I also have to admit that I just never "got" Gleason in anything else he ever did,either. Red Skelton was hilarious, Groucho Marx (think maybe the Russians lost the draw on who got what sets of "Reds" and "Marxes"?) took it a step or two further than that. Then there was Johnathan Winters who came along slightly later and he was a comedy monster.
Red Skelton was made for television; hell, his best bits were the silent "Freddie the Freeloader" sketches, just like Jackie Gleason's
best sketches were the silent "Poor Soul" sketches. His radio show, you just knew something was missing---unless you were in the
studio audience, you couldn't see him.
Which is a shame, because I once read (in John Dunning's
On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio) that tickets for
the Skelton radio show were one of the hottest tickets in Hollywood not because of the radio show itself but because of Skelton's
after-show: he was too nervous to do a warmup before air time, as many radio comedians did (a lot of the warmups from Phil
Harris, before performing
The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, have survived), so he'd do the show and then be so wired up
the kazoo from it that he kept his studio audience aboard and did an after-show for them. The after-show was considered so
hilarious---with Skelton going into visuals of his characters, as he'd do on television---that people were often turned away for
tickets. There were those who were lucky enough to be there who swore Skelton's after-show was twenty times as funny as the
actual on-air radio show.
Skelton had a wounding flaw: he absolutely couldn't bear to give credit to anyone, even those who created some of his most
memorably characters for him.
Red never gave credit to anyone. Noncredit 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 would
always say how useless they were. He never understood the philosophy behind a show.---Sherwood Schwartz,
who wrote for Skelton in radio and on television.
It could have been worse, though. It could have been Eddie Cantor, who habitually re-wrote scripts to give himself
the biggest laugh-getters---even if they weren't suited for his character (and were liable to bomb on the air as a
result), and who refused to listen when his writers tried to tell him that his long-running gags about his five
unmarriageable daughters were deeply hurt by the gags, which went on long after the ladies did marry. (Not
to mention his long-running on-air devotion to wife Ida---all the while he was having a long-term affair with
comedienne Joan Davis.)
