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.