In a talk with someone on the road recently about changing entertainment trends and techniques, we got on the subject about how in early radio (before my time) and early TV (not before my time) some entertainers “snuck” commercials into the middle of their shows. And, also, about how cigarette companies were major advertisers.
Here is an example from the show of one of radio and early TV’s masters and how he did it. Jack Benny (who is credited with having invented the situation comedy on radio) loved to have highly entertaining commercials in the middle of his show. Here is one done on early TV — so early that this is when the Benny show was live (it was later filmed)
It features the TV character Benny’s valet “Rochester” (the truly incredible comedian Eddy Anderson whose work needs to be studied by comedy fans and aspiring comedy actors) who breaks into song and adapts “The Sunny Side of the Street” into a commercial for Lucky Strikes using the advertising slogan LSMFT (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco). His foil in this is Benny’s longtime overweight announcer Don Wilson, whose weight was a running gag on the show.
Notice how they turn this into a great stand alone vaudeville style number — and get the commericial smack dab in the middle of the number. Some of Benny’s radio commercials were literally pieces of comedy art.
Watch this clip to see the artistry of these two Benny cast members — but keep your eye on Anderson, his pizazz, pure professional show biz…and how Wilson delights the audience by being more (ahem) animated than usual. Benny gave him lots of good laugh lines and compensation: until the 1950s he was the highest paid African-American actor. Some said the best shows were the ones that featured Rochester’s wisecracks aimed at his vain boss:
Cigarette commercials were a huge part of oldtime tv.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.