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.