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With gags alone, no matter how expertly fired, no comic can hit even a gag-loving nation between the eyes. Gags are too brassy, fleeting, unvisual. The true clown or jester tops the gag man by being both a richly eccentric character and a vividly expressive type—Chaplin is The Little Man, Durante The Wild Man, Ed Wynn The Perfect Fool. Hope has no eccentric character; but by giving his gags dramatic value he made himself a type—the dumb wise guy, the quaking braggart, the lavish tightwad. But this type somehow dissolves into a far broader and more significant one—thanks to his vibrant averageness, Hope is any healthy, cocky, capering American. He is the guy who livens up the summer hotel, makes things hum at the corset salesmen's convention, keeps a coachful of passengers laughing for an hour when a train is stalled. With his ski-slide nose and matching chin, he looks a little funny but he also looks normal, even personable, seems part of the landscape rather than the limelight.
And though he hugs the limelight with a showman's depthless ego, in Hope himself is a hunger, or perhaps a final vanity, to reach people as a human being. For a performer who scarcely takes time out to live, perhaps it is the only way of being one.
Hare & Tortoise. In his job, the great ad-libber leaves nothing to luck. He wins by being hare & tortoise both—by carefully plugging along with the help of a batch of scriptwriters and a roomful of filing cabinets, then racing ahead on his own sharp wit. In any Pepsodent broadcast, it's a wise crack that knows its own father.
For every broadcast, Hope's scripters scout for atmosphere, poke into the files for gags that can be retrimmed, dream up new ones. Then they put their heads and hoards together, producing a script that Hope proceeds to tear apart—cutting, sharpening, fitting to character. Finally, before the Tuesday night broadcast (NBC —10 p.m. E.W.T.), there is a Sunday night sealed-in-the-studio tryout at which the audience acts as blue pencil and Hope runs hog-wild.
Hope carves up his movie scripts too—and if Bing Crosby is also in the picture, they go in for downright slaughter. To one scripter who turned up on the set of Road to Singapore, Hope hollered: "If you hear any of your dialogue, yell Bingo!"
Up from Knavery. The fifth of a stonemason's seven sons, Leslie Townes Hope was born in Eltham, England in 1904. (He later changed Leslie to Lester because it sounded more masculine, Lester to Bob because it sounded more matey.)
Then the Hopes migrated to Cleveland. There Bob ran around with a bunch of little toughies, filching apples from pushcarts, racking pool balls, selling papers (legend has it that John D. Rockefeller Sr. once rebuked Newsboy Hope for offering to trust him). He was also a choirboy until "in the middle of a lovely solo, my voice changed."