FUNNY CHAPS FROM THE OLD DAYS

FUNNY CHAPS FROM THE OLD DAYS

I’ve written about this series on television1 before but, with each program, I feel compelled to say a few more words---so delighted I was with the content. From W.C. Fields and the Marx Bros in the 1930s to Jack Benny and Phil Silvers in the 1950s and 1960s. I remember The Jack Benny Program and The Phil Silvers Show on CBS in the 1950s before my parents sold our TV. Both programs were consistently among the most highly rated. These were also the years of my first association with the Baha’i Faith and with partisan politics both of which had a very serious side. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC1, 1:00-1:45 a.m. 24 July 2011, “Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America.”

A Voltairean irreverence has its place;
it had with W.C. Fields and the Marx
Bros back in the ‘30s as the social con-
sensus was breaking-down incrementally
decade-by-decade after that Great War,
and as it continued into my lifetime and
as it will continue into this 21st century
and, perhaps, the 22nd: she’s no picnic!

There’s often a lean provision in life’s
devotion with the weeks and months
of unending dark: a deluge, folks, is
no lark. This journey is definitely not
for the timid and the overwrought,
the vainly pious, the pusillanimous
of spirit and the bloodless prig. It’s
an ardent journey on an unvariable
storm-lashed brig with unseasonable
rain and the long wait for the salient
dove to bring the living twig to us here.1

1 Roger White, “A Parable for the Wrong People,” The Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, pp.70-1.
Ron Price
24 July 2011

1 In trying to explain his successful life, Benny summed it up by stating "Everything good that happened to me happened by accident. I was not filled with ambition nor fired by a drive toward a clear-cut goal. I never knew exactly where I was going."-See Jack Benny Wikipedia
2 The Phil Silvers Show ceased production in 1959, not owing to any decline in popularity, but because of the high production costs of a show with a huge ensemble cast.