In answer to readers’ emails: here’s another tribute to a great comedian.
If you’re a younger reader, you may not know much about Jack Benny, a huge vaudeville star, who became a huge radio star who became a huge television star. He was one of the 20th century’s most beloved celebrities— a major influence on generations of comedians because he was a master of that elusive quality called “timing” — captured in this old clip of a comedy musical number that looks like it could be on the vaudeville stage — or on The Gong Show.
Note two things:
(1) His humor has some of the “feel” of the old, classic Warner Brothers cartoons. And one of the key actors on his radio and TV shows was Mel Blanc, who did most of the key voices for the Warner Brothers’ cartoons. Jack Benny worked “clean” — and got lots of laughs.
(2) Watch the way he PROLONGS THE LAUGHTER by “scanning” the audience, making them laugh by his reaction to what is going on. Benny was a master of taking a laugh and stringing it out by the way he’d scan an audience or just look into the audiences’ faces. Yes, he used some jokes on his shows — but much of what he did was with attitude, body language and timing (way ahead of his time). He is credited with having invented the situation comedy on radio. His best friend and comedian George Burns once noted that when you read a Benny script it was notable how few standard jokes it contained: the biggest laughs came out of his character and his interactions with others on his shows.
If you’re a comedian or aspiring comedian who’s interested in studying more of Benny’s work, you can get some good episodes of his
TV shows on DVD and also listen to his old radio shows. Some hold up better than others. But it was the TV-version of Benny when people discovered the way he could milk a laugh. If you’re a performer, studying Benny could be quite beneficial.
Above all, his humor was good-natured and had tons of pizzaz. We just discovered this old clip on You Tube and hope you enjoy it: despite the graininess (someone basically filmed a TV screen as this number was done “live”), its energy level will immediately hit you — and we hope it’ll encourage you to seek out and watch more of his wonderful work. MUST VIEWING.
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.