Radio Comedy, Arthur Frank Wertheim
Published by Oxford University Press in 1979, this history covers U.S. radio comedy and comedians from the 1920s up through the rise of TV and the accompanying decline of entertainment radio in the 1950s. At 440 pages, it's not as in-depth as the biographies and autobiographies of, say, Fred Allen and Jack Benny, but it's a thorough overview of the subject.
Commercial radio began in this country in 1920-21 with the debut of KDKA in Pittsburgh and WJZ in Newark. At first the content was limited to music and news programs, plus of course commercials. Gradually live performances of music increased, though the groups were small because studios had limited floorspace. Now and then a bandleader or musician would offer patter and jokes. One of the earliest broadcast ran, "What's the difference between a coconut and a Scotsman? You can get a joke out of a coconut!"
Because at first there was no live studio audience, or even an undead one, the jokesters never paused for a laugh, which given the quality of the patter was probably for the best. As stations proliferated, some big-name performers showed up now and then. Cowboy comic philosopher Will Rogers made a brief appearance for a thousand bucks, not a token fee in the twenties. Sponsors began to name the musical groups after themselves (the Happiness Candy Company had the Happiness Boys; a cough drop company had Trade Smith and Mark Smith, really Scrappy Lambert and Billy Hillpot). The jokes began to elbow out the tunes.
Then came Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who launched a comedy series called Sam 'n Henry in 1926. Gosden and Correll were white. The characters they played were black. It was, in short, a small-cast blackvoice minstrel show. Before long the actors moved to a larger station, the show changed the names of the characters to Amos and Andy, and the first hit comedy series was born. It went on for thirty-some years, enormously popular with the white audience, much less so among African-Americans. Different times, different values . . ..
The real importance of the show was that it pioneered the concept of a network. Three stations, then five then dozens broadcast the same episode at the same time, and the audience demand exploded. As the twenties ended and the Depression years began, nearly every household in America had a radio.
Chapters set during the 1930s cover Will Rogers, who pioneered sly political and social commentary, and then Ed Wynn, a specialist in silly, goofy humor. He had a terrible time at first because the lack of a studio audience threw his timing and confidence way off. The solution was to invite a few folks in to give him the reactions he needed, and the pattern of the radio comedy show changed. Though radio was a ravenous beast, hungry for humor, it didn't always reward the comedians. Joe Penner, Stoopnagle and Budd, even Bert Lahr and the Marx Brothers (two of them, anyway, Chico and Groucho) had short-lived series, mainly because a weekly show really ran through the basic routines fast. Later Fred Allen said the grind of a weekly show felt like a treadmill to oblivion.
Beginning in the late thirties, the golden age came and with it, comedians who could survive in the long term by not relying on one routine until it ran into the ground. Jack Benny paradoxically relied on audience familiarity with the characters, but established the characters first. Jack was a ladies' man at first, then a punster and finally settled into his vain, egotistic, and above all miserly violinist/comedian who was always the fall guy. He brilliantly and generously discovered he got far more laughs by reacting rather than by cracking jokes. Eventually if anyone in the show mentioned money, the audience would begin to titter, anticipating Benny's pained reaction at the thought of spending a dime. By letting everyone else get the laugh at his expense, Benny became a number one star.
Benny's good friend George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen similarly hit their stride by changing their act to emphasize situational and character-driven humor instead of going through a series of gags. Burns, originally the comic, swapped with Gracie, who had been feeding the straight lines. Burns quipped, "One night i asked Gracie, 'How's your brother?' and since then I've never worked a day in my life." Fred Allen, an erstwhile Vaudeville juggler who discovered that juggling didn't translate well to radio, became an acerbic, quick-witted observer of life, dealing with an assortment of oddball characters who lived in Allen's Alley. Fibber McGee and Molly moved to Wistful Vista and like George and Gracie became like everyone's funny neighbors. Edgar Bergen became radio's favorite ventriloquist. After all, when dummy Charlie McCarthy talked, the radio audience didn't know that Bergen's lips were moving.
Later personalities and stars get their turns in the book's discussion of what is and isn't funny. Bob Hope rose to prominence beginning around 1939 and built a radio career on fast-flowing wisecracks and (unfortunately) tons of topical references that today badly date recordings of the show. Red Skelton developed a variety show made up of music interspersed with skits that starred Skelton using varying voice intonations to play an assortment of characters, from hick Clem Kadiddlehopper to punch-drunk boxer Cauliflower McPugg, Sheriff Deadeye, a Mean Widdle Kid, and bum Freddie the Freeloader, among others.
The arc of radio's popularity peaked during WWII and rapidly descended after 1950, when TV became the preferred medium for comedy. For a force that had such a limited span of success, thirty years or so, radio gave the country an impressive depth
and width of experience. The book is not about nostalgia, not exclusively, anyway, but gives the reader an understanding of radio's impact and importance. There were times when almost all Americans shared the experience of sitting in a darkened room, with no moving pictures but the glow of the radio dial, and simply listened and laughed.
