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Jack and Mary and Fred and Portland: The American Magic of Vaudeville
I’ll admit right out of the gate that I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia kick lately, something that can probably be blamed on not having seen home since January, and having been in lockdown alone since March. Things may have occasionally come to the ‘rocking out to metal songs sung by Christopher Lee about Charlemagne at 11 pm while washing dishes in llama pajamas’ point of solitary living. Maybe. Either way, when I’m not working or doing something useful, I find myself more and more seeking out the comfortingly old fashioned. It should be acknowledged that most of the cultural products I associate with nostalgia aren’t ‘personally nostalgic’ for me, in the sense that I had or have a contemporary connection (only post-1999 things could be such). One of the biggest parts of this recent obsession has been old radio comedians, mostly Jack Benny and Fred Allen.
Readers of a certain age will probably have at least some memory of Benny, who dominated radio and television from the ‘30s almost until his death in 1974. My mother absolutely and completely despises him, and threatens homicide if I listen to his ‘40s broadcasts in the car, so he played no great role in my early life. Allen, meanwhile, is a largely forgotten figure, mentioned, if at all, as a “comedian’s comedian” and witty satirist who failed to make the transition to television, a contrast to his arch-nemesis. I could, I think rightfully, laud their comedy chops, their innovativeness, and their lasting impact on American popular culture. These certainly all deserve praise, but what has struck me most in listening to and watching their performances in the last few weeks is who they were and who they became.
Jack Benny was in fact Benjamin Kubelsky, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrant business owners in the suburbs of Chicago. Allen, meanwhile, was really John F. Sullivan, a Massachusetts-born son of Irish Catholic parents who came of age in a deeply dysfunctional and shattered family, something George Burns identified as a common denominator among his generation of comedians (he noted his best friend, Benny, as a rare exception to this pattern). Both men, then, came from groups that were often regarded with hostility in more than one quarter, and Allen suffered the additional handicap of poverty and early experiences with family tragedy. By all rights, they should have expected modest success in life at best, but Vaudeville put them on an entirely new path.
By the time that Benny and Allen entered the Vaudeville circuit (roughly the same time, sharing a birth year), it was well established and well known. Neither man began as a comedian, the Waukegan native was initially one half of a serious piano and violin act, while his counterpart from Cambridge was a monologist who juggled. Through a series of act changes and nearly endless movement around the country, both began careers on radio, and became enduringly successful in that medium. Vaudeville was the perfect stepping stone, a way for people to come into contact with living difference, as well as enjoy live entertainment. And it forced a two-way method of assimilation. The performers, many of whom hailed from immigrant or minority religious roots, had to shape their performances to the tastes of their audiences, while the same audiences came face to face with the very human (and talented) members of groups which they may have despised. For others, seeing these entertainers may have been the first time they saw people of their background in positions of prominence, or gaining widespread acceptance and fame.
Of course, Vaudeville was far from perfect. Racism was rampant, and minority (especially black) performers often found themselves paid less than their white colleagues, denied lodging or the chance to bring their acts to the best venues, and made the butt of harmful stereotypes. Benny and Allen’s use of stereotypes shows just how conscious both men were of the line between the humorous and the pernicious, undoubtedly influenced in some part by their own experiences with discrimination. Allen’s Alley was a popular part of the comedian’s radio program, populated by a cast of caricatured men and women (heavily accented Jewish housewife Mrs. Nussbaum, bellicose Southern senator Beauregard Claghorn, and stoic Northern farmer Titus Moody among others), but “the warmth and good humor with which they were presented made them acceptable even to the most sensitive listeners.”
Rochester, Benny’s famously gravel-voiced valet, was never subservient and often outsmarted his vain and penny-pinching boss but as the ‘40s wore on, Benny insisted on dropping the more offensive stereotypical parts of the character’s makeup (his womanizing, frequent drunkenness, gambling, etc). When a skit in one radio broadcast involved Rochester punching his employer at his behest, and a plethora of Southern stations cut off the show for the offense to the white race, Benny labeled the complaint absurd and refused to apologize. His own character (for the Jack Benny of sound and screen in very few ways represented the real man) did not rely on common negative perceptions of Jewish thrift, but was consciously all-American and areligious.
We rightfully celebrate civil rights leaders, educational campaigners, and activists of all stripes for their efforts to bring more equal opportunity to the American experience, but I think that Vaudeville and a lot of its progeny deserve a share of the glory too. (And we as conservatives can, of course, appreciate that this sprang out of a non-governmental, capitalist enterprise). Often without intending to, they conveyed to everyday Americans that differences in race, religion, and tradition, within a solid civic framework, were not going to produce the ‘downfall of the white race’ or anarchy, but brought much-needed vitality, diversity, and humor to their country. Fred Allen was an open, devout Catholic, unashamed of his beliefs, and thus showed the skeptical that “paptists” could also be pretty great comedians and relatable people (something I, as a Massachusetts-born Catholic, am grateful for). His boxing partner Benny, meanwhile, was an example for the children of all immigrants of the promise of America, that hardwork and dedication really could make good. What better, and more enjoyable, expression of the American ideal is there than that?
*If you’re looking for a place to start, this appearance of Allen on Benny’s television show is great fun.
Published in General
They were great in Star Trek IV…
Funnily enough, that continuity week to week was one of the reasons early network executives were eager to bring it to television (in fact, a lot of radio scripts were used almost verbatim for tv episodes of The Jack Benny Show). The characters were already so firmly established, that there was very little trouble introducing them in that new format, although they did have to find a way to slowly write out Mary because Jack’s wife had such severe stage fright that she refused to preform any longer after a certain point.
@kirkianwanderer, thank you for this post. It has been enjoyable and has nothing to do with today’s madness.
You’re welcome, I’m thrilled that you enjoyed it! I didn’t feel like I had anything constructive to offer in terms of writing about recent political developments, but that this might be a nice distraction and maybe help someone find something pleasant and entertaining to listen to/watch at a stressful time.
Since everyone else posted their favorite Benny quotes, I would say that mine is his first (major) appearance on radio, when he said on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1932 “Hello folks, this is Jack Benny. There will be a short pause while everyone says, ‘who cares?'” Fred Allen has almost too many pithy quotes, but I think this one has to be in the top ten: “If I could get my membership fee back, I’d resign from the human race.”
Dana Gould has a part in his one of his sets about meeting Hope when he was in his 90s and Gould was just starting out, it’s dark but hilarious.
I’ll just leave this here for those “in the know”: Chiss Sweege Sandwich.
Drear Pooson
I thought about posting this before.
Cue it up to about 3:30.
The surgeon I started in practice with, Mike Greany, was a good friend of Bob Hope’s. He was also a patient but the relationship was much closer. When Mike and his wife Mary had their 50th wedding anniversary party at Lakeside Golf Club, Bob and Dolores Hope entertained them and the party. She was a bit high handed at Eisenhower Medical Center (another story) but they were nice people.
Agreed, for the most part. I do love “The Great Gildersleeve,” because it has a happy, gentle quality. I’ve never warmed to Fibber McGee. I have an undying love for “Lum and Abner,” a two-hander rural comedy that could be described as the White Amos & Andy – and there are hundreds upon hundreds of eps available.
Fifties comedies fare a bit better. Bob & Ray were wonderful. And the other day I was listening to SiriusXM channel while shopping at Target and heard two eps of a show that made me laugh out loud behind my mask – but that’s another post.
We didn’t have a TV until some time in 1958, but I remember listening to some of those old time shows on the kitchen radio in 1956 or thereabouts. We left North Dakota in November 1956, when I was eight, and I don’t recall listening to them after we arrived in Nebraska. We did listen to right-wing talk radio when we lived in Nebraska, though. It wasn’t anything like the talk radio shows that started to spring up in the late 60s, when I was in college in St Paul MN. But back in North Dakota (much further west than Fargo, where some of you eastern types came from) I remember listening to Jack Benny and one other program. Might have been Fibber McGee and Molly. I was certainly aware back then that there was such a show. And I didn’t learn about it from my friends, because they all had television so didn’t listen to radio. Now I wish I had asked my parents about it, but I’m five years too late for that.
I suppose the radio station could have been based in Bismarck.
I need to find some Fibber McGee and Molly shows to see if they sound familiar.
I didn’t learn about Bob and Ray until years later, when we used to listen to Garrison Keilor’s program.
He got cancelled too.
I love Bob & Ray, but I have never lucked into hearing them on the Sirius/XM OTR channel.
I’ll have to ask my dad what they listened to/watched when he was a kid in Western MA. He was born in 1953, so Jack Benny was basically off the radio, but would have been on TV. It’s always so hard to predict with his family because the parents (really his mother) were strict baptists and picky about what the kids were and weren’t allowed to see. Then again, I’m in the same boat compared to a lot of people my age because we never had cable, so I basically just watched whatever was on PBS and its Boston based affiliate stations. I grew up tagging along with him to job sites and listening to way too much talk radio for a little kid, so maybe that’s why I have a soft spot for the old shows.
I think that’s because SiriusXM’s “content provider,” RadioSpirits, cannot (or just doesn’t) resell the stuff on CDs. There’s a lot of B&R stuff floating around, but its naming conventions are completely fubar’d and in need of standardization. Most of the collections and compilations are different, and run the bits without any useful meta info like dates and station.
I made the awful, awful mistake of reading a ‘queer academic analysis of Jack Benny’ in a book on old media. It’s no secret that he had certain feminine mannerisms, and played them up for laughs, but the author decided that his violin playing, his walk, his gentleness with women, and especially his friendship with George Burns were signs of latent homosexuality in the character of Jack Benny and in Jack Benny the man. (There’s nothing wrong with being gay, but I think there is in deliberately reading it into someone’s private life as though they were a coward or a liar when it clearly wasn’t the case). I need all the brain bleach in the world just to get the things he said about George Burns and his reasons for loving Jack Benny out of my head.
I thought for a minute that you were going to say that there is nothing wrong with being a violin player.
Haha, I’m still struggling to comprehend how being a violin player means that one is gay. Am I pansexual because I play the harp?
Maybe if you played panpipes?
No. I looked it up and at least at first glance Pan seems to have been a typical male.
These are the greatest (worst?) hits from what I could get through:
-“Along these lines, perhaps the most remarkable revelation about how the gayness of Benny’s star image translated itself into bio- graphical erotics comes with the treatment of Benny’s long friendship with George Burns.”
-“sketch out a compelling sadomasochistic scenario in which Burns is constantly inflicting upon Benny various forms of verbal and physical (supposedly humorous) public humiliation. In response to all this, Benny consistently rewards Burns with fits of prolonged, intense, and even incapacitating laughter that can only be labeled “org****c” as they are described in the three biographies.”
-Burns’ “tender, erotic sentiments” for Benny.
-“Taken together, these two defining character traits suggest a pathology of sexual dysfunction in which unacceptable gay behavior/desire has been displaced and avaricious activity sub- stituted for it—avarice being an excessive or aberrant behavior better tolerated and understood by capitalist, patriarchal culture. In this context, the comic hysteria Jack displays when, for example, Roch- ester takes —or threatens to take —money from Jack’s pants pockets or from his mattress, accumulates intriguing psychosexual and social dimensions, bound up as it is with codes of gayness, Jewishness, and blackness.”
-“established Benny’s star image as implicitly, if uneasily, gay.”
-“conventionally considered unmasculine: vanity (about his blue eyes, his hair, his age); coyness; excessive hand and arm gestures; a loose, bouncy walk; a high-pitched nervous giggle; an interest in play- ing the violin; a lack of aggressive sexual desire for women; and a gen- eral lack of aggressiveness in his dealings with other people.”
Go on YouTube to a lot of Benny show video clips and you see the same thing in the comments section — some people have too much time on their hands, which seems to pretty much explain half of the professors, courses and books surrounding the humanities nowadays. What was a joke 60-70 years ago has to be a sign of reality now (even if it goes against one of the other rumors about Jack having an affair with Giselle McKenzie).
Lots of stereotyping there.
Hold on. Hasn’t the left – and especially women on the left – been telling us for decades that men aren’t SUPPOSED TO BE aggressive? Because it’s mean, and stuff? Which means what, they want all men to be homosexual? Except black men, I suppose, because it’s okay for black men to riot and burn and stuff? (As long as it’s for “a good cause”?)
No kidding. Also, I think poor George (and Gracie, for that matter) would be a little shocked to know that he had “erotic sentiments” towards Jack.
Maybe that’s why that kind of thing doesn’t get written until after the subjects are deceased.
That was the gag!
Burns picked on him. Allen picked on him. Mary picked on him. Phil Harris picked on him. Rochester picked on him. Frank “aaYesssssss?” Nelson picked on him. It was evidence of comedic genius. Benny was a cheapskate. He wasn’t. Benny couldn’t play the violin. He could and had started as a musical act doing so — he was no Jascha Heifetz, but he could play “Love in Bloom.” But competence isn’t funny. Raucous failure is.
And Burns playing jokes on him in everyday life off of the stage is something all friends do to each other; they were performers as well as human beings, in their free time they wanted to laugh too, and everyone knew that it was so easy to break up Jack Benny and that he loved nothing so much as being broken up. It’s depressing that such a charming expression of male friendship has to be turned into something sexual. Also, I never, ever, ever wanted to associate the word “org****c” with Jack Benny or George Burns.
Jack and his writers actually made that point in the final sketch they did with Mel Blanc as Jack’s violin teacher. The denouement of the bit is that Jack cures Professor Le Blanc of his nervous breakdown by showing him he can play the violin well, but he doesn’t want the professor’s psychiatrist to tell anyone about it, because it would be bad for his comedy routine if people knew he could play the violin well….
It’s true.
Teddy and the Fiddle