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Author: Kathryn Fuller-Seeley Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520295056 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
"Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century--by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating "Fall Guy" character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack's pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering "showrunners" combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors' products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932's depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Kathryn Fuller-Seeley Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520295056 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
"Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century--by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating "Fall Guy" character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack's pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering "showrunners" combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors' products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932's depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Kathleen M. Newman Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520936751 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Radio Active tells the story of how radio listeners at the American mid-century were active in their listening practices. While cultural historians have seen this period as one of failed reform—focusing on the failure of activists to win significant changes for commercial radio—Kathy M. Newman argues that the 1930s witnessed the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between advertising and activism. Advertising helped to kindle the consumer activism of union members affiliated with the CIO, middle-class club women, and working-class housewives. Once provoked, these activists became determined to influence—and in some cases eliminate—radio advertising. As one example of how radio consumption was an active rather than a passive process, Newman cites The Hucksters, Frederick Wakeman's 1946 radio spoof that skewered eccentric sponsors, neurotic account executives, and grating radio jingles. The book sold over 700,000 copies in its first six months and convinced broadcast executives that Americans were unhappy with radio advertising. The Hucksters left its mark on the radio age, showing that radio could inspire collective action and not just passive conformity.
Author: Arthur Frank Wertheim Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press ISBN: Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 472
Book Description
Discusses American radio comedy shows and performers of the 1930's and 40's and examines their place in American life and their relationship to the social history of the time.
Author: Gerd Horten Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520240618 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
"By focusing on the medium of radio during World War II, Horten has provided us with a window into an important change in radio broadcasting that has previously been ignored by historians. The depth of research, the book's contribution to our understanding of radio and the war make Radio Goes to War an outstanding work."—Lary May, author of The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way "Radio broadcasting, and its impact on American life, still remains a neglected area of our national history. Radio Goes to War demonstrates conclusively how short-sighted that omission is. As we enter what is sure to be another era of contested claims of government control over freedom of speech, the controversies and compromises of wartime broadcasting sixty years ago provide an ominous example of difficult decisions to be made in the future. The alliance of big business, advertising, and wartime propaganda that Horten so convincingly illuminates takes on a heightened significance, especially as this relationship has tightened in the last several decades. When radio and television go to war again, will they follow the same course? This is cautionary reading for our new century."—Michele Hilmes, author of Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952
Author: Fred Allen Publisher: Ravenio Books ISBN: Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
In the spring of 1932, I had finished a two-year run in Threes A Crowd, a musical revue in which I appeared with Clifton Webb and Libby Holman. The following September I was to go into a new show. I had no contract; merely the producers promise. When I returned to New York to start rehearsals, I discovered that there was to be no show. It had been a hot summer. Many people hadn’t been able to keep things. One of the things the producer hadn’t been able to keep was his promise. With the advance of refrigeration, I hope that along with the frozen foods someday we will have frozen conversation. A person will be able to keep a frozen promise indefinitely. This will be a boon to show business where more chorus girls are kept than promises. With no immediate plans for the theater, I began to wonder about radio. Many of the big-name comedians were appearing on regular programs. In the theater the actor had uncertainty, broken promises, constant travel and a gypsy existence. In radio, if you were successful, there was an assured season of work. The show could not close if there was nobody in the balcony. There was no travel and the actor could enjoy a permanent home. There may have been other advantages but I didn’t need to know them. The pioneer comedians on radio were Amos and Andy, Ray Knight and his Cuckoo Hour, the Gold Dust Twins, Stoopnagle and Budd and the Tasty Yeast Jesters. With the exception of Amos and Andy, who had been playing smalltime vaudeville theaters under the name of Sam and Henry, the others were trained and developed in radio. All of these artists performed their comedy routines in studios without audiences. Their entertainment was planned for the listener at home. In the early 1930’s when the Broadway comedians descended on radio, things went from hush to raucous. The theater buffoon had no conception of the medium and no time to study its requirements. The Broadway slogan was “Its dough—lets go!” Eddie Cantor, Jack Pearl, Ed Wynn, Joe Penner and others were radio sensations. They brought their audiences into the studios, used their theater techniques and their old vaudeville jokes, and laughter, rehearsed or spontaneous, started exploding between the commercials. The cause of this merriment was not always clear. The bewildered set owner in Galesburg, Illinois, suddenly realized that he no longer had to be able to understand radio comedy. As he sat in his Galesburg living room he knew that he had proxy audiences sitting in radio studios in New York, Chicago and Hollywood watching the comedians, laughing and shrieking “Vass you dere, Charlie” and “Wanna buy a duck” for him.
Author: Jack Benny Publisher: ISBN: 9781629335780 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
For the first time in almost 90 years, we can experience the origins of Jack Benny's radio comedy genius. Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, brought up from Benny's subterranean vault [or the UCLA archives, almost as difficult to access!] finally share scripts of his earliest live radio programs--for which no recordings exist. See how the soon-to-be-king of radio comedy moved from his vaudeville stand-up comedy background to invent the workplace situation comedy. In these first shows of 1932, Jack plays a "Broadway Romeo," a genial, self-deprecating comedian, who is not yet the famously cheap "fall guy" he would become over the next two years. Jack claims that it's his bandleader, George Olsen, who's the tightwad. Highlights of Volume One include: - Jack's commercials for Canada Dry Ginger Ale- the funniest, and most controversial, advertising parodies he would ever perform. - Jack's panic as he realizes he has used up every vaudeville routine he'd ever performed on stage, and this is a twice-a-week program. - The initial Introduction of Mary Livingstone, the radio fan from Plainfield, New Jersey. - An introduction by Kathy Fuller-Seeley that sets the stage for why these historic shows are so important to understand Benny's career. These 26 hilarious radio scripts offer Jack Benny at his early creative best. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is the author of Jack Benny and the Golden Age of Radio Comedy (2017) and books on early motion pictures and nickelodeon audiences. She teaches media history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Author: Scott Balcerzak Publisher: Wayne State University Press ISBN: 0814339662 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Film scholars and fans have used distinctive terms to describe the Classic Hollywood comedian: He is a "trickster," a "rebel," or a "buffoon." Yet the performer is almost always described as a "he." In Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity, Scott Balcerzak reads the performances of notable comedians such as W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello through humor and queer theory to expose a problematic history of maleness in their personas. He argues that contrary to popular notions of Classic Hollywood history, these male comedians rearranged or, at times, rejected heteronormative protocols. Balcerzak begins by defining the particular buffoonish masculinity portrayed by early film comedians, a gender and genre construct influenced by the cultural anxieties of the 1930s and '40s. In chapter 1, he considers the onscreen pairing of W. C. Fields and Mae West to identify a queered sexuality and drag persona in Fields's performance, while in chapter 2 he examines the two major constructions of Fields's film persona-the confidence man and the husband-to show Fields to be a conflicted and subversive figure. In chapter 3, Balcerzak considers the assimilation and influence of Eddie Cantor as a Jewish celebrity, while he turns to the cross-media influence of Jack Benny's radio persona in chapter 4. In Chapters 5 and 6, he moves beyond the individual performer to examine the complex masculine brotherhood of comedy duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey. Buffoon Men shows that the complicated history of the male comedian during the early sound era has much to tell us about multimedia comedic stars today. Fans and scholars of film history, gender studies, and broadcast studies will appreciate Balcerzak's thorough exploration of the era's fascinating gender constructs.
Author: Aniko Bodroghkozy Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1118646282 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 512
Book Description
Presented in a single volume, this engaging review reflects on the scholarship and the historical development of American broadcasting A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting comprehensively evaluates the vibrant history of American radio and television and reveals broadcasting’s influence on American history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With contributions from leading scholars on the topic, this wide-ranging anthology explores the impact of broadcasting on American culture, politics, and society from an historical perspective as well as the effect on our economic and social structures. The text’s original and accessibly-written essays offer explorations on a wealth of topics including the production of broadcast media, the evolution of various television and radio genres, the development of the broadcast ratings system, the rise of Spanish language broadcasting in the United States, broadcast activism, African Americans and broadcasting, 1950’s television, and much more. This essential resource: Presents a scholarly overview of the history of radio and television broadcasting and its influence on contemporary American history Contains original essays from leading academics in the field Examines the role of radio in the television era Discusses the evolution of regulations in radio and television Offers insight into the cultural influence of radio and television Analyzes canonical texts that helped shape the field Written for students and scholars of media studies and twentieth-century history, A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting is an essential and field-defining guide to the history and historiography of American broadcasting and its many cultural, societal, and political impacts.
Author: Kathryn Fuller-Seeley Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520295048 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
"Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century--by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating "Fall Guy" character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack's pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering "showrunners" combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors' products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932's depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Kathryn Fuller-Seeley
Author: Kathryn Fuller-Seeley
Author: Kathleen M. Newman
Author: Irving Fein
Author: Arthur Frank Wertheim
Author: Gerd Horten
Author: Fred Allen
Author: Jack Benny
Author: Scott Balcerzak
Author: Aniko Bodroghkozy
Author: Kathryn Fuller-Seeley