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Benny at War with the Radio Critics

Jack Benny’s radio program, riding high in the ratings in 1940, suffered a prolonged slump during World War II.1 Benny lost his two writers, and key cast members left for military service. He felt obligated to broadcast programs from stateside military camps, which seriously cramped the show’s style. His sponsor and ad agency neglected to adequately promote the program. The narrative of the show floundered and the comedy was often listless. The ratings declined precipitously. The bright spots in his wartime recession were his summer overseas tours to perform live USO shows to military camps in African, European, and Pacific battlegrounds. In 1945 the radio program started to improve, as Benny and a new team of writers experimented with adding new characters and comedy routines to the show. Although the innovations took some time to jell together, the Benny show gradually climbed out of its doldrums and recaptured its radio audience; by late 1946 Benny regained his previous high ratings. The re-energized show also reached new levels of popular acclaim; the period between 1946 and the early 1950s became known as the program’s “golden era.”

Benny’s radio wartime fall and postwar revival occurred during a time of aesthetic malaise in network broadcasting. Radio was at its height in terms of revenues, listenership, and influence, but was simultaneously drowning in critics’ disapproval. A new breed of radio critics, fresh voices emanating from top newspapers and magazines, thrust aside the curtains cloaking commercial network radio’s operation and exposed all of its shortcomings, mistakes, and sins.² Jack Benny unexpectedly found himself in the middle of this maelstrom of discontent. As one of the most successful and longest-running of the radio comics, Benny served as a lightning rod for critics’ disparaging blasts—Benny’s time-worn narrative formulas were dull; his jokes were corrosively nasty, derivative, and repetitive; and fossilized performers like Benny were propped up unnecessarily by sponsors, who would not permit new talent to blossom.

The newspaper critics were led by brash young journalist John Crosby, whose “Radio in Review” column debuted in the back pages of the New York Herald Tribune in May 1946. Crosby was joined by other reviewers (Gilbert Seldes, Jack Gould, Ben Gross, and Harriet Van Horne), who energetically attacked the stagnation, overcommercialization, and tastelessness of current radio offerings.3 They hammered away at Benny, not only as symbol of the strangling control of sponsors over program choices, but also for the legion of imitators who broadcast pale copies of his show. They called for innovative program formats, and higher levels of artistic aspiration. The new radio critics carved out a unique place for themselves in arts criticism, as Amanda Lotz has noted; commenters on the fields of music, dance, the theatre, and even film did not have to negotiate so constantly between the imperatives of a medium that was “at once an artistic and commercial form.”⁴ The new critics brought a much-needed outsiders’ perspective to radio that was not beholden to networks, commercial interests, or the entertainment trade press, and they played invaluable roles in the production of popular culture of the postwar era.

Benny and his writers ameliorated his show’s problems with innovations like the “I Can’t Stand Jack Benny Because” contest, and the introductions of the Ronald and Benita Colman characters, Professor LeBlanc, the Sportsmen Quartet, and the subterranean vault—and still the show was held up by the critics as an example of everything that was wrong with radio. Benny was defensive, hurt by the charges. Nevertheless, Benny and his writers occasionally turned to engage the critics head-on—on the air in comic performance in the case of Gilbert Seldes, and through published replies to criticism and tentative negotiations with John Crosby.

The downside of the sponsor-controlled system, as the radio critics sternly pointed out, was that radio audiences and innovative performers, writers, and producers were terribly shortchanged. The near-sightedness of ratings-seeking sponsors and advertising agencies kept them overreliant on the same top performers and programs for decades, stifling chances for artistic innovation. There was an ironic benefit to this system, however—certain performers, producers, and writers were allowed time to develop finely crafted comedy or dramas over a period of many years. The fragmentation of broadcasting and mass audiences since the 1990s has put tremendous pressure on television programmers to maximize ratings and create immediate viewer support. Executives have become so fearful of failure that they cancel a struggling new show after just a few episodes, rather than giving it time to develop an engaging narrative and find a devoted audience. Jack Benny often expressed gratitude for having been able to cultivate characters and situations over time in the early 1930s, to work out problems in the mid-1940s, and restructure to his radio program for the needs of television in the 1950s, rather than to have decision makers, frightened by the show’s declining ratings at any of these critical junctures, end his program. Benny pointed to Benita Colman’s joke about how even the mention of Phil Harris and his band could spoil her appetite. The comedy contained in the dialog’s hugely successful punch line was a gag whose pay off laugh could only have been so potent with a twelve-year build up.5

BENNY’S WARTIME SLUMP

1940 found Jack Benny a major ratings and box office force across radio, film, and live performance. The success of his Paramount radio films released in 1939 and 1940 (Man About Town, Buck Benny Rides Again, Love Thy Neighbor) would bring Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox studios knocking on Benny’s door, as they asked him to lend them his box office magic. Benny worked constantly, simultaneously making films during the broadcast year and crafting his weekly radio show. Each summer Benny took his radio cast on the road for lucrative personal appearances at urban movie palaces. Disappointed by the increasingly tepid efforts of his sponsor General Foods and ad agency Young & Rubicam (Y&R) to support him with extensive promotional efforts (unlike what Bob Hope and Edgar Bergen were getting), an enormously frustrated Benny saw his rivals surpassing him in the ratings in 1941.

Benny’s comedy show faced challenges as soon as the United States entered World War II. The heartbreak of war quickly came home to Benny in January 1942, when his friend and To Be or Not to Be co-star Carole Lombard was killed in an airplane crash as she returned to Hollywood from a war bond selling trip. She had been scheduled to appear on Benny’s radio program to promote their new film that Sunday. Lombard’s death was a psychological and emotional blow to Benny; he cancelled his comedy episode for that week and instead asked his orchestra to provide a somber musical program. The loss soured him on creating the type of highly effective on-air marketing campaign for the film To Be or Not to Be like those that had boosted Benny’s previous mediocre Paramount films to box office gold.

Pressure to contribute to patriotic homefront efforts also caused problems. Soon after the war started, Benny and his cast began making field trips to broadcast their regular radio program from military bases. Other comics were taking their shows to the camps, and the pressure to do likewise must have been immense. Benny produced eight episodes of his program at camps between January and May 1942, but he was so dissatisfied with the subpar results that he vowed to stop. Camp programs cramped the Jell-O Program’s narrative style by gearing the program’s jokes towards the boisterous servicemen audiences in front of them and away from its home listeners and Benny’s carefully rehearsed control. The writers especially had trouble incorporating Rochester into the narratives. He was the camp audience’s favorite character, but Rochester (Jack’s valet at his home in Beverly Hills) had almost never been included in skits where the cast was at the studio creating the fictional radio show. The writers resorted to clunky routines having Rochester telephone Benny from a gas station outside the base. Time magazine pointedly noted that other comics like the “uninhibited” Bob Hope, “who adores his soldier audience,” didn’t have such problems doing their patriotic duty:

Although willing to do special camp shows, fretful Jack Benny, after several attempts, has concluded that he couldn’t entertain soldiers and the home folks from the same script. His advertising agency agreed, but its announcement of the disassociation raised a few eyebrows. . . . Benny has found that incalculable whoops and whistles upset his expertly worried lines. No ad-libber, he has to stick to his painfully prepared script, [and] feels that a lot of mugging thrown in for a visual audience is a sin against his radio listeners.6

While Bob Hope gained approbation from troops and the public for his camp show performances around the world, not as many people were aware that Jack Benny also made major commitments to entertain troops during the war. His gratis appearances on Command Performance and other Armed Forces Radio Service (AFROS) programs were usually not heard stateside.⁷ Benny also led a small, intrepid USO troupe to military outposts on the front lines in North Africa, the Middle East, and Sicily in Summer 1943, the South Pacific in 1944, and France and Germany in 1945. Benny blamed lax publicity efforts by General Foods and Y&R for the relative obscurity in which he labored.⁸

If new demands on Benny’s time weren’t challenging enough, he received knock-out punches to his program from the military draft. First Benny lost the services of Phil Harris and his band to the Merchant Marine in December 1942; Benny used stand-in musicians until Phil returned in March 1943. Then Benny lost his two writers, Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow, in May 1943. Morrow was drafted; Beloin decided to move on to screenwriting. Variety reported that Benny’s show writing staff was the hardest hit among the major radio programs, and that the comic was at the end of his rope:9

Jack Benny is threatening to quit radio this fall. He is said to have told friends that on his trip East he will ask General Foods for a release from his contract. Comedian said he wouldn’t be averse to doing a few occasional guest shots but that the regular Sunday grind would be too hard on him, what with his writers of the past eight years, Bill Morrow and Ed Beloin, engaged elsewhere.¹⁰

Y&R executive Tom Harrington and producer Pat Weaver rushed out from the East Coast to Benny’s vacation home in Palm Springs to quash the rumors, calm Benny down, and help him rebuild his scriptwriting team.¹¹

In the summer of 1943, Benny hired new writers to start working on his program in the fall. Probably nervous about how overly dependent he had been on Harry Conn as his sole scriptwriter in the first half of the 1930s, and then relying on only two scripters, he sought to spread the risk out further and hire four. John Tackaberry, Milt Josefsburg, and George Balzer were originally joined by veteran gag writer Cy Howard, but he was replaced after half a season by Sam Perrin, who like the others remained with Benny for many years.¹²

At mid-war, Benny and the cast regularly traveled across the nation to broadcast episodes at military camps and hospitals. Playing at military bases still didn’t mesh comfortably with the program’s sense of timing and established situation comedy narratives. Although his role in these shows remained ill-crafted, Eddie Anderson was always greeted with the loudest cheers from the military crowds. Mel Blanc began appearing on these camp programs in November 1943 in bit roles as a common soldier. Blanc also provided the sound effects of fighter planes zipping overhead. The writers also played up the fact that a good-looking woman was on stage in these all-male environments. Benny shows had very rarely discussed Mary’s relationships with men since she flirted with band members in 1933, but now in the camp episodes she was being pursued by pilots, officers, sailors, and soldiers who wanted to kiss her.

The war continued to deplete Benny’s staff as his long-time personal secretary, Harry Baldwin, was drafted into the Navy in fall 1943. Baldwin had performed many vital functions on the show since 1932, including the role of the man knocking on the radio studio’s door (once referred to as “Mr. Bald Dome”) who inserted nonsensical asides into the program’s proceedings.13 Then Benny lost tenor Dennis Day to the Navy in April 1944, another major blow to the quality of the show’s comic narrative. Benny hired a replacement singer for the duration, eighteen-year-old war veteran Larry Stevens. Unlike the versatile Day (who had blossomed into a talented comedian under Benny’s tutelage), young Stevens was rarely used in skits, and there were rumors that he would be replaced.¹⁴ The Benny show lost a vital gaiety and craziness from not having Dennis’s juvenile antics, deftly innocent readings of lines, and amusing impersonations incorporated into the program.

Secondary characters in the Benny show’s narrative world, such as Jack’s crazy boarder Mr. Billingsley (1941–1943) or timid insurance salesman Herman Peabody (1944), did not substantially contribute to the humor of the listless show. Talented radio character actress Minerva Pious journeyed west to the Benny program in Fall 1943 when Fred Allen’s program suddenly ceased due to his ill health. The Benny writers did not devise a continuing character for her, however, and Pious left the show in early 1944 to rejoin Allen’s program when he recovered. She would go on to play Mrs. Nussbaum of Allen’s Alley.

The new writers also did not make thoughtful use of the comedic talents of actress Butterfly McQueen, who portrayed Mary’s maid and Rochester’s niece “Butterfly” from October 1943 to May 1944. McQueen’s cardboard character was a naïve, unintelligent young woman who mostly talked about her boyfriend in the military; she did not spout sharp, witty retorts like Rochester. McQueen quit the show before the end of the season. On the other hand, the Rochester character developed more dimensions than any other persona during the war years. Rochester got more dialogue lines in the scripts, more dignity, and less association with minstrel show stereotypes. The writers created for Rochester an easy informality and equality in his interactions with Benny. These “gains” for interracial understanding were fragile, however, and as discussed in the Eddie Anderson chapters, the unthinking way in which Benny and his writers could reintegrate old stereotypes into the program would bring increasing criticism from the African American community.

“It’s not telling tales out of school to say that many in Radio Row felt Jack had slipped badly the past couple of seasons,” New York Times reporter Jack Gould noted in fall 1944.¹⁵ By spring 1945, the Jack Benny show had fallen out of the top fifteen shows in the Hooper ratings.¹⁶ Newsweek noted: “His program abruptly skidded. The comedy became dusty and labored. Listeners demoted him from his customary post among radio’s top four or five shows. . . . The smart alecks whispered that he was finished.”17

THE BENNY SHOW INNOVATES

With rumors of decline swirling in radio industry circles, Benny worked intensively with his still-struggling young writers to improve the show’s quality.¹⁸ They began experimenting with new catch phrases and characters to add to the familiar situations that Harry Conn and then Morrow and Beloin had crafted over the previous twelve years.

In March and April 1944 the writers developed several new routines that emphasized Jack’s temper fraying as other people annoyed him. Jack would try to reinstate order or at least stop the madness when a group of characters began yelling or singing at the top of their voices, tossing out egregious insults, the dialogue descending into gibberish. As noisy chaos filled the air, Jack would lose his temper and shout “Now cut that out!!!!” or “Wait a minute, wait a minute, WAIT A MINUTE!!!” Jack and the cast also began deprecating his starring role in the Warner Bros. film The Horn Blows at Midnight; insults about the movie began flying in December 1944 when the film was not even released until April 1945.

The increased involvement of versatile voice artist Mel Blanc was a tremendous addition to the show. In January 1945, the writers created an unhinged railroad station train announcer who befuddled Jack by repeatedly calling out “Train leaving on track five for Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga.” Angelenos in the studio audience laughed not only at the funny-sounding town names but also because they knew that no train could run between those disparate stops. Terming the thirty-seven-year-old Blanc a “one-man crowd,” Time magazine informed readers that his chameleon-like talents voiced fifty-seven other characters, including Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig in Warner Bros. cartoons, the unhappy mailman on Burns and Allen’s radio show, and characters for Judy Canova, Bob Hope, and Abbot and Costello’s broadcasts.¹⁹

Benny’s writers developed numerous comic characters for Blanc. The first was Professor LeBlanc, who was introduced as Benny’s long-suffering violin teacher in April 1945. No other character expressed such sheer frustration with Benny as poor benighted Professor LeBlanc, and his lessons, with his witty, insulting rhymed instructions intoned over Jack’s scratchy practice stanzas, were priceless comic additions to the program. Mel Blanc also vocalized the sound of Jack’s Maxwell. Back in the 1930s the Benny show had used a sound effects person to create the raucous sounds of the Maxwell’s motor wheezing to life. Jack donated the Maxwell to a patriotic scrap drive in October 1942. Within a few months Rochester was again chauffeuring Jack around in a rattletrap old car, which went unnamed, but by 1947 Benny and the writers once again called it the Maxwell. Studio audiences especially laughed at Mel Blanc’s personification of the Maxwell because Blanc contorted his face so comically in creating noises representing the car’s ancient, tubercular engine.20 The writers further expanded Blanc’s repertoire with the introduction of Polly the Parrot as Benny’s household pet in October 1945. Unlike previous resident Carmichael the polar bear who only growled (when he wasn’t causing the gas man to disappear), Polly the Parrot participated in the show’s dialogue. Benny and the writers determined, however, that Polly must create her jokes only by repeating phrases that she had overheard from humans.

In January 1945 Benny and his writers inaugurated the idea of incorporating an underground money vault into the basement of Jack’s home, guarded by Ed the vault-keeper, who was played in a deadpan voice by Joe Kearns. Benny’s trips downstairs past an array of burglar-thwarting obstacles to meet with Ed, who had been down there so long that he wasn’t aware that the Revolutionary War had ended, created a delightful source of humor on Benny’s radio shows. As with the Maxwell, the elaborate series of loud and clangy deterrents securing the vault was more satisfyingly imagined in radio listeners’ minds than it would be when viewed as a constructed set on a TV sound stage.

Several other new characters joined the program in fall 1945 including sassy telephone operators Gertrude Gearshift and Mabel Flapsaddle, played by veteran radio actresses Bea Bernaderet and Sara Berner. They traded tales of woe about the miserable dates Jack took them on. The Benny radio show also increasingly incorporated Jack’s nemesis, Frank Nelson, into the radio program. Nelson had played occasional roles on the show as early as 1934. Beginning in 1945 he appeared regularly in a variety of roles—the rude department store floorwalker, railroad station ticket seller, doctor, waiter, or any number of other annoying people who did their best to thwart and enrage the hapless Jack when he ventured into town.

Benny himself claimed to have come up with the serendipitous idea of having distinguished British film actor Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Colman appear on the show, in December 1945, as Jack’s exasperated next door neighbors in Beverly Hills. Benny had referred to them on the program for several years as being among the large group of Hollywood celebrities who disdained him, but they had remained among the celebrities that Jack had never actually met. Benny thought the Colmans would provide a delightful contrast between their upper-class English reserve and Jack’s obnoxious lack of manners. “Frankly,” Ronald Colman admitted in an interview, “when I read that first script I thought it was pretty corny, but when we started rehearsing it and everyone got laughing, I got into the spirit of the thing.” Cleveland Amory wrote that “Benny himself rates their first appearance, on December 9, 1945 as the best single program he has ever had, and claims that the cocktail glass breaking scene . . . was a situation so real that the script girl it the control room actually had tears in her eyes.”21 The Colmans were such a hit on Benny’s program that they returned fourteen times over the next three years. Despite Ronald Colman’s reservations that he might be made to appear ridiculous, these radio guest shots secured for him and Benita (who blossomed into a delightful comedian with Benny’s encouragement, which peeved the jealous Ronnie), starring roles in a delightful situation comedy, The Halls of Ivy, which was known as one of the most humorously erudite radio programs of the 1950s.

THE “I CAN’T STAND JACK BENNY BECAUSE” CONTEST

While Benny and his creative team were bandying about ideas in late fall 1945 to draw attention to the program, Benny came up with the idea of “spoofing” the write-in contests that were again so endemic on the radio. Instead of giving reasons why they “liked” some product in twenty-five words or less, or submitting an ad slogan or jingle praising a product, Benny hit on the idea of listeners sending in reasons why they disliked his comic “Fall Guy” character. Benny’s sponsors had not indulged in efforts to get audiences to write into the program since the mid-1930s when Jell-O had offered listeners autographed pictures of Jack or recipe booklets if they mailed in a couple of box tops, so the novelty of this stunt captured attention in the trade press, as did the chutzpah of the contest’s theme. It was one of the most controversial stunts the Benny show ever attempted. Variety’s Jack Hellman praised Benny for the idea: “It takes uts-gay to put himself on the spot like that.”²²

Steve Bradley, a new character on Jack’s program who was a boorish publicity agent, cooked up the contest in December 1945. Listeners would send in statements of fifty words or less explaining why they “couldn’t stand” Jack Benny, and the winners would split $10,000 in war bonds. Jack was robbed of that sum from his vault at gunpoint, and Jack handed the cash over without even considering the choice of “his money or his life.” (That Jack acquiesced is an amusing demonstration of how, over the years, Benny’s writers would have to find ways to continually increase the absurdity of Benny’s faults and frailties in order to keep the audience laughing.)

The New York Times noted that “In some quarters it was questioned whether it was a smart decision to invite criticism deliberately, even as a gag.”23 Benny feared an outpouring of anti-Semitism. The war had recently ended, and prejudice against Jews remained a volatile issue. Civic groups called for racial and religious tolerance in public service announcements on the radio, the horrors of the Holocaust were becoming more widely known, and calls for the creation of a Jewish state filled the news columns. As I discussed earlier in the chapter on Benny’s masculine identity, like some others in the entertainment business Benny rarely called attention to his Jewish identity, but all of the on-air celebrations of Christmas and Easter on his program would not satisfy the haters. As interviewer Cleveland Amory noted for Saturday Evening Post readers, “Since he is Jewish, Benny asked his cordon of 12 contest secretaries to hold out all definitely anti-Semitic letters. Out of 270,000 received, he had only three.”²⁴

Variety’s Jack Hellman took the contest rather too literally. Although he praised its “atomic wallop” to enhance publicity for Benny’s program, he assumed the event would point out to Benny what actually ailed his show:

Neatest trick of the week was Jack Benny’s unique contest, which will mount more lineage and lip service than all the orthodox soap giveaways combined. . . . Letters received in the contest, and they’ll run in the thousands, will be smartly indexed and for such a meagre sum as $10,000 he’ll find out what’s wrong with his show. Among the tradesmen the reaction is mixed. Some say it’s a smart move while others feel that he’s letting himself in for some unkindly criticism. Many found fault with the inclusion of Fred Allen as judge. That put it strictly in the gag class and may militate against constructive criticisms, which must be one of the main reasons for the $10,000 giveaway.²⁵

The stunt generated voluminous numbers of entries. “Half of the letters in the ‘Can’t Stand Jack Benny’ contest are in verse,” Hellman noted. “Mail averages around 30,000 entries daily and according to Mr. B. all contestants have one thing in common—they try to imitate Fred Allen. Incidentally, Allen gets mentioned in half the mail.” Benny became the butt du jour of other radio comics’ jokes (including Milton Berle and Eddie Cantor), garnered quips from public figures (baseball’s Hank Greenberg joked that a running gag on Benny’s show had left him stuck on third base the entire previous year, so he was going to send in an entry), and of course bon mots from Fred Allen, who was disqualified from the contest by being named chief judge. More than 300,000 entries poured in during the month-long event.26

The winning submission was contributed by Carroll P. Craig Sr., a lawyer from Pacific Palisades, California. His name was announced by Fred Allen at the close of the January 27, 1946, program. The next week, Ronald Colman read the winning entry, a poem, on air:

I can’t stand Jack Benny because . . .

He fills the air

With boasts and brags

And obsolete

Obnoxious gags

The way he plays

His violin

Is music’s most

Obnoxious sin

His cowardice

Alone, indeed,

Is matched by his

Obnoxious greed

And all the things

That he portrays

Show up MY OWN

Obnoxious ways²⁷

For all the excellent publicity the contest generated for Benny in the entertainment industry and popular press, it did not necessarily fix his problems, and it generated other controversies. Terming it a “neat stroke of showmanship,” Variety’s Jack Hellman commented that “no contest in radio history whipped up as much dialer interest and trade talk as the ‘can’t stand Jack Benny’ letter-writing derby for the 10G in Victory bonds. It also contributed many laugh lines to a few weeks of scripting and to all intents and purposes it looked like a good deal all around.”²⁸ Yet the contest did not immediately boost Jack’s Hooper and Crossley listenership ratings, which remained frustratingly low.

After receiving those hundreds of thousands of entries, Benny did not publicize them. At first, his decision disappointed me as a researcher (and fan) because as I initially began exploring Benny’s archives, I had hoped to discover a trove of similarly brilliant, humorous paeans to Jack’s faults. But there were none in his papers, or in Fred Allen’s, either. I eventually realized that a corporate-initiated publicity stunt was just a publicity stunt, and the other entries probably contained merely some combination of inanity and meanness and did not deserve being saved. As Jack Hellman had commented:

Contests are tricky things that rarely accomplish any good aside from a mail pull. They have an ungrateful way of biting back and more often than not leave a trail of bad will. . . . Benny admittedly let himself in for a nationwide round of criticism when he and Judge Allen decided against reading the prize-winning “hate” letters on yesterday’s broadcast. They knew full well the logic of their reasoning and also the unpleasant aftermath, but allowed it was an easier escape from public wrath than to have a few thousand women mutter, “mine was better than that.” Taking it philosophically, Benny sighed, “so they’ll be mad at me for a few weeks.” Another annoyance to the comedian was that the capital prize winner was a suburban Angeleno when he had hoped it would be someone from Oklahoma or Vermont.29

The dialogue during the episode on which the winners’ identities were to be announced ran too long, and Fred Allen was unable to read out more than a few of the finalists’ names and addresses. Benny’s concern to get middle America involved in his contest at least would have been mollified if the other nine prize winners had been publicized—they hailed from Cleveland; Detroit; Phoenix; Topeka; Greenwich, Connecticut; Portland, Oregon; Fullerton, California; Arlington, Virginia; Burgenville, New Jersey; Bartlesville, Oklahoma; and Jamestown, Texas.³⁰ Variety’s George Rosen reported that the reading of Mr. Craig’s winning entry on-air was itself unusual:

The reading last Sunday of the “Can’t Stand” Benny jackpot contribution [brought] . . . a division of opinion as to whether it was the smart thing to do. It’s reported that Fred Allen, who was the final judge in the contest, did a burn over the decision to air the letter, with others siding with the camp that contends it will invite wholesale beefs from other contestants. On the other hand, many argue that the letter itself was in such good taste and of such superior caliber that it will automatically erase any stigma of cheapness that might be associated with the Benny contest idea.³¹

Meanwhile, Benny and his writers continued innovating to further enliven the show. On January 6, 1946, Artie Auerbach was introduced as an (initially unnamed) hot dog vendor at the Rose Bowl football game, the immigrant Jewish greenhorn, Mr. Kitzel. Dennis Day returned from service in the Navy on the March 17, 1946, episode, and immediately returned his zany, juvenile antics to the program.32 Benny’s ratings started climbing back up the charts.³³ Jack had been vain about his age from the beginning of his radio program in 1932 and for years would not reveal it (while Mary and other cast members delighted in exposing the truth). Jokes about Jack claiming a youthful age increasingly began to crop up in the show during the war years. In 1945 he announced that he was 37 years old (when his actual age was 51.) He claimed to have turned 38 in 1946. He claimed to be 38 years old until his birthday in February 1948, at which time he turned 39, and there Jack remained for the rest of his career.

Benny also began to capitalize more intently on the flubbed lines that performers (especially Mary Livingstone) inadvertently blurted out during the broadcasts. Mary, for instance, mistakenly said “chiss sweez sandwich” in a scene set at a diner. Other comics had teased Benny throughout his career about his inability to ad lib. However, Benny’s lightning-fast, critical reactions to his cast members’ mistakes showed that he was a superb extemporaneous joker when the situation mattered to him. Benny always insisted on the perfect reading of his scripts with the jokes’ timings carefully crafted, and these mistakes exposed how thoroughly invested he was in trying to maintain complete control over his program. Lucky for Benny, his quick shows of temper were deliciously funny for studio audiences to witness and for listeners to hear. His calling cast members out for missing a cue or mangling a line added more spontaneity and liveliness to the radio program. They also added moments of self-reflexive humor in which Benny and the actors momentarily slipped out of their regular characters’ roles to comment on the script and their performances. Behind the scenes, the fact that most of the mistakes were made by Mary Livingstone indicated how serious her “mike fright” was becoming. The explosions of laughter from the studio audience that these unexpected moments produced caused Benny’s legion of comic imitators to rush to incorporate flubbed lines and jokes about them into their own radio programs.

In 1946, Jack Benny was back to riding atop the radio ratings, and he remained there through the rest of the decade. His rejuvenated radio program, however, now collided with a greatly increased critical discourse about network primetime radio’s shortcomings.³⁴

“WANTED: RADIO CRITICS”

In a 1940 editorial, Variety’s chief radio reporter Robert Landry called for establishment of a professional critical voice to hold radio responsible for its shortcomings and encourage better programming.35 At a time when the Axis powers’ propaganda was strongest, Landry suggested that responsible published criticism would ensure that American radio remained open to democratic discussion and input, and keep pressure groups’ influence at bay. He charged sponsors, ad agencies, and networks with being too afraid of angering pressure groups and rushing to censor anything that might offend even one person. They confused cranky complaints with reasoned criticism, and feared both. Newspapers imperiously turned up their noses at a “low-class medium,” Landry said, and for twenty years had been reluctant to hire radio critics in jealous fear of radio’s popularity. He disparaged the timidity of most radio reporters and their reliance on popularity surveys, which were “a substitute for judgment.”³⁶ He hoped that professional radio critics would elevate radio’s standards “by spotlighting the shoddy, the careless, the incompetent, and praising the opposites. . . . It is easy to dissect the mediocre, difficult to capture the essence of merit.”³⁷

Radio’s vital importance to American culture during World War II, as a source of information, propaganda, solace, and entertainment,³⁸ sidelined Landry’s immediate calls for broadcasting critics. In early 1946, however, there were still few serious appraisals of radio programming being published. What mitigated against the establishment of regular radio critiques? The sheer amount of programming to cover was daunting, with as many as 65,000 fifteen-minute segments of programming broadcast every day for a radio critic to account for.³⁹ The continued reluctance of newspapers to deal with radio was a second factor. Even though 33 percent of all American radio stations were owned by newspapers, broadcast programming’s beholdedness to their own advertisers caused friction.⁴⁰ Newspaper publishers feared that advertisers might boycott them if they printed anything too realistic about the companies’ sponsored radio shows.⁴¹ Some newspapers refused to list radio schedules, and other papers (angered that they did not receive remuneration for an advertising plug) removed sponsor’s product names from the schedules, so that the Jell-O Program would be listed as The Jack Benny Program. Lack of information about upcoming broadcasts was a problem for radio reviewers, who rarely received scripts to peruse ahead of time to help them prepare detailed analyses. As the programs were aired live and not repeated, reviews seemed superfluous to those who had not heard the broadcast.

As Ben Gross, radio critic of the New York Daily News, complained, “regular criticism seldom covered a show after its premiere and there were not enough new openings to keep him busy.”42 The same top programs reappeared year after year, and as one Variety reviewer noted wearily, “What can be said about Burns & Allen’s act that hasn’t been said a hundred times in the last 16 years?”⁴³ Here was the daunting challenge for the establishment of radio criticism—there was an overwhelming amount of potential programming to cover, most of it was broadcast live, and a reviewer could get little information ahead of time. Every program he or she heard vanished into the ether and would not be repeated.

Variety identified only between forty-five and fifty journalists (across 900 U.S. newspapers) worthy of even being termed radio reporters.⁴⁴ Creditable radio editors worked at Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh newspapers, but the major papers in Los Angeles and San Francisco banned all radio coverage. In New York, the corporate center of radio and home of the literary, theater, and film reviewing establishment, Jack Gould of the New York Times was the only critic of note, and his weekly reports focused largely on industry issues. His predecessors John Hutchens at the Times and Alton Cook at the World-Telegram had quit the radio beat in disgust in 1944 and turned to theater and film reviewing. “Except for a very small handful, radio writers have no influence whatsoever,” Variety’s report concluded:

They’ve rapped soap opera for years. Soap opera goes on. They wham excessive commercials, the middle plug, hitchhikes and cowcatchers [extra advertising snuck in between programs]. No one pays any attention to them. Three or four legit theatre critics could close a show (except in very rare instances) with adverse reviews. The radio writers can howl their heads off and, if other factors are present in the show, the Hoopers keep clicking right along.⁴⁵

Indignation over the sins of network radio was heating to the boiling point.⁴⁶ In February 1946 the Federal Communications Commission released its blistering report on the status of radio, known as “The Blue Book,” which contained scathing findings about broadcasters’ lack of responsibility to the public. Variety’s editors nodded in agreement. Network radio was in serious trouble:⁴⁷

Slowly but surely, over the past few years, over-commercialization has won out. Good taste, development of original radio technique and cognizance of public service programming have gone by the boards. . . . [A] factor that would have helped tremendously in making the public cognizant of what it had a right to expect would have been a critical press; one that would have constructively played the part of a guide. Even with regulation, radio needs able criticism by men who respect it as a mature medium and accept it on a full par with other arts.48

Variety was willing to be a voice of conscience for radio, but it was beholden to the industry’s commercial structure controlled by sponsors. Its reporters and columnists could only rap knuckles. It was usually quite gentle in chiding major stars like Jack Benny. Variety pleaded for real radio critics. Once the critics arrived, however, the trade journal’s editors may have rued what they asked for.

GILBERT SELDES’S CRITIQUE OF INSULT HUMOR

Benny’s radio program based much of its humor on cast members insulting the vainglorious, penurious boss, and him dishing it back, creating swirling crescendos of invective. In fan magazine articles such as 1945’s “Gags Have Grown Up,”⁴⁹ Benny reassuringly claimed that no one was really injured by the cartoonish insults. “We try to follow one simple rule: ‘if it hurts, it isn’t funny.’”

However famous the Benny show was for its insult humor, Benny was sensitive to anyone seriously criticizing him for it. In the March 1946 issue of Esquire magazine, New York–based theater and film critic Gilbert Seldes opened his column of wide-ranging media commentary with a paragraph subtitled “The Young Sadists”:

Next Sunday night, will you please listen to all your favorite comedians and note the percentage of cruel jokes. They may be self-directed, a bit of light masochism, or straight jabs to someone else’s jaw. The saucy dummy in Bergen’s hands turns out to be relatively mild compared to the snarling and smearing that goes on between comedians and stooges and band leaders and announcers. Fred Allen’s trademark is the bags under his eyes; Benny gets it (and takes it) right and left from Rochester and Mary Livingstone; . . . Maybe a philosopher will discover some deep meaning in this mania for cruelty. All I say of it is that it begins to bore me. It’s a translation into popular terms of the smart wisecrack, the insults that pass for wit in the comedies of Noel Coward; there’s a speak-easy-age staleness over it and I feel that other sources of humor must exist, beyond the physical deficiencies and imputed meannesses of the comedians.⁵⁰

One little paragraph. But someone had dared to pass judgment on Benny for the cruelty of his on-air humor, and his continued reliance on it, which had spread to all the copy-cat radio comedy programs to become the de rigueur form of humor on nearly all radio shows.51

Other radio critics disagreed with Seldes, asserting that insult humor’s centrality to radio comedy was natural. John Crosby would claim that there was something all-American about masculine-type joking (battles between sharp wits, a comedian deflating his own vanity with self-deprecating humor, and subordinates’ barbs lobbed directly at the boss). Crosby traced its history in vaudeville routines, the local saloon, and street corner jousts.⁵² “[T]he most astonishing characteristic of American insult, is its amiability,” noted Crosby.” Americans enjoy insulting one another and, providing it’s among friends, even take delight in being insulted.”⁵³ Jack Gould asserted that insult humor allowed “listeners to share in mankind’s most ennobling experience—to tell somebody off.”⁵⁴

Gilbert Seldes nevertheless stood firm in his disapproval. Benny’s writers read the article while the production crew was in Palm Springs and invited Seldes, visiting the area, to attend the February 24, 1946, broadcast. Seldes recalled being curious about what Benny would do. “The question was, how could he turn criticism of his fundamental style and material into a good radio program?”

[T]he first half of the program was all in the usual vein: Benny was jealous of Mary Livingstone because she got all the requests for autographs; she accused him of falling asleep while dancing with her; the announcer was called “obese”; the orchestra looked like dogs, and so on. Then Benny put me on the witness stand, announced my ideas, and offered to play a sweet show, “sort of a Ma Perkins with a band.” This part of the program, therefore, consisted of honeyed compliments, excessive gushing, and attempted interruptions on my part, put down severely by Benny. . . . At the end, Rochester phoned to complain that something had gone wrong with his radio—“Don Wilson’s got thin, you got hair. . . .” etc. And Benny asked me which way I thought the program was best, allowing me to reply: “I think it’s better when they insult you.”

What Benny had done was, of course, the opposite of what he said he was going to do. He had really played his comedy of insult right through, using a different technique and making me the fall guy instead of himself.⁵⁵

After the Seldes incident, Benny and his writers occasionally incorporated comic twists on radio critics’ reviews of the program into the Benny show broadcasts, fabricating terrible notices that included deprecating words (like “exacerbate”) that neither Jack nor Phil were able to understand. As Milt Josefsberg recalled, Benny and his writers reasoned, “nice is nice, but nasty is funny.”56

JOHN CROSBY’S “RADIO IN REVIEW”

On May 6, 1946, the New York Herald Tribune, one of the nation’s premiere newspapers that had disdainfully ignored broadcasting for twenty-five years, started a department of radio criticism to add to its greatly respected theater, book, film, dance, and art reviews. The new column was helmed by someone without broadcasting industry experience, thirty-four-year-old Ivy Leaguer and war veteran John Crosby, frustrated playwright and sometimes theater critic, who claimed he’d never previously listened to the radio. His five-day-a-week column, “Radio in Review,” was inauspiciously placed, not in the middle with the other cultural criticism, but buried at the back of the paper between the stock market quotes and the want ads.

From the start, Crosby’s essays exhibited a sense of intelligence, withering scorn for shoddy work, and a willingness to take radio seriously. His first column compared a promising young comic, Alan Young, to the tradition of Harold Lloyd’s bumbling, quirky, and kind American young man of silent film comedy. Crosby baldly announced his dislike of the program’s other comedian, George Jessel, who “somehow got mixed up in the festivities and dampened them considerably.” Crosby expressed a fervent hope that risqué jokes about Jane Russell—and Jessel—would both disappear from Young’s show.⁵⁷ In the next days Crosby took the radio networks to task for the violence in children’s programming, suggesting that kids would be better off reading books instead of being exposed to so much screaming and so many murders.⁵⁸

At the end of his second week, Crosby showered effusive praise on Fred Allen. In “Breakfast with Freddie and Tallulah,” Crosby judged that “radio’s greatest wit” had created a sharp satire of the blatantly overcommercialized morning programs like Mr. and Mrs. at Home that exposed the shows’ inanities with “explosive violence.” Crosby devoted most of the column to quoting the script of Allen’s wickedly funny skit.⁵⁹ Thin-skinned hosts Ed and Pegeen Fitzgerald immediately took out a full-page ad in Variety protesting their rude handling by Allen and Crosby (even reprinting Crosby’s column) and arguing that their show’s popularity negated any disparagement.⁶⁰

Crosby next addressed the popular situation comedy Fibber McGee and Molly, praising the show’s insight into small town politics and culture. Its creator Don Quinn understood that small towns were not simply “not a collection of homespun jokes,[but . . . ], in fact, an intricate web of old feuds, lifelong friendships, local custom and high complicated family relationships.” Crosby admiringly concluded that Jim and Marion Jordan as the titular characters “handle this all with genuineness, an air of innocence and good nature about them.”61

In his third week, Crosby turned to Jack Benny, but instead of the mash notes he sent to Allen and the Jordans, he lambasted Benny for his tired, formulaic humor:

In the fourteen years he has been on the air, Mr. Benny has joked tirelessly Sunday after Sunday about his age (37), his stinginess, his thinning hair, his jealousy of other radio comedians, his violin playing and Waukegan. Gradually through the years, the jokes on these themes have been foreshortened to the point where they would be unintelligible to anyone who had never heard the Benny program, if there is any one like that. Last Sunday, Mr. Benny and his announcer held the following colloquy: “I’m giving everyone a bonus check. That’ll help you get back to California,” said Mr. Benny. “Get back to California—with THIS check?” “Turn it over—there’s a road map on the other side.”

Unless you know Benny pretty well, that gag would mean very little. But, the veteran radio comedian has invented and perfected a sort of radio family joke. Benny’s idiosyncrasies excite both laughter and sympathy the same way father does when he leaves his umbrella on the streetcar again. It’s not funny to anyone outside the family. . . .

During the last year there have been dark whisperings that Jack Benny was seriously slipping; that his material was old; his scripts poorly written. There’s some truth to these charges. The Benny show is no longer put together with the loving care he once lavished on it. Some of his shows were shapeless and floundering, which you could never say about a Benny program in the old days. But I keep listening anyway. I have been listening to Jack Benny for so many years my critical sense is paralyzed. He is like an old friend of whose faults you are fully aware, but are willing to forgive.⁶²

To intimate that Benny had retired in place while Allen was at the top of his game must have stung. Benny’s supporters tried to spin the “my critical sense is paralyzed” quip positively, but it is difficult not to take the essay as an indictment of Benny’s lapses in creative comedy writing.

Crosby brought knowledgeable and demanding criteria to radio’s popular programs—he excoriated weak scripts, and identified obnoxious personalities and poor performers; he published passages of poor dialogue to expose its stupidity. Although he did not discuss his intellectual underpinnings, Crosby’s focus on the intellectual values of programs aligned him with late nineteenth-century cultural critics like Matthew Arnold, and the reviewer’s contemporaries of Frankfurt School cultural critics, in their belief in the superior value of high culture. However much he would have rather heard symphonies and poetry readings on the radio, however, Crosby was populist enough to unabashedly adore Fred Allen; Edgar Bergen; Kukla, Fran, and Ollie; and even Amos ’n’ Andy.

FIGURE 21. The Sportsmen Quartet, who could only hum in response to Jack Benny’s questions, sang parodies of popular songs that turned into delightfully nonsensical Lucky Strike cigarette commercials, winning the Benny show kudos for making the harshest advertising on the radio seem enjoyable. Radio Best March 1948, 10. Author's collection.

As well as hewing to traditional techniques of the arts critic, John Crosby used the tools of a passionate fan, publishing insistent criticism and fault-finding in order to spur performers and the medium to do better. Crosby was especially critical of Jack Benny because he admired him and thought that Benny and his writers were capable of creating much more incisive comedy. Few readers of Crosby’s widely syndicated columns rushed to write in to disagree with him about Benny, or the reviewer’s denunciations of the excesses and inanities of radio. Only Crosby’s diatribes against Liberace (in 1954) created a sizeable public backlash in newspapers across the nation.

The broadcasting industry nervously kept tabs on Crosby’s skyrocketing fame and influence.63 “[I]n general its agreed that he’s brought a refreshing note in to the journalistic picture that may prove to spur to additional radio activity on the part of newspapers not only in New York but elsewhere throughout the country,” reported Variety.⁶⁴ Newsweek magazine dubbed Crosby “Reporter with a Hammer” and claimed that the critic, whose column was already syndicated in eight other newspapers, “expressed what a great portion of the public had been feeling about certain radio shows.” By Newsweek’s account, 60 percent of his reviews thus far had been negative.⁶⁵ Billboard noted the rise in public interest in radio reviews:

Critical emphasis, less straight reporting, seen as new tack for air editors. . . . Interesting angle on the whole situation is the emergence in New York of John Crosby’s Herald Tribune column as a prestige pillar on a plane comparable to Jack Gould’s critical writings in The New York Times. Level of both the Times and Tribune critiques is causing much consternation, admiration and wonderment, not only locally, but in areas far removed. It’s believed and hoped this is only the beginning.⁶⁶

Radio comedians topped Crosby’s list of worst offenders in fall 1946, with Benny directly in the cross-hairs of his criticism.

Jack Benny returned to the air for his fifteenth year. . . . Within the first few moments of his opening program Rochester pulled a gag about stinginess. Within the next ten minutes came, in order, a joke about Petrillo, one about those pens that write under water, and another concerning the size of Don Wilson’s stomach. . . . Writing a Benny script must be as precise and standardized an operation as the chant of Speed Riggs, of Goldsboro, North Carolina.⁶⁷

Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Crosby maintained that he was actually being polite to Benny and the other thirty-year veterans of show business who dominated radio’s primetime. “When they came to radio they were fresh personalities and highly skilled entertainers. If the bloom has worn off, it’s because they have been imprisoned by their own popularity in the same routine. . . . They have not failed radio. Radio has failed them.”⁶⁸

Crosby swung down hard on the top radio comedians in a series of articles on their “growing obsolescence.”⁶⁹ Crosby blamed the structure of network radio, “a strange and unyielding mixture of oil and water, or show business and advertising.” He argued that success in radio had first come to be measured by the volume of studio audience laughter and applause, not by critical appraisal of the quality of the program. “But while this debatable innovation might measure the entertainer’s talent, the sponsors had to have some better way to measure the listening audience. Previously show business had but two ways to judge success—the pounding of palm on palm, and the jingle of gold in the box office. The listening public could neither applaud nor buy tickets, so the Crossley rating came into being.” Now ratings points, a suspiciously vague reduction of popularity to exact numbers, ruled programming choices. Quality was nowhere to be found as a factor, as the same ratings-getting programs returned year after year without strong competition from programs on networks or other stations opposite their shows. In response, Jack Hellman of Variety defended Benny’s tried and true formula:

By the end of 1946, John Crosby’s tally of critical jabs at the comedians was long. He admitted that he just plain hated Red Skelton and George Jessel (for unfunny routines) and that he nurtured an ever-growing dislike of Milton Berle’s radio work (for stealing jokes and formats from other comics, lame puns, and blue double entendres). Crosby announced that he was very weary of the lackluster performances of Jack Haley, Frank Morgan, Jack Carson, Henry Aldrich, and Abbott and Costello (whose finely honed vaudeville routines he admired but whose sloppy radio writing appalled him). Eddie Cantor’s humor was sometimes ancient and his songs were too, but Crosby appreciated him shouting out the old tunes. Burns and Allen’s formula was really worn, but a bit of Gracie when she’d been off the air all summer pleased him. He was fond of the old but neighborly nonsense of Fibber McGee and Molly and the Great Gildersleeve; he praised Bob Burns for storytelling with a dark bitter edge to his endless supply of family stories, and Lum and Abner’s old but amusing corniness. Crosby admired Fred Allen, Henry Morgan, and Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy for their original wit, Ed Gardner of Duffy’s Tavern for his use of language, and Amos ’n’ Andy for their nonsensical silliness with language, their use character comedy, and for remaining “masters of timing and inflection” even, as Crosby explained, their humor dealt in blackface stereotyped fantasy that had no relations to anyone’s real lives. Jimmy Durante he liked for his kindness and wordplay. Crosby had a grudging respect for Bob Hope’s hard work but despaired over the comic’s reliance on double entendres and formulaic jokes about current topics like Sinatra, nylons, The Lost Weekend, Petrillo the czar of the musicians’ union, Jane Russell, the housing shortage, and three-way stretch girdles.

While in 1946 Crosby particularly criticized Benny’s comedy for being stuck in a well-worn rut,71 he also heaped scorn on soap operas, giveaway programs, and violent kids’ adventure shows. He praised the occasional broadcasting of “good music” and news documentaries about the Normandy invasion anniversary and atomic bomb testing. As he later noted,

It’s extremely difficult to write enthusiasm with distinction. The best critics, or at any rate, the best known critics, have been caustic critics, and their most quoted works have been, in my experience, the most excoriating.. The late great Percy Hammond tore apart a bad play with surpassing skill but approached a good play with the inarticulate enthusiasm of a small boy who has been given a nickel.⁷²

Crosby’s column had become so famous that on December 30, 1946, the New York Herald Tribune editors moved it up from the back pages to reside among the theatrical and music reviews.⁷³ Editors added a small photo of the handsome author. Ninety newspapers across the nation now syndicated his daily pronouncements.⁷⁴

“THE JACK BENNY MYSTERY,” OR “BENNY MAY BE A
HOWL, BUT YOU CAN’T PROVE IT BY THE SCRIPT”

Recounting his appearance on Benny’s radio program, Gilbert Seldes had noted the unremarkable nature of Benny’s printed scripts and how much of the program’s humor came from the cast’s performance of the written lines: “You add all the cracks tougher and, on paper, it seems that Benny isn’t a funny man. You add the show together and you feel that it is insanely funny.”⁷⁵ However, John Crosby, who admired eruditely written scripts, didn’t quite understand that. In January 1947 Crosby drew on the strategy he’d used as highest praise for radio comedy scripts he considered outstanding, of printing portions of them and letting the writing’s excellence speak for itself. He tried to use this method to praise Benny, but ended up instead pummeling Benny further for perceived mediocrity.

The incident began on December 29, 1946, when Crosby listened to the Benny Sunday night program and thought it was so outstanding that he quickly wrote a letter of praise to Benny and his writers in California and asked to obtain a copy of the episode’s script. Writer Milt Josefsburg, terming the whole affair “possibly the strangest thing that ever happened in the history of the Benny show, and perhaps any show in the history of broadcasting,” remembered that the writing staff was extremely proud to have gained Crosby’s notice (an indication how much political and cultural power the columnist had gained in just eight months).76 Just a few days later they were abashed to read Crosby’s January 6, 1947, column, “The Jack Benny Mystery.”

One of the most mysterious things in the world, at least to me, is the strange quality of genius that separates a good comedy script from a bad one. A couple of Sundays ago Jack Benny offered his fans a program which to my mind was as hilarious as radio can ever get. Out of curiosity I sent to the west coast for the script to determine, if I could, just what curious essence Mr. Benny had blown into this script to make it that funny. After reading the Benny script I’m as much at sea as ever. Even allowing for Benny’s great gift for pacing, inflection and timing, I still don’t see why the darn thing should have made me laugh like that. In order that you may, if you like, share my bewilderment, I append below an abbreviated version of the Benny script. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the broadcast version was very, very comic.⁷⁷

Here is the dialogue Crosby quoted:

ROCHESTER: Ol’ man River, Dat Old Man River

He must know sumpin but don’t say nuthin

He just keeps rollin, he keeps on rollin’

Along

Ol’ man Benny, dat ol’ man Benny

He won’t waste nuthin,’ and don’t spend nuthin’

He just keeps rolling, he keeps on rolling along

You should have seen him sweat and strain

When he spends a nickel, he’s wracked with pain . . .

BENNY (OFF): Rochester!

ROCHESTER: Tote dat barge, lift dat bale. . . .

BENNY: Rochester!

ROCHESTER: Git a little drunk an’ you land in jail. . . .

BENNY: Rochester, I’ve been calling you.

ROCHESTER: Sorry, Boss, I was carried away with my own voice.

BENNY: Oh fine.

ROCHESTER: Well, I’m becoming quite a popular singer. You know they call Bing Crosby the Groaner?

BENNY: Uh huh.

ROCHESTER: And they call Andy Russell the Swooner?

BENNY: I know. And what do they call you?

ROCHESTER: The Razor’s Edge.

BENNY: You sound more like the Yearling. Now Rochester, my cast should be here soon for rehearsal. This is the holiday season and I’d like to serve them the eggnog I told you to make this morning. You did make it, didn’t you?

ROCHESTER: Yes sir.

BENNY: Is it good?

ROCHESTER: Wanna smell my breath?

BENNY: No thanks. I’m on the wagon. But you know, Rochester, that’s a strange drink. I wonder why anyone would ever think of mixing eggs and bourbon.

ROCHESTER: It’s psychological, Boss.

BENNY: Psychological?

ROCHESTER: Yeah. The eggs make you think you’re getting something very healthful.

BENNY: Uh huh.

ROCHESTER: And the bourbon makes that fact unimportant.

BENNY: Well that’s logical. By the way, Rochester, how much eggnog did you make?

ROCHESTER: About two hundred and fifty gallons.

BENNY: Two hundred and fifty gallons? For goodness sake, Rochester, I want to drink it, not bathe in it.

ROCHESTER: Well, to each his own.

BENNY: All right, all right. Make some sandwiches, too.

(DOOR OPENS)

LIVINGSTONE: Hello, Jack.

BENNY: Hello Mary, Come in. You’re the first one here.

LIVINGSTONE: Jack, how come you called rehearsal so early?

BENNY: Well Mary, to tell you the truth, I have a date tonight.

LIVINGSTONE: With whom?

BENNY: Gladys Zybisco.

LIVINGSTONE: Gladys Zybisco? Oh Jack, surely you can do better than that.

BENNY: Look, Mary. Gladys is very nice. She may not be the most beautiful girl in the world but she has a nice figure.

LIVINGSTONE: I know, but does she have to walk that way?

BENNY: Mary, that’s not her fault. She’s near sighted and she anticipates the curb in the middle of the block. By the way, Mary, would you like a glass of eggnog?

LIVINGSTONE: Sure, Jack. I’d love to. Wait a minute. Who made the eggnog?

BENNY: Rochester

LIVINGSTONE: Uh uh.

BENNY: Why, what’s the matter?

LIVINGSTONE: Well, last Christmas I tasted some of Rochester’s eggnog and the next thing I know I was at the Rose Bowl game.

BENNY: Oh—you saw the game?

LIVINGSTONE: Saw it, nothing. I was playing left tackle for Alabama.78

Crosby’s column concluded, “That’s just a sample of the Benny dialogue. Just how he manages to wrest so many laughs out of such harmless stuff is his own deep secret.”

Josefsburg recalled the bewilderment, shock, and anger the writers felt, to have some of their best work labeled (in Josefsberg’s words) “flat, turgid, belabored, and contrived.” Crosby had completely discounted the impact of superb acting, vocal inflection, comic timing, live ensemble performance, the structuring of the gags to build upon each other, and the contribution of the audience’s reactions in the creation of successful radio humor. Benny did not publically complain about Crosby (unlike Skelton and Hope, who took to the pages of Variety to hurl invective at the critic). Benny, however, had Jack Hellman of Variety make snide comments about grouchy reviewers.

Benny and his writers sought a truce with John Crosby, who visited with them in Palm Springs while on a junket trip to the West Coast radio production studios in February 1947. The critic published several columns detailing his discussions with Benny’s writing staff. He learned more about the weekly pressures and challenges of creating a show; Crosby explained that they put the whole program together from bits like a Ford car, and competed with each other to laugh loudest at their own jokes so that they remain in the overlong script and somebody else’s humor is cut.79 Crosby reported on his conversations with Benny’s writers about the challenges they faced of short deadlines and restrictions placed on them by networks and sponsors. Crosby dealt with them sympathetically, if not praising their skills to level that he did with Fred Allen.

CHARGES AND COUNTERCHARGES

In fall 1947, Fred Allen addressed the controversy of radio critics’ continued charges—by completely agreeing with them. In his usual satiric mode, Allen used his first radio show of the season to poke fun at the failings of the radio comedians. The episode opened thoroughly disguised as an episode of the crime drama Mr. District Attorney (even using that show’s theme music and regular announcer), with its lead actor (Jay Jostyn) and his faithful assistant Harrington (Len Doyle) investigating what an amused Variety reviewer called

the NBC Crime—the case against comics (with Allen cited as the chief offender) who return to the air season after season with the old formulas still intact. “That,” says the DA, “is a crime against the people.” At the show’s windup, Allen is in neck deep, with a first degree rap against him, [Allen’s] program being labeled “murder.”⁸⁰

A few months later, Crosby published his fullest indictment yet of the broken system of American network programming, in an Atlantic Monthly essay.⁸¹ “Stalled—Resistance to New Ideas, Fear of Experiment, Reliance on Ancient Formulas, Have Brought American Radio Almost to a Standstill” announced its provocative subtitle. Crosby charged that while the highest paid radio comedians brought in the most listeners, “during the last ten years, the criterion of pure popularity has resulted in a freezing of broadcast standards, a highly developed resistance to new ideas, a distaste amounting almost to revulsion against any form of experimentation, and a widespread and depressing imitativeness.” Crosby charged that all of the radio comedians (with the exceptions of Fred Allen and Edgar Bergen) “rely heavily on a [never-changing] formula invented almost fifteen years ago by Jack Benny . . . at whom all the jokes are directed—jokes about his tightfisted attitudes toward money, his waistline, his hairline, his violin playing, his age. Mr. Benny bellows with pain at each gag and the audience roars.”82 “The Benny formula just happened to work,” Crosby argued,

and consequently has been perpetuated and will continue to be perpetuated. Years ago, comedians new at radio cut records of Benny’s broadcasts and played them over and over again to find out what made him tick. They imitated his inflections, his minor characters, his pacing and even his jokes. Today where Benny has Rochester, Jack Carson till recently had Arthur Treacher, Bob Hope has Jerry Colona, and Ed (Archie) Gardner has Eddie Green, each playing Sancho Panza to his master’s Don Quixote.

Paul Lazarsfeld’s study The People Look at Radio had inquired sorrowfully if such unrelentingly derisive comedy was “a general function of humor or is it especially characteristic of the contemporaneous scene?” Crosby angrily responded, “The answer is NO to both questions.”

Despite his frustration at the limitations and failings of all the meager replications, Crosby was willing to explore what made Benny’s formula the “gold standard” that every other show was trying so desperately to ape. He acknowledged that copying Benny was “not as easy as it sounds”:

Benny, a veteran of years of vaudeville, is a master of timing and inflection, possibly the greatest on the air. The characters who surround him have been selected and developed very shrewdly to exploit the Benny personality. Somehow Benny has contrived to teach each of them his own mastery of timing. In addition, Benny has whittled away at the classic formula of the joke until it has assumed an entirely new shape. A simple “hmmm’ takes the place of the punch line, which the home audience can fill in for itself. James Barrie once remarked that the most dramatic parts of his plays occurred when nothing at all was happening on the stage; similarly, the funniest parts of the Benny program occur when nobody is saying anything. The silence at these points is so pregnant with meaning that nothing needs to be said.

Failing to implicate the sponsors or advertising agencies who designed their programs specifically to closely copy Benny’s show, and then brought in headliners to star in them, Crosby blamed the radio comedians themselves for this sad state of affairs. He judged that the lesser comics lacked the cultural taste to demand scripts of a more literate, sophisticated level. “While all comedians have writers, they are their own judges of the material the writers give them, and the level of humor in the program is an almost automatic reflection of the level of the critical judgment of the comedian. In the case of Benny, Allen and Bergen it’s high. In the case of Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Eddie Cantor and Abbott and Costello, its low—sometimes painfully so.”83

By November 1948, New York Times radio critic Jack Gould, who had previously showered Jack Benny with praise (in 1946 arguing that Benny’s program had so improved that he should have won the Peabody Award instead of Bergen),⁸⁴ now took up John Crosby’s cause and cudgel. In a Sunday Times Magazine essay “How Comic Is Radio Comedy,” Gould charged that programs were “suffering from . . . monotony, undernourishment and repeats.” Gould took no prisoners, claiming that Allen’s Alley was boring and old with the same familiar characters, “and when will either Jack Benny or Charlie McCarthy let a week pass without a reference to the twin who waved her hair at home?” Gould claimed that the major problem was that radio characters remained the same every week, instead of changing with every production like film or stage roles. He also charged that the influence of sponsors, agencies, and networks placed undue pressures to censor out the kind of edgy, adult themes prevalent in nightclub comedy, and the limitations of maintaining high Hooper ratings were strangling. Like Crosby, Gould charged that these restrictions had reduced radio comedy “to follow a rigid formula” and rely too heavily on topical humor, repetitive running gags, and insult humor.⁸⁵

Jack Benny responded to Crosby and Gould in an essay, “Gentlemen of Depress,” published in Variety in early January 1949.⁸⁶ Crosby actually claimed Benny made good points, and republished a portion of Benny’s essay in his own “Radio in Review” newspaper column, titling it “Down with the Critics.” While Benny tried to be comic in defending himself against the critics’ charges, he did not contemplate altering anything about the way he constructed his program. His claimed that the critics were high-culture killjoys, and that if the public applauded and gave him high ratings, why should he change anything? Benny argued that longevity and the comedians’ time-tested, finely honed comic personas were actually the key markers of comedy success in radio. In his telling, the entire configuration of primetime programming would collapse if any old dog tried to learn a new trick.87

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FIGURE 22. The studio audience’s view of Jack Benny’s live radio broadcast, featuring, left to right, Eddie Anderson, the Sportsmen Quartet (Bill Days, Mack Smith, Marty Zperzel, Gurhey Bell), Don Wilson, Phil Harris, producer Hilliard Marks, Jack Benny, Mary LIvingstone, musical arranger Mahlon Merrick (seated behind Mary), and Dennis Day. Mel Blanc is at far right. Radio Mirror, November 1948, 34. Author's collection.

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At the end of the 1940s, both Jack Benny and John Crosby were at the top of their respective industries in radio comedy and radio criticism. Benny’s biggest concern, fixing the problems with his program, appeared solved. The show had resurged in the ratings and was praised in many places (if not necessarily by the top critics) for its finely tuned scripts and cast. Acknowledgement of his influence and achievements would come in the bitter struggle the CBS and NBC networks waged over his services in late 1948 and his anointment as one of the highest paid and highest honored radio performers. Benny could not singlehandedly fix the broken system around him, where so many other programs aped everything his program did. What might have addressed this problem—perhaps the radio industry listening to the critics? Perhaps only a force such as the network assuming much greater responsibility for improving and diversifying programming could have made a greater change in the dullness of radio programing, rather than having the decisions made by competing ad agencies and sponsors.

Indeed, not only critics’ concerns about radio’s problems, but also radio’s leaders’ smug satisfaction at their success would very soon become moot. Television broadcasting was beginning, and that forestalled any concerted effort to make radio better as primetime programming would soon be just about abandoned in a move forward to TV. Even NBC Radio president Niles Trammell had admitted to Crosby in January 1948, “My future is entirely wrapped up in sound broadcasting, but I’m the first to admit that when television comes in, sound broadcasting is finished.”88 Much of the critical buzz of reviews and commentary in radio industry trade press and newspapers by the end of 1948 was starting to be all about television. Even though there were only 25,000 TV sets in all of New York (vs. 60 million radio sets), the new medium’s tail was going to wag the broadcasting industry dog. What was Jack Benny going to do about television and the widely predicted death of radio when TV took hold nationwide? Critics, wielding a great deal of influence, would also soon shift their focus to TV. They would speculate about how old-hat radio performers and genres were going to adapt to the new medium (or not). The final chapter explores how Benny, his writers, and his cast attempted to adapt radio humor to the visual medium of TV, and how critics, sponsors, ad agencies, and the public would shape the program through their critical reactions.