Ghost Town (1988)

 

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.