Jack Benny

• Born: February 14, 1894
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: December 26, 1974
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

Comedian, actor, and entertainer

Benny entertained audiences for decades onradio and television programs with his comedic character, who was stingy, vain, and inept.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

Jack Benny (BEH-nee) was the son of Meyer Kubelsky, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, and Emma Sachs from Lithuania. Meyer was a saloonkeeper, and Emma was a housewife. Although Benny lived in Waukegan, Illinois, until only the age of seventeen, he always held the city in high regard. As a boy he showed little interest in school but much promise as a violinist. He began playing at age six, although his talent far exceeded his work habits. The violin became an important factor in his career, but he did not develop into the classical musician his parents wished. Benny’s mother died in early middle age, but his father, a strict Orthodox Jew, lived to see his son become a famous entertainer.

Benny was expelled from high school in his first year. Although the principal informed Benny that he might return if his study habits improved, he never did. His entry into the entertainment world was playing violin in a vaudeville theater in Waukegan at the age of seventeen. In 1912, he responded to the query of a middle-aged pianist named Cora Salisbury, who was looking for a violinist to accompany her. Although this was not the career his parents wanted, they discovered that she was a respectable woman and agreed. He took the name Ben K. Benny because a violinist named Kubelik complained that the young man’s similar name was confusing audiences. After two years with Salisbury, Benny joined another pianist, Lyman Woods, until 1917, when Benny joined the Navy. He continued to play the violin but initiated a comedy act in shows at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, near Waukegan. Continuing his act after the war, he oddly ran into another complaint about his name, this one from vaudeville performer Ben Bernie. In 1921, when his comic talent began to draw wide attention, he finally became Jack Benny.

Life’s Work

Through the 1920’s Benny was essentially a vaudevillian who became sufficiently well-known to be offered film roles, the first being Hollywood Revue in 1929. A comic routine on Ed Sullivan’s radio show impressed an advertising agent who gave Benny a chance to have his own program. Although not a well-educated man, Benny became a keen student of radio comedy and developed an acute sense of the relationship between performer and the unseen radio audience in the next few years. In 1934, he was given a temporary assignment on Sunday evenings at seven on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) Blue network. His position on the dial lasted twenty-one years, the final six years being on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and led to many years on early television.

Benny developed a role as a character with obsessive but familiar faults: vanity, stinginess, and a comprehensive ineptness. The character emerged in his relationships with a set of performers, all perennials on his programs. One was Sadie Marks, the woman he had married in 1927. Although she did not think of herself as a performer, Benny perceived her comic talent and encouraged her to work with him in his final vaudeville years. On radio she became Mary Livingstone, a name she took legally. She appeared not as Mrs. Benny, not even as a regular girlfriend, for in his shows Benny was usually portrayed as dating younger women, often telephone operators, who grudgingly put up with him despite his flaws. Livingstone, who saw the flaws clearly, needled him constantly about them.

Another character was Benny’s butler, Rochester. Although black performers at the time were invariably saddled with demeaning roles, Eddie Anderson performed a part different from that of humble black servant. A competent comic actor, he appeared on more of Benny’s shows than anyone else. The Benny character, of course, paid Rochester skimpily and was paid back in putdowns. If the doorbell rang and Benny was closer to the door, for instance, Rochester would tell him to answer it himself. In real life, Benny and his cast would never stay at a hotel that refused service to Anderson.

Other regulars included tenor Dennis Day, who even as a middle-aged man played the part of a “silly kid”; orchestra leader Phil Harris, who portrayed an unruly character with a casual way with Benny, whom he always called “Jackson”; and Mel Blanc, who did a variety of characters, voices, and noises. For example, Blanc made the sounds that came from Benny’s ancient Maxwell car. The home and studio audience often laughed more at them, or with them, than at Benny, but Benny perceived their value in enhancing his character.

Benny took his character into television fairly regularly from 1950 to 1965 and occasionally thereafter. He also was cast in many films. The relative failure of The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) became his running gag for years thereafter. His most successful film was To Be or Not to Be (1942), a satire on Nazi Germany, in which he imitated Adolf Hitler, a role that initially enraged Benny’s Orthodox Jewish father until he came to understand the satirical purpose of the characterization. During his World War II summers, Benny entertained American troops at home and abroad. Until Benny died in 1974 of pancreatic cancer, he remained a comic star of the first magnitude.

Significance

Ernst Lubitsch, a famous director, wanted Benny for the leading role in To Be or Not to Be. When Benny asked why, Lutbitsch explained that he saw Benny not as a comedian but as an actor skillful at playing the part of a comedian, a capacity that set Benny apart from most other nominal comedians. In comedy Benny prevailed because he understood so well the preparation and timing involved in playing this role. He pointed out that one of the most successful of all his routines on radio happened accidentally with three words from Livingstone: “Oh, shut up.” The audience found it uproariously funny because it came at the end of a long dialogue on opera between Benny’s announcer, Don Wilson, and an operatic guest on the show. After maintaining a long silence as listener, Benny—presumably ignorant about opera—suddenly interjected, “Well, I thought. . . .” His well-established role and the timing of the remark prepared the audience to howl at Livingstone’s putdown. Benny’s signature comment, “Well!”—said with his hand resting on his cheek and a roll of his eyes after he sensed he was being ridiculed—also became a classic. Benny understood that he did not have to tell jokes to be funny.

Bibliography

Benny, Jack, and Joan Benny. Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story. New York: Warner Books, 1990. Although the portions by Benny’s daughter Joan sometimes stray into merely her autobiographical details, this book is valuable for incorporating her father’s unpublished autobiography.

Benny, Mary Livingstone, Hilliard Marks, and Marcia Borie. Jack Benny. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. This biography draws upon the insights of Marks, Livingstone’s brother, who wrote for Benny and later produced his show.

Fein, Irving. Jack Benny: An Intimate Biography. New York: Putnam, 1976. Fein was a business associate and a friend of Benny. With him he formed Amusement Enterprises, which discovered talent, including Jack Paar, who gained renown as a summer replacement for Benny. Benny’s longtime friend, comedian George Burns, wrote the introduction.

Leannah, Michael, ed. Well! Reflections on the Life and Career of Jack Benny. Duncan, Okla.: BearManor Media, 2007. Contains essays by various authors on such Benny allies as Livingstone and Blanc, and one on Benny’s famous “feud” with comedian Fred Allen.