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American Humor Studies Association
 
Becoming Benny The Evolution of Jack Benny's Character Comedy from Vaudeville to
Radio
Author(s): Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
Source: Studies in American Humor, Vol. 1, No. 2, SPECIAL ISSUE American Humor Across
Media in the 1920s and 1930s (2015), pp. 163-191
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/studamerhumor.1.2.0163
Accessed: 19-09-2016 21:22 UTC
 
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Studies in American Humor, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2015 
Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
a b s t r a c t : This case study traces the evolution of Jack Benny’s comedy practices as he 
moved across entertainment systems from vaudeville to radio in the early 1930s. The core of 
his comic identity endured—his self-deprecating humor—but other facets of his comic iden-
tity shifted and changed in reaction to the new environment. Facing the daunting challenge 
of filling radio’s unprecedented, ferocious demand for new content, Jack Benny struggled but 
ultimately thrived by developing new approaches to comedy. Benny and writer Harry Conn 
began to craft a personality-based radio variety program that moved from Benny’s vaudeville 
monologues to expanding the narrative world of the show with dialogue and skits. They cre-
ated characters out of the show’s performers, put them in situations, and turned Benny into a 
“fall guy” character, the butt of his cast’s insulting jokes.
K e y w o r d s : comedy, radio, vaudeville, Jack Benny, situation comedy, character, comic 
persona 
Anticipation mixed with anxiety in the small glass-enclosed broadcasting stu-
dio installed in the old roof garden situated atop Broadway’s New Amsterdam 
Theater on Monday, May 2, 1932. Beginning at 9:30 p.m. EST, the inaugural 
episode of Canada Dry Ginger Ale’s new half-hour radio program aired live, 
carried over a network of NBC Blue radio stations covering the eastern por-
tion of the nation. The only audience members were representatives from the 
show’s sponsor, advertising agency, and network. The program’s concept and 
cast had been assembled for Canada Dry by NBC executive Bertha Brainard 
as a new direction in sponsorship for the company, which had previously 
underwritten a dramatic (and violent) adventure series set in the Canadian 
becoming benny
The Evolution of Jack Benny’s Character Comedy 
from Vaudeville to Radio
K a T h R y n h . F u l l E R - S E E l E y 
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164 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
Rockies.1 Canada Dry’s advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son billed the new 
show as “30 minutes of music and quips” featuring six numbers played by 
New York bandleader George Olsen and his orchestra with singing by his 
spouse, Ziegfeld Follies star Ethel Shutta. Already widely familiar to radio lis-
teners, they were considered to be the main attraction of the show.2 The music 
would be interspersed with brief monologue segments performed by 38-year-
old vaudeville veteran Jack Benny (1894–1974), who was introduced as “that 
suave comedian, dry humorist and famous master of ceremonies.”3 In his first 
performance for Canada Dry, Jack Benny told a series of jokes drawn from 
his well-honed stage routine, offering informal and genially self-deprecating 
comments on personal experiences such as his Hollywood adventures and the 
meagerness of his girlfriend, who posed for the “before” shots in “before and 
after” photos. By the conclusion of his fourth broadcast, Benny queasily real-
ized he had used up nearly every monologue he had perfected over fifteen 
years in vaudeville and more broadcasts lay ahead of him.4
The new Canada Dry Program joined a rapidly increasing number of 
variety-comedy programs on primetime network radio. While music had been 
the dominant program form of the previous five years, the entertainment trade 
press noted that comedy was growing as a less expensive option for sponsors 
weary of paying for high-priced orchestras and temperamental crooners. New 
shows in the 1932 season featured not only newcomer Jack Benny but also 
other vaudevillians such as George Burns and Gracie Allen, George Jessel, 
Fred Allen, and Jack Pearl. Most, like Benny, were serving as emcees (short for 
M.C. or master of ceremonies) for programs that mixed music, comedy, and 
advertising messages. The new entrants joined such already-popular variety 
programs as those hosted by Rudy Vallee for Fleischman’s Yeast, Ed Wynn 
for Texaco, and Eddie Cantor for Chase and Sanborn Coffee.5 The pull of this 
growing entertainment medium, coupled with the push of steeply declining 
opportunities on Broadway and in vaudeville due to the Depression, propelled 
the apprehensive Benny to try his hand in radio.6
Facing the daunting challenge of filling radio’s unprecedented, ferocious 
demand for new content, Jack Benny struggled but ultimately thrived in the 
new medium by developing new approaches to comedy. Benny and script-
writer Harry Conn began to craft a personality-based radio variety program, 
drawing on Benny’s vaudeville style and exploring new (to them) comic 
constructions of what contemporary critics termed character comedy and 
comedy situations.
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Becoming Benny 165
Experimenting as the program progressed from week to week, Benny 
and Conn expanded the narrative world of the show. They began develop-
ing comic identities for the major performers (orchestra leader, vocalist, and 
announcer) who stood around the microphone. Framing the group as work-
ers putting on a radio show, Benny and Conn developed a personality for 
each of them that blended reality and fiction. The cast became a stable of 
recognizable, quirky-yet-likeable continuing characters who could bounce 
off each other in informal exchanges in the studio or interact in situations 
from visiting the zoo, or having dinner at a cast member’s home, to perform-
ing a parody of a popular new film. This variety greatly reduced Benny and 
Conn’s reliance on pat monologues and standard joke telling. What they 
developed was one example of the forerunner of the situation comedy, 
which would become much more prominent only fifteen years later in radio 
and television broadcasting in response to changing industrial practices and 
cultural norms.7
The duo could have created comic content for the program while leaving 
the “master of ceremonies” as the star, a dominant figure being fed straight-
lines by subordinates, or by making him a pleasantly bland father figure 
who rode herd over his workplace family. This essay, using archival materi-
als such as scripts and recordings and discourse in the entertainment trade 
press, demonstrates that,over a three-to-four year period, Benny and Conn 
gradually transformed the Jack Benny persona. Writer and performer transi-
tioned the role from the vaudeville character of a suave but self- deprecating 
monologist (called by vaudeville critics the “sleekly bored joker”) to that of 
a vainglorious, hapless Fall Guy, a “negative exemplar,” in Steven Mintz’s 
terms, roundly (and ritually) roasted by his stable of zany stooges.8 Benny 
and Conn turned the humor around. Benny the emcee became the butt, not 
the mouthpiece, of most of the acerbic comic lines. The Jack Benny character 
of radio fame was their greatest creation and soon solidified Benny’s place 
as the premiere comedian in American radio.
Benny’s Early Vaudeville Persona
Born Benjamin Kubelsky in Waukegan, Illinois, Jack Benny spent more 
than twenty years developing a vaudeville identity that brought him, if 
not immense stardom, solid success as a musician who transitioned into 
a humorist who held a violin in one hand and a cigar in the other as he 
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166 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
joked. Working as a “single” who occasionally interacted with an assistant 
or other acts on the bill, Benny joined the expanding group of informal 
modern vaudeville hipsters whom we would know later as stand-up comics. 
Benny’s twist to the genre involved creating a “middling” personality who 
was neither young nor old, neither wealthy nor poor. He was not loud or 
buffoonish, and he related to a homogenizing American audience as much 
more Anglo-American than Jewish or ethnic.9 He was a midwestern variant 
of what vaudeville historians term “the Voice of the City.”10 Variety critic 
Robert Landry later asserted that Jack Benny’s stage manner had always 
seemed “big time,” even as it was perfected in the hinterlands of local theater 
orchestras, military camp shows, and smalltime vaudeville in the 1910s and 
early 1920s:
[Benny’s] style was subdued, his delivery one of the first examples of modern 
“throw away.” He was poised, unhurried, seemingly effortless. . . . He was not 
an ad libber, in the general sense. He prepared his stuff ahead but changed it 
frequently, infused it with topical allusions. But he sounded ad lib.11
Landry acknowledged that Benny’s appeal was nevertheless somewhat lim-
ited, because his act “demanded too much attention and quiet” to thrive 
either in noisy metropolitan nightclubs or among the rough-and-tumble 
milieu of hinterland vaudeville comics.12
Reviews of Jack Benny’s routine in the early 1920s commended the 
“reserve, poise and personality” of the monologist.13 “Jack Benny with his 
slow, easy patter, gets his crowd before he is well under way,” commented a 
typical critic, who also mentioned the mediocrity of Benny’s jokes.14 When 
he appeared in 1925 at New York’s Palace Theater, vaudeville’s pinnacle, 
Billboard praised Benny’s “droll delivery,” but also labeled his routine as 
being “a cross between the Frank Fay and Ben Bernie styles.”15 Initially, as 
Ben K. Benny (his early stage name), the act had superficially resembled that 
of deep-voiced bandleader Ben Bernie, who grasped a fiddle and embel-
lished the punch lines of his jokes with the catch phrase “yowza yowza!”16
Bernie pressured the younger Benny to further modify his stage name to 
widen the perceived differences between them.17 The comparisons with 
Frank Fay continued, however, as Jack Benny unabashedly modeled his act 
on that of the well-known Irish-American comic. When Benny returned to 
the Palace in April 1926, Variety complimented his “excellent material and 
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Becoming Benny 167
delivery” and his witty interplay with other performers: “Stanley and Birns 
[the next act] came out early and asked to tell a story in Benny’s spot. Benny’s 
comments on the story were real funny. It was likable nonsense and a yell 
when Benny stopped [them] as he recognized it as a stag story.”18 Benny regu-
larly re-enacted this routine with a female assistant whispering the salacious 
story in his ear, so that he could flirtatiously dance between polite and sexu-
ally suggestive humor. When he incorporated it into a 1928 Vitaphone talkie 
short, a reviewer snarkily noted its similarities to a Frank Fay routine—“they 
can fight out who did it first.”19
Frank Fay’s urbane manner made him one of the most prominent and 
highest-paid performers in vaudeville.20 He was one of the first to enact the 
master of ceremonies role at the Palace and the nation’s other top theaters. 
Emcees had existed previously in minstrel shows (where they were called 
interlocutors) and in British music halls (where they were called compères) 
but Fay was said to have coined the term used in American vaudeville.21 The 
emcee role was an outgrowth of Fay’s innovative monologue act. Fay was 
one of the first stage comedians to eschew outlandish costumes, makeup, 
props, and broad physical shtick. The debonair redheaded, blue-eyed Fay 
dressed with impeccable, aristocratic style and moved with a feminine grace. 
His timing and delivery were judged “masterly.”22 He was a “boastful big city 
boulevardier” with a breezy delivery and relatively restrained, soft-spoken 
demeanor that covered a rapier wit. “Faysie” had a devastating ability to ad 
lib insults that could destroy any heckler in the audience. A Life Magazine 
profile described “his cockiness and his conceit . . . the gentle smile, the quiz-
zical lift of the eyebrows, the sweet voice and then the dirty crack.”23 Fay did 
not depend on strings of one-liners, but was a storyteller whose collection 
of whimsical and digressive tales were peopled with everyday individuals, 
such as a family that obsessively saved string. Fay also sang stanzas of cur-
rent songs like “Tea for Two,” stopping to dissect the absurdities of the lyr-
ics along the way. He was elegant, suave, and superior—and made sure the 
audience knew it through his wicked repartee and stinging quips, perfect-
ing what a critic called “an odd combination of humor and elegance.”24 Fay’s 
act was widely admired and copied by other comics, but offstage he was 
reviled for his bigotry, his alcoholism, and his massive ego (calling himself 
“Frank Fay, the World’s Greatest Comedian”). Fellow comic Fred Allen once 
cracked, “The last time I saw Fay, he was walking down Lover’s Lane holding 
his own hand.”25
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168 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
Vaudeville acts had traditionally followed each other on stage in quick 
succession, identified in printed programs and by title cards placed on 
an easel at the side of the stage. But as attendance began to dwindle, 
vaudeville managers began to add an extra attraction—a headliner such 
as Fay, Benny, Julius Tannen, or Georgie Jessel to present the show. The 
lead comic would appear not only in his own spot, but throughout the bill, 
introducing the acts, interacting with (or interrupting) other performers, 
ad- libbing patter between the spots, and filling time if needed by delays in 
the show. Some critics complained that this restructuring slowed the pace 
of the program, but the emcee’s performance made the disparate parts of 
the program seem more interconnected. This collaborative spirit imbued 
Jack Benny’s approach to the emcee role, whereas Fay took the opportu-
nity to turn the spotlight on himself and dominate the entire proceedings. 
Benny did borrow Fay’s quiet charm, elegant manner, and womanly walk, 
but, lacking his quick and inventive tongue, replaced Fay’s arrogance and 
ad-libbedputdowns with carefully crafted lines that sounded off-the-cuff 
and included a subtle self-deprecation. “Benny’s opening line, which he 
used for years, was celebrated,” recalled vaudeville historian Maurice 
Zolotow. “He would casually lope toward the center of the stage, tuck his 
violin under his arm, brush his hair back with his left hand, and inquire of 
the maestro, ‘How is the show?’ ‘Fine up to now,’ the maestro would reply. 
‘I’ll fix that!’ Benny would say.”26
Jack Benny rivaled Fay as one of the most frequent emcees at the Palace 
between 1927 and 1931.27 “Benny knows the Palace and its audiences there as 
few others do, knowing what else they like besides actor and show biz gags,” 
noted a reviewer, who also voiced the concern mentioned by other critics that 
Benny struggled to find enough new material to last through repeated view-
ings.28 In Chicago, “Jack Benny, who had acted as M.C. throughout the bill, 
was refreshingly humorous in his easy, graceful way, his chatter and violin 
playing both going over big.”29 Vaudeville appeared increasingly unstable, 
however, so Benny experimented with other media forms. He appeared on 
Broadway in the 1927 Shubert Brothers’ revue The Great Temptations, but felt 
that the predominance of “blue” humor did not complement his style.30 He 
also tried his hand at the movies, riding the wave of talent from vaudeville 
and the legitimate theater flowing to Hollywood with the coming of talkies. 
However, after playing a prominent role as the emcee in MGM’s Hollywood 
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Becoming Benny 169
Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner), his subsequent film roles (and reviews of 
his performances) were unsatisfying.
In 1930 and 1931, as Benny moved his stage act from more intimate 
vaudeville venues to cavernous picture palaces (which also began adding 
headliners to their movie shows to shore up falling attendance), critics 
expressed concern that his work was too quiet and low-key to command 
5,000-seat auditoriums. Although he did moderately well, devising some 
punchy additions to enlarge the scale of his act (Zouave soldiers, Japanese 
acrobats, comeuppance from the abrupt start of the film program onscreen), 
a reviewer of his show at New York’s Capital Theater was still skeptical, stat-
ing that “Benny is still the suave and clever emcee working all through the 
show to keep it pieced together effectively. His suaveness, then, tends to 
slowness, which hardly helps a presentation in a ‘deluxer.’ The type of enter-
tainment that goes is that which is served speedily and peppily.”31 Benny 
was at a career crossroads as he wandered among various venues and media 
forms, trying to find the most advantageous platform for his particular 
skills. Moreover, worsening economic conditions of the early 1930s made 
the search all the more nerve-wracking.
In 1932, radio and advertising executives like NBC’s Bertha Brainard, 
scanning the horizon for talent that might best adapt to radio’s needs, con-
sidered Jack Benny, although they were not initially very enthusiastic about 
him. Neither network brass nor sponsors’ agencies were certain what styles 
and types of performers would work on the radio – many preferred the loud 
brashness and quickness of other comics and the stentorian tones of tux-
edoed announcers. NBC had actually approached literary humorist Irvin 
S. Cobb prior to contacting Benny, but Cobb’s salary demands had been 
too high. Executives probably noted the affinities Benny’s stage act had for 
aural presentation—Benny produced most of his humor through low-key 
language and smooth, superbly timed delivery of his lines. He was not a 
primarily physical or visual comedian, getting laughs through broad facial 
expressions, costume, or slapstick body movements. Benny engaged in 
quiet, intimate joking, confiding in the audience as if speaking to a small 
group, methods similar to “crooning” singers such as Bing Crosby who were 
becoming popular through radio appearances. On the other hand, Benny’s 
droll stare out at the stage audience, his hand-to-cheek silently communicat-
ing his frustration and winning their sympathy, was lost on radio listeners 
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170 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
though it would reemerge successfully to embellish his comedy routines in 
the television era.
Challenges of the Initial Canada Dry Program
As Benny began the twice-weekly broadcasts of Canada Dry’s new musical 
comedy radio show, it seemed that not only he, but the sponsor, ad agency, 
and network were almost shockingly naïve about how much labor Benny’s 
role might entail. The orchestra and vocalist had large musical catalogs from 
which they could draw new tunes to perform, but if Benny was to do more 
than introduce the title of the next song, he was going to need fresh mate-
rial for every episode. Apparently no provisions were in the original plans 
for the program to hire writers. The executives must have assumed Benny 
ad-libbed or wrote his own humorous asides. As a popular emcee, Benny 
had experience in creating short gags and conversations with vaudeville per-
formers, but he was used to repeating similar patter for different audiences 
the whole week of an engagement, and then the next week, getting either 
new performers to work with or a new city to play in. No one involved with 
the Canada Dry Program had entirely thought through how a twice-weekly 
program with the same performers and the same audience might work.
The first live episode demonstrated the promise and the drawback of the 
concept. In seven short monologues interspersed between the songs, Benny 
presented himself as a suave, urbane, and thoroughly Americanized fel-
low who was witty and personable, a wise-cracker who was self-centered, 
but who self-deprecatingly understood that his attempts at boastful ego-
tism would end in mild humiliation. Benny exchanged a little banter with 
orchestra leader George Olsen and singer Ethel Shutta as he introduced 
them, although the nervous awkwardness of the new endeavor was appar-
ent in Benny’s doing most of the talking and their very brief responses to 
standard, cheap vaudeville jokes about the age of Olsen’s automobile. Benny 
worked from a script; he wanted a written structure to guide him, to make 
sure that he was organized and that the jokes could be carefully pored over 
and crafted into polished gems.32 He delivered his lines, though, in such an 
easy, nonchalant manner that listeners may have thought he was speaking 
off the cuff. Studies of Benny’s career usually point out the assertive way 
that, even in this first episode, he wove the middle-of-the-program advertis-
ing messages into his monologues, entwining a playful (and fairly unusual) 
mocking tone toward the product in the same way he told self-deprecating 
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Becoming Benny 171
stories about himself.33 (The advertising agency may have had a hand in 
composing the first middle commercials, but the sponsor was so upset by 
their sarcastic tone that it’s reasonable to assume Benny may have written 
these himself.) Benny’s introductory monologue was probably drawn from 
when he played at the Palace, but with the added twist of a backhanded 
plugging of the sponsor’s product:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Benny talking, and making my first 
 appearance on the air professionally. By that I mean, I am finally getting paid, 
which will be a great relief to my creditors. I really don’t know why I am here. 
I’m supposed to be a sort of master ofceremonies and tell you all about the 
things that will happen, which would happen anyway. I must introduce the 
different artists, who could easily introduce themselves, and also talk about 
Canada Dry made to order by the glass, which is a waste of time, as you know 
all about it. You drink it, like it, and don’t want to hear about it. So ladies and 
gentlemen, a master of ceremonies is really a fellow who is unemployed and 
gets paid for it.34
In the second and third episodes of the Canada Dry Program, with a dash 
of desperation, Benny provided brief descriptions of his fellow radio per-
formers that again drew on standard vaudeville insult-humor patter: George 
Olsen was penurious, Ethel Shutta lied about her age, the boys in the band 
were drunkards, and announcer Ed Thorgerson resembled a Hollywood 
playboy with slicked back hair and a thin mustache. (It looked as if “he’d 
swallowed all of Mickey Mouse but the tail,” Benny quipped.35) But the 
 others were given few lines to speak. Benny appealed to his unseen listeners 
directly, asking if anybody was out there, and he repeatedly reintroduced 
himself. In the second week, he opened the program with, “Hello somebody. 
This is Jack Benny talking. There will be a slight pause while you say ‘what of 
it?’ After all, I know your feelings, folks, I used to listen in myself.” He closed 
with, “That was our last number of our fourth program on the 11th of May. 
Are you still conscious? Hmm?”36
Billboard’s review of the new program noted that Benny’s nonchalant 
style of humor and delivery was different from what other comics were 
offering on air. “A taste for his style has to be acquired,” cautioned the 
reviewer, who also noticed the reliance on old vaudeville patter—“On this 
particular program he rang in some of his old material, but no doubt new 
to radio fans.”37
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172 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
Years later, Jack Benny confessed his panic: “in vaudeville you had one 
show and that was it. You changed it whenever you felt like it. And in this, 
when you realized that every week you needed a new show, this got a little 
bit frightening.”38 In another interview, he recalled, “I didn’t have any idea 
how important it was to have good material, and how hard it was to get. The 
first show was a cinch—I used about half of all the gags I knew. The second 
show consumed all the rest, and I faced the third absolutely dry.”39
Established performers appearing on the airwaves similarly expressed 
terror at the speed with which live broadcasts to huge audiences consumed 
a career’s worth of performances in just a few hours. “The scourge of the 
amusement field is radio,” warned Variety. “Radio is devouring too much 
music, eating up the stage too cannibalistically and burning out all talent 
too fast, so that it may undo itself about as rapidly as it made itself promi-
nent in its relation to the masses.”40 Ed Wynn complained that “the gags used 
in four half-hour programs would provide enough material for a full-length 
Broadway play.”41 While Variety acknowledged that radio had made nation-
ally known stars of niche performers like Wynn and Jack Pearl as well as 
previous unknowns like Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (creators of 
Amos ’n’ Andy), it cautioned:
Radio devours everything so fast that it points to the ultimate that the pace 
can’t last. The very biggest on the ether today soon become boresome simply 
because it’s not showmanly to dish up a new act 52 times a year. Comics [who] 
used to be able to test out their new routines in smaller towns like Plainfield 
and Union Hill, now can kill their careers with a bad routine in front of 20 to 
50 million listeners in one night.42
Performers and program producers struggled to adapt old business models 
to this new mode of communication. The radio networks had consolidated 
the complex programming system of vaudeville into just a few broadcast 
outlets that demanded seriality and liveness for mass nationwide audiences. 
These pressures precluded shows from being able to use previously recorded 
performances or reruns, options which might have made the search for fresh 
material, the pressure to perform at peak ability, and the chase for high 
ratings less fearsome.
During his years in vaudeville, Benny had regularly enhanced his routine 
by purchasing jokes and routines from gag writers such as Al Boasberg, 
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Becoming Benny 173
Dave Freedman, and Harry Conn.43 He turned to them now.44 In the 1920s, 
Burns and Allen had paid Boasberg a continuous 10 percent of their $1,750 
weekly vaudeville salary in exchange for his creation of individual routines, 
such as “Lamb Chops,” that they performed for years. The duo asked him to 
write material for their weekly radio broadcasts on the Robert Burns Cigar 
Program, but Boasberg balked at how much more work was involved in 
 creating the seven-to-eight minutes of new material they required each week 
for only 10 percent of their $1,000 radio salary. Boasberg quit and moved 
to Hollywood to take film-writing jobs.45 Burns and Allen and their radio 
producers soon assembled a staff of five writers to churn out all the nec-
essary material. Dave Freedman devised an alternate method to address 
radio comics’ endless need for material (Eddie Cantor was one of his major 
clients). Freedman hired a staff of young assistants who combed through 
every source of humor in the library—joke books, magazine articles, and 
nineteenth-century literature—to cull every possible jest, quip, and comic 
exchange. They organized these jokes into vast files on every conceivable 
topic that Freedman could then dip into, rearrange a few particulars, and 
assemble into scripts that he churned out for a half-dozen different radio 
comedy shows each week.46
By the end of the second week, Benny realized his show was heading 
toward disaster, and he sought out Harry Conn, a tap-dancing former 
vaudevillian who had turned to fulltime writing, penning routines for 
dozens of comedians and for Mae West’s Broadway shows in the 1920s.47 In 
the spring of 1932, Conn was working on the Burns and Allen staff. When 
Benny decided to rely solely on Conn and his material, Benny had to pay 
Conn’s salary out of his own pocket. The two quickly became partners, 
 working closely together week in and out to create, edit, and perfect the 
dialogue. To Conn’s chagrin, the radio network would not allow writers to 
receive on-air credit, however, so Benny always remained the focus of public 
and critical acclaim.48 Benny was as financially generous with Conn as he 
was dependent on him, paying Conn one of the highest salaries earned by 
radio writers.49
By the end of the third week on the air, with Conn on board, Canada 
Dry Program scripts started to become more adventurous. George Olsen 
now was given more straight lines as he and Benny engaged in conversa-
tion. Everyone else in the studio—from orchestra members to Conn and 
to Benny’s personal assistant Harry Baldwin—was pulled to the mike to 
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174 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
voice fictional guests in brief one-time appearances. Benny and Conn 
began experimenting with a richer fictional world for the program, creat-
ing sketch routines that briefly moved away from the microphone. On May 
23, 1932, they finessed the problem of segueing by endowing announcer 
Ed Thorgerson with a magical ability to tune an on-air radio into conversa-
tion made by the characters at a soda fountain located inthe building’s 
lobby. The show staff created sound effects of glasses clinking and ginger 
ale fizzing. Jack and Ethel Shutta bantered with a soda jerk portrayed by 
orchestra member Fran Frey. The scene may have lasted only two minutes, 
but when Benny seemed to return to the studio after the next song, he jok-
ingly assumed that he had to explain to the audience what they had done: 
“Well folks, this is Jack Benny back at the studio. Well, to tell you the truth, 
we never even left here. Olsen’s bass drum was the counter. And the fizz 
you heard was one of the boys sneezing.”50
Subsequent episodes each contained a three-to-five-minute sketch 
occurring in a fictional place away from the immediacy of the studio 
space. Some involved Jack traveling to a special event and reporting on 
it (essentially performing a monologue). In May 30 there was a foot race 
between an animated glass of Canada Dry and several condiment bottles. 
Benny called the action like a horse race, and at the end he interviewed 
the winning glass of ginger ale. (The bottle was played by Jack in a fal-
setto voice.) In another bit, Jack attended the Dempsey-Sharkey prizefight 
at Madison Square Garden and parodied radio sports coverage, giving 
play-by-play action. On other fanciful skits, Jack and George Olsen were 
arrested for speeding and broadcast the program from jail, and, on July 6, 
the cast visited the zoo and gathered testimonials from the animals about 
how much they enjoyed drinking Canada Dry. Meanwhile, Jack continued 
to rib George Olsen for being a spendthrift. Benny and Conn strove to 
avoid a rigid formula, but rather to devise a revolving mixture of comic 
monologues, repartee, pun tossing, and fictional adventures. They made 
humorous topical references to public figures, they made wickedly sharp 
puns and jokes at the expense of the sponsor’s product, and they parodied 
write-in contests and other promotional gimmicks that were then popular 
on other radio programs. Some of their experimental ideas were solidly 
successful; others were problematic. Some ideas (such as satirizing presi-
dential candidates Roosevelt and Hoover) ended after a few attempts, per-
haps at the behest of their sponsor.
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Becoming Benny 175
Benny and Conn also experimented in those first months on the 
radio in order to add at least one additional continuing character to 
the show, the first person who would not also have an official function 
on the radio program as announcer, musician, or singer. On May 25, 
Benny interviewed the supposed janitor of the building, played by band 
member Bobby Moore, who responded to questions only in gurgles of 
baby talk. On June 1, the janitor briefly returned, speaking in a heavy 
German accent. This time the part was probably played by Harry Conn. 
On June 15, Conn portrayed an Italian-American tough guy attending 
the Dempsey-Sharkey boxing match. On July 13, Jack talked to a group 
of Scottish gentlemen who would be judging the latest Canada Dry con-
test; all the Scots were played by Conn (including a Scottish terrier who 
simply woofed). Ethnic characters were a staple in Conn’s bag of com-
edy writing tricks, which reappeared in scripts throughout his tenure 
with the Benny show. Although the burlesquing of immigrants’ struggles 
with the English language was widespread in nineteenth-century litera-
ture and entertainment, and has remained a regular source of insensi-
tive humor up to the present day, there was increasing debate in radio 
(and in film) about whether the humor of country bumpkins and heav-
ily accented greenhorn immigrants was a relic of creaky old vaudeville 
humor that did not mesh with more modern sophisticated comedy of the 
type that Benny, the “Broadway Romeo,” had been creating.51 It’s prob-
able that Conn saw the ethnic-accented caricature of American voices to 
be a bit of verbal slapstick or unexpected aural comedy costuming for the 
airwaves. Despite Conn’s favoring of ethnic voices, Benny used bit-part 
actors, dialect specialists, to portray ethnic characters on the show.52
On air, Benny began to talk about hiring an assistant to handle all the 
mail the program was receiving in response to the outrageous Canada Dry 
contests he had been devising. This search continued over the next month, 
as Benny acquired first an inefficient male secretary, then an incompetent 
female secretary named Garbo.53 A young woman named Mary Livingstone, 
ostensibly a besotted fan of Benny from the small town of Plainfield, New 
Jersey, wandered on to the program on July 27. She was played by Sadye 
Marks Benny, Jack’s real-life spouse, a talented nonprofessional whom he 
would incorporate occasionally into stage routines and film shorts in simi-
lar supporting roles as a flirtatious and flip but none-too-bright young 
female companion. Several episodes later, Mary assumed the role of Jack’s 
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176 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
lackadaisical part time secretary on the radio show. Jack (who six weeks 
earlier had joked about a demanding girlfriend, Molly) was immediately 
attracted to her. Audience reaction was favorable, and Mary Livingstone 
began to appear regularly on the Canada Dry Program.54
Along with new characters came questions of narrative development. 
How much serialization and continuing plot did Benny and Conn want 
to have on their show in the interstitial spots sandwiched between the 
musical numbers? Amos ’n’ Andy had a 15-minute comic-melodramatic 
plot that played out five nights per week. Eddie Cantor had experimented 
with a fictional narrative on his show (with mixed results, a few critics 
complaining about too much plot). Fred Allen placed his character into a 
constantly changing series of situations—running a night court, operat-
ing a department store—which introduced new characters every episode. 
Ed Wynn parodied opera librettos, a different one each time.55 Conn and 
Benny liked the mixture of different show formats: a situation or sketch 
one week, a parody of a film or standing around the microphone another. 
Still, the pair toyed with the idea of developing a continuing romantic 
comedy subplot. Episodes in September and October 1932 played out Jack 
and Mary’s flirtations and comic misunderstandings, and climaxed with 
a scene of them espousing their love for one another. Benny and Conn 
had written themselves into a corner. Would the show now be dominated 
by a love story? Where would the comic conflicts arise? They quickly did 
an about-face with the scripts and decided to move in another direction, 
backing away from romantic tensions. Mary returned to flirting with the 
band mates and announcer, performing ineptly as a secretary, making 
silly comments that pegged her as a Dumb Dora character, and ribbing 
Jack’s small foibles.
After several months of twice-a-week programs, Benny and Conn began to 
garner critical notice for both the comic advertising and comedy situations. 
Variety reported in August, “Jack Benny was in good form on last week’s 
program, having evolved sundry effective gags for plugging Canada Dry. In 
line with the recent trend toward a humorous plug for the sponsor, he is 
sugar-coating and making palatable what is usually a boresome interlude 
in the best of programs.”56 In October, Variety commented, “Jack Benny is 
improving on his Canada Dry humor. Benny has built up a unique style of 
comedy, especially with those puns which, however, are not injudiciously 
primed for strong returns.”57
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Interfering Sponsors
Just when Benny and Conn thought they had achieved a solid, successful 
mixture of comedy and music, with increasingly complex characters, situ-
ations, and sketch parody elements (poking fun at popular films, contests, 
sports coverage, and interview programs), their all-powerful sponsor tossed 
several unanticipated monkey wrenches into to the works. In November 
1932, Canada Dry declared its displeasure with many aspects of the pro-
gram, despite such critical praise as the observation that Benny’s “air appear-
ance [has] brought forward much of the present style of radio humor.”58 The 
sponsor peremptorily changed networks to CBS to gain a larger and more 
advantageous network of participating stations. But this meant losing Olsen, 
Shutta, and the announcer, who were contractually obligated to NBC. The 
sponsor also claimed that the comic elements were insufficient and hired an 
additional writer-performer, Sid Silvers, to take the show in a new direction. 
Benny and Conn suddenly had to start over from scratch—teaching a new 
bandleader, singer, and announcer how to become comedians, and fighting 
off the intrusions of Silvers, who sought to turn the show into the completely 
fictional, continuing story of a befuddled Broadway producer and his smart-
aleck assistant, played by Silvers. Benny, Conn, and Livingstone stormed 
into the ad agency’s headquarters and threatened to quit if Silvers was not 
removed and they did not regain full control of the program’s production. 
While Canada Dry relented and let Silvers go, the sponsor had had enough 
excitement, and it cancelled the show in January 1933.
Fortunately for Benny, it did not take him long to find a new radio spon-
sor. Automobile manufacturer Chevrolet was tired of the shenanigans of its 
temperamental singing star Al Jolson, and when Jolson quit, the company 
picked up Benny. The shift brought several significant changes to the pro-
gram, as Benny was now the program’s acknowledged main focus: the sup-
porting characters (called stooges) interacted with Benny, while he got most 
of the punch lines. Now the show was broadcast only one evening per week 
(NBC on Friday 10:00–10:30 p.m.) and was billed as a comedy program that 
contained music. For the third time, Benny and Conn had to begin to train 
a new cast.59 Mary assumed a much more prominent role on the program as 
Jack’s companion, the only female character on the show, and the program’s 
main stooge. Conn expanded Mary’s role by having her read letters from 
her Mama back on the farm in Plainfield. Mary also composed and recited 
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178 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
dreadful poetry. A decent vocalist, Mary also occasionally performed songs 
with the orchestra. She flirted with band members and the announcer, and 
heckled Benny more than ever before.
Critics continued to commend Benny for creating a different kind of radio 
comedy program. The Ottawa Citizen’s reviewer complimented Benny for 
the high-quality humor he created with his cast of characters—“Jack has the 
knack of making everyone on his program real and human, instead of just 
a lot of radio voices.”60 That summer, when Chevrolet put the radio show 
on hiatus (retreating from national advertising when their revenues lagged 
so badly), Benny and Mary Livingstone returned to the stage in a personal 
appearance tour, and vaudeville critics remarked on Benny’s new level of 
radio-fueled stardom: “[His] popularity was never so frankly confessed by 
the public prior to his radio career. What the air did for Benny was to make 
him a household character,” a Chicago reviewer noted.61
Benny’s radio challenges were far from over, however, for when his radio 
program returned to the air in October 1933, it was broadcast at yet another 
new time slot (Sunday evenings, 10:00 p.m.). Again he and Conn had to 
break in a new cast. Luckily for them, new announcer Alois Havrilla and 
tenor Frank Parker quickly assimilated themselves into Conn’s character-
building dialogue and skits. Then a new chief executive took over the reins 
at sponsor Chevrolet and pronounced that he would rather have his com-
pany’s program present more serious orchestral music than comedy. Despite 
putting on a program that was continuing to climb to the top of the ratings 
polls, Benny once again found himself summarily, and humiliatingly, fired. 
Some sponsors and ad agencies had reservations about picking up a so-
called “used” comedian, whose selling prospects might be sullied because 
his name had already been associated with two other advertised products. 
And it was already mid-season, when most major sponsors were already tied 
to their current programs. Nevertheless, Benny was soon back on the NBC 
airwaves with a stop-gap sponsor—General Tire (who couldn’t afford to pay 
for his program more than a few months)—and yet another new broadcast 
slot, Friday evenings from 10:30 to 11:00 p.m.
In this uncertain time, Benny was especially frustrated that sponsor 
upheavals caused such problems for the success of the comedy narrative 
he and Conn were trying to build. The revolving door of bandleaders, 
singers, and announcers wreaked havoc with the show creators’ attempts 
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Becoming Benny 179
to maintain complex, interesting supporting characters and their comic 
situations. Up to this point, the sponsor and ad agency selected all the 
performers, who might also be under restrictive contractual obligations 
to the NBC network. Benny became determined to assume more of the 
responsibilities of program producer (what we today would call a show-
runner) to control the personnel upheavals by making more of his own 
cast selections, hiring the performers himself, and presenting his pro-
gram as a complete package for the sponsor to fund. Benny’s first hiring 
of a permanent cast member was the new announcer Don Wilson (the 
tenth announcer in two years on the air), who joined the program in April 
1934. Their relationship, sealed by a personal contract with Benny that 
allowed Wilson to announce for other programs but only perform com-
edy on Benny’s, was very productive.62 Conn made Wilson an intelligent 
(and originally pugnacious) opponent who critiqued Jack’s vanity, and 
Wilson’s warm, friendly midwestern voice soon made him one of the top 
salesmen in radio. Wilson’s character became jollier as jokes about his 
girth abounded. Yet another obstacle for the show’s narrative to overcome 
arose when Benny added the logistical challenge of temporarily relocat-
ing the weekly live broadcasts of his radio show to the West Coast several 
times a year while he was shooting a film in Hollywood. Oftentimes the 
East Coast cast members could not accompany him. He would then have 
to work with substitute performers, creating extra challenges to Conn’s 
creative abilities. Having to start over again with temporary players in 
the summer of 1934 led Conn to fall back on parodies of murder myster-
ies, Kentucky hill feuds, and “ten-twent-thirt” melodramas in which Jack, 
Mary, and Don did most of the gagging. These repetitive send-ups of the 
same basic plot were another twist on situation comedy patterns. These 
easier scripts allowed Conn and Benny to spend more time working on 
films (Benny paid Conn to embellish his film dialogue), and they gave 
the cast members opportunities to joke about each other’s personalities. 
While these scripts lacked the energy and inventiveness of the program’s 
more elaborately plotted film parodies and sketches about group adven-
tures that Conn produced when they returned to New York, Benny and 
Conn decided to continue to alternatesituation comedy with intimate 
joking around the microphone and the more elaborate types of comic 
elements.
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180 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
Benny’s Character Becomes More Fallible
By spring 1934, despite the continuing turmoil of changing casts and 
broadcast times, and rancorous relationships with sponsors, the humorous 
content of the Benny show remained rich; the show’s narrative formula and 
characterizations were evolving into the forms Benny would rely on for the 
rest of his career. Harry Conn concentrated even further on developing the 
personas of the cast’s other performers as quirky, individual characters. Don 
Bestor the bandleader was a highbrow; Frank Parker the tenor was a sophis-
ticated young smart aleck; Mary was boisterous but not very bright. Jack was 
making fewer of the jokes, and more often it was the stooges who got the 
laugh lines by ribbing Benny. More than ever, Benny became the poor Shmo, 
the unlucky fellow to whom humiliating things always seemed to happen.63
On the May 11, 1934 show, to make a peace offering after they had had an 
argument at the show’s opening, Don Wilson invited Jack out to his mother’s 
home in the Bronx for the weekend. Jack suffered numerous misadventures 
on their journey, getting robbed three times and gladly handing over his 
money in each instance. The thief even awarded Jack a card identifying him 
as a frequent customer. When the pair finally arrived at the Wilson home, 
there was no food, no spare bed, and no luck for the hapless guest.
Benny’s character began to shift further from being just the likeable, self-
deprecating emcee of the program to develop more personality quirks and 
flaws (cheapness, boastfulness, vanity, infamous for his poor violin-playing 
skills, his paucity of hair, and his lack of masculinity). The list steadily grew 
longer as the Jack character lost most of that assured Broadway Romeo sua-
vity he had demonstrated during his vaudeville career and was now depicted 
as inept at interacting with the opposite sex. His patriarchal authority as 
star of the show was more frequently challenged by his mocking radio 
 employees. While standard joke book-style insults about cheapness and 
stupidity were still bandied about by the entire cast, the jabs were refur-
bished so that charges were now often made by others, egged on by Mary, 
and aimed at Benny.
A significant turning point for the Benny character occurred in a skit about 
Jack’s Hollywood screen test, on the June 8, 1934, program. Benny had taken 
his radio cast out to California, as he was appearing in a film produced by 
Edward Small at the RKO studios, Transatlantic Merry Go Round (Benjamin 
Stoloff, 1934), which involves mobsters’ intrigues and murder on an ocean 
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Becoming Benny 181
liner. As Benny had done since the beginning of his radio show, he entwined 
references to his work in other media forms and personal details of his life, 
blurring the lines between the fictional and real Jack Benny personas. Conn 
and Benny drew on his self-deprecating traits and pushed them further, now 
enacting professional incompetence. Conn created a skit in which Jack was 
at the film studio, where he has been compelled to submit to a screen test 
to secure the role of romantic leading man. As scripted, Mr. Kane, the direc-
tor, was trying to complete the test, and a nervous Benny was making that 
difficult:
Kane: Now for the first line, say “Ah Christina, your royal highness, thou are 
ravishing this evening. Would’st that thou favor me with thy presence at lun-
cheon forthwith!”
Jack: I’ve been waiting for a Jimmy Cagney part like this.
[Jack’s first stumbling attempt to read his line is, “Oh, Christina. . . . er . . . er . . . 
ah Christina . . . er . . . er . . . can you cash a check?”]
Kane: Now Mr. Benny, I think we better rehearse this first. . . . you walk up to 
Miss Hill and say “Christina, I love you.”
Jack: I see, OK [SFX heavy clomp of footsteps]
Kane: Not so heavy on the walk!
[Don Wilson (the announcer) interjects a reference to sponsor General Tire]
Don: Jack, I think he means the Silent Safety Tread!
Jack: You would, Don . . .
Kane: Yes, that’s it. Now come on, read your line.
Jack: All right . . . [very flatly]. “Christina, I love you.”
Kane: How do you expect her to believe that? Come on, put some passion into 
it. . . . try it again
Jack: Christina, I love you!!!! [pants] . . . How’s that, Mary?
Mary: I still like Robert Montgomery.
Kane: Aw, a little more fire now. . . . Ask Christina for her hand in marriage.
Jack: Will you marry me?
Beverly Hill: I should say not!
Jack: Now what do I do?
Kane: Register surprise!
Jack: Why Christina, I’m surprised at you!
Beverly Hill: I never want to see you again!
Kane: Register grief!
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182 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
Jack: Gee whiz, gee whiz . . .
Kane: For heaven’s sake, is that grief?
Jack: That’s grief where I come from
Kane: Where do you come from?
Jack: Waukegan
Kane: That IS grief!
Jack: Oh yeah? Cut!
Kane: Wait a minute, that’s my line . . . cut!64
The scene devolved into further humiliation for Jack as the director called 
Don Wilson over to demonstrate appropriately virile histrionic skills. Wilson 
passionately extolled the virtues of General’s blowout-proof tires to the hero-
ine, while Jack fumed on the sidelines.
Despite the ever-rising ratings and critical acclaim that his radio program 
was attaining, Benny continued to be bedeviled by frustrating developments 
that he could not control. After he guided The General Tire Show through 
the summer of 1934, in September, the sponsor informed Benny that their 
finances were so poor that they were unable to continue funding the show. 
Executives made an agreement to have the show’s sponsorship shared with 
another struggling consumer product manufacturer, Jell-O gelatin, a forty-
year-old product with a declining market share. For what must have seemed 
the umpteenth time, Benny and Conn had to endure not only cast upheavals, 
but the move in October 1934 to NBC’s graveyard broadcast hour of Sunday 
evenings at 7:00 p.m., a slot previously dominated by programs of somber 
music and hymns.65 Money was so tight that Benny and Livingstone even 
agreed to work without pay until sales revenue rose enough to cover the 
show’s production expenses.
After several worrisome months, however, the stars finally aligned for 
Benny. Jell-O sales rose and continued climbing, assisted by both the 
inviting, warm commercials Wilson broadcast for the dessert product and 
the delightful punning references to the product that Benny and Conn 
sprinkled throughout the program. Syndicated columnist O. O. McIntyre 
lauded the show: “Benny’s humor has the dry crackle of sun-burned 
twigs. Never explosive, he bungles along, firing the arrows of contempt 
at himself. He brought to the business of being a comic a combined 
restraint, a suavity that was something entirely different, and it clicked.”66
Radio Guide agreed, noting: “Comedian Benny learned long ago that 
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Becoming Benny 183
the way to make people laugh without straining is to create a comical 
situation—not to redress old jokes in party clothes and rely on studio 
applause to get them over. Jack also learned that the public loves to see 
the headman made the fall guy.”67
Bythe fall of 1935, even though the program had finally obtained the 
financial and organizational security to seal its creative success, fissures 
began to widen between creative collaborators Benny and Conn. A resent-
ful Harry Conn saw Jack Benny reap the spotlight of stardom, while Conn 
labored every week in obscurity (albeit well-paid obscurity). Conn began 
making increasing salary demands on Benny and pressured him to further 
promote Conn’s authorship, and he was quoted in interviews dismissing 
Benny’s editorial contributions and belittling the degree to which actors cre-
ated comedy.68 New York Times radio critic Orrin Dunlap took Benny’s side. 
“It is no easy task for the gag men to keep these clowns on the track that 
fits their personality; to feed lines that win sympathetic reaction,” Dunlap 
argued. “Radio humor is not all a matter of material. The delivery counts. 
Every comedian can take the same joke and make it sound different to the 
average ear. . . . [E]ach comedian ‘pitches’ differently in curving humor over 
the home plates for a strike.”69
Benny devoted innumerable hours to the production of his radio show 
each week, polishing Conn’s scripted dialogue and working closely with his 
cast to hone the timing of the repartee. Distressing to Benny, sponsor, and 
reviewers alike, the Jell-O Program scripts in late 1935 began to lose their 
luster. The dialogue increasingly floundered: Dumb Dora jokes abounded 
from both Mary and tenor Kenny Baker; obvious, weak laughs substituted 
for previously sharp wit. Perhaps Conn had run out of creative ideas, or his 
frustrations boiled over into sub-par writing. The partnership broke irrevo-
cably when Conn deserted Benny midweek in March 1936, while they were 
performing in Baltimore in the middle of an East Coast tour. Benny quickly 
rallied assistance from fellow radio comics and his advertising agency (now 
Young and Rubicam), and after a few shaky weeks, he emerged with a new 
duo of young scripters (Ed Morrow and Bill Beloin). Despite Harry Conn’s 
ambitious plans to become a headlined radio writer-performer, he quickly 
fell into embittered obscurity, while Benny’s radio program, enhanced by 
fresh ideas, became ever more inventive and popular. Building on the strong 
foundation that Conn had laid, Morrow, Beloin, and Benny added embellish-
ments such as scripting their half of the feud with Fred Allen, shifting Mary’s 
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184 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
persona to become much more bitingly sharp, and—especially—introducing 
Rochester the valet (played by Eddie Anderson), who became a perfect foil 
for Benny’s escalating failings.
Conclusion
This brief case study has traced the evolution of Jack Benny’s comedy prac-
tices over one portion of his long career, as he moved across entertainment 
systems from vaudeville to radio in the early 1930s. The core of his comic 
identity endured—his self-deprecating humor—as well as aspects that had 
set him as well as other proto stand-up comedians apart from their baggy-
pantsed, knock about vaudeville forbears: his mild-mannered, urban and 
modern midwestern, nonethnic persona, and his carefully crafted and 
superbly timed jokes and commentary. Other facets of his comic identity 
also shifted and changed in reaction to the new environments in which he 
found himself.
At every stage in his career, Benny’s comic practices were shaped by struc-
tural aspects of the entertainment system in which he worked. Vaudeville 
was organized as a collection of fifteen- to twenty-minute nuggets of enter-
tainment, each act polished, perfected, and constantly moved around the 
nation in controlled circuits to perform before different urban and large town 
audiences every night. Benny had forged a successful place in that system, 
working within the censorship restrictions of the circuit and theater manag-
ers who hired him. As manager of his own routine, Benny devised his own 
performance style, wrote or shopped for comic dialogue, and made his own 
decisions in the choice of performing assistants or partners. Monologues 
addressed directly to vaudeville audiences seemed to Benny the best way to 
deliver his comedy. A little later, he adapted well to the added role of master 
of ceremonies, layering onto his humorous base the role of a congenial host 
who used introductions to draw disparate acts more closely together into an 
intertwined two-hour performance for vaudeville audiences.
Benny’s bumpy entrance into commercially sponsored primetime net-
work radio broadcasting, however, provides one example of the ways in 
which the entertainer’s performing identity and the shape of comedy could 
be impacted by structural factors of a different entertainment system. Benny 
did not have a problem performing within the constraints and stresses of 
radio’s liveness, unlike some other performers who previously had only 
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Becoming Benny 185
worked in recorded media (such as motion pictures or publications). The 
commercial network radio system did, however, add new wrinkles to the 
construction of its entertainment, from the sponsor’s desire to intersperse 
advertising messages into the show and the economic efficiency of continu-
ally working with the same small group of performers, to interference by 
the many executives who sought to meddle in Benny’s attempt to write, per-
form, cast, and manage his own program. Troublesome to Benny and other 
performers from vaudeville, the radio system reconfigured its audience into 
one mass group of listeners who supposedly expected to hear new material 
in every iteration of a program. This system demanded constant variety of 
content along with the identifiable similarity of material being produced by 
recognizable stars or performers whose talent could be associated with posi-
tive qualities of the consumer product being advertised.
The relentless need for new material for his radio performances impacted 
the ways in which Benny shaped his comedy. He became very dependent on 
one writer, Harry Conn, to provide the new material each week, requiring 
Benny to labor that much harder to edit the scripts and polish the lines to 
represent his own comic point of view. Other radio comedians were utilizing 
strings of individual jokes or continuing with one-man-show monologues 
and using ever changing, poorly paid staffs of writers. Individual jokes were 
easy prey for other performers, desperate for funny material, to plagiarize. 
Benny and Conn found that incorporating dialogue exchanges into their 
show added more variety to the single-performer model. Better yet, mold-
ing individual characters for the other performers around the microphone 
enabled Conn to devise more humor from the quirkiness of those disparate 
personalities, the conflicts and misunderstandings between them, and the 
humor that arose from putting those characters into comic situations. The 
development of characters and situations went hand in hand for Benny and 
Conn as they created the show from week to week in those early months of 
the radio program.
Benny’s case study also holds interest for what elements he and Harry 
Conn chose not to incorporate into their program in their three-and-a-half 
years together—such as their rejection of more continuously plotted nar-
ratives when they turned away from the Jack-Mary romance or rejected 
Sid Silvers’s plan for the running story of a harassed Broadway producer. 
The use of satirical political humor was also of brief duration in 1932. The 
domestic side of Benny’s situation comedy would really blossom only 
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186 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
when Eddie Anderson was brought aboard in 1938. Zany comedy, or humor 
of the absurd, cropped up in the program more prominently in the post-
World War II period, when Mel Blanc and the Sportsmen Quartet created 
characters— violin teachers, train announcers, out-of-control jingle singers—
who frustrated Benny to the point of yelling.
Benny and Conn’s perfection of the Fall Guy character (and the stooges’ 
incessant insults and jokes about the character) was a very important aspect 
of the show’s ongoing success, but even it would also have to continue to 
change to maintain audience interest. Benny and his writers had to keep 
increasing the cheapness of Jack’s stingy ways over the years, making his 
penury more hyperbolic in order to shock audiences. Thus Jack could get 
held up by a robber three times in 1934 and shrug it off, but by the late 1940s 
a robbery would become Jack’s famous “Your Money or Your Life” debacle. 
In addition, Jack’s character would become increasingly vain, from coyly 
declining to reveal his age, to the eventual determination to remain thirty-
nine. With repetition and small incremental increases, Mary, Rochester, Phil, 
Professor LeBlanc, and other stooges could turn their insults of Jack into 
comic shorthand, dressing the same complaints in updated costumes over 
the years.
I certainly don’t mean to imply that Benny and Conn invented situation 
comedy, as of course they drew on well-known and long-standing models of 
situational, domestic, and serialized humor in literary storytelling, comic 
strips, and other areas of media and popular culture. My primary inter-
est here is to chart how one particular entertainer changed over time and 
adopted alternative comic forms, and to trace the reasons that he was com-
pelled to use them. Even as Benny continued broadcasting his half-hour pro-
gram for nearly thirty more years on radio and television, he never allowed 
his show to become exclusively framed as a situation comedy. Benny always 
claimed that he preferred to continually mix program formats, incorporating 
workplace sitcom one week, parodies of popular films another, with guest 
stars who appeared as real celebrities to humiliate Jack, performances by 
singers or musicians, domestic sitcom at Benny’s home, or intimate banter 
around the microphone. Benny maintained that he wanted to keep his audi-
ence guessing what form the next episode might take.70 When he entered 
television in 1950, Benny even reincorporated the use of vaudeville style 
monologues and emcee introductory patter into some episodes.
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Becoming Benny 187
As media historian Michele Hilmes has noted, radio entertainers such 
as Jack Benny were fortunate in the 1930s to have had the opportunities of 
time and multiple chances with sponsors in which to develop their radio 
personas as well as their programs’ character and situation comedy forms.71
Broadcasting became ever more expensive with the move to television in 
the late 1940s, and it increasingly became a big business with the prime-
time pressure of expensive productions and expensive airtime. Latter–day 
program producers would not have the relative luxury of time that Benny 
experienced in the seasons during which he evolved his particular comic 
style, was able to experiment and make mistakes, and found and built a loyal 
audience of fans. Only now, in the post network era of media convergence—
when technology has allowed production costs to plummet and the Internet 
is creating new platforms, new spaces, and new niche audiences for pro-
gramming—do there exist again expanded opportunities in which comics, 
performers, writers, directors, and producers can experiment with innova-
tive varieties of programming.
notes
1. Larry Wolters, “Olsen Recalls First Benny Show on Anniversary; Idea of Kidding 
Sponsor was George’s,” Chicago Tribune, December 1, 1935, S6; “With Canada’s Mounted” 
Variety, January 19, 1932, 58.
2. “Inside Stuff—Radio,” Variety, June 7, 1932, 49; “Canadians Hear New Program by 
Canada Dry Ginger Ale,” Montreal Guardian, May 5, 1932, 2.
3. Jack Benny Program, May 2, 1932; Advertisement, Variety, October 1, 1932, 16.
4. This was not Benny’s first radio performance. He had appeared several times on local 
and regional broadcasts connected with his film and stage appearances between 1929 
and 1931, and he was a guest on Ed Sullivan’s gossipy interview program in spring 1932. 
However, he had not been on a major coast-to-coast radio variety program before.
5. “Radio’s Script Act Cycle,” Variety, May 10, 1932, 55; Ben Bodec, “Radio in ’32,” 
Variety, January 3, 1933, 59. On radio in the early 1930s, see Michele Hilmes, Radio 
Voices: American Broadcasting 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 
1997); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
6. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, “Dish Night at the Movies: Exhibitors and Female Audiences 
during the Great Depression,” in The American Film History Reader, ed. Jon Lewis and Eric 
Smoodin (London: Routledge, 2014), 246–75.
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188 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
7. Brett Mills, Television Sitcom (London: British Film Institute, 2005); Horace 
Newcomb, Television: The Critical View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. “Annual Radio Poll,” New York World-Telegram (February 1933), in “Benny Scrapbook 
1933,” box 116, collection 8922, Jack Benny Papers, American Heritage Center, University 
of Wyoming; Lawrence E. Mintz, “Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation,” 
American Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1985): 71–80.
9. Holly A. Pearse, “As Goyish as Lime Jell-O? Jack Benny and the American Construction 
of Jewishness,” Jewish Cultural Studies (2008): 272–90.
10. Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York 
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
11. Robert J. Landry, “For Benny It Was Big Time or Nothing; He Wasn’t for Coalminers,” 
Variety, April 30, 1940, 24, 45.
12. Landry, “For Benny It Was Big Time or Nothing,” 45. On the history of vaudeville, 
see Trav S.D., No Applause—Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous 
(New York: Faber and Faber, 2006); Arthur Frank Wertheim, Vaudeville Wars: How Keith-
Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers (New York: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2009); Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and 
the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
13. “Majestic, Chicago,” Billboard, September 27, 1920, 9; “Keith’s, Cincinnati,” Billboard, 
October 1, 1921, 11; “Orpheum, St. Louis,” Billboard, October 31, 1925, 15; “Palace, Chicago,” 
Billboard, November 15, 1924, 14.
14. “Palace, Chicago,” Billboard, November 15, 1924, 14.
15. “Palace, New York,” Billboard, April 18, 1925, 14. Variety’s review of Jack Benny’s per-
formance at the Palace in 1927 termed him “the gentlemanly kibitzer.” Another review 
specifically noted that he used no Yiddish in his act; see “Palace, New York,” Variety, 
September 21, 1927, 26.
16. Abel Green, “The Big Band Cavalcade: A Study in Changing Sounds and Economics,” 
Variety January 3, 1968, 151.
17. Maurice Zolotow, “The Fiddler from Waukegan,” Cosmopolitan, October 1947, 49–51, 
137–38, 141–46; 142.
18. “Palace, New York,” Variety, April 7, 1926, 26.
19. “Review of Vitaphone No. 2997,” Variety, August 29, 1928, 15. The skit was such a 
Benny favorite that he reused it for years, paired either with femaleor male stooges, on 
his early radio shows and during personal appearance tours.
20. “Frank Fay,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 1961, 1.
21. Frank Cullen, Florence Hackman, and Donald McNeilly, Vaudeville Old and New: 
An Encyclopedia of Variety Performances in America, vol. 1 (New York: Psychology Press, 
2004), 370–71.
22. Robert Landry, “Frank Fay, One of Real Vaude Greats, Dies at 63,” Variety, 
September 27, 1961, 2, 78. One film that showcases Fay as the suave MC is Warner 
Brothers’ early talkie The Show of Shows (John G. Adolfi, 1929).
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Becoming Benny 189
23. Maurice Zolotow, “Frank Fay: Mystical Ex-Vaudevillian Teams with Invisible Rabbit 
to Make a Big Theatrical Comeback,” Life, January 8, 1945, 55, 58, 60, 63.
24. Landry, “Frank Fay,” 2, 78; Cullen, Vaudeville Old and New, 369; Trav S.D., 
No Applause, 184.
25. Cullen, Vaudeville Old and New, 21; Anthony Slide, Encyclopedia of Vaudeville 
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 169.
26. Zolotow, “Fiddler from Waukegan,” 142.
27. “Palace, New York,” Variety, May 2, 1931, 26.
28. “Palace, New York,” Variety, January 8, 1930, 103.
29. “New Palace, Chicago,” Variety, December 7, 1929, 18.
30. “Palace, New York,” Variety, November 24, 1928, 17. Reviewers of the show at 
Los Angeles’s Orpheum Theater in 1928 noted, “Jack Benny in his second week as mas-
ter of ceremonies scored heavily as usual. His girl assistant, [Jack’s new wife Sadye] 
although from appearance inexperienced, aided the humorous atmosphere consider-
ably.” “Orpheum,” Variety, March 17, 1928, 17.
31. “Capitol Theater,” Billboard, September 1932, 11; “Film House Reviews, Variety, 
February 11, 1931, 52.
32. Canada Dry Ginger Ale Program, May 2, 1932, script, Radio Scripts, box 1, file 1, 
 collection 134, Jack Benny Papers, University of California at Los Angeles Library.
33. Other discussions of Benny’s radio career are found in Hilmes, Radio Voices; Arthur 
Frank Wertheim, Radio Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Jack Benny, 
Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story (New York: GK Hall, 1991); Ellen O-Neill, 
Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1991).
34. Canada Dry Program Script, May 2, 1932, Benny Papers, UCLA.
35. “Were You Listening Last Night,” Pittsburgh Press, May 10, 1932, 11.
36. Canada Dry Program Script, May 11, 1932, Benny Papers, UCLA.
37. “Canada Dry Program,” Billboard, May 14, 1932, 17.
38. “Stars Shine Best When Polished,” Broadcasting and Television, October 1956, 118–26; 122.
39. Jerome Beatty, “Unhappy Fiddler,” American Magazine (December 1944), 28–29, 
142–44.
40. “Radio Its Own Menace,” Variety, February 21, 1933, 59.
41. Jerald Manning, “Laughter by the Yard,” Radio Mirror, November 1938, 40–41, 64.
42. “Radio Its Own Menace,” 48.
43. Zolotow, “The Fiddler from Waukegan,” 142.
44. Al Boasberg advertisement, Variety, March 1, 1932, 36; Sid Silvers advertisement, 
Variety, December 8, 1931, 30; “Boasberg Walks on B&A over Difference in Stage-Air 
Royalty,” Variety, May 10, 1932, 55; “Authors! Authors!,” Variety, August 30, 1932, 57; 
“Percentage for 2,” Variety, May 31, 1932, 1; “Fleishmann Hour Program,” Variety, 
October 11, 1932, 58.
45. Al Boasberg advertisement, Variety, March 1, 1932, 36; “Air Getting Ex-Vaude Writers 
on Rebound,” Variety, May 31, 1932, 56.
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190 STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR
46. Fred Allen, Treadmill to Oblivion (Boston: Little Brown, 1954), 70; “Air Gag Writers a 
Now Most Highly Paid Writing Contingent,” Variety, May 16, 1933, 43.
47. “Gag Writing: Its Big Business Now,” Literary Digest, December 12, 1936, 24, 26.
48. “Air Gag Writers,” Variety.
49. “Radio Its Own Menace,” Variety, February 21, 1933, 59.
50. Canada Dry Program Script, May 23, 1932.
51. Dialect was a staple of nineteenth-century textual humor and has never gone out 
of vogue. See, for instance, Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor: From Poor 
Richard to Doonesbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). On verbal slapstick 
and ethnic voices in American radio, see Douglas, Listening In; Hilmes, Radio Voices; 
Melvin Ely, The Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon 
(New York: Free Press, 1991). In film, see Henry Jenkins, “ ‘Shall We Make It for New York 
or for Distribution?’: Eddie Cantor, ‘Whoopee,’ and Regional Resistance to the Talkies,” 
Cinema Journal 29, no. 3 (1990): 32–52.
52. After January 1933, Conn almost never again took on-air parts and decided to 
remain permanently behind the scenes. Benny hired a range of ex-vaudeville comics as 
dialect specialists (Sam Hearn, Ralph Ashe, Patsy Flick, and Benny Rubin) to play these 
occasional bit parts. Sam Hearn started appearing in 1933, although he did not become 
the Shlepperman character until August 1934.
53. Canada Dry Program Script, May 23, 1932.
54. Canada Dry Program Script, June 13, 1932.
55. Ralph M. Blagden, “Laughter around the Dial,” Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 
1939, 4, 12.
56. “Little Bits from the Air,” Variety, August 23, 1932, 42.
57. “Little Bits from the Air,” Variety, October 18, 1932, 42.
58. “Canada Dry Program,” Canton [Ohio] OH Repository, January 20, 1933, 24; James 
Cannon, untitled, undated newspaper clipping, Benny Scrapbook 1932–1933, box 90, 
Benny Papers, University of Wyoming.
59. On the Chevrolet program, Howard Claney was the announcer, Frank Black led the 
orchestra, and James Melton, then Frank Parker, sang.
60. “Jack Benny is Back,” Ottawa Citizen, March 11, 1933, 7.
61. “Chicago Theater,” Variety, July 4, 1933, 14.
62. Don Wilson contract, 1940, box 97, Benny Papers, UCLA.
63. “Conn and Jack made a radical change in Benny’s type of humor. Before, Jack had 
told jokes. . . . As was customary with comedians, he got all the laugh lines. The new 
scripts, however, gave most of the laughs to the others in the cast.” See Beatty, “Unhappy 
Fiddler,” 143.
64. General Tire Show Script, June 8, 1934.
65. The Jell-O Program, which debuted October 14, 1934, at 7:00 p.m. EST, presented a 
new wrinkle for scripting, as Conn and Benny now had to be more careful to keep the 
humor extra clean and appropriate for all ages.
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Becoming Benny 191
66. O. O. McIntyre, “New York Day by Day,” Rochester Evening Journal, September 26, 
1934, 15.
67. “Jack Benny and Company,” Radio Guide, March 2, 1935, 13.
68. Beatty, “Sad Fiddler,” 64.
69. Orrin Dunlap, “Furiously Proceeds Radio’s Gag Hunt,” New York Times, August 26, 
1934, SM 12, 15.
70. “Stars Shine Best When Polished,” 126.
71. Michele Hilmes, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name: Cheers and the Mediation 
of Cultures,” in Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader, ed. Joanne Morreale (Syracuse: Syracuse 
University Press, 2003), 213–23; 217.
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