[Pat's back was bothering him after writing all day, so he recently built himself an elevated desk where he now stands to write and his back problems have disappeared. Photo by Bun, 2010.]
One of the things I noticed about people nowadays is they don’t watch the radio much. As a result their visual imagination is much impaired. When I was a child, people sat around watching the radio. “No,” the younger generations correct me, “You listen to radio and watch TV.” Well, there you are wrong. I’m am talking mostly about the late thirties, forties and a bit of the fifties, during time which I was an addicted watcher of radio.
Back in those days, radios all had little fabric sections on the front, presumably to let the sound to get out. My family and I would sit there and stare at that little patch and see everything that was going on inside our little radio. Molly Magee would say, “What did you do with that thingamagig I bought the other day? Fibber would say, “Oh, I put it in the hall closet. I’ll get it for you.” Instantly, three-fourth of the people in the country would explode with laughter. They would stare at that little fabric screen and hear and “see” Fibber walking toward the closet. They had seen this sequence of events a hundred times and each time it was funnier than the one before. It must have taken at least five minutes for the last thing to finally fall out of the closet, and the last thing was Fibber’s bowling ball, which seemed to roll at least a hundred feet. And we could “see” it coming!
I loved radio comedy. Why was it so much funnier than the television shows that dominate our lives nowadays? Simply because it engaged the reader’s visual imagination. I can still see in vivid details a scene from Red Skelton’s radio show in which he is screaming “Whoa! Whoa!” while trying to stop his rebellious horse. The horse stops suddenly and Red sails off, crashing through numerous objects, until there’s a silence, and then one final object falls. The viewing audience goes crazy. I say viewing because they were all watching the little fabric screen on the radio and seeing the whole scene in vivid detail. I read somewhere that the longest laugh from a studio audience occurred on radio when a holdup man accosts Jack Benny and says, “Your money or your life?” The radio audience all across the country was in on this gag: it knew how cheap the Benny character was. Jack responded with nothing but silence, while the audience roared. The laughter went on and on. When it finally died down, the robber said, “What’s it going to be?” Again the laughter again rises to a crescendo. “Finally Jack says, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”
Once again the laughter goes on and on.
Ten or fifteen years ago I wrote a radio show and we taped it before a live theater audience. We brought in an old sound man from radio who had worked with all the great radio performers: Benny, Magee, Skelton, Hope, all of them. He was now well up into his eighties but still a genius at producing sounds for any action, from galloping horse to a door opening and closing. He even had a tiny door he could open and close next to his microphone. The timing for the door was sometimes a bit off. A character would enter the room and start talking and then the door would open and close. In recent years I have become much more sympathetic to such a minor slip in coordination. The production was great fun. The local radio audience loved it, flaws and all, as did the theater audience, but we were never able to find a permanent slot on radio. I guess the theory was, why make audiences use their imaginations when TV provides everything.
The reason radio comedy worked so well is that the audience was a participant in it, running the visuals on the screens of its minds. It’s entirely possible that the imaginations of television audiences has atrophied so much that radio drama and comedy are no longer possible. Pity.
