Comedy Feuds

From The Evening Huronite, August 26th, 1941. Dorothy Kilgallen relates yet another tale of Joe E. Brown's nasty character-pilfering habit. This is also the first and only time I've ever heard it suggested that there was some kind of rivalry between Bobby Clark and, of all people, Bob Woolsey. If Clark and Woolsey got into a fight, who would win? My money's on Clark.

Happy Holidays from The Third Banana!

Santa Clark and all of us here at The Third Banana wish you and yours the happiest of holidays and a wonderful new year. In honor of the season, please enjoy this trove of Jack Benny holiday goodness culled from around the net.. all free, as Mr. Benny would no doubt appreciate.

First, courtesy Ernie (Not Bert), is this Dennis Day Christmas album from 196?, Christmas is for the Family. A very nice album, but the cover, featuring Dennis and his family with Jack as Santa, is a little worrying. Jack, as it states in the liner notes, was sick when this photo was taken, and check out the shiner on the boy in the middle! You'd think someone would have put some makeup on that eye or at least have done a bit of retouching on the photo itself before having the covers printed. But, hey, this was released on budget label Pickwick, so that's what you get; Jack Benny on the brink of puking and a kid with a swollen black eye.

And here, thanks to the wonder that is archive.org, are fifty holiday episodes of The Jack Benny Program. That includes Halloween, Thanksgiving, and New Years shows as well as Christmas. Enjoy!

1938-10-30 Halloween Party
1938-12-11 Christmas Shopping
1938-12-25 Jack's Christmas Open House
1939-01-01 Goodbye 1938, Hello 1939
1939-10-29 The Halloween Masquerade Party
1939-11-19 Mary's Thanksgiving Poem
1939-12-17 Christmas Shopping- East Coast Version
1939-12-24 Christmas Shopping for Perfume Necktie
1939-12-31 No New Years Eve Date For Jack
1940-12-22 Christmas Shopping
1941-01-05 Christmas Gift Exchange
1941-11-02 Halloween
1941-12-21 The Christmas Tree
1941-12-28 Jack Talks About A Christmas Party He Gave
1942-01-04 New Years Eve Party
1942-12-20 From Fort Devon Boston
1943-11-21 The Awful Turkey Dream
1943-12-26 Christmas at Jack' s House
1944-01-02 Annual New Years Eve Show
1944-11-26 How Jack and the Gang Spent Thanksgiving Day
1944-12-24 Trimming A Tree
1944-12-31 Jack Resolves To Be Friends with Fred Allen
1945-12-30 Christmas Presents on New Year
1946-12-22 Christmas Party At Birmingham General Hospital
1946-12-29 Jack, Mary, Gladys, and Dennis
1947-11-23 Movie Of Jack's Life- Thanksgiving Show
1947-11-30 Turkey Dream
1947-12-21 Last Moment Christmas Shopping
1947-12-28 New Tenant
1948-10-31 Jack Goes Trick or Treating
1948-11-28 How Jack and the Gang Spent Thanksgiving
1948-12-19 Jack Buys a Wallet for Don as a Christmas Gift
1949-12-18 Mary Buys Jack a Pencil Sharpener for Christmas
1950-01-01 Jack Can't Make Mary's Party and is Stood Up by his Date
1950-12-17 Jack Buys Don Golf Tees for Christmas
1950-12-24 Beavers Come Over To Jack's for Christmas
1950-12-31 A New Year's Fantasy
1951-12-02 Jack Buys Don Cuff Links For Christmas
1951-12-23 Christmas Tree Decoration
1951-12-30 New Year's Eve Date with a French Girl
1952-11-09 Jack Goes to the Doctor for a Vitamin Shot
1952-12-14 Jack Buys a Gopher Trap for Don
1952-12-21 Setting Up a Christmas Tree
1953-11-29 Thanksgiving Dinner
1953-12-13 Christmas Show from Palm Springs
1953-12-20 Cactus Christmas Tree
1954-12-05 Christmas Shopping
1954-12-12 In Palm Springs
1954-12-19 Christmas at Palm Springs
1954-12-26 Day After Christmas- Dennis Cold

And to download all fifty shows as a zip file, click here.

Willkommen - Welcome - Bienvenue

Greetings to those of you who have been directed here from Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy! The aforementioned Clark and McCullough Database can be found at this link, and endless thanks to Mr. Maltin both for the kind write-up and the shocking revelation that Bobby Clark's final film appearance wasn't in The Goldwyn Follies after all, but in There's No Business Like Show Business in 1954! Indeed, director Walter Lang gives Bobby a very nice, and quite showy, cameo towards the end of the picture, being greeted by star Ethel Merman in a backstage scene. As you can see in the frames below, Bobby is perfectly recognizable in his greasepaint eyeglasses and is even wearing his late partner Paul McCullough's famous coat (said to be dogskin in contemporary news clippings). Clark had taken to wearing the coat by the late 40s, an affectionate gesture, no doubt, but one also tinged with some strange symbolic undertones. I also like the idea that Bobby just wandered around dressed like this in public. Interestingly, castmember Mitzi Gaynor had co-starred with Bobby in the off-Broadway production Jollyanna two years prior, and may have had some role in securing his appearance. I have yet more remarkable news about Clark and McCullough coming, so stay tuned folks!

Mexican Hayride "too sexy for GIs"

Bobby and Luba Malina in Mexican Hayride. Luba
was one of the only original castmembers to appear
in the 1948 Universal film adaptation. Click on the
thumbnails for full-sized images.

I found this on eBay a couple of weeks ago. It seems that some portions of Bobby Clark's 1944 Broadway hit Mexican Hayride were considered so salacious that the USO banned it as a camp show for GIs overseas. That's right.. Civilians could see Mexican Hayride whenever they felt like it, but not servicemen getting their asses shot at. Lord knows what the moral guardians at the USO got their knickers in a twist over. Universal certainly had no problem converting Herbert and Dorothy Fields' play into a toothless, Cole Porter-less, kid-friendly Abbott and Costello vehicle. Considering that the USO lost Bobby's collection of skits that very same year, I doubt he harbored many warm feelings for that particular institution.

Bobby Clark and the Case of the Missing Skits

If you haunt eBay as regularly and as thoroughly as I do, every now and again you'll really hit the jackpot. For low-income obsessives such as myself, eBay is an absolutely indispensable research tool. My big find of the last few months is this 1944 letter from legendary Broadway clown Bobby Clark to a fan who has requested a transcript of one of Bobby's skits.

March 24th 1944

Dear Mr. Klisto,

Your letter received. Sorry I've been so long answering but I've been having trouble with my knee and have put everything to one side to try and get it back in shape again.

I have received so many letters just like yours, and have never been able to help out any of the requests and here's the reason. When the U.S.O. first went into action, almost everyone of the stage was asked to send in all the material of any kind they could. This I promptly did. I gave everything I possibly could find. So now, I am without any of the old material that I had collected for a lot of years. I was promised that all the material would be re-typed and the original sent back to me. So far I haven't seen any action on it. In fact I am now at the stage, where, if I did want to do any of the old material, blackouts, sketches, songs, etc. I would have to do it from memory.

So you see I can't be of any use to you. It seemed to me that the U.S.O. has slipped up badly in distributing the tremendous amount of material that (was) sent in to them. Where has it gone to?

With all best wishes,
Yours sincerely
Bobby Clark

It's easy to imagine as vast an undertaking as the creation of an indexed USO comedy material database being slow going under the best of conditions (and with computers!), so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it barely got past the planning stages. But what about the material the USO requested? Every red-blooded, patriotic baggy-pants burlesque comic would have gladly offered up their material, so is the US government now sitting on heaps of old vaudeville and burlesque sketches? Is there a warehouse somewhere full of boxes bulging with material from the likes of Bert Lahr, Eddie Cantor, and Joe Cook? Would an FOIA request clear up this mystery?

What's troubling to me, at least, is that the bulk of the writing of one of America's premiere comedians has apparently been devoured by red tape. This is bad news for anyone hoping to chronicle Bobby's life and work.