Hope Springs Eternal

For baby boomers of a certain (rapidly advancing) age, Bob Hope’s popularity is one of the enduring cultural mysteries. Unexpectedly, however, we now have a better chance of solving it than ever before, thanks to the Library of Congress, of all places, and thanks also to Hope himself, who has bankrolled the library’s new “Bob Hope Gallery of American Entertainment,” which opened last month in an out-of-the-way corner of the Jefferson Building on Capitol Hill. The gallery’s first show is — no surprise here — called “Bob Hope and American Variety.” Drawn from Hope’s own vast archives (which his family has begun generously to disgorge into the Library of Congress’s yawning maw) as well as from bits of other collections, the exhibit aims to tell not only Hope’s story but also the story of twentieth-century American popular entertainment. It is hard, in fact, to tell one story without reference to the other.

Bob Hope, christened Leslie Townes Hope, was an immigrant. Born in England in 1903, he was brought to Cleveland by his ne’er-do-well father and a mother bedazzled by show business. He left school at sixteen, and at his mother’s urging turned to dancing and clowning as a way to help support the family. Before long vaudeville beckoned. It is a theme of the exhibit that the conventions of vaudeville pervade popular culture even today, seventy years after its formal demise — surviving in the monologues of late-night comedians, for example, or in the variety-format of Las Vegas revues. But if this is vaudeville, it is so only in a sadly attenuated form; the thing in its original state was a short step up the evolutionary ladder from the carnival midway. The chief characteristic of vaudeville — as the exhibit itself makes plain — was an extravagant preoccupation with eccentricity and freakishness, both human and non-. A typical show might comprise a dozen acts, each more unnerving than the last: contortionists, dancing bears, acrobats, strongmen, fiddle-playing baboons, speed-talkers, comics notable for their obesity, their feebleness, their speech impediments, or their dead-on embodiment of one ethnic stereotype or another. Hope’s first success came when he and a male partner teamed up with the Hilton sisters, a pair of Siamese twins. (“I never dated them,” he said later. “They were too much woman for me.”)

The exhibit excels at conveying this raucously anarchic atmosphere, through an unexpected blending of odds and ends — everything from railroad timetables and newspaper reviews to audio recordings and silent film clips of long-forgotten acts. In the small-time circuits where Hope began, shows ran continuously through the day and into the evening; big-time acts could get away with two performances a night. Transportation and accommodations were primitive; Hope’s first partner died of ptomaine poisoning contracted in an Ohio greasy spoon. He found other partners — there was a bottomless supply — but by the late 1920s Hope had stumbled upon his true calling. In Newcastle, Pennsylvania, one evening, the show’s master of ceremonies took sick. Hope was asked to introduce the next act. His introduction dragged on into an extemporized monologue that brought down the house. By the end of the show he had decided to strike out on his own as a solo act.

On the circuit thereafter, Hope toured as a master of ceremonies — a role quite different from his earlier bread-and-butter as a song and dance man. By introducing the acts and occasionally letting the audience in on backstage goings-on, the emcee placed himself as an intermediary between the spectator and the performer, neither one nor the other but containing elements of each. The persona Hope created for himself was avowedly a figure of fun — the butt of jokes from pretty girls and the target of taunts from hecklers planted in the audience — which made him at once a performer and a character sympathetic to the paying customers. He was a fella just like them. Not just like them, of course, but close enough for show biz: Hope on stage was cocky and cowardly, irreverent and jumpy, fast-talking and witty, and, above all, lecherous — but too inept and self-involved to do much about it.

It was the first duty of a vaudevillian, wrote the critic Brooks Atkinson, “to break down the resistance of the house by direct force of personality.” And this, it transpired, was Hope’s great gift. In the dozens of film clips on view at the Library of Congress, the most illuminating (and, for my money, the most enjoyable) comes from a special episode of the Ed Sullivan show, in 1955, in which Hope recreates an ancient vaudeville routine. Vaudeville had been dead for twenty years, and even in 1955 the lines might have seemed stale: “Girls, ha! I never give ’em a second thought. My first thought covers everything.” But what pretty much hops off the screen is Hope’s high-wattage energy, an almost physical delight in the mere act of being before an audience and trying, trying, trying to get laughs. His every step across the stage is a furlong stride. He wears a checkered suit and spats and a big bow tie. His fingers toy nervously with an unlit cigarillo. A bowler two sizes too small tips precariously on his head. And the patter never stops. He’s a ham, he knows it, he wants you to watch him, he can’t get enough of you watching him. It is show business in purest form, at its least apologetic, thoroughly uncorrupted by irony and far too full of itself to be slowed down by self-consciousness.

With some revisions, this was the character Hope carried with him into radio, where his celebrity and success multiplied many times over. Traveling fifty weeks a year on the circuit, playing to a different audience every night, the emcee could get by with a half-hours worth of material, recycled show after show. Radio allowed for no such luxury. “My style,” he said many years later, “was joke joke joke.” His radio show, sponsored by Pepsodent, called for thirty-nine half-hour broadcasts a year — or roughly thirty-nine times the number of jokes he had required for a season of vaudeville (writing some jokes himself, stealing others, cribbing some from the public domain, and buying still more from an older comic he kept on retainer).

Already a star, Hope signed with NBC radio for a weekly salary of $ 2,500; from that sum he hired eight writers at $ 100 a week. “All these comedy minds were necessary if I was going to carry out my plan, which was almost unheard of at that time,” Hope later wrote in a 1990 memoir, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me, which was, appropriately enough, written by one of his longtime writers, Mel Shavelson. “It was to go on the air every week with topical jokes written right up to air-time.” By contrast, Jack Benny, host of another popular variety show, had only two writers, and Fred Allen, the greatest of the radio comedians, wrote most of his stuff himself. But Benny, Allen, and Hope’s other competitors contented themselves with sketch comedy. Hope devoted a solid third of each Pepsodent broadcast to a monologue, which he believed gave his show an immediacy the others lacked. It also, happily enough, established him as a kind of national kibbitzer, a rogue commentator on politics, show business, sports, and every other topic of barbershop chitchat.

Hope’s method was highly routinized. Each week the writers, working in teams assigned by him, produced as much as two hours of jokes, which Hope would try out before a studio audience at a preview two nights before the show. The writers, closeted in a control booth, encoded each joke according to the laugh it received, from dud to superboffo. Whittling mercilessly, Hope and his staff had produced by showtime a surefire ten minutes. “In those days,” he wrote, “we had no laugh track to create hilarity on cue.”

Countless legends surround Hope’s relationship with his writers. He employed more than one hundred of them over his long career, and several, not surprisingly, left embittered. (They’re writers.) Once on retainer, they were expected cheerfully to receive calls from him day or night, to produce jokes on demand and on the spot, for whatever occasion presented itself.

It is apparently true, too, that on payday Hope would ascend a staircase in his office, call out his writers’ names one by one, fold their checks into paper airplanes, and send them sailing to the floor, forcing the hacks to scramble after them — the act of either a whimsical boss or a sadist, depending on your point of view.

But he was never coy about his use of hirelings for humor. Before too long, in fact, his dependence on writers became a trademark. (Hope had lots of these running gags; recall his failure to win an Oscar, which he “complained” about on the sixteen Academy Awards shows he hosted, from 1940 to the late 1970s.) “Having so many writers has its disadvantages,” he said on one TV special. “Every time I want to ask them a question, I have to hire Gallup to take a poll.” Like all the others, these writer jokes were written by his writers — years before anyone had thought of postmodernism.

Hope’s reliance on gagmen made his enormous fame possible. In addition to his radio and them his television broadcasts, he averaged nearly two hundred personal appearances a year, creating a demand for jokes that could be satisfied in no other way. But the efficiency came at a cost. Though he of course delivered the jokes — expertly, for the most part — and though he remained the final editor who selected them and organized them into routines, Hope more and more became the creature of his writers, and of the assembly line they manned and that he had himself created. As a consequence, there was a dilution of the roguish persona that had once strutted across the vaudeville stage — the original source of his popularity. But by the time Bob Hope arrived on TV, in the early 1950s, something else had happened, too. He had become an institution.

Hope did his first performance at a military installation in May 1941, several months before the start of World War II. He agreed to the broadcast at the insistence of a Pepsodent executive, who wanted to do a favor for his brother stationed at March airfield in Riverside, California. Hope brought his cast and crew to the base and opened, of course, with a joke: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen. This is Bob ‘March Field’ Hope telling all aviators, while we can’t advise you on how to protect your ‘chutes, there’s nothing like Pepsodent to protect your toots.”

The volcanic laughter that greeted this joke is inconceivable to us today, for many reasons. Hope himself confesses to having been startled at the time. But as one lame line followed another, the laughter if anything intensified. And then, as Hope would later tell it, he understood: He had found an audience that was so grateful for his presence it would laugh at almost anything. And it sounded blissful on the radio. The next week, back in Hollywood, Hope found the studio audience “tough and unreasonable.” And it probably was, by comparison. “They wouldn’t laugh at the jokes unless they were funny.” He booked the following week’s show for the naval base in San Diego.

And for the next seven years, until June 1948, every Hope show but two was broadcast from a military base, whether here or in Europe or in the Pacific. He went into the war a radio comedian and came out a national hero. Too old for the draft, he was inexhaustible in his service to the servicemen, unstinting with his time and energy and talents. Frequently he put himself at risk to do shows or visit hospitals under fire.

On Christmas 1948 he went to Berlin for the airlift. Two years later he was in Korea. After Castro’s revolution he went to Guantanamo. Then came nine tours of Vietnam, and on to Beirut in 1983 and then to the Persian Gulf in 1990. He was friends with every president from Roosevelt to Bush, a sought-after pitchman for every company that could afford him. General Motors paid him $ 100,000 merely to walk through their exhibit at an auto show. He was knighted by the queen, given the Medal of Freedom by President Johnson, awarded fifty-four doctorates, and honored, in an act of profound supererogation, with the title “most honored entertainer of all time” by the Guinness Book of Records.

An establishmentarian is a dangerous thing for a comedian to be. Hope was still topical, but his specialty was, in the deadly phrase, “poking gentle fun.” Sure, he could take on the presidents:

“That Ike — he’s all army. He loves golf, but if you lose, you not only have to pay him, he makes you eat K-rations.”

“President Johnson says he wants to get started on his ‘Great Society.’ I don’t know exactly how it’s gonna work, but I think he wants Texas to adopt the rest of us.”

To the credit of its curators, the Library of Congress exhibit touches on this latter half of Hope’s career — there’s letter from Richard Nixon, the golf club from a Vietnam show, clips from a 1970 TV special — but declines to dwell on it. When you hear the limp jokes from those years, answered by the ghostly laugh track, you get the sense you’re not really hearing comedy so much as a ritual — the laughs Hope extruded from his audience were from force of habit, or perhaps a grateful tribute offered to a fond and well-meaning public servant.

At the center of this part of the exhibit is Hope’s famous joke file, which Hope accumulated over decades and stored in a fireproof vault on the grounds of his California estate. The pages have now been digitally scanned and are retrievable through a touch-screen monitor: four-hundred thousand jokes, on eighty-eight thousand pages, indexed by category.

And almost none of them are funny! These products of the Hope assembly line — scarcely a laugh in the whole bunch! I’ve stood in the Bob Hope Gallery, watching the crowds stab at the joke file. Almost every visitor, from sullen high-school kids to balding boomers, turns away after reading a few gags, looking politely puzzled — as people of a certain age always have when confronted with Bob Hope. Piled one on top of another the jokes show Hope as we saw him in mid-century, less an individual entertainer than a brand name of American mass culture. In baked goods, there was Hostess; in cars there was Ford; in religion there was Billy Graham; and in comedy there was Hope: tepid, inoffensive, a distillation of mediocrity. If you’ve ever wondered whether the Sixties were necessary — if you’ve ever wondered what brought on the revolution in popular culture — look no further than Bob Hope.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.