Jack Benny and American Radio Comedy (Part Three)

Another striking feature is the way that Benny’s program interacts with other contemporary series -- the various spinoff series featuring Dennis Day, Fred Harris, and others, or the role that the Colemans perform on the show. What factors made these kinds of intertextual connections possible?

Well, we see plenty of spin-off programs today on network TV, cable and streaming, between a dozen versions of NCIS, or Young Sheldon or r Frazier reboots, etc.  Marketers might call it “brand extension,” a way of giving consumers plenty more of what seems to be popular at the moment.  But using existing product ideas to fill the schedule, instead of gambling on a new and untried narrative idea, has a long history. These kinds of spinoffs happened fairly frequently back in network radio programming days, as The Great Gildersleeve show, for instance was spun off from Fibber McGee and Molly, and I believe Beulah was spun off from Gildersleeve. The sponsors who provided the production money for radio programs were conservative and looked for “sure bets,” or already-familiar performers, characters and situations that could almost be guaranteed to draw a fairly large and loyal audience.  Radio critics in the 1940s complained constantly about the lack of innovation in radio. A half dozen other radio comedy programs borrowed heavily from Jack Benny’s format (such as those starring at one time or another Jack Carson and Groucho Marx and Bob Hope).

So, it was not unexpected that every major character or performer from Jack Benny’s program was tapped by bright advertising executives who pitched spin-offs to sponsors. A Day in the Life of Dennis Day turned the Dennis character into a small-town soda jerk.  The Phil Harris and Alice Faye Show turned Phil from a drunken lout into a devoted father with loutish band members. Former tenor Kenny Baker was back on the radio in Glamor Manor. There was even a Mel Blanc show, that did not have a strong premise, and did not last long.

I happen to be a fan of The Halls of Ivy,(NBC radio 1950-1952) the gentle sitcom-like program starring movie star Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Colman. Colman had been reluctant to appear on Jack Benny’s radio program in 1946, worrying that it was beneath his dignity and afraid of failing as a comic performer.

The Colmans were a marvelous counterpoint to Benny’s social faux-pas, and quite a hit on appearances on Benny’s show. They were convinced to try a show of their own.  It turned out to be a popular show and extended his career. He plays the president of a small college, and Benita carries over her character from the Benny show appearances as the level-headed spouse who solves many of their daily problems. 

 The most unfortunate attempt at Benny radio show spinoff, in my opinion, was a program for Eddie Anderson, called The Adventures of Rochester.  Franco American spaghetti was pitched a daytime, 15-minutes program in early 1950 that took the marvelous Rochester character and regretfully removed everything interesting about him; the existing pilot episodes turn Rochester into a gullible and not very bright fellow who is the constant victim of the get-rich schemes of his feckless friends. The show turns Rochester into a hapless “Amos” character from Amos n Andy.  Just as well that the sponsor ultimately turned down the opportunity.  There are reports in the radio industry trade press that Anderson had originally hoped to pitch a daily 15-minute program called The Five O’Clock Shadow that would have his character parody private eye who-done-its. It’s a shame that this project did not find a sponsor, but a forthright African-American lead character, even with a Benny-show-pedigree, was probably too progressive in terms of racial representation for conservative sponsors to be brave enough to back.  (my book pages 178-179)

The real hallmark of Benny’s interactions with other programs was his ongoing feud with Fred Allen. Here, listeners went back and forth between the two shows as the comics threw insults at each other, and Benny developed a mean impersonation of Allen’s nasal voice. What can you tell us about the circumstances around which this interplay was allowed on radio?

Jack Benny and his writers crafted many superb running gags and recurring comic situations, some of which played out over a few episodes and some which cropped up time and again over the years. One of the longest running, and a favorite with Benny fans, is his feud with fellow radio comedian Fred Allen, which lasted from late 1936 up to Allen’s death 20 years later.  The genius to its longevity and popularity was that the contexts in which it played out changed over time. Celebrity feuds are a kind of easy, gratuitous laugh-getter for comics. They tend to get boring pretty quickly if there is not ingenuity in the writing behind it. Readers today might consider the current Jimmy Kimmel-Matt Damon mock feud, or the way that Jerry Seinfeld’s TV character could say “hello, Newman,” with all the pretend-hate in the world distilled into it. The Bob Hope/Bing Crosby frenemy [friend-enemy] rivalry that made their “Road to…” movies so popular also made feuding work in the 1940s. On the other hand, in my book I talk about the insult humor popular in various cultures, particularly between groups of young men. Throwing “the dozens” back in the 1930s and 1940s is not distant from comic rap battles today, and some of the fun of the Benny-Allen feud comes from their creativity and ingenuity in creating topper insults. Allen was much better at adlibbing than Benny, who occasionally would howl wishing that he could get even “if my writers were here.”



Radio lore claims that the Benny-Allen feud started accidentally with an ad-lib. On December 30, 1936, Fred Allen’s show, which broadcast from New York, featured amateur performers, and Allen had 10-year-old violinist Stuart Canin on the show. Canin played a marvelous version of Shubert’s short composition “The Bee,” and won prize money for being on the program. Allen supposedly adlibbed that the boy played much better than Jack Benny. I believe Allen broadcast on Wednesday evenings, Benny on Sunday. It was not that next Sunday, but several weeks later, that Allen repeated the insult, Benny’s cast members did their usual work of insulting their boss by noting Allen’s quip. Benny shot an insult back east across the ether waves, and from January through early March 1937, there was a radio ratings bonanza as millions of radio listeners tuned in each show to see what new cracks would fly. 

Fred Allen crashes Jack’s stage show in NYC in 1947, terrific and only 3 minutes long

Fred Allen show, where Jack Benny crashes the show and becomes “King for a Day”, its terrific!

Benny show, how Benny and Allen met Jan 15 1950

Benny’s side of the jokes were pretty tame, he made fun of the bags under Fred Allen’s eyes. Allen, who did most of his own writing, each week would add a few new insulting jokes to his already-prepared script at the last minute. Truly, listening to the feud is not all that hilarious, there were some “hits” and plenty of “misses” in the attempts at humor. But radio performers talking about each other, (or throwing guff at each other) had been generally frowned upon by the program sponsors, who were loath to give free advertising to any other company during the airtime they paid so dearly for. Ratings for both the Benny and Allen comedy shows shot to new highs during these weeks and there was tremendous coverage of the uproar in newspaper radio columns, and lots of talk about it in popular culture.  Benny brought his radio cast east to New York for a March 14 show, and the feud came to a climax with a live broadcast from the Waldorf-Astoria. To me the denouement was a bit of a letdown, the two went into another room, and came back singing a snarky song about friendship. 

What I learned in my research, from lots of digging into the columns of radio journalists, that in 1937 it was supposed to be kept “top secret” that the feud was actually manufactured by a fast-thinking advertising agency account executive   Don Stauffer. His company, Young & Rubicam, held both the Benny and Allen radio show accounts (Jell-O and Sal Hepatica, a particularly awful tasting antacid). When Stauffer heard Allen make the Benny comment, he pitched the idea of a mock feud to the two comics, who agreed to do it. The public was supposed to think it was a product of Benny and Allen, but increasing ratings and getting lots of free publicity had a lot to do with it.

Stuart Canin is still with us at 94, and he recently gave a marvelous interview at a Jack Benny convention that I will link to. I enjoyed getting to ask him if the people in his neighborhood heard him on the air and listened to the feud’s progress and he said yes indeed. 

That should have been the end of the feud, as I mentioned it was getting a bit tiresome (as some newspaper radio reviewers noted). But here is where long public memory, and the smart comic twists and Benny and Allen and their writers (long after the Young & Rubicam agency ceased to their listened producers) gave the comedians the later laughs. 

Paramount film studio contributed to the new chapters in the feud, as the movie executives had signed Jack Benny to a film contract, and very much wanted to translate his radio stardom into film stardom. (two wonderful books Catherine Jurica’s Hollywood’s Greatest Year 1938, and Susan Ohmer’s George Gallup in Hollywood provide the background to Hollywood’s slump and looking to the rival medium for new star power). Paramount hired film director Mark Sandrich away from RKO (he had become famous making the Astaire/Rogers musicals), and gave Sandrich the assignment of making Benny a top box office star. Sandrich decided that the way to do that was to craft a film around Jack Benny’s radio personality, and his cast members, making a kind of visual version of the radio show (grafted onto some typical music and dance numbers featuring pretty chorus girls). Sandrich had brought Benny’s hugely popular cast member Eddie “Rochester” Anderson into the first one, a sleeper hit in June 1939 titled Man About Town.

Sandrich then upped the game in April 1940’s “Buck Benny Rides Again” by incorporating the comic insults of Benny by Fred Allen, Allen’s voice emanating from a radio. Another huge box office hit resulted. Sandrich made a third film co-starring Benny and Allen, using the Feud as a take-off point for a bunch of slapstick blustering.

The resulting comedy, Christmas 1940’s release “Love Thy Neighbor” is really a dreadful film, Allen is clearly miserable and the slapstick is forced, and even Rochester has little to do in it. Nevertheless, the film made oodles of money for Paramount. And Stuart Canin appeared on stage in New York at the film’s premiere and was awarded a big scholarship for his future study of music. Sandrich then pleaded to move on to something else, and he created hit films with Bing Crosby. 

During World War II, Jack Benny travelled extensively to put on episodes of his radio program at US military training camps across the US during the prime-time network season, and then Benny toured with USO troops to North Africa, Europe and the Pacific in the summers. Everywhere he went, soldiers greeted Benny with homemade signs touting the feud, making playful insults about Benny or his rival Allen. I mention this just to demonstrate that the feud remained in enlisted men’s memories and it gave them pleasure to hope for a frustrated reaction from their beloved comic Benny. (Allen appeared in the early 1940s as a guest panelist on the delightfully erudite quiz show “Information, Please” and host Clifton Fadiman always asked him questions snarky questions about Jack Benny, another way outside their own programs that the popularity of the feud continued. (Allen, however, had serious health issues that took him off the air for most of the War. He was able to return in late1944).

The most successful way (in my opinion) that the Benny-Allen feud remained evergreen was in the ways the two comics worked it into occasional show narratives in the post-World War II years. Allen appeared as a guest star on Benny’s radio program ten times between 1944 and spring 1953 (second most frequent guest after stuffy British actor Ronald Colman and his wife Benita, another excellent example of a continuing narrative gag). Along with devising his famous “Allen’s Alley group of quirky ethnic characters who responded comically to his interview questions, Fred Allen also had a running gag on his own show of a campaign to “Bring Back Vaudeville,” enlisting Jack Haley and other old variety stars in satirical sketches on the craziness of entertainment in the old days.  When Allen came west to Los Angeles to appear on Benny’s radio program, the episode’s narrative would often revolve around Benny and Allen being asked to reminisce about their early days in vaudeville – how did they form the ideas for their acts, how did the two performers meet, how did one ask the other for advice on becoming a star. Benny and Allen would tell Rashomon-like substantially different versions of the same memories. They worked in references to the oddest acts in vaudeville – Fink’s Mules, Swain’s Rats and Cats, Japanese “flash” acts in which performers (tucked into barrels) would be tossed in the air by the acrobats who were lying on their backs, using their feet. Fred Allen took great delight in the opportunity that gave him to make jokes about Benny having to look out the “bung hole” of the barrel. Benny and Allen playfully insulted each other and fashioned a great deal of funny material that mixed nostalgic with the snark.  

Kathy Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin; her research specializations are in US radio, film and TV history. Recent publications include: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (California 2017);“Archaeologies of Fandom: Using Historical Methods to Explore Fan Cultures of the Past,” in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge 2018); and (edited) Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One: May 2 - July 27, 1932 (BearManor 2020).