They were Bob Hope’s joke doctors, his gag men. Sometimes it meant being on call at all times of the day or night. Hope was liable to phone suddenly from some city, wanting jokes to play off the day’s headlines. When he called back, half an hour later, he didn’t even say hello. You picked up the phone and there was his voice.
“OK, thrill me,” he would say.
Sherwood Schwartz, who would later become well-known for creating the situation comedies “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch,” wrote for Hope’s “Pepsodent Show” on radio beginning in 1936, a job that paid him $50 a week — not bad for a Depression-era salary.
The key ingredient in writing a joke for Hope, says Schwartz, was brevity.
“You knew that if you wrote a joke for Bob, you had to knock out every word that didn’t count. Generally, it had to be a line and a half on a typewriter. If it was three lines, forget it; it took too long to set up. So you learned to respect language.”
Schwartz would later write for another comedy giant, Red Skelton, a performer with a notorious dislike for the men employed to feed him funny lines. Hope, says Schwartz, wasn’t that kind of boss. But then, how could he be? By introducing topical one-liners to a mass audience, Hope relied heavily on his writers to keep his engine fueled.
They were people like the Schwartz brothers (Sherwood and Al), Mort Lachman and Norman Panama in the early days, Gene Perret and Martha Bolton in later years. There was a certain drill to being a Hope writer: You called in to his secretary, got the topics for the day, sat down and wrote jokes.
And if Hope was on the road, the writers had to be especially ready. They might get a call at 2 a.m. from overseas, Hope having neglected to factor in the time change.
“Sometimes you’d hear him breathing on the other end of the line, so you’d want to call him back,” said Bolton, who began writing for Hope in 1983. Bolton remembered how, after an earthquake, her husband, a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, got a call at home to report to work. But the first phone call was for her — from Hope, needing earthquake jokes.
The jokes were his currency, but out of anyone else’s mouth they wouldn’t have been worth as much. To Schwartz, Hope’s gift as a comedian was his timing, his rhythm — the way he could signal to the audience when to laugh. And unlike other comedians, Hope wasn’t interested in building to the laugh. He just wanted to get there, and fast.
“(Jack) Benny had small jokes leading up to the big one. Bob never learned that,” said Mel Shavelson. “He wanted big, big, big jokes, always.”
“He always wanted good material, and then when he got it he wanted better material,” said Perret, who began writing for Hope in 1969.
Though the jokes had to be topical, the humor wasn’t meant to sting. His political jokes arrived not as punches to the gut but as glancing blows. Hope, a patriot, a man who left his most indelible mark performing for US troops all over the world during wars and in times of peace, was hardly the stuff great political comics are made of.
As Perret put it, he “left the deeper stuff to the Mort Sahls of the world.”
