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Hopeless: Did Bob Hope ever say anything funny? (Christopher Hitchens, August 1, 2003, Slate)

To be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is not a particular defect or shortcoming in, say, a cable repair man or a Supreme Court justice or a Navy Seal. These jobs can be performed humorlessly with no loss of efficiency or impact. But to be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is a serious drawback, even lapse, in a comedian. And the late Bob Hope devoted a fantastically successful and well-remunerated lifetime to showing that a truly unfunny man can make it as a comic. There is a laugh here, but it is on us.

Give a man a reputation as an early riser, said Mark Twain, and that man can thereafter sleep until noon. Quick, then—what is your favorite Bob Hope gag? It wouldn't take you long if I challenged you on Milton Berle, or Woody Allen, or John Cleese, or even (for the older customers) Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl. By this time tomorrow, I bet you haven't come up with a real joke for which Hope could take credit.

This, of course, comes from the same source as all the former-radicals-now-neocons who are denouncing Ann Coulter for defending McCarthy. Christopher Hitchens, like many of his generation, hates Bob Hope for the same reason they hated John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, because these men were right about the justness of the Vietnam War in particular and the Cold War generally, whereas Hitchens and his ilk were pro-Soviet then. In effect, Mr. Hitchens has to attack Bob Hope's comedic reputation to get revenge for Hope's being more competent at Mr. Hitchens's chosen profession: political analyst.

Watch The Road to Morocco, or pretty much any of Hope's movies, and you see a comic with exquisite timing and delivery. John Cleese is really a pretty good comparison. There are no great Cleesian lines--there's just Cleese being Cleesish. John Cleese doesn't so much say funny things as be funny. Bob Hope too was funny. Even more remarkable though than just Mr. Hope's comedic gift, watch a Road movie and you're seeing two notorious conservatives do post-modernism before the academy decided po-mo would be revolutionary. Hope and Crosby toyed with narrative structures before Spike Jonz and Charlie Kaufman were born.

One really strange thing about the essay though is that Hitchens follows his own challenge with this:

I saw him twice, and both times he was playing, as he often did, to the soft-centered Brit or Anglophile culture. At an evening dedicated to Prince Philip at Merv Griffin's Beverly Hilton, Hope got up and told of how he left England at the age of 3. "It was either that," he said, "or marry the girl." The timing was OK, consisting as it did of a long pause. The next time I caught the act was at the British Embassy in Washington, where the ambassador did the intro and tried to wow the crowd by telling "Bob's" favorite reminiscence, which was that he left England at the age of 3, having discovered that he could never become king. These are the kinds of joke that keep things going at golf clubs or Rotary dinners: They are harmless and sentimental and have no intrinsic humor. A Bob Hope joke was no laughing matter: It was a bland attempt at what we would now yawningly call inclusiveness.

Now, in the first place, that's a good line. But second, in the context of the story, the suggestion seems to be that Mr. Hope's admittedly mildly risque joke about his childhood sexual prowess doesn't elevate him to the cutting edge level of a Woody Allen--who you'll recall proved his edginess when he ran off with Mia Farrow's child. Is the point that it is no longer sufficient to joke about something somewhat outrageous but that you have to go out and do it? Was Lenny Bruce funnier than Bob Hope because he was obscene? In the age of such drek as American Pie one is almost afraid to ask the question, but: is humor merely measured by shock value now? And, if it is, who would require that Mr. Hope be measured by that degraded standard? Who, that is, that does not have a political axe to grind?

Lastly, it's all well and good that Mr. Hitchens decided to side with the West after 9-11, when it became popular, but Bob Hope was so closely identified with America and the fight for freedom that he was actually the target of a terrorist attack:

1964, Bien Hoa, Vietnam. On Christmas Eve, just before Hope and his USO troupe were to arrive at the Brinks Hotel, a disguised Viet Cong truck with 300 pounds of TNT exploded, blowing out the hotel walls. Hope was delayed because his cue-card man, Barney McNulty, was late getting the cards off the plane. A Viet Cong document found later indicated that Hope was the target of the attack. Hope's opening gag at his next show: "I want to thank you for your welcome to Saigon. As I came into town, I saw a hotel go the other way."

Given that Mr. Hitchens to this day labors under the delusion that our foes in Vietnam were latter-day Jeffersonians, perhaps that was a form of terrorism he found less troublesome than the current kind. But it's worth noting that Mr. Hope was with the marines in Beirut twenty years before Mr. Hitchens (who waxed nostalgic at the death of Abu Nidal, who was the proximate cause of our being in Lebanon) had his conversion experience.

Bob Hope was an American icon for sixty some odd years. Mr. Hitchens was paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly un-American for the first five or so decades of his life. The joke here is not just on Mr. Hitchens, it is him and his former Marxism, which makes him incapable of appreciating his better. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 1, 2003 8:32 PM