Laugh With Buddy, If You Can

Who says everyone thinks Buddy stinks?

About Buddy’s Theatre, the Motion Picture Herald wrote in its issue of March 30, 1935:

Good Cartoon One of the Looney Tune cartoon series, this is really entertaining and amusing, as Buddy is manager, ticket taker and projectionist at his picture house. There is real novelty and laugh provocation in Buddy's newsreel, and the feature starring his friend Cookie, whom Buddy rescues from the pursuit of a gorilla. A wholly engaging cartoon short.

And Motion Picture Daily of April 5, 1935 called it a “fairly entertaining cartoon”:

Buddy as a theatre operator, is in love with a star. He plays one of her pictures and when she finds herself being pursued, on the screen, he dives out of the projection rooms to rescue her. The funniest sequences of the reel, however, are the burlesque of a newsreel and trailer.

How funny was the newsreel?

Instead of “Rome,” it’s “Dome”!!! How could cartoons top that kind of cleverness? (We’ll skip the tired “Pathé” and “Mussolini” puns).

They tried topping it in the next gag. A ship in the Swiss Navy (There’s no ocean in Switzerland. Get it?) sinks after being christened with a bottle of milk. One official turns to the other and says (oh, this’ll KILL you) “Well, here today, gone tomorrow.”

What?

One gag I did like is the ending of the newsreel, which parodies the ending of the Paramount News with its grinding camera. In the cartoon, the grinding is from the roller of a washing machine, which makes the same 90-degree turn that the Paramount camera does. The roller is squeezing out some long underwear.

Bugs Hardaway is the director of this short, with Don Williams and Sandy Walker getting the animation credit. Norman Spencer’s score includes “Mr. and Mrs. is The Name.”

Philsie

Whether anyone at the time realised it or not, one of the biggest shots in the arm the Jack Benny radio show got was when Phil Harris was hired as the bandleader in 1936.

The programme debuted in May 1932 with George Olsen as the bandleader. Benny’s job, initially, was to provide little monologues between Olsen’s musical numbers. That quickly changed. The comedy became more prevalent, and noticed by the critics. By October, Olsen was gone; a change in networks by the sponsor left him behind. Ted Weems filled the breach, followed by Frank Black, Don Bestor and Johnny Green.

Bestor assumed the role of an intellectual and came across as somewhat drab; the cast joked about his spats. Green, a fine composer and later an Oscar-winner, was kind of a sparring partner to Benny at times, but there are comparatively few available shows featuring him to make a judgment about his character.

When Green ended up on a different Young and Rubicam show (Fred Astaire’s for Packard), Harris was hired. For the first few months, the writers decided Harris should be an antagonist, too. It didn’t work. Jack was a jerk to him and you can hear the discomfort in some of the laughter of the studio audience. However, about the same time, Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow decided to parody Western movie serials and cast Harris as the ingenue’s drunken father. Harris got laughs. Whether the writers had an epiphany, I don’t know, but Harris’ character changed course into a lady-killer (conflicting with flirtatiously-inept Benny) who enjoyed his alcohol, and maybe enjoyed himself even more, while not enjoying a command of the English language.

This new Harris was wildly popular. He was over-the-top, a pre-Dean Martin. Interestingly, he was never actually portrayed as drunk on the show. No slurring words. He would drink on occasion but mainly expounded on the life of being a party hound.

Harris left the show (accounts vary on why) at the end of the 1951-52 season. By then, he had his own radio sitcom for a number of years and was recording novelty songs. Unlike almost everyone else on radio, he doesn’t seem to have been interested in television and limited his time to guest appearances on the tube, trading on his larger-than-life Benny character.

(The placid, pleasant Bob Crosby of CBS’s Club Fifteen had the fruitless task of replacing the brash Harris. By the end of the radio series, Crosby’s appearances were reduced and his musical stooge role was picked up either by his musicians or arranger).

Radio Stars magazine profiled Philsie in its June 1937 (at the end of his first season with Benny). A good portion of the article focuses on Phil’s first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1940. By then they had adopted a son. It also states that Harris had never heard Bert Williams sing. It seems odd, considering how much of Williams’ repertoire he used in his early years.

SWING THAT MUSIC!
There's romance back of that "swing" rhythm of Phil Harris, maestro of NBC’s Sunday night Jell-O show
By Miriam Rogers
IF you like swing music — or if you like the Jack Benny program — you know Phil Harris. He has been "swinging it" a long time — dancers have tripped the light fantastic to his catchy tunes, from New York to Hollywood. But it is his spot on the Sunday night Jell-O program that really has given him his big chance, put him at the top with dialers as well as dancers.
Somehow you expect a bandleader to be spoiled, especially when he is young, good-looking and successful, and has been labeled, rightly or otherwise, something of a Don Juan. Phil is tall, well-built, with crinkly dark hair and an effective Pepsodent smile — a "natural" for the build-up Jack Benny has given him as a ladies' man — but he is refreshingly unaffected and sincere, enthusiastic about his music, his part in the program, frankly enjoying his success but not in the least vain or complacent about it.
It was Rudy Vallee who said: "You can't go wrong with Phil Harris' orchestra."
And Jack Benny agrees, for Phil's contribution to the Benny program has been not only good music but a colorful personality, increasingly popular with the fans.
Phil grinned self-consciously when reminded of his reputation as a Great Lover. "I’ve been married ten years," he said quietly.
He is a vigorous, healthy individual, full of life and good spirits and the bubbling sort of humor that can laugh at anything, including himself. He takes Benny's ribbing merrily, blushes and laughs when Jack makes public fun of his penchant for maroon shirts and vivid ties. But he takes his part in the weekly skits seriously.
"Being with Jack Benny is an education," he explained earnestly. "He knows all there is to know about comedy, about timing, about reading lines."

And right there we have a clue to one of Phil's secret ambitions. Music has been his life since he was a youngster. Horn in Linton, Indiana, he went to Nashville, Tennessee, when a small lad and the surging rhythms of the South are in his blood. But he always has had a secret urge to be an actor, too. He has had a taste of it in the movies and once went so far as to give up his band, determined to get a part on the stage, if it was only carrying a spear. But a month without the boys, without his music, was a month of increasing mental agony and finally he could stand it no longer and sent out a wild SOS for the band. Actually he gets more out of leading his fifteen musicians than the dancers who dip and sway and hum to his catchy music.
Phil has had only two bands, the first for six years, the present group for the past three years. They are devoted to him and he to them. "It's a personal relationship," he explained. "Not just men who happen to work together, but friends. They mean a lot to me, not only as musicians but as individuals."
Phil's introduction to the movies was the making of a picture called So This Is Harris, a musical short, so artistically and effectively produced by Mark Sandrich of RKO-Radio that it won the Academy prize. Misled by the success of this, they thrust Phil, without further training, into a full length picture. At that, it was moderately successful, though Phil himself was disappointed.
"I didn't know what it was all about, hadn't the vaguest idea of technique ..."
But Phil is to have another opportunity. He was disconsolate over some tests he had made recently, but tests are notoriously bad and out of these has come a part in Paramount's Turn Off the Moon. So perhaps some day, when the night life enforced by his career has begun to pall, he may turn to acting — not in musicals, nor yet in hopes of being another Clark Gable or Robert Taylor. Phil's ambitions are along different lines; Lewis Stone, Adolphe Menjou, Jean Hersholt are the ones in whose footsteps he would like to follow. Meanwhile, a chance to read lines under the able tutelage of Jack Benny is excellent training.
His Nashville background, of course, makes him especially adapted to Southern parts. He has a deep voice, untrained but pleasant — if you have heard him sing, you know how well he does the Bert Williams sort of thing. He never has heard Williams but his voice is very like that of the famous singer of Negro songs. Phil has a repertoire of about twenty-two of Williams' numbers.
His speaking voice has something of the same appealing quality. He reads lines well — and certainly gets a big kick out of it.
He has that zest for everything, a talent for putting his heart into what he is doing and feeling amply repaid if the crowd enjoys it. That is why he enjoyed his prolonged stay at the Palomar in Los Angeles this winter better than some of his engagements in swankier spots. Instead of the usual two weeks' engagement, Phil stayed tor four months. The dance floor can accommodate a crowd of seven thousand, and the people who dance there are not the blase, satiated Hollywood type but frankly out for a good time, there because they love dancing and appreciate a peppy orchestra. They responded heartily to Phil's music and Phil responded with equal enthusiasm to their obvious enjoyment. The result was swell music and greater fame.
Long engagements are the rule with him, apparently. He spent several years in the East, playing in various New York hotels, on the air three times a day. For seventy-eight weeks he broadcast the Melody Cruise program, for Cutex. On the West Coast, he played for three years at the St. Francis, for two at the Cocoanut Grove, in Hollywood.
But with all the demands of these engagements, interspersed as they were with shorter engagements and much traveling about the country, Phil has found time to build an enduring, happy marriage.
The girl in the case is Marcia Ralston, a beautiful girl and talented actress. She is playing now in a new movie, Call It a Day, and has so impressed the producers with her ability that the part has been added to, built up for her. She looks something like Joan Crawford and had her early dramatic training in her native Australia, where she played leading roles in stock. And she unquestionably would have progressed much further in her own career if she had not ardently believed that Phil's career and their marriage came first.
Since Phil's career made it necessary for him to travel, to be now in the East, now on the West Coast as opportunity offered. Marcia willingly kept herself free to go with him, to make a home for them wherever they might have to be.
"She always knows what to do at the right time," Phil declared earnestly. "She is not only beautiful, she's smart — too smart for me ! She gives up everything."
And so, beacuse Phil insists on it, credit goes to Marcia for their ten years of happy married life — happy in spite of much junketing around, of never having a real home, of the inevitable slighting of Marcia’s own career. Occasionally she has had a chance to work in pictures, once for six months she worked with Phil as a featured dancer. But all that is secondary, it is being together that counts.
"You must have a lot in common," I suggested, "to be so happy."
He grinned. "We get along swell, but we haven't anything in common ! We don't like the same things at all, don't even have the same tastes in food. She is English, I am American. I love horses, she is scared to death of them. She loves to read, I never open a book except when she hands me some special book — like Gone the Wind — and insists on my reading it. She likes bridge — I like ping pong! I attend to my business, she attends to hers — I think it is much better this way," he concluded simply.
And how could he help thinking so, since, for these two, it has worked out so perfectly? For, in spite of diverging interests and opposing characteristics, they have built a deeply satisfying life together. The only lack they admit is the lack of children. They've always wanted them, they still hope to have them. Not adopted, but their very own.
Meanwhile, they work and play with a full measure of enjoyment. They have many friends, mainly among musicians, music publishers and the movie and radio people. Hut they do little entertaining. Their tastes are simple, they work hard and have little time for recreation.

As far as Phil is concerned, he does not mind traveling, although he likes to think of California as home and dreams of settling down there some day. Hut traveling is as much in his blood as jazz itself, for his father was connected with tent shows, and his boyhood, except for school days, was spent touring the country.
Inevitably the smell of sawdust, the lure of the big top, was felt by the growing boy — so much so that, after a disagreement with his dad, he wrote to one of the bigger circuses asking for a job. But the card turning him down reached his father first and, alarmed at the possibilities, Mr. Harris tried to impress his young son with the hardships, the misery attendant upon a career beneath canvas. And wisely, he sought to divert Phil's interest to something else. Because he himself was a musician, music offered itself as a solution to the problem and Phil was put to mastering the fundamentals.
His first professional engagement was as a drummer, and for several years Phil drummed his way around the country with dance orchestras. It was his drumming, in fact, which led to his eventual engagement to play in Australia and thus indirectly led to his marriage.
It was at the height of the jazz craze and American bands were being taken on tour to the various parts of the globe. Because it was expensive to engage a full band, a leader who was intent on taking a band "down under" picked up representative musicians here and there, a saxophone player, a trumpeter and, of course, a drummer.
"For no particular reason he picked me," Phil explained modestly. He was glad enough to go — why not? He was young and fancy-free. He did not dream that when they returned, a year later, Mrs. Phil Harris would be traveling with them! But from the time he first saw Marcia Ralston, he knew there never would be anyone else for him.
That was ten years ago, and in spite of his varied and colorful career, his popularity in the gayest night spots in Hollywood and New York, his association with movie stars and socialites, the main theme of his life has been unbroken. It is the same Mrs. Harris who recently has been poring over blueprints, excitedly planning their new, and first, home.
They have bought seven and a half acres and set out avacado, lime and lemon trees — and when a bit of unusual weather hit southern California this winter, dumping into its sunny lap a most unexpected freeze, Phil hovered over his little trees, phoned wildly to everyone he could think of to ask for advice and help, bemoaning the fact that he had not been prepared with smudge pots. Some damage was done, but not a great deal. The temperature rose and Phil could breathe easily again!
The house is to be a rambling ranch house of brick and wood, built around a patio. From Phil's point of view, the main feature is the bachelor apartment which he decided upon in place of the more traditional and often unused den.
"It will be finished in knotty- pine, with a big fire-place — there will be twin beds and a bath, so that it will serve as a guest room when needed — and it will have gun racks. . .”
There was a faraway look in Phil's eyes. "I am crazy about guns," he admitted. "I've got every kind you can think of — I’ve carried them all over the country, at great expense, but I never get a chance to use them !" He chuckled, "I am going to have bird dogs, too – they are my favorites. And some day I may actually go hunting again — it's been over two years since I've hunted anything. I've been planning for at least two years to go into Mexico — maybe I'll get there yet!
"Musicians can't plan vacations like other people," he explained, "can't say: I’ll take a couple of weeks off next month,' for instance. For one thing, they are always afraid they might have to take a vacation!" He grinned. "And a long one, at that!"
He likes fishing, too, and riding — he used to play a little polo when he had the time. "I wasn't very good at it," he confessed, "but it's great sport. I don't have time now, of course . . .

"I don't suppose we'll even have a chance to live in our house," he sighed, "but we're having the time of our lives building it. And my mother and father will enjoy it — it will be fun when we can come back to it!"
With the ending of the Palomar engagement in January, the pressure was somewhat relieved. Phil felt the boys needed a rest and planned only occasional one-night stands in nearby towns. In June, when the Benny program closes for the summer, he expects to take his band to New York, to play in theatres in the East, opening up with Jack again in September and returning to the Coast when he does. To the Coast and to the ranch house!
There is nothing swanky about the place, it isn't being built for show, but for a home for two people who have almost, if not quite, had enough of touring, of topsy-turvy living, sleeping by day, working by night.
But if it is arduous, Phil thrives on it. And if you doubt his devotion, if you think a musician, a bandleader would make a poor husband, you may change your mind when you learn that, after playing six nights a week until the wee small hours at a night club, rehearsing Saturday and appearing Sunday on the radio program, Phil Harris makes a practice of taking his wife, not to the theatre or to the movies or to spend a quiet hour with some friends, but to some bright spot for music and dancing, every Sunday night after the program.
"It is our weekly date." he smiled.
"You must like dancing," I commented.
"Like it? How could I like it? I get fed up just watching it!" But he grinned again, a shy, shamefaced grin, almost as if he were embarrassed. "It's the only chance Marcia has to get out, as a rule, the only time we can go together — and after sitting around the house or working in the studio, she needs a change."
So, after all, the giving isn't all on one side. However different they are in non-essentials, they are alike in this, that nothing is more important to either than the other's happiness, than their mutual understanding and the permanence of their marriage.

From a Volkswagen to a Rolls-Royce

The role of the Hanna-Barbera studio in the history of animation has been debated to death for years and I doubt anything new could be propounded. My opinion is the studio put out some pleasant-to-funny cartoons at the beginning, then things got blander and repetitious through overwork, followed by interference by network executives and pressure groups.

For better or worse, Hanna-Barbera and other cartoons-for-TV outfits kept the old artists employed as theatrical and industrial studios closed. There was work for newcomers. But, as we mentioned, there was more work than the studio could really handle. This was H-B’s excuse years later for runaway production, which it had considered as early as 1960 after Jay Ward Productions pulled it off with some success.

This story from the King Features Syndicate gives you an idea of how busy things were in 1977. It appeared in papers starting around August 11th. As someone who enjoys Carlo Vinci’s work, it is nice to see a reference to him.

Television Market Cartoon Business Booms: More Artists Are Needed
By CHARLES WITBECK
Business is booming for Hanna-Barbera Productions, makers of animated TV cartoon shows. Believe it or not, artists are needed.
It's good to report new life in the Hollywood animation business after 25 years of stagnation. Since the early ‘50s, skilled animators, artists from Disney, Warner Brothers, Walter Lantz and other shops, found themselves without jobs when film costs mounted to the extent of killing off the movie theater cartoon.
At that time, the makers of MGM's grand “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera entered the TV business, drastically cutting the finer points of animation to scratch out a profit on Saturday morning kiddie shows.
“Comparing TV animation to theater animation is like comparing a Volkswagen to a Rolls-Royce,” said Barbera. “It's another world. For one thing you don’t have any time, and the repetition is endless.”
Disgusted with the product, part-time work and an uncertain future, a lot of the good animators simply quit the business. Others have retired so the supply at local 839 of the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists has steadily declined.
All that is about to change, at least at Hanna-Barbera. Not only is business burgeoning on Saturday morning for H-B at all three networks, but the big three have placed orders for specials.
NBC wants four animated movies of the week, plus four "Flintstones" epics.
ABC has two, one, "Suffer the Little Children," a live action.
CBS has three including a 20-year retrospective, the "Happy World of Hanna Barbera," put together by Marshall Flaum, documentary-maker for Jacques Cousteau.
Now for the kicker. Taft Broadcasting, which owns H-B, has come up with front money, $7,500,000, for three animated theatrical releases.
After looking at the grosses piled up by H-B's "Charlotte's Web," which included a pair of TV re-runs, Taft sees gold in full-length animation.
To Joe Barbera that means three years of steady work ahead, not part-time piecework.
Therefore, artists are needed at the factory. "We finally stopped talking about it," Joe says, "and opened our own animation college."
So far, out of 100 attending studio classes four nights a week on animation, layout, storyboard, design, background painting, checking and camera operation, 70 are now on the payroll while still in school. Another 130 will be required to meet production requirements through 1978.
Veteran Harry Love is in charge of the animation school. Prospective students bring portfolios of art work of film footage, and Love selects the most promising. The teaching staff, led by the bosses, includes Martie Murphy, the skilled animator-cartoonist. A man like Murphy couldn’t be found at H-B two years ago, so his presence means quality has arrived.

Barbera hopes to uncover and develop a new crop of artists—the brilliant moving up through TV cartoons to theatrical projects.
Joe started off as a kid drawing cartoons, and got a job in New York by saying he could animate. He spent four days at it, didn't like it, and quit.
An idea man, Barbera landed another job alongside Carlo Vinci, who works for H-B today, and learned the trade, staying up half the night to catch up. Courses at Pratt Institute and the New York Art Students league were part of the curriculum.
"I'm basically a story man," Barbera explains. "And I don’t know how you find that talent."
Competing in TV's Saturday morning cartoon market has come to be more of a headache than a picnic these days what with network people and activist protest groups looking over your shoulder.
"Networks always wail as long as possible before giving a buy order," Barbera says. "Then it's rush, rush, rush with no time to work the bugs out. By the time we're through with a show we know what's wrong. Now Bill and I have a SWAT team that tries to fix up a show as we go along."
The anti-violence pressure groups, a welcome ally earlier in causing networks to buy cartoon shows, now appear, at least to Barbera, to have gone overboard on the subject, equaling slapstick comedy with violence.
"A pie in the face is really forbidden now. A clown would be out of business on TV," said Barbera. "Charlie Chaplin would be tossed off the screen for kicking. Our old 'Tom and Jerry’ shows couldn't pass the censor."

Hanna-Barbera’s corporate ownership was swallowed by an even bigger corporate owner, which was gobbled down again by an even larger corporation. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera are gone. Their beloved studio on Cahuenga Boulevard is an office complex. But so long as they can make enough money, their characters will live on. And I don’t care how H-B naysayers feel. I still enjoy watching a cartoon dog from 1958 that says nothing but “Yowp.”

Tex's Worm Take

Tex Avery’s first cartoon in production at MGM (and second released) doesn’t exactly have the wild takes he would soon be known for.

In The Early Bird Dood It (1941), a Lou Costello-type worm thinks he’s disposed of a bird. He greets a friend and shakes its wing. After looking away, he realises it’s the bird. There’s a head shake, then the take, ending with the worm’s hat popping up.

Avery has the worm doing little bits of business, perhaps because he now had artists who could effectively animate them. Eventually, Avery would discard a lot of that and stick to outrageous gags, like the ones that found their way into the chase scenes in this cartoon (interruptions, signs and so on).

Irv Spence, Preston Blair, Ray Abrams and Ed Love are the animators. Rich Hogan was still under a Warners contract when Avery started at Metro; it’s possible he wrote this on the side.

Another Zooming Head

An outlaw has his eye on Minnie, um, Rita Mouse in the Van Beuren short Western Whoopee (1930). She shakes in shock and grows an exclamation mark. “Don’t you touch me!” says a male falsetto voice.

The villain swats a beer glass off the table.

The outlaw’s head zooms toward the camera. Why? Because it’s a Van Beuren cartoon. For added fun, his pupils swim into the opposite eye.

This has all that you expect in an early sound Fable. A fake Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Skeletons ballet dancing. Mechanical horses. And someone running away into the background. As a bonus, we get a laconic ostrich playing a piano in a tavern.

Milton Mouse disposes of the villain by slicing him with a sword (in a western?) like a cucumber.

The story to the right is from the Pathé Sun of April 5, 1930 (the Van Beuren cartoons were released by Pathé at the time). I can’t tell you anything about the “patented process” but there are seven couples plus the pianist moving in the dancing scene to Gene Rodemich’s score.

The Motion Picture News of April 19, 1930 raved “Don’t Miss This One,” and urged exhibitors to book it.

The frame grabs are from someone’s old VHS dub. The sound Fables deserve restoration for home viewing. Who doesn’t want to see a saloon table come alive, kick a feisty woman out the door and laugh?

Stop Picking on Brooklyn

Who knowed dem tuff muggs in Brooklyn was sensitive?

The U.S. isn’t as New York-centric as it once was. The New York of the first half of the 20th century no longer exists. So you don’t hear jokes about Brooklyn any more.

How different it was in the days of vaudeville at the Palace, Jack Dempsey at Madison Square Gardens, and gossip columnists on Broadway! Brooklyn was looked down on, a working-class place with a working-class baseball team. Radio shows out of New York made fun of it, though there might be a small rustle of applause by denizens of Flatbush when the name of their borough was mentioned.

Some people didn’t like it. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who may never have stepped foot out of certain sections of Manhattan, pointed out in her “Voice of Broadway” column of March 6, 1956:

Fred Allen's innocently intended quip about a contestant's name on "What's My Line?"—he commented: "Boyd; that's a bird in Brooklyn, isn't it?"—inspired more than 500 dead serious natives of the borough to besiege the Society for the Prevention of Disparaging Remarks About Brooklyn with demands for action.

Yes, there was such a humourless organisation. Its founder was a PR flack. It’s hard to tell how serious he was about it. He eventually quit the group, got fed up with Brooklyn and moved out, saying it was no place to raise a child. He got a pile of publicity, though. Both United Press and the International News Service published feature stories about the group in 1949. The first is from July 29th, the second from May 17th.

Brooklyn Society Rebels Against Television Gags
By JOHN ROSENBURG
United Press Staff Correspondent
NEW YORK — (UP) — The television people better say “Brooklyn” without a smile. And without a pun.
Sidney Ascher says he has them “eye and earmarked” for possible trouble.
Ascher is president of The Society for the Prevention of Disparaging Remarks About Brooklyn. It's a tough job, he admitted his organization boasts a following of 600,000 members, most of them from Los Angeles, Calif., Hollywood, Fla., and 19 towns named Brooklyn.
• • •
“FOLKS JUST DON'T seem ever io get tired of saying unkind things about Brooklyn,” he sighed wearily.
It wasn't so bad. he said, until radio came along.
“All of a sudden ‘Brooklyn’ became a standard joke for every fellow with a microphone,” he said. "They would say ‘Brooklyn’ and everybody would laugh ‘Brooklyn Ha. Ha’.”
He really couldn't understand it, he said.
"But we fixed radio,” he continued.
"Take the time a certain New York radio wise guy learned a guest on his program was from Brooklyn, just across the river. ‘Now don't hurry your lines,’ this guy says, ‘the last train for Brooklyn doesn't leave for an hour yet’.”
VERY FUNNY, Ascher said sourly. The next day, members of the society's New York chapter mailed 600 letters in protest to the offender He promptly apologized Ascher said the moat popular radio "jokes" about Brooklyn seemed to be based on the following situations.
(1) That people need a passport to get in and out of the town.
(2) That Brooklyn water has to be distilled before drinking.
(3) That Brooklyn's citizens are illiterate.
(4) That Brooklyn is an Island off the northeast coast of North America and outside U.S. territorial waters.
“WHAT CORN,” Ascher shuddered "Completely unfunny.”
Ascher said complaints against disparaging remarks about his favorite town hit a high of 8,437 in 1941. In 1942, they dropped to 2,623. With the rapid advance of television, however, they began to climb.
"The number of complaints may set a new record this year,” he said. "But we’ll take care of television, just as we did radio. Television will learn there is nothing funnier in Brooklyn than there is in any town in the South, where they say you-all,' or in the West, where they say 'pod-nuh'."
"You-all and pod-nuh." he said. "Can you imagine that? You-all and pod-nuh."
He laughed heartily.

Brooklyn Strikes Back
By INEZ ROBB
NEW YORK, May 17 (INS) — Brooklyn strikes back!
That is the big news today from the borough across the bridge which, with some puny aid from Texas, won the second world war singlehanded.
Sticks and stones may break this borough's bones, but it is the harsh yak-yak of so-called radio comedians that has at least brought to a berl the proud blood of Brooklynites from Moitle Avenue to Greenpernt.
As an answer to such joiks and for the general information of the world at large a group of public spirited Brooklyn citizens has just published one of the most elaborate civic brochures in American municipal history.
Here, between symbolic gold covers, is proof in word and elaborate pictorial illustration that Brooklyn is a class jernt, full of culture, tradition and high-type sensitive feelings.
Until this brochure dropped into my hands. I was unaware of the fact that from the very beginning Brooklyn has been a more expensive real estate development than Manhattan.
Shares In Whales
At least it cost a lot more to buy Brooklyn from the Indians than the $24 for which the Dutch got Manhattan. The Brooklyn Indians, born realtors, sold their acreage a tract at a time, and under old agreements the Brooklyn "Lodge of Poor Lo” is still entitled to "a half interest in all the whales washed up by the winds and waves” of Jamaica Bay. As of 1949, the other half interest is lodged in the sanitation department.
I never knew, either, that from the very beginning, Brooklyn attracted a very superior class of settlers. Lady Deborah Moody moved over from England snd settled there in 1643 at a time when it is doubtful if Manhattan boasted a lady of any type.
The brochure proudly points out that Ebbets Field was not always sacred to Dem Bums. Oh. Ebbets Field has had its moments, all right! There was the time when camels and elephants shambled over its outfield in what ta still pridefully regarded aa the biggest — if not the best — production of Verdi's "Aida" ever produced in the new world.
Music, the brochure would have us know, has always been the life blood of Brooklyn. And not be-bop or Juke box, either, but strictly from long hair. Indeed, thia 96-page tone poem on Brooklyn has been published by the founders of the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, a young organanization started in 1945 by a bunch of music-hungry Brooklyn G. I.’s in the ruins of Manila.
At $2 a copy, the brochure is selling like gold bricks in Brooklyn, especially to former G. I.’s who are mailing it, wholesale to every point on the globe to prove to overseas acquaintances that it's true what they say about Brooklyn.
Not only is the brochure expected to spread the glad cultural tidings, but another organization is working night and day to shame the clowns who make light of Brooklyn.
The Society for the Prevention of Disparaging Remarks About Brooklyn has just celebrated its tenth anniversary with a membership of more than 600,000 and active chapters strung from London to Hong Kong.
Sidney Ascher, a Brooklyn boy, started the SPDRB as a joke. But it is no joke to those who live in Brooklyn. Before he knew it, Ascher had a large and going brotherhood on his hands. Ascher says there is no such thing as a Brooklyn accent, and adds that "dese, dem, deys and dose, T'oid Avenoo, erl and jernt” are common to all parts of Greater New York City inhabited by the Illiterati.
Members of the society are always calling up Ascher to report any new indignities heaped on Brooklyn. The Brooklyn boiling point is low. and Ascher and the society have even forced major radio programs and studios to apologize for unwarranted slurs on the beloved borough.
Sometimes, though, Ascher kind of wishes he could get away from it all. Not long ago, an angry Brooklyn women called him at 3 a. m. She had been listening to a radio program about the oil business. And the commentator had "oil, or erl, as they call it in Brooklyn.”
"This woman was mad as hops,” Ascher remembers, and adds sadly: "She said to me, 'Mr. Ascher, when I heard that stupe making fun of Brooklyn. I can tell you it made my blood berl!’ ”

Waiting For Petey

Ultra close-ups, shadows, silhouettes and camera angles highlight Frank Tashlin’s Puss ‘N Booty (1943).

Here Rudolph the cat awaits Petey the canary being delivered from a pet store so he can eat it like he has all the previous pet canaries. There’s a little gag here about the cat’s head still watching for the pet store truck while his body turns to pace in the opposite direction.

Ah! He hears something and races back.

Cut to the next scene. Tashlin goes from black to a huge, evil cat head zipping into view. The head is animated. One drawing will give you an idea of the expression.

Cal Dalton is the credited animator. Art Davis is uncredited and I’m pretty sure Don Williams also animated part of this short.

A Girl!

It’s cartoon law. Men believe guys in drag are real women. That goes for walruses and woodpeckers in The Woody Woodpecker Polka (1951).

Here’s Wally Walrus’ take when he sees a sexed-up “lady” woodpecker, as Clarence Wheeler’s score includes a muted bluesy trumpet.

Here’s a window shade/sex gag.

The sight of the “girl” gets Wally so excited, his moribund heart starts pumping wildly.

Finally, Wally melts into a rocket that shoots into the sky.

No writer or director are credited.

Presumably, Lantz thought he could strike cartoon gold twice, where he got The Wet Blanket Policy on screens to take advantage of the huge popularity of “The Woody Woodpecker Song.” In this case, Lantz evidently was pushing “The Woody Woodpecker Polka.” The problem was the song was already about 11 months old by the time the cartoon reached theatres; Billboard of December 5, 1950 shows Capitol had a version in stores sung by Mel Blanc (backed by Billy May’s orchestra). The innocuous Starlighters sing it in the cartoon.

Gagster, Not Gangster

Gangsters were big in the 1930s—Warner Bros. put them on the big screen, people followed their exploits in the papers, Gang Busters was on the radio. It, therefore, isn’t a surprise that a writer for Silver Screen magazine used an FBI metaphor to get into a feature story about Jack Benny.

(Jack had his own run-in with G-Men when he was picked up for smuggling jewelry into the U.S. But that’s outside the scope of this post).

The writer of the article praises Jack’s brand of comedy which rejected old-hat vaudeville and burlesque shtick like funny clothes or accents. But even in vaudeville Jack’s act, going back to his teenage days with Salisbury and Benny, was a classy act. Jack, in a way, didn’t need those clichés because he invented his own—he became a character with so many well-known attributes. He was at the forefront of a change from rowdy stage comedy to situation radio comedy.

The article also refers to “Buck” Benny, the Western parody persona he adopted in a series of sketches on his radio show. So known and liked were they that his writers concocted a feature film called “Buck Benny Rides Again.”

And there’s a reference as well to Jack’s fixation with the violin. You have to wonder if his failure to become the concert violinist his parents wanted ate at him for years and manifested itself in all those symphony appearances in later years.

This story appeared in the July 1937 issue. It’s a shame the cast picture got caught in the page gutter as Don Wilson is blocked out. Between Wilson and Mary Livingstone is Tom Harrington, Jack’s producer for Young and Rubicam.

Jack Benny, Public Comedian No. 1, Makes 100,000,000 People Laugh Every Sunday Night.
He Also Is Brightening Up The Screen.
Head Man OF THE Air Waves
By Laurence Morgan
IT IS a mere question of time now until Mr. J. Edgar Hoover will be free to disband his force of G-Men and retire to the peaceful life of a country gentleman. You ask, "how come?" Well, M'sieurs et Mesdames, it's thisaway: In another month or so, maybe sooner, it is very doubtful whether there'll be enough enemies, either public or private, left for him to fool around with. And, if by any chance there are a few left lying around loose, they will either be in such a maimed condition or in such a state of abject terror as to render them quite harmless. For the criminal has not yet been born who is tough enough not to blanche and quail at mere mention of that dread threat . . . BUCK BENNY RIDES AGAIN!
Robin Hood was a Girl Scout compared to this young man who has come thundering out of the West— if Waukegan, Illinois, can be properly termed the West— with a smoking six-gun in one hand and an equally smoking script in the other.
Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Black Bart doubtlessly turn over in their graves with a shudder every Sunday night at eight-thirty Pacific Standard Time as Jack (Bucky, to his pals) Benny takes to the ether and stalks Cactus Pete to his lair.

But all gags aside, Jack Benny, the gentleman from Waukegan, has definitely proven himself to be one of the foremost, if not the foremost comedian gracing both the radio and pictures today. Recently, here in Los Angeles, where actors and comics come, admittedly, a dime a dozen, a large down-town department store displayed in their window a life size cut-out of Jack Benny dressed in his regalia of Ol' Eagle Eye Buck. The Terror of the Plains. Now, there's nothing out of the ordinary about a life size cut-out— we've all seen dozens of them in front of theaters.

This particular one showed Jack in a ten-gallon Stetson, a very dapper sports jacket around which was buckled a business looking cartridge belt, a six-shooter dangling nonchalantly from one hand, a cigar clenched between his teeth and the famous Buck Benny leer in his cool gray eyes. Nothing at all for the uninitiated to become excited about. But from early morning until late at night that display window had a laughing, milling crowd in front of it. One of the store managers told me that this cardboard figure had created more attention and comment than any other window display they had ever before attempted. And the funny part of it was-they weren't advertising anything. That seems to prove something, doesn't it?
Anything of a biographical nature but the sketchiest of outlines would be superfluous here, Jack having kidded his earlier background so consistently on the radio. So, with Mr. Benny's kind indulgence, we'll just skip over the fact that he was born in Waukegan, Ill., having already mentioned it twice. Or how his days as a clerk in his father's department store were brought to an abrupt close when he resolved that life held no further allure unless he became, as quickly as possible, a concert violinist. And we'll omit that part of his career when the smell of grease-paint became overwhelmingly strong, when the call of the theater was vibrant within him . . . when he became doorman of Waukegan's only showhouse. In like manner we'll pass quietly over that cross-section of his life that brought him nearer and nearer the ever beckoning rostrum . . . when he became the ticket taker, a property boy, and finally a violinist in the pit orchestra.
"Those were the days," Jack sighs, reminiscently. "That was the hey-day of the truly great violinists. Ah, I can see them now . . . Mischa Elman, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and, yes . . . Jascha Benny."
Naturally, there may be some divergence of opinion as to whether Jack did the right thing by posterity when he deserted the concert stage to become a comedian, but, as he says, the field was becoming cluttered up with second rate geniuses and he thought he'd better branch out into a medium which allowed for more expression of the soul.
"My sense of the aesthetic was so often offended," he explains, by what came out of that darned violin. Maybe it was the brand of resin I used, I don't know. Anyway, I decided to become a comic instead.

So he did. His rise to the top of the heap of the vaudeville comedians was only a little short of meteoric. Followed long years of trouping from the rock bound coast of Maine to the sunny shores of California, playing every town enroute that boasted anything with a stage, than which there is no tougher business in the world. Ask anybody who's done it. Cold dressing-rooms, unlooked-for lay-offs. (Sure, even headliners have lay-offs) the loneliness that show people know, having thousands of acquaintances and few real friends. It takes all that to reach the top via the vaudeville circuit— all that and a little more. And it is that "little more" that Jack Benny possesses in large copious quantities.
It was while playing in Los Angeles a few years ago that he was spotted by some very important people from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio. "What did I tell you?" boasted one v. p. to the other v.p. "You're right," was the reply. "Where's that contract?" And that's how Jack happened to be signed to do a part in one of the first musicals to be produced in Hollywood, "The Hollywood Revue of 1929." Following that he appeared in "Chasing Shadows," and "The Medicine Man."
But the stage, with its live audience, still beckoned and he returned to New York to accept one of the leading roles in Earl Carroll's "Vanities." After that show closed Jack was a little undecided whether to return to Hollywood and pictures or to accept a very enticing offer to play another vaudeville circuit. "You know how it is," Jack explains, diffidently, "I'd done so much trouping I often wondered if my parents weren't holding out on me and were really Gypsies, after all." He pauses to light a cigar and then dreams quietly ... a far away look in his eyes. "Sometimes," he sighs, "I'm just a vagabond ... a wild, untamed thing."
However, he didn't have to make a choice after all because, as it happened, a famous columnist invited him to appear on his radio program one night as a guest artist and Jack gladly obliged. Two weeks later the happily amazed Mr. Benny was handed a long term radio contract of his own, complete with microphones and sponsors. Today this overworked young man has two bosses . . . Paramount Studios and his original radio sponsors who, by the way, have just signed him to a new three year contract. To a great many people attempting both picture and radio work this has often caused a lot of trouble and hard feeling on both sides. But not so in Jack's case. Fortunately, for all concerned, Paramount and NBC have worked out an arrangement whereby neither his picture nor radio engagements conflict, although, in so doing, he garners an occasional ticket for speeding from one studio to another. And so everybody is happy, especially Jack. And Mr. and Mrs. Public.



Any attempt to analyze whatever quality it is that makes Jack Benny's style of comedy stand out from all others, like the proverbial sail on a submarine, would be well-nigh impossible. But stand out it does, and to such an extent that, in comparison, he makes the great majority of alleged comics appear about as funny as a Vassar Daisy Chain. There is an old saying among show people that straight comedy is the most difficult thing in the business.
"Straight" comedy means, in the parlance, not to employ any of the standard "props" of the comedian, such as bizarre facial make-up, misfit clothes, heavy dialects etc. But without these "props" about nine out of ten of the funny-men drawing down tremendous salaries would find it necessary to go back to clerking in the corner cut-rate or to driving a bakery wagon. Which, by the way, doesn't seem like a bad idea, now that I mention it.
Jack, though, has never had any use for make-up of any kind except, of course, the standard grease paint necessary for moving picture photography. And as for clothes, instead of getting a laugh from some outlandish misfit suit. Jack is recognized on and off the stage as one of the best dressed men in Hollywood or New York. And when it comes to a dialect . . . well, old Buck Benny just naturally doesn't use one, unless you can call almost perfect diction a dialect.

No, Jack relies on nothing but his matter-of-fact, conversational tone of delivery to get his laughs. That and a marvelous sense of timing. The definition of “timing” is a subject that has been discussed and argued pro and con probably more than any other one point of comedy technique. However, all definitions boil down to the same thing. It is the manner of delivery by which a master of "timing" can produce a belly-laugh instead of a mild chuckle out of a very ordinary gag. That about sums it up. Naturally, all comedians who are worth their salt must have a certain sense of timing, but only one in a hundred possess "it to such a finely marked degree as Jack Benny. That's why Jack can take the most mediocre line and make it sound excruciatingly funny. It's like the timing of a boxer's punch, only instead of hitting you on the jaw-bone, Senor Benny smites you on your funny-bone.
Take the matter of Jack's voice, his stock in trade, one might say. Where so many comedians have to resort to synthetic foreign dialects or some other form of vocal affectation (especially those who kill themselves with their own gags), Jack's chief charm lies in the quiet, unruffled mariner in which he puts over his best punch lines. He seldom, if ever, raises his voice. And it comes as a very definite relief after hearing the laugh-getting tactics employed by some of our very best (?) gagsters. You've heard them, those priceless wits who have a violent case of hysterics before, during, and after the telling of their own jokes.
And so, in a nutshell, that has been the rise of Jack Benny, Public Comedian Number One. His has been no sudden overnight rise to fame and popularity but rather a long, gradual climb which, after all, is the surest way to achieve anything worth while.

He lives quietly in Beverly Hills with his wife, Mary Livingston, who, by the way, is a comedienne of no mean ability herself, and between pictures makes sporadic forays on New York for a few radio programs. He shuns all forms of violent exercise like the plague, his favorite sport being to watch the nags run themselves into a lather out at Santa Anita, where his unerring ability to judge horseflesh sometimes nets him the staggering sum of four or five dollars clear profit. He staunchly denies being superstitious but always whips out his own cigar lighter when anyone offers him the third light from a match. "You know how those things are," he says, "why take foolhardy risks?"
And if you should happen to want to find Jack Benny and he's in New York at the time, you can most likely find him at the Friars Club placidly devouring a large plate of cold asparagus. Or, if he's in Hollywood, first take a peek into the studio cafeteria where, in all probability, you can also find him placidly devouring a large plate of cold asparagus.