Jack Benny: King of Classic Comedy

Comedian Jack Benny (L) in a 1977 skit with Eddie Anderson who played Benny's sidekick and valet Rochester. Public Domain

Many of our country’s most beloved entertainers started out in vaudeville, a national network of theaters offering bills of miscellaneous acts: singers, dancers, comedians. For Americans, it was television before there was television. TV variety shows, in fact, with hosts like Ed Sullivan and Carol Burnett, were vaudeville’s final encore.

Performers known for one skill in vaudeville sometimes became stars later doing something completely different. Funny man W.C. Fields began in vaudeville as a juggler. Comedy legend Jack Benny began as a musician.

Dry Humor Makes a Star

Born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago in 1894, Benny helped out at his father’s dry goods store while studying the violin. By age 17, he was good enough to score gigs in vaudeville. Joining the Navy’s entertainment division in 1918, Benny discovered his talent for comedy and demoted the violin to a prop, which he deliberately played badly for comic effect. After the war, he returned to vaudeville, this time as a comedian.

Joan and her father, Jack Benny, in 1944. Public Domain

Instead of imitating the knockabout clowning of The Three Stooges or the verbal sparring of the Marx Brothers, Benny forged his own uniquely dry, self-deprecating style. Though Benny was kind and generous in real life, the character he played onstage was vain, malicious, and ludicrously stingy. It was all part of the act and audiences loved every minute.

Benny’s appeal stemmed in part from his running gags and catch phrases. He insisted he was 39 years old—for decades. He maintained a “feud” with fellow comedian Fred Allen. He scolded audiences with “Now cut that out!” or a frustrated “Well!”

His exasperated fingers-to-cheek gesture was endlessly imitated, and nobody did deadpan or the “slow burn” better. Benny’s flawless timing, sly pauses, and comical vanity would influence comedians right down to the present day.

Jack Benny was also the king of one-liners: “When another comedian has a lousy show, I’m the first one to admit it.” “I’m an old newspaper-man myself, but I quit because I found there was no money in old newspapers.” “I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.” “My wife Mary and I have been married for 47 years and not once have we had an argument serious enough to consider divorce. Murder, yes, but divorce, never.”

Jack Benny and his wife, Mary Livingstone, who performed as his secretary in his radio shows, in 1944. Public Domain

Benny and Anderson

Beginning in 1932, “The Jack Benny Program” reigned for 20 years as one of the most popular programs on the radio. His supporting cast included his real-life wife as a wisecracking secretary, and Eddie Anderson as “Rochester,” Benny’s valet, who could outwit his employer and always had a quip to burst Benny’s bubble.

The great Mel Blanc voiced additional characters, as he would go on to do for Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and more than 400 other cartoon personalities.

Eddie “Rochester” Anderson was the first black actor to land a regular role on a nationwide radio, and later television, program. Although he’d been in movies since 1932, he became famous as Benny’s gravel-voiced sidekick. Benny and Anderson’s humorous partnership delighted listeners and viewers for almost three decades. In later years, Anderson bought and trained racehorses while still appearing in movies and on TV.

Benny and Anderson were close friends on and off the screen. Benny refused to stay in hotels that didn’t admit Anderson, and he didn’t let his writers use racial slurs or demeaning stereotypes.

Into Filmed Media

Besides radio, Jack Benny appeared in many movies. Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be” (1942) cast the comedian as an actor who impersonates a Gestapo officer to foil a German spy and get his troupe, including his wife (Carole Lombard), safely out of occupied Warsaw.

Carole Lombard and Jack Benny starred in Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be," a comedic satire that criticized the Nazi regime. United Artists

Today, the film is acclaimed as one of Hollywood’s finest comedies, but at the time not everyone was amused. Some felt that setting a farce in war-torn Poland, which Hitler had invaded only three years earlier, was in bad taste. Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times: “To say it is callous and macabre is understating the case.”

In 1950, “The Jack Benny Show” migrated to television. Loyal to his radio family, Benny brought them along. With typical generosity he gave Rochester, Mary, and the rest most of the punchlines. The beloved regulars and a parade of famous guest stars—everyone from Bob Hope to Jayne Mansfield—kept the sketch comedy show running for 15 years.

In a 2020 interview, Benny’s daughter, Joan, remembered her father as “a truly nice man.” The feeling was general among those who knew and worked with him.

His shows are remembered as “a high-water mark in 20th century American comedy,” and possibly no comedian ever earned more respect and affection from his peers. British comic Benny Hill even took his stage name from him.

In the words of Carol Burnett, Jack Benny was “a timeless kind of funny.”