STARS
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They'd know that jaunty saunter 0anywhere. Bob Hope comes onstage with the cocky glide of a golfer who has just knocked off three birdies for a 68 and nailed Arnold Palmer to the clubhouse door. The crooked grin spreads wide, the clear brown eyes stay cool, and the audience roars its welcome; they can hardly wait for Hope to sock it to them. And so he does. Five, six gags a minute. Pertinent, impertinent, leering, perishing. And sometimes plopping, but only for an instant. When he misses, the famous scooped snoot shoots defiantly skyward, the prognathous jaw drops in mock anguish, or he goes into a stop-action freeze. Sometimes he just repeats the line until the audience gets it. They don't have to laugh of course —but if they don't, it's almost treason.
Probably nobody recalls the sprightly Hope ebullience and the Hope-engendered laughs so well as two generations of U.S. military men. For twelve Christmases straight, Hope has spent the holidays with the troops—in Alaska and Korea, in the Azores and North Africa, in Guadalcanal and London and Viet Nam. Last week, with a company that included Raquel Welch, Miss World (Madeleine Hartog-Bel), Singer Barbara McNair, Bing Crosby's son Phil and Bandleader Les Brown, Hope arrived in Bangkok for his fourth Viet Nam tour. No doubt there will be old soldiers who will tell him that they saw him in Bougainville in 1944 and youngsters who will say that their dads caught his act in Frankfurt. And no doubt Hope will quip that "I hope your grandfather didn't miss me at Appomattox—I was great!"
Tee Off. At 64, Hope is the Will Rogers of the age, a kind of updated, urbanized farmer's almanac of political and social currents. Rogers was the sly rustic, a humorist with a lariat; Hope is the self-caricaturing sophisticated comic with a paradiddle patter. Rogers was show business, and so is Hope, and they share the same understanding of what is unique in American humor: a healthy irreverence for pomp and position. And they both succeeded by pitching their personalities across the footlights to touch their listeners with something close to folk wisdom. Some of Hope's lines even sound like Will Rogers'. "I like to see politicians with religion," he says. "It keeps their hands out where we can see them."
More than Rogers, Hope has become the friend of politicians and statesmen, tycoons and sportsmen. These are the public figures at whom he tees off at a banquet or on television; yet they cannot wait to tee off with him on the links the next day. He kids the starch out of them, and they feel better for it; a needle from Hope becomes an emblem instead of a scar.
Hope laces his wit with good taste. He may sometimes play the ogling goof, but he is essentially a monologist who portrays no other character than Bob Hope. Jack Benny is a "character" comedian—stingy Jack. Such comics as Danny Kaye, Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason shine best in sketches. Many of today's young monologists, in the style of the late Lenny Bruce, specialize in acutely perceived, often bitter commentary, not to say four-letter words. Hope's comedy is broader, less original in viewpoint, but it is almost always clean, just as topical, more deftly timed, and tuned more to the sensibilities of his audiences.