Show Business: Hard Way to Tell a Joke

Two Manhattan TV critics (the World-Telegram’s Harriet Van Horne and the Journal-American’s Jack O’Brian) headlined their views identically: THE BIG PARTY is A BIG BORE. Fresh out of quiz programs to sponsor, Revlon this year is betting on 15 biweekly CBS variety shows, each to be laboriously dressed up to look like a party thrown by show folk for one another. Host of last week’s opening brawl (in a make-believe Waldorf duplex) was Movie Idol Rock Hudson, who a few years ago inspired the title for a comedy called Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Last week millions of televiewers found out the answer: no, because there is nothing to spoil. His amiable, muscular and vacant manner scarcely intruded on some predictably competent guests—Lisa Kirk (topnotch nightclub numbers), Sammy Davis Jr. (dervish dances and impersonations), Comedian Mort Sahl (sick, sick).

What was intensely irritating about the show was its phony air of spontaneity, with every delighted squeal (“Darling, I haven’t seen you in ages”) and every “ad-lib”‘ joke carefully put down beforehand by veteran Radio-TV Writer Goodman Ace and a staff of three. Typical of the show’s calculated coyness was the time Tallulah Bankhead (whose parody of herself is becoming increasingly pathetic) started to tell a joke about some Texans in Paris, only to be cut off by a commercial. Writer-Producer Ace promises that on successive shows a guest will tell a little bit more of the joke until, by season’s end. the whole story (cleaned up if necessary) may actually be heard on the air. Whether the joke turns out to be good or not, the prospect is misty.