Show Business: Master of Silence

Burglar: Your money or your life!

(Long pause.)

Benny: I’m thinking it over!

For Comedian Jack Benny the pauses were always more eloquent than the gags. When he died last week of cancer, Benny had become the grand master of comic timing; like Playwrights Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, he had built a career around silence.

That career was a capsule history of show business. Benny Kubelsky, a poor Jewish kid from Waukegan, III., was something of a prodigy on the violin; his father, a small-time haberdasher, entertained hopes of a concert career. But by 1912 the brash kid had practical-joked his way out of school and onto the vaudeville stage. His solo act, A Few Minutes with Jack Benny, swiftly became the country’s most civilized performance. When Jack tried a Broadway revue, Robert Benchley marveled at his savoir-faire. Yet somehow Benny always seemed a cut below headliner status. His few films for MGM were undistinguished; he was too low-key for nightclubs. By mid-Depression the choice was narrow: the new medium of radio or the old misery of starvation.

Drunken Bandleader. It was a momentous decision. “Practically all the comedy shows owe their structure to Benny’s conceptions,” admitted Comedian Fred Allen. “The Benny show was like a One Man’s Family in slapstick. He was the first comedian in radio to realize that you could get big laughs by ridiculing yourself instead of your stooges.”

The format was to become a permanent structure. Even today, Benny’s influence still echoes around the channels. Jack’s wisecracking girl friend —and offstage wife—Mary Livingstone is the original of Rhoda. Don Wilson, the pompous announcer, can be seen in Ted Knight’s role on the Mary Tyler Moore show. The drunken bandleader, Phil Harris, is a 100-proof version of Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s sidekick. Rochester, the sardonic Negro valet, is the granddaddy of all the servants, black and white, who have hilariously put down their employers since the invention of the vacuum tube.

With minute accretions, Benny developed a persona that was never more than 39, intolerably stingy—he drove an old, wheezy Maxwell—and cranky beyond repair. When radio grew static he opened a 20-year feud with Fred Allen. Benny put a clothespin on his nose and mimicked Allen’s nasal delivery. When Waukegan planted a tree in Benny’s honor, Allen asked, “How do you expect it to live when the sap is in Hollywood?” Once when Benny was on the losing end of an exchange, he told Al len, “You wouldn’t dare say that if my writers were here.”

In that line, he gave the show away. For Benny was never a great creator. Even on TV his gift was that of an actor who wraps himself in other people’s material. His props were inflections, pauses and reactions. In his mouth, “Well!” could express a thesaurus of repartee; a Benny “Yipe!” could wring laughter from a stone. Benny might have enjoyed a film career as durable as Bob Hope’s. As the Polish ham in Ernst Lubitsch’s wartime comedy, To Be or Not to Be, the comedian gave one of the screen’s classic performances. Indeed, British Actor Alec McCowen, whose humorous timing derives from Benny’s, called the old pro “one of the greatest comedic actors in the world.”

Vain Lothario. Yet Jack preferred the format that had brought him recognition and riches. By the ’50s, his TV program style—lifted bodily from the old radio days—had grown as rigid and formal as a state ceremony. Yet his fans never grew weary of the latter-day Scrooge.

But there was another Jack Benny —less comic but considerably more generous. It was that trouper who traversed the country, raising some $6 million for America’s leading orchestras. Thank yous were always abruptly dismissed. “Soloing with Leonard Bernstein,” he liked to claim, “is like being on a desert island with Zsa Zsa Gabor and her boy friend. You feel you’re not needed.”

It was a characteristic remark. The egomaniac was, in fact, a modest man. The vain Lothario had been married almost 50 years to the same woman. The skinflint was a great tipper.

To the end, Benny kept his own calendar. He continued to perform in concerts, star in TV specials and make plans for another film. “I never look back on life,” he liked to say. “I don’t indulge in nostalgia. The hell with the past. I’m only concerned with how good my last show was, and how good my next two will be.” Though he died at 80, neither he nor his jokes had ever really aged. It was part of Jack Benny’s gift to make the number 39 appear eternal.