Now, I grew up on Danny Kaye; my mother was (and is) a big fan of Kaye's - she shared one of his albums with us when we were children and we listened to it very often. Later, when my brother and I shared a room, we would listen to her Best of Danny Kaye LP most evenings, to the point that I can still recall many of Kaye's comedic songs from memory. And that's without getting into all the movies we watched! Every time I dig up one of Kaye's films that I didn't see during my childhood, I wish I'd been exposed to it back then - I would have loved it much more. Similarly, listening to the Danny Kaye Show, I wished I'd heard it all when I was a kid. Among other things, almost all of the songs on the Best of Danny Kaye were heard on his radio program - possibly some of them originated there.
The Danny Kaye Show enjoyed two seasons - a half-season from January-June, 1945, then a full season from October, 1945-May, 1946. There's quite a difference between the two seasons. Although Pabst remained his sponsor (and during the summer break they sponsored Harry James in a replacement show), all of Danny's stooges left between seasons. Danny did pick up a new stooge - Butterfly McQueen (who had just exited the Jack Benny Program) portraying the president of Danny Kaye's fan club and a new orchestra led by Dave Terry but otherwise the show became less of an ensemble program.
The other huge change is that Danny missed a few episodes; check that, a lot of episodes! Throughout the fall of 1945 Danny Kaye did not appear on the Danny Kaye Show while he went on a USO tour, with instead the casts of other shows filling in for him, including Frank Sinatra with Judy Garland, George Burns/Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and Eddie Cantor. They're decent broadcasts (in fact, the script for the Jack Benny episode was later repeated on his own show a couple of times) but they're not, in any meaningful sense, episodes of the Danny Kaye Show! I think it's especially notable that most of the guest hosts just insert a reference to Kaye in their scripts but otherwise play out as though it's an episode of their own programs- but Jack Benny structured his guest episode entirely around Kaye, with his cast having seen Kaye's film Wonder Man and upsetting Benny by showering Kaye with accolades as a great comedian.
Missteps? The show made a few. I like Danny's rendition of "Accentuate the Positive," but boy he sings it quite often on his show - four times in 1945! "Minnie the Moocher," "the Railroad Song" and "the Fairy Piper" turned up multiple times as well. But I should add this is only a problem during the first half-season - in the second season I didn't hear Danny repeat any songs.
Neither season feels quite like the right fit for Danny Kaye's talents; he loved speech and song, making funny voices. All he really needed were straight men, not stooges like Eve Arden and Lionel Stander. Why give him a popular bandleader like Harry James? Or a smarmy commercial spokesman like Ken Niles? The first half-season sounds like an attempt to make Danny sound like other popular comedy-variety shows of the 40s. But Danny was not Jack Benny. I like Arden and Stander just fine, but when the show went into jokes with their characters I simply thought, "that's not what I want from a Danny Kaye program." As for Harry James, he had a running gag about what a terrible performer he was; he'd show up in most sketches declaring, "I am James, the butler." Seriously, that was his entire gag.
So the second season - once Danny came back from the USO - should have been more to my liking, right? It's true that in the 2nd season Danny didn't have to compete with stooges for laughs (Butterfly McQueen's role wasn't that large) and there was a wider sampling of Danny's silly songs. But there were also a lot of guest stars - people like Orson Welles and Arthur Treacher. Probably the best guest star was Dick Powell, who popped up to promote his show Rogue's Gallery. Powell appeared in a sketch with Kaye in which Powell was constantly being knocked out by unlikely objects, a funny parody of his own program.
The bottom line is: the Danny Kaye Show could have been great. I felt Danny was restrained by the conventional format of 1940s radio comedy, not permitted to cut loose in the manner of his movie performances. I still would have loved this series when I was a child and I definitely point to the Jack Benny and Dick Powell episodes as diamonds in the rough.
Most of the Danny Kaye Show still exists and you can hear them in this YouTube playlist created by the Old Time Radio Researchers.
