Jack Benny, 1894-1974: The man who
could be funny just by standing there

One of my favorite Benny/Blanc routines is from the tv show where Jack is in a department store trying to buy a wallet for a Christmas present for Don Wilson. He drives the poor counter clerk, played by Blanc, so crazy that he pulls out a gun and walks off screen. Then a shot rings out! Although I was a little shocked that they would end a Christmas sketch with a suicide joke, the build up to it was absolutely priceless. (And having spent more than my fair share in the retail trenches during the Holiday season, I could sympathize with Blanc's character wanting to top himself...)

My favorite movie of all time is To Be or Not To Be. I wish Carole Lombard and Jack Benny could have made dozens of movies.

In the book The Powers that Be, when he documented the competition between NBC and CBS in the early days of radio, I love the story that while NBC had the better hardware, network etc, CBS had Jack Benny. Guess who won. Lessons for today still.

I grew up in Philadelphia, and when I was a kid (the 1980s) one of the local AM stations would play old radio shows every night, starting at seven. So I heard The Shadow, and Fibber McGee and Molly, and the original Dragnet, but my favorite was Jack Benny's show. I don't know why it appealed to me as a kid, but it did. I grew up to be a sort of comedy geek; about two years ago, I found a lot of Jack Benny Show episodes online, and downloaded them, curious as to how they held up, and I was surprised by just how funny they were, and how much I enjoyed them as an adult. I guess I was a smarter kid than I remember being.

Back in college (further back than I care to admit) a prof of mine in the Radio-TV Dept. told students that Jack Benny held the record for the longest sustained laugh in broadcasting history. According to the tale, Benny had made a cutting joke about Jack Warner during one of his weekly radio shows. In the week that followed, the papers were full of stories about it and, reportedly, Warner's displeasure. When the next week's show aired, Benny answered a ringing phone in one of the sketches and followed the "Hello" with "Oh, yes, Mr. Warner." That was enough to bring a laugh. Then he said, "But..." which produced a bigger laugh. For the next 14 minutes (the prof told us) Benny played that audience with nothing more than additional utterances of "But..." whenever the laughs started to drop. Of course, the studio audience had one advantage over the radio audience -- they could watch Jack's reactions. And, as Roger points out, the man could get laughs just standing there. (This story, by the way, is not supported by anything in Wikipedia's entry for Jack Benny...so it's a case of a story that isn't true, but ought to be!).

Most comedians have to do comedy to get laughs; Benny had to do a lot less than most to get a huge response -- he was pretty funny just being Jack Benny, a very funny character. It seems to me that Jimmy Durante only had to be Jimmy to get laughs, making him the Buddha of comedy; if you look at most Durante "routines,: they make little or no sense and could have been written by bartenders at Fritzel's. Benny's material, in contrast, was beautifully tailored by expert writers. Both men were giants in the field of comedy, despite disappointing film careers ("To Be or Not To Be" being the exception, of course, and a glimmer of the Durante enlightenment shines through one of my favorite B movies, "It Happened in Brooklyn"). It's the ultimate achievement, imo, when a comedian can stop doing comedy and just be funny.

As a one-time violin player of fair ability, I remember a hilarious skit from Jack Benny's TV program (I saw it on a rerun, as I was too young to watch it when it first was aired) where he is a violin student and Mel Blanc plays his teacher, who has been driven crazy trying to teach him to play the Kreutzer sonata right. I'd love to see that skit again.

I just found this page on your web site, Roger, although you posted it over a month ago.

I must tell you, I am a true "Jack Benny" afficionado, in the sense that I have collected about a hundred cassette recordings of the Jack Benny radio show.

To me, Golden Age Radio Comedy is the purest form of comedy. Benny and his contemporaries couldn't do sight gags or blue humor. They had to have quality writing with ingenius jokes based on the characters and their personalities. They had to create images in the minds of their listeners in order to sell the jokes. This meant their situations and humor had to be very well-written, and the characters had to be very strong.

Jack Benny created an unforgettable character -- the stingy, vain man, the inept violin player, who could be the butt of jokes from all those around him, even from his African-American valet Rochester. (A black character who was of equal intelligence to his white employer was an innovation for that day.)

There are "Jack Benny" radio shows where Jack himself barely appears. His friends -- Phil Harris, Don Wilson, Dennis Day, and Mary Livingstone -- stand around making jokes about Jack, and getting huge laughs, because everyone in the audience knows Jack's character so well. Then in the last five minutes of the show, Jack shows up and asks, "What have you all been talking about today?"

This was the mark of a true professional. Benny could let others on his show get the laughs. He didn't have to have every punchline to himself. Also, he was not afraid to take risks. It takes courage to turn the show over to your supporting cast, so that they get the laughs, while you show up at the end of the show. No comedian today would do it.

Of course, Jack himself was possessed of perfect comic timing. His famous "Jack Benny pauses," accompanied by a pained look, would get huge laughs because the audience knew his persona so well, they could tell what he was thinking with his silence. They could feel his frustration, or his wounded vanity, when someone deflated Benny's ego.

Benny was also a master of the running gag, and could stretch the use of a gag (i.e. "Anaheim, Asuza, and Cuc-amunga!") over many shows and many years. He knew how to use sound effects, and fortunately had legendary sound man Mel Blanc (who did everything from the voice of Polly the Parrot to the hiccupping of the Old Maxwell) on his show.

It's too bad that Jack Benny isn't as well remembered these days as, say, Bob Hope or Johnny Carson. Hopefully, the YouTube phenomenon will allow people to rediscover Benny and other classic comedians.

If you're interested in hearing many of Jack Benny's classic radio shows, here's a link to a page with over 200 free shows in .WAV format.

http://www.freeotrshows.com/otr/j/Jack_Benny_Program.html

Late in his career, Jack Benny appeared as a guest on one of those British-made summer replacement shows that the networks often scheduled, because they were less expensive than doing them locally.

In one sketch, Jack walked into a men's clothing shop. He picked up a necktie and, smiling pleasantly, asked the clerk how miuch it cost.

(The following figures are approximate; it's been a while since I saw this, and I'm guessing at the rate of excahnge.)

Anyway, Jack asks the clerk,"How much does this tie cost?"

The clerk answers, "That tie sells for ten pounds, sir."

Jack asks, "How much is that in American money?"

The clerk answers, "That would come to about twenty-five American dollars."

And Jack Benny, still smiling, still holding the necktie in his hands, froze in position for what must have been at least the next two full minutes.

"Sir? Mr. Benny? Sir?"

Another customer walked into the store, and the clerk moved over to deal with him. Jack held his position like a West Point cadet.

The studio audience was laughing so hard that the conversation between the clerk and the other customer couldn't be heard.

I was laughing so hard that to this day I can't remember how they paid the bit off.

All I can remember is Jack Benny.

Just standing there.