Tex Avery's Clementine

“Hey, Bill.”
“What, Joe?”
“Remember how we took Tex Avery’s Southern wolf and turned him into a dog?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, why don’t we take that ‘Clementine’ song Tex used in ‘Magical Maestro’ and give it to the dog?”
“Joe, that would be the Chuckle-berriest!”

Okay, the conversation didn’t go like that. But you have to admit some of Tex’s ideas at MGM were the same as the ones the other unit at the studio put in its TV cartoons when Metro shut down production.

Magical Maestro (released in 1952) is one of Tex’s “revenge” cartoons. Mysto the magician gets revenge on Poochini the opera singer for not buying his magic act. Poochini then gets revenge on Mysto for screwing with his performance of “Largo al Factotum” from Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” (well, what other opera IS there in cartoons? Unless you’re Bugs Bunny on a plump horse, I mean). Mysto and his wand turn Poochini into all kinds of singers, and the situation is reversed at the end.

Oh, for good measure, Tex and writer Rich Hogan have completely refined a gag from his Warner Bros. travelogue Aviation Vacation (1941) involving a hair getting “stuck in the projector.” Instead of Mel Blanc’s character on screen screaming at an unseen projectionist, Poochini pauses in his act just long enough and casually takes care of the situation.

This is one of those cartoons you have to freeze-frame to appreciate the expressions as Poochini is controlled by Mysto’s wand. Here are a few from the Clementine scene. These two are consecutive.



The next pose is below. No in-betweens to smooth things over. Tex wanted to show the abrupt change in Poochini and does it by making a sudden switch in positions so enabling the singer to go into a little Western song and cowboy stroll while playing the guitar. He walks wide because he is wearing furry chaps and that is how someone wearing them would walk.



Some random frames. The animation is on twos. Tex has the background moving every frame.



Poochini butt.



A look of contentment.



The contentment evaporates. He realises he’s not singing Rossini now.



He shoves the guitar away (while still playing it). He’s seething.



He’s angry now and back to singing “The Barber of Seville.”



Mysto’s rabbits suddenly appear. Tex has them show up here and there during the cartoon so you don’t know when to expect them and are surprised when they appear.



Poochini didn’t expect them. When he realises he’s holding onto those rabbits again, he throws them out of the scene.



Avery comes up with various ways to change costumes back to the tuxedo, some of them using an obscuration gag. That’s what he does here with the oversized cowboy hat.



I believe this is a Grant Simmons scene. Mike Lah and Walt Clinton also animate; I can never figure out Clinton scenes. Judging by the opening scene of the old brick theatre, Johnny Johnsen is the uncredited background artist. And, as you have likely read elsewhere, the orchestra conductor is a parody of MGM musical director Scott Bradley.

This cartoon is full of great little scenes. Far better than this one, in my estimation is Poochini as Carmen Miranda and as the Ink Spots.

Daws Butler should be recognisable as the voice of Mysto. Historian/impressionist Keith Scott went through studio records. People who guess at actors’ identities and get it wrong don’t have to guess who you are hearing in this cartoon any more. Read them here.

Warners has done a wonderful job restoring this short for a BluRay release (as a side note, I am happy their latest version of Car of Tomorrow is minus some very frustrating DVNR issues). You can see unrestored versions of other scenes in earlier posts by clicking on the “Magical Maestro” label to the right.

Pieces of Spike

Daredevil Droopy is a compilation of gags that you can probably figure out how they’re going to end, at least if you’ve seen enough Tex Avery cartoons. Avery and gagman Rich Hogan even re-use the “Timmmm-br” gag as their topper. Evidently it was the strongest gag they could come up with.

Here’s one of Avery’s old favourites—the bad guy being sliced into pieces and collapsing. It starts off with Spike cutting the tightrope Droopy is on. You pretty much know what’s going to happen. The bad guy is always victimised by the law of gravity. The good guy is not.



Spike’s panicking until he looks below.



Any Avery fan can guess what’ll happen. The scene ends with one of Avery’s eye blinks.



Avery came up with several of these competition cartoons, The Chump Champ, Droopy’s Good Deed and this short, which was officially released in 1951 but played at the Loew’s State and Egyptian theatres with Pagan Love Song on December 29, 1950. It was supposed to be remade in Cinemascope, but the cartoon studio shut down. Instead, the Academy Ratio version was re-released in 1958.

Mouse Musicale

There’s a cartoon where a mouse heckles a piano player. Tom and Jerry, you say? Bugs Bunny, you say? No. Some 17 years before The Cat Concerto and 16 years before Rhapsody Rabbit, the Fleischers came out with the Screen Song Come Take a Trip on My Airship.

The title has really nothing to do with the plot of the cartoon, which involves an anonymous female cat having a piano delivered to her apartment. Kitty is playing away when a mouse jumps onto the top of the piano and starts hitting the keys.



The cat is not happy and swats the mouse off the keys. Unfortunately, the keyboard goes flying, too.



The mouse is not dismayed. It continues to play the keys like a xylophone until kicked out of the picture.



Here’s a great in-between. The piano re-grows a face and pulls the cat back toward it.



Earlier in the short, the cat and the piano hugged and kissed each other.

I have no idea what company decided to black out the original lettering of the song lyrics, but the substituted ones with upper and lower case that stand still while the film behind them moves slightly are a little disconcerting.

The song, by the way, goes back to 1904 and was sung on a recording back then by Billy Murray, who was later heard in Fleischer cartoons.

That Show Seems Awfully Familiar

Even as a pre-teen kid, I noticed after watching Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, a bunch of Laugh-In imitations popped up on TV.

Little did I know this was a long established, tried-and-true tradition in broadcasting dating back to the radio days.

We’re not talking about Milton Berle lifting gags. Whole programmes were carbon-copied if they were a success, some not so well as others. After Jack Benny’s writer, who helped develop Benny’s format of stooges and a sketch, departed under not-so-pleasant conditions, he felt he could do Benny’s show just as well as Benny. So he duplicated it. CBS picked it up. It lasted 13 weeks. Then there were a number of comedy shows in the mid-‘40s starring sincere-but-socially-inept young men, including Mel Blanc, Alan Young and Eddie Bracken.

This unbylined article appeared in the Pittsburgh Press of January 16, 1937.

Originate a Radio Stunt And Watch Your Imitators Follow
Who Sets Mode for Program Might as Well Pass It Along, for If It Clicks It Will Promptly Bob Up Elsewhere, Perhaps a Bit Changed
Radio has developed an odd set of rules about ownership of ideas. No man with an idea for a program has any right to keep it for himself. If the program becomes successful a lot of other program makers immediately take over the idea, with whatever improvements they can think of.
Within the industry they merely follow the current mode much as a man might start wearing bell bottom pants if some of his neighbors did. Anyone who talks about theft of ideas is treated with the gentle courtesy due an innocent new to big business. Radio is Communist about ideas. The dull boys share what the bright ones originate.
There was a time, back in pre-radio days, when comedians bought jokes and considered them their private property. If another comedian stole jokes there were howls of agony and denunciatory ads in Variety, the theatrical weekly. Frequently the despoiled comedian would pick up a burly acrobat friend and pay a call to the man accused of themt [theft].
Jokes are now in the public domain. Anyone in radio considers it his right to use anything that appears in print or on the air. Writers for comedians maintain files, gathered almost entirely from humorous columns and magazines. The magazine writers who think of the jokes in the first place complain frequently, but they are the innocents who are smiled at. Those writers don't get much money selling their jokes to the magazines, and around radio people who don't get much money don't get much respect. The radio script men who take the jokes and put them into comedy routines get the money.
George Burns Talks
George Burns tells a story about a small time vaudeville couple spending all its savings on a novel finish to the act. Bookers saw it in the tryout theater and advised, "Not a bad act, but you should change that finish. Better finish with a song and dance."
"But everybody finishes with a song and dance," the man protested.
"That's right. And everybody's working except you.”
"If everybody is doing something," George points his moral, "it must be all right. We'll do it, too."
Jack Benny was the one who developed the idea of making a whole group—conductor, soloist, stooges, etc.—into a little informal stock company. He understood the radio rules and probably did not give it a thought when Burns, Baker and a lot of others took as much of his idea as they could use. Don't get the idea this is said in any spirit of disparagement. I am certain Jack would be furious if anyone accused these good friends of using a Benny idea dishonestly.
O’Keefe Original
A Walter O'Keefe program started playing games with its audience this fall. "Show Boat" executives liked the idea and adopted it. Major Bowes did not create the original idea of an amateur show, but he was the one who adapted it to radio with the gong and amateurs telling their sad or comical stories. Before the Major even landed on a network there were amateur programs going full blast with gong and everything else.
Amateurs were added to Fred Allen's program against his wishes. Harry Tugend, a writer working with Fred at the time, made some fiery remarks at one of the program conferences. “I come from the theater, and there we would consider that idea as belonging to Major Bowes. Taking it would be theft."
The executive group liked Harry and considered him a very competent author, but, as Harry said, “They just waited until I finished and paid no attention."
Radio Has Rules
Radio understands its rule, but the courts have lagged behind. Tess Gardell had spent many years on the stage as "Aunt Jemima," but she wanted more than a sponsor was willing to pay to bring the character to radio. So the sponsor engaged a less expensive singer and simply called her "Aunt Jemima" instead. Miss Gardell was awarded something over a hundred thousand dollars in court, but the case has been appealed.
Barbara Blair, who had appeared in Herman Timberg's vaudeville act as "Snoony," came into radio with the character and also used the comic dialogue Timberg had written. Under the law, not yet modernized to conform to radio customs, Timberg was able to sue for a whopping sum for each of the 40 network stations on which the program was broadcast. The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, but it was easily a record price for any author's couple of minutes of dialogue.
Such cases straying into court are, of course, exceptions. Radio really is Communistic about ideas—except that the executives call each other such things as "J. H." or "L. W.," instead of "Comrade."

How Dry He Is

Andy Panda tries catching a woodpecker by putting salt on his tail in Knock Knock (1940) but is thwarted by the crafty-but-insane bird several times until the end of the cartoon.

In this scene on the roof of family home, Andy almost has him until the woodpecker unexpectedly swirls around with a convenient, filled stein.



Evidently there are people who put salt in beer. Whether they blow the subsequently-created foam at someone, I doubt. Unless they are a woodpecker.



Cut to the next scene where Woody drinks the beer, shows some effect (they loved cross-eyed characters at Lantz back then), then tosses the empty stein away.



Woody jumps out of the scene with his usual laugh, though his mouth doesn’t open.

You likely know this was Woody’s debut and the woodpecker was played by Mel Blanc, who voiced everyone in this cartoon except Andy (who is Sara Berner).

Alex Lovy and his brother-in-law Frank Tipper are the credited “artists” with the story credit going to Bugs Hardaway and Lowell Elliot. An uncredited Edgar Kiechle is responsible for the great background paintings. Frank Marsales scored “How Dry I Am” behind the beer-drinking scene.

Today's Inside Gag

Inside gags found their way into Friz Freleng shorts from the mid-‘40s to the mid-‘50s when Paul Julian was responsible for background art. But there’s one a little before then in Freleng’s The Wacky Worm (1941).

At one point the title character, confronting a hungry crow in a junk yard, is next to an empty can for Binder Brand Peaches.



Henry Binder was the studio manager. He was born in 1906 in Bayonne, New Jersey, and worked as a publicist for Mack Sennett at one time. Leon Schlesinger hired him in 1933 when setting up a cartoon studio to replace Harman-Ising. Binder went into the navy during the war and after coming out, found Schlesinger had been bought out by Warner Bros. He soon joined Schlesinger's brother-in-law Ray Katz at Screen Gems until Columbia shut down its cartoon operations in late 1946. The 1950 census lists Binder as an “artist.” He never married and died in Los Angeles in 1975, age 68.

At this point, Len Kester was responsible for Freleng's background paintings.

Behind The Feud

“Fred Allen Forecasts 1937” reads a yellowed newspaper clipping of undermined origin. One of Fred’s prognostications simply states “Jack Benny will win the World-Telegram Radio Editors’ Poll.”

The gag here is Jack won the poll every year, so it’s not much of a prediction. (By the way, Allen guessed correctly).

Allen did not predict something else about Benny—that the two of them would begin a radio feud that pretty much lasted his entire life. The reason is simple—it had only sort of started.

The crack by Allen that set it off happened on December 30, 1936. When this column came out, Jack hadn’t responded and Allen hadn’t picked up on it.

The feud supposedly ended on March 1937, when the two made up on Benny’s show. But, as a reporter for the Boston Post editorialised, it was really too good to end permanently. To me, it got better with time. Let’s face it: does “You Wednesday night hawk” strike you as funny, let alone much of an insult? The original feud seems to have been full of weak name-calling and weird, one-shot characters that Allen invented to back up his insults. But audiences loved it.

We’ve reprinted two feature stories from the Post about the feud. The one below was the first in the series, from the March 21, 1937 edition. It comes from a picture taken of a scrapbook in the Allen archives in the Boston library. The newsprint is glue-stained, shot at an angle, with copy and photos in the page gutter (making the pictures unusuable). In fact, I am guessing at the words in one paragraph as they are out of focus and in the gutter.

Jack Benny-Fred Allen Feud
Gathered, by intrepid reporter and cameraman, in the jungles of Manhattan, the Boston Sunday Post presents today the first installment of a series on the wordiest embroglio of modern days, the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen radio feud.
At jeopardy of life and limb, and irreparable damage to their laugh muscles, these Post men have bearded the dualists in their retreats among the cliffs of New York and have garnered from them the “inside” facts of the inception and progress of the mock-controversy based on Jack Benny’s ability to play “The Bee” on his violin.
Read it exclusively in the Boston Sunday Post, if you think you can stand it.

By JOHN F. COGGSWELL
“Why, you bow-legged musical mistake, are you reachin’ for a violin again? Well, as I live and breathe and tear my silver locks, if you load that lethal machine with ‘The Bee’ and point it toward me, I’ll have you arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Well, you listen to me, you Wednesday night hawk! Another crack like that and Town Hall will be looking for a new janitor.”
“Why, you fugitive from a Ripley cartoon, you lay a hand on me and...”
Jack “Buck” Benny, the Waukegan wrangler, suddenly swung a hay-maker from the floor straight for the lean jaw of Fred “Boo” Allen, the Boston word-tosser.
A flash of light stabbed through the murk of the little room back stage in Studio 8-J of the National Broadcasting Company’s palatial pile of architecture, over in New York.
“Boys, that was swell! No, Jack, you......”
But feminine voices took command of the instruction giving.
“You boys sure you aren’t getting a little too realistic in this thing?” Mary Livingstone cautioned. “Besides, you used some of that stuff before, in your great reconciliation meeting Sunday night.”
“Yeah, and besides,” broke in Portland Hoffa, “if you used less time in chatter and more time in picture taking, we might get home and to bed some time tonight.”
“Well, you know, girls, we have to sort of get-in-the-spirit-of-the thing,” protested Jack.
Radio fans, don’t be looking for me for any odds that the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, that has been delighting millions ever since the latter made disparaging remarks about Jack’s violin playing, especially his musical preparation and ability to play Schubert’s “The Bee,” is all washed up, finished, forgotten and forgiven.
Just Loves Feuding

If you glued your ear to you loud speaker, last Wednesday evening, at 9 o’clock, you found of that that gun-totin’, feuding wildcat Fred Allen had no more than signed a peace treaty with Jack Benny, than he swing his artillery around in another direction and started a war with the Carvers, dwelling in their shack down the valley, just in nice gun range.
Why, that guy Allen just loves feudin’, especially when it’s all in fun. And just before he shook hands good-by and told me he was leaving for Hollywood tomorrow, Jack Benny observed...
But that comes later in the story. Did you notice, too, another little episode occurred Wednesday night? It was just after Portland had observed that it was rather stupid of Jack Benny to have sent Fred a “Happy Birthday” telegram, when it wasn’t Fred’s birthday at all. And Fred cracked:
“It isn’t the stupidity that makes me love him, it’s the sentiment.”
Now, I leave it to you, in spite of all this Jackie-Wackie, Freddie-Weddie, Palsey-Walsey stuff, that has been bedrivelling the airlanes, ever since Fred and Jack went out in the alley last Sunday night to fight it out to the death and came back scatheless, leaving out Jack’s dotted eye, and breathing undying friendship, does that wise crack sound like love?
Besides, of all the millions who laughed and shrieked and gurgled over this feud, which didn’t last quite so long as the one during which the Hatfields and the McCoys were tossing lead from West Virginia into Kentucky and vice versa, but had a lot more listener-inners, none enjoyed this mock embroglio more than Jack Benny and Fred Allen, themselves, did.
Then there’s the angle of whether or not the listening public is going to stand for such and abrupt ending to an aerial face that has given it so many genuine belly laughs as this one.
It Wrote Itself
For this was “tops” comedy at every angle. The boys and their companies had a hard time to keep from guffawing into the microphone, so high was their glee. The sponsors loved it; the whole thing cost them not a single cent for the extra talent or the like.
And the public? Why, man, the public ate it up. Last Monday a concern which specializes in that sort of thing made a country-wide survey, calling a large number of homes by telephone in every city and most of the villages in the nation. That survey showed that of all the radio fans called, of those who had their radios going from seven to seven-thirty last Sunday night, 95.5% were listening to the Jack Benny programme.
“Small credit to us,” Jack insisted to me. “The whole thing was a natural; if we couldn’t steal the air show with it, we’d better quit.”
“Yeah, but what about you and Allen taking a little credit for shaping up a natural,” I asked.
“Huh, we didn’t shape it up; the darn thing wrote itself from start to finish,” he insisted. “All we did was keep it going.”
Well, it went, all right. A couple of weeks ago the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra had just finished playing a number that all but brought to its feet an audience composed of the elite of the big-river metropolis. The applause rose, flooded the huge auditorium as the gathering clapped and roared its approval.
Such an ovation demanded an encore. After repeated bows the maestro turned to the players, waved his baton. From the instruments there flowed forth a swiftly-moving drone of melody. A titter of delight ran over the listeners. Soon it swelled to a roar of laughter that shook the rafters, all but drowned the music. It was a nonplussed leader who turned his face to his convulsed audience at the end of the short number.

Huh, he had just made a mistake; that was all. He should never have played “The Bee” before an audience that knew its Jack Benny and Fred Allen just as well as it knew its Schubert. But I’m told that even that fiasco was all right with a certain musical house; they have republished “The Bee” several times since Fred Allen made his crack about Jack not being able to play the piece on his fiddle.
A pair of “swell guys”—I use the term advisedly; ask any hold-over from the vaudeville days, such as these two old friends are, about anybody and if he assets that fellow is a swell guy, that’s praise—this Jack Benny and Fred Allen.
There they were, the two of them, at 1 a. m. last Thursday, in the little room backstage of Studio 8-H, where this installment of The Famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen Feud began.
Jack was in pretty good physical shape. Aside from the fact that he had been continuously busy for over 14 hours, working with his script writers, interviewing insistent talent, and attending to a thousand and one little things that he must accomplish before trekking back to Hollywood. If you think putting on a radio show is a soft way of earning a living just follow a couple of putters-onners for a few days as Frank Jason and I have been doing; honestly, we were run ragged.
Yet Jack was fairly bright and chipper, that early morning. But Fred Allen was dying on his feet. His hands were shaking; lines of fatigue were etched into his rugged, good-natured pan.
He had been up early Wednesday morning, laboring long putting finishing touches to the script—you know, he writes all his stuff, himself—timing the show, cutting, revising. At a few minutes before 2, he came hightailing it into the studio for rehearsal, his iron hat on the back of his head.
During three hours of rehearsal, that hat never left his head. Oh, it changed position; it did, you know. He’s one of those fellows who wears a hat all over his head; on the back of it, on either side, tilted over his eyes. “Does anything ever knock that derby off your head,” I asked him during a lull in the rehearsal, when he came down to sit with us a few minutes.
Right there, I got an illustration of the difference between these two head-liners of radio comedy. Benny would have laughed that one off, gone right on with serious stuff.
Jack Really Plays
But not Fred Allen. Always ready to “ad-lib” a wise crack when on the air, he’s just as ready to display his wit in conversation. The hat slid to the back of his head, his voice assumed the nasal twang so familiar.
“Man, I wouldn’t take that hat off to take up a collection to get Jack Benny not to play the ‘Bee,’” he cracked.
Well, anyway, he rehearsed three hours, rushed out and put in more time than that revising and cutting, came back and put on his regular full hour’s performance at 10, then showed up for another hour at midnight for the repeat programme that goes to the Pacific coast.
By 1 o’clock, he had been working continuously at hard, concentrated labor for nearly 20 hours. Yet he was willing to spend another hour in that stuffy little room, the sweat streaming down his forehead, and down Jack Benny’s, too, going through all sorts of stunts for a couple of newspapermen from the Boston Post.
We did everything but ask these two radio top-notchers to stand on their heads and you’d have thought we were movie directors or something, the way they caught the ideas and proceeded to give us something a little more than we asked for.
Swell guys! You bet! And Jack Benny played the fiddle for us. What do you think of that? I’m not going to try to name the piece; it wasn’t “The Bee” and it wasn’t “Love in Bloom,” which piece really started the feudin’, but, anyway, noises did come out of the instrument and they sounded like music to me, but my music teacher always thought that I must have been dropped on my head as a child.
The way it came about that we got this sample of Jack’s fiddling was that we’d asked one of the orchestra players to stick around for a while so that we could take a picture of his violin being played by the comedian. Of course, Jack Benny can’t carry a fiddle around with him all the time, not even in these parlous times when he’s called upon constantly to defend his prowess.
Jack picked up the loaned instrument, while its owner watched it with jealous eye, to see that nothing untoward happened to it. I gathered the impression that he, the professional violinist, didn’t believe that Benny should be trusted too far with any fiddle. Anyway, Jack tucked the proper end of the instrument under his chin and drew the bow across the strings making the aforesaid sounds.
“I’ll bet even money you never had as good a fiddle as that one to commit musical assault with,” drawled Fred Allen. “And I’ll give odds that fiddle was never handled by a lousier fiddler.”
“Oh, yeah!” roared Jack. “I’ll have you understand I’ve got a mighty good violin.”
Which struck me as good comedy missed during the feud. Anyway, no foolin’, I’ll lay a bet myself that if Jack Benny were given the choice of being, say, the 10th or 20th best violinist in the country, which he isn’t or of being radio’s top-notch, A-1, champ comedian, which he is, if national polls and awards count for anything, he’d choose the fiddling career.
If you get to talking confidentially which him on violining, he may pull a wallet from his back pocket and extract from it a yellowing newspaper clipping. It is comment upon a vaudeville act put on by Jack Benny, some 16 years ago, written by a critic in a small Mid-West city.
“What we would like from Benny,” the clipping reads, “is more violin and less chatter.”
“Why didn’t you hit Fred Allen between the eyes when that feud was on?” I asked Jack.
“Well, he answered, “if you get to thinking it over carefully, you’d get the idea that he didn’t exactly say that my playing was good, but he leaves no doubt of his opinion about my chatter.”
But his chatter is good enough now, eh? Anyway, we’d better start getting this feud to broiling, if we’re to get any real balling into this installment.
Really, it was “Love in Bloom” and not “The Bee” that set the air lanes for the great Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, though the latter did start the bullets to singing through the atmosphere.
Those who were there, that afternoon at a rehearsal in an NBC studio, will never forget that milestone in radio comedy. When I asked Don Wilson, the big, good-natured announcer who carols “Strawberry, raspberry, cherry, orange, lemon and lime” so melodiously every Sunday night, about that, his whole frame shook, his triple chin jogged up and down violently for minutes before he could reply.
He’s a Riot
Here’s the picture. The first part of the rehearsal is over. At front stage stands Jack Benny, his treasured violin tucked under his chin, the bow just about to sweep over the strings. The champ comedian is to show the world that he can be as artistic as he is funny. Mary Livingstone tips a wink to Don Wilson.
The orchestra strikes up the first few chords of “Love in Bloom,” and fades out. The waiting bow sweeps. A wail of music sweeps over the studio. The first few bars and the other members of the company are tittering, a few more mouths are wide open with guffaws. Jack hits a sour note and quite, to find his small audience doubled up in mirth.
“It’s terrific, Jack!” shouts a control man, bursting out of the control room.
“It’ll lay them in the aisles,” roars the production man as he slaps Jack on the back.
“We’ll put it in the show permanently,” decrees the sponsor’s representative, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
“You’re breaking my heart,” Benny mourns. “Here I thought I was to blossom out as a virtuosos and what am I? Just another musical joke.”
“Joke, thunder,” yells Don Wilson with just as much enthusiasm as he puts into a Jello plug. “Man, you and that fiddle ain’t no joke; you’re a riot.”
And blest if the bit wasn’t a riot when it went out over the air. Jack Benny’s attempt to play “Love in Bloom” made radio, comedy history. All America listened and laughed.

There’s the background. Now, let’s allow the villain of the piece to come buzzing into the plot, all set to sting a feud into action, to fill the air with verbal bullets, to lay a man-sized portion of the populace in the aisles. Enter “The Bee,” herded by a 10-year-old kid, Stuart Kanin, of Edgemere, Long Island.
Stuart brought the insect in, concealed in a violin case, on the evening of Dec. 20, 1936 [sic], when Fred Allen had called a number of juvenile performers into his Town Hall show. A new year about to dawn; youth, emblematic of the drawing year. See?
Stuart Kanin was there to show what a 10-year-old could do with a fiddle. He played Schubert’s “The Bee” and played it darn well, got a lot of applause.
They Just Ad-Libbed
What followed the dying down of the applause isn’t to be found in the script of the show that night. It wasn’t written in; Fred Allen ad libbed it on the spur of the moment; sent it wafting out over the air waves, just as old Devil Anse Hatfield sent the first bullet whining across the clearing after the McCoys had shot down one of his hogs in cold blood. And with just as immediate results.
“That was fine, Stuart,” twanged Fred Allen. “Jack Benny and his ‘Love in Bloom.’ Phooey! He ought to be ashamed of himself after hearing you play ‘The Bee’.”
Those may not be Fred’s exact words—he can’t say for sure, himself—but they convey the intended sentiment.
Listening in on Jack Benny, the following Sunday night you’d never have known, until the programme was over, that he had heard Fred Allen’s ad libbed wise crack. The orchestra had played its last number, “Buck” Benny had finished the evening’s gallop and in the “closing tag” wished his guest and radio audience a Happy New Year. For the act that set a feud to broiling let’s follow the words of the original script, which is before me as I write:
Jack—Oh, Mary!
Mary—Yes.
Jack—Take a wire to Fred Allen.
Mary—Okay.
Jack—Dear Fred: I am not ashamed of myself. When I was 10 years old I could play “Flight of the Bumble Bee on my violin too. Aegh! signed Jack Benny.
Mary—This mystery will also be continued next week.
Mary spoke prophecy that night all right. And many weeks! There was the beginning of the feud—a wise crack and a casual comeback. But the rest of it, with the radio audience, the stuff that has set all the nation shaking with laughter, was built up word for word, phrase by phrase by these two old time, warm friends, with much wringing of eyebrows and rearranging of scripts.
Maybe the reader thinks that a radio script is something that just happens. I kind of thought so, too, but changed my mind after a short period spent in the room in which Jack Benny, his secretary and three writers were getting together tonight’s programme. Imagine! They spent a whole half hour playing with one small bit.
It may or may not be on the air tonight, depending upon whether they were able to work the idea into anything. One of them had, figuratively speaking, seized upon that baker’s confection known as an “upside down cake.” Maybe they could work something out of that. Listen to Jack Benny toying with a slash of genius.
“Say, listen. How would this be? I’ll say to Mary. ‘What did you eat for supper?’ and she’ll say, ‘Upside down cake. Why?’ and I’ll say, ‘I wondered what had stood you on your head.’ U-m-m. Nawh. That isn’t so hot, it it? Well, no, maybe ...”
I’ll be interested in learning what they do with that. Also whether Jack gets the Mayor of Waukegan to New York for tonight’s show as he was trying to do by long distance as I was leaving. The feud’s over, eh? Well, if it is, why does Benny need the Mayor of Waukegan to back him up?

Next week! Oh, thunder, let’s allow Fred Allen to make the announcement, he’s a Boston guy and would just as soon do it. “Don’t fail to read in on the next installment of the hair-raising tale of the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, next Sunday at this same hour in the Boston Sunday Post. There’ll be fun, Hah, hah, ha!—Tragedy, Unhand me, villain—Pathos, Ah, woe is me, Drama—And what, oh...”