LLeff wrote:OK, our divergence on other things is totally eclipsed by our alignment on this. I get more questions on and people looking for the "Si Sy" routine than any other single Benny gag...maybe more than all the others COMBINED. And...I don't say this in public too often...but...*sigh*...*looks around furtively*...

...I don't get anything out of the Si-Sy routine. Well, I get something out of watching Jack crack up. But the routine itself is a mystery to me. I defy anyone in comedy today to try a routine like that--not as a throwback/tribute to Jack, but a routine of that structure--and have it work. I'm not saying it doesn't work...it obviously does because so many people are so committed to finding it. But I can feel my brain check out when it starts because I know exactly what's going to happen.
All right, *flinching* I'm ready for the stoning.
And as you probably know, I go exactly the opposite on the Si-Sy routine. I think most of it is in the timing for me. You know it's coming, but it's how they get there that's so funny.
I think the reason you'd never get away with that routine today has to do with the ethnicity of the character. You probably couldn't get away with Kitzel or Schelpperman today either, and as for Rochester, he might make it but never in his role as Jack's valet. Times have changed.
Interestingly enough the Mel's Sy voice made his way into a couple of series of cartoons in the '50s and '60s, about the last time that kind of ethnic humor might have been acceptable in mass media. Of course he use a variation on the voice for the WB character Speedy Gonzales (except he talked faster since he was the "fastest mouse in all Mexico") and as the character Go-Go Gomez in the Dick Tracy cartoons shown on TV in the '60s.
I had forgotten about the Dick Tracy character until looking up some information on Chicago TV personality Ray Rayner who did the live segments on the show. WGN-TV showed a special on Rayner, focusing on the morning show he did in Chicago for 18 years, showing WB cartoons among other things, along with two other local kids shows from the '50s through the '90s.
I remembered the Dick Tracy cartoons. Blanc's character's full name was something like Manuel Tijuana Guadalajara Tampico Gomez, Jr. (always followed by "I think"). I had also forgotten that another character in the cartoons Heap O'Calorie was voiced by a Chicago kids TV host from the '50s, Johnny Coons. BTW, Tracy's voice was done by actor Everett Sloane. At any rate, like Speedy, Go-Go spoke much faster than Sy.