Jack Benny and Radio Comedy in American Culture, 1932-1955

FAIN: FA-57271-13

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA 30303-3011)

Comedian Jack Benny mattered enormously to 20th-century American culture--he taught us how to live in the endlessly compromised world of consumer culture. Jack Benny’s character (the ultimate Fall Guy; the vain, cheap Everyman; your family’s hapless Uncle) suffered all the indignities of the powerless patriarch in modern society--fractious workplace family, battles with obnoxious sales clerks, guff from his servant, and withering disrespect from his boss/sponsor, all women in general, and the leaders of Hollywood society. From the hard times of the Depression, through the pinched war years, to 1950s’ prosperity, Benny’s schemes to avoid spending money collapsed like his dignity, week after week, as his inflated ego was punctured by fate, abetted by his unruly staff. Benny could only dissolve into raging tantrums and injured sighs. Thirty million Americans laughed at him, and with him, each week for more than three decades as he sardonically skewered American cultural foibles.

Associated Products

Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (Book)
Title: Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy
Author: Kathryn H Fuller-Seeley
Abstract: The king of radio comedy from the Great Depression through the early 1950s, Jack Benny was one of the most influential entertainers in twentieth-century America. A master of comic timing and an innovative producer, Benny, with his radio writers, developed a weekly situation comedy to meet radio’s endless need for new material, at the same time integrating advertising into the show’s humor. Through the character of the vain, cheap everyman, Benny created a fall guy, whose frustrated struggles with his employees addressed midcentury America’s concerns with race, gender, commercialism, and sexual identity. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley contextualizes her analysis of Jack Benny and his entourage with thoughtful insight into the intersections of competing entertainment industries and provides plenty of evidence that transmedia stardom, branded entertainment, and virality are not new phenomena but current iterations of key aspects in American commercial cultural history.
Year: 2017
Access Model: printed book
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-052029505

Jack Benny’s Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One May 2- July 27, 1932 (Book)
Title: Jack Benny’s Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume One May 2- July 27, 1932
Author: Jack Benny
Author: Harry Conn
Editor: Kathryn H Fuller-Seeley
Abstract: For the first time in almost 90 years, we can experience the origins of Jack Benny’s radio comedy genius. Jack Benny’s Lost Radio Broadcasts, brought up from Benny’s subterranean vault [or the UCLA archives, almost as difficult to access!] finally share scripts of his earliest live radio programs—for which no recordings exist.See how the soon-to-be-king of radio comedy moved from his vaudeville stand-up comedy background to invent the workplace situation comedy.In these first shows of 1932, Jack plays a “Broadway Romeo,” a genial, self-deprecating comedian, who is not yet the famously cheap “fall guy” he would become over the next two years. Jack claims that it’s his bandleader, George Olsen, who’s the tightwad. Highlights of Volume One include:•Jack’s commercials for Canada Dry Ginger Ale- the funniest, and most controversial, advertising parodies he would ever perform.•Jack’s panic as he realizes he has used up every vaudeville routine he’d ever performed on stage, and this is a twice-a-week program.•The initial Introduction of Mary Livingstone, the radio fan from Plainfield, New Jersey.•An introduction by Kathy Fuller-Seeley that sets the stage for why these historic shows are so important to understand Benny’s career.These 26 hilarious radio scripts offer Jack Benny at his early creative best.Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is the author of Jack Benny and the Golden Age of Radio Comedy (2017) and books on early motion pictures and nickelodeon audiences. She teaches media history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Year: 2020
Access Model: published book
Publisher: Bear Manor Media
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-1629335780

Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume Two: August 1 to October 26, 1932 (Book)
Title: Jack Benny's Lost Radio Broadcasts, Volume Two: August 1 to October 26, 1932
Author: Harry Conn
Author: Jack Benny
Editor: Kathryn H Fuller-Seeley
Abstract: In Volume Two of Jack Benny's Lost Broadcasts, (25 episodes from August 1 to October 26, 1932), Benny and scriptwriter Harry Conn continue to craft a personality-based radio variety program. They draw on Benny's vaudeville style and explore new constructions of comedy characters and situations. Benny and Conn develop quirky-yet-likeable identities for the major performers - "Broadway Romeo" Jack, tightwad band leader George Olsen, sultry vocalist Ethel Shutta and flighty young fan Mary Livingstone from Plainfield, New Jersey. The cast bounces jokes, reactions and bad puns off each other. This series features experimentations - several political skits, a serious romance for Jack and Mary, and the program's first film parody - then ends with a sudden twist.
Year: 2021
Access Model: published book
Publisher: Bear Manor Media
ISBN: 978-1629338453

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