Adventures In Recordland, #15: The Bs, part 12

I tried to do three records today. Turned out one was cracked and I had to do throw it away! So here are the two I got done today.

#1: Oscar Brand- "For Doctors Only", 1960:

Oscar Brand (who, I found out, is still with us and 94 years old at the time of this writing) was a folk singer who released an impressive number of albums in the '60s. This album consists of a whopping 14 songs, all humorous ditties about various aspects of the medical profession. As the title implies, I'm sure it's funnier if you're actually a doctor- not all of the humor is quite knee-slappingly hilarious for a layman like myself. And while some of the tunes are clever and generally enjoyable, a full half-hour of this sort of thing is a bit much. The humor is a bit on the corny and slightly naughty side (a line about a gynecologist "starting from the bottom"- which is used in just one, but two different songs). I find it wears out its welcome after a while- 14 songs concerning one general topic is more than enough- but fortunately the songs are all about 2-3 minutes long, so even the one-joke songs are not completely run into the ground. There are some cute moments.

#2: Fanny Brice- "Baby Snooks And Daddy", 1974:

Coincidentally enough, today is Fanny Brice's birthday. She was one of the great stars of vaudeville for many years, but I find it unfortunate that she's best-known today, if at all, for the child character Baby Snooks which she played on radio for many years.
In small doses, these routines are fine, and a good showcase for Brice's good comic timing, and Hanley Stafford as Daddy was a solid straightman. They can be funny- I got some laughs out of this album- but I was never a big fan of the character. Neither one of them is really likeable or sympathetic- Snooks is a rather obnoxious brat, and Daddy gets easily frustrated with her and yells at her a lot. There's not much more to it than that. Not to mention that most of the routines end with Daddy giving Snooks an abusive smack- certainly something which is uncomfortable to hear today. But it's never been my favorite of the old-time radio shows. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.

Adventures In Recordland, Post #12: The Bs, part 9

#1: Herschel Bernardi- "An Evening With Herschel Bernardi (Chocolate-Covered Matzohs)", 1960:

Herschel Bernardi, a Jewish actor, singer and comedian, spends this album doing humorous monologs about Jewish assimilation and family life, and singing Yiddish folk songs. It's a delightful, funny, nostalgic album for those of us with Jewish roots. The monologs are very entertaining, and the songs are wistful and delightful. I have several records of Jewish humor- similar performers like Sam Levenson and Myron Cohen come to mind- but Bernardi's is one of the most enjoyable.

#2: "Beyond The Fringe", 1962:

"Beyond The Fringe" was a satirical revue featuring four very talented English university students: Peter Cook, Dudley Moore (may they rest in peace), Dr. Jonathan Miller (still living) and Alan Bennett (also still living). It was a big hit in England- John Cleese recalls it being the funniest show he ever saw, and a major inspiration to Monty Python several years later- and equally successful when it crossed the Atlantic and played on Broadway.
Unfortunately, I think this album fails to capture the magic of what was a very important show in its day. Highlights include Cook's classic monolog "Sitting On The Bench" about a coal miner who laments that he never became a judge, the closing "End Of The World" sketch, and Dr. Miller's "Portrait From Memory", a satire on philosopher Bertrand Russell. But much of the rest of it just comes across as dated and not especially funny now, at least to my ears- and in the case of Dudley Moore's piano solos, I'm sure they were much funnier when you could see the visuals. So while I love British comedy and I respect "Beyond The Fringe"'s place in its history- not to mention I think Peter Cook was one of the great comic geniuses- it just doesn't hold up on disc. Of course, the album only contains about 40 minutes of what I assume was about a two-hour show- it seems the editor just made some bad choices.

 #3: "The Bickersons", 1962:

"The Bickersons" was a radio sitcom that lasted for a few years in the late '40s, starring Don Ameche and Frances Langford as John and Blanche Bickerson. Long before the Bundys, the Ropers, even the Kramdens, the Bickersons were the original married couple who insulted each other and fought over.. just about anything. Writer Phil Rapp created it as an antidote to all the squeaky-clean happily-married couples one heard on the radio at the time- and while I like a bit of cynicism in my humor as much as anyone else, the Bickersons can get tiresome after a while. Ameche and Langford were very good actors and they work well together, and the gags and one-liners can be funny- they're not only cynical, but often vaudevillian, which I also like- but the constant yelling can get unpleasant and tedious. There are funny moments, but I'd say this is a pretty good album, not a great one.

Adventures In Recordland, Part 9: The Bs, part 6

#1: Jack Benny- "Jack Benny's Golden Memories Of Radio", 1969:

A very nice nostalgic six-record set covering the many aspects of radio as it was in the golden era of the 1930s and '40s. And who better to narrate it than the star of arguably the greatest American radio comedy show of them all, Jack Benny? The set covers comedy, drama, commercials, sports, and of course news (WWII material takes up 3 of the 12 sides). And to top it all off, the 12th side presents several veteran radio actors in a chilling 20-minute drama called "Cat Wife", a "Twilight Zone"-ish tale of a man whose nasty and abusive wife turns into a cat- quite a stirring finish after marathoning through all six records. It's a very interesting set, and a good education for anybody who wants to know why radio is an important medium, and what it meant in its heyday. I grew up listening to an abridged version which I think was three records instead of six, so it was nice to get the full set these many years later.

#2: Edgar Bergen- "The Edgar Bergen Show", 1974:

This album has two full half-hour Bergen shows- one from 1952 and one from '42. The 1952 show is notable for being perhaps the only radio appearance made by a young up-and-coming actress named Marilyn Monroe. The show was broadcast in late 1952, right after her breakthrough roles in "Don't Bother To Knock" and "Niagara", so she wasn't quite the superstar she would be just a couple of years later. She very rarely made guest appearances of any kind on either radio or television, so this is a nice collector's item if you're a Monroe fan- although at the time I bought this record, I was too young to know who she was!
Guests on the other side include Abbott & Costello, who appeared regularly on the Bergen show in the early '40s, and Edward Everett Horton, who did not. This show is amusing but mild, although A&C are a highlight- the Monroe show has better writing.

#3: Edgar Bergen- "Fractured Fairy Tales", 1979

Issued shortly after Edgar Bergen had passed away, this album contains a half-hour show on one side and three excerpts from various shows on the other side. The half-hour show is Bergen (with Charlie McCarthy, of course) appearing on the "Lady Esther Screen Guild Theater" in 1946 in an adaptation of Disney's "Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs." Bergen's performance is sharp and funny, and the supporting cast is good too. The second side consists of excerpts from Bergen's own show, where he tells a skeptical Charlie the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, the tortoise and the hare, and Jack and the beanstalk. All three are wisecracking vintage radio fun. I enjoyed this one very much.

#4: Hector Berlioz- "Symphonie Fantastique", played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

Well, it's nice to have something a little different once in a while.
When I was a kid, I went through a phase of listening to a lot of classical music. Much of it didn't stick, and I've never been an expert on the subject- far from it- but there are certain pieces I like, and "Symphonie Fantastique" is one of them. I heard the fourth movement, "March To The Scaffold", when I was a kid and was hooked, and heard the equally colorful fifth movement, "Dream Of A Witches Sabbath", shortly thereafter. Those are still my favorite parts, but there's much to enjoy the whole symphony. And while I have no vocabulary when it comes to classical music, suffice it to say that I've heard some less-than-stellar versions of this piece, and fortunately this is not one of them. The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra plays it wonderfully. I love all my comedy records, but it's nice to have a little bit of high culture in my collection once in a while too.

Tomorrow: round 1 of 2 with a groundbreaking comedy legend.

Adventures in recordland, post #1: the As, part 1

Hello, Blogspotters!
I started digitizing my LPs today. I decided to do somewhere between 3 and 5 per day, depending how much time I have. At this rate, it will take maybe five or six months to do, but... I expect to be alive six months from now, so why not?
I did five today. Here's what they were.

#1: Abbott & Costello: "When Radio Was King", 1974

 I bought this album when I was maybe ten years old. You can see it still has the price sticker on it from the dearly missed Plastic Fantastic record shop in Bryn Mawr, which I used to go to every now and then. Got a lot of great stuff there, too.

Being a comedy nerd with OCD, I have copies of all of Abbott & Costello's movies and just spent the past summer watching all of them, so I've learned quite a bit about them. I'd have to agree with the consensus that radio was not their best medium- although they had their moments, and the show on this disc is enjoyably silly. It's about the boys going on safari to hunt big game. Costello meets a lion, who turns out to be a misanthropic hermit wearing a lion skin to fool people. He lets Costello take the skin, Abbott thinks Costello has successfully killed the lion, he eventually finds out the truth and Costello's in trouble again. That's about all you need to know.  Oh, and there's a gratuitous musical number about what a hero Costello is. Anyway, it's an amusing show with some good lines. Trouble is that, where most record companies give you two half-hour shows on a record, this one stretches the half-hour show over both sides and only gives you a so-so version of the team's classic "Who's On First?" routine as a "bonus", so it's hardly their best representation on vinyl. But hey- not a bad way to start off. I'm glad I have it.

#2: Don Adams- self-titled album, 1963

Comedy albums were a fairly new phenomenon in the early '60s. Of course there had been comedy records of some kind going back to the dawn of recorded sound in the 1890s, but they were primarily of a musical nature, such as the 1940s records by people like Spike Jones or Danny Kaye. It wasn't until long-playing records became popular in the 1950s that two new kinds of comedy records came into being: radio-style concept albums recorded in a studio- the most famous of those being Vaughn Meader's famous "First Family" album from 1962- which I'll be discussing in a later blog- and recordings of a nightclub stand-up comic doing their act. The latter particularly was a whole new experience in the 1950s. Remember, this was long before the internet or hour-long cable specials could bring famous stand-up comics immediately into our homes. The whole idea of a "live album"- sitting around listening to a recording of a comedian doing his act in a nightclub- was brand new. Mort Sahl was among the first to release a live comedy album- Shelley Berman won a Grammy for it. They were followed in rapid succession by Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, and many others. (More on all of those talented gentlemen in later entries.) Just about every nightclub comic gave vinyl a try back then. Among them was a young up-and-comer named Donald Yarmy- known professionally as Don Adams.
Of course you all know him as Maxwell Smart on the "Get Smart" TV series, but that didn't start until a couple of years after this album was recorded- but the liner notes mention that he had already been on television, on Steve Allen's show among others, so he was certainly becoming famous by this time.
What's interesting about this album is how different it is from today's comedy. Adams is relaxed and confident, and, instead of having to hit the audience over the head with a comic attitude right away, he just starts talking, conversationally, really taking his time, and leads the small but appreciative audience into some very funny, very well-crafted jokes. I grew up listening to the albums of this era, and because I'm a curmudgeon who doesn't like modern comedians very much (with some very notable exceptions I might discuss some other time), I wish today's audiences had the attention span to appreciate the humor of an act like Adams'. His opening series of monologs, lasting a full 13 minutes, is wonderful.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album is rather mild in comparison. A lot of the bits involve parodying the clichés and characters found in old movies, so you have to be a real movie fan to get some of the humor. This being an album from 1963, of course audiences at the time would have recognized names like Edward Arnold, Conrad Nagel or Chester Morris, but it's a bit dated now. Adams' talent is obvious, and there are some good lines here and there, but aside from the opening, much of this album isn't his best work- that would come later.

#3: Kip Addotta: "The Comedian Of The United States", 1985

 

Another album I've had since I was maybe 11 or 12. The reason I knew who Kip Addotta is- and this is probably the case for many of you- was because I heard his song "Wet Dream", a funny song involving about 40 or 50 puns about fish- on a Dr. Demento compilation tape. Of course I was too young then to even know what "wet dream" meant, but... I digress.
I love puns- if you read my blog long enough, you're bound to see many of them here- so I still find that song amusing. Unfortunately, the rest of the album doesn't have anything nearly as clever. A few bits of average '80s standup (though I admit I laughed at a couple of the jokes) combined with mediocre studio-recorded songs. Really nothing very memorable. The opening "State Of The Humor Address" (in keeping with the presidential theme established by the album's title and cover, which otherwise has nothing to do with most of the album) is cute, but that's about it.

#4: Dayton Allen: "Why Not?", 1960

Back to the innocent, whimsical humor of the late '50s, a style I really enjoyed as a kid and still do now. I only got this record a few years ago, but it's a fun one.
Dayton Allen, for those who don't know, was a comedian and voice actor, probably best known for doing cartoon voices for characters such as Deputy Dawg and Heckle and Jeckle. At this time, he was a regular on Steve Allen's TV show, and this album compiles some of his appearances there.
He delivers a series of goofy, slightly surreal monologs in a cartoony voice, in the guise of an expert on various topics- criminology, surgery, the military, etc. There's some good material here (interestingly, his satirical lines about early television have not dated), but the album does run out of steam after a while. His shtik was meant to be taken in three-minute bits, and in that small dosage, it's very funny, but a full half-hour of that stuff wears thin. But there's still a lot of fun to be had, and I enjoyed this one.

#5: Fred Allen: "Down In Allen's Alley"

 I know I have at least one or two younger readers here who may not be entirely familiar with who Fred Allen was.
Fred Allen was a vaudeville comedian who found his greatest success in radio with a cerebral, sarcastic brand of humor. He was on the air from 1932 to 1949 when, much to his dismay, he was replaced by a quiz show, a genre of radio programming he found idiotic and often ridiculed mercilessly on his own show. He tried to adapt to the new medium of television, but never really found his niche, and then died suddenly in 1956.
So unfortunately, because so few people today remember or appreciate the kind of purely radio-based humor which Fred did so well, his remarkable wit and talent have been largely forgotten except by a few comedy devotees like myself. I've been listening to him since I was ten, so it's hard for me to review his work in an objective way- all I can do is describe.
The most famous and best-remembered element of Fred's radio shows was the "Allen's Alley" segment, where Fred would stroll down an imaginary street and interview a group of recurring characters about their opinions on things that were in the news that week. Many characters came and went over the seven years that Fred wrote "Allen's Alley", but the best-remembered group consisted of the Southern loudmouth Senator Claghorn (played by Kenny Delmar, a character who partially inspired the famous Warner Brothers cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn), dour New England farmer Titus Moody (Parker Fennelly), Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious) and excitable Irishman Ajax Cassidy (Peter Donald). Many other memorable characters with names like Falstaff Oppenshaw and Socrates Mulligan were featured in the segment over the years, but only the four I mentioned are featured on this record.
The album features four "Allen's Alley" segments which are all delightful and funny. Side 2 has something a little different- a 1949 radio show with Fred discussing the history of American humor, and where he thought it was going at the time. His comments about the decline of radio comedy and the lack of originality in television comedy, again, are not entirely outdated in lieu of the lack of quality comedy material around today, and very interesting to a comedy nerd.
One other very important point about Fred for those who don't know- he had a long-standing "feud" with Jack Benny (if you don't know who Jack Benny was- shame on you!). The two comedians insulted each other constantly on their respective shows for almost 20 years. It was all for the audience's amusement, of course- in real life they were close friends who respected each other greatly. But of course that made the insults even funnier. So this record closes with a wonderful six minutes of Fred roasting Jack Benny at the Friar's Club in 1951.

That's all the records I did today. See you tomorrow for more.