How real his cast of characters were to his audience may be difficult if not impossible for modern viewers to gauge. Yet, in fact, he was a great innovator: the man who figured out that radio, and later television, played to small clumps of people in intimate settings, and that character itself was the best source of humor. “Everything good that happened to me happened by accident,” he says, and you tend to believe he believed that. From the Depression through the ‘60s, he was a model of stability-forever 39 years old, vain, stingy, absurd. On his character’s sex life: “There’s a kind of bittersweet side to the sex game and if you can play it somewhere between broad farce on the one hand and tragedy on the other, you get a fine irony which reflects a true-to-life situation.”īenny was probably the most beloved entertainer of his time, by audiences and associates alike. You don’t hate a race when you’re laughing with it. I do not feel today that Rochester and Mr. On ethnic humor: “Bad as you may think this kind of humor was, I think it was a way that America heated up the national groups and the ethnic groups in a melting pot and made one people of us-or tried to do so.
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