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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 AND Lou Costello was born Louis Francis Cristillo in Paterson, New Jersey in 1906. It might surprise you to know that in high school he was an excellent athlete, playing basketball (he was a champion free throw shooter) and he also did some boxing! In 1927, Lou went to Hollywood, wanting to be an actor, but he only got some extra roles, and a job at a studio as a carpenter. In 1930, he gave up and moved back home, and got jobs in vaudeville as a stand-up comic (and at this time he changed his name to Costello). A few years later he met "straight man" Bud Abbott, and they worked together sometimes, and in 1936 they became a team. In 1938, they got their big break on "The Kate Smith Hour" on radio. They were a giant success, and they appeared on Kate Smith's show on a regular basis. In 1940, they made their Broadway debut in a play called "The Streets of Paris", which also featured Bobby Clark, Louella Gear, Carmen Miranda, and many others, including 50 Parisian beauties. This led to their first appearance, in the 1940 movie "One Night in the Tropics", where they repeated a shortened version of their already classic "Who's On First?" routine. The next year they were given the starring roles in Buck Privates, and the movie was such a huge success that they made 14 more movies for Universal before the end of World War II, and they were among the foremost Hollywood stars. After the war, they continued to make lots of movies but in 1948 they hit on a new kind of movie, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which paired them with classic Universal monsters. This was very popular, and led to three more similar movies. The team had a popular radio show throughout the 1940s, and in the early 1950s, with their movie careers winding down, they started another radio show, and they also had a TV show for two seasons. Lou Costello had had a great tragedy in his life. In 1943, he had caught rheumatic fever and did not work for six months. He and his wife had three children, and later in 1943, soon after he returned to work, and when their youngest was just under a year old, the child fell into their pool and drowned. In 1957, the IRS went after Bud and Lou for back taxes, and they both sold their homes and the rights to some of their movies. They split up their act, and Lou acted alone in just one movie, but then he died of a heart attack. He was just 52, and his wife died later that year at age 49. In their day, Abbott and Costello were the biggest comedy stars (and were likely the most successful comedy team ever in terms of box office). They had many classic routines and catchphrases that are instantly recognizable to anyone over a certain age ("Who's On First?","HEEEEYYY ABBOTT!", "I'm a BAAAD boy", etc)!

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