Tag: Jack Paar

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The House That Jack Sat

“Frankly, I’m a little worried,” comedian Jack Paar confided in announcer Hy Averback on this day, 17 August, in 1947. He was, after all, merely a “summer replacement,” a “fellow who broadcasts during the hot weather to give the other actors time to count the money they’ve made all winter.” For the past twelve weeks, Paar had been sitting in for his first-namesake, skinflint Jack Benny, and had held warm that cozy place on the summer sun dial quite nicely at that. Still, while the reception had been far from icy, his “brief summer career” was fast coming to an end as radio was “getting ready for the winter again.”

Unintelligible as they might seem to most of today’s readers, there were tell-tale signs: Edgar Bergen “repainting Charlie McCarthy,” Fibber McGee “waxing Harlow Wilcox,” and Phil Harris switching to “antifreeze, with an olive.”

Resigned as he was to his autumnal fate, the soon-to-be displaced replacement did not go gentle into the night; instead, he took it upon himself to find his “winter replacement” by staging a talent contest.

The first applicants auditioning for Paar are a midget sister act. The sisters do not impress Paar much, even though his assessment suggests that he was not quite at home in the non-visual medium. I mean, having bags under his eyes didn’t send Fred Allen packing; nor did being a trifle wooden hurt Charlie McCarthy’s career.

PAAR.  Maybe I was listening wrong.  Did you say you do card tricks with mice?

ACT 2.  Yes.  Here.  Pick a mouse.

PAAR.  [ . . .] Don’t you do any of the conventional magician’s tricks, like, maybe, sawing a woman in half?

ACT 2.  Oh, but monsieur, I shall never saw a woman in half again.  I was never so humiliated.  I was on the stage of the Orpheum Theater, you see . . .

PAAR.  You mean, something went wrong with the trick?

ACT 2.  Oh, yes. I don’t know how it happened, but I was sawing this woman in half when, all of a sudden, I heard . . . blup, blup, blup, blip . . .

PAAR.  Poor Simone Simon.

The third act is somewhat more promising or, at any rate, more familiar. It is, don’t you know, Jack. Benny, that is, “comedian and violin virtuoso.”

“I was the original Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy,” Benny insists as he lists his spurious radio credentials. “When you were a boy, we didn’t have all of America,” Paar retorts. To prove that, until his season ended some twelve weeks ago, he was “one of the funniest men in radio,” the self-important Benny reads some lines from one of his scripts. So convinced was he of his own genius, that he did not bother to fill in the blanks left by his absentee sidekicks:

Thank you, Don.  Well, hello Mary.  Phil, you gotta do something about that band.  Sing, Dennis.  Rochester, answer the door.  Yikes.  Well, what do you know, it’s Ronnie and Benita.  But I think.  But I.  But.  But.  But.  Bu . . . we’re a little late.  So, good night, folks.

Whether boasting Benny looked in on his replacement to give the latter a boost or to let listeners know that the spot was still his, I don’t know; but rarely has a reminder of being replaceable made a comedian on hiatus sound so incomparable.

Meanwhile, just to remind myself that summer ain’t over yet, even though it sure feels like autumn here on the Welsh coast, I booked a trip to visit the old place. Yes, hold your wax, Harlow, beginning next week, I am back in New York. It’s a neat trick, considering that the new place we’ve been doing up still demandss so much of our attention and time. Displacement activity, you say? I should be scratching paint rather than scrape pennies and scram? Aw, go pick (on) a mouse!

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Jack Paar (17 August 1947)

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On This Day in 1943: Gracie Allen Decides to Replace Jack Benny with "Thirty Minutes of Refinement"

Last night, I finally got to see the so-called highlights of the Academy Awards, an assortment of leftovers that UK channel Sky One tosses to those subscribers who refuse to have juicy bits of trivia over-nighted for a premium. While mercifully abridged, the ceremony was chopped off at all the wrong spots, with more attention being paid to red carpet parading than to the presentation proper, let alone the politics behind the trophy distribution.

I had been looking forward to a few choice moments described by television critic Brent McKee in his online journal, but never got to judge for myself what exactly was the matter with Lauren Bacall, whom I had already presumed dead a few weeks ago. The commercials-riddled presentation made gossip-fest Entertainment Tonight look like an uncompromising piece of investigative journalism. Being accosted by the inane and utterly superfluous commentary provided by a couple of British MC stand-ins, I hardly even got as much as a glimpse of Jon Stewart, whose hosting of the high-profile, low-rated affair received rather mixed reviews.

Just how difficult it is to find a suitable master (or mistress) of ceremonies was played up in this year’s introductory Oscar sketches, in which former presentational misfires like Whoopi Goldberg and David Letterman refused to front once more what amounted to a chorus of disapproval.

What is required of an Academy Awards host is not simply a modicum of charm and wit, as well as a stature that bears a vague semblance to Hollywood star power, but also a persona firm enough not to crack when faced with the shocks and punctures it is likely to sustain during a never entirely predictable live broadcast. Censors and advertisers balk at volatile comics (an energetic personality Robin Williams once used to personify), as much as a large percentage of the statistical presence known as the general public might enjoy their ad-libbing antics.

True, the exposure of certain parts of the human anatomy aside, American broadcasters are no longer quite as squeamish as they once were in their furtive approach to the lexicon of the commoners (even though rap lyrics can still be awarded a prize without being deemed fit to air in their original form). Still, notwithstanding the fact that everyday language seems to have just about shrivelled to the utterance of monosyllabics, the broadcasters’ dictionary of permissible phrases sure used to be much smaller a few decades ago.

On this day, 7 March, in 1960, for instance, Jack Paar returned to host the Tonight Show after an absence of one month, during which he protested NBC’s rejection of a tame bit of toilet humor (some quip about a “water closet”). Today, of course, it is chiefly political correctness that concerns those who suck up the open air of which they are merely lessees while sucking up to the advertisers and corporate entities that condition it.

Sometimes I wonder whether the host is as overrated a figure as the actor who portrays the spectacle that is a James Bond movie. How irreplaceable are the ostensible headliners of any show, even if their names are as closely associated with it as, say, Jack Benny’s was with the Jack Benny Program? Benny learned the hard way on this day in 1943. The perennial 39-year old—who would later give a young Paar his break when discovering the newcomer while entertaining the troops)—was forced to sit out his own broadcast due to a cold, only a funeral having kept him away during the previous season.

Asked to substitute for him were fellow radio comedians George Burns and Gracie Allen. Yet while George was perfectly willing to pinch-hit for bedridden Benny, his batty wife simply refused to go on the air to take care of the impending vacuum.

Gracie had decided to become an intellectual, and filling in for the lead of an old comedy act just would no longer do. She was scheduled instead to give a piano concert, undaunted by her apparent lack of keyboards-tested talent. None of George’s coaxing would convince her to change her absent mind; besides, she already owned the expensive articles of clothing that George promised to bestow upon her in the event of her much-needed cooperation.

Eventually, Gracie condescended to do the show after all, having discovered a kindred soul in sensitive Dennis Day. Sure, he liked Little Women; but he liked books even better. And when he demonstrated his love for poetry by reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “If” in a pitch that screamed “cultured”—no ifs and buts about it—Gracie could not but seize Benny’s temporarily vacant timeslot, determined to present her “Thirty Minutes of Refinement.”

Now “refinement” was a concept to which violinist Benny himself aspired, but which those in charge of shaping popular radio entertainment mainly derided for profit as some harebrained, longhair attempts at bothering the blissfully ignorant with unnecessary uplift.