The Indian Chief Really is an Indian

Popeye and his trusty spinach (he eats the can, too) polish off some marauding Indians in I Yam What I Yam (1933). But wait! The chief comes at the sailor man from behind a rock. Popeye takes care of him with one punchk.



But wait again! Who is the chief revealed to be?



Why it’s Mahatma Gandhi! Wearing a diaper. Cartoons and radio comedy shows of the early ‘30s were big on fasting Gandhi jokes.

Now stuff from the chief drops from the sky and lands on Popeye. The Fleischer writers liked falling stuff gags; one ended I Eats My Spinach (1933) and Wild Elephinks (1934).



Billy Costello, Gus Wicke and Billy Murray (at least I think he’s Wimpy) provide voices, along with Margie Hines.

Let's Try This Plot, Rudy

“I know!” said one of the writers at Harman-Ising, “Let’s do a musical cartoon featuring a pile of little characters where a big bad guy comes in around the start of the first half, abducts the girl, everyone gangs up to finish off the bad guy, then they cheer to the end the picture.”

“Why didn’t we think of this before?” said one of the other writers.

Actually, they did. Over and over and over.

Here’s the version from the 1933 short for Warner Bros., The Dish Ran Away With the Spoon, animated by Ham Hamilton and Bob McKimson. It’s set in a bake shoppe. The bad guy—a huge piece of dough that’s eaten yeast and turned into a Mr. Hyde.

The pile of little characters sing and dance to the Warners-owned “Young and Healthy.”



The bad guy. The scream.



The pile of little characters realise he’s got the girl.



Let’s get him with cans of tomatoes. “Frank, play that music in double-time. We’ve never tried that before.”



“Hey, Rudy, let’s throw in a crotch pain gag. We’ve never done that before, either.” “Let’s do it three times. It’ll be three times as funny!”



The evil guy is turned into yummy baked goods.



And waffles! Hurray for waffles!



So long, folks!



“What’ll we write for the next cartoon?” “Say, I have an idea....”

“Shuffle Off To Buffalo” and “Am I Blue” are in Frank Marsales’ score, though the cartoon was likely plugging “The Dish Ran Away With the Spoon” composed by Paul Eisler in 1932.

Didya Hear the One About the Golfing Grasshopper?

What jokes do comedians find funny? Parade magazine milked that question for years.

Parade was a weekend newspaper magazine supplement. One of its pages was taken up with a little biography of a comic actor or comedian and a number of jokes they supplied that they found funny. At least, I’m presuming they supplied them.

Here’s Jack Benny’s contribution. At least he doesn’t mention the one about the wheelbarrow that he used on his radio show one time. This appeared on October 15, 1961.

My favorite jokes
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jack Benny's 30th consecutive season in network broadcasting and his 12th in television—an unparalleled record which began when his first sponsor signed him for 15 weeks on radio in 1932—gets underway tonight.
The opening show will be video-taped in New York. Jack then moves to Waukegan, Ill., the home town he publicized to world-wide fame, for dedication of the new Jack Benny Junior High School, which will be the scene of his second telecast next week. Waukegan boasts five other such schools: Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Boone junior high schools. Thus the name of the new institution is some indication of the pride and love Waukegan feels for Jack.
Born on February 14, 1894, Jack was originally named Benny Kubelsky, but when he entered show business at the Orpheum Theatre in. St. Louis, he took the name Ben Benny. Since there was then another entertainer called Ben Bernie, the comedian was ordered by the Vaudeville Managers Association to call himself something else. He took the name Jack Benny when sailors entering a St. Louis restaurant hailed him with the greeting, "Hi, Jack."
Benny lives in Beverly Hills with his wife Mary Livingston, whom he married in 1927. They have one daughter, Joan, and two grandchildren.
By JACK BENNY
I'M A SUCKER for talking animal stories. Here's one of my favorites:
It was the final game of the World Series. The Dodgers were wracked with injuries to their key players. Defeat was a certainty, it seemed, but manager Leo Durocher had something up his sleeve. His team was trailing by three runs. It was the last of the ninth with two away. Durocher signaled to the dugout for a pinch hitter. Out walked a horse with nerves of steel and a Dodger uniform. After a few practice swings the horse took his stance at the plate. The Yankee pitcher worked the count to three and two. With the next pitch the horse belted the ball out of the park. It was, by far, the longest-hit home run in the history of baseball. The crowd jumped to its feet in frenzy. Panic had broken loose.
But the horse stood still at home plate.
"Run," screamed the fans.
Their shouts were echoed by the Dodger players, who had streamed out of the dugout.
Durocher rushed to the horse.
"Run," he pleaded.
"Don't be stupid," came the deadpan reply. "If I could do that, I'd be at Santa Anita."
RECENTLY BOB HOPE left the bar at Lakeside Country Club. He was about to tee off when he looked down and saw a grasshopper sitting beside his golf ball. Hope, a friendly fellow wanting to be sociable, said; "Did you know, old fellow, they've named a drink after you?"
"Irving?" asked the grasshopper incredulously.
A GREAT WHITE HUNTER had just returned from a three-year safari. He was regaling members of his private club with some of his harrowing experiences, when one of his cohorts interrupted:
"As I recall," said the listener, "you stood well over 6 feet in height when you left and now you're only 18 inches tall. What caused this?"
"I don't know for sure," came the reply, "but it's the last time I'll ever insult a witch doctor."
A NOUVEAU RICHE COUPLE decided they should start spending in a grand manner. For a starter they made reservations on the most expensive round-the-world cruise. They were assigned the largest and most expensive suite on the ship.
As is the custom, the captain checked the passenger list for likely candidates to sit at his table. He was told the couple were not only booked into the best accommodation, but had filled half the luggage space with their trunks and baggage. It was the captain's decision that they most assuredly would qualify for a place of honor at the head table.
He sent the steward with an invitation to the couple to join him at dinner.
To the steward's amazement the couple were shocked and insulted. "We've spent a fortune to get the best of everything on this ship," shouted the husband, "and now we're expected to eat with the crew!"
THE HONEYMOON is really over when he phones to say he'll be late for dinner . . . and she's already left a note saying his TV dinner is in the freezer. . .
I LIKE THE ONE ABOUT the Englishman who says to the waiter, "Didn't you hear me say, 'Well done'?" The waiter (ignoring the blood-red steak) absentmindedly answers: "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. It's seldom we get any thanks."
A DISGRUNTLED HUSBAND was complaining about the short dresses being worn by women. "What would people say," he asked a leading banker, if it was your wife who was gallivanting around showing her knees?"
"I imagine they'd say," sighed the banker, "that I must have married her for her money."
I REMEMBER THIS STORY about George Gershwin: This great composer was an avid golfer. Playing on an unfamiliar course one day he just couldn't get going. He registered a 9 on the first hole and an 8 on the second. "I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong," he fretted. "Mister," volunteered the caddy, "you just ain't got rhythm."

Satire the Ward Way

The Jay Ward studios had some ideas that never got off the ground and others which took some time before they finally appeared on TV screens.

One of the latter was Hoppity Hooper, which finally found a place on ABC’s Saturday schedule in 1964-65, airing at 12:30 p.m. Keith Scott’s indispensable book, “The Moose That Roared,” reveals it germinated in the idea for a Fractured Fairy Tale in 1960, but Bill Scott envisioned the character as the lead of a series (which would also include something called Clobbered Classics). Ward’s staff was asked to pony up money so a pilot could be shot.

I love the humour of Ward’s writers but Hoppity was blah and not all that sharp, certainly not as much as The Bullwinkle Show. The pace seemed slower, too. Hoppity lasted three seasons on Saturdays but it seems to me the show ended up on Sundays for a time.

Ward refers to Hoppity in this 1964 column by the Newspaper Enterprise Association around May 28th. There’s a reference as well to The Nut House, a pastiche of comedy that was being bashed about by Ward’s staff as early as July 1963 and aired as an hour-long special on CBS on September 1, 1964. Nothing like it had been tried on television before and it’s compared these days to Laugh In, which appeared three years later. Critics found the show uneven and the network took a pass on turning it into a series. Ward always had some clever concepts and it’s too bad some of them never made it.

Satire? Yes. Malicious? No
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (NEA) — Can satire be funny without a point of view?
The answer from Jay Ward is a resounding "Yes."
A professional funny man in the field of animated television cartoons, Ward is making it pay big money. He has the popularity rating charts of a delighted audience to prove he is right.
Ward is the creator - producer of such cartoon hits as Bullwinkle, Rocky and His Friends and, an old film with narration, Fractured Flickers. He crashed home screens early, in 1947 [sic], with Crusader Rabbit. Next season he is introducing a new series, Hoppity, starring a frog.
But about satire being funny he adds:
"You can't be malicious. That's the secret of our whole operation."
Via Bullwinkle, his outlandish moose of a star, Ward has kidded the Northwest Mounted Police (Dudley Do Right), Chicago politics, the Los Angeles City Council, the Peace Corps, assorted Washington figures, film stars, TV shows and personalities and even television commercials.
Ward's "commercial" kidded a well-known drive-it-yourself auto rental company. In Ward's version, the driver had to be yanked skyward out of the car, which then crashed into a wall.

He is happy to say that no one has complained seriously and the laughs have paid off. Since he is not malicious and attempts no points of view, even sensitive network censors welcome the Ward brand of looking at the world satirically.
The old Hollywood comedy film he features in Fractured Flickers is Ward's guide, he says, in seeking audience laughter.
He says: "Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton and Hal Roach had a sense of comedy we would like to equal. Their film was just funny, period."
A jolly, sport-shirted, 38-year-old, Ward came home to Berkeley, Calif., after World War II to launch a real estate business, which he still owns. With the coming of TV he and an artist friend created Crusader Rabbit which they sold to NBC as the first cartoon series made especially for home screens. Now Ward hopes to equal his past success with a live one-hour variety show featuring young talent and titled, The Nut House.
"We hope to do a lot of wild, crazy things," he says, adding. "It will be nice for a change to work with people who can talk back."
For his new Hoppity series he chuckles: "We will be featuring the only frog in existence who isn't really a prince." Hans Conreid [sic] will provide the voice of another frog [he was actually a fox], a conman always involved in wild schemes. It's another chance for non-malicious satire with — as Ward puts it — "no point of view. Just funny, period."

Nyahh, Wolf!

A wolf vanquished by Scrappy, Oopy, a goat and hot coals bays in defeat on a hill outside the goat’s home in The Wolf at the Door (1932).



The smoke from the chimney of the house forms a message for the wolf.



The print is battered but you get the idea.

Dick Huemer wrote the story, such as it is, with Sid Marcus and Art Davis receiving animation credits. Joe De Nat opens the cartoon with Franz Schubert’s "Erlkönig" that was also heard in Warner Bros. cartoons.

Chicken Soup, Please

Rudy Vallee revealed in the February, 1932 edition of Radio Digest that composer Herman (Do-Do) Hupfeld promised he could introduce his newest competition “Goopy Gear Plays Piano By Ear” on the air. Hupfeld was appearing on the Hart, Schaffner & Marx Hour on CBS at the time, and the sponsor was unhappy that Vallee got a two-hour jump on putting the song on the radio.

The tune is best known for being the reason for the existence of the 1932 Warners cartoon Goopy Geer. There’s singing, dancing, piano playing, repetitious “gags,” re-used animation from an earlier cartoon. And we get a gorilla-waiter ordering chicken soup, made by a chicken swimming in a pot then drying itself off.



At the time, Hupfeld was best-known for composing “When Yuba Does the Rumba on the Tuba,” which also appeared on Warner Bros. cartoons and Vallee recorded for Victor. He also wrote a song involving something to do with a kiss being just a kiss and a sigh being just a sigh.

Phyllis the Fraud

Phyllis Diller is a fraud.

How many times can it be said?

Well, twice by United Press International in stories by two different columnists two years apart.

The first article was written soon after her completely overhauled The Pruitts of Southampton was cancelled. I liked the original show. Mind you, I was nine when it debuted in 1966, but it was fun seeing Phyllis prance around in her ridiculous outfits, cackling away. Unfortunately, she didn’t use any of the material from her nightclub/TV talk show stand-ups. All that was left were broad and somewhat ridiculous plots. By January, the whole thing was started over from scratch and I tuned out.

I dispute columnist Vernon Scott’s characterisation that Diller worked in “fleabag clubs.” She started in San Francisco at the Purple Onion and the hungry i, and worked the Blue Angel in New York, all before 1958. They were hardly “fleabag.” This story appeared starting around May 2, 1967.

Phyllis Diller Not Really What Most People See
By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) – Phyllis Diller is a fraud.
She's been passing herself off as a shapeless scarecrow with a maniacal laugh and a frightwig hairdo to become the top comedienne in the movie and television business. And you can throw in nightclubs, too.
Phyllis heightens her fraudulent image with outrageous clothes. She doesn’t appear to be something the cat dragged in for good reason that no respectable cat would get near one of her costumes.
She is more London after the blitz, or Johnstown when the waters raged through the place.
Her outfits make Twiggy seem a burlesque queen. Phyllis would have the world believe her measurements are 18-18-18.
But beneath the fuss and feathers, the phony patina of nothingness is a warm-blooded pretty, well-rounded female who keeps her curves a secret.
THE OTHER DAY she climbed out of a horrible red gown and hat on the set of her new movie, “Did You Hear the One About the Traveling Saleslady?” and into a snug fitting white blouse and capris.
The transformation was eye-popping. It was as if Don Knotts donned a bathing suit and came out a Rock Hudson.
“Ah haaa, haaa, haaa,” Phyllis roared. “Didn't recognize me did you, baby? This is the real me in all my glory. Kind of grabs you doesn't it?”
She slapped her leg and bellowed her laugh again.
“Can't say that I like to have too many people see me in this condition. It could ruin me.
“You know what my real measurements are? Well, I'm 38-30-38, and that ain't bad considering what I've been through.”
More recently Phyllis was through a television series, "The Pruitts of Southampton." The ratings didn't even measure up to Phyllis' measurements and was cancelled.
“I don’t miss the series at all,” Phyllis said. “It was wrong from the start and I knew it from the first day shooting the pilot. But you learn from failure and it really gives you more confidence in yourself.”
Television wasn’t her goal, anyhow. Since working in flea-bag clubs years ago, Phyllis has always dreamed of starring in movies.
She's co-starred with Bob Hope in a couple of comedies (most recently “Eight on the Lam”), but always in a supporting role. Now she is top billed and thrilled out of her mind.
“This is it, baby,” she cried. “This is what I've been shooting for all these years. And I'm doing another one with Hope after this. We're becoming a sort of road company Taylor and Burton.”

“Movie star” Phyllis? Um, not quite. In 1968, she was headlining on TV again in a comedy/variety show which died quickly (Rip Taylor was in the cast; apparently Phyllis herself wasn’t campy enough). This next United Press International story comes from pretty close to the time she was starring in “Hello, Dolly” on Broadway. It appeared in papers around November 2, 1969.

Comedy Star Really Attractive, Good Housewife
By PATRICIA E. DAVIS
NEW YORK (UPI) – Phyllis Diller is a fraud.
Offstage, comedy’s most famous raucous, incompetent housewife is a soft-spoken, attractive middle-aged woman who is, she admits, “rather elegant.”
And, to add to the cracking Diller myth, her husband, singer Warde Donovan, brags she is a “marvelous” housekeeper and a “superb” cook.
“I have convinced the public through the tube that I’m a monster,” Miss Diller said in an interview. “They don’t believe I’m elegant until they see me in person. Then their first reaction is, ‘My God, she’s pretty.”
And as for housekeeping — “I’m persnickety — precise — about the way my house is run,” Miss Diller said, adding that becasue her house is a 22-room mansion she has a staff of eight to help run it.
Donovan, whom Miss Diller insists is not the Fang of her comedy routines — “Fang is fictional” — claimed that his wife is a “superb gourmet cook.”
“I’m great with eggs,” Donovan said, “So I cook breakfast and serve it to Phyllis in bed. But after that, it’s her show.
“She loves to cook so she crowds everybody out of the kitchen. They become choppers and slaves,” he added.
“But Warde’s a great chopper,” Miss Diller interrupted. “We stand there for hours cooking together.”

Miss Diller and Donovan were married four years ago, the second marriage for each. The Donovan household includes seven children, three living at home, as well as one harpsichord, seven pianos, three pump organs, three sets of drums, a xylophone, three saxophones and a melodion. “We’re rather musical,” Miss Diller, who once studied to be a serious singer, noted wryly.
Miss Diller had swept into the interview in a white Maribou bathrobe and bare feet. “Excuse me while I get put together — my Americana Hotel late show doesn’t let me get to bed til 3 a.m. I’m still asleep,” she apologized, disappearing to change outfits.
Returning in a pink quilted robe with matching shoes, she flashed an enormous cocktail ring and noted with a straight face that the main purpose of the compartmentalized jewel was as “a receptacle for storing my front tooth caps in during meals. If I put ’em on the table the waiters sweep them away,” she explained, demonstrating the storage process.
The ring is one of the few remaining pieces in her jewelry collection, practically wiped out by two burglaries. The most recent, in Cleveland, netted the burglars $100,000 worth of gems, “pieces it took years to collect; one-of-a-kind things we can’t replace,” she said woefully.
About the only off-stage trace of the on-stage Phyllis Diller is her raucous “aw-ha ha-haaaa” laugh, which she insisted is “natural; it comes with the package.”
But the laugh is carefully nurtured — its an important part of her act.
“Great comedy,” she explained, “is a combination of material, delivery and attitude. You must have all three.”
Just as the laugh is important, so are the blond “fright wigs,” teased to look as if the wearer had her finger in an electric socket, and the wardrobe crafted by “Omar of Omaha.” Omar (actually a woman named Gloria Johnson) has come up with such gems as a turkey feather dress for Thanksgiving performances and a “spring outfit” covered with paper flowers.
“I couldn’t get near the impact with conventional clothes,” Miss Diller said. “I’ve tried it at benefits where I was dressed to the teeth and, my dear, I laid such bombs you couldn’t believe it. Hot dang! ”

Phyllis may have spent a lot of time reading cue cards with Bob Hope on television, but she kept working almost until the end. She appeared on the soap The Bold and the Beautiful only months before her death in August 2012. She was 95.

Turning Chicken

One of the great things about the Fleischer cartoons of the 1920s and early ‘30s is characters would morph into something else. Their shapes would change, using simple line drawings.

How different were things later on. Even the MGM studio, which had money to spend the time making those types of drawings, copped out in Wild and Woolfy (1945), another wolf-Red-Droopy cartoon.

Here, bad guy Wolfy points his six-shooter at a big hombre in a bar. He becomes a chicken. But instead of changing shapes, Tex Avery has his animator superimpose chicken animation and fade out the hombre animation (Walter Lantz did the same thing in Hot Noon, a 1953 Woody Woodpecker cartoon.



There’s an effort at perspective as the chicken runs out of the foreground and out of the cartoon. The sound of the old tune "Chicken Reel" is in the background.



Ed Love, Ray Abrams and Preston Blair are the animators. Bill Thompson was still away on military service in the Chicago area so he’s not Droopy in this one.