Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin

The late Bob Hope devoted a fantastically successful and well-remembered lifetime to showing that a truly unfunny man can make it as a comic.
Christopher Hitchens

Richard Zoglin's biography of Hope (Simon and Schuster, 2014) tries hard, with little success, to show that Bob Hope was occasionally funny.  The problem is that Bob Hope had little to say --though he said it very well sometimes --and preferred making money, chasing skirts, and being famous.  Certainly he may have done some good in his many trips overseas to entertain troops, though as always he made sure not to offend anyone and always brought along starlets, encouraging the troops to ogle them.

Hope was equally at home and equally unfunny in films, radio and TV.  In his films he was always, as Zoglin says, opaque and lacking emotion, and, according to Zoglin, never worked with a major director, probably because he did not like anyone telling him what to do.  I would consider Frank Tashlin a major director and Hope would sometimes use him to add gags to his film.  But the two Hope films that Tashlin directed, Son of Paleface (1952) and The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (1968) are Hope's best films, simply because Tashlin did not let Hope dominate things with his smart--aleck persona, but rather emphasized visual gags.  Minor director Sidney Lanfield said, "Hope was the worst egomaniac I ever worked with."  

I have said before that the best comedy is the most serious and Hope was never serious, except perhaps about supporting the war in Vietnam.  One can't necessarily blame him for his political beliefs, but he never wanted to annoy a President because then maybe the guy would no longer play golf with him.  Zoglin tries to make a case for the Road movies, with Bing Crosby, but one cringes today when watching those films:  the talking camels and frequent irrelevant asides indicate a genuine insecurity with the plot, a refusal to take it seriously.

Certainly humor and what is funny can be quite subjective, though I seldom hear from anyone how much they laughed at the Bob Hope movie they watched last night.  A good comparison with Hope's radio show is that of his contemporary, Fred Allen; there are about 175 surviving episodes of each comedian's show:  they both do monologues and spoofs of current politicians and events.  But Hope's quips have no bite, while Allen's are both funny and thought-provoking.  Certainly part of the reason is that Allen wrote much of his own material, while Hope was always completely dependent on his writers, who came and went in great numbers.