Some serious thoughts about a funny subject. Where there’s life
there’s hope but sadly now, where there’s Hope there is no longer
life. Bob Hope’s hundred-year life lasted until shortly after the
old century, awash with wars, semi-wars, tyranny, conflicts,
suffering and starvation, came to an end. He brought the sunshine
of humor to shine upon the blasted landscape of a planet engaged,
for much of the century, in brutal self-destruction.
He was so funny for so long that we all became like Pavlov’s
dogs — so conditioned by a lifetime of his humor that once he
began his monologue, we laughed at almost anything he said. He was
the first and longest running of political comedians. While he
enjoyed unprecedented success in the movies — listed among the Top
10 box office movie performers from 1941 through 1953 — he was
defined and set apart by his political activities. We hardly think
of him as a political person but through four wars — one of which
was unpopular with Americans and two others that had varying
degrees of support — and all the time in between wars, to American
service people stationed in contentious and God-forsaken places
around the world, he brought the message that we at home cared
enough to send them Hope.
More important than his jokes, he was their tenuous thread of
connection to home and the thought that they were not forgotten —
that this was the same guy they saw on Saturday afternoon in the
neighborhood theater or at the drive-in, acting exactly the same
way they remembered him; that somewhere back there, thousands of
miles away from the insanity of war or desperate loneliness, things
were as they always were, that there was normalcy waiting for them
at home. The laughter and the cheers were as much for his just
being there as it was for the jokes.
Bob Hope certainly could not have agreed with all of America’s
adventures in his three generations of performing for the troops,
but his journeys to remote and often dangerous places to entertain
them were themselves a silent political statement that spoke louder
than so-called entertainers whose entire performance consisted of
reading from someone else’s script into a TV camera and making
arrogant, cynical, wise-guy comments on the day’s happenings, or
standing unwashed and unshaven in a T-shirt at a microphone on a
stage and spewing out the message in four letter words that “My
country right or wrong is wrong” and that somehow the young people
who were dispatched to carry out the country’s decision should be
placed in the same garbage heap as the politicians.
Hope’s message to the troops was much simpler. “Why you are here
is not the important thing to me, but the fact that you are here is
important to all of us. Whether the country’s policy makers are
right or wrong, we support you and now let’s make fun of the
officers and the enemy.” He understood the proper chords to be
played. To the troops he resonated with the basic American psyche:
independence, resentment towards authority and regimentation, fight
those who threaten — get the job done and go back home.
He was one of the last great entertainers who could achieve in
silence what others could only aspire to do with volumes of
verbiage. A raised eyebrow, the silent stare across the audience, a
lecherous smile, the exquisite timing of the silent pause, all
spoke more loudly that any words and represented a skill that is
possessed by very few humorists today — and completely unlearned
by the under-forty comedy club wannabes.
Wherever Bob Hope is, there must be many — too many —
soldiers. At least they can look forward to lots of laughs.
