Radio critics treated Cantor’s show harshly, and he was sensitive to their scorn. Ben Gross and Abe Greenberg gave Cantor unfavorable reviews and Cantor called them out over the air. In response Gross and Greenberg filed individual libel suits against him—and won.
Cantor’s ego ballooned, to the detriment of those around him. Irving Fein, the veteran manager of Jack Benny and George Burns, said, “The cast of the Eddie Cantor program always complained that whenever one of them got a big laugh at rehearsal, Cantor would immediately change the dialogue so that he could take the funny line.” Comedy writer Mort Lachman said, “He begged for laughs and that bothered me. He was a difficult man to work with, a very limited talent, but he got the most out of what he had.”
The disparity between Cantor’s onstage persona and offstage personality was an issue. He was sold to the public as a family man with five daughters, but within showbiz circles he was considered a sexual harasser and philanderer. “Cantor liked the girls,” said radio actress Jean Vander Pyl. “And he liked to goose them. He would wait until they were on the air, so that they couldn’t protest and no one would know. On one occasion, he goosed Billie [Bellport], who was a sweet naive thing. She was so unprepared she went, ‘Oh, Mr. Cantor!’ and he had to quickly cover. Cantor was fuming. He came storming off the set, ‘Don’t ever use that girl again.’” Comedy writer Bob Weiskopf said, “He was chasing women around while poor Ida [Cantor’s wife] would sit in her room crying. But all the mothers loved him. My own mother refused to believe he wasn’t a nice man.”
Cantor was eventually knocked off the air by the competition—Major Bowes Amateur Hour, a forerunner to American Idol type of programming. Philip Rapp relished the poetic justice: “The world’s greatest professional toppled by amateurs.”
As radio progressed, so did methods of marketing. Advertising agencies controlled the early radio shows. They dictated the content and packaged the talent. The advertising agencies provided the money and as such filled the airwaves with Madison Avenue hucksterism. The success of comedian Joe Penner was such a creation.
Penner was an early radio comedian whose popularity was based on gimmickry. He toured with an exotic dancer named Sheikee in the late 1920s, but an obscenity bust scared him off the circuit. Influenced by fellow comic Al Reeves, who segued gags shouting, “Give me credit, boys,” Penner created his own catchphrases. Penner became a hit repeating the phrases “You na-ah-asty man!” and “Wanna buy a duck?”
While playing vaudeville with dancer-actor Russ Tamblyn’s father, Penner was signed by a scout from the Rudy Vallee radio program. His 1933 guest shot went over well enough that the J. Walter Thompson marketing agency felt it could manufacture a spin-off. Penner was paid seven thousand dollars a week as star of The Baker’s Broadcast.
Penner had a whiny, childlike voice that annoyed adults and appealed to children. The style of his program was juvenile but undeniably popular, a sort of Gilligan’s Island of the air. His catchphrase “Wanna buy a duck?” was merchandised shamelessly. Rubber ducks with the Joe Penner seal of approval polluted department store shelves. Moronic songs like “Doin’ the Ducky-Wuck” were sold as Joe Penner sheet music. As the merchandisers cashed in, so too did Hollywood. Film studio RKO starred Penner in several cheap movies alongside comedians Jack Oakie and Harry “Parkyakarkus” Einstein. He toured the country making personal appearances in an all-white suit. The color was a necessity. “Wherever we went, we were invited to the swankiest restaurants,” said lead Penner writer Parke Levy. “The owners always thought they had a novel publicity idea when they would have Joe Penner hold a live duck. They gave him a live duck for the photographers to snap, and the ducks always shit all over him—all over his pretty white suit. The suit would be immaculate and he would have that smile and the duck would be shitting all over him.”
Like any career based on a gimmick, Penner’s dissipated as quickly as it rose. After his show had been on the radio for two and a half seasons, the public grew tired of hearing “Wanna buy a duck?” He was a marginal figure by the 1940s, when he accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills at the age of thirty-six.
It was singer Rudy Vallee who gave Penner his first radio shot. Vallee was the Johnny Carson of his day, introducing new acts and turning them into stars. He was immensely popular. “During the span between 1928 and 1933, the king of crooners won a degree of feminine adulation,” wrote radio critic Ben Gross. “The Vallee fans were the original fanatics of radio.” George Burns & Gracie Allen, Edgar Bergen, Milton Berle, Fanny Brice and Bert Lahr all had their radio debuts with Vallee. An unknown comic named Victor Borge was his audience warm-up man. But while Vallee got credit for introducing many future giants of comedy, the actual booking process had little to do with him. “Rudy Vallee’s great claim to fame was that these stars were on his show,” said one of his writers, Paul Henning. “That was none of his doing—they were all chosen for him—he just fronted the band.”
“He never wrote a line, never edited a line and never really could tell a joke,” said Norman Panama, another of Vallee’s writers. “He had absolutely no talent and the show deservedly went off the air.” Comedy writer Jess Oppenheimer was frustrated by Vallee’s lack of comic savvy. “We once wrote a long sketch that ended with Rudy delivering a great punch line. It was met with uproarious laughter. In the middle of the following week’s show, Rudy suddenly turned to the audience and ad-libbed the same punch line—this time by itself, without any of the preceding material. The audience just stared at him. Rudy later told me he couldn’t understand why last week’s audience thought the line was so much funnier.”
Comedian Ed Wynn entered radio in 1932 and pioneered the idea of a studio audience. The Ziegfeld veteran was terrified of an audience he couldn’t see. His son, Keenan, said, “He got so scared about his ability to keep an unseen audience laughing that he was the reluctant dragon of Madison Avenue when it came to signing a contract.” A Texaco advertising executive attended four Ed Wynn performances with his back turned to the stage. He wanted to see how Wynn’s act played without the visual element. Wynn was signed by NBC for five thousand dollars a week, with his contract stipulating the need for a live audience. Texaco footed the bill to have the radio studio renovated, and the studio audience was invented.
Ed Wynn, like many vaudevillians, had a great memory for old jokes. That mental reservoir came into play when a radio writer tried to pass off an old gag as new. “Snag Werris worked for The Ed Wynn Show,” says comedian Jack Carter. “He gave Wynn a joke [in the writers room] and Wynn said, ‘Come with me!’ They left the theater, got in a cab, went to Ed’s home, went up to his office. Ed had walls of boxes and crates. He pulled them out and pulled out pages and and pages! And there was the joke. Ed said, ‘There! There’s the joke you gave me today! You see? Don’t ever do that to me again.’”
The Kate Smith Hour was an important radio showcase for comedians. It revolved around the famed singer’s introducing different guests, including a comic who’d Americanized his family name, Jungmann. “I put thirty guys in business,” said Henny Youngman. “When I was on Kate Smith I had six writers, so every week I told twenty-six jokes. A lot of comics started from those routines. They couldn’t afford routines. They were all amateurs at the time. Buddy Hackett. Jan Murray. Red Buttons. All of these guys started in the business with my jokes.”
Paramount studio executives offered him a contract based on his Kate Smith Hour appearances. Not wanting to screw over a show that had given him his break, Youngman scouted for a replacement. He went to New Jersey with his friend Pat Cristillo, who wanted Youngman to see his brother’s act. The brother was Lou Costello. “So we went out there and that’s where I first saw and met Abbott & Costello,” said Youngman. “They were working in burlesque and because burlesque comedy had by that time become filthy to keep up with the stripteasers, Bud and Lou were working very dirty.”
Despite their salacious material, Youngman
recommended Abbott & Costello to Kate Smith’s manager. The hiring of Abbott & Costello was controversial in the burlesque community. Burlesque had stock routines and it was no big deal if one comic had the same act as another. But no one expected interchangeable burlesque routines to find a home on a national broadcast. Other comedy teams like Wheeler & Woolsey and Howard & George had done versions of “Who’s on First?” prior to Bud and Lou, but Abbott & Costello now got all the credit.
Regardless of where they got their style, Abbott & Costello influenced future comedians. “Bud Abbott was a genius,” said Mel Brooks. “Lou Costello was one of the greatest comics in movies. Together Bud and Lou were sublimely funny.”
Abbott & Costello would become the most successful comedy team in movies, but in radio the distinction belonged not to Abbott & Costello, but to two white guys pretending to be black—Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden.
Amos ’n’ Andy was a serialized sitcom with established characters. Its radio competition was joke-driven, while Amos ’n’ Andy presented season-long sagas with the arc of a soap opera. Historian Elizabeth McLeod said, “While minstrel-style wordplay humor was common in the formative years of the program, it was used less often as the series developed, giving way to a more sophisticated approach to characterization.”
Remembered for controversy rather than content, Amos ’n’ Andy was one of the most prolific comedies in broadcast history. Airing for fifteen minutes, five days a week, it had broadcast 4,091 episodes by 1943, when it became a weekly half-hour broadcast.
There were objections to the audio blackface of Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden as early as 1930. Radio Digest published a complaint from a listener: “I have never heard negroes (and I was ‘fotched up’ among them) talk as these two comedians talk.” An accompanying article said, “Similar protests have been received from dwellers in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere. Particularly do the correspondents say that ‘Andy’ Correll’s use of [malapropisms] are out of place.” The Pittsburgh Courier called Amos ’n’ Andy a racist program in May 1931 and published letters of support: “I am glad to know that there is one paper that is willing to take up the fight against the two ‘crackers’ from the South. If Amos ’n’ Andy and the rest of their kind would spend a little of their time broadcasting about the lynching and burning of Negroes in the South, I am sure that we could get some benefit and America could hold her head up. Please don’t give up the good fight.”
To offset the controversy, Correll and Gosden became one of the only network shows to hire nonwhite cast members. In 1938 African American actress Ernestine Wade was hired to play Andy’s girlfriend and Asian American actress Barbara Jean Wong was hired as Amos’s daughter. Four years later James Baskett, Ruby Dandridge, Jester Hairston, Lillian Randolph and Ernest Whitman—all African American—were added to the cast. While Correll and Gosden did audio blackface through the war years, they employed more black actors than any other show.
When Amos ’n’ Andy moved from radio to television in 1951, the executive director of the NAACP called the program a “gross libel on the Negro and a distortion of the truth . . . The picturization of Negroes as amoral, semi-literate, lazy, stupid, scheming and dishonest perpetuates a harmful stereotype which departed with the old minstrel show.” There was less stomach for racial comedy after the days of Hitler. Amos ’n’ Andy faded away.
The Jack Benny Program featured the most prominent African American comedian in radio. Eddie Anderson played Benny’s valet, Rochester Van Jones. His raspy voice and sarcastic comments frequently upstaged the star. Anderson and Benny had the chemistry of a great comedy team—but with one being black and the other white, no one dared describe them as such.
Benny was one of the most enduring comedians of the twentieth century, and he managed to do something no other comedian could boast of. His persona as a miserly penny-pincher was established in the 1930s and became so ingrained in the American consciousness that it made setups unnecessary. Whenever a store clerk told him the cost of a piece of merchandise, Benny could evoke and then milk a laugh by simply remaining silent. These were punch lines in 1959 that had been set up in 1939, a remarkable feat that was never again equaled.
Benny’s penurious character emerged on his first series in 1932, sponsored by Canada Dry. “The president of the advertising agency representing Canada Dry Ginger Ale thought I was funny,” said Benny. “His client wanted to be in radio with a variety program and he talked them into making me a star.” Comedian Bobby Ramsen explains, “During that first sponsorship, Canada Dry decided if they could get their hands on the empty bottles, offer a deposit of two cents, they could reuse them. The writers started to give Benny lines like, ‘I’m so excited. Today is the day I’m bringing back four bottles of Canada Dry and I’ll get eight cents!’” Canada Dry eventually objected to being ridiculed and canceled the show.
Chevrolet was Benny’s next sponsor, footing the bill for two years. The critics named Benny the best radio comedian of 1934, but Chevrolet president William Knudsen decided Benny wasn’t funny and pulled out. A lot of people were tricked by the program’s unconventional structure; the majority of the laughs went to his supporting players and were derived from Benny’s hesitant silence. Nothing he actually said got laughs, and people like Mr. Knudsen felt he was a lousy comic. As critic Gary Giddins wrote, “He may be the only great comedian in history who isn’t associated with a single witticism. He was the ultimate reactor—and it made him a comedy star.”
Eddie Anderson joined The Jack Benny Program in 1937. The Benny cast was going by train from New York to Los Angeles in his first episode and the script called for a porter. “He was a traditional Negro dialect stereotype,” recalled Benny. “He had a molasses drawl and he yassuh-bossed me all over the place. He was such a drawling, lazy, superstitious stereotype that even the original Uncle Tom would have despised him.” Benny Rubin was initially slated for the part, but writers figured a white actor doing a black drawl would not win the same laughs as an African American actor doing the same. Eddie Anderson was hired and he would soon be the highest-paid African American actor in the world, but first he had to shed the caricature. Racist stereotypes were not uncommon prior to the Second World War, but as Benny writer Milt Josefsberg said, “Jokes of that insensitive sort tapered off during the war years, and when Jack’s new quartet of writers joined him in 1943, such punch lines were at a minimum and soon became non-existent.”
European fascism changed comedy in America. Benny explained, “During World War II, attitudes changed. Hitler’s ideology of Aryan supremacy put all ethnic humor in a bad light. When the black man’s fight for equal rights and fair play became an issue after the War, I would no longer allow Rochester to say or do anything that an audience would consider degrading.” Benny’s attitude toward race relations was enlightened. Starting in 1940 he refused to play any segregated venue. In the 1960s when his agent scheduled a world tour, Benny chastised him for booking a gig in apartheid South Africa and refused to appear.
Although he is increasingly forgotten, Benny was influential in his time. When Kraft Foods sponsored his show starting in the late 1930s, Jell-O was the company’s worst seller. After a season of plugs on the Benny program, it was Kraft’s number one product, and “Jell-O” remains a household word. He influenced subsequent comedians from Bob Newhart to Albert Brooks. “The biggest influence was Jack Benny,” said Brooks. “He was at the center of a storm, he let his players do the work, and just by being there made it funny.”
American neutrality in the face of European fascism in the late 1930s was a concern for many Jewish comedians, and seemed to embolden anti-Semites. Jack Benny and George Burns received an onslaught of vicious, anti-Semitic hate mail—and it was only amplified after they were indicted on charges of international jewel smuggling.
“Jack Benny and I were arrested for smuggling jewelry,” said Burns. “It really shook up Gracie [Allen]. We were
having dinner at 21 one night with a charming man named Albert Chaperau and his wife. She was wearing an unusually wide diamond bracelet. I admired it and told them I’d like to buy one just like it for Gracie. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Chaperau said. ‘I’ll sell you this one.’”
Benny’s wife, Mary, was known in the Beverly Hills social scene for her petty jealousies. Eyeing Gracie’s new bracelet, she goaded Benny into purchasing jewelry from Chaperau as well. “What none of us knew was that the jewelry had been smuggled into the country,” said Burns. A few months later Chaperau got into an argument with his German maid. When Chaperau spoke ill of the Nazis, the maid took offense and tipped off local customs agents to his smuggling ring, leading them to Benny and Burns. “After a brief investigation,” said Burns, “Jack and I were charged with possession of smuggled jewelry.”
Chaperau was a bona fide con man. The Los Angeles Times reported that Chaperau was “his name at the moment. Investigation revealed that his claims of being a Nicaraguan diplomat, his ploy for getting baggage through customs without inspection, were utterly false. In fact, Chaperau was born Nathan Shapiro and under that name had served eighteen months after being convicted of mail fraud.” Chaperau pleaded guilty, and there was a real concern this would end the careers of the comedians. “Under a strict interpretation of the law, we were guilty,” said Burns. “I pleaded guilty on a misdemeanor in Federal Court.” The papers reported Benny was “pale and nervous [as he] pleaded not guilty to the smuggling charge. He faces a maximum of six years in prison.”
The Burns and Allen Show lost its sponsor in the panic and NBC radio was nervous, quietly coaxing New York State prosecutors to resolve the matter. “The executives at NBC, General Foods and the advertising agency were in a state of hysteria,” said Benny. “They kept talking about ‘public relations’ and ‘strategy’ for handling the press and what kind of statements I should make. The main problem was how would this influence the sales of Jell-O? At that moment I was probably the single most popular radio star in the country. I didn’t want to plead guilty.”
The Comedians Page 5