Make 'Em Laugh

01/14/2009 :: 10:33:10 PM
Ken Says:

Thanks for this great story! I love so many comics from Jack Benny’s era, but I miss Benny the most. What a magnificently funny man he was!

01/14/2009 :: 11:40:16 PM
Robb Hadley Says:

The Jack Benny radio programs–short on topical humor, long on character humor–still hold up today. I have hundreds of them on my iPod. My eleven-year-old makes fun of me for listening to them, but he always lets out several guffaws per show.

01/15/2009 :: 12:29:29 PM
Richard Wozny Says:

Comedy as I remember was a common healer for the common good.
Having been a WWII war baby, I do remember the rushing, the postponements and the sacrifice, just to hear a broadcast of comedy.
Radio had our attention for oh so many years. The reasoning was that
lacking sophisticated technology, comedy was the thought stimulus that
helped us to reason us through our problems. We were thinkers and tinkerers. We could figure out ways to accomplish a task using only what
we had on hand at the time. We couldn’t create personal debt without
material collateral. Our neighborhood bankers were our mentors.
Comedy was centering to us. Is was our guide to reasoning. Not an extra
club in the bag if you will but a thought alternative on the road to accomplishment.
It was a conversation piece as we compared what we had heard the night before on a radio show. We were all attached and couldn’t live without it.
Thanks for the memory.

01/22/2009 :: 06:31:52 PM
John Dzurak Says:

It is an absolute tragedy that the young people today have absolutely no idea who Jack Benny, Laurel & Hardy, Red Skelton, Burns & Allen, etc. were. They woulnd’t watch a black and white movie if you paid them Baby Boomers like me were priviledged to grow up on “moldy oldies” music on AM radio and the great old movies shown on TV. comedians.

01/25/2009 :: 12:06:21 PM
John Bialas Says:

True story: Jack Benny once appeared on stage with an antique Stradivarius violin and announced that it was valued at over ten thousand dollars. It was a setup for a joke, but before he could get out the punchline, a guy in the audience yelled out “Didja buy it new?” Jack said it was one of the few times a heckler ever made him laugh out loud.