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Jack Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago, Illinois in 1894, but he grew up in nearby Waukegan, Illinois. He was the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, and he started playing the violin at 6 years of age. He was kicked out of school and failed at every regular business he tried, so while still a teen he started playing the violin at vaudeville houses. He had a series of straight musical acts (and changed his name and the act's name several times) and he even "played the Palace" (the greatest vaudeville theater) but he bombed out and joined the Navy. He played the violin for the sailors, and when they booed him he started telling jokes about how bad he was, and they loved it, and his act was born! He left the Navy and returned to vaudeville with a one-man violin comedy act, and in 1922 he met Sadye Marks, and and they married in 1927, and she joined his act under the name of Mary Livingstone. In 1929, MGM signed him to a contract but they didn't know what to do with him and he only made a few movies, and he went to the Earl Carroll's Vanities. In 1932, he started The Jack Benny Program on NBC radio, and it was a huge hit. He soon developed the exact same persona he later used on his TV show, with the center around his cheapness and his vanity, and he was the butt of most jokes. He had a great mock feud with Fred Allen, and his wife played his girlfriend on the radio show, and all the main people who were later on the TV show were also on the radio show, including Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, the great African American performer. The radio show had all the characters playing "themselves" and they would spend each episode in "real-life" situations. In 1950, Benny moved the show to TV, where it was equally popular, and audiences finally got to see what a master physical comedian he was, with his dead-pan facial expressions and gestures. Entire books can and have been written about how wonderful Benny's show was, and if you have never seen it, I urge you to get some and see some of the best TV comedy of all time! You'll see how Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld pretty much lifted the entire premise of their show from Benny (not that there's anything wrong with that) and Johnny Carson's entire comic delivery came largely from Jack Benny's. Of course, Jack Benny also made some movies in the 1930s and 1940s, and some were quite good. Likely the best of these was as Shakespearian actor Joseph Tura in Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be or Not to Be" ("So they call me Concentration Camp Erhard!"). Benny had so many great recurring gags (he was always 39, he was a terrible violin player, etc, etc), and his ensemble cast was a well oiled machine that never failed (and most of the biggest names in Hollywood consented to guest on his show). See at least a few of episodes of his TV show and you are likely to become hooked! Benny passed away in 1974 at the age of 80.

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