Actors - Jack Benny

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	Actors - Jack Benny

Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky, February 14, 1894 – December 26, 1974), an American comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor, was arguably one of the biggest stars in classic American radio and was also a major television attraction.

He may have been the first standup comedian as the term is known, as well as one of the first to work with what became the situation comedy; he was renowned for his flawless comic timing and (especially) his ability to get laughs with either a pregnant pause or a single expression. In hand with his great "rival" Fred Allen — their long-running "feud" was one of the greatest running gags in comedy history — Jack Benny on radio helped establish a basic palette from which comedy since has rarely deviated, no matter how extreme or experimental it has become in their wake.

Early career

Benny grew up in Chicago and Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a Jewish saloon keeper. He began studying the violin, an instrument that would become his trademark, when he was six. By fourteen, he was playing in local dance bands as well as in his high school orchestra. After he found an opportunity to play the instrument in local theaters for $8 a week, he quit school and eventually began a career in vaudeville.

In 1911, he was playing in the same theater as the young Marx Brothers, whose mother was so enchanted with Benny that she invited him to be their permanent accompanist. The plan was foiled by Benny's parents, who refused to let their son, then seventeen, go on the road, but it was the beginning of his long friendship with Zeppo Marx.

The following year, Benny formed a vaudeville musical duo with pianist Cora Salisbury. This provoked famous violinist Jan Kubelik, who thought that the young vaudeville entertainer with a similar name (Kubelsky) would damage his reputation. Finally, Benjamin Kubelsky agreed to change his name to Ben K. Benny (sometimes spelled Bennie). He also found a new pianist, Lyman Woods. He left show business briefly in 1917 to join the Navy during World War I, but even then, he often entertained the troops. One evening, he was booed by the troops, so he began telling Navy jokes on stage. He was a big hit, earning himself a reputation as a comedian as well as a musician.

After the war, Benny returned to vaudeville and changed his first name to Jack. He had several romantic encounters, including with a dancer, Mary Kelly, whose devoutly Catholic family forced her to turn down Benny's proposal because he was Jewish. In 1922, he accompanied Zeppo Marx to a Passover seder where he met Sadie Marks, whom he married in 1927. Adopting the stage name Mary Livingstone, she became Benny's collaborator throughout most of his career. They had an adopted daughter, Joan.

Radio

Benny had been only a minor vaudeville star, but he became an enormously successful national figure with The Jack Benny Program, a weekly radio show which ran from 1932 to 1948 on NBC and from 1948 to 1955 on CBS, and was consistently among the most highly rated programs during most of that run, often as not proving to be the highest rated program in radio.

The Characters

Benny's stage character was a clever inversion of his actual self. Though the character was Jack Benny, he was also just about everything Benny himself wasn't. The character was cheap, petty, vain, and self-congratulatory, and all these elements remained vital to the character even though the skinflint aspect became the linchpin to the Benny show's overall humour. Benny set himself up as the foil as much as the primary laughgetter, allowing his supporting characters to draw laughs at the expense of his stinginess, vanity, and pettiness. And, by allowing such a character to be seen almost completely as human and vulnerable, in an era where very few male characters with or without such vanities allowed that kind of vulnerability to be that obvious, Benny made what should have been a despicable character into a kind of Everyman character.

The supporting characters who amplified that vulnerability only too gladly included wife Mary Livingstone as his wisecracking and not especially deferential steady girl friend (as the saying went in those years); rotund announcer Don Wilson (who also served as announcer for Fanny Brice's hit, Baby Snooks); bandleader Phil Harris as a jive-talking, wine-and-women type whose repartee was rather risque for its time (Harris and Mahlon Merrick shared the actual musical chores of the show); boy tenor Dennis Day, who was cast as a sheltered, naive youth who still got the better of his boss as often as not; and, especially, Eddie Anderson as valet-chauffeur Rochester van Jones — who was practically as popular as Benny himself.

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Actors - Jack Benny

Early career

Radio

The Characters

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