Benny fans usually state that the Jack Benny Program was at its best when what's considered the classic cast is assembled: Jack with Mary, Don, Phil, Dennis and Eddie Anderson (Rochester). But I feel there are other important factors which are often neglected in determining what was the best of Benny: the supporting cast; the sponsors; the writers; the audience.
I have divided up the 1932-1955 run of the Jack Benny Program into six rough groupings and I'll explain how I rate each of these groups of shows.
1932-1936: The early years of the Jack Benny Program creak quite a bit; in the earliest episode we have he kept running through sponsors (Canada Dry, Chevrolet, General Tire, then finally Jell-O) and he didn't have a studio audience. His wife, Mary Livingstone, was with him almost from the start and stayed to the end; before too long he added Don Wilson as his announcer and he remained 'til the end. During this time he also picked up Kenny Baker as the show's singer and 'crazy kid' type to annoy Jack. It isn't terrible radio comedy, but it isn't Jack at his funniest either.
My Judgement: Completists Only!
Best episode: June 9, 1933: I kinda enjoy the opening sketch which satirizes Schmeling vs. Baer.
1936-1939: And this is where the show becomes great for the first time. Again, most fans think Dennis Day is indispensable - I don't. Kenny Baker was not as good as Dennis Day, but filled the same role and did it better than other person in the show's history. What's really important is that this is era where Phil Harris joins the show as the bandleader and Eddie Anderson begins playing 'Rochester'. Phil isn't fully-formed when he first appears on the show, but he gathers steam quickly and by '39 was basically the same person he'd play on radio and television for the rest of his career. Along with the arrival of Rochester, who was such a hit with audiences that many felt he overshadowed Jack, this is also the era of the many 'Buck Benny' skits with Andy Devine, the great Fred Allen feud of 1937, and it's where Ed Beloin and Bill Morrow became Jack's writers. Beloin/Morrow are, so far as I'm concerned, the best of Benny's writers; throw in Jell-O and all the fun the show had with that product... and the show had a great supporting cast which included Beloin himself (frequently as 'Mr. Billingsley'), John Brown, Frank Nelson, Verna Felton and Mel Blanc; most of the radio cast at this point stuck with Jack to the end.
My Judgement: Great!
Best episode: May 5, 1939: The second half of a two-part 'Gunga Din' parody, this half including Phil's performance as the jazzed-up leader of the villains (ie, his band).
1939-1944: 1939 brought Dennis Day to the show, taking the place of Kenny Baker. This era of the show is, to my thinking, the absolute best: Beloin & Morrow are the writers, Jell-O (later Grape Nuts) is the sponsor, there are live audiences (including army bases during the war), and the most important members of the cast are there: Jack, Mary, Dennis, Don, Phil and Rochester. This is the era of the memorable 'Trip to Yosemite' four-parter and the four weeks with Orson Welles as host! The supporting cast also saw Butterfly McQueen for about a year - she's one of my favourite underrated Benny performers. But by the end of this era, Milt Josefsberg had joined the writing staff as Beloin and Morrow stepped down...
My Judgement: THE BEST!
Best episode: January 12, 1941: Jack's writers fail to come up with a script in time for the broadcast; when they try to perform a murder mystery story the cast keeps running out of pages!
1944-1946: This era is kind of a letdown on a few fronts; Beloin and Morrow are gone and while Josefsberg was a great writer (who ran the writer's room for the rest of Jack's career), the humour has a different feel as the show becomes more and more of a sitcom. Lucky Strike becomes the show's sponsor and is almost certainly the worst sponsor in all of old-time radio; Benny and his crew occasionally made light of the Lucky Strike commercial campaigns but not to the extent they did with Jell-O or Grape Nuts; the Lucky Strike people were, by all accounts, humourless and fiendishly devoted to the idea of repeating commercial catchphrases over and over. The sheer number and volume of Lucky Strike commercials from this point on--and typically only one ever done by Don Wilson--really hurts the show going ahead. Topping that off, this is from the period where Dennis Day was in the Navy and Larry Stevens took his place. Stevens was a fine singer, but didn't achieve much as a comedian.
My Judgement: Great!
Best episode: April 1, 1945: Jack relates the story of how he first met Phil Harris; in this telling, Jack actually enjoys all of the things about Phil's personality which normally make him upset!
1946-1952: And this is the last great era, the last time in which the cast was Jack, Mary, Dennis, Don, Phil and Rochester. The supporting cast continued to balloon as performers like Bea Benaderet, Artie Auerbach and Sheldon Leonard became recurring presences. I always have time for one of Leonard's 'racetrack tout' routines, but some of these recurring characters--like Sam Hearn's 'Friend from Calabassas'--aren't especially funny. It also points to a weakness of the Josefsberg era - despite the larger comedy writing staff, the jokes were becoming repetitive; instead of Jack and his gang put on their show, many episodes were in sitcom format and would follow Jack as he encountered the various supporting characters, who would each come out, do their bit, then go away. The show was starting to get predictable; I think it also hurt the program that while Phil Harris was still present, he had less time for the program due to his own Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show and would typically disappear about 10-15 minutes into Benny's show. And to top off all those Lucky Strike commercials, we have the Sportsmen Quartet; the only funny thing about the quartet is how much Jack despised them; the musical interludes by the quartet were only great when it made Jack upset (thankfully, that was most of their routine). This was also pretty much the end of Benny before a live audience, which is definitely an element in its favour--a number of memorable bloopers occurred during this era (such as Don's "Drear Pooson") and the show certainly felt more dynamic when it was live.
My Judgement: Great!
Best episode: October 20, 1946: Jack and his cast parody the program The Whistler with their sketch "The Fiddler" in which Dennis is the would-be hapless victim while Jack is irritated by Phil, the would-be murderer.
1952-1955: And here the show ends; Bob Crosby replaced Phil Harris but never developed an identity of his own, mostly just repeating old routines of Phil's about the show's band; the show start to be pre-taped; Mary began reducing her appearances or outright disappearing; scripts were recycled with greater frequency; entire episodes were rebroadcast. By this point, Jack was well on his way with television; I'm glad he stuck with radio as long as he did, but I can't call this era as good as what came before... I wouldn't even call it as good as the 1936-1939 era--it's a very slick production and better than anything else in radio comedy of the time, but compared to where Benny had been before, I find these years a letdown.
My Judgement: Pretty Good!
Best episode: January 11, 1953: Bob Hope guest stars in a parody of Hope's film Road to Bali, irritating Jack, who wanted to play Hope's part in the sketch!
Check out the very excellent fan webpage Jack Benny in the 1940's for a horde of great information and opinions on Jack Benny!
1 comment:
I really like the Dennis Day era in terms of him being a character on a sitcom but his musical choices are often bizarre and boring, and usually some sort of "Irish Ballad". Phil Harris was mostly during this period and his lines and parts are top-notch. I finally had to look up who Alice Faye was.
There are mysterious factors that lead to continuing fame. Mel Blanc might be more famous than Jack Benny or George Burns although he was just a minor character on those shows.
I wonder why Ronald Colman has been largely forgotten compared to other male actors of his era. He won an Oscar and was in several well-known movies but perhaps he was too versatile to be firmly implanted in people's minds. Jimmy, Humphrey and Cary all played the same character over and over although Stewart's performance in Vertigo changed that.
In terms of radio, Colman is impossible to dodge. He's on several anthology shows like Lux Radio Theater. There was a period where he was virtually a cast member of Jack Benny to the point where Benny and Rochester often discuss Mr. Colman as a running gage even when he wasn't feature. Halls of Ivy is a very interesting show and he is on several Suspense episodes and maybe even on Escape a couple of times. Although English, Colman had sort of a mid-atlantic accent on Halls of Ivy, which is another thing that died out with Cary Grant and Vincent Price and of course, Grace Kelly but not in High Noon, obviously. That's a stunning movie by the way.
Fred Allen is all but completely forgotten. Peter Lorre is barely remembered and he always spoke in annoying dialect which I refuse to listen to. His accent was more contrived than Dracula's.
Currently listening to this, which is very good so far:
https://archive.org/details/ford-theater-1949-03-04-61-the-horn-blows-at-midnight/Ford+Theater+1948-05-30+(35)+Laura.mp3
You mentioned one show similar to this and I checked archive.org and I found eight others that feature Otr versions of novels or of movies or plays. CBS Workshop seems to vary too much in quality for someone who listens on archive.org as a running series. It will wake you up with some of the bizarre shows not tied to novels or movies. This is basically the post-Welles version of Mercury/Campbell's etc.
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