Jack Benny (1894 – 1974) was a radio actor. The closest thing we could think of nowadays would be a morning show host. The working kind.
Benny became a national figure with The Jack Benny Program, a weekly radio show which ran from 1932 to 1948 on NBC and from 1949 to 1955 on CBS, and was consistently among the most highly rated programs during most of that run.
In those early days of radio, the airtime was owned by the sponsor, and Benny made a point of incorporating the commercials into the body of the show. Sometimes the sponsors were the butt of jokes, though Benny did not deploy this device as frequently as his friend and « rival » Fred Allen did at the time, or his cast member Phil Harris later did on his own successful radio sitcom.
Nevertheless, for many years Benny insisted in contract negotiations that his writers pen the sponsor’s commercial in the middle of the program (leaving the sponsor to provide the opening and closing spots) and the resulting ads were cleverly and wittily worked into the storyline of the show. For example, on one program, Don Wilson accidentally misread Lucky Strike’s slogan (« Be happy, go Lucky ») as « Be Lucky, go happy » prompting a story arc over several weeks that had Wilson afraid to show up at the studio for fear the sponsor would fire him. In fact, the show was not officially called The Jack Benny Program for many years; usually, the primary name of the show tied to the sponsor.
Benny’s first sponsor was Canada Dry Ginger Ale from 1932 to 1933. Later, Benny’s sponsors included Chevrolet from 1933 to 1934, General Tire in 1934, and Jell-O from 1934 to 1942. The Jell-O Program Starring Jack Benny was so successful in selling Jell-O, in fact, that General Foods could not manufacture it fast enough when sugar shortages arose in the early years of World War II, and the company had to stop advertising the popular dessert mix. General Foods switched the Benny program from Jell-O to Grape-Nuts from 1942 to 1944, and it became, naturally, The Grape Nuts Show Starring Jack Benny. Benny’s longest-running sponsor, however, was the American Tobacco Company’s Lucky Strike cigarettes, from 1944 to 1955, and it was during Lucky Strike’s sponsorship that the show became, at last, The Jack Benny Program once and for all.
Txs to quite cool Madalina for the video !
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