NOTE: We ran this earlier this week. In light of 21st Century cutting-edge comedy, which often has a meaner edge, we hope all readers will just take a minute and watch a classic short bit of a gentler form of comedy. (TMV saw and liked Borat so he is not dumping on current comedy forms. But you can like BOTH forms)
Years ago, on a retrospective on the late Jack Benny, a clip appeared of a comedy violin solo Benny did with Gisele MacKenzie. I thought it was one of the classiest little bits of gentle, clean and hilarious comedy I had ever seen. It had my chuckling after I watched it…but I never could locate it and bought a batch of Benny DVDs. No luck (yet).
I now have found it on You Tube but they don’t allow this one to be embedded.
View IT HERE and see if you agree. Watch Benny’s face throughout as the character he plays (a vain comedian named Jack Benny) sees he’s being upstaged…
Be sure to read my OTHER POST HERE that contained a hilarious You Tube Benny vaudeville style routine clip.
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.