Hancocks Half Hour Episodes Collection
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For the two and a half decades The Jack Benny Show was on radio, Benny and his writers came up with a lot of of the most beloved gags of the era. And they mined them like gold. Just a few of the ongoing jokes were:
And of course there were a lot of more. One of Jack’s favored bits, and I dare say mine, was the ongoing kinship amongst Jack and his “next door neighbors,” Ronald Colman and Benita Hume (the real life Mrs. Colman). The Colmans firstborn guest starred on the show in 1945. They played Jack’s neighbors, a prop that had been brought up on prior shows but never genuinely dramatized. The episode was so standard (you may listen it on my blog) that the Colmans were called back assorted times that season and for the next assorted seasons after that. The gag, of course, was that Ronald and Benita Colman were a proper British couple: Very refined and very reserved in their manners and social graces. Benny was – well, Benny. He perpetually borrowed items from his neighbors and Mr. Colman quietly seethed at the audacity of Benny’s miserly ways. Looking out the front window, Colman regularly observed not only the spectacle next door, but also Jack’s jokes in the neighborhood. He was perpetually bewildered by the way Benny was followed around by his group of “dimwitted” friends, peculiarly “that Phil Harris fellow.” Mr. Colman, much too much the proper English gentleman, could never actually be rude and tell Benny what he thought. Instead, he dumped all his foilings on his his poor, long suffering wife Benita – who perpetually got an ear full. And as the third person in the room, so did we. Jack, of course, was exclusively unmindful to Colman’s attitude. Benny considered himself equivalent to, or superior, to the Colman’s on each level: as an actor, as a star, in his social life… well, you get the picture. The results were hilarious. One of the funniest outstanding old radio shows, hands down, was The Jack Benny Show. And of all the sequences in my collection, the shows featuring Ronald Colman and Benita Hume as Jack’s neighbors are my sheer favorites. They are still laugh out earsplitting funny! |
