Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity

4. Queered Radio / Queered Cinema

Queered Radio / Queered Cinema Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice 4 111 The radio audience totaled approximately thirty million, but it really consisted of small family groups. I felt that now I understood the medium. I would play to those small family groups and get them to know me and my family [the cast] as real people with real problems. Exaggerated people, yes, but fundamentally honest and true to life. Jack Benny, from his autobiography Unlike the other Classic Hollywood stars this book covers, Jack Benny can be unquestionably classified as a radio comedian, a new type of celebrity that emerged in popular culture during the 1930s.1 While Eddie Cantor found major success on the air with The Chase and Sanborn Hour, his celebrity was fostered on the Broadway stage and expanded through his motion pictures in the years before starting his popular program. Benny’s celebrity took a different route that exemplifies his position as an early example of a broadcast star, a figure who was a forerunner to the television comedians of today. Born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago, Benny had worked his way through the ranks of small vaudeville theaters and grew in reputation as a monologist.2 While he had found some initial success on the stage, he never proved the headlining star, as is the case with other figures like Cantor or W. C. Fields. It would be on radio where Benny found his largest audience, establishing a voice and distinctive style as a performer to become one of the largest stars of the period in any medium. The Jack Benny Program (1932–55) can easily be categorized as the most popular and influential radio show of the 1930s, since it redefined 112 | chapter 4 many of the classifications of broadcast comedy, privileging character humor over broader gags. This shift in sensibilities dictated approaches to radio and television comedy that came later, directly or indirectly influencing comedy programs ranging from those of Fred Allen to Phil Silvers to Dick Van Dyke to Bob Newhart to Jerry Seinfeld to Tina Fey.3 Eddie Cantor and Jack Benny (1935). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Jack Benny’s Mediated Voice | 113 As the opening quotation suggests, Benny proves most significant in the history of broadcasting in that he rethought the very nature of entertainment to fit a changing media environment.Recognizing the move from theater audiences to “small family groups” that radio embraced, the comedian’s show was the first to fully recognize that comedy and characterization needed to take a more intimate approach. As his popular contemporary, Fred Allen, correctly asserted:“Practically all comedy shows on radio owe their structure to Benny’s conceptions. He was the first to recognize that the listener is not in a theater with a thousand other people, but is in a small circle at home.”4 As historian Edward D. Berkowitz suggests, this enriched the broadcast comedy format: “Over time, the program [Benny’s show] became less of a conventional variety show and more of a situation comedy with variety elements. . . . The writers developed distinctive personalities for each of the permanent cast, changing the nature of the jokes.”5 This new direction moved away from vaudevillian clownishness toward something more subtlety personality based. Benny and his writers created a show structure with a cast of regular characters who interacted in ways exemplifying, in Benny’s own words, “exaggerated” yet “fundamentally honest and true to life” personalities. As David Marc summarizes, the Benny show “was a place that a listener could visit rather than attend. If a stage comic’s job had been to dazzle the audience with something rare, the radio comic would depend on a recognizable persona moving through endless variations of habitual themes.”6 Thus far, this book has focused on the well-documented influence of the popular stage, seen within the film comedian’s journey from vaudeville to Broadway to the screen. But what of the influence from the other major competing media of the era—radio? By the 1930s,Broadway revue style shows stayed restricted to major urban centers, such as New York City. Its forerunner, vaudeville, was now a dying stage tradition, replaced not only by a cinema that converted the theaters themselves into movie houses but also the widespread popularity of radio that allowed audiences to hear musical and comedy entertainment at home for free. The period covered in this book represents...