The Machine-Age Comic

He

was a guy who basically did nothing but stand at a microphone and tell jokes. He was a wiseguy, a smart aleck, a comic minimalist in pursuit of the perfect gag, which, through a process of trial and error and full of genially sneering asides at the eggs he laid along the way, he often found.

But Bob Hope, who died last week at 100, was something else too: the voice of 20th century America at midpassage, the spokesman of our heedless, surface-skimming spirit, the comic for the age of the production line, churning out interchangeable, immediately disposable jokes at an industrial pace. His comic persona was primitive. He was a wolf, constantly leering at pretty women, constantly rejected by them (until the last reel). He was a coward, hiding his ignobility under instantly collapsible braggadocio.

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That was about it. And the finer critical minds were always dubious about him. "Bob Hope is a good radio comedian, with a pleasing presence, but not much more," critic James Agee wrote in his lament for the passing of comedy's Golden Age. Hope lacked Groucho's surrealism, Fields' misanthropy, Chaplin's soul, not to mention that element of the grotesque they all shared. Dapper and a trifle distant in his suit and tie, he also lacked their patience in building and extending gag sequences. Typical American that he was, he always wanted the instant gratification of the big boff.

When he was at the height of his first fame — with his top-rated radio program, his 12-year run in the top 10 at the movie box office — he set a tone for us junior-high wisecrackers that resonates to this day in our inner monologues and in our snap-dash dinner-table zappers. Give us enough gag writers (reportedly underpaid and overworked in his case) and a vast file of jokes (which he stored in a fireproof vault), and we thought we might, on a good night, be him.

And, indeed, one among us managed a pretty fair imitation. That would be, of all unlikely people, Woody Allen, ever voluble in his admiration for Hope. "It's just shameless how I steal from him," he said recently. "I don't mean the contents of his jokes — but I do him, I lean on him." He means Hope's comic character — especially, in Allen's early films, his sexual ineptitude and the endless spray of one-liners. What Hope uniquely had was brashness, the ability to tweak the mighty (and their supporting ninnies) and skip away unscathed.

There was no depth to Hope. But he made up for that with his tireless brio, his total lack of sentimentality — and his ability to stay on top of the news. He famously mastered every comic venue his 20th century offered — vaudeville, Broadway, radio, movies, television — and even in his early days he did topical jokes, designed to be tossed aside and replaced by others on tomorrow's hot topic. This was in contrast to his peers, whose endlessly polished routines had to endure unchanging over the long years they toured the circuit. That skill made Hope the perfect comedian for the new media of radio and TV, which chewed up material (and personalities) at a manic rate. We were properly awed by his motormouth profligacy. We knew he had a million jokes on an equal number of topics: Eleanor Roosevelt, Crosby's golf game, Los Angeles pedestrians, income taxes.

Yes, it was impersonal. He was an equal-opportunity insulter, especially of himself, about whose passions and politics he revealed nothing (until — his one gaffe — he took sides in the Vietnam conflict). It was all very Waspy and Middle American, but it perfectly suited a great age of denial. Then, of course, comedy changed. Sometime in the '60s, it became more personal — more ethnic, more neurotic, even more socially critical — at which point Hope began to seem old-fashioned, someone whose endless string of top-rated NBC specials "skewed old" demographically. The younger, hipper crowd wanted more bite.

Normally, institutional status — including friendships with Presidents and a (literal) warehouseful of humanitarian awards — is death for a comic. But he prevailed, mostly because of the reservoir of goodwill he had stored up by entertaining the American military on all its battlefields, in all its wars, for a half-century. Those lonely young men, facing death, didn't want soul; they wanted cheek and sass, a moment's escape, girl gags, second-lieutenant gags, K-ration gags — well-machined jokes that drowned out the machinery of war. They loved him for the trouble he took on their behalf. And their affection spread outward.

We'll probably never know if Bob Hope had any demons he dared not face. But action is — or eventually becomes — character. Lacking the anguish and self-doubt many great comedians come to feel about being funny in an unfunny world, he did something different: he became a bright, brisk anodyne for the torments of a brutal era. It was no small burden, and he carried it dauntlessly.