For Stan Freberg, Whose Parodies and Satires Live On

August 7th, 2016 § Comments Off on For Stan Freberg, Whose Parodies and Satires Live On § permalink

Stan-Freberg-croppedTo a particular subset of junior comedy nerds, of which I was an unapologetic member, 1976 was a watershed year, for a reason only tangentially connected to the official Bicentennial celebration that faced Americans down at every turn.

At a time when the vinyl record remained the primary means of owning recorded music (cassettes were coming into vogue, as were, briefly eight-tracks), the comedy sections of record stores were relatively low on product. Without access to a really good used record store, it was particularly hard to find vintage comedy recordings, and by vintage at age 14, that meant anything older than 10 years. Cosby and Carlin filled the racks, but beyond them it was luck of the draw. Believe me, I looked.

stan freberg historySo when the essential Barry Hansen, aka Dr. Demento, began “serializing” Stan Freberg’s 1961 album “Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America Volume One: The Early Years,” it was nothing less than a revelation. Conceived as the cast recording of a Broadway musical that never was, with Freberg writing, composing and performing many of the vocal chores, “America” was, to my mind a masterpiece, and I was thrilled when, in the wake of its showcase on Dr. Demento’s show, it was rereleased by Capitol Records, so I could listen to it again and again (which I did, and still do).

As Freberg’s witty, wise-guy approach to everything from the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Battle of Yorktown proved subtler than Mad Magazine, not as raw as the National Lampoon, and as tuneful any classic cast album, I was hooked. I even went so far as to write down to the lyrics to every song (some in two and three part counterpoint), which involved constantly lifting the needle and dropping it back again, so that I could truly commit the songs to memory, where they remain.

Freberg’s voice, as it happened, was plenty familiar, as he had been a cartoon voice artist for years, but as I grew older, I learned more about his work.

  • That he was part one of television’s earliest children’s shows, Time For Beany, whose most popular character, performed by Freberg, was Cecil, seasick sea serpent (initially a live puppet show, it was much later made into an animated cartoon).

  • That he had been a charting recording artist, who broke out with a record called “John and Marsha,” which consisted of nothing but some romantic string music and a male and female voices saying “John” and “Marsha” in a way that charted a relationship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkfwmB8jeSU

  • That he obviously found the Jack Webb TV procedural Dragnet an endless source of amusement, as he parodied it often (with Webb’s support).

  • That he had one of the last network radio comedy shows, having filled the gap left when Jack Benny shifted to television (a favorite target of Freberg’s). And, most startlingly, that by the time I discovered him, he had largely left the comedy business in order to bring humor into advertising.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY2VAIIQAj4

I raise all of this because today would have been Stan Freberg’s 90th birthday. Unfortunately he passed away at the age of 88 early last year. I regret never having sent him a fan letter, never having made an attempt to meet him on one of my irregular forays to Los Angeles.

Listening to 50+ year old comedy can be a mixed bag, but when I came to Freberg’s work, it was only 15 to 20 years old, so the majority of the comedic references were sufficiently current for me. Today, his parodies of Mitch Miller and Arthur Godfrey don’t resonate as they would have in Freberg’s heyday; his cutting satires of everything from the commercialization of Christmas to the McCarthy hearings can be appreciated for their virtuosity, but they don’t necessarily elicit laughs. That said, Freberg’s riff on censorship and “political correctness” from 1957 holds up very well.

And because his humor was – like that of my other comedic heroes from the same era,  Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman and Bob and Ray – entirely aural, there aren’t copious videos to show Freberg at work. YouTube reveals page after page of Freberg routines, but the images are often of static record labels, of montages of photos.

Because he was more prolific than Lehrer and, even truncated, his comedy career was longer than Sherman’s, I have more Stan Freberg discs on my shelves than those two artists put together – included the complete boxed set of his radio shows (well, it was canceled after only four months of weekly airings). But just as I play Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons In The Park” every year on the first day of spring, and play Bob and Ray’s “Komodo Dragon Expert” every time I want to demonstrate what truly inept interviewing and moderating skills sound like, Freberg gets a spin at least once a year, on the Fourth of July, when his masterwork “The United States of America” underlines and undermines every patriotic expression of the day.

Happy birthday, Stan Freberg. I knew you, but oh, how I wish I’d known you.

 

Etcetera: Bob and Ray, Keener Than Most Persons

April 30th, 2013 § 1 comment § permalink

Though I’ve occasionally written about topics outside of theatre and the performing arts, with this post I’ll be titling them as a distinct series, affording me the opportunity to stray wider in my writing while noting when I’m “off-topic.” So here’s the first “Etcetera.”

If I tell you that I fondly recall coming home from junior high in the mid-1970s and huddling up to my radio for the verbal entertainment found there, I hope you will be struck by the incongruity of the date and the medium of choice. There was a burst of nostalgia for radio comedy and drama in that era; one station that I could receive, if the weather conditions were right, scheduled classic shows like Fibber McGee and Molly and The Shadow weekly; radio veteran Himan Brown launched a new series of radio plays called the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre (archived here), and even the countercultural satirists at the National Lampoon syndicated their Radio Hour, a precursor to their own stage show Lemmings and shortly thereafter, the debut of Saturday Night Live.

bob and Ray bookI loved them all, but the most intriguing were the evening drive-time broadcasters on New York’s WOR, Bob and Ray. They would chat, do segues to traffic and news reports and intermittently launch into decidedly off-kilter comic sequences. Those I remember best were the serialized “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife” and “Garish Summit.” None of my friends at the time listened to this stuff and it wasn’t until I got to college that I discovered the cult of Bob and Ray, who, as it turned out, were in their final regular radio run as I listened, having started their careers in the late 40s.

In the just-published Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Person (Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, $27.99), David Pollack provides the first biography of the duo, from their fortuitous pairing  in 1946 through Ray’s death in 1990. Though their material has circulated for years, on tape and records (later CDs), in books and now on YouTube, the book offers the opportunity to learn the detail (even minutiae) of their joint career, including their early leap from radio to television in the latter’s earliest days, their role (along with another hero of mine, Stan Freberg) at injecting humor into advertising, and their reluctant foray onto the Broadway stage in 1970.

The book goes out of its way to point out what ordinary guys Bob (Elliott) and Ray (Goulding) were and how much they eschewed the trappings of even minor celebrity. It also repeatedly comments on the lack of conflict between the two, only mentioning Ray’s occasional flashes of anger that were quickly forgotten. There’s no tell-all here, pretty much just the facts, ma’am, and very little drama.

bob and ray albumIn addition to noting just how much the duo were outside the comedy mainstream (indeed, they didn’t consider themselves comedians at all), Pollack makes one important observation about the pair’s popularity. Because they performed almost exclusively for years in studios – not stages or nightclubs – there were no aural cues as to what was funny and what was not. Their humor thrived on being underplayed, and undersold. But what may have made them truly unique was that without a live audience, fans would feel they were an audience of one, communing directly with the hosts from their car or home, unmediated and deeply personal.

Save for the occasional line of dialogue, Bob and Ray, Keener Than Most Persons reproduces none of the duo’s material and its straightforward, authorized telling makes the assumption that you’re reading the book because you’re already a fan; there’s no effort to drum up new aficionados. While such an effort would have been challenging given that so much of Bob and Ray’s humor emanates from their rapport and timing, it’s hardly impossible to proselytize for comedians of the past; witness Dick Cavett’s superb evocation of the once sui generis improv of Jonathan Winters, which just ran in The New York Times.

So I must urge you to head to YouTube, to listen to my indescribable favorites, “The Komodo Dragon Expert” and “The Slow Talker,” both from their Broadway stand (therefore, with atypical audience laughter). Then just keep searching.

A personal addendum, less than 24 hours old. When the book arrived and landed on my coffee table, my wife’s response was, “Bob and Ray. Who are they?” At the time I didn’t launch into a rhapsody, but last night, having just read the book on an airplane, I began talking about Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, mentioning that I thought Ray might have lived near her family on Long Island. “Goulding?” she said. “I went to school with a Mark Goulding. His dad did something in radio.” I showed her pictures from the book and, indeed, my wife recognized Ray Goulding from school events. He flew under the radar even in his own town.

I, of course, was floored to find that my wife had come so close to one of my heroes, completely unaware. So I played the two pieces mentioned above, and we both laughed until tears came to our eyes. I am happy to report that nearly 70 years after they began working together, I had just recruited a new fan to the cult of Bob and Ray. Join us, won’t you?

 

 

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