines." Because he has made the creation of comedy such a serious business, Jack knows better than any other man in the world what will be funny an his program. "I can't always tell when a line is good," he admits, "but, brother, I can tell when it's lousy."
Despite all this, despite his stature as "Mr. Radio," his consistent standing among the top five on the air, his huge earnings, his talent as a star-maker, the kudos paid him by the public and the trade, Jack Benny is still the "unhappy fiddler," (Why must comedians always want to play "Hamlet"?) Oddly enough, Benny really believes that if he had listened to his father, and practiced more on the fiddle when he was a boy in Waukegan, he would be a fine violinist today. He honestly envies the great virtuosi like Heifetz, Isaac Stern and Szigeti. He still remembers that Heifetz once told him he had a rich tone and that he should have continued with his music. The pre-comedy Benny was actually a soulful fellow with a violin. Unfortunately, it didn't get him any place.
Even Jack realizes this in his less pre-occupied moments. As his wife, Mary Livingstone once told him, "If you had kept up with fiddle-playing, you would have lost all the humor of being a lousy violinist on your program." (Jack is actually quite proficient.) But he can never seem to forget that he was once a fiddle player. Being no noodle, despite the role he plays on the air, Jack has managed to sublimate his musical yearnings. He has turned his frustration into one of the most riotously funny routines among all the running gags or his program—the "Professor Le Blanc" situation in which Mel Blanc, as the "Professor," gives Jack violin lessors and forever ends up with his buck-fifty unpaid.
Occasionally, however, Jack will rebel against the fate that has made him the comedian with the longest run in radio among the top funny men. He sets out to prove that he has other talents, only to wind up behind the personal eight-ball. Not long ago there was a party at Jack's $250,000 Beverly Hills home, where expert pantaloons like Danny Kaye, George Burns and Georgie Jessel were panic-ing the guests, bouncing ad libs around like on many basket balls. After a couple of hours Jack turned restless. "Everybody gets laughs around here but me," he complained. "And in my own house."
Benny went upstairs, then came down again a short time later, made up like the corniest of gypsy fiddlers. He strolled among the guests, playing as schmaltzy an assortment of tzardas ever heard outside of the ineffable Rubinoff. Then he passed around a battered hat.
No one bothered to laugh.
Another time, at a Hollywood benefit for Greek War Relief, Benny, instead of his expected comedy turn, performed an elaborate concerto arrangement of "Love in Bloom." The surprised audience burst into applause, but Jack merely bowed to the conductor, bowed to the audience, then sauntered off the stage, his treasured violin under his arm.
The contradictions in the Benny personality show up in many ways. Take, for instance, his reputed inability to get off a fastie unless his scripting crew running interference for him. True, Benny is no rapier wit like Fred Allen or Henry Morgan. "Benny," said Harry Conn, his first writer, "couldn't even ad lib a belch at a Hungarian banquet." Yet Jack, when hurt or cornered, can dish it out as well as take it. Radio circles still chuckle over Jack's famed bout with Fred Allen, who had Benny hanging on the ropes with his ad libs. Jack stood it as long as he could, then said, plaintively, "You wouldn't dare do this to me if I had my writers with me."

On another occasion when Benny, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, Jimmy Durante and Jerry Colona were on a Christmas "Command Performance" for the Army, the photographer lined up the comedians for a series of pictures. Someone had to say something and Hope started it with a crack about his profile. There was a pause and Durance yelled, "Hey, you ushers, stand erect and give this jernt a little class." Neither Benny nor Allen could think of anything to say. Allen started mugging and Jack jammed his hat on crosswise. "Well, at least I'll look funny," he quipped. Then Benny pulled a parking ticket out of his pocket. "I don't mind doing this show for free," be announced, "but who in heck is going to pay for this parking ticket?"
The delighted screams of the audience could have been heard all the way to Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga.
His studio audience, watching Jack do a warm-up before a broadcast, see Benny come out with all his own hair, see him tanned, genial and sassy-looking. He looks like a man with a million bucks in his pocket and a phone call from Lana Turner. "Welcome to the Lucky Strike Program," he says, then flips the ashes off his cigar.
But that incredible Benny poise is ersatz. Jack's "deliberately cultivated suavity," said a friend, "conceals an almost irrational terror of an audience. Nobody watching him realizes that he is trembling inside and that every line he speaks and every piece of business he does requires an effort of will power. Even in the days when he was an unknown vaudevillian, happy to pick up a fast twenty-five dollars with a dog act, Benny had that magnificent poise. Once, Jack tried out a turn at the Academy of Music Theatre in New York —a vaudeville house not particularly noted for its polite treatment of entertainers who weren't too well known. Everything went—from boos to over-ripe tomatoes. As Jack came out on the stage with his violin under his arm and his routine "Hello, folks," opening, the Bronx cheers began. When Jack got to the center of the stage the raspberries were deafening. But instead of going into his act, Benny kept on walking obliviously toward the other wing. Just as he reached the wing he turned and faced the customers. There was an ominous silence. "Goodbye, folks," he said. Then he strolled off the stage and out of the theatre.
To his cast—Dennis Day, Mary Livingstone, Rochester, Phil Harris, Don Wilson and the others—Benny is simply The Boss. He is no whip-cracker, but he demands and insists on perfection. Benny is his own producer. He rarely glances at the control booth for cues. He can get together with the sound man and patiently go over an effect—the clank of the chains in his "vault," for example—as many as 40 times, until his meticulous ear is happy. Jack himself labors over the hilarious rhymed commercials that his Sportsmen Quartet sings—incidentally, one of the freshest new routines to appear doing the last twelve months. All of the painstaking Sunday-to-Sunday writing sessions are master-minded by Benny, though he may not contribute an original line of his own.
The Benny show has almost as many recurring situations and running gags on tap as the objects that fill Fibber McGee's closet. There's the broken-down Maxwell, the violin lessons, the Benny vault with its caretaker who never sees the light of day, the brash telephone operators, Mr. Kitzel and his "peekle-in-the-meedle," the synthetic feud with Fred Allen, the Quartet and a packet of others. On the whole they pay off with laughs. But even so shrewd a judge of material as Benny will occasionally rely too much on strictly local references—things like his "Eastern-Columbia, Broadway and Ninth" routines which at best ring hollowly on the ears of listeners away from Los Angeles.

It's been said of Jack that he lives on a diet of black coffee and fingernails. It's true that he just can't wait to start to work and begin worrying every day. Benny arises at six in the morning, goes out for a couple of rounds of golf, then is ready for work. He is always the first on hand for conferences and rehearsals. Ten minutes before the end of a luncheon break, Benny is back in the studio, hunched up in a corner studying his script. He fumbles nervously with his hair, clamps his teeth on an unlighted pipe, keeps fingering his tie. He is no concerned about the carefully-contrived spontaneity of his show that he keeps the side men in the Phil Harris band away from the final Sunday rehearsals. Jack wants the lines to he as fresh to them as to the audience.
All this is part of the perfection Benny strives for and usually achieves. Yet Jack's own bedroom at home, where he relaxes before he goes to sleep, has been described as "the worst mish-mash since the cyclone hit Lecompton, Kansas." Old scripts, recordings of broadcasts, books, magazines, newspapers and fan letters are piled high on very table and chair. In this cluttered room Benny the perfectionist finds a certain surcease from the strain. Here he wallows in mystery stories and listens to who-dun-its on the air—rarely to other comedians. "I know they're suffering, just the way I suffer," he once said. "If a gag of theirs doesn't get a laugh, I cringe."
Jack has been known to add $1000 out of his own pocket to boost a guest fee for violinist Isaac Stern. His four writers who have been with him five years—Sam Perrin, Milt Josefsberg, George Balzer and John Tackaberry—together earn around $5,000 a week. Jack keeps Artie Auerbach, the "Mr. Kitzel" of his show, on salary all year round, though he may use him but three or four times a season. Recently, when Sara Berner and Bea Benadaret—"Gladys" and "Mabel," the telephone operators—were written out of two programs at the last moment, because the shows were overboard on time, both girls received their full fees just the same. One year Jack spent more than $100,000 on line charges to put on his broadcasts from remote camps and hospitals. This was Jack's own money, spent without publicity. And the troupe travels, Rochester stops in the same hotel with Jack and the rest of the cast, or Jack moves the troupe to a hotel where Rochester is welcome.
Yet Jack, abnormally sensitive as he is to the feelings of others, can sometimes reveal a curious naivete. Preoccupied with the problems of his own program, Benny displays an odd surprise when he is confronted with the fact that there are also other programs on the air. Not long ago he used a couple of 12-year-old radio actors in the roles of "Steve" and "Joey," two neighborhood youngsters who, on the air, play football with Jack, fall for his tall stories and believe he is the superhero he claims to be. After a preliminary script reading, Jack told the boys they could leave, but to be back that afternoon at 2 for another rehearsal. After the boys had scurried out, John Tackaberry, one of Benny's writers, said, "Jack, I don't think that one kid will make it back on time today. He's got a 'conflict'."
"What do you mean?" asked Benny.
"Well," said Tackaberry, "that boy has a show of his own, you know."
"A show of his own?" repeated Jack. "Ohh."
Going into his record consecutive 16th year on NBC, Benny is still shrewdly playing to the listener in his living room at home, still using the narrative show with a framework of situations which he developed. Actually, Benny is the great revolutionist of radio. He was, as Fred Allen said, "the first comedian on the air to realize that you can get big laughs by ridiculing yourself, instead of your stooges."
Just where the once-skinny Waukegan kid who was born Benjamin Kubelsky got his superb sense of timing, is unimportant. But not even the most lukewarm can deny that Benny has it. Jack is able to get more laughs out of a pause, or a simple word like "Well," than other comedians out of a dozen prattfalls. Jack reads a line so that the very inflection makes it funny. He is "a masterly comedian who could wring a laugh out of an executor's report." Benny is still the only radio artist who has a lifetime option on NBC's choice 7 o'clock spot a Sunday night. Niles Trammel, president of the network, gave Jack that option back in 1941, no matter who sponsored him in the future. And for the next three years, at least, Jack will be toting home around one thousand dollars a minute, just for being the very opposite of himself on the air.