The Funniest Man Who Ever Lived (by Larry Epstein)

Here's an excerpt from one of the early vaudeville skits performed by George Burns and Gracie Allen:

George: Gracie, let me ask you something. Did the nurse ever happen to drop you on your head when you were a baby?
Gracie: Oh, no. We couldn't afford a nurse. My mother had to do it.
George: You had a smart mother.
Gracie: Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.
George: Gracie, what school did you go to?
Gracie: I'm not allowed to tell
George: Why not?
Gracie: The school pays me $25 a month not to tell.

Many in the vaudeville audiences either did believe or wanted to believe that Burns and Allen were just reflexively funny. Great comedians could do that. Their well-rehearsed seeming spontaneity made it appear that they were thinking of the lines as they spoke them.

Of course, those lines had been carefully written. However, comedy writers rarely got any public recognition for their efforts. The writers knew the illusion that the comedians made up the material was part of the job. And they knew a joke was not just in the writing. The line had to be delivered well by a comedian the audience liked playing a character with whom the audience could identify.

There have been many great comedy writers, but Al Boasberg (right, with Marx brothers Chico and Harpo) gets my nomination as the greatest comedy writer of all time. Boasberg, the son of a Buffalo jeweler, was born in 1891. He sold pinky rings backstage at a local vaudeville theater. Soon he began selling $5 jokes to the comedians. George Burns found Boasberg in that theater, and the two joined together. Boasberg wrote many of the early Burns and Allen routines.

Jack Benny bought the first joke he ever told on stage from Boasberg for $25. The comedians of the day were called monologists. Monologists told a few jokes, but most of their act consisted of telling long stories or reciting some famous piece of literature. Boasberg thought Benny worked best just with the jokes. They developed Benny's character as a skinflint and then had the character tell joke after joke. The monologist had become a stand-up comic, and a new art form was invented.

Boasberg was the person who suggested that Bob Hope be given a screen test and then helped Hope develop his character. He told a 16 year old Milton Berle to go on stage and say he'd been accused of stealing jokes, the running gag of Berle's long career. Boasberg wrote the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera and wrote for Buster Keaton's The General. Boasberg rarely wrote the entire films on which he worked. He wrote gags, making the material others had written funny or funnier.

The lines he wrote were often hilarious, but the endurable and vivid comedy characters he created were his most important contribution. Creating those characters required not only a nimble mind but also a deeply subtle understanding of the foibles of human nature and the needs of American audiences.

Groucho Marx called Boasberg "probably the funniest man who ever lived," and Jack Benny called him "the greatest gag man who ever lived."

Boasberg had an odd way of doing his writing. He sat in a bathtub up to his neck in hot water and spoke into a Dictaphone a few feet from the tub. The shower stall had a shelf for some books to which he could refer.

On June 17, 1937 Boasberg met with Benny to work on a new character for the radio show. Boasberg wrote the lines for the incomparable African-American valet named Rochester. Benny and Boasberg shook hands on a new contract and Boasberg went home. He died very early the next morning from a coronary at age 45.

His early death was sad, and so, too, is the fact that Al Boasberg's name and contributions have remained largely unknown by the American public. His endlessly inventive mind, though, lives on through the comedy that American have, across the decades, so thoroughly enjoyed.

A NOTE TO READERS:

My purpose in this column is to identify worthy but neglected American cultural figures and creative efforts, the people, art, books, magazines, movies, music, performances, radio shows, and television shows that have been unfairly forgotten, underappreciated, or overlooked. These neglected figures and products can be from the past or present. I invite readers to comment about the column and to offer suggestions for what forgotten person or effort ought to be included.

Comments

[Laura Orem]

Groucho Marx tells a funny story about Boasberg, who worked at such a slow pace that it drove the frenetic Brothers crazy. While filming "A Night at the Opera," Boasberg wasn't moving fast enough for the Brothers, and they kept bugging him and bugging him for the scene he'd promised. Finally, after they'd nagged him for a few days, Boasberg called Groucho and said, "I've finished the scene. But you'll have to come over to my office and pick it up, because I'm going home." So the Brothers headed over to Boasberg's office. The scene was nowhere to be found. They emptied his desk, looked under the cushions on the chairs, nothing. Finally, one of the Brothers looked up. There was the promised scene - cut into one-line segments and nailed to the ceiling. They pulled the pieces down and started reassembling, a mammoth job of incredible tediousness, but, as Groucho pointed out, it was worth it - it was the first draft of the famous stateroom scene.

[Laura Orem]

Here's a link to the stateroom scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RocGJA3Mi1M

[Stacey]

This is interesting. I never heard of Boasberg so thanks for introducing him to me here. At some point I was told that Gracie wrote many of the Burns and Allen routines. Is that not true?
Stacey

[Larry Epstein]

Thanks, Stacey. Gracie didn't do any of the writing. For many years, she desperately wanted to leave the act, but its success and her husband's pleading made her stay. I think she felt trapped by the character.

[Lee Marc Stein]

Great column! One candidate for a future piece might be Jim Moran. He was both a TV/radio publicist and wacko practical joker in his own right whose halcyon days were the late '40s and '50s. I remember him doing some crazy bits on a TV show broadcast New Year's Eve in the early '60s. He's the writer of the George Washington Bridge song, and once sat on an ostrich egg for 19 days to promote the movie "The Egg and I."

[Larry Epstein]

Thanks, Lee. I appreciate the kind words. I think Jim Moran is an excellent suggestion, especially because of his inventive publicity stunts.

Larry

[ben schwartz]

Thanks for mentioning Boasy in your column. Recently, the Buffalo International Film Festival named its comedy award after Boasberg, too. Maybe there'll be a groundswell of Boasberg awareness in 2009. Who knows? If you're on Facebook, you can see the page up for it. The award will be designed by cartoonist/illustrator Drew Friedman, author of "Old Jewish Comedians."

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=86058158907&ref=ts

As for Boasberg and Benny, Boasberg sold Benny the first joke he ever bought, true, but Benny was already telling jokes on-stage before he met Boasberg - just not great ones. Benny paid for individual lines, and when he could afford a full act from Boasberg, the Benny we know was born.

[Larry Epstein]

Ben Schwartz is the author of an extraordinary article on Al Boasberg, the best work on the man. "The Gag Man" is available in The Film Comedy Reader edited by Gregg Rickman. I therefore thank him very much for his contribution.

[Robert Howe]

Regarding Gracie "Desperately" wanting to leave the act is inaccurate. Although a normal Burns and Allen TV script averaged 40 pages and 30 of those were Gracie's, she still enjoyed the work. George and the crew did everything they could to make filming as easy for Gracie as possible.

[Larry Epstein]

Perhaps "desperately" is too strong a word, but surely however much she enjoyed her work, she felt it was getting to be a strain. As you point out, she had a lot of lines and those lines would have been difficult for anyone to memorize. In many places, Burns is on record as saying that Gracie did want to leave years before she finally did.