NRR Project: The Jack Benny Program, “Jack Is Robbed of Ronald Colman’s Oscar” (March 28, 1948)

NRR Project: The Jack Benny Program

“Jack Is Robbed of Ronald Colman’s Oscar”

Performed by Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Dennis Day, Phil Harris, “Rochester” (Eddie Anderson), Don Wilson, et al

Performed March 28, 1948

28:59

It was the best comedy show on radio, hands down. It lasted from May 2, 1932 to May 22, 1955, one of the longest-running and most successful shows in the history of media. What made it so great?

Benny didn’t have the improvisational wit of Fred Allen, nor the cracked logic of Burns and Allen, nor the folksy tones of Vic ‘n’ Sade, Fibber McGee and Molly, Lum and Abner, and, yes, even Amos and Andy. What he had were killer writers who slowly transformed it from a variety show to a character-based situation comedy that featured its star as an inspired straight man.

The writers deserve mention – over the years Harry Conn, Al Boasberg, Howard Snyder, Hugh Wedlock Jr., Bill Morrow, Ed Beloin, Sam Perrin, Milt Josefsberg, George Balzer, and John Tackaberry all contributed to the Benny mythos.

He gathered top-notch performing talent who took what was essentially his direction of the show and made it really perc. He was a master of timing and reaction. Most importantly, he let his compatriots on the air get the laughs. He set them up with a deeply flawed persona – “Jack Benny” was vain, cheap, shrimpy, and balding, a petty smart-aleck who was almost always wrong. He played a schlub.

There are many sources of information about this show, such was its importance. You can read the explanatory essay by Kathy Fuller-Seeley at the National Recording Registry. The greatest capsule explication of The Jack Benny Show is in John Dunning’s On the Air, pgs. 355-363. You can also check out Benny’s and daughter’s memoir, Sundays Nights at Seven, and show writer Milt Josefberg’s The Jack Benny Show.

He started off cracking wise about New York, from whence the show originally came. This morphed into him doing parodies in between orchestra numbers for dancing. Benny started to banter with his fellow performers. Gradually, the gags about his pretended attributes turned into sources of endless jokes. He was so stingy he kept his money in his sock, his mattress, a secret bank vault under his house. He saw himself as a leading man. No one else did. He and his hair often got separated. He had himself driven, slowly, around town in a car made in 1925.

He moved the show to Hollywood in 1935. His announcer beginning in 1934, Don Wilson, was a jolly man mocked for his weight, who could deliver the integrated wisecracking commercials Benny and company snuck into the show. Benny’s wife Sadye Marks became Mary Livingstone, at first a daffy poet and singer and eventually a sharp-tongued deflater of Jack’s pretensions.

In 1935, he hired a talented tenor, Kenny Baker, to play a numskull version of himself. In 1936, he hired bandleader Phil Harris, who started off subdued and soon became a bragging, vain hipster with his mind on women and booze, a real ignoramus. In 1937, he brought on Eddie Anderson, who morphed into Benny’s put-upon butler, valet, chauffeur, and manservant, Rochester. He was the most beloved character; audiences cheered his entrances.

In 1939, Baker quit and Dennis Day became the new dopey tenor. Now the cast was complete. The show changed. Instead of spoofs of current movies, the show focused on Jack’s foibles – his lousy dates, his efforts to make and save a dollar, his disastrous encounters with studio executives. The show became about the creation of the show,  a “backstage” comedy, meta ahead of its time.

The great film actor Ronald Colman and his wife Benita first guest-starred on the show in December of 1945. Playing his next-door neighbors, these proper English were driven mad by Benny, who was always borrowing something, inviting himself to their parties, and generally being a pest.

The thrust of this episode consists of Jack selfishly asking to borrow Colman’s recently won Oscar to show to Rochester. Colman reluctantly consents, and Jack walks back to his house. A robber stops him in the street, and says, “Your money or your life!” Pause. “Look, bud, I said your money or your life!” “I’m thinking it over!” Jack replies. This is often cited as the biggest laugh Benny ever got – although the famous “Drear Pooson” gag of 1950 was more convulsive.

Benny made the transition to television in 1955, and continued for another decade. He continued to work until his death in 1974, making him one of the longest-lived comedians in American history.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Truman speaks at the Democratic National Convention, 1948.