Saturday, May 21, 2022

Vital Viewing (Serenading Second Banana Edition)

 


Singer and comedian--no, no, that's not right--comedian and singer--no, I had it right the first time--singer and comedian Dennis Day was born on this day in 1916 (he died in 1988.) Day thought of himself as a singer first and a comedian second, and I have to respect that. Yet watching this clip from the once-popular game show What's My Line, it's hard for me not to think of him as first and foremost a comedian:

If you haven't figured it out, the way the What's My Line mystery guest segment worked is the blindfolded celebrity was allowed to keep asking questions as long as each answer approximated a "yes".  A "no" and the next celebrity to the right got their turn, or if you were at the very right, as was Random House publisher and best-selling joke anthologist Bennett Cerf, then the next celebrity up would be the one at the very left, in this case Broadway gossip columnist and occasional true-crime journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. Dorothy's string of correct guesses was unusual. In most cases, there's were enough "no" answers to go around, assuring each panelist got a chance to ask a question. I suspect it was no accident that the line of questioning began with stage and radio actress Arlene Francis, that the producers hoped that the segment would reach an exciting climax once radio comedian Fred Allen's turn came up. If I'm right, then obviously, things didn't go according to plan. Why does it matter? Well, in the larger scheme of things it really doesn't, except that Allen previously had been engaged in decades-long mock feud with...


...radio, and by this time, television comedian Jack Benny, Dennis Day's long-time boss. As it was, poor Fred had to settle for blurting out Benny's name afterwards, but it would have been a lot cooler, and a lot funnier, if the acerbic comic had guessed the answer instead of Kilgallen. Oh, well, at least you know the contest wasn't rigged. As for whether Day was first and foremost a singer or a comedian, we have Benny to thank for that bit of confusion. Day indeed started out as a singer. Mary Livingston, Benny's wife and radio show castmate, had heard the 23-year-old Day sing on some local New York program and told hubby about it. Benny liked what he heard and hired him on, a big break for Day since he was now heard coast-to-coast. But he couldn't just sing, he had to perform comedy when asked to do so, and as time went on, he was asked to that more and more. Day was most certainly as good a comedian as he was a songster, more than holding his own with program regulars Livingston, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Mel Blanc, Frank Nelson ("EEE-yeeeeeeeesssss?") Phil Harris (a band leader first and Baloo the Bear second?) and Benny himself. You just heard how good he was with the mimicry, but he became best known as the smiling innocent who couldn't help but get on the dryly prickly Benny's nerves. 

It's more than nerves at stake in this gangster film parody:


Given the all the shootings in public places--there's been several just this past week, including that one in Buffalo--you may question whether the gunplay in the above video is an appropriate subject for humor. But that sketch is from 1960. Back then, as far as the average person was concerned, shootings in public places mostly happened in fictional movies and on fictional TV shows, and not on the nonfictional news found on yet-to-be-invented smart phones. So give Benny and his writers some slack. In the meantime, Turner Classic Movies fans may have recognized the first gangster to succumb to Jack's bullets. It's Dan Duryea, a supporting actor mainstay of the 1940s and '50s genre we now call film noir. Gunplay for him was rare enough outside a movie set that he could make fun of it, and himself.



By 1968 both the long-running radio show and the long-running TV show were off-the-air, but Benny and Day occasionally found things to do together, such as this Texaco commercial. Day is in his early 50s by now, but gamely still plays the insouciant youth of yore:


Life before the self-serve pump.

OK, I've said Day was also, even primarily, a singer, but what did he sing? Usually novelty-numbers, especially when he sang on TV. But the son of Irish immigrants seemed particularly drawn to...



...Irish songs (or songs written in America about Ireland.) Here's one such song. Longtime Benny announcer Don Wilson provides a bit of musical accompaniment towards the end:



Maybe Day was a singer after all. A comedian shouldn't let the announcer have the last laugh.


Dialect comedy has fallen out of favor in this century, arguably for a very good reason. By poking fun at foreign (as well as homegrown ethnic) accents, it encourages xenophobia and racism, which so plagues present-day politics (and, increasingly, present-day police dockets, hospitals, and cemeteries.) Yet I don't think Dennis Day's intent in the above video was meant to be so harmful. It was all in fun, and, besides, the British, French, and Germans haven't historically been among the more oppressed groups to make a home on these shores. The Irish are a different matter. If you go far enough back in time, you'd find they were a put-upon group in the early days of our republic. But as Dorothy Kilgallen already told you, Day was really Owen Patrick Eugene McNulty. Jack Benny (Benjamin Kebulsky) was another first-generation American, in his case the son of Russian Jews. It all harkens back to an earlier "great replacement" that took hold on an island named Ellis, one of those occasional moments in our nation's history when people aren't afraid of foreigners, or the descendants of foreigners, whether they have accents or not.


 

 

15 comments:

  1. This was so entertaining. I loved Dennis Day when I was a kid. Had nearly forgotten.

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    1. Mitchell, I pleased to have jogged your memory.

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  2. An interesting read about someone I knew nothing about.
    Ah, replacement... now where have I recently heard that word!!!

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    1. Andrew, events in the news obviously intruded upon my consciousness as I was working on this post.

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  3. Hi, Kirk!

    Happy 106th birthday in heaven to Dennis Day. I'm patting myself on the back for having a good memory in my old age, because the moment I laid eyes on Dennis' publicity portrait at the top of the post, I made the correct identification. I well remember Dennis from The Jack Benny Program. I can still hear Jack's voice addressing him and setting up a humorous dialogue with the words, "Now Dennis...

    Right off the bat, I will say that Dennis had better penmanship than most of the mystery celebrity guests that appeared on What's My Line? When he signed in on the chalkboard, his name was easy to read, while the signatures of other celebs looked like hieroglyphics. I watched that game show regularly and it was nice to see Dorothy Kilgallen, Fred Allen, Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf on the panel in this episode. Dorothy was a sharp cookie to zero-in on Dennis Day's identity during the round of questioning. I always liked Dorothy. She died young at age 52 either by accident or suicide, and What's My Line? host John Daly, fellow panelist Arlene Francis, WML producer Mark Goodson, the late Betty White and Ed Sullivan were among those in attendance at her funeral.

    i enjoyed the Shootout with Dennis scene from Jack Benny. I smiled all the way through, especially whenever Benny would look offstage in reaction to a punchline, one of his trademark moves. You're damn right about shootings being the stuff of fictional movies, TV crime dramas and funny TV sketches back then, and the Alec Baldwin incident was still light years away. Yes, I remember Dan Duryea, the slugger in that scene. I also enjoyed the Texaco commercial that played off the running joke that Benny was a tightwad. It was fun listening to Dennis running through Irish and French accents as he performed that Irish song with Don Wilson, the latter another familiar face and shape from my youth.

    I am not a big fan of dialect comedy, especially when a comedian relies heavily on it and goes to the well too often. To me, it's like spreading the big lie about the 2020 election being stolen. If you repeat a lie often enough, loudly enough and long enough, a significant number of people are going to start believing there's truth to it. Likewise, the repetition of jokes classifying one group of people as heavy drinkers and fighters, another group as greedy penny pinchers and another as stupid and lazy, can lead to large numbers of people forming a negative impression of those groups, and within that number, a few radicals that will grab their guns and take violent action against them.

    I thoroughly enjoyed this tribute to Dennis Day. Thanks, good buddy Kirk, and have a great weekend!

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    1. First off, Shady, Jack Benny was a comedy genius and would have been a comedy genius no matter who he surrounded himself with on the air. That he surrounded himself with people like Dennis Day who could be very funny in their own rights, well, that may have been a part of his genius--as well as a noticeable lack of anxiety about being upstaged. Benny was also the first radio comedian to credit his writers on the air. Bob Hope thought he was crazy to do that, though he eventually did so himself.

      I admit I never thought about the penmanship--or chalkmanship--of the What's My Line mystery guests. I used to watch the show on the Game Show Network and am familiar enough with old-time show biz to recognize most of the celebrities when they took their seats next to John Daly. Had I been a mystery guest--and a celebrity to boot--my signature would have looked like a Rorschach chalk blot test.

      I'm not trying to bring back dialect comedy. In fact, when Sid Ceasar died, I wondered out loud on this blog why Your Show of Shows had such a reputation for sophistication when so many of its skits relied so heavily, and so obviously, on Sid's phony foreign babbling. Yet I have to question whether banning something from print or the silver screen or the airwaves or, as some would like, the internet, really gets at the roots of certain problems. In the What's My Line video, when Dennis Day answers "si", I was momentarily reminded of the comedian Bill Dana, who made a name for himself in the 1960s by portraying a wide-eyed broken-English Hispanic character named José Jiménez. In 1970, Dana (who in fact was Hungarian-Jewish) announced he would never again play the character and held a mock funeral for him on Sunset Boulevard, which eventually earned the comedian a commendation from the National Hispanic Media Coalition. Yet you can't really say 52 years of José Jiménez-less comedy has led to a noticeable improvement in Hispanic-NonHispanic relations. This isn't meant as an argument for Dana bringing the character back (kind of hard to do since he's been dead for five years) only that when it comes to xenophobia and racism there may be forces at work other than comedy.

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    2. By the way, Bill Dana also wrote the famous Sammy Davis Jr episode of All in the Family. Go figure.

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  4. I remember seeing Dennis Day in a lot of old movies when I was a kid!

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  5. HA! I did not know about Benjamin Kebulsky.

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    1. Mike, Old Hollywood seemed to be a drop-off point for so many immigrants and children of immigrants, it should have had its own Statue of Liberty. Come to think of it...

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ4bg0dXu9A

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  6. I was so enthralled by the What's My Line clip and how they guessed. I was also giggling at their blindfolds!

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    1. JM, those blindfolds covered their cheeks as well as their eyes.

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  7. We had Whats my Line in England too - a knock off of the US show I imagine. The most famous one was a saggar maker's bottom knocker - something to do with the pottery trade!

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  8. Jenny, I would never have guessed that occupation. In fact, I never HEARD of that occupation.

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