Kliph Nesteroff Presents "a portal into a previously unseen world" - The Guardian
"Invaluable" - The Onion AV Club
"Important" - John Hodgman, The Daily Show
Friday, February 29, 2008
Password with guest Jack Benny (1962) - Footage Offline - 10/11/10
The interesting thing about the Jack-is-Cheap gag is that such a major piece of his mythology may not have originated with Jack or his writers at all. Instead, it seems to have been one of the running insults Fred Allen and his crew devised when the "feud" began in early 1937. It wasn't until 1938 that Jack's cheapness became a given in his own show.
The problem is that while we have a fairly complete set of Benny episodes from those years, recordings of the corresponding Allen shows are apparently lost. Thus we can only hear Jack's responses ("He said I'm cheap, did he?"), not the Allen jokes that inspired them.
The interesting thing about the Jack-is-Cheap gag is that such a major piece of his mythology may not have originated with Jack or his writers at all. Instead, it seems to have been one of the running insults Fred Allen and his crew devised when the "feud" began in early 1937. It wasn't until 1938 that Jack's cheapness became a given in his own show.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that while we have a fairly complete set of Benny episodes from those years, recordings of the corresponding Allen shows are apparently lost. Thus we can only hear Jack's responses ("He said I'm cheap, did he?"), not the Allen jokes that inspired them.
--Krammar