Radio: Out in Left Field

In radio’s hierarchy, nothing is much lower than a summer replacement. Few performers make the grade from an easy summer show to the rigorous winter competition. This week a comedian made it. Jack Paar, an unpredictable young man (29) with a windblown sense of humor, was kept on by the American Tobacco Co. and given cozy quarters (9:30 to 10 p.m.—between Abbott & Costello and Bing Crosby) on ABC’s Wednesday night program powerhouse.

How he did it was still something of a puzzle. As a summer fill-in for Veteran Jack Benny, Paar has set no new records. His Hooperating, beginning with a mild 10.2 on June 1, drooped steadily to an ominous 4.8 in late summer. Radio people had all but dismissed him as a heady, handsome prima donna whose humor was too specialized and too sophisticated.

Moody, Mad Thing. Jack Paar lives in an improbable little world of satire filled with musclebound lady wrestlers, bombproof subterranean love nests and amorous girl gym teachers. Political commentators in Paar scripts have great difficulty “predicting” that Friday will follow Thursday; small boys expect to be rewarded with refrigerators when they answer questions in history class. Because U.S. institutions are Paar’s target, a Paar grammar school administration drums up business with radio commercials (“Children! Have you tried the seventh grade?”).

Paar has been kicking this kind of humor around show business for eleven years. Born in Canton, Ohio, he began training early. “I was a sensitive boy,” he says grandly. “Moody. A mad, mad thing even then.” He landed his first job at 18 announcing in Indianapolis. He “loved” radio, he says, but the station did not love him. He lost half a dozen jobs because he could not make the broadcast on time (“Hell, I was at my typewriter creating”).

Just as he was beginning to catch on as a wisecracking Buffalo disc jockey, the Army caught up with him. He was put into a G.I. entertainment unit trailing Benny and Hope around the Pacific.

The Real Me. Paar sometimes proved to be a bigger hit with G.I.s than either of his famous predecessors, mostly because of his almost foolhardy brass-baiting. Once he squelched a noisy, silver-barred heckler by cracking, “Lieutenant, a man with your I.Q. should have a low voice, too.” He once addressed a commanding officer as “My dear sir—and you are none of the three—.” Or, apologetically: “I suppose I shouldn’t talk about officers so much. Some try, a few are sincere, and—what the hell—a couple even know what they’re doing.”

One day he went too far. A commodore was so outraged by Paar’s impudence that he ordered the comedian court-martialed. The Army had to bail Jack out by promising to exile him to Okinawa. “But they couldn’t do that,” cackles Paar. “I found out later that some friendly doctor had written all across my record, ‘Unstable, Positively Unfit for Front-Line Duty.’ Best friend I ever had.”

With three complete turns of the Pacific to his credit and the war ended, Paar turned his fat press notices into a movie contract and a radio show for Camel cigarets. He lasted exactly three weeks. “They cut my lines,” he says. “They had no understanding of the real me.” American Tobacco came to the rescue.

Paar attracted attention with his summer show despite its low rating. In big-time radio this fall, attention will be harder to get. But Paar is confident. “I will not mug. No, I will not mug,” he cries. “Way out in left field, that’s where my humor really lies. I’m new and I’m good. And I represent true radio as against the false radio we have been getting from the vaudeville comics. . . . Me and Henry Morgan and a few others . . . we’re the future.”