Tag Archives: Jack Benny

03.14.23
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Jack’s Big Show

Jack Benny, 1964 publicity shot. Public Domain.

The new thing called television was run by the same networks that ran the old thing called radio. 

Popular radio programs, from The Lone Ranger to Art Linkletter’s House Party, were carried over to TV and brought their loyal audiences with them. 

A great radio show was The Jack Benny Program, a weekly half-hour of hilarity and running gags that ruled the air from from 1932 to 1955. Benny, like many others, made the jump from radio to TV, appearing on CBS television from 1950 to 1964 and on NBC for one year after that. For five years, he and his ensemble pulled off the frenetic trick of appearing regularly in both media.

An Overnight Success

Benny Kubelsky with violin, early 1900s. Public Domain.

He was Benjamin Kubelsky, a violin player from Waukegan, Illinois. After achieving great mediocrity in school and business, the dreamy 18-year-old took his fiddle to the vaudeville stage in 1912. 

Audiences yawned. 

Famed violinist Jan Kubelik hinted at legal action because of the similarity of names. Kubelsky, adding jokes to his routine, changed his billing to “Ben K. Benny: Fiddle Funology.” 

Ben Bernie, a well-known “patter-and-fiddle” star, was not amused. The new kid’s name was too similar.

Kubelsky—having meanwhile served in the U.S. Navy for World War I—adopted the name Jack, common parlance for a sailor (“Jack Tar”). 

After two decades of scratching out a living, first as a vaudevillian, then as a movie novice at MGM, Jack Benny auditioned for NBC Radio and became an overnight success.

Show Within a Show

Jack Benny, newly-minted radio star, in a 1933 NBC publicity shot. Public Domain.

For NBC, Benny—billed as “the star of stage, screen, and radio”—exercised his dramatic skills by portraying a radio comic named Jack Benny. 

This fellow Benny lived a sedate bachelor life in Beverly Hills. He employed the gravel-voiced Rochester, a butler-valet-chauffeur played by black actor Eddie Anderson. Benny’s girlfriend Mary Livingstone (in real life his wife, Sadie Marks) dropped by often, as did people from the cast of his radio show: bandleader Phil Harris, boyish tenor Dennis Day, the closely harmonious Sportsmen Quartet, and rotund announcer Don Wilson.

Mary Livingstone, 1940 publicity photo. Public Domain.

Add a rotating cast of quirky character actors including multi-voiced Mel Blanc, supercilious Frank Nelson (with his famous baritone “Ye-e-e-s-s-s?”), and race track tout Sheldon Leonard (“Psst! Hey, Bud!”), and you had the basic ingredients. 

Dennis Day. ABC publicity photo, 1960. Public Domain.

A show’s plot would focus on some minor incident in the life of stage-screen-radio star Jack Benny. One week he, Mary, and Dennis would go to the race track to play the ponies. Another week Rochester would drive him to the train station for a trip to Palm Springs. Another week, Benny went Christmas shopping or stewed about an impending meeting with his show’s sponsors. Odd things happened to Benny in these commonplace situations, with disparaging commentary by the screwball characters in his cast. 

A comedian playing a comedian in a show about nothing. Are you listening, Jerry Seinfeld?

Pay No Attention to That Man at Center Stage

With kooks on every hand, Jack Benny himself seemed like the normal person in the show. But not exactly . . .

Each episode revolved around Benny. He was center stage. The shady characters, uppity store clerks, band members in a constant state of carousal, wry Mexican villagers, and most of all Benny’s long-suffering household intimates—Mary, Don, Dennis and especially Rochester—all served to call attention to Benny’s eccentricities.

He was vain and vainglorious. Blue-eyed and never ageing beyond 39, he admitted freely to being a violin virtuoso and a comic genius, with leading-man looks thrown in. 

He was indecisive, sometimes making a store clerk wrap, unwrap, and rewrap a purchased gift half a dozen times so that he could change the sentiments expressed on the card inside.

Most of all, he was cheap as only the rich can be. He had fabulous wealth, which he kept in an impregnable basement vault, while pathologically resisting any effort to part him with a dime. This miser image was displayed in every show and developed in almost every joke, until no American could have been unaware that Benny was a skinflint. 

His stinginess was the tacit explanation for his car, a 1908 Maxwell roadster, always on the verge of death. When Rochester, as chauffeur, would suggest Jack acquire a new car, he always insisted on coaxing a few more miles out of the Maxwell. The car’s throes of anguish in its brave attempts to start were given voice by the great Mel Blanc.

Jack Benny and Eddie Anderson as Rochester from the television version of The Jack Benny Show, with Jack’s 1908 Maxwell—one of the rare times an actual car was shown. CBS Television, 1951. Public Domain.

When Benny encountered a hoodlum demanding cash, the studio audience and every fan at home could see the punchline coming.

Jack was a master of the long pause. Comics to this day rave about Benny’s comic timing.

Fred Allen 1940 publicity photo. Public Domain.

Audiences, who may not have understood such subtleties, roared.

To boost ratings, Benny and rival comic Fred Allen concocted a feud, which played out on both shows over a period of almost twenty years, until Allen’s sudden death at 61 in 1956. A typical exchange:

Allen: Jack, you couldn’t ad lib a belch after a plate of Hungarian goulash.

Benny: You wouldn’t say that if my writers were here.

But Benny’s writers were there, every Sunday night. And when he moved from radio to television, “audiences learned that his verbal talent was matched by his controlled repertory of dead-pan facial expressions and gesture” (Wikipedia).

A Smooth Transition

Except for that discovery, the transition was seamless. Of all shows that went from radio to TV, Benny’s had the least noticeable format change. The Jack Benny Program on television was exactly what we radio listeners had always seen in our mind’s eye.

Benny trouped on for another fifteen years on television and continued making stage and TV appearances until shortly before his death in 1974. 

Audiences gradually learned that Jack’s on-air persona was a carefully constructed myth. In person he was warm and generous. And his devotion to music was real, even if his musical talent was less than stellar.

He donated a Stradivarius violin purchased in 1957 to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. At the time of the gift, Benny said, “If it isn’t a $30,000 Strad, I’m out $120.”

If you’re interested in a more complete account of the Jack Benny Program, try  https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Jack_Benny_Program.

Next week: Something completely different. Tune in.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought.)

03.07.23
by

Add Pictures and Stir

Guglielmo Marconi, in 1896, figured out how to send Morse’s telegraphic code through the air, over great distances, without wires. 

Guglielmo Marconi. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.

Microphones, also invented in the late 19th century by a series of audio pioneers, were added to the radio signal, and by the 1930s commercial radio had become an established medium. Popular programs included The Lone Ranger, Amos ’n’ Andy, and the National Barn Dance.

Antique radio, photographed by Doug Coldwell, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. 

After supper, American families now sat around large wooden boxes warmed by the orange glow of vacuum tubes to hear concerts, dramas, comedies, mysteries, westerns, news, and quiz shows. Your New Favorite Writer remembers it, Dear Reader. When I was a boy, in the Fifties, “old-time radio” was still going strong. 

But the seeds of its destruction had been sown. Somebody—a group of somebodies, actually—figured out how to transmit motion pictures using radio waves. 

At the end of World War II in 1945, almost nobody owned a television set. By 1955—only ten years later—almost nobody did not own a television set. 

Continuity is a recurring theme in human affairs. The first automobiles resembled horse-drawn buggies or carriages, with a combustion engine taking the place of the horse. 

Early TV set, an RCA Model 630-TS, sold in 1946-47. Photo by Fletcher6, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Likewise, the first TV sets were built like radios: lovely mahogany furniture filled with vacuum tubes, with the addition of a luminous picture tube, the front surface of which served as a screen. That one extra tube brought moving pictures of the world to us in glorious black-and-white. 

Continuity of design ruled content as well. The early television shows were often just radio programs with pictures added.

Cowboys and Indians

Moore and Silverheels as the Lone Ranger and Tonto. ABC photo, Public Domain.

The Lone Ranger and his “faithful Indian companion” Tonto galloped across our living room three nights a week on ABC Radio. When TV came along, they became movie stars, their cinematic exploits piped into our homes once a week on Saturday mornings. 

George W. Trendle produced both the radio and television series, but other personnel changed. On radio, Brace Beemer played the Lone Ranger and John Todd played Tonto. But Beemer was only marginally photogenic, so Clayton Moore was hired to wear a mask and ride the great horse Silver, while authentic Native American Jay Silverheels took over the Tonto role. He looked the part.

Gunsmoke was another western that began on radio and switched to TV. Manly-voiced radio actor William Conrad played U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon. But Conrad was inescapably rotund, so he was replaced in the TV series by tall, lanky James Arness.

William Conrad. CBS Radio photo, Public Domain.
James Arness. CBS Television photo, Public Domain.

What’s a Question Worth?

The radio quiz show show Take It or Leave It premiered in 1940 and rapidly became popular. Wikipedia describes its format perfectly: “Contestants selected from the audience were asked questions. After answering a question correctly, the contestant had the choice to ‘take’ the prize for that question or ‘leave it’ in favor of a chance at the next question. The first question was worth $1, and the value doubled for each successive question, up to the seventh and final question worth $64.”

Because of the show’s popularity, “That’s the sixty-four dollar question” became a widely-used catchphrase applied to any especially difficult conundrum. 

When something you have created becomes a household word, use it. Take It or Leave It changed its title in 1950 to The $64 Question. The program went off the air two years later.

But in 1955, CBS revived The $64 Question as a television show, hosted by actor Hal March. The producers added three zeroes and called it The $64,000 Question. It was the first big-money game show. For that kind of dough, they made the questions hard.

IBM card sorter, 1955. Photo by Atomic Taco, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

For TV, they added visual gimmicks to the program. When a contestant chose the category to compete in, a lovely young lady pushed the start button on an IBM card sorter—at that time the most decorative aspect of computer technology. The machine whirred and shuffled. The lovely assistant scooped up a deck of IBM cards from the end of the sorter and delivered the deck to Hal March. 

It seemed that an all-knowing machine, the computer, had spun out a graduated series of questions on the spur of the moment. A modern marvel!

There was another gimmick: Once a contestant reached the $8,000 level, he or she was sequestered in an “isolation booth,” able to hear only the quizmaster. It was show biz, folks.

Dr. Joyce Brothers in 1957. World Telegram photo by Phyllis Twacht. Public Domain.

The show spawned imitators: The $64,000 Challenge, Twenty-One, The Big Surprise, Dotto, and Tic-Tac-Dough—all quiz shows with tough questions and high stakes. We TV watchers could not get enough of shows like that. They made instant heroes of brainy people nobody had heard of before. People like eleven-year-old science wizard Rob Strom; polymath Teddy Nadler, a St. Louis stock clerk who made $264,000 answering questions across a broad range of categories; and everybody’s favorite, psychologist Joyce Brothers, a demure young blonde with an uncanny knowledge of boxing. All us regular folks out in TV-land were deeply impressed.

What’s an Answer Worth?

Then, in August 1958, CBS cancelled Dotto without explanation. A federal probe revealed a contestant had been given answers in advance. The G-men expanded their inquiries and found hanky-panky going on in several shows. The bloom was off the rose for big-money game shows. They all went off the air that fall and did not return until forty years later (Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, 1998).

Soon after, in 1959, the U.S. Congress launched grim hearings exposing “payola.” The Congressmen were shocked, shocked!, to learn that record companies were paying radio disc jockeys to plug their records, manufacturing smash hits by the simple expedient of playing them more often than other records. This actually might have been legal had the source of funding been disclosed; but it was not.

The quiz show scandals, followed soon by the payola scandals, were a one-two punch to the solar plexis and jaw of Middle America. Perhaps not since the Black Sox scandal of 1919 has the American public been so let down. (“Say it ain’t so, Joe!”)

It was hard to know exactly how we’d been cheated. The quiz shows, after all, were entertainment. Seeing all these smart people answer tough questions was engrossing and entertaining, even it it was rigged. After all, for years we’d been watching professional wrestling, which everybody knew was rigged. We liked it anyway.

Likewise, the smash hits produced by the payola system were great songs. We still play them on the oldies stations today. Did anybody really care how they made their way onto the air? 

Still, there was something unsettling about unseen people manipulating contests we had no reason to think were not on the square. Our stubborn innocence was under attack.

I’m not sure it has ever recovered. 

A Ray of Hope

Fortunately for all of us, Jack Benny remained steadfastly on the air, first on radio, then TV.

Benny and cast members, 1946. Public Domain.

Be sure to tune in next week.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

10.08.19
by

Say Goodnight, Gracie

Nattie Birnbaum was in a jam. He needed a new act. Nattie loved the vaudeville circuit, but it was not a secure living. 

Vaudeville was a form of theater—before cinema, radio, and television—that featured brief live performances: Songs, dances, song-and-dance teams, comedy acts, animal acts, jugglers, magicians.

Nattie was game for almost anything that got him a gig. He had been Glide of Goldie, Francis, and Glide; Jed Jackson of Jackson and Malone; Maurice Valente of Maurice Valente and His Wonder Dog; Harris of Harris and Dunlop; Jose of Jose and Dolores; at various times both Brown and Williams of Brown and Williams; Jack Garfield; and “Eddie Delight when the real Eddie Delight got out of show business and gave me all his left-over business cards.” 

However, after years of experience, Nattie still did not have a successful long-term act. For the past year he had performed with Billy Lorraine under the name George Burns, but the act was going nowhere fast. Then—

SHAZAM!

Show Business Magic happened. 

A woman named Rena Arnold brought a friend to see Burns and Lorraine perform. “Nattie,” Rena said, “this is Grace Allen.” 

Grace told Rena she would not consider performing with Billy Lorraine, who had a tendency to stutter when he was nervous. But she would not mind trying a partnership with the other one. “That was my big talent.” George Burns reflected in his 1988 book, Gracie: A Love Story. “I didn’t stammer.” That’s the kind of line that would cue a cigar puff. Whenever George delivered a funny line, he puffed on his cigar—a signal for the audience to laugh. You know, in case they couldn’t tell.

George and Gracie started with “a boy-girl act, a flirtation act.” George had most of the funny lines. “Just to make sure the audience knew I was the funny one in the act,” he wrote, “I dressed like a comedian. . . . I wore wide pants and a short coat, a hat with the brim turned up in front, and a trick bow tie on a swivel. That jazzbo tie was very important; this was long before I smoked a cigar onstage; I let the audience know I’d told a joke by whirling my bow tie. Being the straight man, Gracie wore a lovely dress.” 

Gracie Steals the Show

Burns and Allen, 1952. CBS Television. Public Domain.

They soon discovered that Gracie got more laughs than George. So George rewrote the material with himself as straight man and Gracie the funny girl. They became a  sensation. When vaudeville died, they made the transition to motion pictures and radio. In 1950 they dropped radio for television. For eight years they had a hit half-hour sitcom—in fact, they helped invent the form. Then Gracie retired, never to perform again.

George and Gracie were what vaudeville called a “Dumb Dora act.” The woman got the laughs by being silly, stupid—a featherbrain. But Gracie, from the beginning, was Something Different.

“The audience had created Gracie’s character,” George wrote. “I listened to the jokes they laughed at and gave Gracie more of that type. Gracie certainly wasn’t the first comedienne in vaudeville. There had been a long line of ‘Dumb Doras’ . . . . What made Gracie different was her sincerity. She didn’t try to be funny. Gracie never told a joke in her life, she simply answered the questions I asked her as best she could, and seemed genuinely surprised when the audience found her answers funny. Onstage, Gracie was totally honest, and honesty is the most important thing a performer can have. And if a performer can fake that, he can do anything.” 

Gentle Reader, if you have never seen Burns and Allen perform, you may not understand what George meant in the paragraph above. So we invite you, through the wonders of the Internet, to spend the next four minutes watching this. When you have done that, our symposium will reconvene here.

Many other samples of Burns and Allen’s work can be found online; you don’t need me to direct you to them. They include brief monologues when George tells jokes and puffs his cigar so you’ll know when to laugh. But, invariably and everlastingly, Gracie is the mainstay. George’s true genius lay in knowing how to cue Gracie appropriately, stay out of her way, and react naturally. His other true genius was in running all the business and managerial aspects of their show-business partnership. 

“The audience roared,” he wrote. “Either I was the greatest straight man who ever lived or Gracie was something special. By the time we finished those three days in Newark, Gracie had three-quarters of the punch lines. I didn’t mind, I still had 60 percent of our salary.”

Partners in Life, Too

When Nathan Birnbaum, from the Lower East Side of New York, and Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen, from Irish Catholic roots in San Francisco, started their vaudeville act, it was strictly a business partnership. Gracie was in love with a big star named Benny Ryan. But theirs was a long-distance relationship, since she and Ryan were always playing different cities. Soon, George fell in love with Gracie and began a determined campaign to woo and win her away from Benny Ryan.

With the disarmingly honest self-assessment that is one of his charms, Burns wrote: “I fell in love with Gracie because she was pretty, smart, nice, and talented. But I’ll tell you the truth. I also fell in love with Gracie because I fell in love with making a good living. If she had married Benny Ryan, what was I going to do for an act? I had no real affection for the seal [with whom he had once performed]. The Siamese twins already had partners. Where was I going to find another Gracie? Remember, she was born Gracie, she wasn’t manufactured. Gracie didn’t come by the dozen. I fell in love with her just like our audiences did.” 

Extra Tidbits

George Burns, who lived many years after Gracie’s death in 1964, turned out to be the bestselling author of ten books. I have not read any of the others. But I suppose Gracie, A Love Story is the one you need. Besides the tiny glimpses given above, it reveals many facts I had not previously known about George and Gracie, even though I grew up in the era when they were household names.

  • Gracie Allen ran as the Surprise Party’s candidate for President in 1940 against FDR and Wendell Willkie, on the slogan, “Down with common sense. Vote for Gracie.” She even did a whistle-stop tour.
  • Gracie was never seen in public except in full or three-quarter-length sleeves, because her upper arm had been badly scarred in a scalding accident when she was a child. 
  • She had one blue eye and one green eye. 
  • George and Gracie, unable to conceive, adopted two children, Sandy and Ronnie, as infants from a Catholic orphans’ home in Evanston, Illinois. Ronnie later appeared on television as their handsome young-adult son, Ronnie.
  • Jack Benny, fellow star of stage, screen, radio, and TV, was their dearest friend—a man beloved by all who knew him. His wife, Mary Livingstone (née Sadie Marks), not so much.
  • When Gracie retired in 1958, she was physically worn out and had a debilitating heart condition. In those days there were no heart transplants or coronary bypasses. She was given nitoglycerin pills to control the pain, but eventually her heart gave out.

Nattie summed it all up very fittingly in the opening line of the book: “For forty years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.”

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author 

Larry F. Sommers

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

06.18.19
by

Radio Days

The Adventures of Izzy Mahler

A boy named Izzy Mahler, seven years old, springs out of bed and dashes down the stairs. It is a Saturday morning in October, 1952. 

The Old Philco

Barefoot and pajama’d, Izzy makes straight for the wooden Philco radio, switches it on. Izzy remembers going downtown with Dad to bring home the Philco and its fine supporting table. Ever since—through three apartments, the birth of little Christine, and now the move to this two-story house just across the alley from Grant School—the Philco has been the Mahlers’ proudest possession, and the most useful.

Moving on to the kitchen, Izzy opens the refrigerator, takes out a quart of milk, removes the round cardboard cap from the glass bottle’s neck, and pours himself a glass. Then he sits down at the kitchen table and listens as the radio set in the living room spills forth Let’s Pretend, Buster Brown, and Space Patrol. He sees every detail of each story.

Commander Buzz Corey is just cutting his way into Jelna’s spaceship with an atomic cutting torch when Mom and Dad come out in wrinkled pajamas, rubbing their heads with their knuckles. Izzy wishes he had an atomic cutting torch like Buzz Corey’s, or even just a plain old cosmic ray gun. He would give it to President Eisenhower for copying. That way, should American soldiers run into bug-eyed monsters from Planet Orkulon, they’d be ready.

“Ray gun prop” by lessherger is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Christine bangs her tin cup on the wooden tray of her high chair, but Izzy hardly hears. Why can’t you get a ray gun by sending in box-tops? he wonders. A ray gun would take more boxtops, and probably more quarters, than the usual things like the Lone Ranger decoder ring he lost while helping Buster Wiggins plant potatoes—but it would be worth it. He hopes none of the Wigginses will bite into a spud and break a tooth on his decoder ring. 

Now Christine squalls to beat the band, so loud that Izzy can’t hear the radio.

“Harold,” Mom says. Dad stares into space, as usual. Mom plunks down the checkbook with a loud WHACK! Dad sighs and sits down at the kitchen table.

Izzy goes upstairs and gets dressed. When he comes down, Dad frowns over his slide rule, while Mom knits her brows over numbers scrawled on paper with a pencil. 

Izzy opens the back door. Dad looks up. “Where are you going, son?”

“Out to play,” Izzy says.

“Be home for supper,” says Mom.

A fictionalized account of true events.

Out of the Ether

I was born in 1945 into a family that couldn’t, or at least didn’t, afford a television set until 1957, when everybody else had already had a set for two or three years. As a result, I was privileged to be present at the last stand of radio broadcasting as a mass entertainment medium—before TV gobbled up radio’s best shows, and most of its advertising revenue, added a few original programs of its own, and became—well, Television. As we know it.

If you did not experience those “radio days,” let me assure you: radio was great. All the action, all the drama, all the excitement, all the laughs of TV—only you could see it better, because everything played on the full color, panoramic, high-definition screen inside your mind—with all the pans, tilts, and zooms each story required. 

Stan Freberg, the advertising world’s comic genius, produced a radio spot, “Stretching the Imagination,” that perfectly illustrates the vast cinematic potential of the sound-only medium. You can hear it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppZ57EeX6vE.

An Embarrassment of Riches

What kind of shows did radio offer? Besides the Saturday morning fare Izzy consumed in our fictional vignette, there were:

Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger. “roy_trigger_new_color72.jpg” by amycgx is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 

Westerns galore, all of the juvenile variety: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. But most of all, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:30 p.m.: “In the pages of history there is no greater champion of justice than this daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains, who, with his faithful Indian companion Tonto, led the fight for law and order in the early West. . . . Return with us now to those gripping days of yesteryear—the Lone Ranger rides again!”

Northerns, starring Royal Canadian Mounted Police like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon with his famous lead dog Yukon King; and mountie Jim West, The Silver Eagle, voiced by radio legend Jim Ameche—one of the Amici boys from Kenosha, Wisconsin—on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Lone Ranger’s 6:30 time slot. 

Game shows like The Quiz Kids and The 64-Dollar Question. That’s not a misprint. Sixty-four dollars was the top prize. That was big money. When television came along, the same show was recycled, “isolation booths” added for showmanship, and three zeroes tacked on to the prizes—so it became The $64,000 Question.

Audience-participation shows like Art Linkletter’s People Are Funny or Ralph Edwards’ Truth or Consequences, in which typical Americans made fools of themselves, on the screen in your mind, for fame, glory, and small sums of money. They may have been forerunners of what is today called “reality TV.” 

Comedies, glorious comedies of all descriptions. There was the pompous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with his dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd; you could not even see his lips move—at least, on the radio. There were situation comedies of small-town life, like Fibber McGee and Molly and The Great Gildersleeve. Others relied on ethnic identities: The Goldbergs (not to be confused with the 2013 TV series of that name), Life with Luigi (in which Irish-American actor J. Carrol Naish played the title Italian character), and Amos ’n’ Andy (a show whose African American title characters were created and portrayed by white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll). There were comedies about teenagers—Henry Aldrich, Corliss Archer, My Little Margie, and the high school denizens taught by Our Miss Brooks. And there were wholesome family shows like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. (Leave It to Beaver, the classic exemplar of this kind of show, never appeared on radio; it was a creature of television only.) 

“Jack Benny entertaining troops during World War II” by gbaku is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 

And then there was The Jack Benny Show, in some ways the forerunner of modern shows like Seinfeld. To say the Benny show was comedy is true enough; but it hardly does justice to the subject. Jack Benny was an institution. Perhaps a good subject for a later blog post.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)