Jack Benny Part 2

Oh yeah - also any thoughts on Bob Crosby?

I'm not wanting to start a board war, I'm just curious: is Kenny Baker or Dennis Day more popular among contemporary Jack Benny Show fans? I really don't have a preference since they're both great singers and performers, and they both basically play the same kind of character, but just from a couple comments made earlier about Dennis Day I'm curious.

@gaelicviking Dennis Day all the way. Probably because I heard him first on a collection of Old Time Radio Shows I had checked ot from the library. Fortunately, Internet Archives has pretty much every radio show available, including the solo Phil Harris, Dennis Day and Rochester shows. (Not so many Rochester- probably because he didn't make as many as the others.

Im thinking!!!

@jimmbo13 .....LOL! Exactly!

So it really ended up being more of an "ensemble" show than one based around a big star, the way, say, Milton Berle was.

That's because Rochester gets all the lines where he gets to knock Benny down verbally - something nearly unheard of back in that day. Rochester breaks the stereotype of a subservient black worker that was common at the time. Normally in the media black people weren't allowed to insult "the man" the way Rochester does, because they were still considered a "servant" race of sorts. I may be wrong, and would gladly welcome correction, but that's my impression of the era.

@gaelicviking I believe that you are correct. Actually, Rochester and Phil Harris have pretty much the same chararceristics on the JB show. And in fact, in some way each of the cast 'get thier own' back on Benny. LOL. They just do it in different ways.

@monkfan72 Right, and even that was on purpose. Jack Benny's intention was basically to play a character with so many quirks that he would become a comedic figure just by having everyone make fun of him, perverse as that sounds. It's even funnier when you consider that the character Jack Benny plays on his own show is completely different from how he was in real life - even to the point where waiters he generously tipped couldn't believe it was actually him.

It's also interesting to see how they are able to act it out in a lifelike fashion despite reading from scripts - their acting is so good it still seems like they're improvising it even though they're actually reading from scripts.