The Bob Hope Christmas Show (1985)

    This was, somehow, not Hope’s final Christmas special. They would continue, in one form or another, until 1993, albeit increasingly in clip-show form. Hope lived all the way until 2003, one hundred years old, and would appear in the occasional documentary or tv special almost until the end of his life.

Don't you threaten me.

    This, however, is quite far enough for me. Airing on December 15, 1985, this special had the usual random assortment of celebrities including Barbara Eden, not doing much at the time other than still being the former star of ‘I Dream of Jeannie,’ Brooke Shields, still being the former star of ‘The Blue Lagoon’ but who had been touring with Hope on USO tours so that explains her presence, and Emmanuel Lewis, smack in the middle of starring in ‘Webster.’ I think there are more sportsball people as well.

    He’s walking out a little slower this time, a little more deliberately. His delivery speed is down about a fifth but the man was 82, I’m going to cut him some slack. No more cue card jabs from me this time. Based on his jokes he’s still racist and homophobic, though, so I got that going for me. Which is nice. And apparently the fact that LA exists is still worthy of discussion. I get that the celebrities live there, we know that, you know that, it’s not surprising, why do you keep bringing it up? The political humor is the same as the rest of them: mention a name they know and the audience laughs in recognition. It’s more than a little weird to be referring to Reagan in the present tense, I will admit.

Your joke's still aren't funny, Hope.

    Huh, Frederick’s of Hollywood joke. I haven’t thought about them in forever. One tiny, tiny tick in the weird nostalgia column.

    My outrage has been worn down to a nub because all I can manage at the prospect of a parody sketch of ‘Miami Vice’ set on Christmas and called ‘Miami Nice’ with Hope and Emmanuel Lewis as Crockett and Tubbs is just a pained exhalation. The writer for this special was Martha Bolton who wrote almost exclusively for Hope from 1981 through 1996 so I’m directly blaming this on her. The only reason I’m guessing there won’t be a short joke in the first twenty seconds is that the setup is going to be too long to get it in that quickly. As it turns out, minute and a half. Very proud of you, Ms. Bolton. Brooke Shields comes in to be the streetwise something or other and I guess the premise is that ‘Miami Vice’ is really violent and these characters want to be but can’t since it’s Christmas so it’s essentially an entire scene of them wanting to beat Shields but not able to. Stay classy, 80’s. There is an odd moment when they get her to talk by threatening to show her Christmas specials and name drop Como, Williams, essentially all the ones I’ve been watching. Meta?

This presumably went through several levels of approval.

    After commercials Hope introduces Lewis like we didn’t just watch him in a sketch. He comes out and grabs a stool next to Hope. It’s just a series of back and forth one liners, none of them are funny. They then vaguely do a song and dance number to ‘Me and My Shadow.’ It’s exactly as not charming as you would think.

    More sportsball people. That sure did take up seven and a half minutes of air time.

    Hope then welcomes on Shields wearing a brown, shimmery dress that makes her look like a chocolate fountain. More Hope jokes and a plug for her book on going to college, which is a very specific book to write. The title is On Your Own and you will be surprised to find it is currently out of print. He then thanks her for her time and waves her off. Wow, that was just over two minutes, glad we spent all that time being introduced to each and every member of the 1985 AP All American Football Team.

She now claims it was ghostwritten, by the way.

    And we’re back to nightmare fuel as a sketch starts in a toy store starring Hope, Lewis, and Shields with their heads poking through a prop wall so they’re on top of tiny little doll bodies. I expect nothing but greatness from this sketch. Ah, they are dolls bemoaning their unbought state. They insult Cabbage Patch Dolls for a bit and I was going to maybe put up another little nostalgia tic but no, those are still at least a little culturally relevant. Nice try, though. They just make a bunch of stupid pup culture jokes, it’s got all the internal structure of the section of ‘You Can’t Do That on Television!’ where they pop out of lockers. They sing a ragged little version of ‘Side By Side’ and we are out.

And there it is.

    Now it’s Barbara Eden’s turn to come out and chat. They do, she plugs what’s she’s doing, then she’s suddenly gone as well. Whatever fills the time slot, I suppose.

    We’re back to the multidimensional outdoor set (in my internal canon it’s a long-forgotten section of the TARDIS). Hope and Eden ride up in a stage sleigh to sing ‘Silver Bells.’ Again. This entire special is just the last one with different celebrities and somehow even less effort.

Don't try to pretend the doll sketch didn't happen.

    Randomly for the very last bit he brings out William ‘The Refrigerator’ Perry. They even have him in his uniform, like we wouldn’t have believed who he was otherwise. Another two minutes and he’s gone. What, was he there to promote the concept of football? Oh for fucks sake, next we have something called The Rose Queen and her court? It’s something about The Rose Bowl and it sounds like it’s three rungs below the Miss USA pageant. Apparently it’s a Pasadena thing. He sings a little ditty thanking his guests to close out the show and I will never have to watch this much Bob Hope in such a short time ever again in my life.

What the fuck is this?

    So now to sum up my thoughts on Mr. Bob Hope. My appreciation for him has not increased after this much exposure. Is it weird that the only host I’ve looked at for these specials that I would truly characterize as not funny is the comedian? He’s still referred to a great man by industry figures, the tributes after he died came from presidents and singers and actors and even Tom Hanks but what I don’t seem to recall is any amount of current appreciation for him. Though I suppose that’s pretty true of everyone on this list, even Johnny Cash.

    Despite my incredulity Bob Hope was a cultural linchpin for decades for reasons that escape me. He could deliver a decent enough line, sure, and could riff if he had to, but it seems like he was running on reflexes. He never seemed to be having any amount of fun, he was just doing a job for money. The only one of these hosts I guess I can really compare him to would be Bing Crosby, which would make sense as they were a comedy duo for so long. I felt a similar remove from him as I do with Hope but there it was more a sense of reserve, that he was passionate about singing and acting but wanted to keep a professional distance. I don’t get the sense from Hope that he placed anything of himself in his work.

    Maybe that is one one way comedy has actually changed from back in the day and why I was able to feel some appreciation for Dean Martin. Comedy now is about feeling at least some connection with the performer, a sense that you’re getting at least some of their real thoughts and seeing them for who they really are. Late night hosts today, at least the good ones in my opinion, will be somewhat open to the audience and actually let them know what they’re thinking. Pretty sure this is why everyone hates Jimmy Fallon, he’s just another Leno. There is no connecting with Bob Hope, when he looks at the camera he’s just making sure the light is on, he doesn’t see or even think about you. He rattles through his cue cards, hits his mark, then leaves. Perhaps in expecting at least some amount of actual human connection I’ve done him the disservice of expecting too much.

 

The Bob Hope All Star Christmas Comedy Special (1977)

    The problem with topical comedy is that it inherently dates the material. If the topics are of sufficient magnitude or longevity they can still work, it may or may not be funny but if you reference the attack on Pearl Harbor you’ve got a more than even shot that your audience is going to know what you’re talking about. In something like a nightly or even weekly comedy show you can get away with churning through material that won’t age well because it’s not meant for the long haul, it’s just meant for the now.

I believe the Texaco part, the comedy not so much.

    Which is to say that other than the names of individuals and countries and a couple of Jimmy Carter peanut jokes I didn’t understand any of Hope’s opening monologue for this special. Other than a brief mention as he first steps on stage about being six days out from Christmas almost none of the jokes even reference Christmas. They’re oddly political in nature, about half are about tensions in the Middle East, a lot of the rest are about the Carter administration, and the rest are a grab bag of lines about recent sports news and celebrities he’s associated with. I was blaming the incoherence of the comedy in the Vietnam specials as a product of stress and rushed production but he tracks just as badly all these years later. He’s back to doing Leno bits, getting jokes and applause lines out of the audience by saying things they recognize and not out of anything that’s actually funny. It’s not like the rules of funny have changed between then and now, I still liked almost everything Dean Martin was doing and even gave little smiles at some of Como’s one-liners and at least recognized what Crosby was doing as actual constructed comedy but Hope is somehow beyond me. The grim machinery of jokes is all too recognizable in him.

    Airing on December 19^th, 1977, this show is a giant step up in the guest star department. We have yet another showing from Olivia Newton-John and Perry Como presumably planning his trip to Williamsburg the next year. We’ve also got Mark Hamill, still doing the rounds for ‘Star Wars,’ as well as The Muppets. I’m not quite so worried about how The Muppets will fare, they’ll just bulldoze over a celebrity if they can’t keep up but I’m genuinely worried what old man Hope is going to do when presented with a Luke Skywalker to play with.

Not even Hope can ruin The Muppets.

    After the monologue wheezes to an end we get those Muppets who had already been doing ‘The Muppet Show’ since 1976 and proven they could do the variety show format better than any actual humans. Hope gives them a bemused introduction and they basically do their routines around him. Kermit sends Gonzo off to play in traffic, Fozzie gets off a joke before Hope sends him away, there’s an extended riff of Miss Piggie trying to team up with Hope with Kermit gently egging it on from the sides, then they all sing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ Some things can’t be ruined even by Hope.

    After a commercial there are sportsball players. Moving on.

 

So young, so hopeful for the future.

    Another commercial break and now Hope explains to the audience that there is a motion picture in existence called ‘Star Wars.’ I will just note that as of the time of this special airing ‘Star Wars’ had made approximately $196 million dollars, which in today’s money would be just over $840 million. So maybe, just maybe, the audience at home would already be familiar with it. He then brings on Mark Hamill, who by the way doesn’t look anything like The Joker. Hamill gamely does his lines as Hope tells old man jokes about the space fighting flick. Hope points out that as an actor Hamill has done acting before and Hamill is forced to agree. This leads to a terrible segue into a sketch where they’re kids locked overnight is a toy store and do what any kids would clearly do, which is put on different hats and do bad impressions. If you actually want to examine this with any amount of seriousness its biggest failing is that they act like kids one moment, then put on the hats and they’re adults doing impressions and making very bad topical humor jokes, then when they’re switching hats they’re back to acting like kids, and the constant whipsaws make sure that even if any of the jokes were any good the premise would be stuck so full of holes you’d never buy into the scene. They end it with a little dance.

Don't worry, Mark, it gets better.

    I want to briefly focus on the specific amount of time contained in eight minutes. It doesn’t seem like it’s that long but if you purposefully decide to spend that amount of time doing absolutely nothing it becomes interminable very quickly. Eight minutes is about a fifth of an album, or half the time it takes to bake a frozen pizza, or a pretty respectable amount of time to run one mile. What it is not is the appropriate amount of time to do a parody sketch of ‘Star Wars’ on a Bob Hope Christmas special.

Fuck. You.

    Everyone always talks about ‘The Star Wars Holiday Special,’ which would air in 1978, and how terrible it is but nobody ever talks about this eight minutes. I’m not about to claim that this is worse than the Holiday Special, that had a full two hours (including commercials) to explore all the nooks and crannies of its own awfulness, but that at least involved people who presumably cared some amount about ‘Star Wars.’

    I will give this limited amount of credit: they do tie it to Christmas by having the Empire capture Santa flying through space. Begrudging point there. This and all subsequent points deducted for getting Perry Como and Olivia Newton-John on this show just to appear in this sketch. Since I’m not going to keep track I’ll just list their parody names then never refer to them again: Hope is Barf Vader, Como is Luke Sleepwalker, and Newton-John is Princess Hialeah. This is the level of humor we’re dealing with.

    Newton-John comes onstage, answers the phone and makes some jokes, is told Santa has been captured, then Como walks on like he’s sleepwalking with ‘Space Love it or Leave It’ written on the back of his jumpsuit which is a reference to the McCarthy hearings and Vietnam protests and he starts singing a song about sleeping and I’m back from playing several hours worth of video games as it was do something else or smash my computer monitor. Hokay.

The worlds longest and deepest sigh.

    I would argue that most successful parody comes from fans of the subject matter. They know the material inside and out and any criticisms come from a constructive place. They know the style, the characters, the themes, they’re coming at it from a place of knowledge. Bad parody is having only a rough idea of the material, taking a surface scan, and deciding you know what you need to know and doing dumb jokes on what you assume the thing is about. Guess which one this special does. They make puns of the names, figure it’s about space stuff, and that’s enough to know, who wants lunch? There is no actual ‘Star Wars’ in this ‘Star Wars’ parody. It’s using some vaguely similar costumes to tell the same old set of jokes with vague references to something something science fiction. Eventually Hamill runs on looking faintly embarrassed and has them arrested for parodying ‘Star Wars.’ The sketch then ends with Hope uttering the line, “I should’ve stuck to ‘Looking for Mr. Goodbar.’” That movie, also released in 1977, was a psycho-sexual crime drama about a teacher who grew up in a repressed household seeking out increasingly risky men for sex and drugs who eventually ends up raped and murdered. Merry Christmas!

So tempted to put a horrific still from 'Looking for Mr. Goodbar' here.

    Hope decides he wants in on the interdimensional outdoor set everyone else has been running around so he and Newton-John sing a duet of ‘Silver Bells’ in the fake snow in the fake outdoors because that makes up for the rest of it. The show ends with a few weird PSAs, one about fires and Christmas clutter, which apparently was a thing? And he ends it with “Merry Christmas, good night.”

No, no last second dignity for you, Bob.

    That was ... that was awful. Including the opening monologue there were a total of six set pieces, one of which was just a bunch of football players. One was Muppets, sure, but it was completely offset by the ‘Star Wars’ section. I understand that Hamill gotta eat but that toy store bit was embarrassing. This entire thing was three or four ideas crumpled together in a ball and then tossed lazily at a tv camera.

    I’ve got one more of these and then I get to leave Christmas behind and suffer through some New Years specials. I’m going to take one last look into the abyss at the heart of Bob Hope and maybe I’ll come up with some answers. Not as to why he did what he did, that was just money, but why it worked for so long and why people haven’t ripped his name from the history books.

 

The Bob Hope Christmas Special (1973)

    Filmed in 1972, released on January 17^th, 1973, my first question is why in the world is Redd Foxx in this? He’s the one name I recognize, everyone else is is a low-tier actor or singer with another Miss World thrown in there. At least this special’s only an hour. I doubt these were ever great for anyone’s career and by 1972 they must have practically been begging people to participate.

I am beginning to go a little mad.

    The format is identical: they fly someplace, Hope does some stand up, maybe another guest, troops cheer wildly, rinse and repeat. Work in some cultural insensitivity and you’ve got yourself a special. Increasingly it’s reference humor, he’ll say a name or a place the troops recognize and they applaud. I’m pretty sure he could say nonsense words in the cadence of a joke, throw in a proper noun, and he’d still get laughter. At one point they bring on a juggler and he’s a pretty good juggler but he’s still a juggler and this is what they’ve come to. This is the fifth act on an episode of ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’

This man is increasingly becoming an existential threat to me.

    Okay, I need to examine one joke because it sticks out to me. He’s in Korea addressing the troops and makes a joke about how he’s addressing the 2^nd infantry division who’s occupying Korea except on Saturday nights when they occupy Seoul. Already that’s a lame joke since they were in South Korea and Seoul is in South Korea but we’ll let that one go. The next line is, and I quote, “On Saturday night these fellas all go to town looking for a little Seoul food.” And I get that he’s doing a pun on soul food but where in there is the actual joke? Because all you’ve really got is that Seoul is a similar word to soul which works as a banal observation but is not in and of itself a joke. Of course the troops laugh because they’ve been looking forward to this for weeks and it’s freezing out and it’s time off from other duties and it sounds like a joke and it’s time to laugh. And it keeps getting worse, I can’t tell if after so many USO tours he’s tuned into the lingo and in-jokes that develop in the armed forces as shorthand and so it’s hard as a civilian to understand or if he’s literally just started listing a series of buzzwords he knows will get a reaction from the crowd.

Always a class act, that Hope.

    He also has a habit of openly insulting our allies in the region that is increasingly starting to grate.

    Another one I don’t really get, he says this is his ninth trip to Vietnam and it has to be his last because the chicken with his blood type just died. Is that a joke about how he’s a coward and he couldn’t get a transfusion from the chicken if he got hurt while in Vietnam? These jokes are becoming almost hallucinatory.

    Next an actual sketch as Hope and Foxx play a couple of servicemen cleaning the barracks. ‘Sanford and Son’ had just started in 1972 and I really doubt that many of the servicemen watching had seen too many of the broadcasts so I’m wondering what he was bringing to the act in the way of name recognition. As a sketch it’s just the same set of jokes in a different context.

    

Still don't know what Foxx is doing there.

    I’m starting to notice they’re nibbling away at the edge of the region but never actual flying into Vietnam itself. Maybe they get there later but I’m starting to suspect that by 1972 the war was developing not necessarily in our favor. We’re going to skip over the various Miss Wherevers and their saucy lines to the troops. Also Miss World feeds Hope straight lines as a ditzy little nothing so he can drool all over her and I can’t help but think she must have hated every minute of it.

The patriarchy in all its majesty.

    Next up is a football player. I don’t care about sports. Moving on.

    The last stop is at Guam, so they never did make it to Vietnam itself. They mention again it’s their last trip so even the military must have given up on funding these. At the end of the show Hope at least does a shout out for the crew, which is nice, and then they all finish up with ‘Silent Night.’ Over the ending montage Hope briefly reflects on 22 years of these trips, which mean he’d been entertaining the troops since 1950, so I have to grudgingly admit it must have meant something to him to keep doing it for so long. In passing he notes how when he started visiting Vietnam in 1964 he never thought he’d be back for eight years, which yeah, Bob, I don’t really think anyone did. He gently hints that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to wind down the military adventure there, noting without context the drastic reduction in troop numbers. He lists his guests from over the years and gives them his thanks.

Sure, thank your staff.

    These two specials were quite the little mind-fuck. Turns out the husk surrounding a howling void I’ve been referring to as Bob Hope did have a passion project and it was supporting the troops in Vietnam. He certainly bought into and supported the military view of the war, that we were essentially doing the region a favor by invading it. I suppose if you’ve signing on to that particular USO tour you’re already most of the way down that line of thinking anyways and I doubt the troops would have really appreciated a rich comedian coming all the way over there to lecture them about what a terrible thing they were taking part in. There’s probably some kind of middle ground to be walked between acting as a fully committed tool of the military propaganda machine and just a guy shoved out to do silly jokes as a distraction and I guess it’s one Hope tried to walk but if you find yourself put on that stage by the guys running the show I guess at the end of the day it’s because they want you there saying the things they want you to say.

    I need to stress I still hate Bob Hope but I don’t hate him for doing these specials. You can make a decent argument that by providing entertainment he was doing the troops no small kindness and that would have been true whether or not he was for the war. I suspect that the lack of center I accuse him of is how he was able to go back year after year and look out onto that sea of faces judged as, in the end, expendable to the cause and not just snap under the strain. I haven’t mentioned the not infrequent shots of wounded soldiers and children that sometimes crop up and some kudos to the show for not ignoring the human cost entirely but I cannot see how you could get up on that stage and tell those corny jokes for year after year with that footage woven right into your Christmas special.

    Luckily from this point on they’re just regular old Christmas specials and I can just go back to making fun of the blocking and costumes. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to enjoy a simple, uncomplicated hate for Bob Hope without anything as distracting as a war getting in the way.

 

The Bob Hope Christmas Special (1968)

    Oh shit, we’re already onto the USO tours, I was hoping we weren’t there yet. Hokay.

Well they do warn you.

    Shot over the course of 1967 but aired on NBC on January 18^th, 1968, the only name I recognize off of the cast list is Raquel Welch. Barbara McNair was apparently a singer and actress who would go on to give several notable performances after 1967. Elaine Dunne did all of the usual tv variety shows during the 60’s as a singer and dancer but stopped appearing in 1968 for reasons I couldn’t easily find. Madeleine Hartog-Bel was Miss World in 1967. Finally, oddly enough, there’s Earl Wilson, a sometimes actor but better known as a prominent gossip columnist for the Broadway scene. Oh, and Bing’s kid Phillip Crosby.

    Fair warning, by the way, this special is an hour and a half long and features a lot of troop footage so we are going to just zoom through the content.

    It’s made very clear in the opening that this was filmed at many, many locations over the course of some time so I am fully expecting a stitched together mess. Also, audible sigh, this is humor for soldiers during a war in Asia in 1967, expect casual racism unless I specifically say it’s not present.

The golf club adds dignity.

    The first actual segment is Hope, golf club in hand, doing such clever bits as how funny they talk over there and boy aren’t these guys horny. I’m already expecting exactly zero mentions of Christmas during this Christmas special. They fly somewhere else and have Hartog-Bel strut around for the crowd. You can add casual sexism to the assumptions.

    As we traipse from location to location with Hope changing outfits but clearly not material I find myself with lots and lots I’m able to say but no desire to say it. This was a stupid war fought for stupid reasons by basically teenagers with very little access to world culture and an attitude towards women that was not improved by their complete lack of exposure to them and Hope is exactly in his element in playing to just the easiest crowds he could ever hope for. These men have next to no access to entertainment so of course they’re going to jam themselves around the stage to watch a famous guy tell jokes and parade around celebrities at them. The whole thing is such a miasma of despair I can either throw my hands up and just focus on the very specific parts I’m looking at this month or track down every scrap of the raw footage and start writing a dissertation.

She wore that outfit like thirty times.

    So the jokes continue, he makes fun of the protests back in the US, complains about prices in Thailand, brings on Raquel Welch to sing a number (y’know, that famous singer Raquel Welch), makes sure to tick some anti-Communist boxes, the troops eat it all up and ask for more. I’m sure at some level Hope really did support the USO out of some kind of patriotism or altruism or something but I’m starting to think he really did these for the access to such easy audiences.

    At a certain point the repetition become numbing. It’s standup, shots of troops, travel footage, and then repeat with the occasional interstitial material. I will say that even now there’s still something jarring about seeing footage of the celebrities touring bunkers near the front, Hope with golf club in hand. Maybe every third go round you get lucky and someone does a song or dance number. Apparently these are some of the most watched tv programs in history, I’m not seeing what 60 million people were getting out of this.

    Oh hey, 45 minutes in and a new face, Phillip Crosby. I will simply note that his highest professional accomplishment was being born to Bing Crosby and he was a vocal Goldwater supporter. His act is a shadow of a shadow of his father’s and that’s enough about him.

I do like the idea of the troops desperately missing Broadway gossip.

    Now it’s Earl Wilson and I’m back to paying attention because I really want to know the justification for his inclusion in this. He presents himself as a member of press out to get the true news about the war directly from the troops, which is a lazy way for Hope to come back onstage in character as the supposed oldest enlisted man. Earl is stiff and nervous and they’re both reading off cue cards and I figure this setup is enough to justify a Broadway gossip columnist being flown onto an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. And then he exits the stage and that’s it, that was Earl Wilson. Sure.

    I guess I can see the appeal for the US audiences, it’s an opportunity to see the troops having a good time and served as a contrast to the images they were seeing on the news. I mean, of course in the end this is all pro-war propaganda fully supported by the military so I guess the question as to its purpose answers itself, they used Hope as a vehicle to smuggle in the imagery they wanted the US populace to see. Did it have to be so all-encompassingly boring, though?

I dunno, girl power or something.

    Not gonna lie, the last half hour was watched with two half-opened eyes while I slouched ever deeper in my chair. It feels unkind to say but perhaps the caliber of entertainment hauled halfway across the world to plunk down before bored servicemen is not up to the usual televisual standards of the time. The acts are a bit shit, to clarify. The only thing keeping me awake is verifying that Raquel Welch really does wear the exact same outfit at all of her appearances. Hey, at least this thing doesn’t end with a Christmas medley.

    I’ve got another one of these from 1972 and five years is a long time so I think I’m going to save my overall thoughts until after that one. I will say I very much did not enjoy watching this for both the obvious and non-obvious reasons. The comedy was hacky, the jokes were all sorts of problematic, and I have no wish to see the Vietnam War filtered through this particular lens.

This man's name was Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, go ahead and look him up.

 

The Bob Hope Christmas Show (1965)

    This is the first thing to be established: for no single reason I can yet point to I loathe Bob Hope and everything he embodies and I’m hoping through exposing myself to his specials I’m at least able to identify where exactly this burning distaste comes from.

    This was not Hope’s first Christmas special, though it was the first one shot in color, as he will constantly remind you during the show. Hope had come up through radio in the 20’s and 30’s, much like Crosby and Como though strictly as a comedian. He was 62 in 1965 and aside from the occasional film role had mostly moved on to television doing numerous specials for NBC with sponsors including Frigidaire, General Motors, and the sponsor of this show Chrysler. His first Vietnam special wouldn’t be until the next year, but we’ll get to those.

I mean, if you say so.

    The show premiered on December 15^th, 1965, and featured Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Janet Leigh, and Nancy Wilson. It begins with what seems to be a perfect impersonation of Johnny Carson’s ‘Tonight Show’ opening including the background drapes and overly long monologue. For the first few jokes I’m worried that I’ve misjudged Hope as they’re not unfunny and he delivers them well enough but after the 12^th joke I realize why it seems so familiar: it’s the same deadening cadence of technically funny material that’s caused Jay Leno’s tenure at that same ‘Tonight Show’ to be tossed into the cultural trash heap. Any individual joke is funny enough, although a lot of them are topical and are basically just confusing to modern ears, but they’re delivered with such machine-like efficiency and framed by such obviously canned laughter that amusement fairly quickly gives way to a grim resolve to make it through this death-march of comedy. It’s set-up, punchline, take to camera as the audience applauds, repeat until the necessary amount of time has been filled. And Hope clearly doesn’t care about the material itself, he’s just there as a delivery mechanism. He could not be more obviously a puppet of the writer’s room if you could see them in the rafters physically pulling his strings. It’s LA smog and LA culture one moment then a physical thud as he just drops that line of jokes and starts making ones about the French election. I hate to think that anyone thought he had any authenticity to him at the time.

So was he stealing from Carson or was it the other way around?

    After far, far too long the monologue winds to a close with some NASA underwear jokes (it barely makes more sense in context) and next up is what we’re told is the interior of Bing Crosby’s Palm Springs home. Their last ‘Road’ movie was three years previous and Crosby’s mannerisms are peevishly annoyed through, which considering how openly Hope is reading off of the cue cards seems justified. They run through their usual shtick which if you’ve seen their double act before hasn’t changed a bit, the premise of this go ‘round being that Hope needs a place to stay for a few days and Bing is renting him a room. It gives them an excuse to do a bunch of jokes about both of them being cheap and/or gullible. Eventually a couple comes by to see about buying the house and God this scene goes on forever.

I am forced to agree, Bing.

    Next up is Nancy Wilson to do a couple of numbers. She’s got a nice jazzy energy to her, like Beth Gibbons without the paranoid edge. Not sure why she’s on a Christmas special but all right, I’ll take actual talent over more first-draft jokes.

    Next up in an interminable sketch with Jack Benny as an escaped convict ending up in Santa’s workshop. God love Jack Benny, he’s one of my favorite comedians of all time but good lord is he ill-served by this material. As an aside I’ve let some reactionary right-wing jokes kinda pass by without comment because it was 55 years ago and the man is dead but they deliberately refer to Muhammad Ali as Cassius Clay a full year and a half after his name change and that’s just an asshole move.

Oh, Benny, you know you're better than this.

    The core idea of the sketch is fine, which is the disconnect between Jack Benny’s comedy persona as a prissy skinflint and portraying him as a vicious escaped convict and those jokes work, as do all of Benny’s slow-burn reactions (those were his bread and butter, rivaled only by Bob Newhart), but they’re surrounded by all this bullshit topical/cultural humor that’s so dated and mean-spirited it just lands with dull thunks. I think a lot of the pleasant surprise I’ve felt at previous specials was due to the lack of just this kind of comedy. And it just keeps going and going. It’s like the writer’s room took a bet about taking an entire hour to do only four sketches and we all lost.

Satire!

    Oh jeebus the next sketch is a political one, just what I wanted. Hoo boy. The premise is that Hope is a fancy movie star wanting to run for Senate and I guess it’s a take on Ronald Reagan who had announced that year he would run for Governor of California in 1966. That, um, is a lot less funny on the face of it than it must have been in 1965 for any number of reasons, but I guess I can’t really blame Hope for that. Janet Leigh is his also movie-star wife and the joke is that’s it’s kind of a fake marriage? Which is less a riff on Reagan than of movie stars in general, I suppose. Teasing out exactly what they’re commenting on from his distance is at least distracting me from the sketch itself, which like the rest of the show is just obvious jokes piled one atop another. Turns out she wants to run for Senate too. And bless Janet Leigh, she’s putting the work is but this is just boring.

    I suppose they gotta work the Christmas angle some more as Crosby takes the stage to perform ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ in front of some cardboard angels looking bored as fuck. I was about to specify whether I meant Crosby or the cardboard angels but, y’know, both. I guess when your entire comedy persona is crass sarcasm you can’t really pull off authenticity and so have to bring in a ringer.

No, no, the angels are cardboard, not Bing.

    The show ends with Hope and Benny shoving in as many plugs as they can for both the network, the sponsor, and Hope’s most recent album, ‘On the Road to Vietnam,’ which oddly enough enough has never been issued in any format other than the original vinyl. Really, really interested in tracking that one down. One extended commercial for ‘The Admiral,’ a Chrysler Theatre original, inserted directly into the show and a reminder to use Easter Seals later and we are out.

This shot didn't fit anywhere else.

    And there it is, three weeks into this extended examination of Christmas Specials Past and I’ve finally found the cynical, dated material I’d been expecting this entire time. There were hints of it in the Crosby specials and you could see it kind of in passing in the later Martin ones but this is the first time I’ve seen it fully realized. One through line of these specials is that even if the person at the center isn’t the actual organizing force it still has to be crafted around that persona and that will shape not just the structure and material but the very feel of the show. John Denver’s was loose and ramshackle and far out, man, Johnny Cash’s might have been stagebound but there was a palpable and exciting live tension in the air. Como was laid back and affable, Williams was neutered to the point of almost parody, you get the point. Hope has a persona, sure enough, but I think I’m starting to identify what instantly puts me so off of him is there’s no center to the man, no core animating force. There’s just this void of naked show-biz professionalism that’s happy to tell any joke, bend any which way to get the easiest laugh and then get off stage. Another trend I’ve noticed is that the older these celebrities get the more and more they just become themselves and if I’m already contemplating the abyss with Hope in 1965 I shudder to think about what the next few specials will turn him into.