Comedy Stars on Suspense, Day 26: Danny Kaye!

Today's Suspense episode is "The Too-Perfect Alibi" (January 13, 1949) starring Danny Kaye! This was the first of two appearances on Suspense by Kaye. Kaye had briefly been a radio comedy star in the Danny Kaye Show (1945-1946) but did better in comedy films.

Danny Kaye plays Sam Rogers, "a prince of guy," whose best friend is getting married to the woman Sam loves; he resolves to murder his friend and arrange an alibi, as he's certain to be suspected. As the title suggests, his scheme works a little too well!

When you hear how downright goofy Danny Kaye was in his radio series - or his records, or nearly all of his films - you might be surprised to find he had some dramatic skills too and was capable of restraining himself; the plot could have been done on the Mysterious Traveler without any changes, but Kaye's performance elevates it.

Tomorrow: Eve Arden!

Radio Recap: The Danny Kaye Show

The Danny Kaye Show was a comedy-variety program starring Danny Kaye. It was heard on CBS from January 6, 1945 until May 31, 1946. Kaye was joined by Eve Arden (as Kaye's manager), Lionel Stander (as Kaye's elevator boy), announcer Ken Niles and orchestra leader Harry James. It was sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer. Frank Nelson was heard in the first episode as "Mr. Pabst," Kaye's sponsor.

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.

White Christmas, the Musical That Feared the Future

During the holidays I was re-watching the 1954 musical-comedy White Christmas. I remember watching that film with my family in the 1990s and it became a family tradition to watch it every year around Christmas-time. The funny thing is, the contents of the film are only loosely tied to Christmas. Although the entire film is set around Christmas and features the titular song "White Christmas" near the beginning of the picture and again at the climax, the rest of the film is a series of songs and comic situations that could have been told at any time of the year.

But the most recent time I watched the film, I noticed an odd connection between two of the Irving Berlin songs: "Minstrel Number" and "Choreography." The entire "Minstrel Number" is a nostlagic piece about how much fun minstrel shows were (thankfully, unlike the film Holiday Inn where "White Christmas" debuted, there's no blackface to accompany this number). "Choreography" is some kind of diatribe against avant-garde theater, with Danny Kaye as a satirical choregraphed dancer contrasted against Vera-Ellen's traditional stage dancing; wouldn't you rather watch Vera-Ellen tap dance than see Danny Kaye spin his arms around like a clock? (if you would, then I don't get you)

Now, I like both of those numbers - they're both very silly and Danny Kaye is top-notch in both productions. What I find interesting is that "Minstrel Number" is pining for the past - for a mode of entertainment that hadn't been in vogue for, at the time, decades. And also, you have "Choreography," which is suspicious and disdainful of what was popular on stage at the time. Irving Berlin's heyday began in the 1920s; perhaps his tastes calcified then and never really kept hep with changing tastes.

For another instance, you could look to the film the Band Wagon, which went to cinemas a year before White Christmas. That one features Fred Astaire as a performer who's enlisted into a deep re-interpretation of Faust that ultimately flops on the stage. The performers then rally together ("Gosh, with all this raw talent around, why can't us kids get together and put on ourselves a show! Maybe, we could find ourselves a barn or something.") and put on a production that's what audiences really want to see... another big song and dance show.

Now, the Band Wagon is really elevated by "the Girl Hunt Ballet," an impressionistic dance number based on Mickey Spillane's pulp fiction. But taken together, White Christmas and the Band Wagon give me the sense that musical producers in the 1950s were a bit worried about how to continue appealing to audiences. They knew what worked in the past - and those movies both succeeded at the box office - but perhaps they knew the writing was on the wall? The 1950s are remembered as the last really great decade of movie musicals, as the 1960s would be littered with so many high-profile musical flops that it seemed to taint the entire genre of films.

Knowing what lay ahead of musical films, I kind of want to reach into White Christmas, slap Irving Berlin in the face and tell him to stop pining for those ancient minstrel shows. Those creative decisions are so much of their time that I had no clue what "Minstrel Number" was pining for when I first saw it (answer: really racist old-timey humour) and I'm still unclear as to what exactly was being spoofed in "Choreography." The singing and dancing that accompanies those numbers overcomes their lack of relevance.