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You could almost hear the writers schvitz with glee when the guest was someone with a snout as prominent as Hopes. Theyd have Tony Bennett dub Bob the proud bird with the golden snorkel. Jimmy Durante (with whom Hope teamed for a 1957 novelty tune called Blame It on the Proboscis) would proclaim, In the face of superior weaponry, I surrender. One skit had Hope and Danny Thomas play gangsters. Again the stars mash faces, and Hope snarls: I could let you have it between your eyes, but I see youve been punished enough there already. To which Thomas ripostes: You should talk. They cant hang a coat on mine.
This ostensibly good-natured raillery was a staple of radio and early TV comedy. It grounded the repartee when this weeks guest star was already established as his own caricature. Actors gamely allowed themselves to be reduced to humors (Orson Welles artistic pomposity, Bennys stinginess) or to some physiognomic eccentricity (Crosbys stuck-out ears, the bags under Fred Allens eyes).
Throughout the 40s, Frank Sinatras youthful skinniness had been the butt of much raillery in all popular media, including movie cartoons; the Tex Avery classic Little Tinker has a Sinatra figure disappearing behind a microphone pole and falling between the cracks in a stage floor. In an early-50s stint guest shot, Frank listens politely as Bob swears he will never again make Sinatra jokes — which he immediately repeats: the pooped-out Pinza, a breadstick with lungs. Hope goes on to compliment Sinatra on his record-breaking engagement at New Yorks Copacabana night club. No, but the prices were mighty steep steep there. I walked in a Republican and came out a Democrat, Hope says. Its the first time in night-club history so many people paid a cover charge to see a minimum. (An older, heavier Sinatra visited Hope and make his own joke about his once-svelte self: When I weighed 60 pounds, had a gang o hair and looked like my own X-ray.)
He could be crueler about the famous when they werent there. In 1984, after Vanessa Williams stepped down as Miss America when Penthouse threatened to publish figure studies shed posed for years earlier, Hope called her resignation a photo finish, and said, She claims shes got nude photographs of Bob Guccione. Around the same time, at the apogee of Culture Clubs fame, Hope dead-panned to guest Milton Berle: I hear when they built Boy George they used you for a blueprint.
And he continued to rag celebs, whether or not theyd been on his show, just for looking funny. Woody Allen had done nothing notorious (yet) and had proclaimed his admiration for Bob. In his first films Allen was already trying to be a hamische Hope; Peter Kaplan wrote that Allens feminized version of urbane charm crossed with the insatiable and unconsummated lust of an obsessive masturbator are inventions that stem from Hope. Woody revered Bob as much as he did Groucho Marx; his tiny tragedy was that he possessed neither the comforting looks and delivery of the one or the rough, stalking grace of the other. Yet on a 1969 show Hope called Allen the little spider monkey with the falsetto voice, and added, I always thought the tiger in his tank was a rental. Why make jokes that appear to go out of their way to be hurtful? Any comic will tell you: because theyre funny! A Hope writer would concoct an insulting gag about a famous person, and if it made Bob laugh, he figured the audience would go for it too.
POLITICAL SHTICK
The same standard applied to the political jokes that were a staple of Hopes TV monologues. If we split the 20th century into thirds, we can say that Will Rogers was the preeminent political humorist of the centurys first third, and Hope had the second third to himself. The final slice would go to Johnny Carson and his avatars, Jay Leno and David Letterman — with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show pointing the way to a millennial freshness of wit and perspective.
Of the main political roastmasters, only Rogers was forthright about his affiliation: I belong to no organized party. Im a Democrat. Hope, Carson and the rest were ostensibly nonpartisan (though Leno, in his early stand-up years, had a noticeably progressive tinge). The same for the two clowns now occupying the Weekend Update desk on Saturday Night Live; if they ever stopped giggling at the jokes they read, theyd might notice how lame and irrelevant they have become. Stewart is the anomaly: he strikes a distinctly (and to me quite melodious) leftist tone. I cant explain the high quality of the writing on The Daily Show, or the general uniformity of its political POV. For the simple fact is that producing four or five news-related comedy monologues a week requires that you take your political creatures in whatever field you find them. And then you milk them to death. Letterman still cant let go of Bill Clinton — hes as obsessed with the ex-President as Rush Limbaugh is — though he is as reluctant as Limbaugh to put the current Presidents war adventures into critical perspective.
I think this timidity relates a fear of seeming to take sides. Except for Stewart, the comedy talk-show hosts dont joke about issues; they make fun of politicians personal quirks. This is celebrity, not political humor. A sampling of Hopes TV monologues reveals, surprisingly, that his political jokes were less squeamish than those of Dave and Jay. The sharper gags he would expectorate at the audience, then stare them down, Jack Benny-style, to see if they got it. Sometimes the jokes were cynically nonpartisan. In a skit with John Wayne, the Duke asks rhetorically, Whatever happened to truth in advertising? and Bob parries, They canceled it. Its an election year.
But election year or not, he would run the current U.S. President through a not-very-rough hazing. On his 1952 Christmas show: Senator McCarthy and Harry Truman were going to exchange gifts, but the Post Office wouldnt let either one of them mail it. 1961: President Kennedy has already sent a message on the teletype. He wired Khrushchev: Get out of Berlin, get out of Vietnam and get out of Cuba. Khrushchev wired back: Never mind that. How can I get out of Russia? In 1966, before a trip overseas by Lyndon Johnson: LBJ is gonna visit all our allies over there. He may be back the same day. 1975, after a trip overseas by Gerald Ford: The President had a very successful trip to Japan. They were very happy to meet the man who runs the country they own. Hope went where the news was. In the early 70s, he made Mao-Kissinger jokes. (A skit from that period features Shirley Jones supposedly on the phone with Kissinger: Acapulco? I thought you were in Peking? [Pause.] Oh, I see. Shes prettier than Chou En-lai.) Visiting Turkey, Hope lightly mocked Islam when he announced that he was going to a mosque a second time: Im not overly religious. I just want my shoes back.
OLD SHTICK
As the decades wore on, Hopes TV shows increasingly became a repository, a reliquary, for vanished forms of entertainment. In 1954 he did a tap dance with a very young, pre-movies Shirley MacLaine (she was about 19). During the routine, they swap patter: Bob asks, You sing? and Shirley replies, No — you dance? A few years later, Hope paired for another charming dance bit with sinfully cute Natalie Wood (also about 19). In both these routines he is expert on his own and generous to his partner — the old vaudeville hoofer helping the new kid on the stage. On the specials, Hope would often encourage his more venerable guests to reprise their music-hall shtick. When Red Skelton did it, you could see why vaudeville died.
Other gags could have come from ancient stand-up routines; they had more whiskers than the Smith brothers. (Hope: Thats irrelevant! Durante: No. Irrelevant eats peanuts.) But a late-50s sketch — with Hope on stage promoting his protg, a singer from the movies, and young comics Dan Rowan and Dick Martin heckling from the audience — shows a bit of the verve of an actual old Hope vaudeville routine. Hope: This man is a great singer! Rowan: Hes a louse! Hope: Who called my singer a louse? Martin: Who called that louse a singer? Hope: Just a second. This mans a genius. Rowan: Hes a bum! Hope: A bum? This man is of the cinema! Martin: Oh — a cinema bum!
In a 1979 Film Comment article on Hope, Dick Cavett cited the way Bob, in his films, looks off-screen the way a vaudevillian looks into the wings to punctuate a laugh. That sideways glance, a Hope trope from way back, could be many things: the movie equivalent of playing to the band, or a conmans avoiding eye contact with his mark after hes made the score. On TV, though, it was just one thing: a sketch-saving glance at the cue cards or the crawling TelePrompter that no one ever thought to place within natural eye-line range. (On one show he tells a stale joke, and when it flops he asides: I gotta get younger idiot cards.) If you thought that the recent Saturday Night Live cast had invented the indolent TV comedy habit of sight-reading their lines instead of performing them, know that Hope was there first, and stayed longer. And could read better. Im the best feed in the world, Hope told Brooks Riley, because I know how to throw a straight line delivered by somebody else. That was true in his prime, but by the later TV years he often glazes over when guest star tell extended anecdotes; his smile becomes a rictus.
Not that his guests gave him much feedback. The old stars, like Lucille Ball and Milton Berle, would show up, their voices an octave deeper, their eyes glued to their own cue cards, their gift for approximating spontaneity long since rusted over. Hopes later TV shows were often a mausoleum of mid-century star power, with the coffin lids ripped open to expose the dust and disuse. Its understandable that a performer who was in his 60s, 70s, 80s — 90s, at the end of his run — would lose some of his vitality, his avidity for an audiences love. (That he knew hed had for decades.) But its clear that the fast-spieling, eye-rolling fiction known as Bob Hope was a role he had tired of playing; he kept at, I suspect, because it was his job, and he didnt mind perpetuating the Hope legend.