Drunken Dancing Turtles

1930 was a great year for cartoons. At least, some of my favourites were made that year. The East Coast was humming along with the Fleischer, Van Beuren and Terry studios at work. I love Swing You Sinners from Fleischer, Chop Suey from Terry-Moser with the great roof chase at the end, and the fun Don and Waffles shorts Gypped in Egypt and The Haunted Ship produced by Van Beuren.

The Haunted Ship has some incredibly inconsistent animation, but it also has weird sea creatures, dancing and swaying for the sake of dancing and swaying, skeletons (what Van Beuren cartoon around then didn’t?) and, best of all, a turtle barbershop quartet.

Here they are pulling out of their shells and dancing to “Sweet Adeline,” adding some vocals at the end. (They open their mouths at the start but nothing comes out. Nothing like Van Beuren sloppiness). A cat bartender ends it all by casually smashing one of the turtles on the head with a bottle.



See some more frames in this earlier post.

John Foster and Manny Davis are credited with overseeing this cartoon, with Gene Rodemich providing a nice musical backdrop.

Sea Wolf

Anyone who is a real fan of old cartoons knows about the crazy reactions of the Wolf to Red in the cartoons Tex Avery made at MGM. Other studios tried the same kind of thing.

One of them was, of all places, Harman-Ising Productions, which picked up a contract to make one of the Snafu cartoons for military audiences. Seaman Tarfu in the Navy appeared on screens after the war (January 1946). It’s in the vein of Warners’ spot gag cartoons and even features Robert C. Bruce, who narrated most of them (Mel Blanc adds his voice as well).

At the beginning, a sailor gives a woman the eye and turns into a wolf. The reaction isn’t anywhere close to what Avery gave general audiences in the Red cartoons. It’s pretty blah.



The sailor now follows her (in cycle animation) as a running gag throughout the cartoon.



The cartoon is an odd mix of stylised character designs and the standard, rounded type you’d find in theatricals at that time (notice the change from sailor to wolf).

George Gordon, formerly of MGM, directed this cartoon. Soon he was on his way to John Sutherland Productions.

Shakespeare's Second Banana

Howard Morris was so over-the-top when working with Andy Griffith and Sid Caesar, it’s hard to think of him as anything but a comic actor. Ah, but that’s how television pigeon-holes you.

Howie spent World War Two in Maurice Evans’ special services unit in the South and Central Pacific, performing in Hamlet, along with another chap named Carl Reiner. Morris and Reiner, at least according to the Boston Globe of February 9, 1947, had worked together on WNYC before they were drafted, appeared together on stage in “Call Me Mister” in ‘47, then worked together with Caesar. Morris moved into television after getting plenty of exposure on stage at the Ziegfeld in New York in a 1949 production of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

(Morris had returned to radio in March 1946 in the debut cast of a Friday night show on Mutual called “Passport to Romance.” Romance doesn’t come to mind when you think of Howard Morris).

Sid Caesar’s shows truly showcased Morris’ comedic talents. Caesar left audiences uproariously laughing with his outrageous dialects—but Morris was even more outrageous. And one of the funniest things ever broadcast on TV, as far as I’m concerned, is the “This is Your Life” parody on Caesar’s Hour, with Morris as an almost uncontrollable Uncle Goopy.

If you appreciate Howard Morris, you may appreciate these newspaper articles from 1955. They were published during the run of Caesar’s Hour, which aired from 1954 to 1957, the year it won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Series.

TV Star Achieves Note As ‘The Little One’
By JACK GAVER
United Press Staff Correspondent
NEW YORK, April 13 (UP) Television has brought street recognition of a sort to Howard Morris.
Those who spot him may not be able to lay tongue to his name immediately, but they don't need to.
“Oh, you're the little one,” they'll say.
And that's identification enough for themselves or for anyone else.
“The little one” can only be the one who isn't Sid Caesar or Carl Reiner, plus-six-footers both to Morris' five-six.
This member of the quartet that dominates "Caesar's Hour"—the fourth and distaff member is Nanette Fabray—is a legit dramatic actor turned comic who figures he has played in about 1500 sketches in six years on television.
"Just imagine that!" exclaimed the slight, serious-looking funny man.
“Why, if a stage comic had a career of 50 years, doing a new revue every year, he wouldn't appear in more than 250 sketches.”
Played Hamlet
Morris is one comedian who has no yearning to play Hamlet. He's done it. Well, not Hamlet exactly, but "Hamlet."
After New York schooling and a few seasons of acting apprenticeship with various groups, Morris spent four years in the Army during World War II. Three of those overseas in the Pacific with entertainment unit headed by the then Major Maurice Evans which, among other things, played a condensed version of the Shakespearian tragedy which was known as the "G.I. Hamlet." Morris was the Laertes. He was back in the role when a civilian version was presented on Broadway in 1946.
“I was a first sergeant in Evans unit,” Morris recalled, "and do you know who was one of my men? Carl Reiner."
Reiner has been with Caesar longer on an uninterrupted basis, but Morris was with him first.
From The First
“That was when Sid did his very first television work,” Morris explained. "When Max Liebman did the old "Admiral Revue" show for a season more than six years ago. I was around doing all sorts of bits for a while.
"Out of that came Max's ‘Your Show of Shows’ program for NBC, starring Sid and Imogene Coca, but by that time I had a role in the stage musical, ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ where I stayed for a couple of seasons.
"When I joined 'Your Show of Shows' in the fall of 1951, there was Carl again."
But for all the benefits, Morris considers three one-hour shows a month about all he or any other actor can take.
"When that fourth, idle week rolls around," he said, "I try to forget about television for seven days. I just stay home and relax. Or maybe 'collapse' is the better word."



This story is from the New York Herald Tribune December 25, 1955.

A BONANZA for “SECOND BANANAS”
IS IT inconceivable that an actor, with stardom at his fingertips, would reject it?
But such thespians do exist and Howard Morris may be counted among them.

Morris is the diminutive pixie who, together with sidekick Carl Reiner, helps Sid Caesar dispense comedy on NBC’s “Caesar’s Hour.” He is what is known in the trade as a “second banana” and Morris finds it a comfortable lot.
“It’s a real cushy spot,” says Morris, who avers that his decision is not a compromise. “With Caesar, I couldn’t find a better showcase, or a better opportunity to become versatile. The ultimate aim of any dedicated actor is to attain perfection and he can only achieve that by working constantly, playing as many different parts as possible within his capabilities.”
“You know,” he continued, “years ago it was easy to tell the difference between a top banana and his second banana, or straight man. The second banana would feed a straight line to the top banana, who’d advance to the footlights and hit the audience with a knock’em dead punch line.
“But times have changed since then, and a guy gets a lot more opportunity to show his talent. Oh, we’re still called second bananas, but now we’re a more important part of the bunch. Today, there [are] as many different types of second bananas as there are styles of comedy. Why, we second bananas today have as many funny lines and bits as the top comics.”
Second bananas today, Howard explains, may be insulting, pessimistic, cynical, language-fracturing toughies, or character men who can play anything from bulbous-nosed Prussian generals to waterfront hoodlums.
What’s more, they have become among the best-paid performers in television and have acquired almost as much of a following as the top bananas themselves. Viewers of the Caesar show are often moved to fits of laughter by Howard’s antics. He particularly falls into the category of the aforementioned character type, in that he is often called upon to play entitled noblemen, meek bank clerks, eccentric little music teachers, amatory Frenchmen, and the like.
Howard’s talent is unique in itself, combining a great sense of timing with an uncanny knack of facial expression and posturing. He can sway an audience into sympathy for the little man, squeeze every drop of humor out of a gag situation, yet subtly underscore a situation by merely letting the others take the fore. He can take up the slack when the line of funny business wears thin in spots. To Caesar, Howard’s a funnyman’s funnyman.
Hard to imagine this little guy was once a Shakespearean actor. His heart’s in television, though, much as he enjoyed doing the Bard.
He loves Shakespeare. But he loves Caesar more.

Coy Pitcher

“McGrip starts his wind-up, and here’s the throw,” announces the play-by-play man (John Wald) in Batty Baseball (1944). The pitcher shows off his coy side after tossing the ball.



Ray Abrams, Ed Love and Preston Blair are the credited animators in this Tex Avery cartoon for MGM.

Angry Adolf

Herr A. Hitler is so angry about a newspaper headline showing Daffy Duck's scrap pile has helped beat the Axis buddy Mussolini that he jumps on the newspaper and then starts chewing his carpet.



Art Davis gets the only animation credit in Frank Tashlin's stylish Scrap Happy Daffy. The music over the opening credits is "This Is Worth Fighting For" by De Lange and Stept.

How To Sign a Guest Star

Jack Benny had a well-earned reputation of handing many of the laughs on his show to everyone else. It served him in good stead. It’s how he got Marilyn Monroe for his TV show at a time when heads of movie studios were sticking pins in voodoo dolls of television sets. Benny’s shrewdness helped him land movie stars, too. He coaxed Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn to appear with him on radio and showcased them as funny, sympathetic guys who suffered by miscasting him in movies. Ego stroking never hurts in Hollywood.

Guest stars can be a good thing or a bad thing. I’ve always felt a show that starts relying on guest stars is one that’s run out of gas and needs a gimmick. The Benny show, on radio, rarely had them in the first decade with the main notable exception of Fred Allen. In the ‘40s, Benny used them pretty well. The writers found a logical reason for them to be there—Ronald and Benita Colman were neighbours, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson and Bob Hope were vaudeville buddies, Lauren Bacall was rehearsing a movie part with him and so on. In the ‘50s, some of the hook-ups seemed strained or existed solely to plug a movie. A show with Sarah Churchill strikes me as contrived, and a two-parter with Deborah Kerr just doesn’t work for me.

Jack went for guest stars on television and, in some cases, used safe, familiar routines. Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper had appeared with him on radio. They showed up with their wives on TV, basically doing the Colman schtick—they were the “normal” Hollywood stars uncomfortable with, and aghast by, the boorish and socially awkward Benny. The Colmans handled the roles much better.

Here’s a story from the New York Herald Tribune of March 13, 1960 talking about how Benny treated his guest stars. And he again gripes about interviewers asking about his Maxwell and “being 39.” To me, the “39” question is a logical one and the Maxwell is an ice-breaking joke, but perhaps Jack heard them so many times (he was constantly giving interviews, it seems), that he was tired of it.

Jack Benny:
Still Fiddling Around
By Joe Hyams
THE other day I was sitting at lunch with Jack Benny, trying to puzzle out what it is about his shows that make them almost consistently good entertainment. Mr. Benny was being modest about it all, but finally when the conversation got on to his next spectacular, he gave me what I think is the key to his success. “It’ll be different,” he said, “otherwise I’d go nuts and get in a rut.”
The point is, Jack Benny’s show, more than any other on television, seems to be tailored to his personality and his likes and dislikes. I guess that’s a formula of sorts, and as long as it is successful and good, I doubt that Jack will change it.

The show, as most any viewer must know, consists of Jack and a couple of carefully chosen guests. On the coming CBS-TV spectacular, for example, the guests will be Phil Silvers and Polly Bergen, making a balance Jack likes: another man and a woman, preferably a singer.
Generally Jack has an idea which he presents to his guests in advance, rather than getting the guest and then the idea. For instance, one of Jack’s favorite guests was Gary Cooper.
A Coup on Cooper
“Three years ago Coop’s wife, Rocky, came to me at a party,” Jack recalled. “She said Gary wouldn’t mind being on the show. Well, who wouldn’t jump to have Gary Cooper, so I thought of a way of presenting him. At lunch a few weeks later I outlined the idea to him, then realized it wouldn’t come off. Two years later I had a terrific idea and asked him to come on with Rocky. He did, and it was one of our best shows.
“Then from the time Jimmy Stewart first said he’d come on the show, it took me almost three years to find the right idea—but when we did, the show worked out fine.
“The point is, I hurt myself if the guest doesn’t look right. In the first place, I don’t ask someone to appear until I have the right idea. With the right idea you can go to a star, but it’s bad to go to them first, then have to scramble for an idea to fit them.
“I had Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Colman on dozens of times, but I remember calling them off one Saturday because the skit we planned just didn’t fit the show. We postponed them for a couple of weeks and then, when they fit the show, we invited them back, and it came off perfectly.”
Jack said he likes to use off-beat guest stars, people like Harry S. Truman, Mrs. James Stewart and Mrs. Edgar Bergen—people one doesn’t normally expect to see on a television show. “I must say that as a rule it is easier to write comedy scripts for dramatic actors than comedians,” Jack said. “The surprise impact is greater. But it’s fun having another comedian on too. Generally they come off well, because I don’t mind a bit being the straight man, as long as it’s on my own show.”

Jack has played the straight man to some of the great comics of our day, something rare in show business, where everyone likes to be the “top banana.” But his formula of making the “guest look good” is one that pays off handsomely.
I guessed that in “payment” for Phil Silver’s [sic] appearance on his show, Jack would guest on Phil’s show, and I was right. This practice of lend-lease among stars is getting more prevalent these days, and Jack gave me a good reason for it.
“Money doesn’t mean much to entertainers any more,” he said. “There’s only so much they can keep, and the prices of top talent are prohibitive. Since I’m not interested in taking money, but I am interested in getting top guests—and they’re in the same situation—we exchange visits. It seems to be working out all right all around. You just have to pick your spots as well as your guests.”
A Vote For Paar
In line with this, I asked Jack which shows he liked to be a guest on.
“It’s easy to be good on the show Jack Paar had,” he said. “Jack was sensitive and asked nice leading questions you could talk about. It’s not hard to ad lib when you’re talking on sensible subjects. But interviews I hate are when someone starts out by asking, ‘Did you drive over in your Maxwell?’ ‘How long are you going to stay 39?’ ‘Are you really that stingy?’
“Steve Allen is good to work with, too, because he asks sensible questions. As a rule, when I go on a George Burns show I don’t have to worry, and Danny Thomas comes up with good ideas and good jokes. Bob Hope is a good guy to exchange with, but there are some I really worry about. When I know I’m going on their show I bring in my writers too and we all sweat.”

Mighty Mouse the Money Mouse

At the start of 1955, Paul Terry told the New York Herald Tribune there was nothing he’d rather do than make cartoons. At the end of 1955, Paul Terry wasn’t making cartoons any longer. He was counting the millions he made selling his cartoon studio to CBS.

There isn’t a lot to be said about Terrytoons that hasn’t already been said. The studio had popular characters in Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle; in fact, they were the only ones I had ever heard of when I was a kid in the ‘60s. By the time Terry talked to the Trib his cartoons were the least polished in all of theatrical animation and had been for many years. They filled time and, to be honest, that’s all cartoons were meant to do in movie houses by the early ‘50s. Distributors didn’t care. And kids seemed to like them.

Here’s the Tribune article, published November 13, 1955, about six weeks before Terry closed the deal to sell everything to CBS.

Mighty Mouse Invades 10-Million-a-Year Class
By David Steinberg
Forty years ago Paul Terry “spoiled some good movie film by drawing all over it” and produced his first animated cartoon. Today Mighty Mouse is a Money Mouse and Terrytoons have become a $10,000,000-a-year business.
Terrytoon characters appear on motion picture and TV screens, in books and comic books, as foam rubber toys, puzzles and games and as designs for children’s clothing, jewelry and playing cards.
Farmer Al Falfa, Dinky Duck and the rest of the Terrytoon family make their home in New Rochelle, N.Y., “to be near the city where the major decisions of the movie industry are made.” In the studio Paul Terry and his staff of animators, photographers, tracers, writers, composers, engineers, sales personal and office help produce an average of twelve wide-screen cartoons a year to be distributed by Twentieth Century Fox.

Sixty-eight-year-old Paul Terry has made some 650 Terrytoon shorts since he started the firm on Forty-second St. in 1931 and made many other films prior to that time. Mr. Terry estimates that 40,000,000 people see each of his cartoons in theaters on every continent.
The average seven-minute Terrytoon reel today costs $60 a foot, or $40,000, to produce excluding prints. In 1915 Mr. Terry recalls working around the clock for a month—“a privilege accorded to the self-employed”—to produce his first animated movie, “”Little Herman.” He spent almost as much time trying to find a buyer and finally settled for $1.35 a foot, slightly more than the cost of the raw film.
Mr. Terry asserts that he has never worked a day in his life. As he puts it, “if you’re doing one thing when you would rather be doing something else, you’re working. There’s nothing I’d rather do than make cartoons.”
According to Mr. Terry, cartoons are more popular today than ever. On a global basis he reports that the best markets outside of the United States are England and France. He attributes part of the increased interest to television, which he says, “makes people more picture-minded.” One phase of the Terrytoon operation is the Barker Bill TV show on C.B.S. twice a week. Plans have been formulated for a new TV program, the Mighty Mouse Playhouse, also slated for C.B.S., to begin after Jan. 1.
The latest enterprise of Terrytoons, Inc., is a reversion to the nickelodeon, spiced with modern gadgetry. When the Mighty Mouse Playhouse hits the streets, the nation’s small fry will be able to hear and see in three dimensions any one of four different Terrytoon stories in each machine for only a nickel.

A Lantz Cow

People love laughing at yokels. Universal discovered that with The Egg and I, a 1947 film stolen by Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main as Pa and Ma Kettle (the leads were actually Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert). The studio decided to build a series of films around the supporting players, which proved to be a very profitable decision.

Universal distributed cartoons by Walter Lantz, who decided what was good enough for feature films was good enough for him. So he came up with a Maw and Paw series in 1953, with Dal McKennon sounding more like Parker Fennelly’s Titus Moody than Kilbride.

Unfortunately, the Lantz cartoons, with very few exceptions, stopped being funny in the ‘50s. The first Maw and Paw short may have had laughs in Homer Brightman’s story meeting, but there probably weren’t many in theatres. The presence of a “smart pig” in the cartoon brings to mind comparisons with the later TV series Green Acres. The difference is Green Acres had surrealism and subtle satire. This cartoon had Brightman and Paul J. Smith.

Here are some of the drawings of a take by a cow which sees it’s about to be run over by a modern, streamlined car driven by the pig.



Ken Southworth, Gil Turner and Bob Bentley are the animators in this cartoon.

Just Order Two Seidels

3.2 beer doesn’t really strike me as much of a beer, but when you’ve lived through almost 12 years of Prohibition, it was something to celebrate. So on April 7, 1933, 3.2 beer became legal in the United States.

Many cartoonists of the 1930s, as I understand it, enjoyed their alcohol, so it’s only natural that the repeal of Prohibition ended up in animated cartoons. One such effort was Van Beuren’s Doughnuts (1933), starring Tom and Jerry at a bakers convention, where the attraction is 3.2 pretzels.



Poor Tom and Jerry can’t attract any customers. The quality of animation is pretty inconsistent in this cartoon but our heroes are pretty well drawn here. And you can easily read the expressions, helped along by radiating lines and a question mark that appears out of nowhere.



Musical director Gene Rodemich dredges up the 1902 beer drinking song “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows” for the soundtrack. The chorus goes:

Take me down, down, down
Where the Wurzburger flows, flows, flows.
It will drown, drown, drown all your troubles
And cares and woes.
Just order two seidels of lager or three.
If I don't want to drink it, please force it on me,
The Rhine may be fine
But a cold stein for mine,
Down where the Wurzburger flows.

The cartoon ends in a drunken mess. I suspect there were Van Beuren animators who could relate to that, too.

The Human Joke Machine

“The only thing I can turn on around my house without getting Morey Amsterdam,” Fred Allen once declared, “is the water faucet.”

Allen may not have been far from the truth. At one point in 1948, Amsterdam was doing two shows on WHN radio and “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This” on both NBC radio and TV; it was the network’s biggest television show at the time it began airing that March. He was performing in a nightclub he had a part interest in and was about to launch a revue called “Hilarities of 1949” (It never reached 1949. It closed after 16 performances in 1948).

That was kind of the second phase in his career, which also included writing some popular songs. People are generally familiar with the third phase of his career, when he was a regular on The Dick Van Dyke Show in the first half of the 1960s.

The first phase of his career goes back into the 1920s when he appeared on the vaudeville stage, and while in San Francisco, connected with comedian Al Pearce, becoming part of his gang around 1930. He, his wife Mabel Todd and orchestra leader Tony Romano left Pearce in summer 1936 and soon had their own radio show. Naturally, because Amsterdam was everywhere, the show was broadcast out of Los Angeles on the NBC Red network one night and the Blue network another night. Along the way, the three of them ended up in New York and took up residence on WOR/Mutual by the end of November 1939.

The corny jokes Amsterdam spouted on the Van Dyke show were a good indication of the kind of humour he used on stage and on radio. Critics’ feelings about him were mixed. The ones who didn’t like him dismissed him as being loud, hokey and unfit for the big time. Audiences evidently disagreed or Amsterdam wouldn’t have been as ubiquitous. Still, when the 1950s came, his stardom was eclipsed by others, despite a quick wit and a bottomless barrel of laugh material.

Let’s pass on a few clippings about the man once known as the Human Joke Machine. The first is a profile in the Los Angeles Times of October 14, 1934. Among a number of things, it confirms his age. In later years, he shaved a few years off it.

Ether Etchings
Morey Amsterdam is short in stature and long in satire . . . has a good memory for bad jokes . . . never remembers their source . . . never tells the same joke twice—on the same program . . . is one of Al Pearce’s favorite comics . . . helps routine Al’s daily operas . . . has a flair for high-waisted trousers and low-brow humor . . . does everything on a big scale . . . insisted that Al use six people in the quartet from Rigoletto.
Was born in Chicago (no reason given) December 14, 1908 . . . his father a musician with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra . . . has two brothers—one a pre-possessing pianist—the other a repossessing auto financier.
BOY SOPRANO

Went through San Francisco schools . . . entered university at age of 14 (an inspection tour) . . . did his first broadcast in 1922 as a boy soprano; then his voice changed . . . which was a lucky break—for the listeners.
Singing and playing his ‘cello, he was booked for vaudeville dates around California with his piano-pounding brother . . . first time his parents heard him they brought him a one-way ticket to Chicago and told him to get the ‘cello outa here!
THEY SHOT HIM
Mastered the ceremonies in a lot of Middle West “hot spots” and theaters . . . was shot by gangsters in Milwaukee (after they heard him) but he insisted on continuing to sing . . . returned to California and to more receptive radio audiences.
“You Lucky People” was phrased around this time . . . after a period on a local rebel radio station went to San Francisco for a year’s engagement at the Warfield . . . met Al Pearce and did several programs for him . . . returned here and did some movie work.
Met Mabel Todd and lost his heart as well as his voice . . . now writes most of the material used by Mabel . . . directs and coaches her . . . every time he remembers a good joke he tosses a coin in the air . . . if it stays up he lets Mabel use it (the joke) . . . If the coin falls—he uses it . . . if it stands on its edge---it’s original (the joke.)

Amsterdam and Todd broke up but he kept plugging away in New York City. He was part owner of a trade rag there (the Broadway Reporter) as well as a nightclub, in addition to his radio work. He received a visit from columnist Earl Wilson and radio writer Hal Block in 1947. Wilson wrote about it in his column in the Post of July 1st that year.

A Call on Amsterdam Finds Him Master of the Switch
By Earl Wilson
Morey Amsterdam, the One-Man Gag Factory, screams out his yaks every night in a cellar cafe that I hereby name "The Jokebox."
"Welcome to our saloon, under a saloon," he says, in his little coal mine, the Playgoers Club. "Eighty-five per cent of the people get in here by mistake thinking it's the subway. Have you ever been to the Copa-cabana? Lousy liquor. Stinkin' ventilation. Outrageous prices. Just like this place, only larger." Comedy Writer Hal Block and I stumbled down there and told Amsterdam we'd come to study his type of humor. This meant we'd come to steal it.
"You guys talk so much," he said, "my voice is flat from trying to get a word in edgewise."
* * *
His rapid-fire delivery can make you laugh in the middle of a yawn. He mentions a house without plumbing—"it's uncanny." He introduces the 2 ½-piece band. ''Here's our band," he says. "They need no introduction. They know each other very well."
Block and I decided Amsterdam, one of the funniest men alive, is a master of the switch or surprise joke.
Morey wrote "Rum and Coca-Cola," "Tucson," also "Wyoming," and he won't let you forget it. Starting to sing "Rum and Coca-Cola," he says, "I'm sure you all know the words, so when I come to the chorus, kindly keep your damn mouths shut."
* * *
Another sample is "Did you see a guy in here with a bad eye named Joe?” . . . “I don’t know. What was the name of his good eye?”
Morey doesn't use puns—even famous ones like Ed Wynn's when he heard a man ordering some lamb chops and cheese and called out to the chef, "Cheese it, the chops!"
* * *

He avoids most of the "I had a hotel room so small that" jokes but don’t worry, he doesn’t discriminate against hotels. "In my hotel they change the sheets every day—from one bed to the other."
He works effectively with absurdities such as "Joe Louis hit me so hard that they counted me out while I was still in the air. My wife's so troublesome that she'd give an aspirin a headache. When they gave her penicillin, it got sick."
* * *
"Summer is here—this morning I found a Blue Jay sitting on my corn," he announces. He had to tell about a golfer who chose the wrong club every time against the advice of his caddy, managed to get on the green in 20 strokes, and then, insanely using a driver, put the ball in the cup from the force of the wind stirred up by his swing.
Turning to the caddy, he said, desperately, "Now I'm stuck. I don’t know what club to use."
I sat around in Lindy's with Amsterdam while he ordered a Monte Cristo sandwich—a ham, cheese and chicken between white bread, dipped in egg batter, and fried like French toast. Even Lindy hadn't heard of it. In fact, Lindy asked him, "What kind of bicarbonate of soda you want?"
But it was right good! Lindy had made a special effort to listen to Barry Gray's radio spot, to see how he sounded with his new nose. Amsterdam was guesting. "You were foolish to pay to get your nose fixed," he told Gray. "I know 18 guys who would have broken your nose for nothing. You look like a fellow who fell in front of a steam roller side-ways." According to Amsterdam also, "an education is something you get so you can work for guys with no education," while California, to combat the influx of unwelcome people, will post signs, "Bums not allowed, except those who have contracts in pictures."
So there you are—a funny funnyman. It may be corny but the best humor is the kind people laugh at.

Network television was still very small in fall 1948 when Milton Berle became a phenomenon—for NBC. CBS must have thought it needed its own version of Berle, so it looked around on its talent roster, found Amsterdam, then gave him a variety show it ended up cancelling after four months. Du Mont must have thought it needed its own version of Berle, so it hired Amsterdam. That’s where he was on November 8, 1949 when this story hit the news wire.

Free Advice Out, Says Funny Man
By HAL BOYLE
Associated Press Staff Writer
New York—"I grew up," said Morey Amsterdam, "the day I discovered you can't give people good advice—you have to charge them for it."
Amsterdam is one of the top funny men of television and radio. This is the new Amsterdam. The old Amsterdam was just a gag writer for other comics.
As a youthful vaudeville performer Morey — he joked and played a cello—used to try to suggest to the stars he hero-worshiped ways they could improve their routine.
HE GETS ADVICE

"They just laughed me off," he said. "Then I went into professional gag writing. And five years later they were paying me $3,000 to $5,000 for the same material I had tried to give them for nothing."
He himself got an excellent bit of advice from one star for whom he wrote movie dialogue — Will Rogers.
"Don't offend anyone," the genial cowboy wrote on one of about 1001 postal cards he mailed Morey over the years. "I get by because no matter what I say about anyone I always wind up saying something good about him also."
At 37 Morey, one of the best ad libbers in the trade, figures he has coined himself some 10,000 gags.
200 JOKES A DAY
“For a while I was doing 78 shows a week and had to throw 200 jokes a day,” recalled Amsterdam, who now has his own program on the Du Mont television network. “I believe I really know a million jokes. Some comedians keep a file. I don’t. It’s a waste of time.
“I think it’s easier to make up a new joke or remember one that fits the situation than it is to dig through a file.”
Morey likes ridiculous humor—but humor that also carries a thought behind it. His best gag?
“I like the one I wrote for a Bob Benchley movie short. Benchley picks up the phone and says:
“ ‘Hello, honey. Get the kids off the street—I’m driving home.’”
CONFIDENCE COUNTS
Morey has a theory that what defeats most comedians is a lack of confidence in their own jokes.
“You have to tell them like you think they’re funny yourself,” he said.
“Old material alone never really killed a comedian. No matter what joke you tell—it’s new to a large part of your audience.

Amsterdam’s run on Du Mont lasted 18 months. Perhaps the height of his stardom came in June 1950 when he was picked to be one of the alternating hosts of the late-night show Broadway Open House. The gig lasted until late November. There had already been talk of Jim Hawthorne from Los Angeles replacing him. The descent began. By February 1952, we find Amsterdam hosting a post-Today show on local morning TV in New York. He returned to late nights with a show on KTLA in May 1957, surviving less than nine months before returning to New York.

It wasn’t like Amsterdam was destitute. There was plenty of club work and a few films. And then came the phone call from Carl Reiner. The Human Joke Machine was back on TV again.