Mark Steyn: Comedy, Inc - Bob Hope at 100 (Happy Birthday, Mr. Hope!)

Daily Telegraph via SteynOnline ^ | May 4th 2003 | Mark Steyn

[MeekOneGOP]

hehe ! "Ah cha-cha ! I gotta million of 'em !!"

[Rightfootforward]

Happy Birthday, Mr. Hope! You are dearly loved and deservedly so. I'd say you are our finest English import, but I think it's far more accurate to acknowledge that you are one of the finest Americans we've ever had.
"And thank you so much..."

[gcruse]

The counter version, just as stale, is that he’s a bland sell-out

Maybe a little.  The king of bland sellouts was Art Buchwald.
He never met a knave he couldn't praise faintly.

[HHFi]

I have to disagree with Steyn on two things:

1. I think Hope made the absolute right choice of soldiers over hippies in the 1960s;

2. W.C. Fields' comedy is not antiquated. The reason Fields had such a resurgence of popularity in the '60s and '70s is because his comedy was so far ahead of its time. His biting, black humor (cute little kid nearly impaling him with an ice pick, getting revenge on the brat by kicking him right in the butt) didn't really become accepted until the National Lampoon/SNL generation came of age. And "The Fatal Glass Of Beer" was booed or yawned off the screen in 1932, but today, it makes audiences scream with laughter. People finally get its surreal humor and breaking-the-fourth-wall jokes about the phoniness of the movie they're appearing in (something that Hope started doing in the "Road" movies six or seven years later, and was credited with starting).