When the skits come on, do the laughs drop off?

[krledu]

Thanks for the tip! I just watched my first "old" movie for the first time yesterday. Old meaning a movie from the 1950's called My Favorite Brunette. I usually stick to modern movies but I though i would try it. I liked it even though it was cheesy in some parts. Maybe I will start watching some so I know what they are talking about.

[Yhtapmys]

I would imagine that it would be rather difficult for anyone born in the past 30 years or so to understand the skits, especially the movie parodies.

That's not always true. It just means you miss some of the jokes on one level. I've seen some parodies on TV which have the same camera angles as the subject; you miss that if you've never seen the movie.

I don't know if I've seen any of the movies Benny parodied in the 30s but I still like some of the silliness.

Yhtapmys
"Drive Your Blues Away"

[Jack Benny]

Oh Rochester... I'm gone for a few months, and when I come back there are a bunch of strange people in the house, as the hipsters say, having a great conversation...I feel left out!

Hi gang!

Anyway, I was thinking about the great skits with Jimmy Stewart. I love the Bend in The River skit, and the Brown Dreby skit with the line about Jimmy having more food on him than in him is wonderful. I don't know if you call the last one a skit, but it has more of a Sit-Com feel to it.

[Monoceros]

Rather silly of me I suppose for my first post ever to this forum to be an attempt at reviving an ancient and expired discussion, but I stumbled across this topic while browsing through the archives and felt compelled to jump in (four years late.)

One of the first Jack Benny episodes I have a clear memory of listening to--most likely sometime in the mid-'80s on KNX 1070 Los Angeles--is the episode parodying Edward My Son. I couldn't have been much more than eleven or twelve years old, I had no idea what Edward My Son even was, but I thought the whole thing was hilarious, heaven knows why. I suppose, in retrospect, that what I found funny back then was just "run-of-the-mill Jack Benny shtick"--Jack being cheap and hamming it up dreadfully, Mary being sarcastic (and fluffing a line), Dennis being a dopey freak of nature, Frank Nelson being Frank Nelson, and so forth. But it's stuck with me a long time. It was like a shot of "Jack Benny concentrate", with the added bonus of actually getting funnier with time once I learned what Edward My Son actually was.

Since rediscovering the show several years ago I've gotten to know many more of Jack Benny's movie parodies. Some of them have, I admit, seemed a bit listless or disappointing to me. I was keen to learn, for instance, what Jack would do with the bizarre Tyrone Power movie Nightmare Alley and I remember feeling let down when the skit turned into a retread of Jack's Fred Allen impersonation. It was funny, I guess, but a bit stale and in any case it wasn't anything to do with Nightmare Alley. Others, though, just make the episode for me. For example I admire the parody of The Lost Weekend, featuring Ray Milland spoofing himself and playing off Jack brilliantly. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has many memorable moments, particularly a rare dramatic turn from Don Wilson.

Then there are the movie parodies that...I'm not sure how to put it exactly...it's like they've got one foot in ordinary parody and the other foot in the world of Jack Benny. Take, for example, the Sorry, Wrong Number episode. There's an unusual case: Barbara Stanwyck reenacts a crucial scene from Sorry, Wrong Number in a fairly straightforward way, but still interleaved with jokes ("Please, get off the line!" "HOLD THAT LINE!"), but then Jack ups the ante by give us the same scene only now it's Jack in Stanwyck's role. If any of Jack Benny's parodies can be regarded as clever and innovative, surely it's that one.

There's one more aspect to the Jack Benny movie parodies, at least those from later years. I might be wrong about this, but I think there's a suggestion running throughout the program that Jack has pretensions of heading up a serious radio company like the Mercury Theatre on the Air. He yearns for the chance to show off his acting chops in dramatic roles, only it always goes wrong. The episode that most clearly displays this is the To Have or Have Not program with Bogie and Bacall. Jack seems to want to do a straightforward reenactment of To Have or Have Not with Lauren Bacall, where he can have a chance to play a "great lover". But Jack's interrupted by one thing after thing until finally Humphrey Bogart shows up and deflates his balloon completely. And, as shimp scrampi points out, there are other episodes where Jack never gets to perform at all.

What would be equivalent to Carol Burnett's "curtain rod" moment? The "curtain rod" scene is hilarious (I think) because it takes a melodramatic scene from the original movie, starts out much the same melodramatic way, but then punctures the drama with the ludicrous appearance of "Starlett" wrapped in a curtain still on its rod. I can think of a few bits from Jack Benny movie parodies that are structured the same way. In The Lost Weekend parody, for example, Jack and Ray Milland search desperately for the hidden bottle and rummaging through all the furniture much as was done in the original movie, and it's pretty conventional, but then Jack suddenly shouts, "The china closet!" and there's a ridiculously loud crash of what sounds like hundreds of dishes hitting the floor; then Jack drops in the exquisitely timed line, "Hm, paper plates." Doesn't sound like much written out but surely that sequence fulfills the criteria: starting out a scene from the original movie in a reasonably normal fashion, then suddenly putting a laughable twist on it.

[Jack Benny]

Rather silly of me I suppose for my first post ever to this forum to be an attempt at reviving an ancient and expired discussion, but I stumbled across this topic while browsing through the archives and felt compelled to jump in (four years late.)

One of the first Jack Benny episodes I have a clear memory of listening to--most likely sometime in the mid-'80s on KNX 1070 Los Angeles--is the episode parodying Edward My Son. I couldn't have been much more than eleven or twelve years old, I had no idea what Edward My Son even was, but I thought the whole thing was hilarious, heaven knows why. I suppose, in retrospect, that what I found funny back then was just "run-of-the-mill Jack Benny shtick"--Jack being cheap and hamming it up dreadfully, Mary being sarcastic (and fluffing a line), Dennis being a dopey freak of nature, Frank Nelson being Frank Nelson, and so forth. But it's stuck with me a long time. It was like a shot of "Jack Benny concentrate", with the added bonus of actually getting funnier with time once I learned what Edward My Son actually was.

Since rediscovering the show several years ago I've gotten to know many more of Jack Benny's movie parodies. Some of them have, I admit, seemed a bit listless or disappointing to me. I was keen to learn, for instance, what Jack would do with the bizarre Tyrone Power movie Nightmare Alley and I remember feeling let down when the skit turned into a retread of Jack's Fred Allen impersonation. It was funny, I guess, but a bit stale and in any case it wasn't anything to do with Nightmare Alley. Others, though, just make the episode for me. For example I admire the parody of The Lost Weekend, featuring Ray Milland spoofing himself and playing off Jack brilliantly. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has many memorable moments, particularly a rare dramatic turn from Don Wilson.

Well stated points! Welcome aboard!

Then there are the movie parodies that...I'm not sure how to put it exactly...it's like they've got one foot in ordinary parody and the other foot in the world of Jack Benny. Take, for example, the Sorry, Wrong Number episode. There's an unusual case: Barbara Stanwyck reenacts a crucial scene from Sorry, Wrong Number in a fairly straightforward way, but still interleaved with jokes ("Please, get off the line!" "HOLD THAT LINE!"), but then Jack ups the ante by give us the same scene only now it's Jack in Stanwyck's role. If any of Jack Benny's parodies can be regarded as clever and innovative, surely it's that one.

There's one more aspect to the Jack Benny movie parodies, at least those from later years. I might be wrong about this, but I think there's a suggestion running throughout the program that Jack has pretensions of heading up a serious radio company like the Mercury Theatre on the Air. He yearns for the chance to show off his acting chops in dramatic roles, only it always goes wrong. The episode that most clearly displays this is the To Have or Have Not program with Bogie and Bacall. Jack seems to want to do a straightforward reenactment of To Have or Have Not with Lauren Bacall, where he can have a chance to play a "great lover". But Jack's interrupted by one thing after thing until finally Humphrey Bogart shows up and deflates his balloon completely. And, as shimp scrampi points out, there are other episodes where Jack never gets to perform at all.

What would be equivalent to Carol Burnett's "curtain rod" moment? The "curtain rod" scene is hilarious (I think) because it takes a melodramatic scene from the original movie, starts out much the same melodramatic way, but then punctures the drama with the ludicrous appearance of "Starlett" wrapped in a curtain still on its rod. I can think of a few bits from Jack Benny movie parodies that are structured the same way. In The Lost Weekend parody, for example, Jack and Ray Milland search desperately for the hidden bottle and rummaging through all the furniture much as was done in the original movie, and it's pretty conventional, but then Jack suddenly shouts, "The china closet!" and there's a ridiculously loud crash of what sounds like hundreds of dishes hitting the floor; then Jack drops in the exquisitely timed line, "Hm, paper plates." Doesn't sound like much written out but surely that sequence fulfills the criteria: starting out a scene from the original movie in a reasonably normal fashion, then suddenly putting a laughable twist on it.

[shimp scrampi]

Great discussion monoceros, welcome and no worries about resurrecting an old thread, that's half the fun, having these conversations that can go on for literally years! Hope you'll continue to join in.