Obituaries for 2020

[EasyAce]

Here is some history about who was responsible for Red Skelton's success. https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/guzzlers-gin/

@GtHawk

It's just a shame that Skelton went from, "Without her I'd still be making $10 a week," to finally denying she ever existed starting around a decade after their divorce. (The divorce didn't stop her from continuing as his manager and head writer for a few years to follow.)

It's also a shame that Skelton and his wife not only never credited those among his writers who created characters for him but that he belittled them every chance he had.

Red was suspicious of anything new and didn't always understand the humour of it right away. He might have to mull it over a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Later, he'd pull it out of the joke file and offer it as something he'd just originated and put it in the script, and then say, 'Now why can't you guys come up with something like that?' If any of us dared to say we already had, he'd blow his stack.---Ben Freedman, who worked for Skelton in radio.

You just stayed out of his way. He felt they were all his characters and he didn't want to divide up the honours with the writers.---Larry Rhine, who created Skelton's fabled Clem Kadiddlehopper for him.

I had grave reservations when CBS asked me to do the Skelton [television] show, because I knew he was crazy---talented but crazy. I'd heard he was particularly vicious with writers. He was in deep trouble when I joined him, because he was going a [radio] show that was 80 percent verbal and 20 percent mime. I changed the format and added much more mime and turned the show around in a few months . . . Red never gave any credit to anyone. Non credit never bothered me--I've given away credit so people could get into the Writers Guild. It was not just Skelton's neglect of writers but his attacks on them. On talk shows, he'd always say how useless they were. He never understood the philosophy behind a show.---Sherwood Schwartz, later a successful television producer but then a writer for Skelton's television show. Schwartz also revealed the reason for one of Skelton's most familiar television ticks, his habit of breaking up over his own gags: He didn't do it to get a laugh but so he could look at the script on the floor. He couldn't remember a joke.

Schwartz left the Skelton show in due course and Skelton retaliated by firing his brother, Al, also a writer on the show. "They told me," Sherwood said, "how those beady little eyes of his narrowed and he yelled, 'Fire that other f@cking Schwartz, too! And from now on I don't want any more Schwartzes working on my show.' My brother, who was a trusting, innocent soul, didn't get it. I told him, 'Look, we're talking about [the mentality of] a six-year-old child'."

Contrast that with Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and others who went out of their way to boost their writers and often credited them more than themselves for what worked on their shows. (Fred Allen had a running gag where, if a joke didn't work, he'd make a crack like, "The writer who provided that joke is now providing himself with unemployment insurance"---an idea suggested to him by one of his writers.)

I've listened to enough of Red Skelton's radio shows to know that it was a shame nobody thought about filming his legendary after-show performances unheard by his normal radio listeners. The radio shows were good, but Red Skelton really did belong more on television where he could be seen. He may have been a pr!ck to work for, but the man really was a genuinely great clown.

[GtHawk]

@GtHawk

It's just a shame that Skelton went from, "Without her I'd still be making $10 a week," to finally denying she ever existed starting around a decade after their divorce. (The divorce didn't stop her from continuing as his manager and head writer for a few years to follow.)

It's also a shame that Skelton and his wife not only never credited those among his writers who created characters for him but that he belittled them every chance he had.

Red was suspicious of anything new and didn't always understand the humour of it right away. He might have to mull it over a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Later, he'd pull it out of the joke file and offer it as something he'd just originated and put it in the script, and then say, 'Now why can't you guys come up with something like that?' If any of us dared to say we already had, he'd blow his stack.---Ben Freedman, who worked for Skelton in radio.

You just stayed out of his way. He felt they were all his characters and he didn't want to divide up the honours with the writers.---Larry Rhine, who created Skelton's fabled Clem Kadiddlehopper for him.

I had grave reservations when CBS asked me to do the Skelton [television] show, because I knew he was crazy---talented but crazy. I'd heard he was particularly vicious with writers. He was in deep trouble when I joined him, because he was going a [radio] show that was 80 percent verbal and 20 percent mime. I changed the format and added much more mime and turned the show around in a few months . . . Red never gave any credit to anyone. Non credit never bothered me--I've given away credit so people could get into the Writers Guild. It was not just Skelton's neglect of writers but his attacks on them. On talk shows, he'd always say how useless they were. He never understood the philosophy behind a show.---Sherwood Schwartz, later a successful television producer but then a writer for Skelton's television show. Schwartz also revealed the reason for one of Skelton's most familiar television ticks, his habit of breaking up over his own gags: He didn't do it to get a laugh but so he could look at the script on the floor. He couldn't remember a joke.

Schwartz left the Skelton show in due course and Skelton retaliated by firing his brother, Al, also a writer on the show. "They told me," Sherwood said, "how those beady little eyes of his narrowed and he yelled, 'Fire that other f@cking Schwartz, too! And from now on I don't want any more Schwartzes working on my show.' My brother, who was a trusting, innocent soul, didn't get it. I told him, 'Look, we're talking about [the mentality of] a six-year-old child'."

Contrast that with Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and others who went out of their way to boost their writers and often credited them more than themselves for what worked on their shows. (Fred Allen had a running gag where, if a joke didn't work, he'd make a crack like, "The writer who provided that joke is now providing himself with unemployment insurance"---an idea suggested to him by one of his writers.)

I've listened to enough of Red Skelton's radio shows to know that it was a shame nobody thought about filming his legendary after-show performances unheard by his normal radio listeners. The radio shows were good, but Red Skelton really did belong more on television where he could be seen. He may have been a pr!ck to work for, but the man really was a genuinely great clown.

It seems that our heroes or those that we admire often have feet of clay, maybe more so the great comedians.  Oddly, or maybe not, the Wikipedia page for Red Skelton has a different genesis for some of his characters like Clem which the wiki page attributes to Red basing it on an old hard of hearing neighbor. I would think that people would write in corrections, but hen maybe those writers who actually developed characters for him, or their families, took the higher road and left the image of Red that we all learned to love in his performances.

[EasyAce]

It seems that our heroes or those that we admire often have feet of clay, maybe more so the great comedians.  Oddly, or maybe not, the Wikipedia page for Red Skelton has a different genesis for some of his characters like Clem which the wiki page attributes to Red basing it on an old hard of hearing neighbor. I would think that people would write in corrections, but hen maybe those writers who actually developed characters for him, or their families, took the higher road and left the image of Red that we all learned to love in his performances.

They may well have taken that higher road.

Skelton had a harsh life from his early youth. From everything I've read of him, he seems to have taken it out severely on those whom he professed to love at home, and those with whom he worked, and knew only how to love the strangers who comprised his audiences in studio, on screen, listening on radio, or watching on television. He once said there was noting nobler than making people laugh. Who knew it meant strangers as opposed to his own loved ones and friends?

It's as though he knew and believed to his soul two things above all: 1) Those strangers couldn't hurt him. b) Playing his characters took him out of his own self but he knew too well he couldn't stay there. The show has to end sooner or later. That wouldn't make Skelton too different from numerous other performers of his or any generation, of course. (Jackie Gleason comes to mind almost immediately.)

For a study in a complete opposite, consider Fred Allen. He, too, had a harsh childhood; he, too, came from vaudeville; but he left the vaudeville style behind when he moved to radio in 1932 and rarely if ever looked back, and he succeeded in not letting his childhood embitter him. He not only developed his own comedy style (including pioneering the news satires that soon became common enough among comedians), he was known to be generous to a fault with both his wife (Portland Hoffa, also his on-air partner), his cast, his staffers, and complete strangers. Allen was far more prone to battling imperious network officials and censors than battling his wife, cast, staffers, and complete strangers, often inserting zaps against network executives in general but biting terms into his shows.

And he was funny as hell, even and especially when ad-libbing. (When Allen and Jack Benny kicked off their once-famous running gag of a feud, Benny's side of it made plenty of wisecracks about Allen's ad-libbing. The feud was so successful many didn't realise the two men were not only good friends in real life but often had each other's writers come up with zaps. In actuality, Allen considered Benny the first radio comedian to work with radio as its own medium of mind and imagination and not just struggle to make vaudeville work invisibly as many of the earliest radio comedians did. Jack Benny has been my friend for thirty-nine years, Allen wrote once, and I hope to be his friend for thirty-nine more.)

He was known to drop $100 bills on friends he hadn't seen in ages and downtrodden strangers alike, he would talk to fans whenever they recognised him on the street, and the only apparent interruption to his life and his style was the lifelong hypertension he suffered that finally forced him off the full-time air as a host/head writer in 1949 (Allen worked almost all week long putting his scripts together from the best of what his staff writers and himself came up with for each week's exercise) and delivered his fatal heart attack in 1956, before he could finish his memoir Much Ado About Me.

[verga]

@verga

When I do, you'll get one!

If you want the real inside stories about the network radio era, I recommend these books (I listed some of them earlier, but what the hell, they deserve a rerun . . . ) . . .

Thank you, I have made more than enough book purchases (according to vergette) these last 9 months. I will see if the local library has them or if I can use the interlibrary exchange.

[PeteS in CA]

Thank you, I have made more than enough book purchases (according to vergette) these last 9 months. I will see if the local library has them or if I can use the interlibrary exchange.

@verga, if e-books work for you, check out whether your library "loans" e-books. My daughter "borrowed" e-books from the Santa Clara County Library when she was living in China.

[catfish1957]

One year ago today.  Harbinger that 2020 would Royally Suck.....




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[Hoodat]

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