Book review: 'Hope' chronicles a century-long life in comedy

Hope

Entertainer of the Century

By Richard Zoglin

Simon & Schuster. 576 pp. $30

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Reviewed by Carrie Rickey

Richard Zoglin's Hope is a perceptive biography of Bob Hope, the definitive argument for Why Hope Matters. The comedian (1903-2003) was a fixture of American humor for so many decades it's easy to forget he was among the innovators of screen comedy during the sound era.

Many born after 1960 grew up thinking of Bob Hope as a dinosaur. Yet "the scope of Hope's achievement, viewed from the distance . . . is almost unimaginable," says Zoglin, who not only ranks him the most popular entertainer of the 20th century but also reckons that because of his live shows entertaining American troops abroad, "He may well have been seen in person more than any other human being in history." More critically, Zoglin offers ample evidence that "the modern stand-up comedy monologue was essentially Hope's invention."

That most middle-American of entertainers was born Leslie Townes Hopes and hailed from Eltham, England. He was the fifth of seven brothers from a working-class family that immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was 4. At 15, Les - a scrapper who would soon change his name to the more masculine Bob - was nabbed for boosting a bicycle. Upon release from the reformatory, he bounced among menial jobs before becoming a boxer under the name Packy East.

In 1924, he began his career in vaudeville as the variety-show form began its permanent eclipse. On the boards of small-time vaudeville houses, he learned to adapt to new forms of entertainment - in particular, radio. In vaudeville, Hope perfected his timing and learned to ad-lib. Along the way he transformed the monologue form: Rather than present canned gags, Hope offered "fresh jokes, drawn from the news and real-life experiences."

His comic persona, that of a brash coward, emerged. He would later reinforce that type in movies such as The Paleface, where his character quips, "Brave men run in my family."

As vaudeville houses shuttered, Hope turned to Broadway, where he played second lead in Roberta, and to radio, where he was second fiddle on CBS' Atlantic Family Show. In 1930, he failed a Hollywood screen test, but in 1937 Hope was cast as the radio announcer in The Big Broadcast of 1938. The movie earned him movie stardom and a theme song, "Thanks for the Memory," which he sang on screen with Shirley Ross. As Zoglin tells it, in the afterglow of Big Broadcast, during a Hope monologue at a star-studded ball, "Al Jolson turned to George Jessel and said, 'Move over, boys.' "

When the keyed-up comic paired with the low-key crooner Bing Crosby, they were box-office dynamite. For the way Hope broke the fourth wall, stepped out of character and commented on the action (like Groucho Marx before him), one might call him a premature postmodernist.

In Hope's prime, between 1938 and 1948, he was ubiquitous. You couldn't go to the movies without seeing him trading jokes with Crosby in the Road movies. Or turn on a radio without hearing him host The Pepsodent Show. And if you were fighting in World War II, Hope came to you with his USO show. He employed so many gagmen that they threatened to form a union.

Hope's career peak was during World War II and immediately after. "When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered," wrote John Steinbeck, author and war correspondent, "Hope should be high on the list. He gets laughter . . . from men who need laughter. It's hard to overestimate the importance of this thing."

In the 1950s, Zoglin writes, Hope morphed from an irreverent renegade to the court jester for presidents, CEOs, and royalty. As his movie career wound down in the 1960s, Hope fed one-liners to presidential candidate Richard Nixon. The newly elected Nixon used the comedian "to help sell his Vietnam policies," Zoglin writes, alienating those who protested against the conflict. For so many years, Hope had been a unifying figure; he now polarized audiences.

As John Huston said in Chinatown, "Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." Hope did. He would be embraced (by Woody Allen and Dick Cavett, among others) as a comic genius. True, purists such as Groucho Marx complained that Hope didn't create his own material. But would Groucho complain about a quarterback who didn't create his own playbook?