Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone · NBC / CBS Radio, 1932-1955
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Jack Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky in 1894 and grew up in Waukegan, Illinois. The Jack Benny Program: 704 episodes of the old-time radio comedy series from NBC / CBS Radio, 1932-1955, starring Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone. Free, live around the clock and as a podcast (a new episode every day), every episode in the order it first aired.
The Jack Benny Program is the best-loved comedy of old time radio, and one of the best preserved: nearly every broadcast from 1936 on survives. Jack Benny played a vain, stingy version of himself who insisted he was 39 and sawed through Kreutzer's Etude No. 2 on the violin. As radio historian John Dunning put it, Benny did not tell jokes, he was the joke. His cast got the laughs, and Benny got the credit for perfect timing and the longest pauses in radio.
The show ran from 1932 to 1955 on NBC and then CBS, for 21 years in the same Sunday 7 p.m. slot. Around Jack grew radio's most famous company: Mary Livingstone, Eddie Anderson as Rochester, bandleader Phil Harris, tenor Dennis Day, announcer Don Wilson and Mel Blanc as the wheezing Maxwell car. The running gags, from the money vault to the feud with Fred Allen, build week after week, which is why the series rewards listening in order.
Benny's comedy holds up because it is character comedy, not topical jokes. You don't need to know the news of 1946 to laugh at a man who keeps his money in a vault guarded since the Civil War and drives a car whose maker went out of business in 1925. It is clean, family-friendly listening for a commute or a long drive, and the cast is so consistent that after a few episodes you know what each of them will say, and still laugh.
NBC / CBS Radio, 1932-1955. With Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Eddie Anderson, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, Mel Blanc.
The these recordings here come from the Old Time Radio Researchers' Jack Benny Singles 1939-1940 set (39 episodes), hosted by the Internet Archive. Our thanks to the Old Time Radio Researchers, the volunteers who found, dated and assembled the set, and to the Archive and the collectors whose uploads it rests on. Also from the Old Time Radio Researchers' Jack Benny Singles 1952-1953 set (39), the Old Time Radio Researchers' Jack Benny Singles 1947-1948 set (38), the Old Time Radio Researchers' Jack Benny Singles 1949-1950 set (38). The sound is our remaster of those files (rumble, hiss and hum cleaned out, levelled to steady broadcast loudness); the recordings themselves are theirs. About our sources.
Every The Jack Benny Program episode: the full list, with air dates and stories
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It was part of his on-air character, a vain man who would not admit his age. He claimed to be 39 year after year, the same way he played the miser and the bad violinist.
On the March 28, 1948 broadcast a robber demands "Your money or your life." Benny says nothing, the robber repeats himself, and Benny snaps, "I'm thinking it over!" The broadcast is in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.
No. Their feud, which began on December 30, 1936, was a running joke for about ten years. They were close friends, and their writers sometimes met to plan the next round together.
Eddie Anderson, from 1937. He was the first African American with a regular role on a nationwide radio program, and his Rochester often won the argument with his boss.
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