In the late summer of 1939, after having mulled over his grievances for four years, Harry W. Conn, a writer, went to his lawyer and sued Jack Benny for $65,000. Conn said that during thirty-nine weeks of working for Benny, starting in September, 1935, he had concocted jokes and japeries which Benny had continued to use and from which Benny had made the tidy sum of $1,170,000. Five per cent of this, Conn said, ought by rights to be his.
The methods Mr. Benny used to settle this little difficulty out of court are not of interest; that $1,170,000 figure is, however, since it represents the fortune you can make if, like Benny, you can go on the air for a half hour once a week and make America laugh. According to latest reports, he turned down a $25,000-a-week offer to accept $17,500 from the National Broadcasting System and the dessert manufacturer who sponsors him. In addition, he was given a unique joint contract with Paramount and Twentieth Century-Fox in which he is to be available to either or both parties and for which he will receive a typical star's salary.
Radio's number one artist got that way and stays that way through the employment of a formula he creates himself and which he zealously improves but never changes. It is by no means a secret one. The extremely literate Mr. Benny will analyze it for you upon request, and if you think you can make anything of it you have his permission to try.
Benny is a clown, as distinguished from a jester — that is, you do not laugh with him at a joke he tells, you laugh at him because the joke is always on Benny.
Benny's fabricated comedy character did not evolve into the richly complete buffoon his fans now know and delight in until he developed it for his radio shows. To be able to turn every type of gag and every variation of a situation on himself, he was forced to endow the character with all the harmless weaknesses an ordinary man can have, and exaggerate them.
In character, Benny is the greatest tightwad in modern history; he is a braggart, forever boasting about his conquests of women, his ability as an actor, and his intimate social relations with Blue Book and movie colony celebrities. Yet it always turns out that he is lying about the women, that he is a punk actor (he is perfectly adequate when he plays himself on the screen), and that none of the celebrities knows who he is.
More important than these failings, Benny feels, is the old-womanish quality he has — fussy, eternally hurt and irritated over some petty annoyance or fancied slight. Things are never going right, and everybody is always perfectly horrid to him. His anger every year because he has not been voted the Academy Award is an example.
All the other members of the show have characters just as carefully established as Benny's, and just as carefully maintained. Mary Livingstone, who is his wife, plays Benny's girl friend, a hard-boiled, straight-thinking girl who is stuck with him emotionally but knows him thoroughly and who keeps asking, in exasperation and in effect, "What's the matter with you, for Pete's sake? Whatta ya wanta be like that for?"
The most successful gag Mary was ever given to read was an excellent example of her affectionate but tough attitude toward Jack. She announced at the beginning of the program that she wanted to recite a poem, and he told her she couldn't. All through the show she kept begging him to let her read her verse and each time he said, "No, Mary, there's no time. And besides, it's probably a lousy poem."
Finally she told him in desperation, "Listen, Jack. You let me recite my poem, or I won't buy my Christmas cards from you next Christmas!" This is a classic variation on his tightwad propensities, Benny explains, because it shows that, not satisfied with his present job, he would plan and work for such meager pickings.
Phil Harris, the orchestra leader, is a man about town, a great guy with the ladies, who likes to drink, stay up all night, and shoot his wages on the horses. Phil picks on Benny, too, bearing down heavy on the sarcasm.
Even better than Mary's Christmas-card gag, in Benny's opinion, is the one about the oranges, with Phil in the spot. Jack has bought a house in Florida and Phil has come to visit him. As Benny is proudly showing his guest around the place, Phil reaches up to pick an orange off a tree, and Jack immediately grabs his arm. "Hey," he yells, "none of that stuff! Don't you see that sign — no fair stealing the fruit?"
Sometime later, when Benny is in the house, an alarm bell goes off. "Oh-oh," says Benny, rushing to the window." Phil, you put that orange right back where you got it!"
The gag got a good laugh when Jack was too stingy to let Phil have even one orange, but when the audience discovered he had gone to the immense trouble of wiring every orange in the grove with a burglar alarm, it let loose with the longest roar ever clocked on a Benny program.
The rotund announcer, Don Wilson, does the commercials, takes a bit of teasing because of his size, and likes everybody, smoothing things over when the others wrangle too long among themselves. Dennis Day, who sings romantic ballads in a good tenor, is the show's ingénu, wide-eyed and innocent as Little Annie Rooney. He replaced Kenny Baker when Baker left the show about two years ago. Like Baker, he has been given a naïve character, and is one person in the cast who is not as bright as the boss. He appears in such situations as this:
(It is Dennis' first trip to New York with the program.)
JACK: Hey, Dennis!
DENNIS: Yes, please?
JACK: Take a bow, kid. (Applause.) Well, here you are in the big city, Dennis.... Been having any fun?
DENNIS: Have I! ... I've been to the Eltinge, and the Apollo, and the Gaiety, and the Republic ... Wow!
JACK: Why, Dennis, those are all burlesque shows.
DENNIS: Boy, I whistled myself silly!
JACK: Now, Dennis, I won't have this. I promised your mother I'd take care of you and see that you behaved yourself.
DENNIS: But I wanta get circles under my eyes like Phil Harris.
When Benny first began broadcasting he played his comedy fairly straight, in the accepted fashion, but shortly he began to grow a little cocky, kidding not only himself and his gang but the show, the script, and, to the initial horror of every one, the sponsor and the product. Ed Wynn had previously begun a practice of butting into the commercials on his show, saying, "Well, well," and "You don't say?" at every claim made by the announcer. Benny went further, writing comedy twists and whole gags to serve as the commercial.
One of the first concerns to buy his time manufactured a best-selling ginger ale, which the Benny program was supposed to plug. Benny told the audience a little story about a salesman of this product whose territory was the Sahara Desert. The fellow had been traveling across the Sahara for weeks and finally came upon a caravan which had been blown off its course many days before by a sandstorm and which was dying en masse of thirst. To each parched Arab the salesman gave a glass of his ginger ale — "And when he asked them what they thought of it," Benny concluded, "not one of them said it was a bad drink."
In deference to the public whose slave he necessarily is, Benny gives unrelaxing attention to the character of Rochester (real name: Eddie Anderson), his Negro valet, chauffeur, and houseman extraordinary, and incidentally the most popular of the Benny radio family. Rochester is always playing tricks on his employer, arguing with him, and making wisecracks, an attitude certain portions of the country would resent if it were not established that, after all, Rochester works his head off for Benny and Benny never pays him. A typical situation designed to remind listeners of this (and incidentally a prize Benny gag) had Rochester complaining about not getting his salary, and asking when he could have the eighty dollars Jack had just lost to him at casino.
JACK: Now, don't forget about that old blue suit I gave you last week. That was worth at least twenty dollars — and I'll only charge you sixty dollars for teaching you to play casino. So we're even; I don't owe you a thing.
ROCHESTER (resignedly): I knew that's how it would end up, but I was wondering just how you were going to figure it out.
Rochester's troubles are chiefly concerned, however, with two of the other constant characters: Carmichael, the polar bear some one sent Jack for a Christmas present, and Mr. Billingsly (played by Ed Beloin), a crazy but harmless old crackpot who lives at Benny's house. During each show Rochester telephones Jack at the broadcasting studio and makes his report on the activities of these guests, whom he hates but whom Benny tolerates. It is a Benny characteristic that he doesn't care if Mr. Billingsly is nuts, so long as he doesn't bother him and pays his board. Most recent of the Rochester-Carmichael situations revolved around the gasman, who, according to Rochester, went downcellar, where Carmichael lives, to read the meter and didn't come back up again. Rochester claimed Carmichael had eaten the gasman, with Benny saying that was ridiculous and that the fellow must have gone out through a window or left when Rochester was looking the other way. This situation lasted for weeks, but the best tag of the lot came at the end of a telephone conversation, when Benny was about to hang up:
ROCHESTER: Say, boss ...
JACK: Yes?
ROCHESTER: The gasman's here.
JACK: There, now! You see? What did I tell you? Carmichael didn't eat him after all. What does he want?
ROCHESTER: He wants to know where's the other gasman?
Benny, after appearing on a radio program as a guest of Ed Sullivan, determined, in 1932, to take six months off from vaudeville and concentrate on radio. The show was not by any means an overnight triumph. Sponsors did not pursue him nor respond to his wooing until it was discovered that his slowly won audience was constantly growing in size and devotion and that Listening to Jack Benny was becoming a household institution.
With such nonsense, satirical and exaggerated, as the Buck Benny Rides Again routines, in which Jack played a blustering but scared-to-death Western sheriff, his lengthy feud with Fred Allen, and sly gibes at all current news topics and popular personalities, the program grew in appeal until it had the highest Crossley rating on the networks. Then Paramount signed him, whereupon he fortunately turned out to be just as funny in the movies, which is not inevitable with radio comedians.
Forte of the Benny program is the running gag. Some are in the short-run classification, which means they wear out after a few weeks; others survive to become an integral part of the show, along with the established characters. All are accidental in origin, meant as one-program situations and retained because they naturally fit into the pattern or are too successful not to milk so long as the public will have them. Carmichael was one of the latter happy accidents, and so was the Maxwell, Benny's incredibly ancient bus which he will not relinquish so long as it will run at all and which he always defends. Benny takes all of his trips in the jaloppy and makes his crowd go with him. After they have used it for a trip to Palm Springs, for instance, Mary complains that Jack was too stingy to buy-them any food on the journey.
JACK: Now wait a minute, Mary. What about that delicious pressed chicken we had?
MARY: It had to be pressed — you ran over it.
JACK: All right. I didn't mean to do it; it was an accident.
MARY: An accident?
JACK: Yes.
MARY: Then why did Rochester yell Tallyho! and chase it clear through a cornfield?
Later on in the program Rochester makes his regular phone call:
ROCHESTER: I'm over here in Pasadena to pick up the Maxwell, but you didn't give me enough money.
JACK: Rochester, I gave you twenty dollars to have that motor fixed, and that's plenty.
ROCHESTER: I know ... but complications have set in.
JACK: What do you mean?
ROCHESTER: You remember how the motor used to backfire just before it would blow up?
JACK: Yes.
ROCHESTER: Well, now it whistles eight bars of There I Go — and boom!
Holidays and seasons provide Benny and his writers with basic settings in which to stage situations, which in turn breed their own twists and gags. On the first day of spring the program opens with Jack planting seeds in his garden, Dennis mowing the lawn, Rochester kibitzing, and Mary making wisecracks. "Say, Jack," she says, "look at the cute little swallow over there."
JACK: Oh yeah? How do you know it's a swallow?
MARY: He's got a sign on his back — Capistrano or Bust.... Oh-oh, here comes your boarder.
JACK: Oh, yes. I wonder why he's wearing that turban. Hello, Mr. Billingsly.
BILLINGSLY: Good afternoon, Mr. Benny. Digging in your garden, I see. I do hope you plant pistachios — they're delightful.
JACK: But, Mr. Billingsly, pistachios are nuts!
BILLINGSLY: Well, who isn't?
JACK: Oh, I didn't look at it quite that way.... H'm. By the way, you look just like a Hindu. Is that a turban wound around your head?
BILLINGSLY: No, that's a bed sheet. I slept like a top last night.
Most Benny programs include a satire on a recent movie, in which the entire gang is apportioned parts and which, as routines, have become noteworthy commentaries on certain entertainment formulas practiced as a habit by Hollywood. The best of these, Benny feels, was his take-off on The Women, in which he cast all the men as the various female characters and told Mary she could be Don Wilson and announce the play. With Jack playing Norma Shearer's role, Phil in the Rosalind Russell cat part, Don as Joan Crawford, the home-breaking actress, Dennis as Denise, Jack's five-year-old daughter, and Rochester playing Jack's maid, Rochelle, the little drama proceeded merrily.
Rochester, told he must play the maid, asks why he can't be Benny's valet.
JACK: Because I don't want a man in my room when I'm dressing.... Now, fellows —
ROCHESTER: I ain't gonna wear no dress!
JACK: You are, too. Now, fellows —
ROCHESTER: I ain't gonna put on no mascara!
JACK: You are, too. Now, fellows —
ROCHESTER: It ain't gonna show!
The opening scene takes place in Jack's boudoir. He calls for Denise.
DENNIS: Yes, mumsie?
JACK: We're having dinner alone, darling. Daddy's working late at the office.
DENNIS: Oh, mother, when are you going to wake up? When are you going to realize that men are only snakes in the grass?
JACK: Denise! ... I will not have you talking that way about your father.
DENNIS: But gee mumsie ... father hasn't been home for dinner in over five years.
JACK: Well, maybe he isn't hungry.... Hand me my foundation cream. I must get made up.
DENNIS: Aren't you going to shave first?
In the luncheon scene, when all the girls are catting about each other, a knock-down drag-out hair-pulling fest occurs, during which the sound fades and Wilson does a commercial; in the end, while Jack is packing for Reno, her husband, J. Updyke, comes home at last, replying to Jack's frenzied welcome that he is just after a clean shirt. Jack says they're in the bottom drawer and is off to a train as the music signals the tag.
Situations and these plays create the kind of happy laughter which sustains for minutes at a time; but for the periodic belly laughs which every comedian must produce if he wants to be great, Benny depends on two or three-line punch jokes. Thus, when Jack is organizing a football team:
JACK: Now, Mary, we're short of men this year and you'll have to be one of the players. Here's your equipment. Put it on.
MARY: O. K.... Oh, Jack, do men wear these?
JACK: Put 'em on! Those are shoulder pads....
Publication Date: November 8, 1941