Bob Hope, Marilyn Monroe, dirty jokes on live TV

[Lionel Mandrake]

Before the VCR was invented, television programs were always live. Comedians would sometimes see what they could get away with before the censor could pull the plug. Bob Hope supposedly said something like the following on TV.

Joke number 1: "Marilyn Monroe may not be able to make banana cream pie, but she can sure make my banana cream."

Joke number 2: (in conversation with Marilyn Monroe)

Bob: "Let's play television."

Marilyn: "How do we do that?"
Bob: "I twirl your knobs, and you watch my antenna spring up."


I can't vouch for the authenticity of these jokes, but I like to think they really happened.

As an aside, let me say that I'll believe in "artificial intelligence" when a computer program can understand jokes such as these.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Not before the VCR was invented, before videotape was invented

There was videotape long before there were VCRs.

I wonder if those jokes came from the live shows he did for military personnel rather than from TV. Anyone who was known to be too risque didn't make it onto live TV.

[Lionel Mandrake]

2. You're right.

The first videotape recorders were reel-to-reel. Cassettes came later.

The jokes could very well have come from live shows. Or they could be apocryphal. I just don't know.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. My dear Lionel Mandrake!

Well, Bob Hope was a dirty old man, and he found Marilyn Monroe very inspirational...

If these stories aren't true, then they certainly should be!

[Lionel Mandrake]

5. My dear CP,

Heh heh heh. Indeed he was a dirty old man, whether he told these particular jokes or not.

Marilyn did her best to straighten him out.

[nolabear]

4. I once heard Buddy Hackett tell a joke on Carson that would shut DU down.

It had to do with engaging a prudish audience member during one of his shows and telling her a series of increasingly bawdy jokes and asking if they were okay. The final joke (really the punch line of his story) has a gay slur but was so horrifically funny we pull it out like we pull out "The Aristocrats!"

I thought Carson was going to die onstage from laughing.

It's nowhere on YouTube, but it lives on in that little guilty place where something can contain a word I abhor and still be very, very funny.

[Locut0s]

6. We have simultaneously become more open AND more prudish...

I've heard stories like this and others about things said in the 20s through 50s a d you think to yourself wow they were more open and liberal back then than I thought. Then it occurs to you wow if something. Like that was said today there would be a scandal on the evening news and the person would be out of a job. Sad world we live in now.

On the slip side we have come farther on women's rights and today the person might get in trouble as much for the sexist quality of the joke as much as anything.

[Lionel Mandrake]

7. Different words are bad now.

Clark Gable's line "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" was a shocker in 1939 but doesn't raise any eyebrows now.

When Captain Butler explained the kind of business he was engaged in, he used what we now call the bad "N" word, which didn't raise any eyebrows in 1939.

But words are only a tiny portion of what has changed. Now there's a different and much longer list of groups that must not be made fun of. Besides racial and ethnic groups, these now include drunks, punch-drunk ex fighters, and farmers (to name a few). Most of Red Skelton's skits would now be unacceptable on these grounds.

Some things have improved. Now it's okay to depict the Ku Klux Klan as bad guys. It's not okay to be nostalgic about slavery in the Old South.

[Locut0s]

8. That's true but it also seems that we are catering more to the ultra right than we ever did...

and some of that includes the ultra rights family values morals as well. 7 second delay? Janet Jackson's nip slip, and the "shock" and outrage it created on network news? These seem more draconian than things we've seen in the past even if over all things have improved.

[jakeXT]

11. Ever heard of Pre-Code Hollywood?

Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the era in the American film industry between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s[1] and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (usually labeled, albeit inaccurately after 1934, as the "Hays Code&quot censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.

As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, miscegenation, profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence and homosexuality. Strong women dominated films such as Female, Baby Face, and Red-Headed Woman. Gangsters in films like The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface were seen by many as heroic rather than evil. Along with featuring stronger female characters, films examined female subject matters that would not be revisited until decades later in American films. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions, and drug use was a topic of several films. The Pre-Code era featured shorter films, usually running little more than an hour. Many of Hollywood's biggest stars such as Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson got their start in the era. But it also contained stars like Ruth Chatterton, Lyle Talbot, and Warren William (the so-called "king of Pre-Code&quot who excelled during this period but are mostly forgotten today.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

[In_The_Wind]

9. Marilyn was amazing!

[panader0]

10. Arnold Palmer's wife was on the Carson show once

and Johnny asked her if she ever did anything to give Arnie good luck. "I kiss his balls'" she said. Johnny replied,
"I bet that makes his putter stand up."

[Lionel Mandrake]

12. Way to go, Mrs. Palmer!

That was quick thinking on Johnny's part
(assuming it wasn't rehearsed).