Many Happy Returns.

I’ve shamefully neglected this blog; if I thought anyone was reading it, I’d aplogize.

I’ve been listening to a lot of the Jack Benny Show from 1948 and 1949, when it made the switch from NBC to CBS. The show had been on the air for about sixteen years by then, and the formula had been pretty well perfected (as had transcription technology, which means that these shows often sound much better than older ones). It’s pretty much domestic humor by this point, only a half-step away from something like Leave It to Beaver — whose name might very well have come from the Beverly Hills Beavers, the boys’ club that idolizes Benny in several of these shows. But the beautifully-conceived premise — utterly Jewish in essence, and passing for all it’s worth — keeps it from devolving into schmarm.

The premise, for those benighted souls who haven’t heard the show (and who aren’t reading this, remember?) is simple: Jack Benny, the star of the show, is an egocentric, cowardly, bullying, smarmy, jealous, irascible, clueless, vain, unappealing miser. The female lead, Mary Livingstone, serves no purpose but to make wisecracks (usually aimed at him). The announcer, Don Wilson, is fat and therefore has a large appetite. The bandleader, Phil Harris, is a drunk and a skirt-chaser. The tenor, Dennis Day, who always sings a song at some point in the program (which is rarely comic or even interesting), is dumb. And Benny's manservant, Rochester, is — well, I guess he’s the most fully-realized human being; or at least he’s the least caricatured of the bunch, after Mary. Even his few traditionally “black” characteristics, such as his love of parties and girls, end up sounding more like a corrective to Benny’s stinginess and lack of sex appeal than as comic devices in themselves. These could easily be very unpleasant people; I can imagine a nasty, tell-it-like-it-is novel with the same characters whose flaws rather than being comically overblown were tragic and vicious. Instead, I can listen to eighteen shows in a sitting without any dimmunition of laughter.

Or fall asleep to it. Falling asleep to Old Time Radio can be a rewarding experience in itself, especially if you've listened to enough of a program to have a feel for the ryhthms of the dialogue and structure of the show; at this point I can listen to the Jack Benny Show without actually hearing it, just chuckling at the appropriate moments until I wake up some time later to discover that I've slept right into the next episode and have no idea where I left off.

That would probably not fit into a lot of people's idea of what creates a valid aesthetic experience; but I love it.