Thanks to everybody who left approving comments for my Radio
Spirits piece of yesterday—namely, the review of the Shout! Factory release The
Jack Benny Program: The Lost Episodes.
I’m sure no self-respecting Benny fan will want to be without this
collection so if you haven’t put one in your shopping cart yet, do so at your
earliest opportunity.
I mentioned in the review that one of my favorite shows on
the set is a
December 24, 1961
telecast that is sans big-name guest stars; just Jack and his regulars (Don
Wilson, Dennis Day, Eddie “
Rochester”
Anderson). At one moment during the
show, Benny ventures out into the audience and chats with a few of the people
watching the performance; some of them are real people like you and me, to paraphrase Lily
Tomlin’s Judith Beasley, but a few of them are those marvelous
character thesps that the show used whenever they could. One encounter involves Jack and actress Jesslyn
Fax, who made multiple appearances on the show (usually as a member of Jack’s
fan club). On this show, she plays a
little old lady who gives Jack a jar of preserves as a gift…then tries to
hijack the proceedings with a pitch for “Mother Sara’s Jams” that has the
familiarity of a Jell-O commercial (“Strawberry, raspberry, orange…”)
Jack talks to a few more audience members, and then he
encounters his nemesis Frank Nelson—who, as you know, always played the one guy
who
hated Jack Benny. Maybe it’s the spirit of the season but Frank
saves his animosity for the end of the show—for now, he’s genuinely enjoying
himself (“My palms are red from all the applauding!”). He introduces the woman sitting next to him
as his wife, and when Jack asks the woman if she really is his wife she
screams: “
Oooooooooh…am I!” This is funny in itself, of course…but the
in-joke is that the actress is our dear friend Mary Lansing (the long-suffering
Martha Clark on
Mayberry R.F.D.), who was married to Frank Nelson at the time.
Mary turns up in another one of the shows: a
September 24, 1963 telecast with the
Reverend Billy Graham as guest. Jack and
Dennis are discussing Dennis’ song when the show is interrupted by Frank and a
few people who didn’t get seated before the show started. (You can see Mary standing there beside her
husband; she asks if he can work the logistics so that she’s sitting next to
her fake husband in the skit.)
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