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JOHN CROSBY COMMENTS
329
the comedians — but what will future generations think of us?
In the passage of years, humor tarnishes more easily than any other form of writing but ours is going to be hard even to pass on to future generations. Take, as an example, □scar Wilde's bon mot: "A second ',-narriage is a triumph of hope over ;xperience." Through the years, it las lost some of its savor but, at least, t still makes sense. Now, just sup! nosing fifty years from now, some listorian of humor started prowling \ through our current humor files. He l would come upon Jack Benny saying 'Rochester!" in a certain tone of i voice. And there would be torrents [ of laughter. Or. Mr. Backus dropping s street names as thousands cheer. Our ti ruture historian is likely to conclude :li we were a nation of idiots. 111 1 Not to take too dim a view of it, % there are still some very funny things H mi the air that frequently hit you in jnexpected places. I rather like this c bne which was related by Arthur >'■'■ Godfrey.
1JI "There once was a small boy of " right years who had a slingshot, a o! Jialf-dozen marbles, a broken jack' J :cnife, a partly eaten peppermint d; rtick, thirty feet of twisted and 1 knotted kite string, a live frog and ! fhree well-used handkerchiefs in his jxxrket. His mother told him to get Hd of the stuff. He did. He dumped t all into her pocketbook and she f didn't discover it for three weeks."
i Or Herb Shriner talking about the '^Siew atomic submarine: "It only comes ■ ip once every three years so the boys
,tan reenlist."
"The nice thing about television is that it keeps the children home nights!"
RED BUTTONS is the kind of buttcn-eyed, ingenuous, slew' footed innocent who stems directly from the days of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. The things that happen to him — he stumbles into the gangsters' hideout and captures them all more or less by accident — are all the sort of things that used to happen to Lloyd and Keaton and Langdon. It was a kind of comedy that had its great day in the movies twenty to thirty-five years ago and then passed on.
And here it is back again to a whole new audience. (Well, almost wholly new. There are still a couple of us oldsters who remember the originals.) And, for my money, the stuff is as good as ever. Why did it ever disappear?
Largely, I suspect because the movies passed from an individual or performer's medium to a medium where the writer and director, especially the director, were the big wheels. Comedy of this sort demands that you give the performer his head. The material is secondary to the way