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Here's an interesting article on Bob Hope's 100 years. There is a whole paragraph devoted to his work on The Muppet Movie.
Thanks for the memories
On his 100th birthday, a look back at the legendary career of Bob Hope
Courtesy of the Star-Ledger Staff
"You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake."
That's a Bob Hope line. You can tell because, like Hope, it's older than some countries, yet it still makes you smile.
Hope, who turns 100 today , is no longer an active force in show business. He hasn't appeared in a motion picture since 1985's "Spies Like Us," his last live performance before American troops was in 1991, and his last major TV appearance was 1996's "Laughing With the Presidents."
Yet Hope endures. In the past decade, the actor-comedian-producer-philanthopist has survived health crises, laughed over premature reports of his death and set a number of show biz records in the process.
Among his many distinctions: He's been married to the same woman, Dolores Hope, since 1934. He's been under contract to a single broadcaster, NBC, longer than any other entertainer (61 years), performed for more presidents (11), received more awards (1,500) and hosted more Oscar ceremonies (18). He was USO Entertainment Coordinator from 1941-2001, perhaps the longest consecutive stint by any American in an appointed government job. (Wayne Newton succeeded him.) He was the only entertainer whom legendary control freak Johnny Carson invited to walk onto "The Tonight Show" any time he pleased.
More significantly, Hope's comic style has permeated American humor so completely that he doesn't need to be in the public eye to keep it going. It keeps going all by itself.
What is Hope's style? You know it when you hear it -- and you hear it all the time. It's so basic it's primordial. It's prehistoric corn -- English music hall shtick, spiced with all-American wiseguy sarcasm and an irresistible urge to jump outside the drama and tell the audience, in effect, "Yeah, I know this is silly -- but it's kind of fun, isn't it?"
He was born Leslie Townes Hope in London, England, to parents of modest means (Hope often joked that his family was English because they didn't have enough money to be British). After a brief career as a boxer (he said he stopped fighting when he realized that people were carrying him into the ring), he turned to vaudeville.
Hope learned tricks of timing and inflection, and used them to construct a distinctive persona -- a cheap, greedy, lazy, lustful, cowardly, cynical trickster, too dishonest to be a hero, but too inept to make a good con man. The Hope character saw through everybody's bull (including his own), yet he could still be snared by a promise of wealth or a sweet pair of gams.
By the time Hope brought his style to TV in 1950, he'd already honed it to perfection on the radio and in dozens of movies, usually playing some variant of Bob Hope. He made his feature film debut in "The Big Broadcast of 1938" after landing a starring role in radio's "The Pepsodent Show" the same year.
In 1939, the comedian struck comedic pay dirt in the thriller spoof "The Cat and the Canary" as a cheesy actor; he cringed, whined, pleaded and criticized his way into the audience's hearts. He reprised the same kind of character in 1940's "The Ghost Breakers," a retread of "Canary," and kept it going for over 30 years, in the sentimental bookie-meets-cute-waif comedy "Sorrowful Jones" (1940); in the smash Western spoofs "The Paleface" (1948) and "Son of Paleface" (1952), and in a string of buddy movies with Bing Crosby that stretched from "The Road to Zanzibar" (1941) through "The Road to Hong Kong" (1962). And that's just the short list.
Hope didn't maintain the "Bob Hope" persona all by himself. He paid an army of writers to help him come up with material and stored it in an intricate filing system believed to be the largest repository of jokes in humor history.
Hope's stuff was old when he was young, yet he and his collaborators found endless new ways to keep it topical and otherwise punch it up. Typewritten gag sheets stored in the Library of Congress are a testament to Hope's zeal for comic recycling. On one 1953 joke sheet devoted to Christmas cards, a reference to "Road" movie costar Dorothy Lamour in a sarong is crossed out and replaced with Marilyn Monroe in a bathing suit.
But if Hope's material was a group effort, his persona was a singular triumph. His style is a wisecracking, self-aware, self-deprecating one that makes ancient gags sing again by futzing with their timing -- waiting too long to get to the punchline, or rushing into it so quickly that the straight man barely has time to finish his setup.
The Hope style is perfectly suited to contrived, lightweight, time-wasting material -- particularly spoofs. It lets the performer stand outside the thing he's performing in while still managing (somehow) to be a part of it. It ridicules the clichés of heroism (selflessness, bravery, romantic passion) and embraces their opposites (selfishness, cowardice, total shmuck-itude).
Hope is the opposite of macho, the enemy of sincerity and the antidote to romance. In "Road to Utopia" (1946), he sends up the Gary Cooper-style tough cowboy by bellying up to a bar and ordering "a lemonade... in a dirty glass." His romantic repartee almost never rises above this come-on from 1942's "My Favorite Blonde": "Is that your real hair, or did you scalp an angel?"
Hope never met a fourth wall he didn't want to break. In "The Cat and the Canary," when Hope is asked, "Don't big, empty houses scare you?," he replies, "Not me. I used to be in vaudeville." In "The Road to Bali," Hope introduces Crosby's obligatory musical number with, "He's gonna sing, folks. Now's the time to go out and get the popcorn."
Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen shoplifted his delivery, his plotlines and his brazen spinelessness. (Allen to a would-be dueling opponent in the Napoleonic war spoof "Love and Death": "If a man said that to me, I'd break his neck." Opponent: "I am a man." Allen: "Well, I mean a much shorter man.")
You could tell by Johnny Carson's easy, knowing rapport with his audience -- particularly while muddling through bad monologue jokes -- that he learned a lot from Hope. So did James Garner in "Maverick" and "The Rockford Files," Bruce Willis in "Moonlighting," and Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters." (The latter was partly an homage to Hope's "The Ghost Breakers.")
The "Road" series arguably influenced every buddy movie made since 1940 -- especially the heavily improvised "Lethal Weapon" films, which are not traditional action-adventure pictures, but incredibly brutal slapstick comedies about a couple of bickering misfits who can't stay out of trouble.
Even Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck started sounding like Hope once animator Chuck Jones got hold of them in the '40s. He put them in a series of jokey, talkative, self-aware shorts, clearly modeled on the "Road" series, in which the duo visited exotic locales, from ancient Arabia to the land of giants at the top of Jack's beanstalk. Despite being intricately rendered cartoons, Bugs and Daffy seemed to be ad libbing their material. (Daffy to Bugs, untangling the rabbit season-duck season confusion: "Aha...Pronoun trouble.")
One of Hope's most revealing bit parts was as an irascible ice cream man in 1979's "The Muppet Movie," in which Muppet creator Jim Henson gave cameo roles to many of the show biz giants who influenced him, from Edgar Bergen to Orson Welles. It's literally a road movie, with Kermit the Frog and company meandering cross country en route to Hollywood, riffing on filmmaking clichés as they go. At one point, fellow Muppets who've been separated from Kermit and Company find them again in the middle of the desert by consulting a copy of the screenplay -- vintage Hope.
If you've read this far, it means you wanna know more. Too bad. I'm out of space.
Hope enough for ya?
http://www.nj.com/living/ledger/index.ssf?/base/living-1/1054189148243870.xml
Thanks for the memories
On his 100th birthday, a look back at the legendary career of Bob Hope
Courtesy of the Star-Ledger Staff
"You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake."
That's a Bob Hope line. You can tell because, like Hope, it's older than some countries, yet it still makes you smile.
Hope, who turns 100 today , is no longer an active force in show business. He hasn't appeared in a motion picture since 1985's "Spies Like Us," his last live performance before American troops was in 1991, and his last major TV appearance was 1996's "Laughing With the Presidents."
Yet Hope endures. In the past decade, the actor-comedian-producer-philanthopist has survived health crises, laughed over premature reports of his death and set a number of show biz records in the process.
Among his many distinctions: He's been married to the same woman, Dolores Hope, since 1934. He's been under contract to a single broadcaster, NBC, longer than any other entertainer (61 years), performed for more presidents (11), received more awards (1,500) and hosted more Oscar ceremonies (18). He was USO Entertainment Coordinator from 1941-2001, perhaps the longest consecutive stint by any American in an appointed government job. (Wayne Newton succeeded him.) He was the only entertainer whom legendary control freak Johnny Carson invited to walk onto "The Tonight Show" any time he pleased.
More significantly, Hope's comic style has permeated American humor so completely that he doesn't need to be in the public eye to keep it going. It keeps going all by itself.
What is Hope's style? You know it when you hear it -- and you hear it all the time. It's so basic it's primordial. It's prehistoric corn -- English music hall shtick, spiced with all-American wiseguy sarcasm and an irresistible urge to jump outside the drama and tell the audience, in effect, "Yeah, I know this is silly -- but it's kind of fun, isn't it?"
He was born Leslie Townes Hope in London, England, to parents of modest means (Hope often joked that his family was English because they didn't have enough money to be British). After a brief career as a boxer (he said he stopped fighting when he realized that people were carrying him into the ring), he turned to vaudeville.
Hope learned tricks of timing and inflection, and used them to construct a distinctive persona -- a cheap, greedy, lazy, lustful, cowardly, cynical trickster, too dishonest to be a hero, but too inept to make a good con man. The Hope character saw through everybody's bull (including his own), yet he could still be snared by a promise of wealth or a sweet pair of gams.
By the time Hope brought his style to TV in 1950, he'd already honed it to perfection on the radio and in dozens of movies, usually playing some variant of Bob Hope. He made his feature film debut in "The Big Broadcast of 1938" after landing a starring role in radio's "The Pepsodent Show" the same year.
In 1939, the comedian struck comedic pay dirt in the thriller spoof "The Cat and the Canary" as a cheesy actor; he cringed, whined, pleaded and criticized his way into the audience's hearts. He reprised the same kind of character in 1940's "The Ghost Breakers," a retread of "Canary," and kept it going for over 30 years, in the sentimental bookie-meets-cute-waif comedy "Sorrowful Jones" (1940); in the smash Western spoofs "The Paleface" (1948) and "Son of Paleface" (1952), and in a string of buddy movies with Bing Crosby that stretched from "The Road to Zanzibar" (1941) through "The Road to Hong Kong" (1962). And that's just the short list.
Hope didn't maintain the "Bob Hope" persona all by himself. He paid an army of writers to help him come up with material and stored it in an intricate filing system believed to be the largest repository of jokes in humor history.
Hope's stuff was old when he was young, yet he and his collaborators found endless new ways to keep it topical and otherwise punch it up. Typewritten gag sheets stored in the Library of Congress are a testament to Hope's zeal for comic recycling. On one 1953 joke sheet devoted to Christmas cards, a reference to "Road" movie costar Dorothy Lamour in a sarong is crossed out and replaced with Marilyn Monroe in a bathing suit.
But if Hope's material was a group effort, his persona was a singular triumph. His style is a wisecracking, self-aware, self-deprecating one that makes ancient gags sing again by futzing with their timing -- waiting too long to get to the punchline, or rushing into it so quickly that the straight man barely has time to finish his setup.
The Hope style is perfectly suited to contrived, lightweight, time-wasting material -- particularly spoofs. It lets the performer stand outside the thing he's performing in while still managing (somehow) to be a part of it. It ridicules the clichés of heroism (selflessness, bravery, romantic passion) and embraces their opposites (selfishness, cowardice, total shmuck-itude).
Hope is the opposite of macho, the enemy of sincerity and the antidote to romance. In "Road to Utopia" (1946), he sends up the Gary Cooper-style tough cowboy by bellying up to a bar and ordering "a lemonade... in a dirty glass." His romantic repartee almost never rises above this come-on from 1942's "My Favorite Blonde": "Is that your real hair, or did you scalp an angel?"
Hope never met a fourth wall he didn't want to break. In "The Cat and the Canary," when Hope is asked, "Don't big, empty houses scare you?," he replies, "Not me. I used to be in vaudeville." In "The Road to Bali," Hope introduces Crosby's obligatory musical number with, "He's gonna sing, folks. Now's the time to go out and get the popcorn."
Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen shoplifted his delivery, his plotlines and his brazen spinelessness. (Allen to a would-be dueling opponent in the Napoleonic war spoof "Love and Death": "If a man said that to me, I'd break his neck." Opponent: "I am a man." Allen: "Well, I mean a much shorter man.")
You could tell by Johnny Carson's easy, knowing rapport with his audience -- particularly while muddling through bad monologue jokes -- that he learned a lot from Hope. So did James Garner in "Maverick" and "The Rockford Files," Bruce Willis in "Moonlighting," and Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters." (The latter was partly an homage to Hope's "The Ghost Breakers.")
The "Road" series arguably influenced every buddy movie made since 1940 -- especially the heavily improvised "Lethal Weapon" films, which are not traditional action-adventure pictures, but incredibly brutal slapstick comedies about a couple of bickering misfits who can't stay out of trouble.
Even Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck started sounding like Hope once animator Chuck Jones got hold of them in the '40s. He put them in a series of jokey, talkative, self-aware shorts, clearly modeled on the "Road" series, in which the duo visited exotic locales, from ancient Arabia to the land of giants at the top of Jack's beanstalk. Despite being intricately rendered cartoons, Bugs and Daffy seemed to be ad libbing their material. (Daffy to Bugs, untangling the rabbit season-duck season confusion: "Aha...Pronoun trouble.")
One of Hope's most revealing bit parts was as an irascible ice cream man in 1979's "The Muppet Movie," in which Muppet creator Jim Henson gave cameo roles to many of the show biz giants who influenced him, from Edgar Bergen to Orson Welles. It's literally a road movie, with Kermit the Frog and company meandering cross country en route to Hollywood, riffing on filmmaking clichés as they go. At one point, fellow Muppets who've been separated from Kermit and Company find them again in the middle of the desert by consulting a copy of the screenplay -- vintage Hope.
If you've read this far, it means you wanna know more. Too bad. I'm out of space.
Hope enough for ya?
http://www.nj.com/living/ledger/index.ssf?/base/living-1/1054189148243870.xml
