The Jack Audience Debate

[Yhtapmys]

Today's dip into Olde Newspaper Land involves dueling columns in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The first one is from Jan. 30, 1942, the reply is from the next day.

Mirrors of Sport
By Havey Boyle
Sports Editor, Post-Gazette
It was Jake Mintz, the boxing matchmaker, who was the only one considerably confused about the President’s encouraging the baseball men to continue with night baseball. “I heard,” said Herr Mintz, “that the President gave baseball the green light for night baseball, but do you think that will be as easy on the eyes as the old system?” It would be great to hear the shriekings coming from Jack Benny’s studio audience if they heard Benny pull that one. I must ask Vincent Johnson, our talented radio editor, if those radio studio audiences just sign up for a run at home or do they accept a contract for the road? Benny’s is by far the best.

Radio, According to Boyle, Is Not Better Off for Benny—Or Is It?
By Vincent Johnson
IT HAS long been our intention to commiserate with Mr. Havey Boyle on the illness that has deprived his colleagues of the benignities of his company, but we have deferred the matter through the fear that our sympathy would be misdirected.
It is not so much his illness that irks Mr. Boyle, we are afraid, as the fact that it forces him to listen to the radio. From time to time, his column has carried pointed but well-mannered insinuations that in a world where everything is for the best, Jack Benny and his brand of comedy are for the worst.
Mr. Boyle contends that all Benny has to do to send his studio audience into hysterics is say something as banal as “gee whiz.” He intimates that it’s the easy risibility of the onlookers and not the badinage written by Mssrs. Morrow and Beloin that is largely responsible for the comedy in the Benny program. And yesterday he came out with the lethal epigram that Benny’s studio audience is by far the best of the air.
In answering Mr. Boyle’s amusing critiques, which, by the way, are good enough for Jack to kid himself with in a broadcast, we would like to point out that there are two general types of radio comedy, probably best illustrated by the programs of Benny and Bob Hope.
Hope, with seven pillars of wit and wisdom ghost-writing his material, is strictly a gagman. He throws his gags so fast that he sometimes takes his own punch lines on the chin.
Benny’s comedy depends on situations rather than gags and its success or failure still depends further on timing. As of the nation’s outstanding experts on the boxing sport, Mr. Boyle probably would be the first to admit that when a fighter’s timing is off his chances of landing a solid punch are correspondingly lessened.
This, while Benny may never throw a very heavy chunk of leather, he ties a blow so that however light the impact it hits the funnybone at the right place and at the right time.
Many listeners have probably noticed that, after listening to a really funny Benny program, they can’t remember a single line that stood out by itself as a laugh-getter. On the other hand, several of Hope’s gags, lifted from the general context of the script, will be good for laughs in the re-telling.
The woof of Benny’s humor has worn somewhat threadbare, we’ll admit, and the pattern seems a trifle dingy with the years. But, to us, he’s still funny.
At any rate, we hope Mr. Boyle listens to him tomorrow night if only to cluck a chiding tongue at the studio audience and coin another program.

Yhtapmys

[JohnM]

Jolly good read, that was.