The Jack Benny Program

About The Jack Benny Program

715 complete radio episodes (347 hours) from 1932 to 1954, across 2 series:

• Jack Benny: 714 episodes, 1932–1954
• The Jack Benny Program: 1 episode

Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.

The Jack Benny Program on the radio

NBC / CBS Radio, 1932-1955. With Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Eddie Anderson, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, Mel Blanc.

• Jack Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky in 1894 and grew up in Waukegan, Illinois. Legal pressure from the famous violinist Jan Kubelik pushed him to change his name, first to Ben K. Benny and later, after another complaint from bandleader Ben Bernie, to Jack.
• Benny's first words on radio came as a guest of Ed Sullivan in 1932: "This is Jack Benny talking. There will be a slight pause while you say, 'Who cares?'"
• Benny's own series began on May 2, 1932, on the NBC Blue Network as The Canada Dry Program, sponsored by Canada Dry ginger ale. That first version was mostly a music show.
• After only a few broadcasts Benny hired Harry Conn as his writer. Canada Dry dropped the show in January 1933 after trying to replace Conn with Sid Silvers.
• Benny moved on to The Chevrolet Program on NBC from March 1933 to April 1934. It ended because the head of General Motors wanted a musical program instead.
• For most of its life the program was not announced as The Jack Benny Program at all. It took the sponsor's name: the Canada Dry, Chevrolet, General Tire, Jell-O, Grape-Nuts and Lucky Strike programs.
• General Foods took over in October 1934 to sell its slow-moving Jell-O. The new show went into Sunday at 7 p.m., then considered a dead time slot, and Benny kept that hour for the next 21 years on radio.
• Counting his television years, Benny was on the air on Sunday nights for a record 28 consecutive years.
• The Jell-O program sold so much dessert that General Foods could not keep up once wartime sugar shortages hit. In 1942 the sponsor switched the show to Grape-Nuts instead.
• On October 1, 1944, Lucky Strike cigarettes became the sponsor, and the show became The Lucky Strike Program Starring Jack Benny. It was Benny's longest-running radio sponsor.
• Benny wrote into his contracts that his own writers would create the middle commercial and fold it into the story, leaving the sponsor only the opening and closing spots.
• Don Wilson once misread the Lucky Strike slogan "Be happy, go Lucky" as "Be Lucky, go happy." The writers turned the slip into a storyline that ran for weeks, with Wilson too shaken to come to work.

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