Quotes of the Day

“How d’ya like this little juke box for Easter I have on?” a tuxedoed Bob Hope asked in the opening monologue of his first TV show, on April 9, 1950. “Pretty formal, huh? Of course, the real reason I’m wearing this little outfit is the fact that a lot of performers die on television, and if it happens to me I wanna be prepared.” He needn’t have worried. The 284 NBC specials he would host over the next 43 years averaged a 40-plus Nielsen share, making Hope, unquestionably, the highest-rated star in television history.

“The Best of Bob Hope: The Ultimate Collection” compiles more than six hours of video and audio material, most of it from “Best of” clip shows: the 1975 “Highlights of a Quarter Century of Bob Hope on Television” (82 guest stars in two hours); the 1970 “The Bob Hope Christmas Special: Around the World With the USO”; the 1993 “Bob Hope’s Bag Full of Christmas Memories”; the 1995 “Bob Goes to War”; and a throwaway blooper show. Watch these to see the longevity and limitation of America’s most decorated comedian. I wonder if, in his invalid days, Bob did.

MOVIE SHTICK

The Bob Hope you know from TV was younger, and so, so much better, in a decade of Paramount movie comedies. The first Hope film I’ve seen that displays his trademark persona is the 1939 “The Cat and the Canary.” In this old-dark-house comedy melodrama he plays radio actor Wally Campbell, whom one character snidely subs “the original flutterbrain.” He’s already the chatty coward: “I’m not really frightened. I’m just naturally nervous.” He analyzes his behavior for leading lady Paulette Goddard: “I always joke when I’m scared. I kind of kid myself into being brave. Ain’t that silly?” In early Paramount films Hope had played the straight comic; in “The Cat and the Canary” he was the lead. That meant he and the writers could help shape the material as they did Hope’s radio show scripts. There’s a topical political joke (Nydia Westman: “Do you believe in reincarnation — you know, that dead people come back?” Bob: “You mean like the Republicans?”) as well as gags about Jack Benny and Bob’s favorite sport, golf. All that’s missing from his soon-to-be-familiar repertoire is a joke about Bing.

Which is odd, since one of the characters, the murderer’s first victim,  is named Crosby. Crosby had already established his screen and radio character: the smooth, genially aloof crooner. The great luck was that his persona and Hope’s should prove so perfectly complementary when they were paired in the 1940 “Road to Singapore — the first of seven “Road” movies” — and that their styles played off each other so adroitly. They worked together with the easy camaraderie of an old vaudeville team (and often began their movies with a peppy song-and-dance routine). Hope called this synchronicity “the mesh thing.” It has hardly an equal in comedy-movie history. In 2001, for a TIME.com consideration of Crosby, I wrote the next three paragraphs about the “Road” movies:

Superficially they were breezy comedy-adventures, Kiplingesque tales of two pleasant wastrels in a far-flung land. But they were really extensions of Crosby’s and Hope’s radio programs and personae: variety shows that were clogged with topical gags, inside jokes about golf and the horses, and light mocking of the stars’ cartoon physiognomies (Crosby’s ears, Hope’s nose and chin). Crosby is heard singing off-camera and Hope asks, “Who’d be sellin’ fish at this hour?” Another time Bob cracks, “Next time I bring Sinatra.” The proceedings were unabashedly ridiculous: in one of many self-referential asides, a talking camel (never mind) dryly observes: “This is the screwiest picture I was ever in.”

The “Road” films (the five major ones are the ’40s visits to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia — Alaska — and Rio) were screwy, all right, but pretty shrewd as character comedy of a high, broad stripe. With the help of their writers, Crosby and Hope perfected two hardy comic types: Bing the lordly overdog, smart and charming enough to get other folks to volunteer for the sucker’s game; and Bob the scruffy underdog, too used to losing, too stubborn to give up. Bing was Bugs to Bob’s Daffy; Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis; Bill Murray to Hope’s Martin Short; and, in “The Mask” and “Me, Myself & Irene,” Jim Carrey to Jim Carrey.

Bing is the sharpie, the con man, the cad to men and women alike. He sells Bob into slavery in “Morocco,” picks Hope’s pocket of his boatfare in “Utopia,” forces him into a dangerous highwire bicycle act in “Rio.” Crosby never apologizes for his dastardly doings, and the plot rarely smites him with a climactic comeuppance. ... “You know, way down underneath I’m honest,” Bing says in “Utopia.” Hope replies, “Yeah, but on top you’re a rat.” That was Bing in many of his movies: the rat on top.

I’ll just add that the prime “Road” movies were the five in the 40s: “Singapore,” “Zanzibar,” “Morocco,” Utopia” and “Rio.” — in seven years. Each movie sent these Yankee lads into some exotic clime to make light mockery of the locals: Orientals in “Singapore,” Africans in “Zanzibar,” Arabs in “Morocco,” Eskimos in “Utopia,” Latins in “Rio.” (Never to Europe: there, the natives would condescend to Bob and Bing.) I suppose that, in retrospect — or politically-correctrospect — the movies can be accused of racialism. They certainly celebrated the smooth wit and fast banter of these two Yanks; who wouldn’t want to imitate them? In that sense, America’s cultural imperialism never had two sunnier salesmen.

STAR SHTICK

Hope might have been a conventional leading man, if not for his nose — and the prosperous fun he made of it. As far back as his early radio days, the nose was a running gag (especially when Bob had a cold, and let’s pretend I didn’t say that). Crosby made frequent mock of it in the “Road” movies, and kept at it on a radio broadcast in 1951: “Has your nose always been like that, or did you have that ball-point put on it?” By the time he landed on TV, nose jokes were as much an institution as Hope was. A standard bit had Hope go nose to nose, smack up against another male star’s face, to set up the laugh. In one such face-off, Jack Benny abruptly complained,“He cut me!”

You could almost hear the writers schvitz with glee when the guest was someone with a snout as prominent as Hope’s. They’d 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 you’ve been punished enough there already.” To which Thomas ripostes: “You should talk. They can’t 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 week’s guest star was already established as his own caricature. Actors gamely allowed themselves to be reduced to humors (Orson Welles’ artistic pomposity, Benny’s stinginess) or to some physiognomic eccentricity (Crosby’s stuck-out ears, the bags under Fred Allen’s eyes).

Throughout the 40s, Frank Sinatra’s 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 York’s Copacabana night club. No, but the prices were mighty steep steep there. “I walked in a Republican and came out a Democrat,” Hope says. “It’s 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 weren’t there. In 1984, after Vanessa Williams stepped down as Miss America when Penthouse threatened to publish figure studies she’d posed for years earlier, Hope called her resignation “a photo finish,” and said, “She claims she’s got nude photographs of Bob Guccione.” Around the same time, at the apogee of Culture Club’s 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 they’d 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 “Allen’s 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 they’re 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 Hope’s TV monologues. If we split the 20th century into thirds, we can say that Will Rogers was the preeminent political humorist of the century’s 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. I’m 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, they’d 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 can’t 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 can’t let go of Bill Clinton — he’s 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 don’t joke about issues; they make fun of politicians’ personal quirks. This is celebrity, not political humor. A sampling of Hope’s 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. It’s 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 wouldn’t 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. She’s prettier than Chou En-lai.”) Visiting Turkey, Hope lightly mocked Islam when he announced that he was going to a mosque a second time: “I’m not overly religious. I just want my shoes back.”

OLD SHTICK

As the decades wore on, Hope’s 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: “That’s irrelevant!” Durante: “No. Irrelevant eats peanuts.”) But a late-50s sketch — with Hope on stage promoting his protégé, 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: “He’s a louse!” Hope: “Who called my singer a louse?” Martin: “Who called that louse a singer?” Hope: “Just a second. This man’s a genius.” Rowan: “He’s 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 conman’s avoiding eye contact with his mark after he’s 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. “I’m 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. Hope’s later TV shows were often a mausoleum of mid-century star power, with the coffin lids ripped open to expose the dust and disuse. It’s 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 audience’s love. (That he knew he’d had for decades.) But it’s 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 didn’t mind perpetuating the Hope legend.

Problem was, this was the wrong legend: not the snappy radio comedian, or the brash movie actor, but the TV star who phones it in, interested in nothing but getting back on the links or, in the final years, to bed. Hope may spring eternal, but Hope had no eternal spring. TV was the long, profitable autumn of his career. He had budded on Broadway, bloomed on radio and in the movies, then withered, slowly, on the TV specials. The curse on his reputation — one reason his centenary didn’t strike sparks with people my age and younger — is that we know Hope, if at all, mainly from this desultory, often lazy work.

CHRISTMAS WITH THE TROOPS

A Hope season for NBC would comprise eight or nine specials, with two invariable slots: a Christmas show and a mid-January record of his visit to whatever troops Bob could find. The December broadcast would begin with a monologue featuring a few seasonal jokes. (From the 50s: “A Christmas present. That’s the thing you get for somebody that you hope is getting something for you that costs as much as. If not more than. And never does.” From the 70s: “Christmas is pretty strange in Beverly Hills. When Santa lands on your roof, you’re expected to provide valet parking.”) Then he’d amble through some sketches, usually labored, with guest stars. The highlight, especially in retrospect, was the annual introduction of the Football Writers Association’s All-America Team. Baby brutes like Dick Butkus, Ed Marinaro, Walter Payton, or a cool glider like Lynn Swann, stepped forward in their college uniforms and their now-preposterous coiffures to be the butt of Bob’s banter. On the 1984 show, William Perry, soon to be dubbed “the Refrigerator,” laughs heartily when Hope looks at Perry’s 320-pound bulk (big then for a defensive lineman) and asks: “Did the bus come in you?” There’s also the creepy moment, from 1967, when a young but instantly familiar face announces that he is “O.J. Simpson, University of Southern California.” Hope explains blithely: “That O.J. stands for Orenthal. He runs the 100 in 9.4., and with a name like Orenthal you have to run fast.”

By the time the Christmas show aired, Hope would already be abroad, on one of his dozens of USO tours. That’s when he could come alive for an audience — not a few hundred civilians in a Burbank studio but 15,000 GIs in hostile territory. Hope’s only weapon was the golf club he leaned on; the sound of distant rifle fire was his rim shot. But in these shows, the old man appears younger, sharper, energized by the roars of laughter and his pleasure in fulfilling a comic’s mission.

Hope’s first big tour was in the summer of 1944, when he took singer Frances Langford, dancer Patty Thomas, the comic tenor Jerry Colonna and guitarist Tony Romano (along with writer Barney Dean) to the Pacific. Now the caricature gags were given a military twist: Hope caresses Colonna’s fertile mustache and Jerry warns: “Careful, careful — snipers.” It was on this tour that Hope stood next to the shapely Thomas and uttered his most famous wartime famous quip: “I just want you boys to see what you’re fighting for.”

Hope went from famous to notorious in the Vietnam years, when the pacifist Left saw him as an enemy for rah-rahing the war and making jokes about bombing civilians. These gags, hmmm, are not on the DVD. The ones that are suggest Hope had a more rounded take on the war than his opponents thought. In 1968, he jibed at the inability of America’s local ally to subdue the Viet Cong. “But I envy you guys,” he said with souflée sarcasm. “Now that the South Vietnamese have taken over, you can just sit around all day and do nothin’, huh?” In Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, a few miles from the Laotian border, he acknowledged the Viet Cong’s perseverence: “If you listen carefully, you can hear the neutral troops carrying neutral ammunition down the neutral Ho Chi Minh Trail.” And in Chu Lai, he anticipated the “Apocalypse Now” surfing scene by paying tribute to “one of the prettiest beach resorts in Vietnam. Even the Cong is crazy about it.”

Hope could expressed optimism, obliquely. 1969: “Now we’re in the midst of a 24-hour Christmas truce. Isn’t that beautiful? I like a war with a commercial break.” But as the war dragged on and dragged 3-1/2 million lives into the Big Muddy, Hope directed his softy bullets at military and political targets. In a skit with Teresa Graves, Hope asks her about her TV show “Laugh-In.” “It’s really nutty,” Graves says. “You never know what’s gonna happen, or why it’s gonna happen, or what you’re doing it for.” Bob drawls: “You’d be very happy in the service.” As Richard Nixon assumed control, and the Paris Peace Talks stalled, and more Vietnamese and Americns died, Hope visited U Taphao in Thailand. “I didn’t really expect to be here this year,” he told the boys. “The Paris Peace Talks were going so well. Hey listen, if you’re wondering what’s going on with the Paris Peace Talks, here’s the latest, up-to-the-second flash on what they’re doing over there. [Long silence.]  That was it.” Then, taking a potshot at Vice President Agnew, Hope added that Nixon was looking for a new negotiator in Paris: “He can’t send Spiro. He’d start another war.”

OLD SOLDIER

Through wars and not-quite-wars, from the 40s till the 90s, Hope took his troupe to the troops, ever the salesman, ever on the road. (In his last Christmas special, Hope and his wife Dolores played host to celebrities at their Toluga Lake chateau. Non-star Joey Lawrence tells Dolores,  “This is the first time I’ve ever actually visited your home.” Mrs. Hope replies, “Four more times and you’ll be tied with Bob.”) Finally he was making jokes about his age. When he was 85 and visiting troops in the middle East, he said to the GIs: “I told the USO I think I’m getting too old to be traveling the Persian Gulf for Christmas. They said, ‘Baloney. The Ayatollah’s older than you, and he spends every Christmas there.”

But Hope seemed most touched, moved, scarred, by his first South Pacific visit in 1944. In a 1995 TV clip show included on the DVD, he recalls that he did a show for sailors on Mios Wundi Island near New Guinea. Lt. John Kennedy was in that audience, and 19 years later, in the White House, President JFK presented Hope with the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bob also shows clips of a performance for Marines on Pavuvu Island. He adds: “Of the 15,000 kids who cheered us in Pavuvu, 40% never got home.” At the end of the war reverie, Hope tells the audience: “All of us were left with memories. These are mine.” The camera closes in as, in his mottled hand, the 92-year-old Hope holds a photo of a dashing young man in uniform. It is his younger self: Bob, in his late 30s or early 40s, full of vitality and assurance, and ready — like the America he represented — to conquer the world.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on Bob Hope’s TV travels