OVERLY VERBAL?

Bob Hope, Prisoner of War (Francis Davis, July 30, 2003, The Nation)

Hope's influence has been ubiquitous, both as a stand-up comedian and as a comic actor. Without him as the prototype, there would be no Johnny Carson, Steve Martin or Bill Murray -- to say nothing of Maxwell Smart, Austin Powers, George Costanza, Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife and even M*A*S*H's Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, an idealist-become-cynic whose nonstop wisecracking outweighed the fact that he was Hope's antithesis in every other way (many of his quips were the work of Larry Gelbart, the creator of the series, who did his own tour of duty in Korea as Hope's head writer). Conan O'Brien, when announcing that his guests that night include a supermodel or leggy movie star, might lick his index fingers and use them to smooth his eyebrows, like Hope primping for what he's only been led to believe will be a romantic rendezvous (it's usually some sort of scheme, with him as the sucker). The host of Late Night also occasionally growls when an attractive female guest says something provocative, a variation on Hope's ejaculatory woof! And the premise of many of O'Brien's best sketches is either that he's sexually inadequate or that nobody thinks he's funny -- two more pages straight out of Hope's book, as O'Brien would be the first to admit.

Hope's other most adoring fan among fellow professionals is Woody Allen, who once admitted that "it's everything I can do at times not to imitate him," and has himself frequently been accused of being overly verbal in his approach to comedy. "It's hard to tell when I do," Allen said in 1973 while filming Sleeper, "because I'm so unlike him physically and in tone of voice, but once you know I do it, it's absolutely unmistakable." (Forget that Hope is funny-haha, and Allen often funny-weird. The real difference between them is that Allen, in his movies, is usually desperate for our approval, whereas Hope dared us to dislike him, confident that he was irresistible.) Allen has more or less credited Hope with inventing the one-liner, which I think is going a little too far. What Hope does seem to have originated, for better or worse, is the celebrity in-joke, a type of humor that assumes the audience is familiar with the foibles of the stars. (It resembles ethnic humor in presupposing such knowledge, but hasn't celebrity become a type of ethnicity? Many show business elders adored Ronald Reagan when he was President not because they agreed with his policies but because he was one of theirs.) Jokes about the famous flatter the rest of us, in making us feel like members of the clan. But no other brand of humor has a shorter shelf-life. [...]

What other comics have always admired about Hope isn't necessarily his material, but his mechanics -- the smoothness of his setups and payoffs. My favorite joke of his, in a way, is the one he opened with after being announced as the winner of the Hersholt award: "I don't know what to say," he admitted, seemingly humbled, then waited a beat. "I don't have writers for this kind of work." "Bob Hope is supposed to employ so many gagmen they are organizing a union," the film critic Otis Ferguson once remarked -- a joke that only sounds like one written for Hope. The new Bob Hope: My Life in Jokes, assembled by his daughter Linda, proves that Hope's humor doesn't really translate to the page. His gift, hardly a small one, was in delivering scripted material as if he were ad-libbing.

In the 1960s, Hope found himself on the wrong side of both a war and a generation gap. How did someone with such unerring timing so misjudge the cultural moment?

Wise both about what made Bob Hope funny and about why a certain generation won't acknowledge it. Who but the Baby Boomers would believe that Bob Hope owes them an apology for supporting the war rather than they owe the people of Vietnam one for opposing it?

MORE:
Bob Hope: Court Jester (Marty Jezer, August 4, 2003, AlterNet)

In the late 1950s, a new generation of comedians came to the fore: Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, and Shelly Berman to name a few. Their subject was social and political reality: what was happening behind the headlines, and in the bedrooms, boardrooms and backseats in our lives. While Bob Hope got laughs from sexual double entendres, the new comedians spoke about real relationships, which, because they were "real," included sexual situations. In making everyday experience the subject of humor, these comics gave Americans permission and a language to talk about what was bothering them. Time Magazine, mounting a defense of Bob Hope's humor and Bob Hope's world, dubbed them "sick comedians." Their "sicknik" humor, Time said, "represented a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world."

The world was changing and comedians were on the cusp of that change. In totalitarian states, people who question authority are often dismissed, hence marginalized, as having mental problems. But who or what was sick: comedians or society? As Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanist psychology, was soon to ask, what is a healthy reaction to racism, poverty, totalitarianism, and "the husband who wants his wife to remain a child?" Maslow's answer, written in "Toward A Psychology of Being," was: "It seems quite clear that personality problems may sometimes be loud protests against one's psychological bones, of one's true inner nature. What is sick then is not to protest when this crime is being committed."

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2003 7:45 PM