sunday nights at seven the jack benny story

Still, Benny remained the ideal audience-delighted when someone else got the biggest laughs. In his later years, he took his violin playing seriously as well, always insisting that the numerous benefit concerts he played were for real and not put-ons. True, he proclaims: “I am a master of my kind of timing.” But who would disagree? Benny got his biggest laughs cradling his chagrined face in the palm of one hand and staring into the middle distance. Unlike the character, however, he appears to have been free of excessive or even normal vanity-though he was so involved with the details of his show that he could fail to recognize members of his family. Just as his program made him the butt of all the jokes (another Benny innovation), his memoir finds him recounting incidents in which he ends up playing the fool.

Imagine the Cosby cast changing its names to Huxtable.Īlthough Benny was astonished to discover that millions of people mistook Jack Benny for “Jack Benny,” he was bemused by how often he found himself acting like his fictional alter ego.

Several regulars on his show legally changed their names to those of the characters they played, including his wife, formerly Sadye Marks Benny, thereafter Mary Livingstone Benny. How real his cast of characters were to his audience may be difficult if not impossible for modern viewers to gauge. Yet, in fact, he was a great innovator: the man who figured out that radio, and later television, played to small clumps of people in intimate settings, and that character itself was the best source of humor. “Everything good that happened to me happened by accident,” he says, and you tend to believe he believed that. From the Depression through the ‘60s, he was a model of stability-forever 39 years old, vain, stingy, absurd.

On his character’s sex life: “There’s a kind of bittersweet side to the sex game and if you can play it somewhere between broad farce on the one hand and tragedy on the other, you get a fine irony which reflects a true-to-life situation.”īenny was probably the most beloved entertainer of his time, by audiences and associates alike. You don’t hate a race when you’re laughing with it. I do not feel today that Rochester and Mr. On ethnic humor: “Bad as you may think this kind of humor was, I think it was a way that America heated up the national groups and the ethnic groups in a melting pot and made one people of us-or tried to do so.

Sunday nights at seven the jack benny story