Comedian, born in Waukegan, Illinois, USA. He dropped out of high school to play violin for vaudeville companies, and discovered his own talent for comedy while appearing in US Navy shows in 1918. Combining his violin with his comic routines, in the 1920s he toured in vaudeville and made a few films. In 1927 he married Sadye Marks, a clerk in a retail store; she adopted the name Mary Livingstone and became a foil for his comic routines. He went on to become an American institution on radio, first with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) (193248), then with CBS (194855), where his own character (a mildly neurotic, self-important spendthrift) plus a regular supporting cast managed to milk laughs from endless variations on a few themes. He made occasional appearances on television in the early 1950s before settling into The Jack Benny Show (195565), where to his famous radio techniques - the pregnant pause and the perfectly timed Well! - he added the slow take and the piqued stare. Among his many films the most notable was To Be or Not to Be (1942). After giving up his regular television show, he continued to appear on television specials, and he made a new career playing his violin in benefit concerts with the nation's symphony orchestras. In real life he was said to be the very opposite of his comic persona - generous, modest, and considerate.
| Jack Benny | |
|---|---|
| Jack Benny | |
| Born |
February 14, 1894 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died |
December 26, 1974 Beverly Hills, California |
Jack Benny (February 14, 1894 – December 26, 1974), born Benjamin Kubelsky, was an American comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor.
Benny may have been the first standup comedian, as the term is known, as well as one of the first to work with what became the situation comedy. In hand with his great "rival" Fred Allen — their long-running "feud" was one of the greatest running gags in comedy history — Benny helped establish a basic palette from which comedy since has rarely deviated, no matter how extreme or experimental it has become in their wake.
Biography
Early career
Benny grew up in Chicago and Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a Jewish saloon keeper.
In 1911, he was playing in the same theater as the young Marx Brothers, whose mother Minnie Marx was so enchanted with Benny that she invited him to be their permanent accompanist.
The following year, Benny formed a vaudeville musical duo with pianist Cora Salisbury.
After the war, Benny returned to vaudeville and changed his first name to Jack (purportedly after another actor named Ben Benny complained). this was a fabrication for the fictional Mary Livingstone character.) Adopting Mary Livingstone as her stage name, Sadie became Benny's collaborator throughout most of his career.
Radio
Benny had been only a minor vaudeville performer, but he became an enormously successful national figure with The Jack Benny Program, a weekly radio show which ran from 1932 to 1948 on NBC and from 1948 to 1955 on CBS, and was consistently among the most highly rated programs during most of that run.
The Characters
Benny's stage character was a clever inversion of his actual self. Though the character was named Jack Benny, he was also just about everything the actual Jack Benny himself was not: cheap, petty, vain and self-congratulatory. His masterful comic rendering of these traits became the vital linchpin to the Benny show's success. Benny set himself up as the comedic foil, allowing his supporting characters to draw laughs at the expense of his stinginess, vanity, and pettiness. By allowing such a character to be seen as human and vulnerable, in an era where few male characters were allowed such obvious vulnerability, Benny made what might have been a despicable character into a lovable Everyman character. Benny himself said on several occasions: "I don't care who gets the laughs on my show, as long as the show is funny."
The supporting characters who amplified that vulnerability only too gladly included wife Mary Livingstone as his wisecracking and not especially deferential female friend (not quite his girlfriend, since Benny would often try to date movie stars like Barbara Stanwyck, and occasionally had stage girlfriends such as Gladys Zybisco); Benny, in character, tended if anything to treat Rochester more like an equal partner than a hired domestic (even though gags about Rochester's flimsy salary were a regular part of the show), while Rochester seemed to see right through his boss's vanities and knew how to prick them without overdoing it. Benny deserves credit for allowing this character and the actor who played him (it is difficult, if not impossible, to picture any other performer giving Rochester what Anderson gave him) to transcend the era's racial stereotype and for not discouraging his near-equal popularity.
Other cast included character actors Sheldon Leonard (later a hugely successful television producer and creator), Joseph Kearns (best remembered as cantankerous Mr. Wilson on the television version of Dennis the Menace), Verna Felton as Dennis Day's mother (best remembered as the Queen of Hearts in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland"), Frank Nelson, singer/bandleader Bob Crosby (who succeeded Phil Harris in the early 1950s), and the remarkably versatile Mel Blanc, who provided several characters' voices, as well as the famous sound of Benny's aging auto, an early century Maxwell that was always on the verge of collapsing with a phat-phat-bang! Blanc is probably remembered best, however, as Benny's perpetually frustrated violin teacher, who was as likely to throw his own and Benny's instrument into the fireplace as he was to have a nervous breakdown before he was out the door.
Benny's method of bringing a character into a skit, by announcing his name, also became a well-known Benny schtick: "Oh, DEN-nis..."
The Situations
The Jack Benny Program evolved from a variety show blending sketch comedy and musical interludes into the situation comedy form we know even now, crafting particular situations and scenarios from the fictionalization of Benny the radio star. Anything, from hosting a party to Christmas shopping, to income tax time to a night on the town, was good for a Benny show situation, and somehow the writers and star would find the right ways and places to insert musical interludes from Phil Harris and Dennis Day. (With Day, invariably, it would be a brief sketch that ended with Benny ordering Day to sing the song he planned to do on that week's show.)
In 1936, after a few years broadcasting from New York, Benny moved the show to Los Angeles, allowing him to bring in guests from among his show business friends — guests as diverse as Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Bing Crosby, Burns & Allen (Benny's best friend in show business was probably George Burns), and many others. Allen, and other stars guest hosted several episodes in March and April of 1943 when Benny was seriously ill with pneumonia, while Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume appeared frequently in the 1940s as Benny's neighbors.
Sponsors
In the early days of radio (and in the early television era, often as not), the airtime was owned by the sponsor, and Benny made a point of incorporating the commercials into the body of the show. Sometimes the sponsors were the butt of jokes, though Benny did not deploy this device as frequently as his friend and "rival" Fred Allen did at the time, or his cast member Phil Harris later did on his own successful radio sitcom.
In fact, the show was not officially called The Jack Benny Program for many years; General Foods switched the Benny program from Jell-O to Grape Nuts and Grape Nuts Flakes cereals from 1942 to 1944, and it became, naturally, The Grape Nuts Show Starring Jack Benny. Benny's longest-running sponsor, however, was the American Tobacco Company's Lucky Strike cigarettes, from 1944 to 1955, and it was during Lucky Strike's sponsorship that the show became, at last, The Jack Benny Program once and for all.
Writers
Benny was notable for employing a small group of writers, most of whom stayed with him for many years. Historical accounts (like those by longtime Benny writer Milt Josefsberg) indicate that Benny's role, like that of Fred Allen, was essentially that of both head writer and director of his radio programs, though he was not credited in either capacity.
During his early radio shows, Benny adopted a medley of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Love in Bloom" as his theme song, opening every show.
Benny would sometimes joke about the appropriateness of his theme song.
A master of the carefully timed, pregnant pause, Benny and his writers used it to set up what is popularly believed to be the longest laugh in radio history. Benny paused, and the studio audience — knowing his skinflint character — laughed loud and long. "I'm thinking it over," the second writer replied — and, at once, Benny and his staff burst out laughing.
Despite the popularity of this myth, in actuality, the laugh fell far short of a record, even for The Jack Benny Program.
The longest laugh currently known to collectors of The Jack Benny Program lasted in excess of 32 seconds. The International Jack Benny Fan Club reports that at the close of the program broadcast on December 13, 1936 and sponsored by Jell-O, guest Andy Devine says that it is "last number of the eleventh program in the new Jelly series."
The Benny-Allen "Feud"
In 1937 Benny began his famous radio "feud" with rival Fred Allen. Benny — who either listened to the Allen show or was told about the crack — answered in kind on his own show, and the two comedians (who were actually good friends in real life) were off. But Benny and Allen often appeared on each other's show during the thick of the "feud"; Calling the sketch "King for a Day," Allen played the host and Benny a contestant who snuck onto the show under an assumed identity. Benny answered the prize-winning question correctly and Allen crowned him "king" and showered him with a passel of almost meaningless prizes, climaxing when a professional pressing-iron was wheeled on stage to press Benny's suit properly. Allen instructed his aides to remove Benny's suit, one item at a time, ending with his trousers, each garment's removal provoking louder laughter from the studio audience. As his trousers began to come off, Benny howled, "Allen, you haven't seen the end of me!"
The laughter was so loud and chaotic at the chain of events that the Allen show announcer, Kenny Delmar, was cut off the air while trying to read a final commercial and the show's credits.
The CBS Talent Raid
While Benny was top of the proverbial heap on NBC, CBS czar William S. Paley apparently had good reason to believe Benny could be had: he learned that NBC refused to deal with Benny in terms of buying Benny's holding company package (a tax break major entertainers usually enjoyed in those years), since "Jack Benny" was the star's real name. Paley reached out to Benny and offered him a deal that would allow that package-buy — a tremendous capital gains tax break for Benny at a time when World War II had meant taxes as high as 90% at certain high income levels.
But Paley, according to CBS historiographer Robert Metz, also learned that Benny chafed under what he came to see as NBC's almost indifferent attitude toward the talent that brought the listeners. Because Paley also took a personal interest in the Benny negotiations, as opposed to Sarnoff (who had actually never met his top-rated star), Benny was convinced at last to make the jump — and, in turn, he convinced a number of his fellow NBC performers (notably Burns &
To sweeten the deal for a very nervous sponsor, Paley also agreed to make up the difference to American Tobacco if Benny's Hooper rating (the radio version of today's Nielsen ratings) on CBS fell a certain level below his best NBC Hooper rating. NBC, for its part, its smash Sunday night lineup now broken up in earnest, became nervous enough to offer prompt and lucrative new deals to two of those Sunday night hits, The Fred Allen Show and The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show (Benny's bandleader and his singing actress wife now starred in their own hit sitcom, meaning Harris was featured on shows for two different networks), before they, too, got any ideas about jumping ship.
The ironic postscript, according to Metz: Benny and Sarnoff finally met, several years later, and became good friends, with Benny saying that if he could have had this kind of relationship with Sarnoff all those years earlier, when he was Sarnoff's number one radio star, he never would have left NBC in the first place.
Television
The television version of The Jack Benny Program ran from October 28, 1950 to 1965.
In September 1954, CBS premiered Chrysler's "Shower of Stars" co-hosted by Jack Benny and William Lundigan. Often as not, Benny would sign off the radio show in such circumstances with a line like, "Well, good night, folks. I'll see you on television.")
When Benny moved to television, audiences learned that his verbal talent was matched by his assortment of facial expressions and physical gestures. Livingstone appeared rarely if at all on the television show (for the last few years of the radio show, she pre-recorded her lines and Jack and Mary's daughter, Joan, stood in for the live broadcast as the pre-recordings were played), and finally retired from show business permanently in 1958.
In due course the ratings game finally got to Benny, too. CBS dropped the show in 1964, citing Benny's lack of appeal to the younger demographic the network began courting, and he went to NBC, his original network, in the fall, only to be out-rated by CBS's Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. NBC dropped Benny at the end of the season, though he continued to make periodic specials into the 1970s.
In fairness, Benny himself shared Fred Allen's ambivalence about television, though not quite to Allen's extent. "By my second year in television, I saw that the camera was a man-eating monster," Benny wrote in his posthumously published memoir, Sunday Nights at Seven, which his daughter, Joan, finished after his death.
Movies
Benny also acted in movies, including the Academy Award-winning The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Broadway Melody of 1936 (as a benign nemesis for Eleanor Powell and Robert Taylor), and notably, Charley's Aunt (1941) and To Be or Not to Be (1942). Benny often parodied contemporary movies and movie genres on the radio program, and the 1940 film Buck Benny Rides Again features all the main radio characters in a funny Western parody adapted from program skits. The failure of one Benny vehicle, The Horn Blows at Midnight, became a running gag on his radio program, although contemporary viewers may not find the film as disappointing as the jokes suggest (Benny plays the trumpet-not the violin!!}
Benny also was caricatured in several Warner Brothers cartoons including Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur (1939, as Caspar the Caveman), Slap-Happy Pappy (1940, as Jack Bunny), Malibu Beach Party (1940, as himself), and The Mouse That Jack Built (1959). The last of these is probably the most memorable: animation giant Robert McKimson engaged Benny and his actual cast (Mary Livingstone, Eddie Anderson, and Don Wilson) to do the voices for the mouse versions of their characters, with Mel Blanc — the usual Warner Brothers cartoon voicemeister — reprising his old vocal turn as the always-aging Maxwell, always a phat-phat-bang! away from collapse. In the cartoon, Benny and Livingstone agree to spend their anniversary at the Kit-Kat Club — which they discover the hard way is inside the mouth of a live cat.
The Final Years
After his broadcasting career ended at last, Benny performed live as a standup comedian and also returned to films, with a cameo appearance in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963 and preparing to star in the film version of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys when his health failed. he won an Academy Award for his performance, and the surprising but endearing career revival of George Burns lasted until his own death two decades hence.)
In October 1974, Benny cancelled a performance in Dallas after suffering a dizzy spell, coupled with a feeling of numbness in his arms. Mr. Benny's will arranged for flowers to be delivered to his widowed wife, Mary Livingstone, every day for the rest of her life. An enormous volume of Benny's classic radio shows remains available to old-time radio collectors even today, likewise video offerings of his television show.
Running gags
Benny teamed with Fred Allen, of course, for the best-remembered running gag in classic radio history, in terms of character dialogue. (By far, the best-remembered running gag of sound was Fibber McGee's clattering, cluttered closet.) But Benny alone sustained a classic repertoire of running gags in his own right, including his skinflint radio and television persona, his continuing age of 39, and his (ahem) atonal violin playing. when he didn't throw up his hands and threaten some variation of suicide or nervous breakdown.)
Benny even had a sound-based running gag of his own: his famous basement vault alarm, ringing off with a shattering cacophony of whistles, sirens, bells, and blasts, before ending invariably with the sound of a foghorn. In one episode of the Benny radio show, the guard, named Ed, actually agreed when Jack invited him to take a break and come back to the surface world — only to discover that modern conveniences and transportation, which hadn't been around the last time he'd been to the surface, terrorised and confused him. Upon his death, having celebrated his 39th birthday 41 times, some newspapers continued the joke with headlines such as "Jack Benny Dies - At 39?"
39er
In February 2006, Benny's name appeared in the news again when his fans petitioned to put this famous 39er on the US postal stamp after the standard postal rate for first class letter was increased to 39 cents.
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