Jack Benny
Copyright (c) (2017) by Kathleen Spaltro
All Rights Reserved
Jack Benny built
a good living and a solid career on the flimsy foundation of sheer pretense. He
pretended to be vain, miserly, and ornery, and he pretended to be oblivious
about these failings. The character "Jack Benny," our self-absorbed
Uncle Jack, enlarged our own traits in a mirror turned on ourselves. His embodiment
so exaggerated our faults into absurdity that, by laughing at Benny, we also
laughed at our own silliness.
Benny
mastered the humor of self-deprecation. If he played the violin, his butler Rochester
van Jones (Eddie Anderson) cautioned that rope should not be nearby to tempt
any listeners. If Benny invited guests to his home, they put coins in his vending
machines, such as the lamp that sold penny candy. If Benny reluctantly dragged
out some coins in payment, suction in his pocket held the coins back. If Benny
went out of town for 10 days, he pawned his parrot to get free room and board
for the bird. If Benny boasted about his cleverness in buying a beautifully
tailored suit in Hong Kong for $17, the lapels, pockets, and sleeves fell off
as he demonstrated his mastery of the violin.
Oblivious to his own orneriness, Benny maddened a department
store clerk whom he badgered into repeatedly rewrapping an uncharacteristically
generous Christmas gift. In the "Christmas Shopping Show," Mel Blanc
hilariously conveyed the growing despair of the clerk. (The voice of many
Warner Brothers cartoon characters, Blanc also impersonated Benny's parrot and
"the Maxwell," Benny's elderly—manufactured no later than 1925—and
barely functioning car, as it coughed itself into starting.)
While Blanc's
clerk submitted to Benny despairingly, more frequently Benny got no respect
from store clerks, phone operators, or plumbers. With a pained look at the
audience, a "put-upon" expression, and the drawn-out, indignant exclamation
"Well!," Benny would fold his arms, place his hand on his chin, and
eventually saunter away with his trademark swaying, mincing walk, "like
Theda Bara," the "vamp" of American silent movies.
The audience expected "Jack Benny" to be cheap, vain,
fussy, bad at violin playing, and oblivious, and the audience never tired of
Benny's re-enactments of these faults. Forever 39 years old, Benny locked his
savings in a vault located in a dungeon guarded by a crocodile and a
Confederate soldier who had never learned of the end of the Civil War. Most
famously, he prolonged a hesitating response to a hold-up demanding "Your
money or your life!" Several minutes of "dead air time" later,
the audience was speechless with hilarity.
Benny recycled this durable material from vaudeville and radio
into the movies and then into television. Born as Benny Kubelsky, he had begun
his entertainment career in vaudeville with violin playing; his childhood
violin lessons got him a job in ninth grade as a violinist for the orchestra of
the vaudeville house in his Waukegan neighborhood.
(His lifelong friendship with the Marx Brothers began there in 1911.) In the
Navy during World War One, Benny entertained his fellow sailors at the Great
Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan with comedy routines. By 1921, he was focusing
on his vaudeville career as comedian "Jack Benny."
An advertising account executive for Canada Dry who had heard Benny
perform during a 1932 appearance on a 15-minute radio program hosted by "New
York Daily News" Broadway columnist Ed Sullivan recruited Benny to be the
emcee of the CBS Radio "Canada Dry Ginger Ale Program." By the end of
1932, he was voted "Most Popular Comedian on the Air."
Other sponsored radio shows followed on CBS and NBC: "Chevrolet Program,"
"General Tire Revue," General
Foods's "Jell-O Program" and "Grape Nuts Flakes Program,"
and American Tobacco's "Lucky Strike Program."
Benny still did radio programs while he was trying out
television on a local affiliate station in 1949-50 and on his first network TV
show on 28 October 1950. His last new radio program (for Lucky Strike) aired in
1955. With his concentration now on his CBS TV show, Benny won a 1957 Emmy
Award, and his program in 1958 won the Emmy for Best Comedy Series. TV sponsors
included American Tobacco's Lucky Strike (1950–59), Lever Brothers' Lux
(1959–60), State Farm Insurance (1960–65), Lipton Tea (1960–62), General Foods's
Jell-O (1962–64), and Miles Laboratories (1964–65).
With his ratings slipping
in the 1960s, CBS did not renew Benny's contract at the end of the 1963-64
season, and he went to NBC on a 1-year contract. His last regular TV program
aired in 1965; TV specials and guest appearances followed during his last
decade of life.
A kindly and gentle, not oblivious man, Benny was actually not
cheap but very generous. The benefit concerts that he did with orchestras
raised $6 million for orchestras worldwide. (He also gave $1 million to an
actors' retirement home.) Concert audiences came for the "Jack Benny"
that they half-knew was a fiction but wanted to laugh at anyway. Benny joked
that, during these benefit concerts, the more expensive seats were the furthest
from the stage on which he played his violin: "When I give concerts, the
tickets sell for $5 to $100, but for my
concerts the $5 seats are down in front . . . the further back you go, the more
you have to pay. The $100 seats are the last 2 rows, and those tickets go like
hotcakes! In fact, if you pay $200 you don't have to come at all."
First published in The Woodstock Independent
