Showing posts with label Jack Benny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jack Benny. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Well!


Here's a question that scares me, frankly: Is mine the last generation to "get" the cultural assumptions that underlie the hilariousness of all the Jack Benny gags in this four-decade-old episode of The Lucy Show?

Friday, January 16, 2009

I miss the '60s: Part 2,347

The great thing about the 1960s was that society hadn't completely fragmented yet . . . and you had only a few TV channels from which to choose.

That meant you still had things like variety shows on the tube -- the Kraft Music Hall, preserved here from 1967, for example. It also meant you had these wonderfully awkward mashups like Jack Benny introducing, then interviewing, the Blues Magoos.

Oh . . . don't watch this video if you have some sort of seizure disorder. It's '60s psychedelic TV production at its finest.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Jack Benny: The original twisted Christmas





Before Monty Python, there was Jack Benny. Warped and absurd doesn't just come from nowhere, you know.

And sometimes, prime-time television in White Bread America (which is what we, today, assume what all of America must have been in December 1960, when the episode of The Jack Benny Program aired) was just downright twisted. So twisted there would be hell to pay if it aired today.

I'D TELL YOU how twisted, but that would give away the plot. And the jokes.

No, in the New Edgy Millennium, you can rhapsodize about giving your baby "D*** in a Box," but you can't show this.

In 2008, you can go just so far. We have standards of decency, you know. Some things still are offensive.

But if you can't be offensive at Christmastime, though, when can you in the New Edgy Millennium?

Strike a blow for freedom of expression. Watch.