NINE

Jack Benny’s Turn Towards
Television

In 1948, Jack Benny nervously faced the prospect of adapting his iconic radio program to the new medium of television. During more than fifteen years on the airwaves, Benny and his writers, actors, and production staff had crafted a superb comedic soundscape, perfecting a successful brand of aural situation comedy that blended the interactions of quirky characters into a richly developed narrative world colored by radio listeners’ imaginations. Audiences in 30 million American homes reveled in the cacophony of Benny’s ancient Maxwell automobile engine sputtering to life and the mysterious clangs and roars of the contraptions and beasts that guarded his subterranean vault. Listeners grew to love the familiar patois of the show’s characters—from cement mixer–laden rejoinders of Benny’s bumptious valet Rochester, to the absurdities of the demented train announcer Mel Blanc, the pained embarrassment of his cultured neighbors Ronald and Benita Colman, the addlepated young tenor Dennis Day’s non sequiturs, the jolly announcer Don Wilson’s laugh, and acid-tongued Mary Livingstone’s put-downs of Jack’s egotism. Benny was the leading actor in this multilayered narrative world, who pulled the show together with his mild, Midwestern twang–tinged reactions to the chaos and insults that beset him on all sides. From his longtime informal greeting, “Jell-O again, folks,” to the “Well . . . ” that introduced his vainglorious lies and the “Hmm” in response to being caught—or the “But . . . but . . . but . . .” of despair as his sponsor berated him and the frustrated bleating of “Now cut that out!” and “Wait a minute, wait a minute!”—Benny had crafted his comic character and the award-winning show by orchestrating a symphony of aural humor with a deft sense of timing.

World War II had stalled TV’s implementation, but its arrival was always presented as being imminent. Video stole the trade paper headlines even as radio hit its peak in listenership and advertising revenues from 1945 to 1948, and Benny’s show climbed back to the top of the ratings. Now, competing demands from Jack Benny’s sponsor, network, broadcast critics, and audiences buffeted him as he sought to transition his radio program to television. As a show producer and a performer, Benny wrestled with obstacles thrown up by the technical, industrial, and aesthetic demands of the new medium.

The burgeoning TV industry was based a continent away from Jack Benny and the radio production center of Hollywood. The dictates of programming practices, combined with the technological limitations of coaxial cable, which had to be strung from city to city to transmit network broadcasts, mandated that nearly all early primetime TV shows would be presented live from the networks’ Manhattan studios. The number of TV sets in use was also extremely small. In 1947, the coaxial cable spread north to Boston and south to Philadelphia and Washington, DC, and television stations broadcast three hours of programming per evening. Milton Berle on NBC’s Texaco Star Theater became the first breakout TV star in October 1948, when only about 350,000 TV sets could tune him in.1 Influential radio critic John Crosby first incorporated discussion of television into his column in November 1948, describing the television “feast” emanating from New York on Sunday nights (stealing away audiences from Benny’s radio show) which included The Theater Guild, Philco Television Playhouse, Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town, The Ford Theater, Studio One, and Actors’ Studio.² Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca appeared in the Admiral Broadway Review on NBC beginning in January 1949. Ed Wynn starred in a CBS comedy program originating from Los Angeles in October 1949 that was kinoscoped for East Coast viewers. Benny’s continuing career depended on making a successful leap to TV.

Benny was one of the last senior figures in radio entertainment to start the transition to television while continuing the full-time job of creating and starring in his radio program. Benny made an initial TV appearance on a local program celebrating the opening of the Los Angeles CBS affiliate on March 1949, and then, nineteen months later, he starred in his first network primetime show produced in New York, on October 28, 1950.³ Critics were already beginning to label some of the first stars of TV “has-beens” before Benny ever made his first tentative steps into video.

He struggled to craft a television program mode and performance style in the face of contentious critical reception of his early efforts. Similar to complaints of the sophisticated film critics of 1940 that Benny’s Paramount films were not “cinematic” enough, as discussed in chapter 7, debates raged among the new TV reviewers and industry insiders about how far TV comedy should distance itself from radio’s aesthetics—should visual aspects dominate, dialogue be minimized, slapstick action and spectacle be sought, and sophisticated, quieter wordplay in dialogue-based humor be eliminated? Television critics’ vehemently negative reactions to Jack Benny’s initial television productions in 1950 and 1951 were humiliating to the veteran performer. Reviewers scornfully attacked Benny’s aurally focused radio performance style as inadequate for the new medium’s demands for visual spectacle and action. The New York World Telegram’s acerbic radio/television critic Harriet Van Horne pointed directly to the public reaction that Benny most feared:

Benny on video is in no sense as funny or as likeable as Benny on radio. When we hear the radio Benny our imagination comes nimbly to our assistance (and to his). Imagination supplies the missing picture. So it has that each of us has created a Jack Benny. We know the “character” so well that we can laugh at his smallest jests . . . In television we see something approximating the “real life” Jack Benny. A tired looking man in a well-cut suit who is neither mobile of feature nor flexible of body. He speaks with the slow, deliberate timing that proved a million dollar asset in radio. In television this same timing gives the script a curiously halting gait. The lines may be every bit as funny (and last night there were some excellent lines). But the laughter isn’t as joyous or explosive. We realize, a little sadly, how generous have been our imaginations.4

Benny, his writers, and the production crew labored to balance critics’ desires for substantial changes in the comic performance of his program with the competing expectations of the program’s commercial sponsors and longtime fans that the show remain faithful to the characters and aural narrative landscape that Benny had perfected in radio. Benny’s powerful sponsor, the American Tobacco Company, and CBS, his broadcasting network after 1948, handed Benny a predicament—they not only demanded that their popular star continue to produce his weekly radio program (based in Hollywood) to service the still-large radio audiences, but also impatiently insisted that he launch full time into television production in New York City. Benny was caught in the middle of these industrial forces, uncertain of how to translate his radio success to television, confused about how his character and comedy world could be adapted to the new medium, and piqued by the critical drubbing he was getting from TV reviewers. Ultimately, Benny modified his own comic performance style in a way that was true to his character but that utilized acting skills somewhat different from those he had previously developed for the vaudeville stage, film, and radio.

Benny’s experience provides new insight into TV’s upending of the status quo of network radio and the comics who had dominated it.5 Variety cheekily termed the senior comics gingerly entering TV “the nine old men,” as if they were aged Supreme Court judges a frustrated president wished would retire.⁶ The increased production workload and the draining cross-country commute to New York that Benny faced, while he simultaneously continued to write, produce, and perform a weekly radio program, stretched him thin. His wife Mary headed toward retirement and counseled Jack to do the same.⁷

Why was Jack Benny so reluctant to plunge into television? We have seen how Benny developed his radio format and characters over the first years of the program, but since 1937 it had remained essentially the same, with some polishing and additions of new characters and situations in the postwar years. What aesthetic changes would need to occur to adapt his radio formula to TV? These were central concerns for media critics (and the audiences they spoke for), who demanded to see Benny and his writers meet the new media head on with more visually based humor. How were Benny’s carefully crafted radio jokes, based on aural cues, word play, and fantasy, and the rapid repartee of characters standing around a microphone, going to work on TV? What new sources and forms of humor could be developed? Television’s difficulties colored the slow and cautious strategies through which Benny approached the new medium.

Meanwhile, his comedy colleagues chose a variety of different paths. Edgar Bergen and Jim and Marian Jordan (Fibber McGee and Molly) remained on radio until 1956 and then essentially retired, making a few TV guest appearances. Ed Wynn, who had retired from radio by 1937, had a successful run on TV from 1949 to 1952.⁸ Eddie Cantor left radio in 1950 and appeared as one of the rotating hosts of the Colgate Comedy Hour from 1950 to 1954 (alternating with Abbott and Costello, and Martin and Lewis). George Burns and Gracie Allen quit radio and moved to New York to co-star in their video situation comedy, initially aired biweekly from New York in 1950, then from 1951 to 1958 from California.⁹ Fred Allen’s radio program ended in 1949 (chased off the air by competition from a prize-giveaway quiz show). It was said Allen never found a comfortable TV format; in the 1950s he appeared mostly in guest-star or quiz panelist roles before his death in 1956.¹⁰ Health problems also shortened the TV careers of Eddie Cantor and Gracie Allen. Younger radio comics Bob Hope, Red Skelton, and Danny Kaye, who had active film careers that kept them tied to Hollywood, delayed their entries into TV until 1950, 1951, and 1952.

POSTWAR CONCERNS ABOUT TELEVISION,
AND THE BATTLE FOR BENNY

In 1947, when Variety addressed the issue of how television might impact the very profitable network radio business, amid the utopian hopes for the future were tremendous anxieties about costs, technological hurdles, how primetime programs and stars might (or might not) transition to the new video medium, and what would be left of radio once TV was launched. An initial concern voiced by the advertising agencies that produced primetime radio programs was how expensive television was going to be to mount—almost prohibitively costly, given the vast expenditures and the small number of receiving sets yet in operation. Prognosticators in Variety speculated that sponsors would not be able to afford to move the top radio shows with their huge talent budgets to TV, not soon or not ever—“Possibility of a weekly tele show featuring stars like Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope . . . is consequently extremely remote.”11 Critics suggested focusing instead on lower paid talent in less expensive formats and genres, and not to be so totally reliant on the star-driven comedy and variety programs. They added up the budget items that radio shows had not needed—sets, costumes, lighting, cameras, rehearsal time, plus the stars’ high salaries, divided the sum by cost per thousand TV viewers, and judged that the price was ruinously high, fretting that “even then the possibility of any producer using a top star to whom he’ll have to pay a top salary is something far in the future.”¹²

Queried about his own television plans in summer 1947, Jack Benny was taciturn. New York Daily News radio columnist Ben Gross asked radio’s top-rated comic, “Do you think your radio show would be equally successful in television?” Benny responded, ““I don’t think so. I’d be afraid to try it. We’d have to alter our format radically. In my opinion, the comedy of television will be the comedy of the legitimate stage and of vaudeville.”¹³ Another article’s scare headline proclaimed, “Benny Fears Advent of Television.”¹⁴

Variety’s George Rosen saw “alarm and bewilderment” spreading across the radio industry in 1948, as radio broadcasters looked to the future in what was actually their most successful and profitable year. He predicted that TV would not fully take over as a coast-to-coast medium until 1953, but wondered what would happen in the interim. He guessed that the major comics such as Benny, Fred Allen, and Eddie Cantor would become much less important to sponsors, and he thought that Benny had the most to lose because he was so dependent on an “imaginative appeal that visual presentation would destroy.”15

FIGURE 23.  The American Tobacco Company marketers achieved a brand promotional trifecta in this print advertisement, combining grinning caricatures of their stable of radio and TV stars, awkward product placement and brash ad slogans into an over-the-top holiday sales pitch. LIFE Magazine, December 1950, 77. Author’s collection.

The senior radio comics might have been skittish about the advent of television, but soon the industry deduced that their ability to draw high ratings would give the networks an advantage in TV. With the guidance of increasingly assertive talent agents, in 1948 Jack Benny and the other radio comedy stars began to plunge into the hustings of deal making.¹⁶ Star systems had dominated the American film and radio industries, and TV executives began to accept that established stars would be needed in the new medium after all. Networks, performers, advertising agencies, sponsors, and talent agencies all began jockeying for position. “Television Raids Scare Radio,” Variety reported in April 1948, “Air Names Now Want TV Wedge”: “Looking ahead into the television future, the major networks, the advertising agencies and the sponsors who plunk down $1,000,000 apiece and more a year for air time and talent are frankly disturbed over the prospects of losing their top stars to rival webs and sponsors. . . . Amos ’n’ Andy is being peddled around by MCA, with a tag on it for $30,000 a week for coupled radio and television services.”17

If Benny the creative performer feared what television might do to disrupt his patented radio formula, businessman Benny, working with MCA agent Lew Wasserman, jockeyed to find the most monetarily and creatively advantageous position in which to approach the new medium.¹⁸ William Paley and CBS entered the fray to wrest top talent from the staid arrangements that NBC held with sponsors and advertising agencies. In late 1948, radio experienced a free-for-all battle, with headlines about the networks’ back-and-forth struggle to secure the services of Jack Benny (and other top air comics like Amos ’n’ Andy’s Gosden and Correll, Edgar Bergen, and Phil Harris) filling the industry trade papers.¹⁹ Variety’s Jack Hellman called it “the most fantastic story in big time radio’s spectacular career.”²⁰

Paley’s talent raids of 1948 have been discussed in detail elsewhere, as has Jack Benny’s subsequent wrangling with the IRS over whether the sale of his company, Amusement Enterprises, to CBS was legal or just an income tax dodge. In the short term, CBS wanted to increase its primetime radio offerings. It had been considered the second-tier network for many years. Both NBC and CBS were having difficulties developing new programming; ad agencies and sponsors were reluctant to gamble with unproven performers or program formats.²¹ In the longer term, the battle for talent was for control of established, proven, name brand entertainers to prepare for the coming of television. For Benny and the other “raided” radio stars, much of the allure of the deal was receiving additional income.²² During World War II, individual income tax rates had risen to 90 percent, and they remained prohibitively high after the war (still as much as 87 percent in 1950). Stars working for salaries faced huge tax consequences significantly limiting their earnings. Forming corporations that could be sold to a network meant that they would receive payment to their companies taxed at the much lower capital gains rate of 25 percent.²³

Equally important to Benny, the deal was also about promotion for his program. Benny continually fretted that NBC had not been willing to publicize his show. NBC left promotion nearly entirely up to individual sponsors who provided the programs, and the sponsors and their ad agencies cared far more about their product sales than about the cementing the popularity of performers. Paley and CBS promised to provide much more help for Benny and his show, and indeed the network mounted a full-on promotional push in January 1949 when he joined CBS’s radio network, spending $100,000 or more, taking out ads in scores of newspapers and magazines, running hundreds of spot announcements on other CBS radio shows detailing the change, and having Benny make guest appearances on other CBS primetime radio programs.24 These efforts boosted Benny’s CBS radio ratings to the top of the Hooper and Nielsen ratings in early 1949.²⁵ Benny’s Variety advocate Jack Hellman crowed:

Jack Benny’s high hop in the Hooper hoopla that caught the experts far off base proved many things. It punctured myth—knocked the pins from under infallibles and revised the thinking of our master minds. It had been dinned in these ears for seasons on end that no one ever improved his rating by moving from NBC down the street to CBS. It would have been heresy to even mutter that anyone could cut into Radio’s City’s impregnable Sunday bloc. Well, it happened and with a comfortable margin to spare. Two of the so-called “inviolables” came crashing down on the heads of the believers and placed a large doubt in their minds. Dialing habit, they pounded, was so strong that it would take a lot of doing to change the status quo. Secondly, NBC’s powerhouse lineups were so strongly entrenched that no amount of battering would budge them. But you know what happened. . . .²⁶

As soon as the Benny-CBS radio deal was inked, trade press articles maintained that now Benny was definitely pointed in the direction of television.²⁷ Variety reported:

Only minor revisions will be required to convert Benny’s ether layout to sight and sound. . . . Fantasy won’t be as rampant in video as it is in radio, but tele viewers will see Rochester and Benny riding in the old Maxwell down Main Street. They’ll also see the guardian of the squeaky hinged vault in the cellar, the violin teacher, the spare toupees, bashful Dennis Day and his mother, visual proof of Don Wilson’s oft-mentioned obesity, and the special Phil Harris brand of braggadocio as he bosses his sidemen around.²⁸

The physical reality and visuality required of television concerned Benny far more than this article let on, for he worried that the carefully crafted “picture jokes” and fantasy objects and places he had created over the years on radio were not going to work on TV at all. The Variety reporter did reassuringly note that the Benny radio performers had long assumed characteristics that matched their physical looks, so that they would look “right” to television audiences. (This would not be the case with short, rotund radio actor William Conrad, unable to plausibly portray his famous character of Marshall Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, or Gosden and Correll trying to embody their Amos and Andy characters on the video screen.)

CBS and sponsor American Tobacco wanted their star to venture into TV as soon as possible, and on the West Coast the first opportunity that sprang up was an hour-long gala celebrating the opening of Los Angeles CBS TV station KTTV, which occurred March 8, 1949. Benny and Eddie Anderson headed the live program’s cast, which also featured singers Margaret Whiting, Bob Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, violinist Isaac Stern, and comics Lum and Abner.29 Benny found the experience stressful. He recounted in an interview, “One problem . . . encountered in the rehearsals of the show was in keeping the director from switching the camera from one player to another and from changing from long shots to close-up and then back to long shots. In many cases . . . the camera let on that it knew the joke and much of the humor was lost.” Although Benny convinced the director to restrain the overactive camerawork, it only added to the anxiety of having to prove himself in a new medium where everyone involved behind the cameras was also new, and there were technical elements he could not control.

Despite high anticipation on the West Coast for the program, many reviews of Benny’s first appearance were negative. Even Variety’s steadfast Benny supporter Jack Hellman grouched:

Jack Benny was not flattered by either camera or makeup . . . Rochester (with Benny) will be only as good as his material, and fiddlers such as Isaac Stern have too limited an appeal to stay on too long. It’s more than fair to qualify these remarks with the extenuation that the performers were being lensed for the first time in a medium new to them and therefore nervous and ill at ease. . . . But, as any housewife knows, you won’t buy the product if you don’t like the sample.³⁰

On Benny’s radio show of March 13, 1949, the cast talked about the KTTV show, cracking jokes that having Jack appear on television was great for the rival theatrical industry, and that Dennis’s mother had seventy-two stitches in her hand from punching through her TV screen. One month after the ill-received West Coast TV broadcast, Benny trekked to New York to discuss future TV plans with CBS executives and his sponsor, who had optimistically scheduled Benny to make four TV programs in 1949. While he evinced a confident demeanor and enthusiastic opinion of television to a New York Times interviewer in his spacious hotel suite, there were hints of Benny’s uncertainty. The reporter described a television set, placed in the room by CBS in order for Benny to better acquaint himself with current New York programming, looming in the background like a one-eyed intruder.31

Benny now anticipated that he would have to make major changes to his program format to move from radio to TV. He would revert to the stage-mindedness of his earlier 1920s work as an emcee in vaudeville, in which he introduced the acts, did monologues, and interacted briefly with the various performers. “This is going to give me the chance of picking up where I left off twenty years ago at the Palace Theatre,” Benny told the Times.³² Although Benny was loath to jettison the informality, camaraderie, and competitive insult throwing that the radio cast experienced gathered closely together around microphones, he wondered, what did TV audiences want to see? He was flummoxed.

By May 1949, Benny was leaning even further away from his radio routine for his video plans as concerns about the costs involved in trying to visualize radio fantasies mounted. Chicago Tribune columnist Larry Wolters reported:

The Benny video show will not be the same as his radio show. Benny plans to use the variety show format, similar to that employed by Milton Berle and Arthur Godfrey on their TV shows. Benny has dropped earlier plans for bringing his old Maxwell car, squeaking vault hinges and other gimmicks that are merely sound effects in radio to television. If he were to use these, much advance filming would have to do be done. This would prove too costly.³³

In the panicky rush to figure out what television comedy ought to be, performers hardly knew which way to turn, as critics downplayed and dismissed many of the aural touches that had made radio distinctive and pleasurable for its creators and fans.

“Benny’s principal concern over television at the moment is whether he will be able to put on his shows from the West Coast,” the interview concluded. Ed Wynn was currently performing his TV show in Los Angeles, with kinescope recordings of it aired several weeks later across the rest of the country. By July 1949, the technical limitations of West Coast kinescopes were becoming more evident. Film and radio actor Jack Carson had worked with an ad agency to create a pilot for a kinescoped TV series to be sponsored by General Foods; the finished product looked and sounded so poor when broadcast, however, that the sponsor ate the entire $6,000 production cost and shelved the program. Other critics complained that Ed Wynn broadcast his show from the stage of a theater so vast that a tiny Wynn seemed lost in a cavernous auditorium.34 Given the guff Benny had already gotten about the KTTV special, doing a kinescoped program presented many technical and aesthetic drawbacks. Such concerns gave Benny cold feet, and he pulled out of any plans to broadcast television shows from the West Coast or anywhere else in the near future. This could not have pleased his sponsor or the CBS TV executives. Variety reported, “Jack Benny will do no kinescope recordings here for American Tobacco unless the quality is considerably improved. . . . He is favorable to live telecast but believes the strain would be too much, flying back and forth [to New York] each week. . . . Another reason for bypassing scheduled TV is that he wants to concentrate on his radio show.”³⁵ Now Benny’s only “plans” were eventually to “ease into television via occasional guest shots.”³⁶

Network, sponsor, advertising agency, and talent representatives struggled with Benny throughout the next sixteen months to decide when and where Benny would finally appear on television, since it would have to take place on the East Coast on a live broadcast. They all urged Benny to go on as soon as possible, but for one impeding reason or another, the months dragged on. A July 1949 memo in advertising agency BBDO’s files finds CBS executive Frank Stanton pestering BBDO to secure a definite day and time for Benny to premiere a fall 1949 TV series. The memo revealed that “there is still some doubt in some people’s minds that Jack Benny will do television this fall. Both Frank Stanton and Ted Scheiver of MCA, when he was in town last week, said they feel certain that Benny will do at least two shows in the Fall and perhaps will stay on an alternate week basis thereafter.”³⁷

Fred Allen voiced the concerns of many radio veterans skeptical of the new visual medium. In a July 1949 Life magazine interview, the comic pessimistically detailed TV’s technological limitations, the loss of the intimacy that radio created between listener and performer, and concerns that imaginative input of radio listeners would be lost:

[T]he [small] screen is a problem. How can you show a glint in somebody’s eye? The eye itself is as big as a fly speck. The beautiful girl in television has as much sex appeal as a clothespin. The only way you can register mild disapproval on that screen is to hit somebody over the head with a broom. And there’s something about the television screen that prevents the close, personal contact between the actor and the audience that you had in radio.38

In an October 1949 Radio-Television Life interview, “Year of Decision; Jack Benny Knows That Television Is Breathing Heavily Down His Neck,” Jack Benny seemed to agree with his radio feud rival, expressing doubt that the new visual media could allow for performers to create the intimacy and fantasy of a medium in which he he’d grown so comfortable. Benny admitted, “Truthfully, at this moment I have no television plans. . . . I don’t think bad TV can compete with good radio. It is physically impossible to do both television and radio shows and have them both good. If a performer has been lucky enough through the years to have built up a good show (for radio) his audience will expect him to deliver a good television show; both radio and television would kill me.”³⁹

While network and sponsors were fretting over Benny’s nonappearance on television, his weekly radio show continued to garner kudos from critics and the public; the programs of these years are considered by fans to be his “golden era” of characters, situations, and performances. Highlights include one of Jimmy Stewart’s rare radio appearances soon after Benny switched from NBC to CBS (January 9, 1949), a classic Benny the Shmo episode, in which he joined Stewart at a table at the Brown Derby restaurant and proceeded to destroy everything at the table. In the next episode (January 16, 1949), Jack borrowed household items from his neighbors the Ronald Colmans. Jack walked down the street with an empty cup to borrow flour and suddenly a coin dropped in it (the footsteps and “clink” with no dialogue made a perfect radio “picture joke”). Subsequent weeks included sketches about the radio cast striking for higher wages and Jack holding them prisoner until they relented, Jack losing $4.75 at the racetrack, and the spiraling consequences of Jack giving a bum fifty cents.

Other notable radio episodes drew on such familiar themes such as Jack’s birthday shakedown of his cast for gifts, the annual Christmas shopping episode, Professor LeBlanc’s misery being Jack’s violin teacher, Sheldon Leonard’s tout giving Benny ludicrous advice, Frank Nelson’s insults, Mary and Rochester’s wickedly sharp puncturings of Jack’s egotistical excesses, and Jack boiling over with frustrated aggravation and yelling “Wait a minute!” or “Now, cut that out!” Other than the one ill-considered revival of the “Rochester in Harlem” skit of 1940 that Benny and the writers fell back on while on a rushed trip to New York City, which drew sharp negative reaction from the African American community, Benny’s radio programs of this period were sharp, fresh, and inventive, filled with both small talk and mayhem. Based on well-established themes, they were nevertheless lauded for their liveness, rollicking humor, and “looseness” in capitalizing on cast members’ minor script fluffs.

On the fall 1950 radio season opener (September 10, 1950), Jack was frustrated to find that all the CBS radio studios were booked and were being used for TV broadcasting (an ironic comment on Benny’s ambivalent situation). Jack asked CBS vice president Howard Meighan where he could locate space in which to perform his radio show, and Meighan suggested NBC. Jack threw a tantrum. To compound Benny’s anxieties, Sunday night TV programs were eating into his East Coast radio audience base. His radio program also faced new competition on the airwaves in fall 1950, when NBC launched The Big Show from 6:30 to 8:00 P.M. on Sunday evenings, directly opposite the popular show NBC had lost to the rival network. It was an audaciously expensive and elaborate ninety-minute weekly radio spectacular, hosted by Tallulah Bankhead and featuring Fred Allen and many other A-list guest stars. Traditionally, top radio programs had never run opposite each other in the rival networks’ schedules, as conservative sponsors wanted as large an audience as possible guaranteed for their shows. NBC created this last great radio extravaganza as a sustaining program (without commercial sponsorship), hoping to attract deep-pocketed advertisers to support it, to prove that primetime radio was still a top entertainment medium. If its success humbled Jack Benny, that traitor to NBC, all the better. The Big Show’s high quality was lauded by critics, yet despite a surfeit of expensive talent (reportedly NBC spent up to $100,000 an episode for star performers), The Big Show never attracted the sponsors that NBC sought, and its ratings remained meager.40

Whether or not Jack Benny was anxious to move from radio to television, social trends becoming apparent in 1950 were forcing his hand and adding to CBS and American Tobacco’s urgency in pushing him toward the new medium. Articles in trade journals and the popular press in 1950 documented a startling trend—Americans across the country were turning off their radios, even when they did not yet own televisions. (They attended the movies much less often, as well.) In cities like Portland, Oregon, which had no TV station, the highest Hooper radio ratings were now 18–21 as opposed to the 31–35 of just a few years previously.⁴¹ Economists, sociologists, and media historians have attributed the sharp postwar drop in American moviegoing to the Baby Boom and changing demographic trends, maintaining that families shifted money away from movie theater attendance and put larger shares of their time and money into having children, moving to suburban homes, purchasing expensive consumer goods, and taking up hobbies. These reasons explain why people would not travel downtown to the older movie theaters that had little parking for cars. But radios were already in their homes (and in an increasing number of cars). Critics suggested that the “sameness” of top radio programs, many of which had been on the air for fifteen years, also brought on audience boredom.42 Those who had televisions, however, were watching them obsessively.

Studies now showed that families who had owned TV sets for eighteen months listened to very little radio after 6:00 P.M., and Jack Benny’s previously high Sunday evening radio ratings were hit particularly hard. Another article noted that, “in the last 11 months, television’s share of the total night time broadcast audience in New York City (both radio and television) had increased from 19 percent to 44. In Los Angeles it has moved up from 10.5 to 36 percent. . . . More people in New York City watched Milton Berle on television than listened to Jack Benny on radio.” This was despite the fact that three times as many New York homes had radio sets as had TV sets.⁴³ Nationwide, Sponsor reported, Jack Benny’s radio show was now heard in 9 million homes, while Milton Berle’s TV show was viewed in 6.5 million residences. TV was growing even more rapidly in parity with radio than industry spokesmen had ever predicted.

BENNY’S FIRST TV PROGRAM, OCTOBER 28, 1950

Even as the growing ranks of TV journalists focused their attention on the brash new video comedians, when Jack Benny finally appeared on a special forty-five-minute live broadcast on Saturday, October 28, 1950, the event was one of the most anticipated in TV’s young history. This first show preempted Ken Murray’s hour-long Saturday night musical-comedy variety program, which was also sponsored by American Tobacco. Benny was joined in CBS’s New York studios by several of his regular radio cast members—Eddie Anderson, Don Wilson, and Mel Blanc. Benny also brought his popular group the Sportsmen Quartet, to sing the slyly comic Lucky Strike commercials.

FIGURE 24.  Local television program guides promoted Jack Benny’s first TV program as a special event in October 1950. Note how Benny is associated with his wheezing, ancient Maxwell, whose sputtering engine was voiced on radio by Mel Blanc. Loyal audiences wanted to see their favorite humorous aural aspects of Benny’s show made visual. Benny’s great concern was the efficacy of trying to do that. TV Forecast, Chicago, October 28, 1950. Author’s collection.

Publicity for the upcoming video filled Benny’s radio programs for weeks beforehand, much as Benny had cross-promoted his films on the airwaves a decade earlier. The October 22, 1950, radio episode featured Jack and Rochester packing for their trip to New York. At the airport, Benny encountered the race track tout (Sheldon Leonard) who argued he should take oranges instead of apples for the trip, and the crazy flight announcer (Mel Blanc) and ticket agent (Frank Nelson) aggravated him before he boarded the plane. The show served as send-up of Benny’s nervousness. On the October 29, 1950, radio show (which would be aired on the evening following his first TV program), Jack was interviewed by a reporter who asked how Jack had met Ronald and Benita Colman. Mary retold the story of the Jack Wellington dinner invitation fiasco. This program, with the Colmans reprising their original roles, re-created Benny’s favorite and most highly praised radio episode, originally performed in December 1945. Benny was taking no chances in trying to have his programs serve as a one-two popularity punch in TV and radio that week.44

Benny, his writers, and his production staff had ambitiously planned several elaborate visual spectacles for his premiere television broadcast, such as a filmed scene inserted at the opener that was to show a city bus pulling up in front of Benny’s Beverly Hills mansion and riders’ surprise when Jack gets off, banging people in the head with his flailing violin case. This was abandoned for lack of time, and a ridiculous-looking cardboard cutout of a bus slid onto the small New York studio stage instead. Also planned in the script was a scene in Jack’s living room (re-created onstage) in which Rochester, while busy cleaning and singing, would “reveal” his face by polishing a circle of glass wax off one of the windows (while hanging outside the frame to wash it) and smiling to the TV audience. This was also cut at the last minute.⁴⁵ Rochester nevertheless performed an intricate skit, in which he danced and sang while dusting the living room and conversed with Polly the parrot. The crash and clang of the unseen Maxwell wheezing up the driveway outside introduced Jack to the scene, and he proceeded to carry on a phone conversation with the guest star, singer Dinah Shore, with an attempt at re-creating a split-screen effect that came off as absurd because the two were merely separated by a cardboard wall. Next, in a skit that emulated a radio routine, a nervous-looking Benny talked from the front of a small stage (keeping his eyes on the studio audience rather than the camera lens), and Shore took up a big chunk of the show’s time performing three songs (including the middle-of-the-program comedy commercial, singing with the antic, gesticulating Sportsmen).

In a final attempt at incorporating a visual joke into the episode, as Benny again stood on the small stage in front of the studio audience, he pulled out his violin to end the program with a concert. The three hundred members of the studio audience were supposed to rise and leave in a huff. The show ran out of time, however, and cut off abruptly, with just the front row of attendees beginning to get up. The end result was more choppy and low-keyed than Benny might have liked, but the skit nevertheless garnered a modicum of audience laughter. The TV program was the huge draw that CBS, the sponsor, and Benny had desired. Hooper’s reports registered Benny’s debut show at a rating of 41.5, with a 76.6 percent share of the American television audience (which now incorporated 107 stations in 63 cities with 3.9 million TV sets in use on the East Coast and Midwest, with a total of 8.7 million sets across the nation).46

Benny might have hoped to see the same laudatory reviews in the TV columns for his initial foray into the new medium that his radio show regularly earned, but he was disappointed. The majority of comments ranged from neutral to negative, illustrating how divided critics were over what performance and narrative qualities comedy television programs should emphasize. Should there be any holdover from radio, or did a new medium demand different characters, new forms of humor, and innovative ways of performing it? The Chicago Herald American’s reviewer loyally appreciated Benny’s attempts to blend familiar aural elements with attempts at visual humor. Janet Kern termed it a “history making performance. For the first time I can recall, a radio comedian converted to TV without slipping out of character . . . His program was the radio show come to life. That meant one of the best TV comedies ever.”⁴⁷ Several reviewers measured Benny’s program with faint praise against the perceived “errors” other comedians had committed on TV. The San Francisco Examiner critic asserted that Benny had succeeded in comparison to other TV comics because “he eliminated the pathetic pie in the face antics of TV’s first king, Milton Berle. He had no truck with the harum scarum gyrations of the big variety shows.”⁴⁸

More ambivalent critics had hoped for a much more visually focused program and even a different comic persona. The New York Times’s Jack Gould expressed disappointment with the radio-flavored quality of Benny’s program:

[T]hough Jack’s premiere had a number of diverting moments and unquestionably enjoyed novelty interest, the major part of the presentation was largely a revival of one of Jack’s favorite radio formats—the program devoted to telling how the program is going to be done . . . Jack is not going to achieve his end if he does not think much more in visual terms than he did on Saturday and develop a second joke that has nothing to do with penny pinching.49

Others took the opportunity to heap on negative comments about his lack of fast-paced visual comedy. “Jack Benny Premiere on Television Fizzle,” declared Hartford Connecticut’s Sunday Herald reviewer. “Jack Benny flunked his television debut last night,” wrote the reviewer, who then called Benny “an ex-radio star stage-frozen by the new medium.”⁵⁰ “Benny’s long-awaited video bow suffered to some extent the same shortcomings which have marked the TV debuts of other long-established showbiz toppers, notably Fred Allen and Eddie Cantor,” carped Billboard’s reviewer, criticizing Benny’s and others’ “reluctance to depart in any substantial measure from the pattern on their many and consistent triumphs in all other phases of entertainment, particularly radio.”⁵¹ Only the New York Herald Tribune’s John Crosby, while joining the chorus of those disappointed that the TV program was not an entirely new creation, picked up on a quiet new visual addition to Benny’s comic repertoire that the others, in their demands for slapstick, had overlooked. “The Benny radio show was always noted for the skillful use of sound effects—footsteps, nickels clinking in Benny’s palm, doors slamming. On television these have been replaced by sight gags—Mr. Benny employing a long, long look where he once used long, long pauses.”⁵²

Benny responded defensively to these reviewers’ complaints, grumbling to a Variety reporter, “You can’t win with these people, anyhow.”⁵³ Radio performer and critic Goodman Ace defended the star against the journalists in his Saturday Review of Literature column. Ace rolled his eyes at the critics who insisted that Benny should create an entirely new character for the new medium and start throwing cream pies, chiding them for their new mantra “‘it needs action—if there is no action, it’s not television; its radio.’”⁵⁴

TRY AND TRY AGAIN?

The negative reviews and his frustration with how best to create a television program rankled Benny throughout the rest of the year. At the last minute he canceled a December 1950 TV appearance because he and the sponsor could not agree on the length of the next episode. Benny had asked for forty-five minutes to allow the physical humor sufficient time to develop, but American Tobacco demanded insertion of additional commercials. Finally, Benny agreed to squeeze his TV show into the half-hour block. Still uncertain of the best format to suit these East Coast audiences and critics, in his second TV program Benny tried to create a combination of nightclub and burlesque performance, incorporating sexually suggestive skits. It resembled a Las Vegas routine. Jack’s monologue riffed on his cheap hotel room in New York (which came off as a tired reprise of jokes he’d been making for years on the radio). Guest star Frank Sinatra, along with crooning several songs, was given numerous opportunities to brag about his sexual prowess with women. He even demonstrated this expertise to Benny in an encounter with buxom television actress Faye Emerson, in the rehashing of a stage routine Benny had been doing for years, in which Jack’s attempt to engage the woman in a love scene plays much more successfully when she repeats it with the handsome singer. The entire episode seemed desperate for bawdy adult laughter.55

Jack Benny had been performing this more risqué type of vaudeville skit for years during personal appearance tours, using showgirl Marilyn Maxwell and Phil Harris to show up Benny’s lack of seductive skills. On the radio, Benny and his writers had also deployed the gag of Benny being bested by a more virile lover when he had guest stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall on the radio show.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, none of those prior routines had carried the intimate visual impact of the close-ups of Sinatra and Faye’s lip-lock, broadcast into conservative families’ living rooms.

Outraged viewers protested to local newspaper critics that this Benny show had crossed the line. The kissing scene did not fit their expectations of what kind of entertainment Jack Benny would offer, and the skit’s vulgar sensuality affronted them.⁵⁷ The Chicago Tribune’s reviewer judged, “That L-O-N-G TV kiss outlasted its welcome; viewers brand two minute buss bad taste. . . . [T]he Sinatra-Emerson encounter the longest ever seen on television, was clocked by the CBS timekeeper at two minutes ten seconds, far in excess of the maximum bussing permitted in the movies.”⁵⁸

A distraught Kentucky viewer wrote, “If friends of mine had acted that way in my living room, I would have handed them their hats and coats and told them to leave. I have thus given coat and hat to Jack Benny, Frank Sinatra and Faye Emerson. They are no longer welcome in my living room.”⁵⁹ A Chicagoan griped, “The Jack Benny show was rotten and the Frank Sinatra-Faye Emerson kiss was so shocking we just sat here as though someone had hit us on the head . . . What good does it do us to teach our children to conduct themselves properly and then to see such rot?”⁶⁰ Nevertheless, these complaints also drew retorts from more liberal viewers—“We burst into gales of laughter at our house during the Sinatra-Emerson kiss on the Benny show—and we’re not exactly morons. You’ll always find some biddies who will claim that this undermines the morals of our youth. I hope they have more programs like that one,” wrote another, more amused Chicago viewer.61

With his third TV show, broadcast April 1, 1951, an anxious Jack Benny retreated from his use of vaudeville themes and returned to the familiarity of situation comedy, which at least had pleased the audiences and critics who had enjoyed his radio program. Although some reviewers continued to complain that his programs did not incorporate sufficient televisual elements, a growing number of critics began to reassess the show and acknowledged that the Benny program was becoming a proper television comedy. Increasingly, they focused on the addition of his long, injured stare out at the audience as a remarkably effective visual facet of Benny’s comic timing.

Benny’s third attempt at television was a remake of the skit (first performed on radio in 1941) in which Jack barged his way into an audition for a melodramatic play featuring prominent film actors Claudette Colbert and Basil Rathbone. This episode was framed entirely as a narrative situation; there was no onstage monologue, no break for a performer’s songs. It was a surefire, time-tested bit of comedy (although the episode used none of Benny’s regular radio cast), in which the Jack Benny character was at his most vainglorious and obnoxious. He was deservedly humiliated by everyone, from the theatrical director to the disgusted Hollywood stars to a disdainful butler. Benny had garnered positive reviews every time he used the routine (he had performed it at least half a dozen times over the years, most recently in a reprise with Colbert and Vincent Price on his own radio program on February 6, 1949). Benny’s ability to persuade Colbert and Rathbone to repeat their roles, making rare New York TV appearances, certainly helped guarantee that this episode would go over well with audiences and critics. Nevertheless, some critics remained as negative as before.

Luckily for Benny and his production staff, the coaxial cable had finally traversed the Rocky Mountains to make coast-to-coast live broadcasts of prime-time network television possible, and Benny was able to transmit his first program of fall 1951, live from CBS studios in Los Angeles. For Benny it meant no more planes or train trips to New York to make television appearances and much more control over the program’s production. This led to more confidence for the frustrated Benny, who explained to a Boston reporter that what was beginning to work for him on television was a melding of his vaudeville techniques of connecting to the audience with his radio characterization and situations, but with attention to the limitations of television:

A lot of the things I’m doing on television are like what I used to on the stage—the frustration bits, the embarrassing situations, the master of ceremonies monologues. On TV I can look directly at the audience and get intimate with them. I can put over the expressions of frustration and embarrassment. Visual expression, without overdoing it, is a most important aspect of television comedy. In radio you have to make up for the lack of visual help. You go overboard and even get wild. When addressing a TV audience, I don’t have to get that wild.62

By fall 1952, many of the early TV comic stars, from Milton Berle and Eddie Cantor to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, were complaining of overwork and exhaustion; their health problems and ratings declines spelled an end to their programs.⁶³ Jack Benny’s work routines were not quite as frantic—his radio programs were still aired weekly, but his sponsor and network allowed him to prerecord a number of episodes. He appeared on TV only five or six times per season. As Benny persevered, and as the other more raucous live comedy programs were replaced by more sedate suburban-based sitcoms, television critics began modifying their evaluation criteria for what made successful televisual comedy; they became more appreciative of Benny’s quieter TV efforts. Variety now declared, “His [video] show is at its strongest when the comic assumes that look that denotes exasperation and a myriad of other emotions. The longer he holds onto that pose, the funnier the show becomes.”⁶⁴ Billboard praised, “[There is] visible evidence that Benny now has the medium well in hand, and that he has discovered the technique of transferring to the visual all the uproarious characteristics of his radio series. Benny, the master of the long take and the significant sound, has become, for TV, the king of the meaningful stare.”⁶⁵ Benny’s December 30, 1952, TV episode in which Jimmy Stewart guest-starred now garnered praise both for Benny’s injured looks directed out at the audience and for the actors’ physical hijinks:

High spots of the evening were Miss [Sara] Berner’s snuggling up to an embarrassed Stewart on the dance floor and loudly crooning the lyrics of “you belong to me” in a nasal Brooklynese and Benny’s doing a sort of shmo shuffle around the room with the equally embarrassed Mrs. [Gloria] Stewart. The latter scene was the funniest spot on the show with Benny whirling the long-suffering Gloria into a spin away from him and seizing a passing water by mistake. The comedian hardly moved a muscle for several seconds, but his frozen agony and humiliation as he realized his faux pas created the perfect illustration of a man desperately wishing he could sink through the floor. Jack Benny does more with a shamed silence or artful pause than any comedian in the business.66

Benny was also able to employ his long, questioning looks out at the audience to enhance his direction of the other actors’ performances during live TV broadcasts. Live television production was significantly more complicated than radio practices, with directors having to manage not only cast members’ performances but also camera placement and movement, lighting, and sound. Benny was more dependent in TV on the assistance of a producer/director (Ralph Levy) to put the entire program together, especially if Benny was in the middle of the scene performing. But Benny was just as concerned as previously about maintaining the deft, split-second comic timing of the acting ensemble for which his shows were famous. His cast members were not gathered around a microphone across the stage within his line of sight, but were scattered more widely across the set. With the cameras rolling, Benny could not gesticulate or nod to help pace them, and he did not want to clutter up the soundtrack with superfluous “hmmmms” and “wells” that might be muffled by audience laughter. But he could insist that the actors pay attention to his stares out into studio auditorium and wait until he had finished to begin their next line. Then every laugh could be milked out of each line of the script.

To sponsors and critics, loud, frequent audience laughter remained a key indicator of the success of a TV show, the same way it had been sponsors’ means of judging how effectively a radio comedy program had gone over. Now Benny could use the physical and visual aspects of his injured stare to create extra laughs that did not exist in the scripted dialogue. A critic on studio set noted, “Very often Benny can take a line that’s worthy of no more than a snicker and, by looking into the audience for just the proper length of time, build that snicker into an important laugh.”⁶⁷

Increasingly, instead of lambasting Benny, critics began to praise the comic’s TV prowess. “More and more, Benny is using added sight gags and what you see is becoming as important as what you hear. He probably is the first of the standard comedians to breakaway almost completely from laughs dependent upon words.”⁶⁸ Benny would never give up his focus on the radio-inflected banter and repartee of humorous characters bouncing off one another, but this was not an insignificant compliment to pay. Ultimately, Jack Benny was one of the most successful of the older radio/vaudeville comics to make the transition to television and to make good use of its visual opportunities.

FIGURE 25.  In the 1950s, the characters of Jack and Rochester became more closely entwined as an interracial “Odd Couple” in both Benny’s radio and television programs, as more of the situation comedy involved their adventures together. This joke magazine reflects the inseparable nature of their bond, and Rochester’s fearless criticism of the Boss’s failings. 1000 Jokes, March 1956. Author’s collection.

THE END OF AN ERA: BENNY LEAVES RADIO

In 1952, Jack Benny finally began garnering praise for his eight-episodes-a-year television series, but he still faced the issue of radio—how long should he remain on a fading medium that was losing its mass audience? Listener numbers continued to decline across the nation, to less than half of what they had been in 1948. Nevertheless, that still represented ten million people, and sponsor American Tobacco considered these remaining listeners prime targets for their advertising message.69 Cigarette sales were tremendously dependent on the constant boost of advertising to keep the product’s name fresh in buyers’ minds. American Tobacco was unlikely to attract large numbers of new and impressionable young smokers to Benny’s show, which is why Luckies also sponsored the popular radio and TV music program Your Hit Parade. Sales of unfiltered cigarettes were also declining as younger consumers switched to the new brands. Nevertheless, the sponsor needed Benny’s radio listeners to continue on as loyal Luckies smokers.⁷⁰ So American Tobacco executives pleaded throughout the first half of the decade to keep its radio as well as TV salesman on the job. The CBS radio network, too, depended on Benny’s continued popularity to hold together the remnants of its primetime radio audiences. The trade papers in these years regularly featured headlines such as “Lucky Strike, CBS Beseech Benny to Continue in Radio.”⁷¹

However, making it significantly more difficult to keep producing the radio show at his desired level of quality, in April 1952, American Tobacco slashed Benny’s radio production budget for the upcoming year by 30 percent.⁷² Benny regretfully had to let his longtime bandleader Phil Harris go, and replaced him with the less expensive but pleasantly bland Bob Crosby (Bing’s younger brother). Benny cut back on the writers’ input too, as increasingly, radio episodes were revamped from old scripts; more episodes were prerecorded, and fewer guest stars appeared on the show. Nevertheless, Benny and his radio crew still created some fine programs in these years of dwindling audiences. “As long as Jack Benny’s re-entrenched in the Sunday at 7:00pm slot, radio’s still riding the big time kilocycles,” said Variety of Benny’s opening program of the fall 1952 season. “For 30 minutes there wasn’t the slightest evidence or suggestion that the TV ascendancy had rubbed off some of the glamor—and audience pull.”⁷³ In late 1953, Benny reassured a Los Angeles Times reporter that he was still an outspoken advocate of radio:

Two years ago I started to get a little worried about radio because everyone around the country only spoke to me about my TV show. . . . But last year the swing was back to radio talk again and I realize it was just the excitement and newness of television that made it the number one topic of conversation. After 22 years in radio, I still think it’s one of the world’s greatest mediums of entertainment.⁷⁴

Despite Benny’s insistence that he relied on the well-honed characters of his radio cast for the core of his TV humor, however, even after he was able to transfer TV program production back to California, Benny used his radio cast significantly less often on TV than might have been expected, even though his radio cast turned out to be excellent TV performers. With his extensive tutelage in the arts of vocalization and comic timing, Benny had developed them (Wilson, Harris, Day, Livingstone, Anderson, and Blanc) from being announcers, singers, band members, and special effects voice performers into true radio comedy stars. However, on Benny’s 1950s TV shows, guest stars from the film world played a much larger role, while he relied heavily on his regular cast members for the weekly radio show. Don Wilson appeared on nearly every TV episode to do the commercials, but the Sportsmen Quartet appeared on TV only sporadically before 1954. Phil Harris was now absent from both the radio and TV programs. The narrative world of the popular Phil Harris/Alice Faye radio program continued to feature him as Jack’s bandleader, cavorting with band members Frankie Remley and Charlie Bagby, and characters like Sheldon Leonard and Frank Nelson who also frequently appeared on Benny’s radio program.

Mary Livingstone, who suffered from increasingly crippling mike fright, excused herself from radio broadcasts as much as possible, and was coaxed onto the television program only five times before fall 1955. She made semiregular appearances for the next two years, in episodes filmed at the studio, not in front of live audiences, and even then she insisted on brief cameo appearances. Benny’s programs lost some of their deliciously snarky bite with Mary gone, because he did not replace her. Eddie Anderson’s role as Rochester, however, expanded to fill the role of Benny’s radio and TV partner. His lines were as smart and witty as ever, but Rochester was never allowed to skewer Jack’s pretentions as sharply as Mary. As both the Benny radio and TV show developed more of a domestic situation comedy format, Rochester and Jack appeared together even more often. Anderson appeared on about half of the Benny TV programs through 1955, and then most of the subsequent shows after the radio series concluded. Even without their constant appearances on television, long-time Benny fans probably did not notice the absence of these familiar characters, as they had become permanent parts of Benny’s narrative world. All they had to do was pop up occasionally, and fans would assume that they continued to be part of the story line. After all, many fans continued to think that Carmichael the polar bear (a fantasy character from 1939) still lurked in Benny’s basement awaiting the visit of another gas man.

While in the late 1940s Benny’s radio ratings had been in the range of 26–27 points, Benny’s radio program in the 1953–1954 season program held a Neilsen rating of 8.2 (close to first place) and was number one on the air in the 1954–1955 season, with a rating of just 5.8 points.75 The evening radio audience had shrunk so much that, from Benny’s point of view, it was difficult to justify continuing on in the medium. Jack Hellman noted in early 1954 that, despite the pleading of CBS radio top brass, Benny

seems to be losing his enthusiasm for radio. He knows he’s not playing to nearly as many millions as in past years and that’s an actors’ normal reaction a full house always gets a better performance than half a house. Benny, however, as in the past, will go along with his sponsor’s wishes. . . . TV is his first love now and he would rather give it all his time.⁷⁶

Although Variety reported in March 1955 that Benny would continue to create a few new radio shows and rerun older episodes in the coming year, by the summer, Benny and American Tobacco decided to finally pull the plug on any newly produced radio broadcasts.⁷⁷

By the mid-1950s, as televised humor moved past the pratfall and pie throwing of Milton Berle’s frenetic comedy-variety and settled into more predictable and calmer formulas of suburban situation comedy, it increasingly returned emphasis to radio-like dialogue segments while visualizing domestic spaces. In his own TV efforts, Jack Benny still faced the challenge of balancing verbal comedy with visual comedy, struggling to please vexatious critics and audiences and creating comic performances that met his own standards for quality. That Benny succeeded in garnering high ratings through his third decade of broadcasting is a testament to both his skills and the great affection that the American public had for him. Although he broadcast on television only sporadically in the early 1950s and never more than twice a month over the rest of the decade (which makes his ratings somewhat difficult to generalize and compare with weekly programs), Benny’s TV ratings were in the top ten through the latter half of the decade. Even after Lucky Strike relinquished its sponsorship of his television program in 1959, for four more years of the early 1960s Benny’s TV show garnered respectable ratings.

Numerous traces of Benny’s long radio career carried over into the television programs he created through 1964. Benny and his writers mined the years of successful radio skits, comic situations, characters, and places that were beloved by fans. Many skits and situations on Benny’s TV programs were reworkings, adaptations, and embellishments of favorite radio routines. In 1955, critic Goodman Ace argued that reviewers should give verbal and aural elements of TV programs more credit for their aesthetic contributions instead of dismissing well-crafted dialogue as merely “talk-talk-talk” that lacked necessary action and movement onscreen. “I think the time has come to face the fact that television is radio with the added dimension of a little sight,” Ace maintained.

A recent TV show by the estimable Jack Benny could have been—and because I haven’t been listening to radio much, for all I know it was—one of his delightful radio programs. It was the show where he was casting characters for a movie of the story of his life. Practically all of it took place in an office set and all we heard was some of that horrible stuff called “dialogue.” It could all have been transplanted to radio, even to the big sight laugh where he was kissed by a luscious blonde. . . . The time has come for us to stop watching television and start listening to it.78

The foundation of Jack Benny’s televised humor still relied on witty dialogue and verbal humor, from bad puns to bantering repartee, word pictures that created wild exaggerations, and elaborate unseen fantasies. However, Benny and his writers did continue to endeavor to integrate visual elements and sight gags into his television programs.

Sometimes Benny and his writers tried a little too hard to overcompensate for their reputation of creating radio humor. They would create elaborate visual physical jokes with complicated props, and in a program that moved so relatively slowly, their TV efforts could not reach the comic heights of what imagined fantasy had provided for radio listeners. The elaborately constructed re-creations of Jack’s Maxwell, vault, vending machines, or booby traps set up in his bedroom to thwart burglars disappointed some critics, who felt that these gags should again be produced by unseen sound effects and left to viewers’ imaginations. A San Diego television critic in 1956 recalled that reviewers and Benny himself in the late 1940s had so doubted that his most fantastical aural humor could be translated to the visual medium:

Our concept of Benny’s vault . . . is still the concept that radio gave us. On this [TV] show, when the two workmen come to Benny’s house to repair the vault, the jokes begin at once—and our imagination is put to the test immediately. Benny, first of all, must instruct the workmen on how to find their way down to the subterranean vault. “Turn right,” Benny commands, “when you get to the barbed wire.” (Barbed wire? The sight of barbed wire would be gruesome. The sound of it is irresistibly funny.) Now the men are descending and Benny is wearing binoculars. “They’re halfway down,” Benny announces, peering. “When you get to the moat,” he shouts, “watch for the draw bridge. And be careful of the alligator!” Later the workmen emerge from the vault—and they’re actually wrestling with an alligator. This is the punch line of the sequence and for Benny, I’m afraid, a painful one because it is entirely too obvious for a comic of his high standards. The joke was much better when it remained a radio joke put to TV—a joke for the imagination rather than for the eye.79

Nevertheless, even the most aurally focused comedian could create one of the most memorable visual comedy acts of the decade. In March 1959, Benny appeared in a twice-per-season variety program, The Jack Benny Hour. In addition to Bob Hope and Mitzi Gaynor, Benny’s guest performers were the Marquis Chimps. Jack appeared in a segment on stage joining the three Marquis Chimps, an animal act that had performed on the Ed Sullivan program. The animals wore human clothes, rode bicycles, and performed human-like tricks. In a skit that director Bud Yorkin luckily caught on film during rehearsal, a slow-moving Jack “in ribtickling deadpan style” engaged in a hilarious “chimprovized” skit with the monkeys on an empty stage. The chimps, who alternately imitated Benny, interacted with him, and mocked him, walked out on him when he began to play “Love in Bloom” on his violin. Jack (channeling Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton) seemed to naturally enter the monkeys’ realm, as he sat in a child’s chair on stage next to the monkeys, and became their bemused straight man, sharing his reactions silently with the audience. “The act hit a high mark in video comedy,” claimed delighted reviewers, who ten years later were still fondly recalling the skit as one of the most memorable visual moments in TV history.⁸⁰