You may not have realised he was still alive, but Bob Hope is 100 this week. It's giving Old Ski Nose the last laugh, writes Stephen Dixon
Somebody had to have the last laugh, and it has turned out to be Bob Hope. Two days before his 100th birthday, this most aggressively competitive of comedians might be forgiven a feeble cackle of triumph, because he's outlived all his vaudeville and film peers: George Burns, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx and the rest. Bing Crosby thwarted Hope to win Dorothy Lamour at the end of each of the seven Road pictures they made together, beginning with Road To Zanzibar in 1941, but Crosby's final reel unspooled 26 years ago.
It's extraordinary to think that a performer discovered as a teenager by the silent-screen legend Fatty Arbuckle is still among the (just about) living and, according to recent reports, continuing to take an interest in show business. Four years ago his wife, Dolores Reade - they have been married for nearly 70 years - said: "He walks and he sees. He can see sunsets and the beautiful hills and flowers. He doesn't complain except when it comes to doing mild calisthenics - then he's stubborn. But he's never nasty. He loves music; he loves riding in the car and listening to tapes. He's really very quiet and not unhappy."
And he can still crack gags. On his 95th birthday he said he and Dolores were staying together because of the children - "we're waiting for them to die."
That slightly chilling joke was probably supplied by one of his army of scriptwriters, for Hope is rare among comedians in that through most of his career he was the interpreter, the timer, the customiser of other people's words.
Once he hit the big time he very rarely wrote a gag himself, although in his prime he was an amazingly witty man quite capable of providing his own material - as, indeed, he had to do in vaudeville for years. But when he became US radio's top quick-fire topical gag merchant, he used up jokes faster than any comic of his day, hence the hired help he soon relied on.
Hope has had a vast influence on the comedy of the 20th century and beyond. Switch on your TV any night of the week and you'll see stuff he pioneered 60 years ago. The headline-chasing one-liners of Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton and the rest were Hope's stock-in-trade right up to his retirement. He anticipated today's relaxed stand-up in the 1930s, when he strolled on stage in an ordinary lounge suit, giving the impression that he was just some smart alec who had walked in from the street.
His screen persona - the boaster whose cowardice is revealed when the chips are down, nervously wisecracking as peril looms - also has echoes today in any number of action films, especially those starring black comedians such as Martin Lawrence and Damon Wayans. In a way, he has returned a compliment, because when he developed the stance he was borrowing from the jittery "feets don't fail me now" routines of top black vaudevillians such as Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best in the 1920s and 1930s. The terrified action man was also a speciality of Cantor, who often hammered home the ethnic purloining by blacking up on stage and in films. Hope took this tradition, whited it up and adapted it to less stylised settings.
Leslie Townes Hope was born in Eltham, at the eastern edge of London, the fifth son of an English stonemason who emigrated to the US with his family in 1909. He was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and was an embryonic comic in a dancing act at a local theatre when he was spotted by Arbuckle.
There's something ironic about English Bob going on to become the United States' most honoured performer. In 1975 he was voted entertainer of the century when he was inducted into America's Entertainment Hall of Fame, and the same year he received the Freedom Medal, previously awarded to only two other men: Presidents Hoover and Truman. John F. Kennedy presented him with a Congressional Medal in 1963.
From the second World War to the Gulf War, he tirelessly entertained US troops wherever they were fighting, sometimes giving the lie to his cowardly image by exposing himself to considerable danger. Nobody waved the Stars and Stripes more vigorously than Bob Hope.
Naturally, this played extremely well back in Elk City, Oklahoma, and the arch conservative came to be regarded as show business's embodiment of the American way. When Vietnam changed attitudes among America's young people, however, a generation turned its back on everything Hope represented. In London to host the Miss World contest in 1970, he was heckled and pelted with bags of flour after he told scathing and inappropriate jokes about women's rights. For once, the professional coward looked genuinely scared; the ageing former king of the topical gag had failed to sense that the public mood had shifted.
But from 1941 to 1953 he was among the top 10 money-making stars in the US, an unsurpassed box-office record. Fortified by his smart writers, Hope had a zinging one-liner for every occasion. His films, especially the ones in which he partnered Crosby, rattled along, with Hope often stepping outside the plot - another comic innovation - to address the audience with comments about his co-stars, Paramount or politics.
His film career began with comedy shorts in the mid-1930s, and he got his first real break in The Big Broadcast Of 1938, in which he and Shirley Ross sang Thanks For The Memory. It captured an Academy Award as the year's best song and has lived on as Hope's signature tune. He made more than 60 films, and although his wisecracks in them were often very funny, his performances remained monotonously one-note. As a mouthpiece for gags, Hope was simply the best, but a viewer needing more than mechanical perfection would seek in vain to find depth or heart in his output.
Ah, but what timing. He once said it couldn't be learned. "It's a sixth or seventh sense. It's knowing when to let the audience have a moment to think, how long the moment will be and when to pick up the action again. When to hit with the next line. Timing is a thing that can be used to make good material sound better than it is. I have to know how to snap the next line and cover it and move on. You have to get the idea over to the audience that there is a game of wits being played and they have to be alert or they'll miss something. It never fails."
Hope remains one of America's wealthiest men, worth about $400 million (€340 million), with vast business interests administered by his four adopted children and a substantial staff. Recent biographies disclosed sensational stories of ruthless ambition, relentless womanising and a sneering unkindness to his writers, but by the time they were published Hope had been out of the limelight for years.
Within his limited range, Hope had no rivals; nobody could deliver a joke with more aplomb. Handsomer than most comedians, in spite of that famous ski nose, his early appeal was also rooted in an arrogant virility that turned rancid as he got older. By the early 1970s his film career had petered out.
All the same, his accomplishments are immense. There isn't an area of the business that Hope didn't conquer: burlesque, vaudeville, stage musicals, radio, films, stand-up, records, books, television. But Burns, US comedy's other centenarian, generated more affection, because he seemed a genuinely nice old codger who also stayed before the public almost up to his death, in 1996.
Old Ski Nose faded from the scene so long ago that until this week some might have been surprised to learn he is still alive. Today's comedy enthusiasts would probably swap Hope's 100 years for just a little more time with his antithesis, the much-missed Bill Hicks, dead at 32, but for the week that's in it, let's lift a glass to join the rest of the world in saying thanks for the memory.
