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Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy
The king of radio comedy from the Great Depression through the early 1950s, Jack Benny was one of the most influential entertainers in twentieth-century America. A master of comic timing and an innovative producer, Benny, with his radio writers, developed a weekly situation comedy to meet radio’s endless need for new material, at the same time integrating advertising into the show’s humor. Through the character of the vain, cheap everyman, Benny created a fall guy, whose frustrated struggles with his employees addressed midcentury America’s concerns with race, gender, commercialism, and sexual identity. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley contextualizes her analysis of Jack Benny and his entourage with thoughtful insight into the intersections of competing entertainment industries and provides plenty of evidence that transmedia stardom, branded entertainment, and virality are not new phenomena but current iterations of key aspects in American commercial cultural history.
- GenresBiography
389 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 17, 2017
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52 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 28, 2020
A very thorough and fairly academic review of comedian Jack Benny's contributions to radio and television. The book focuses on his skill as a show runner and star. It also focuses on two of his colleagues, his wife, Mary Livingston, and Eddie Anderson, who appeared as Rochester, one of the first African American comedians.
The book assumes some knowledge of the Jack Benny show. Fortunately, I've got plenty of that.
I recommend this book to people who are interested in the societal impacts of mid-century American comedy (both of you.)
The book assumes some knowledge of the Jack Benny show. Fortunately, I've got plenty of that.
I recommend this book to people who are interested in the societal impacts of mid-century American comedy (both of you.)
October 30, 2017
Reviewed at Splitsider: http://splitsider.com/2017/10/fall-co...
In 1937, while visiting Los Angeles, British journalist Austin J. Putnam described the “Seven Wonders of Hollywood.” His list included restaurants, theaters, studios, and the live production of Jack Benny’s radio show. He effused, “It is positively amazing the hold this droll comedian has on the United States public…I enjoyed his show at the NBC studio more than any stage play I’ve ever seen in London or New York.” Explaining what made this show so amazing — and what gave it such a hold over the American public — was more difficult. Radio critic John Crosby, writing in 1947 (15 years into Benny’s roughly 23 starring on his own radio show), obsessed over what was so funny (to audiences as well as to himself) about Jack Benny. Printing a selection from the script of an episode he’d particularly enjoyed in the New York Herald Tribune, he noted, “Just how he manages to wrest so many laughs out of such harmless stuff is his own deep secret.” No longer.
In Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, UT Austin professor Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley provides the most detailed analysis and history of Jack Benny’s radio program available. Devoting time to Benny’s relationships with his writers, costars, sponsors, networks, and fans, Fuller-Seeley examines the impact on situation comedy that The Jack Benny Program (titled, at various times, The Chevrolet Program, The General Tire Revue, The Jell-O Program, The Grape Nuts Flakes Program, and The Lucky Strike Program) had, and its shadow looms large today — even as Benny’s iconic comic persona fades in the public consciousness.
Fuller-Seeley is attempting to keep that memory alive. A major reason why the once-enormously-famous Jack Benny is no longer a household name is that many of his programs, like so much significant content from the early days of radio and of television, have been destroyed, lost, or deteriorated beyond use. Even Benny’s own collection, donated in the 1960s to UCLA, contained a great deal of disintegrated data and unplayable audio. In her exhaustive research, Fuller-Seeley has compiled and archived episodes not heard since their original broadcasts decades ago. The book promises the files will be available on a promotional site, jackbennyradio.com (as of this writing that is not yet the case). As she notes, however, a great deal of archiving has been crowdsourced and can be found, for example, here.
This archiving that Fuller-Seeley has done is emblematic of the enormous research project that makes up this book. As her chapters on Eddie Anderson’s work on The Jack Benny Program demonstrate, ours is not quite the original thinkpiece generation. Indeed, the complicated, frustrating, and problematic racial dynamic between Jack Benny and Rochester (Anderson’s character) was a topic of hot debate, particularly in the Black newspapers at the time. Fuller-Seeley corrects the historical record, set askew by Benny’s own recounting of events in his posthumously-published memoir, Sunday Nights at Seven. There, Benny recalls how the character of Rochester evolved from an offensive Black stereotype to a more nuanced and powerful character (who was still a servant to Jack): “Everybody loved ethnic humor during vaudeville…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 to the dignity of a modern Afro-American.” While any reader with a passing understanding of US history would know that Benny is full of it suggesting that the 1940s were the start of “the black man’s fight for equal rights and fair play,” Benny’s also giving himself far too much credit for putting the racist caricaturing to a stop. As Fuller-Seeley explains, the Black press, Black radio listeners, and the NAACP were vocally uncomfortable with the Benny-Rochester relationship as early as 1942, and it was a concerted years-long push for better representation that finally led to the show abandoning some of its worst stereotyping.
Eddie Anderson was still frequently misunderstood by fans to actually be Jack Benny’s servant Rochester, and the fact that he was credited as “Rochester” even in film roles didn’t help. The intermedia characterization of Jack Benny as a defined character named “Jack Benny” is a running theme throughout Fuller-Seeley’s book; as she explains in early chapters, the character of “Jack” (she uses Benny to describe the actual person and Jack to describe the character) was developed over the course of decades across vaudeville, radio, film, and television, and included borrowing heavily from the now-entirely-forgotten Frank Fay and working in collaboration with a series of writers (a version of this narrative was previously published here). By the 1940s, the character was so well-defined that in this famous 1948 gag, a thief demanding of Jack “Your money or your life!” got a huge laugh from the audience, who could anticipate that Jack’s famous parsimony would cause him to struggle with the right choice to make. For Benny’s wife, Sadye Marks, who played Jack’s on-again-off-again girlfriend Mary Livingstone, the divide between personality and persona blurred dramatically — she began going by “Mary” in her personal life, and her grave reads “Mary Benny.”
Jack Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky, and the way he straddled the line between Jewish and Gentile American identity is at least partly responsible for the way he played a “fall guy.” As Fuller-Seeley writes, “Benny internally defined his character [“Jack”] in terms of Jewish humor, but put him in an outwardly assimilationist package.” Fuller-Seeley details extensively the ways that Jack elided traditional gender roles, even including non-campy cross-dressing. In comparison to other comedians who performed in drag (like Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor, and Ken Murray), “Benny, on the other hand, created something that delighted some audience members by being so slyly accurate.” He wasn’t making a joke of dressing as a woman; he was dressing as a woman and making jokes. These kinds of transgressive identities were part of what made his long success so notable: he was a decidedly non-mainstream personality with broad mainstream appeal.
This book provides a thorough investigation of what made The Jack Benny Program, in its various incarnations, work. Fuller-Seeley addresses the many factors that went into the show, including the different relationships the sponsors had with the content over the course of its run. By discussing in depth the ways the show was and wasn’t distributed during and after its initial run (including the balance of radio stations carrying the show vs. TV stations carrying the show throughout the ‘50s), Fuller-Seeley makes the book itself an intermedia experience, encouraging readers to contribute to the vital work of media archiving. Addressing Benny’s later career, Fuller-Seeley summarizes a 1968 sketch Benny performed in, then notes, “you have just got to watch this, hopefully it is on YouTube.” It is. May the days ahead provide even more of this otherwise-lost content.
In 1937, while visiting Los Angeles, British journalist Austin J. Putnam described the “Seven Wonders of Hollywood.” His list included restaurants, theaters, studios, and the live production of Jack Benny’s radio show. He effused, “It is positively amazing the hold this droll comedian has on the United States public…I enjoyed his show at the NBC studio more than any stage play I’ve ever seen in London or New York.” Explaining what made this show so amazing — and what gave it such a hold over the American public — was more difficult. Radio critic John Crosby, writing in 1947 (15 years into Benny’s roughly 23 starring on his own radio show), obsessed over what was so funny (to audiences as well as to himself) about Jack Benny. Printing a selection from the script of an episode he’d particularly enjoyed in the New York Herald Tribune, he noted, “Just how he manages to wrest so many laughs out of such harmless stuff is his own deep secret.” No longer.
In Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, UT Austin professor Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley provides the most detailed analysis and history of Jack Benny’s radio program available. Devoting time to Benny’s relationships with his writers, costars, sponsors, networks, and fans, Fuller-Seeley examines the impact on situation comedy that The Jack Benny Program (titled, at various times, The Chevrolet Program, The General Tire Revue, The Jell-O Program, The Grape Nuts Flakes Program, and The Lucky Strike Program) had, and its shadow looms large today — even as Benny’s iconic comic persona fades in the public consciousness.
Fuller-Seeley is attempting to keep that memory alive. A major reason why the once-enormously-famous Jack Benny is no longer a household name is that many of his programs, like so much significant content from the early days of radio and of television, have been destroyed, lost, or deteriorated beyond use. Even Benny’s own collection, donated in the 1960s to UCLA, contained a great deal of disintegrated data and unplayable audio. In her exhaustive research, Fuller-Seeley has compiled and archived episodes not heard since their original broadcasts decades ago. The book promises the files will be available on a promotional site, jackbennyradio.com (as of this writing that is not yet the case). As she notes, however, a great deal of archiving has been crowdsourced and can be found, for example, here.
This archiving that Fuller-Seeley has done is emblematic of the enormous research project that makes up this book. As her chapters on Eddie Anderson’s work on The Jack Benny Program demonstrate, ours is not quite the original thinkpiece generation. Indeed, the complicated, frustrating, and problematic racial dynamic between Jack Benny and Rochester (Anderson’s character) was a topic of hot debate, particularly in the Black newspapers at the time. Fuller-Seeley corrects the historical record, set askew by Benny’s own recounting of events in his posthumously-published memoir, Sunday Nights at Seven. There, Benny recalls how the character of Rochester evolved from an offensive Black stereotype to a more nuanced and powerful character (who was still a servant to Jack): “Everybody loved ethnic humor during vaudeville…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 to the dignity of a modern Afro-American.” While any reader with a passing understanding of US history would know that Benny is full of it suggesting that the 1940s were the start of “the black man’s fight for equal rights and fair play,” Benny’s also giving himself far too much credit for putting the racist caricaturing to a stop. As Fuller-Seeley explains, the Black press, Black radio listeners, and the NAACP were vocally uncomfortable with the Benny-Rochester relationship as early as 1942, and it was a concerted years-long push for better representation that finally led to the show abandoning some of its worst stereotyping.
Eddie Anderson was still frequently misunderstood by fans to actually be Jack Benny’s servant Rochester, and the fact that he was credited as “Rochester” even in film roles didn’t help. The intermedia characterization of Jack Benny as a defined character named “Jack Benny” is a running theme throughout Fuller-Seeley’s book; as she explains in early chapters, the character of “Jack” (she uses Benny to describe the actual person and Jack to describe the character) was developed over the course of decades across vaudeville, radio, film, and television, and included borrowing heavily from the now-entirely-forgotten Frank Fay and working in collaboration with a series of writers (a version of this narrative was previously published here). By the 1940s, the character was so well-defined that in this famous 1948 gag, a thief demanding of Jack “Your money or your life!” got a huge laugh from the audience, who could anticipate that Jack’s famous parsimony would cause him to struggle with the right choice to make. For Benny’s wife, Sadye Marks, who played Jack’s on-again-off-again girlfriend Mary Livingstone, the divide between personality and persona blurred dramatically — she began going by “Mary” in her personal life, and her grave reads “Mary Benny.”
Jack Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky, and the way he straddled the line between Jewish and Gentile American identity is at least partly responsible for the way he played a “fall guy.” As Fuller-Seeley writes, “Benny internally defined his character [“Jack”] in terms of Jewish humor, but put him in an outwardly assimilationist package.” Fuller-Seeley details extensively the ways that Jack elided traditional gender roles, even including non-campy cross-dressing. In comparison to other comedians who performed in drag (like Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor, and Ken Murray), “Benny, on the other hand, created something that delighted some audience members by being so slyly accurate.” He wasn’t making a joke of dressing as a woman; he was dressing as a woman and making jokes. These kinds of transgressive identities were part of what made his long success so notable: he was a decidedly non-mainstream personality with broad mainstream appeal.
This book provides a thorough investigation of what made The Jack Benny Program, in its various incarnations, work. Fuller-Seeley addresses the many factors that went into the show, including the different relationships the sponsors had with the content over the course of its run. By discussing in depth the ways the show was and wasn’t distributed during and after its initial run (including the balance of radio stations carrying the show vs. TV stations carrying the show throughout the ‘50s), Fuller-Seeley makes the book itself an intermedia experience, encouraging readers to contribute to the vital work of media archiving. Addressing Benny’s later career, Fuller-Seeley summarizes a 1968 sketch Benny performed in, then notes, “you have just got to watch this, hopefully it is on YouTube.” It is. May the days ahead provide even more of this otherwise-lost content.
April 4, 2018
I love Jack Benny's old time radio shows (you can find them on Spotify and various places online). The more I listened, the more I wanted to know about Benny, his cast, and the ideas that went into making his comedy. But there wasn't a whole lot of places to go - until this book. Fuller-Seeley's scholarly work was like rain in the desert, and I came away completely sated. She is academic without ever being too dry; she also tackles some of the messier aspects of the show (race and gender, for example) - this isn't a love fest. But you can tell she loves the radio program, that certainly shines through. This book isn't for everyone; but if you like Benny, you're going to like this book.
April 9, 2018
The first academic study of Jack Benny and his enormous popularity and influence in the 20 Century. Suffers from the inclusion of now obligatory forays into gender and race studies but is the first book to analyze Benny's career in full.
January 30, 2018
Finally a book about Jack Benny that puts his work and talent into a historical context! I’ve read other books about Benny, one by him, another by his wife and then one by a former writer – all very good, but they were more autobiography/biography than this wonderful work. Fuller-Seeley follows the great man’s career from vaudeville through television, giving us rare views into what was going on in the USA and world at the time, but also the industry. Well written, well documented – just a very a good read!
December 10, 2018
There has long been a need for a scholarly assessment of Jack Benny, arguably the most important and influential comedian of the 20th century. Previous biographies of him are all good work, but all written by personal associates of Benny with not enough perspective. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley fills that void with superb analysis, particularly related to gender and race on Benny's program. The primary flaw in this book, appears to not be the author's fault, but the lack of a good editor. There are repetitious spots, and a few grammatical errors, the most glaring being the spelling of Milt Josefsberg's name two different ways in one paragraph. But one can overlook these faults for the excellent scholarship here.
December 27, 2017
I'd like to rate this three-and-one-half stars. It's well researched, and I enjoyed the photos and quotes. One big problem is poor proofreading. A few glitches I can understand and forgive, but these kept occurring, over and over. That surprised me, considering this is from the University of California Press. Also, the introductory material trumpets a special website to support the book, but all I see is an advertisement for the book.
September 5, 2024
This is a great book. It is an academic book but that is unfair as it might lead you to think it is dry or stuffy.
This book covers all aspects of his Radio productions (Sponors, critics, cast, developing a persona, etc) and puts it in context of the time.
If you love Benny, this book will deepen that love. If you are not familiar this will inspire you to search him out and appreciate his humor.
This book covers all aspects of his Radio productions (Sponors, critics, cast, developing a persona, etc) and puts it in context of the time.
If you love Benny, this book will deepen that love. If you are not familiar this will inspire you to search him out and appreciate his humor.
June 13, 2018
Scholarly inquiry into the Jack Benny radio era
This book dispenses with the anecdotal accounts of Benny’s career and instead looks at how it all worked, and how it dealt with societal mores and pressures. Not a bad read for dedicated JB fans.
This book dispenses with the anecdotal accounts of Benny’s career and instead looks at how it all worked, and how it dealt with societal mores and pressures. Not a bad read for dedicated JB fans.
April 22, 2018
Didn't like.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 31, 2023
A very good, quite scholarly reading of Jack Benny's radio show.
August 15, 2023
Be warned that this is a more academic study of the Jack Benny Radio Show, but I found it very informative.
April 22, 2018
I'm aware of something like a half dozen books that have been written about Jack Benny but this one is absolutely unique because it examines his career and his influence from a scholarly viewpoint. So its academic in tone but no less readable - and every bit as complimentary as those written in the past. I've been a Benny fan for close to half a century now and I still learned new information about the man here. The only complaint I can come up with regarding this book is that Phil Harris and Dennis Day aren't given the same detailed consideration as Mary Livingstone and Eddie Anderson receive. Now if only Professor Fuller-Seeley could be persuaded to write a similar examination of Fibber McGee and Molly...
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews