A Nutzi Kiss

Nazi spy Hatta Mari gives off an electric shock kiss to “woman hater” Daffy Duck in Plane Daffy (1944). Four colours.



The old "melt" gag.



Let’s try the gag again.



Director Frank Tashlin and writer Warren Foster throw a switch.



Daffy channels Jerry Colonna. “Ah! Something new has been added!”



An old-style, Clampett-esque Daffy “Woo-hoo!” exit.



Now, an inside joke.



My best guesses at the studio personnel referred to here: Fred Abrams, Warren Foster, Tubby Millar, Dick Thomas, Curt Perkins, Leon Schlesinger, Ray Patin (or maybe Ray Katz), Ace Gamer and Cal Dalton.

Being the best kind of war cartoon, Hitler is embarrassed by the “secret” message and Himmler and Goering Goebbels commit suicide. In real life, Hitler followed. As Daffy tells us, “They lose more darn Nutzis that way.”

Carving Out Gags

The propeller on George and Junior's boat propels them over dry land as they chase Lucky Ducky (from the 1948 cartoon of the same name). And it carves out a few things.

First, they go across a log. Oh, for a sign popping up that says “Nice bridgework!”



Then, up a tree and down the other.



Finally, over the face of a mountain. Scott Bradley plays “America the Beautiful” after the last gag.



This short has one brilliant gag (“Technicolor Ends Here”) and a fun visual pun (“School Crossing”) and some routines that vary in inspiration (Rich Hogan helped Tex Avery with the story). The original ending is imaginative but has been shorn from available prints. Read about it here.

Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons, Louie Schmitt and Preston Blair are the animators on this cartoon.

Track Five For Vancouver, Edmonton and Cucamonga

Vancouver was, at one time, the home of Mary Livingstone, but it was her husband—Jack Benny—who seems to have spent plenty of time in the city in later years.

Benny played the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver during vaudeville—in 1917 (with Lyman Wood), 1920 (as Ben K. Benny), 1923, 1926 and 1928, the last year at the current Orpheum, which he helped save with a benefit show three months before he died in 1974.

He broadcast his weekly half-hour from the city in April 1944, notable as it was Dennis Day’s last show before going off for war duty (which mainly consisting of singing). But there were other times Benny visited as well.

One of the years was 1965. By that time, Jack’s weekly TV show had come to an end.

Vancouver has a reputation of “No Fun City.” It’s true. If you go the downtown business core late some nights, there is nothing happening, outside of a bit of traffic. But there was a time the city had incredibly popular nightclubs (filled with hard-drinking newspaper reporters, almost all male) where big American acts were imported. The clubs have all been replaced by office towers; all that remains is a tiny street sign at Hornby and Georgia reminding the diminishing few who actually remember that this was “Wasserman’s Beat.”

Vancouver Sun nightlife/celebrity reporter Jack Wasserman wrote about Jack’s arrival in the Dec. 4, 1965 issue. CKNW disc jockey Jack Cullen, who could match anyone scotch for scotch, had a huge collection of radio transcriptions, some of which he liberated without permission from Canadian Army stations during the war.

THE WHEE! PEOPLE — I'll admit that I'm hooked on Jack Benny. I haven't even seen the show he'll do tonight and Sunday night at the Queenie but I'm prepared to wager it will be an evening of first-class entertainment for the whole family. It has to be good because, in my book, he can't do anything bad.
In this column writing business you meet more than your share of nuts and bores. They make good copy but they're awfully hard to be around. From a column-eye view, the trouble with Benny is that he's much too normal — sort of like an uncle that comes to visit from time to time. Within seconds you forget that he is one of the most fantastically successful entertainers of the past three decades in terms of both audience appeal and financial rewards. He headlined at the Lyric when it was the Orpheum back in 1926; he was one of THE radio names in the thirties, forties and fifties. And he's been a major TV star for the past 15 years.
* * *
There's a cliche that goes: "Age is not a time of life — it's a state of mind." In Jack Benny's case, it's for real. He's 72, going on 39, because he's with it. At Friday's press conference Jack Cullen, the disk jockey and show business historian extraordinary, turned up with his tape-recorded bag of tricks and proceeded to put Benny through the memory hoops. Cullen confronted Benny with a rare sound track of the only song the comedian ever sang in the movies and similar memorabilia. Benny didn't remember much of the ancient material. It isn't that his memory is failing. He's too much involved with today to indulge himself in show business senility.
F'r example, Jack is probably the world's oldest Wayne Newton fan. After he concludes his Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary run he goes into a show in California with Newton, about whom he raves. He's entitled to. Benny spotted the young hillbilly doing a show in Australia, and as Wayne himself told me many times, he did more than anyone else to propel Newton towards stardom.
* * *

Although we've talked on the phone several times I hadn't seen Jack for more 10 years. We met accidentally in the hall outside his Georgia Hotel suite. Almost his first words after the initial greetings were exchanged was a suggestion that I run out and buy Sammy Davis Jr.'s excellent autobiography, Yes I can: He has a vested interest in Sammy, too. It was Benny who spotted Davis, the youngest member of the Will Mastin trio, and took him out of the sawdust joints and put him on the road to stardom. It's easy to say now that, sooner or later, Sammy Davis would been discovered, but the fact remains that it was Benny who gave him his first real shot at stardom, on the bill of a powerful package that played Vancouver, among several other centres, in 1954. Sammy hasn't looked back since.
Many of the old-time stars pose as boosters of young talent but it's really a form of insurance. They often have the youngsters tied up to long-term contracts. Not Benny. Anybody he thinks is talented is worthy of a helping hand.
* * *
The subject came up during Friday's press conference. "Are the young people grateful?" a reporter asked. "Certainly they are," Jack replied, "but they can't be expected to go on being grateful forever." By coincidence a young blonde named Betty Robertson happened to come in at that moment. She's a Toronto singer currently appearing at the Marco Polo, but she's done shows with Benny in the past, and she'd dropped by to say hello. Benny's purpose in holding the press conference was to sell tickets for his own show and to introduce Pat Woodell, the young star of Petticoat Junction, who does 18 minutes of the Hour and Sixty Minutes with Jack Benny. But that didn't stop Benny from pointing out Betty Robertson. He stopped everything and announced, "Now there's a talented little girl I just adore," and he launched into a rave about the singer for the benefit of the assembled press.
Later on we went downstairs for dinner and Jack went through the usual routine of trying to find something that fitted his diet, and then eating everything placed in front of him whether it was on the diet or not.
It was all so darn homey, with Jack's manager, his secretary-valet, the girl singer, Jack's cousin-in-law Edie Giant, from Seattle — Mary Livingstone Benny has 30 or 40 relatives between here and Seattle — and Edie's grandson, Gary. To see us sitting there nobody would have realized that the fellow with the glasses in the middle of the group did a command performance for Queen Elizabeth in London a few weeks ago and was a dinner partner of the young Queen of Greece the following night.
“She was so young and I forgot myself at one point and said, ' "Look here, honey'!” Jack was saying. “Then I tried to apologize and I said, 'I'm sorry. You just don't look like a queen to me.' She laughed.” You will, too.

How did the show go? Let’s turn to the city’s other paper, the Province, of Dec. 6 1965.

Kayo kiss a clue to Benny success
By LORNE PARTON
Jack Benny grasps the girl firmly and plants a great buss on her lips. He holds the pose—and holds it. Finally, the girl's arm goes limp and drops at her side.
Benny comes slowly out of the embrace and gazes at the arm hanging free. The audience roars. He moves the hand and it swings back and forth. He looks at the audience. It roars again.
He moves the hand again. Something catches his eye. He lifts the hand and stares at it Then he pulls at jeweller's loupe from his pocket and inspects the diamond ring on her finger. All this time she is still in a swoon.
Blackout and uproarious applause.

To students of humor in general and Jack Benny in particular, this is not only a classic study case, but a clue to his success.
Benny is the master of timing and facial expression. The bit with the girl is a silent movie in itself. First the passionate lover, then the bemused man who is proud and a little awed at his success, then the avaricious miser who covets the diamond.
It's an old routine, but the audiences that caught Benny Saturday and Sunday night at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre ate it up.
Who else can just turn his head and stars at the wings and reduce the crowd to hysterical laughter?
Who else can play Sweet Georgia Brown on a violin and receive applause equal to Menuhin's?
This show Benny does is essentially a one man show, as he points out, but he does have a 12-piece orchestra, a singer and straight girl, Pat Waddell [sic], and a plant in the audience, 15-year-old Toni Marcus.
Toni's routine involves her walking on the stage, asking Benny for an autograph in the middle of his violin solo, eventually playing his Strad better than he does. It's old and its [sic] corny, but its [sic] popular.
In every successful concert show in a place like the QueenlE, there is a reciprocity of warmth and respect between the audience and per former, and the weekend show was an example of this.
At 72, Benny seems indestructible.

About four thousand people, Wasserman later reported, saw the two Benny shows.

What did Jack do between performances? He visited patients at the Shaughnessy Military Hospital, greeted by the 55 members of the Surrey Schools Concert Band.

Days later, he was in Edmonton for another show, before which he was presented with a bright yellow Klondike hat by the local B’nai B’rith Lodge. Then it was back to California for Jack Benny Day on the 15th for a parade in Azusa, sponsored by Chambers of Commerce of Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc.

On top of that, he performed on Christmas at the Carousel Theatre in West Covina. Some 55 years after beginning in small-time vaudeville, Jack Benny was still in demand.

Amonga.

Keith Darling

Keith Darling had a surprisingly lengthy career working on Warner Bros. cartoons. His name can be found on credits for cartoons by the Bob McKimson unit in 1963, but Devon Baxter mentioned in a post on Cartoon Research that he had been an assistant animator at the studio (then owned by Leon Schlesinger) as far back as 1937.

He was never an A-list animator so very little has been written about him. We’ve cobbled together some odds and ends; as we’ve said in similar posts, this is neither a complete biography or a filmography.

To the left you see his birth certificate. The penmanship isn’t the best, but this document claims his first name was “Niram” (short for Adoniram, I imagine). Elsewhere, it’s given as his middle name. There are also conflicting birth dates, but most sources agree he was born on Nov. 24, 1914 in Kokomo, Indiana. (You can click on it to read it).

The Schlesinger studio newsletter, The Exposure Sheet, provides a short biography of Darling in its October 20, 1939 issue. He moved to Tampa, Florida in 1925. A hurricane and a boom that went bust put him in Milwaukee in 1927, then in Los Angeles in 1929. A classified ad in the Los Angeles Times that year has him selling a Florida bungalow—as a teenager! The 1930 census lists him, age 15, living with his father. The return claims his father was widowed, but that wasn’t true at all. Keith’s mother was quite alive and living back in her home town in Burlington, Wisconsin.He graduated from Inglewood High School, as you can see by this 1932 picture to the right; Darling told The Exposure Sheet it was one of six high schools he attended.

He “bought a motorcycle and spent about six months above Stirling City, California, placer mining. . .camped most of the time in an old abandoned hotel. However, with the bar still intact, it wasn’t bad. . .After that I came back to Los Angeles, and got a job at Northrup Aviation, working on fuselage assembly, and after this I worked in a bakery. Then came some more mining east of Big Pine, California, and also for a short while on a mine belonging to a friend between Tonopah and Mina, Nevada.”

He moved on to college. The Burlington Free Press of June 6, 1935 reported: “Keith Darling, son of Mrs. Ruth Darling of Burlington, won second place last week in a poster contest sponsored by the Los Angeles chamber of commerce for the most effective symbolic picturizations of the national foreign trade week program. Keith, student at Los Angeles Junior college, won his prize with his second attempt at poster design.”

He shows up in the Los Angeles City Directory for the first time in 1936, occupation “cartoonist.” Schlesinger didn’t pay junior staff terribly well; the 1940 census shows he made $1,800 in 1939 (he was living in a boarding house on North Wilton Place, about six blocks from the studio at Van Ness and Fernwood).

1940 is also year Darling registered for military service; he was still employed by Schlesinger. He was called for duty in September 1941. The Free Press published portions of letters to his mother. He was a Master Sergeant with the Army stationed in London in Sept. 1942. In August 1943 he was 2nd Lieutenant with the Signal Corps and spent time censoring outgoing mail. He had just finished a brief leave in Cornwall. That December, it reported he was to head back to the U.S. to instruct soldiers; his picture was published by the Associated Press. After the war, he was promoted to Captain and was in Los Angeles by early January 1946 in the Officers’ Reserve Corps.

He also seems to have brought back something from England—a woman. Ynys Rosemary Applin and he were married on June 14, 1946 in Los Angeles; she was 11 years younger than him.

Devon’s research has found that Darling animated on Chuck Jones’ first directorial effort, The Night Watchman, released in 1938, but got no screen credit. He didn’t for years, even though drafts show Darling provided footage for cartoons. Among them are Rabbit’s Kin (a scene of his with Pete Puma walking up a tree was deleted), The Turn Tale Wolf (Darling scene to right) and Fool Coverage (all McKimson, 1952) and Of Rice and Hen and Muscle Tussle (both McKimson, 1953). The first cartoon on which Darling receives screen credit is Beanstalk Bunny (Jones). It was released in 1955 but seems to have been put in production before the studio’s six-month shutdown starting in June 1953 (the McKimson unit was out of commission almost a year).

When normal operations resumed, Darling returned in March 1954 and shuttled between the Jones and McKimson units. He also animated for Abe Levitow who took over Jones’ unit when Charles M. was assigned to other duties, then stayed for a bit. These cartoons must have been on the shelf for a while. Who Scent You? wasn’t released until April 1960. The writer was Mike Maltese, who left Warners for Hanna-Barbera in November 1958. The Club News reported in April 1956 that Darling had left the studio. The word “terminated” is used; I’d hardly think an in-house publication would report a firing.

The Club News of April 1960 mentions his return. It would appear the first cartoon he animated when he came back was What’s My Lion? (McKimson, 1961, frame to left). His final Warner’s short was Aqua Duck (McKimson, 1963).

We run into another mystery. What he did after this isn’t known. Unlike just about everyone in animation, he didn’t go into television. He isn’t found in any newspapers in the 1960s which I can access. Los Angeles directories don’t exist on-line for that decade. He would have been 49 at the start of 1964, which is awfully young to retire. There is no obituary for him in the Times. So, more digging is required. The information is likely out there somewhere.

Darling died in Los Angeles on Dec. 1, 1974.

That Sound Looks Like Lightning

Bosko gets knocked down by his punching bag in Battling Bosko (1932). The phone rings. Three drawings, animated on ones, are used in a cycle, showing lightning bolts representing noise.



The hook for the receiver becomes an arm that hands the receiver to Bosko.



Why, look! Honey’s at the piano. Has anyone tried to count the number of early ’30s cartoons with someone playing the piano? (In Bosko’s next cartoon, Big-Hearted Bosko, he plays the piano).



It seems like this is another cartoon that Hugh Harman couldn’t figure out how to end. Honey, listening to sports announcer Graham Cracker on the radio, rushes to the ring where Bosko is lying. What’s the climax? There isn’t one. Bosko looks at her, says “Aw, uts-nay,” pulls the canvas over himself and goes to sleep.



That’s all, folks.

Friz Freleng and Paul J. Smith are the credited animators. Frank Marsales wrote a title song that Bosko sings (and scats). He also composed “Turkey Strut,” “Ha Ha Ha,” “The Barnyard Serenade,”and “Hen’s Parade,” all copyrighted Feb. 19, 1932, for this short, as well as several other Bosko cartoon tunes copyrighted the same date. The last cue when Honey at ringside is, for some reason, “The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives” by Harry Woods.

You can see how beat-up this old television re-issue print is. Poor Bosko deserves better than this.

No Chicken Tonight

George tells Junior to catch the hen he’s chasing, dunk her in a pot of water, pluck her feathers, then put her in a roasting pan in the oven.

You just know this isn’t going to happen.

Tex Avery has multiples of a running George and a running hen, frames, with a blur drawing in between, all on twos.



You can probably figure out what will happen. Junior grabs the wrong one.



The realisation take.



There’s a running gag of George telling Junior to bend over, then kicking him in the butt to form a different shape every time.



Henpecked Hoboes is not a cartoon that does much for me. I don’t find the “bend over” running gag all that funny and Dick Nelson’s nasally voice for George annoys me. But Box Office magazine deemed the short “very good.”

The animators in this short are Preston Blair, Ray Abrams, Ed Love and Walt Clinton, with Irv Spence handling the character design. His model sheets are dated January 10, 1945. Hoboes was the first MGM cartoon released in the 1946-47 season, on October 26, 1946.

What Golden Age?

Not everything in the wonderful days of network radio in the 1940s was all that wonderful. There were shows funny, creative and adept. There were others that were trite, boring and inept.

On-air people like Fred Allen, Bob and Ray, Stan Freberg and Henry Morgan poked fun at radio with some degree of causticness. Syndicated columnist John Crosby simply highlighted what he saw as banal, clichéd and tawdry. He went further than that in a series of articles on November 21, 22 and 25 where he let listeners do the talking. We’ll republish them below.

I find the first one interesting as the same, quite valid, complaint is made today.

Radio in Review.
By JOHN CROSBY
The Enraged Public
Over a period of time, a columnist gets a lot of squawks from readers, many of them directed at himself. However, a radio columnist, I find, is in a favorable position in this regard because the ire of his readers is usually directed at radio rather than at the man who writes about it. A great many of these complaints are general, but there are many, many specific gripes indicating the letter writer is not only a close listener but a critical one. It might be instructive to pass along some of these criticisms, if only to demonstrate that radio causes a lot of suffering besides your own.
The complaints range all the way up and down the scale of radio from mispronunciation to the selections made by Toscanini for the NBC symphony program. The degree of emotion also varies widely from mild irritation to thunderous rage. The most violent reaction, curiously enough, is usually excited by the smallest details.
*    *    *
Let’s start out with pronunciation. A man from Brooklyn, who describes himself as a linguist, says he is constantly shocked by mispronunciations made by professional news commentators, public figures and actors. In order to set these people's minds straight, he sent along a list of words which he has heard mangled repeatedly on the air. Here they are: "depravity" does not, he points out, have a long “a,” "cacaphony" is not accented on the second to last syllable, "inexplicable," "hospitable," formidable," "applicable," and “indefatigable” are not accented on the “i” syllable, “deprivation” does not have a long “i” and "tenet" does not have a long "e".
A New Haven man with the same complaint says he wishes Red Barber [above, right], director of sports at C. B. S., would learn that its [sic] La Guardia Field, not La Gardia Field, which he persists in saying. From Park Avenue comes a letter in which a listener swears he heard an announcer describe Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony as “po-ig-nant” music, inserting another syllable for good measure. A radio commentator who listens to other radio commentators expresses a strong aversion for the ones who stress the least important word in a phrase such as Columbia Broadcasting SYSTEM. Another irritated listener wishes Van Deventer, the Mutual Broadcasting System news commentator, would say Italy instead of Iddaly, battle instead of baddle, sentimental instead of senimenal, and avenue instead of avenoo.
Dozens of listeners complain about murder mysteries on the air on moral and intellectual grounds. One reader, however, had a special and, I believe, unique complaint. Why, he asked, did so many radio, murderers kill their wives? Why not some other victim, the mother-in-law possibly? This reader feels strongly on the subject because, he says, his own wife gets nervous during those programs and lately he finds her looking at him speculatively, possibly wondering just what thoughts are passing through his mind. He has a strong presentiment that she has already become resigned to the idea of being murdered and has fallen to speculating about when it will come off and what homicidal device he plans to use.
*    *    *
The complaints against advertising would fill a couple of large volumes, but the most illuminating came from the secretary to the director of a sanatorium. She writes that the peremptory note in commercials—("Stop in at your neighborhood druggist's TODAY and ask for Globule's Hair Tonic. Do it NOW!") have an almost hypnotic effect on the mentally deranged. Alter such a commercial, patients rush into her office with the names of products written on little slips of papers and insist that it be bought NOW, or, at the very latest, TODAY.
Complaints against announcers and masters of ceremony, particularly the latter, outnumber all others. The noisy or screaming announcer, you'll be pleased to know, irritates a great many people and has, to my knowledge, no defenders at all. A Los Angeles listener commented bitterly that he couldn't understand why everyone from movie stars to housewives, was introduced with falsetto screams from the announcer. A New Jersey listener narrows this complaint down to certain announcers and names names, specifically Jack Bailey and John Reid King [left].
A New York listener would like to know why emcees, announcers or entertainers always seem so surprised when the guest star actually shows up. "Why, if it isn't CLARK GABLE!" he shouts, as if he didn’t suspect the actor were even in town. Guest stars come in for a good deal of sour comment from readers. A great many of them ask whether something can't be done about all the mutual back-slapping that goes on between guest star and regular entertainer. One writer says he’s getting awfully tired of band leaders who introduce visiting singers as “America’s No. 1 chanteuse,” particularly when the lady in question courteously reciprocates by calling her host “America’s No. 1 band leader.”
And there are many, many irate listeners, I’ve found, who can’t understand why an audience participant gets a shattering volley of applause because he announces he’s from Brooklyn.
This is the first of a series of three articles on complaints from readers.

The Enraged Public
As Dr. Paul F. Lazerfeld pointed out in “The People Look At Radio,” radio commercials arouse not only frequent but easily the most violent complaints from the public. The letter writers bear this out. A reader complaining about, let us say, the quality of a program does so in measured sentences. But when writing about commercials, he resorts to the vivid and sometimes profane expletive.
"Positively revolting!” says one reader. "Horrible, horrible, horrible!” says another. Even when the reader holds his rage down to the point where he can finish a sentence, I find the denunciation is put in the most sweeping terms.
"Just thinking of those singing commercials would drive me to jibbering insanity," writes one man. "They are loud, nerve-wracking and have probably turned more people against radio than any other single thing."
“I’m so sick of B-O boomed at me from every angle that I’d cheerfully send every cake of Lifebuoy overseas in the hope that the advertising would be switched in that direction, too,” writes another.
“Won’t you do something about the AWFUL advertising in rhyme of the Alka Seltzer people,” pleads another woman. “Those AWFUL rhymes! That INANE dialogue!”
*    *    *
As you'll observe, the rage is so intense that mere words don't suffice, the writers take to exclamation points and capitals to express themselves. One man who writes a postcard virtually every week has four different sizes of capital letters which are barely enough to express his feelings. Several persons have written to say they will never buy another bottle of a headache remedy as long as they live because of its infuriating advertising. Some have even begun a crusade against products. The effect on sales is probably negligible but any advertiser who makes such virulent enemies among consumers is practicing poor public relations.
There are, of course, plenty of persons who write in specific complaints. One man, for instance, wonders what the copy writers would do if the word “yes” were banned from the air. Many others object to the use of the comparative ("more delicious," "more satisfying"). As "The New Yorker" magazine pointed out, the comparative is meaningless when not compared with anything. But it is not meaningless to the average listener who knows that a "more delicious" soup means a better soup than a competing product. He is less worried about the misuse of English than he is about the affront to his intelligence.
Repetitious catch phrases repeated over and over again drive many listeners crazy, and I use that word advisedly because "crazy," "insane" and other variations of lunacy bob up repeatedly from listeners writing about that form of advertising. "They go on and on and on and on," screamed one letter writer in handwriting of such intensity that it indicated her reason was beginning to totter.
Another pet peeve is any form of patent medicine advertising. "My insides are my own business," writes one angry woman, "and I'll thank the pill people to stop telling me how to put it in shape. I like it the way it is."
Listeners, at least the letter-writing listeners, view with intense distrust the linking of doctors and dentists with patent medicines, tooth powders or deodorants or any implication that a medicine is made like a doctor's prescription. Even if such a statement were true, they wouldn't believe it.
"It contains not one but several ingredients," as one reader pointed out, doesn't mean anything. It's very difficult, he said, to make a medicine containing only one ingredient.
*    *    *
The singing commercial leads all others in criticism. “The girl that goes for a man in an Adam Hat would go for anything,” writes one girl. She indicated that any man in an Adam Hat would get thrown out of her house. A special complaint against singing commercials is the practice of writing commercial lyrics to the melody of an old and beloved melody, which some listeners feel is a desecration.
All In all, the specific complaints against advertising are not so intriguing as the deep feeling which they rouse. It might interest a certain tobacco company to learn that one man wrote in that he had broken his ankle in a mad dash across the living room to turn off an announcer chanting “LS-MFT . . . LS-MFT.” . . .
This is the second in a series of three articles on complaints from listeners.

The Enraged Public
Radio programs and radio commercials are not the only things lambasted by my letter writers. They also take a dim view of studio audiences, particularly those at audience participation shows. "When I hear the silly loose-lipped laughter when some one on the stage gets a pie in the face, I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Do you think the home audience reacts that way? If they do, there isn't much hope for us," writes a man from New Jersey. A New Yorker writes: "In case the radio sponsors should ask us, which they don't, we listeners are pretty well fed up with the seemingly pent-up outbursts of acclaim from the studio audiences which greet the final words of a comedian as he steps back from the mike. He may close with no more side-splitting remark than "Well, that's all for now, folks,” when the air and our eardrums will be split by an explosion of artificial cheers accompanied by the most annoying of all sounds—finger whistles. If the sponsors think audible indorsement is needed, why not turn it into a revival meeting? Members of the audience could run to the microphone and tell in their own words how wonderful it is."
Another listener says she has learned to identify one woman who apparently goes to many radio shows and giggles continuously, particularly when nothing is very funny. This is a common complaint. One man writes that he and his wife wonder if they have lost their sense of humor. "We hear riotous and continuous laughter from the studio audiences and there we sit not able to crack a smile."
*    *    *
Another common gripe and one which could be easily corrected is against blaring music in dramatic sketches. Listeners point out that when their sets are tuned for voices they are too loud for the orchestra and when they are tuned in properly for orchestra, the voices are too low to be heard. Several persons have written to say they sit with their hand on the volume control knob and must retune their radios several times during one program.
Another and rather querulous complaint concerns the Hooper polls. "I often wonder who is approached by these polls," a Long Island woman writes. "My circle of friends is fairly large and I know no one who has been questioned." The same story comes from many listeners. I have yet to hear from any one who has been polled.
A frequent gripe lately has been the clash [in the East] between the Henry Morgan show [left] on A. B. C. at 10:30 p.m. Wednesdays and "Information, Please" on C. B. S. at the same hour. Both programs appeal to the same type of listeners and there are few programs on the air which do. Why, ask several irate fans of both programs, do they have to be broadcast at the same hour on the same night? (It was an accident. "Information, Please" had to take its time because it was the only time available on C. B. S.) There are also a good many complaints about the lateness of the hour for both programs.
*    *    *
Of late there have been increasing complaints against the reciprocal guest-star trick. "Isn't there something that can be done to break up the monopoly among the top-flight comedians?" asks a man from Wilkes-Barre, Pa. "Benny, Hope, Allen, McCarthy are bad enough by themselves, but week in week out, we find them trading guest-star appearances. I believe an action should be filed to break up this combination under the anti-trust laws."
A slightly different angle on guest stars comes from another listener who objected to the parade of governor on the Edgar Bergen program about a month ago. (The governors of California, Kansas and Missouri appeared in succession on the Bergen program.) It is bad enough," says this listener, "when the governors make fools of themselves in their official capacity but when they compete with professional comedians, it is disgusting."
There are lots more, but that's enough for now. Somewhere in the last three days you must have run across some of your own pet gripes and I hope it helped to discover that you have company.
This is the last of a series of articles on complaints from listeners.

Crosby’s other columns for the week include an attempt at being Fred Allen with a parody of Bride and Groom (November 18), an odd speculation about now-transcribed-on-ABC Bing Crosby (November 19) and one on a gorilla’s skull appearing on a daytime ladies-participation show (November 20) and looking ahead to television. You can click on each to make them larger.