The Theory of Comedy

He claimed he wasn’t a writer, but Jack Benny said he was an excellent editor.

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It's George Jetson's What?

No, I am not wishing George Jetson a happy birthday today.

Read why here.

Cooking With Milt Franklyn

No one ever talks much about Milt Franklyn.

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Tube Tops Donkey

MGM’s inkers got a chance to handle the drybrush in Innertube Antics, a cartoon from the George Gordon unit released March .

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Not The Song By Warrant

Pies and old comedy go together like, well, pies and old comedy. We get both in another one of Friz Freleng’s winners, A Hare Grows in Manhattan (1947).

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Tony Dow

“Leave It To Beaver” had no clumsy dad, no precocious child stars. Even hardened critics talked about the pilot show’s warmth and sincerity.

Perhaps that’s why there’s been an outpouring of sadness today over confirmation that “Gee, Wally” has died at age 77.

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David Brinkley: Not a Celebrity

Whether Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley or David Brinkley liked it or not, or didn’t want to admit it, they became TV stars.

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Inkwell Laughter

Max Fleischer’s old inkwell from the silent cartoon days returns to the big screen in the Betty Boop short Ha! Ha! Ha! (1934).

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Signs of Peace and Quiet

Tex Avery’s last theatrical cartoon is a disappointment. He once again re-visits the “don’t make noise” theme which he put as the premise of his previous cartoon, the fine and funny The Legend of Rockabye Point.

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Five Years of Benny

It’s remarkable that Jack Benny hit the five-year mark of his radio show and he didn’t even have two of the people which we all think of today when Benny comes to mind.

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Lantz's Monkeyshines Don't Shine

Walter Lantz tried out three monkeys in four cartoons before naming them and putting them into their own series in 1936, starting with Turkey Dinner.

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Mucho Mouse Backgrounds

Bob Gentle’s backgrounds evoke old Spain in the Tom and Jerry cartoon Mucho Mouse. We even see his artwork in the opening titles.

More about this cartoon is here.

That Egg's a Skunk

Humpty Dumpty, Jr. uses matches as a weapon as he battles the Bad Egg in the 1935 Ub Iwerks ComiColor short Humpty Dumpty.

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Not Being Ed Norton

He was more than just Ed Norton, and Art Carney set out to prove it after The Honeymooners went off the air in 1956.

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Red Dances

Preston Blair’s master-work at the MGM cartoon studio has to be the dance sequence in Red Hot Riding Hood (1943). Much has been written about it, so there’s little for me to say other than enjoy some of these drawings from one scene.

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360 Bugs

Bugs Bunny divests a South Seas island of all the enemy soldiers, and rhapsodises that it’s so peaceful and quiet.

View some frames here.

Buck Benny and the Buck Private

Stars, big and little, toured military camps during World War Two. One was Jack Benny. Jack went beyond all of what you’ve read.

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Jailhouse Yock

Remember the gag in Tex Avery’s The Peachy Cobbler (1950) where the elves hammered nails into each other’s butts? The same thing happens in one of the mini-cartoons that ended The Quick Draw McGraw Show.

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The Detouring Lizard

Director Tex Avery, writer Rich Hogan, animator Paul J. Smith and composer Carl Stalling all get credits on the 1940 Warner Bros. cartoon Cross Country Detours, but there are several whose names don’t get mentioned at all.

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Zoot Take

Jerry performs a lovely little solo jive dance in The Zoot Cat (1944).

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The Terry Juggling Act

There’s an extended scene in the Heckle and Jeckle cartoon Satisfied Customers (1954) where a grocery store clerk slips into a crate of eggs (courtesy of a banana peel thrown by one of our heroes) and tries to catch them all so they don’t break.

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Bad Movies of 1943

People seem to love lists. They also seem to love bad movies. What happens when you put them together?

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Pre-Droopy

Tex Avery reused or reworked routines over and over again.

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Trolley Track Troubles

Walt Disney and his animators deal with track troubles in Trolley Troubles (1927) by taking drawings and inking them in reverse on cels.

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The Fill-In Announcer, Norman Barry

Don Wilson settled in for a long run as Jack Benny’s announcer in 1934, but there were a few shows when someone else filled in.

Read about one of those announcers here.

Bugs Bunny Goes to War

Theatrical cartoon characters helped boost the Allied effort during World War Two. Let’s focus on a little slice of events of the era.

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Larry Storch

How far did Larry Storch, who died today at age 99, go back?

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Drilling a Gag Into an Audience

How far can we stretch a gag? That seems to be the difference between Deputy Droopy and Tex Avery’s other “don’t make noise” cartoons.

Find out here.

Really Limited Animation

The stories weren’t much, the animation was minimal, dialogue was non-existent, but Colonel Bleep has the distinction of getting on the air before anything Hanna-Barbera put on TV.

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Johnny Carson’s On His Way

Depending on your age, Johnny Carson is still the King of Late Night Television.

Read about him in this 1955 article.

Van Beuren Jungle

Don and Waffles run into weird, made-up creatures in the jungle in Jungle Jazz (1930).

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Old Glory

Leon Schlesinger heeded the call of his country and of the Warner brothers, who decided in 1939 that patriotic films were needed, by rushing the Merrie Melodies short Old Glory through production.

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Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: Fred and the Chevy Spies

Bill Frawley was immortalised as Fred Mertz, thanks to “I Love Lucy” which, I imagine, has never been off television since 1951.

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Carmichael

Maybe the oddest character to populate the Jack Benny radio world was one that wasn’t human.

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The Littlest Giant

John Sutherland Productions released some pretty attractive and imaginative animation/partially-animated short films for industrial customers in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

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The Funny Phoney MP

At one time, humour on national Canadian TV boiled down to The King of Kensington and the occasional Wayne and Shuster special.

Read about a late Canadian comedian here.