The Jack Benny Program

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The Jack Benny Program


Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, and Rochester (Eddie Anderson) in a group portrait.
Other names The Jack Benny Show
The Canada Dry Program
The Chevrolet Show
The General Tire Show
The Jell-o Program
The Grape Nuts Flakes Program
The Lucky Strike Program
Genre Comedy
Running time 30 min.
Country United States
Language(s) English
Home station NBC (Blue) (05/02/32-10/26/32)
CBS (10/30/32-1/26/33)
NBC (Red) (03/03/33-09/28/34)
NBC (Blue) (10/14/34-06/21/36)
NBC (Red) (10/04/36-12/26/48)
CBS (01/02/49-05/22/55)
Television adaptation(s) The Jack Benny Program
Host(s) Don Wilson
Starring Jack Benny
Mary Livingstone
Eddie Anderson
Phil Harris
Dennis Day
Kenny Baker
Mel Blanc
Creator(s) Jack Benny
Writer(s) George Balzer, Sam Perrin, Milt Josefsberg, John Tackaberry
Air dates May 2, 1932 – May 22, 1955
No. of episodes 931

The Jack Benny Program, starring Jack Benny, was a radio-TV comedy series which ran for more than three decades and is generally regarded as a high-water mark in 20th-century comedy.

Contents

[edit] Radio

With Canada Dry Ginger Ale as a sponsor, Benny came to radio on The Canada Dry Program, beginning May 2, 1932, on the Blue Network and continuing there for six months until October 26, moving the show to CBS on October 30. With Ted Weems leading the band, Benny stayed on CBS until January 26, 1933.

Arriving at NBC on March 17, Benny did The Chevrolet Program until April 1, 1934. He continued with sponsors General Tires, Jell-O and Grape Nuts Flakes. But in 1944, the practice of using the sponsor's name as the title faded out, and the show was then known as The Jack Benny Program. Lucky Strike was the radio sponsor from 1944 to the mid-1950s. Radio repeats ran from 1956 to 1958 on The Best of Benny.

[edit] Television

The Jack Benny Program was telecast on CBS from October 29, 1950, to September 15, 1964, and on NBC from September 25, 1964, to September 10, 1965. 343 episodes were produced.

The television show was a seamless continuation of Benny's radio program, employing many of the same players, the same approach to situation comedy and some of the same scripts. The suffix "Program" instead of "Show" was also a carryover from radio, where "program" rather than "show" was used frequently for presentations in the non-visual medium.

The Jack Benny Program appeared infrequently during its first two years on CBS TV. The show then ran every fourth week for the next two years. During the 1953-54 season, half the episodes were filmed during the summer and the others were live, a schedule which allowed Benny to continue doing his radio show. From 1955 until 1960, the show was on every other week, and it was seen weekly after 1960.

In his unpublished autobiography, I Always Had Shoes (portions of which were later incorporated by Jack's daughter, Joan, into her memoir of her parents, Sundays at Seven), Benny said that he, not NBC, made the decision to end his TV series in 1965. He said that while the ratings were still very good (he cited a figure of some 18,000,000 viewers per week... although he qualified that figure by saying he never believed the ratings services were doing anything more than guessing, no matter what they promised), advertisers were complaining that commercial time on his show was costing nearly twice as much as what they paid for most other shows, and he had grown tired of what was called the "rate race." Thus, after some three decades on radio and television in a weekly program, Jack Benny went out on top.

In Jim Bishop's book A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, JFK said that he was too busy to watch most television, but that he made the time to watch The Jack Benny Program each week.

[edit] Cast

Earlier cast members include:

  • Kenny Baker (singer/actor) - the show's tenor singer who originally played the young, dopey character replaced by Dennis Day
  • Andy Devine - Jack's friend who lived on a farm with his ma and pa. He usually told a story about his folks and life around the farm. His catch phrase was "Hiya, Buck!"
  • Phil Harris - a skirt-chasing, arrogant, hip-talking bandleader who constantly put Jack down (in a mostly friendly way, of course)
  • Schlepperman (played by Sam Hearn) - a Jewish character who spoke with a Yiddish accent

[edit] External links

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