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LBRY Claims • 19306

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7 Nov 2020 04:29:46 UTC
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Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy
Author: Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
File Type: epub
The king of radio comedy from the Great Depression through the early 1950s, Jack Benny was one of the most influential entertainers in twentieth-century America. A master of comic timing and an innovative producer, Benny, with his radio writers, developed a weekly situation comedy to meet radios endless need for new material, at the same time integrating advertising into the shows humor. Through the character of the vain, cheap everyman, Benny created a fall guy, whose frustrated struggles with his employees addressed midcentury Americas concerns with race, gender, commercialism, and sexual identity. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley contextualizes her analysis of Jack Benny and his entourage with thoughtful insight into the intersections of competing entertainment industries and provides plenty of evidence that transmedia stardom, branded entertainment, and virality are not new phenomena but current iterations of key aspects in American commercial cultural history. **Review By discussing in depth the ways the show was and wasnt distributed during and after its initial run (including the balance of radio stations carrying the show vs. TV stations carrying the show throughout the 50s), Fuller-Seeley makes the book itself an intermedia experience, encouraging readers to contribute to the vital work of media archiving. (Splitsider) From the Inside Flap Jack Benny built his career on letting his second bananas cut him down to size, but media scholar Kathryn Fuller-Seeley knows a giant of twentieth-century entertainment when she seesand hearsone. A meticulous researcher, sensitive critic, and unabashed fan, Fuller-Seeley examines the sonic wraparound and cultural reverberations of Bennys comic art and discovers an atmosphere thick with the buzz of ethnic, racial, and gendered staticnot to mention some seriously funny gags, wisecracks, voices, and sound effects. Like its subject, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy is tone-perfect and a delight to dial in to.Thomas Doherty, Brandeis University At last, Jack Benny gets the treatment he deserves! This lively, wonderfully detailed and meticulously researched study of Bennys contributions to twentieth-century arts and culture will delight not only those who remember him but those who have yet to discover this icon of American comedy.Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison When we think of Jack Benny, his real-life wife Mary Livingstone and his radio valet played by Eddie Anderson also come to mind. Now we have another perfect pairing, the great Benny with one of our finest cultural historians. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley examines a life and career in entertainment as well as the half-century, cross-media popularity of Bennys particular form of Jewish masculinity.Eric Smoodin, author of Regarding Frank Capra Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960
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