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.
