So I was clicking through the stations on Sirius XM and came upon a rebroadcast of an old Jack Benny radio program from 1953, with Bob Hope as the guest star. There is a live and apparently very appreciative audience that laughs expansively at all the “jokes”. (Yes, the scare-quotes are deliberate.) But one instance stands out from the rest: When Dennis Day informs Bob Hope that, having seen all the Road To… movies, he has something to say. And what, asks Hope, is that? The ensuing dialogue goes like this:
Dennis Day: You’re nothing without Bing Crosby!
Bob Hope: You E-flat idiot!
At this the audience laughs uproariously, out of all proportion to all previous laughter, and for what seems like approximately forever (though I now know that it was about 17 seconds).
Having absolutely no idea what an “E-flat idiot” is, I of course turned to Google, where I get several hits — all of them to pages with lists of something like “the longest laughs in the history of radio”, but not one of which leaves me any more enlightened about what an E-flat idiot actually is.
(I realize it’s probably too much to hope that I’ll ever understand why this was funny, but I’d at least like to know what it means.)
Anyone?
Did you hear the whole show? I assume jokes like this refer back to other parts of the episode. “Are you master of your domain?” or “As God is my witness I thought turkeys could fly” aren’t funny on their own, but if you’ve seen the episode, they work. Maybe something like that here?
According to the Wikipedia entry on the key of e-flat major, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-flat_major,
For Mozart, E-flat major was associated with Freemasonry; “E-flat evoked stateliness and an almost religious character.”
Could this joke be a jab at masons?
Also from Crosby’s Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Crosby
In a recording he made of ‘Dardanella’ with Louis Armstrong in 1960, he attacks lightly and easily on a low E flat. This is lower than most opera basses care to venture, and they tend to sound as if they were in the cellar when they get there.
Steve Reilly (#1): Good thought. I did not in fact hear the entire episode. Maybe this is in fact the solution.
David Pinto (#2 and #3):
I am skeptical that the Jack Benny audience would have been quite so familiar with arcana about what various keys meant to Mozart.
I am even more skeptical that an E flat note, however lightly and easily attacked it might have been in 1960, could have influenced the perceptions of a radio audience in 1953.
It’s quite possible that Crosby was known for his low e-flat well before 1960.
Is it possible he said “B-flat” not “E-flat”?
https://www.amazon.com/Dick-Tracy-B-Flat-Bing-Crosby/dp/B01G4DBREO
(doesn’t explain the ‘idiot’ bit but at least it may be a clue)
Got it. Here’s my path:
https://sites.google.com/site/jackbennyinthe1940s/jack-benny-in-the-1950s/1952-1953-season
Scroll down to #18 to read the entire script.
Note that this is an episode where Bob Hope meets *Bob* Crosby (not his brother Bing.
Ok, now over on Wikipedia –
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Crosby
– the entry for Bing Crosby includes the review about his voice, including how he can nail the low E-Flat:
Quote
Critic Henry Pleasants wrote:
[While] the octave B flat to B flat in Bing’s voice at that time [1930s] is, to my ears, one of the loveliest I have heard in forty-five years of listening to baritones, both classical and popular, it dropped conspicuously in later years. From the mid-1950s, Bing was more comfortable in a bass range while maintaining a baritone quality, with the best octave being G to G, or even F to F. In a recording he made of ‘Dardanella’ with Louis Armstrong in 1960, he attacks lightly and easily on a low E flat. This is lower than most opera basses care to venture, and they tend to sound as if they were in the cellar when they get there.
End quote.
The whole article that the quote comes from is here: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/05/archives/a-bel-canto-baritone-named-bing-crosby-bing-crosby-a-bel-canto.html
In that article, The NY Times discussed repeatedly how Crosby’s decision to go low made him distinctive and a “crooner” in contrast to the higher and louder voices of the day.
I also found at least one point of evidence to Crosby’s preference of E-flat here: https://www.notediscover.com/song/bing-crosby-jingle-bells
Note also that E-flat is a preferred key for traditional jazz musicians [citation needed] such as Phil Woods, whose autobiography is called “Life in E-Flat.”
With Cosby being such a fan of jazz and a singer who preferred E-flat, I am now going to jump to conclusions from here:
The e-flat favoritism must have been a common cliche at the time of this comedy recording. So when Hope was dissed as being nothing without Crosby, the rejoinder that Day was an “e-flat idiot” was either calling him a mental windbag (bad jazz trumpet player?) or saying he was a blind follower who couldn’t see anything but Crosby’s greatness. Given the entire script, I’m tempted to say they were going for the “you’re an airhead” version.
Ok, so my citations are lacking here at my conclusion, but reading the script and knowing that Bob and Bing played together in six movies makes it likely that Hope was able to lean on his own greatness to blow Day off and get such a laugh for it.
FWIW: Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dennis Day were all involved in the ‘Command Performance’ radio show of which ‘Dick Tracy in B-Flat’ was an episode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_Performance_(radio_series)
Rob Rawlings (#7 and #9): I very distinctly heard it as E, though I realize that sometimes our ears play tricks on us. More convincingly, though, there are multiple websites that mention the exceptionally long laugh that Bob Hope got for calling Dennis Day an “E flat idiot” and no websites (or at least none I can find) that say the same with E replaced by B.
Colleen (#8): This is awesome research; thanks. But I have to say that I still don’t believe I quite understand why this was a joke at all, let alone why the audience found it so extraordinarily hilarious.
Is it possible that calling someone “idiot” was funny by itself, and the “E Flat” part is extraneous?
The full episode is available at the Internet Archive. It’s the January 11, 1953 episode.
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Jack_Benny_Singles_1952-1953/
I listened up to the Road to Bali segment, and have no idea. My best guess is that they’re still laughing at “You’re nothing without Bing Crosby” and Hope’s irritated reaction, rather than the specific wording.
Is it possible that there was no special joke, but that this was on the frontier of edgy comedy for the time and received disproportionate laughter because it was outside of the comedy Overton window for the time? (Yet not SO far out that no one thought it was funny).
This is a similar reason to CB (#12), but saying the E-flat part tied the insult to the activity being performed.
Was the audience live and something visual going on?
What note do you get if your drop a piano down a mineshaft? A flat minor.
Many jokes I don’t get from post war comedies (The Navy Lark, Round the Horne etc) are based on slang from the forces in WWII. Many of the audience would have been ex services and possible got the joke. Round the Horne is well known for use of Polari, an “underground” homosexual slang, that being illegal of course. Not a polari example, but a funny one:
HORNE: Will you take my case?
JULIAN: Well, it depends on what it is. We’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.
HORNE: Yes, but apart from that, I need legal advice.
SANDY: Ooh, isn’t he bold?
I doubt that is what is going on in the Bob Hope case, but maybe something in it.
That should be what key, or chord do you get, A flat minor not being a note.
Perhaps “E-flat” is equivalent to our “effing”. It is being used euphemistically as an intensifier since he couldn’t say “You fucking idiot” on the air.
While your Google search might not have been as instructive as to the MEANING of “e-flat idiot”, I think http://www.jackbenny.org/biography/other/longest_laugh.htm (which must have been one of your “longest laugh” results could at least be instructive as to the quality of the “jokes” that get the long laughs. I mean, “Shut up” seems kind of limited in its humorous qualities as well, and that seems to reliably queue up more laughter than “e-flat idiot” (although, obviously, not being as funny as a bird blowing a raspberry).
#19 I suspect this is the answer. Laughter is somewhat unpredictable, such as “corpsing”, where actors laugh, sometimes repeatedly, during a non-humerus performance. I suspect this was just at the end of a distribution, where the audience feeds back on itself to prolong the laugh. The question “why was that funny?” often leads to unsatisfactory answers.
A combination of the above.
If low E flat is the lowest note that Bing (or anyone?) could comfortably emit, and if he was somewhat known for that (mentioned in an earlier episode?), then it follows that an E-flat idiot is the lowest kind of idiot.
Some of the audience probably didn’t get it but laughed along with those who did because it was clearly an arch riposte based on an in-joke which they would want to pretend to understand. In any case, Bob’s delivery was great and his facial expression would have made it funnier.
Dennis Day was an Irish tenor with a high voice. “E-flat idiot” is just another way of saying, “What do you know, you dumb tenor?” The audience laughed because they were long familiar with Dennis Day’s high voice, for which an e-flat would have been an easy reach. It would be like calling Rachel Ray an “Olive Oil dribbler” or something.
High tenors like Dennis Day were always the butt of jokes… “Wait till your voice changes kid… Has his voice changed yet?… He’ll get a girlfriend after his voice changes,” even though the guy is 30-something… Bob Hope is just calling him the musical equivalent of a “dumb kid.”