The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Benny was influenced by Tannen just as Tannen was the first to emulate Frank Fay. It was still a fresh phenomenon. “Julius Tannen [was] for years one of the most brilliant monologists in vaudeville and revue,” wrote historian Marian Spitzer. “His humor was based on ideas, not gags. He was a witty comedian, a quick mind and an economy of effort.” Comedian Joe E. Brown said, “The thing that impressed me most was that he just put on his hat and walked on stage, took it off, chatted awhile, then put his hat on again and walked off.” Benny admitted he “deliberately copied” Tannen while still an amateur comic. When a newspaper columnist saw Benny perform he wrote, “Evidently he has seen Julius Tannen . . . but not often enough.”

  Benny suffered many rough gigs billed as Ben Benny—Fun with a Fiddle, a shameless way to cash in on the popularity of violin-playing bandleader-comic Ben Bernie. Dim-witted bookers confused Ben Benny with Ben Bernie and the amateur Benny got a lot of accidental work. Ben Bernie’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter. In order to appease them he added a middle initial and started performing as Ben K. Benny: Fiddle Funology. The minor amendment wasn’t enough and threats of legal action persisted until he changed his name from Ben to Jack. With the new clarification, Benny saw his bookings fall by half.

  When Benny saw vaudeville comedian Phil Baker—a former partner of Ben Bernie’s—he stole from his act as well. Blatantly performing Baker’s material, he diverted potential criticism by billing himself as Jack Benny: Phil Baker’s Brother. A review of Benny’s act from March 1920 said, “Benny says that he is the brother of Phil Baker, who was here last week. And since he is quite as amusing as Baker and has all his tricks of voice and expression, why dispute him?”

  Phil Baker had a cast of characters that insulted him and he would deadpan to the audience in response. It was the template for the eventual Jack Benny mold in which a wisecracking group made fun of his shallow vanity. Benny developed on the shoulders of ­others—but he was no chump. He knew a career could not be sustained on theft alone. So rather than continue stealing from Baker, he hired Baker’s head writer.

  Al Boasberg was an influential comedy writer who focused on format and persona rather than jokes. Not only was he Baker’s main writer, but he essentially created the comic personalities of Jack Benny, Milton Berle, George Burns and Bob Hope.

  He also created a common vaudeville convention in which hecklers were planted in the audience. Boasberg wrote a sketch for Phil Baker in which comic Sid Silvers sat in a theater box seat and shouted carefully written barbs. It became a popular conduit for straight man/punch line banter. Bob Hope took the idea and used female hecklers in the box seat, to great comedic success. The gimmick was resurrected years later on The Muppet Show.

  Boasberg crafted the persona of the Ben Bernie Orchestra, turning them into a wild group of carousing, drunken party animals (the same persona later adapted for the Phil Harris Orchestra on The Jack Benny Program). Boasberg also wrote a routine for George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, called “Lamb Chops,” in which he forced George Burns to play straight to his clueless spouse for the first time. He wrote a monologue for a teenage Milton Berle in which Berle proclaimed proudly he wrote all his own stuff and would never steal a routine—and then rattled off a series of trademark jokes identified with others.

  Boasberg designed a persona for Jack Benny as a vain man who didn’t realize he was the butt of the joke. Humorist Robert Benchley caught the new act in 1924 and found it hysterical, but other critics missed the put-on and criticized Benny for “egotism and aloofness.”

  After eighteen months using the Boasberg blueprint, Benny enjoyed his first real wave of success. He absorbed the influence of Phil Baker, Ben Bernie, Julius Tannen and Al Boasberg. In doing so he became one of the most successful comedians of his generation.

  When Ben Bernie sent his lawyers after Benny, it demonstrated one of vaudeville comedy’s biggest problems. Thievery was a reality and it was difficult to prove who originated what. “Comedy acts were always the targets of the pirates,” said Fred Allen. “If a comedian was original and wrote his own material, he soon found that other comedians were stealing parts of his act. For many years performers had no way to protect their gags, parodies or bits of business.”

  The vaudeville term for a joke thief was a “chooser.” The National Vaudeville Artists (a company union started by Albee in 1916 to circumvent actual labor unions) put together a plan to stop choosers. Fred Allen explained, “Any member could protect his act. All he had to do was enclose a copy of his material in a sealed envelope and deliver it to the NVA office. The envelope was placed in the files of the Protected Material Department. Later, if a plagiarist was brought to bay, the envelope was opened and the NVA officials dispensed justice. Hundreds of acts protected their material through this service.” But when vaudeville died, so did the National Vaudeville Artists—and the enormous archive within the Protected Material Department. According to Allen, “Before the members vacated the clubhouse on 46th Street, some official, by whose authority nobody will ever know, sold the entire contents of the NVA Protected Material files to [comedy team] Olsen and Johnson.”

  Fred Allen was noted for not having an enemy in the world. But in the case of successful 1920s Broadway comic Eddie Cantor he made an exception. Cantor’s mother died of lung disease when he was a toddler and his father abandoned him shortly thereafter. It created a lifelong insecurity that manifested in difficult behavior. “Cantor was a sneaky little man,” says comedian Jack Carter. “He was never liked by the others.”

  Cantor’s enormous fame came from the lavish Broadway revues of Florenz Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld made stars out of several comedians, including Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Bert Williams and Ed Wynn. Known as the Ziegfeld Follies, these revues were essentially vaudeville shows in disguise, featuring many of the same people and material, but admission was three times the price and the production was placed in a bourgeois setting. “Producers found that with the proper amount of glittering costumes, they could turn a vaudeville bill into a $2 legitimate stage revue,” said Joe Laurie Jr. “The raids on vaudeville talent began and [they] had to struggle to keep their acts from deserting. Vaudeville comedians became harder to find, and harder to hold.”

  The Ziegfeld Follies had gorgeous showgirls doing elaborate dance numbers. Between those numbers were comedy sketches with top comedians. For Ziegfeld they were a necessary evil. “Ziegfeld loathed comedians,” wrote Life, “and tolerated them merely as time-fillers in his shows to enable the girls to make their costume changes.”

  Ziegfeld signed Eddie Cantor for the Ziegfeld Follies in 1916. Comedy writer Gene Buck wrote his sketches and Cantor worked hard to make them a hit. Contemporaries said his work ethic covered for a lack of talent. “Eddie Cantor had to fight for his laughs,” said Milton Berle. “He wasn’t born a funny man.” Broadway luminary George S. Kaufman said, “Cantor’s humor is painted on like his blackface.”

  One of Cantor’s costars was Bert Williams, considered by some historians as the greatest African American comedian who ever lived. When Ziegfeld hired him as his star comic a few years earlier, a racist band of actors informed the impresario they would abandon the show in protest rather than perform alongside him. “Go if you want to,” Ziegfeld told them. “I can replace every one of you—except the man you want me to fire.” Cantor said Williams was the “best Negro comedian to trod the boards. The best teacher I ever had. Working alongside him in the Ziegfeld Follies I studied his extraordinary powers as a pantomist, his incomparable way with an audience—­manipulating their emotions as if they were puppets on strings. A moment of silence as they watched his gestures, his shuffle, his expressive face and hands—then—thunderous applause.”

  Williams was in a turn-of-the-century comedy team with straight man George Walker. In 1911, when Walker died, Williams went solo and found success with signature songs that he talk-sang. He got his laughs with under-the-breath comments (
not unlike comedian Jim Gaffigan a hundred years later), as the songs themselves were not meant to be funny. His signature routine was a melancholic song called “Nobody,” all about a lonely loser. It was a sad bit of humanity that audiences demanded, and Williams grew sick of it. “Before I got through with ‘Nobody’ I could have wished that both the author of the words and the assembler of the tune had been strangled or drowned or talked to death. For seven whole years I had to sing it. Month after month I tried to drop it and sing something new, but audiences seemed to want nothing else. Every comedian at some time in his life learns to curse the particular stunt of his that was most popular.”

  Bert Williams was the most popular African American comedian of his time. There were others, like Eddie Green, a writer of Black comedy revues who later hit it big on the radio sitcom Duffy’s Tavern; Miller & Lyles, popular sketch comedians between 1910 and 1925 who accused the creators of Amos ’n’ Andy of plagiarism; and 1920s dancing hipster comics Buck & Bubbles, who kidded each other with jazz slang and smooth moves. Williams had the greatest crossover success, but despite being a Broadway star he was treated with contempt when he walked offstage—as were most of his brethren. “Conditions outside of New York were not too rosy for the sepia-skinned,” wrote Laurie Jr. “[This] was made evident by a convention of Negro actors held in Washington, D.C. . . . to improve conditions of the colored circuit. Negro thespians also banded together in an organization called The Frogs, a Negro version of The Friars.”

  During vaudeville the Friars Club grew into the most famous comedians’ fraternity in history. Noted for cigar-smoking comics and profane roasts, it was founded under bizarre auspices in 1904. New York press agents were swindled by scam artists posing as journalists, doing so in order to score free theater tickets. The tickets were scalped and the swindlers cleared a profit. Thus, the Press Agents Association was formed to distinguish legitimate journalists from the bums. Eventually showmen and others in the Broadway realm were nominated for membership and it became known as the Friars Club. It accepted all creeds, in contrast to “restricted” showbiz fraternities like the Lambs Club, which initially had racist membership rules.

  The very first Friars Roast, or the closest thing to it, took place in 1921 under the name “Friars Insult Night.” It was a fund-raiser for the Relief Fund, at five dollars a seat. The Friars themselves were a charity case, usually in arrears, unable to pay bills or wages. Their early Manhattan home was auctioned to cover their debts, and their membership roll of fifteen hundred became depleted; by the 1930s the club was all but dead. Indeed, for a long time, the only notoriety the Friars Club enjoyed was death itself. Famous agent William Morris had a heart attack on its premises while playing pinochle. William Morris dead at the Friars Club—must be some kind of showbiz metaphor.

  Vaudeville grew throughout the 1920s, and Albee invested heavily in new ventures. He did not foresee the stock market crash, nor was he concerned about the ascendence of radio or talking pictures. Vaudeville enjoyed one last hurrah in its naiveté. Laurie Jr. said Albee shelled out for “beautiful lobbies with oil paintings that cost thousands of dollars, rugs that cost more thousands, dressing rooms with bath that compared to the finest hotels, and he even furnished Turkish towels to the actors. A green room that a millionaire’s home could boast of.” However, the elaborate theaters were not always full and the comedians who had “made it” often felt as if they had not. “Performers usually worked three or four shows a day for very little money,” said George Burns. “Sometimes, at the five o’clock show, there would be fifteen people sitting in a 1200-seat house.”

  By the 1920s the most important theater in vaudeville was the Palace, at Broadway and 47th. If you headlined the Palace, it was understood you were among the highest-paid performers in show business. Phil Baker got five thousand dollars a week, Eddie Cantor eight thousand, and the Marx Brothers ten thousand for a six-day engagement. It was a time when the average weekly American salary was one hundred dollars.

  Milton Berle, George Burns, Bob Hope—the comedians who dominated comedy in the decades to come—received their vaudeville breaks at the Palace, and they got those breaks just in time. “Just as we were becoming stars, vaudeville was dying,” said Burns. “Movies, vaudeville, burlesque, the local stock companies—all survived together. Then radio came in. For the first time people didn’t have to leave their homes to be entertained.”

  The vaudeville moguls panicked. Albee-Keith-Orpheum had seven hundred theaters and twenty-five thousand performers under contract in 1929. Weekly attendance was an estimated twelve million. The moguls funded a widespread propaganda campaign to warn about “the dangers of radio.” They funded newspaper editorials bemoaning the hearing loss radio caused and the house fires started by receiver sets. Vaudeville financed aggressive lies, but it was no use. RCA had developed the all-electric receiving set in 1925 and a year later released the “perfected radio tube,” which operated with alternating current. “This was a revolutionary advance,” said radio columnist Ben Gross. “It did away with the need for those cumbersome acid-seeping batteries which had disfigured millions of American living rooms. Radio now was so simple that even a child could tune it in without fuss, mess or bother.”

  General Electric and RCA advanced technology and became more powerful than the vaudeville tycoons. They used radio to further their own means and circumvent their adversaries. Historian Erik Barnouw wrote that GE and RCA, “born of a military establishment, and still closely linked to it, had now also acquired a special relationship to a wide spectrum of big business and its advertising agencies. No such constellation had ever planned and controlled a nation’s popular culture. Most programs were being produced by advertising agencies, as an activity parallel to the planning and designing of billboards and magazine advertisements.” Vaudeville would lose out to newer, more powerful business interests.

  Joe Laurie Jr., much quoted here, was the most credible of all vaudeville historians. In 1950 and 1953 he published two massive books chronicling the history of vaudeville. His masterwork—a total of fifteen hundred pages—took eleven years to complete. For him it was not merely radio that killed vaudeville, but a betrayal of its roots. “The backbone of vaudeville was low comedy. Albee dressed up vaudeville fit to kill and it committed suicide. It became something that was neither variety, burlesque nor revue. The performers, forced to dress to match Albee’s million-dollar theaters (which were too large for comedy), looked no different to the audiences who could see tuxedos anywhere. Anyway, the customers stopped coming.”

  The Great Depression was no help. The stock market crashed and people lost their disposable income. New genres like the “endurance contest” lured away vaudeville patrons with a chance to win cash. “They flocked to watch who could sit on ice longer, who could hurl rolling pins further,” said Laurie Jr. Vaudeville profits dwindled and star comedians fled to radio. The medium reaped large profits while other businesses crumbled. Radio paid comics massive sums, and vaudeville no longer could.

  As vaudeville died, so too did its perverted cousin. “A whipped dog, the burlesque industry retreated into the shadows,” wrote Irving Zeidman. “Most of the houses in operation in the rest of the country went back to the side streets and obscure locations. When these, in turn, were censored out of business, the operators withdrew still further—to Skid Row. Many of the operators were bankrupt.”

  Investors turned to radio, as did the crowds. It became impossible to get Wall Street backers for a vaudeville show. Its death was never so absolute as when the ornate Palace fell into disarray, unable to pay its bills. It was “no longer the pinnacle of the entertainment world,” according to Phil Silvers. “This was no living.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Radio

  Vaudeville sputtered in denial at the start of the new decade, but by 1933 it was clearly dead, its old theaters canceling the stage shows and replacing them with movies. But in radio the vaudeville gags and gagm
en lived on. There were three million radio sets in 1923 when vaudeville was still humming. By 1936 there were thirty million radio sets in American homes and everyone had forgotten vaudeville ever existed.

  Radio’s golden age was rather brief—the mid-1930s through the early 1950s—but it lasted long enough to create some beloved comic personalities that endured for the rest of the century. Radio made millionaires out of comedians who had toiled for years touring the vaudeville circuits and performing in Broadway revues.

  Eddie Cantor was one of radio’s first major comedians. By the start of the 1930s Cantor was a bona fide star, having triumphed on Broadway and in vaudeville, movies and books. The final medium for Cantor to conquer was radio—and he did, to the amazement of many. His broad motions and brash speech pattern were designed to reach large crowds in massive theaters and seemed out of place in the subtle medium. His writer, Philip Rapp, said, “Possibly because there was very little to listen to in those days, the Cantor program remained on top of the rating services.”

  Cantor was paid a hundred dollars a minute for his first radio guest shot, a five-minute monologue on The Eveready Hour in 1931. It led to a hosting job on The Chase and Sanborn Hour, and his following grew. Mel Brooks was a young fan at the time. “Eddie Cantor was very important to me. Very influential on my work. The sketches were fast and furious—and Cantor was great at supporting the other guy in the sketch. It was Cantor who was making it all work for me.”

  The comedy community at the time was less impressed. “Cantor was the first man to wear costumes for a radio audience,” said Rapp. “Laughs were mystifying to the home listener. Laughs were provoked by gestures and other means. When script lines were cut we wound up with nothing but trash.” Physical shtick and funny costumes played the same role as laugh tracks did years later; if the people at home heard an audience laughing they figured it must be funny—even if the laughter had little relation to what was being said.