Do you agree with this? Bob Hope Wasn't Funny by Christopher Hitchens [View All]

[WI_DEM]

To be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is not a particular defect or shortcoming in, say, a cable repair man or a Supreme Court justice or a Navy Seal. These jobs can be performed humorlessly with no loss of efficiency or impact. But to be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is a serious drawback, even lapse, in a comedian. And the late Bob Hope devoted a fantastically successful and well-remunerated lifetime to showing that a truly unfunny man can make it as a comic. There is a laugh here, but it is on us.

It's true that Hope had a mobile face and could twist it to look suggestive or leering (though he wasn't in the same class as Benny Hill or John Cleese in this respect). The idea that all women are attractive, not especially thigh-slapping as a concept in itself, can often work with audiences who are very easily pleased and whose members don't want to be left out of the general mirth. The sexlessness of Hope's routines, however, was just another clue to their essential conformism and cowardice. Eye-rolling and wolf-whistling are among the weakest forms of crowd pleasing that we possess. And Hope never stretched or challenged an audience in his life. For him, the safe and antique moves were the best, if not the only. The smirk was principally one of risk-free self-congratulation.

I saw him twice, and both times he was playing, as he often did, to the soft-centered Brit or Anglophile culture. At an evening dedicated to Prince Philip at Merv Griffin's Beverly Hilton, Hope got up and told of how he left England at the age of 3. "It was either that," he said, "or marry the girl." The timing was OK, consisting as it did of a long pause. The next time I caught the act was at the British Embassy in Washington, where the ambassador did the intro and tried to wow the crowd by telling "Bob's" favorite reminiscence, which was that he left England at the age of 3, having discovered that he could never become king. These are the kinds of joke that keep things going at golf clubs or Rotary dinners: They are harmless and sentimental and have no intrinsic humor. A Bob Hope joke was no laughing matter: It was a bland attempt at what we would now yawningly call inclusiveness.

Even the most determinedly fawning obituarists had to concede that most of his movies and many of his "joke" anthologies were basically insulting in their unfunniness. Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, stuck with writing an appreciation on the same day as Canby's labored obituary (and stuck by the newspaper with the exact same vaudeville photograph as illustration) fell back on the exhausted line that Hope always played the same character, which was Bob Hope. A fitting tautology. Hope was a fool, and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian.

http://www.slate.com/id/2086499/