Mill Creek comedy classics #62, "It's a Joke, Son!" (1947)

Kenny Delmar portrays his famous "Senator Claghorn" character in It's a Joke, Son!

The flick: It's a Joke, Son! (Eagle-Lion release of a Bryan Foy Productions film, 1947) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Benjamin Stoloff (Palooka)

Kenny Delmar as Sen. Claghorn.

Actors of note:

• Kenny Delmar (announcer and sidekick of radio comedian Fred Allen; voice of Commander McBragg on TV's Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales)

• Una Merkel (The Parent Trap, 42nd Street, Destry Rides Again; Oscar nominated for Summer and Smoke)

• June Lockhart (the mom on TV's Lassie and Lost in Space; her 75-year career in film and TV is still going)

• Kenneth Farrell (receives an "Introducing" credit here, though this is the third film of his brief and underwhelming career, which also included Railroaded! and entries in the Gas House Kids and Philo Vance series)

• Douglass Dumbrille (The Ten Commandments, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races, etc., etc.)

• Jimmy Conlin (Anatomy of a Murder, Sullivan's Travels, The Lady Eve; repeatedly hired by director Preston Sturges)

• Daisy the dog (Hollywood and Vine)

The gist of it: Beauregard Claghorn (Delmar) is a boastful, long-winded, and fiercely-proud Southerner who owns a crumbling mint plantation and is easily cowtowed by his domineering wife Magnolia (Merkel). A distillery buys the perennially-broke Claghorn's mint crop for $1500, a hefty sum he plans to give to earnest young Jefferson "Jeff" Davis (Farrell), the would-be fiance of his daughter Mary Lou (Lockhart), so that this potential suitor can make a down payment on a frozen food truck and become a decent provider for Claghorn's daughter. But Magnolia has already pledged the $1500 to the Daughters of Dixie so that they can run her as a political candidate against the weak, corrupt Senator Leeds (Conlin), whose administration is run by the evil Northerner "Boss" Dan Healey (Dumbrille).

Out of financial desperation Claghorn accepts $3000 from Healey to run as a third-party candidate in order to split the vote and ensure Leeds' victory. But when Claghorn decides to take the campaign seriously and unseat Leeds himself, Healey and his thugs kidnap him and hold him hostage so that he'll miss the all-important deadline to appear at the Town Hall at 9:00 pm on Election Eve. Jeff and Mary Lou go looking for Beauregard, helped by the Claghorn family's highly intelligent dog (Daisy).

Foghorn Leghorn, the parody that eclipsed the original.

My take: The Blues Brothers, Strange Brew, This is Spinal Tap, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Wayne's World, Borat -- all motion picture vehicles for characters imported from the world of sketch comedy. This is obviously not a foolproof plan for success, as the sadder-but-wiser makers of Superstar, Coneheads, It's Pat, MacGruber, The Ladies Man, and A Night at the Roxbury could tell you.

It's a Joke, Son! must be one of the earlier examples of the form. Radio announcer Kenny Delmar had introduced his "Senator Claghorn" character on comedian Fred Allen's radio show in 1945, quickly becoming a sensation, and this cash-in movie appeared two years later. Delmar, a Boston-born Yankee, based the character on an eccentric Texas cattleman he'd met while hitchhiking. "Everything he said, he bellowed," Delmar remembered. "And everything he bellowed, he repeated."

Like many sketch characters who get their own movies, Claghorn had his own catchphrases, namely "That's a joke, son!" which he'd recite if one of his witticisms did not get the proper response. (This movie's own title slightly misquotes the line. Whoops!)  The Southern windbag also peppered his speech with "I say" and "that is," expressions he employed whenever he'd reiterate a point for emphasis. Water-cooler comedians across the country were soon imitating the character, the way latter-day wannabes would ape Austin Powers or Borat Sagdiyev for cheap yuks.

Today, the fictional senator is most famous for inspiring the Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn, created by Bob McKimson and voiced by Mel Blanc. Forghorn, a rooster who talked and behaved just like Delmar, made his screen debut in August 1946 -- thus beating Delmar to the punch by four months. In one of the rare examples of a parody overshadowing the original, it is the talking rooster and not the talkative politician who has remained in the public consciousness.

Fred Allen and Kenny Delmar.

On Fred Allen's Sunday night radio show, before an audience of 20 million, Claghorn was doled out in two-minute bits (scripted by Allen himself). The challenge of It's a Joke, Son! is taking that character and giving him a satisfying feature-length story while also providing the audience with Delmar's familiar catchphrases and trademark shtick. That's precisely where so many sketch-based movies have fallen down.

The good news is that It's a Joke, Son!, while not exactly a satirical masterpiece for the ages, is mostly a success. Obviously, the audience came to see and hear Kenny Delmar do his famous character, and the script gives the comedian many chances to do his thing. But the filmmakers know enough to use Claghorn sparingly so that his over-the-top personality does not become grating.

It was a good idea to give the blustery politician a wife who can dominate him and, thus, keep his ego in check. Una Merkel could have afforded to play this role a bit bigger than she does. As ball-busters go, Magnolia Claghorn doesn't have anything on Sybil Fawlty, Alice Kramden, or the truly intimidating wives from W.C. Fields' domestic comedies.

The election plot is serviceable, and "Boss" Healey and his thugs make intimidating antagonists. Having them be Yankee "carpetbaggers" felt gratuitous, though, and the whole "let's get Claghorn to the Town Hall at the last possible second" ploy seemed like a lazy way to come up with an exciting third act.

As is typical of so many comedies of the era, including several of the Marx Brothers movies, It's a Joke, Son! also has a rather dull romantic subplot tacked onto it. These straight-laced scenes, with June Lockhart and Ken Farrell as Claghorn's daughter and future son-in-law respectively, exist to make the movie more well-rounded and give us some respite from Delmar's high-energy antics, but did they have to be so blah? Just asking.

In the end, though, this is Delmar's movie, and he makes the most of it. While never entirely a fleshed-out, three-dimensional human being, Beauregard Claghorn does have more substance to him than just a few stock phrases and bits. In his fierce civic pride, in fact, he reminds me very much of Charles Coburn's more-serious character from Colonel Effingham's Raid, i.e. the very first movie I reviewed in this series.

Is it funny: There are definitely laughs to be found here, nearly all of them provided by Kenny Delmar, who is not shy about expressing his pro-Southern philosophy. "Move the Mason Dixon line to the Great Lakes," he says early in the film to a shopkeeper selling apples called Northern Spies. "Make Canada the North. After that, anyone who couldn't speak with a Southern drawl would have to get a passport." That's pretty typical of Delmar's humor, which is this movie's only reason to exist.

To be sure, the other actors are in this film to make the star look good. Rooted in the medium of radio, Claghorn's comedy is mostly verbal rather than visual. Perhaps that's why the filmmakers felt obliged to throw in the antics of Daisy the dog, who performs a number of semi-impressive tricks. As you'd expect, It's a Joke, Son! is largely a series of comedic vignettes. I was inordinately amused by a scene in which Claghorn and Jeff are speaking at cross purposes about a refrigerated truck the latter intends to buy. It's really for delivering frozen food, but Claghorn has gotten the idea that it's for hauling dead bodies.

CLAG: Jeff, my boy, I can't say I approve of the things you're going to carry around in the truck. 

JEFF: Well, what's the matter with 'em? Everything's preserved as good as new! 

CLAG: (incredulous) Good as new?!?

If the movie has an Achilles heel, it's that some of these bits (amusing as they are) go on rather too long after all the comedic possibilities have been explored. In particular, there's a very long scene in which a little kid helps Beauregard make punch for his wife's Daughters of Dixie meeting and inadvertently adds all kinds of alcohol to the mix instead of grape juice. Beauregard then serves the potent potable to the ladies, who are all uptight, teetotaling biddies. You can imagine where it goes from there, right? Both halves of this sequence, the making of the punch and the consumption of the punch, stretch on for many long minutes. It's the kind of thing the Three Stooges would have gotten done in half the time. It's a cute joke, but enough is enough!

My grade: B

P.S. - Whether you see the Senator Claghorn character as a loving tribute to Southern culture or a mocking parody of it depends on you, I guess. Delmar certainly makes his hatred of the North well-known at every opportunity, cringing even at the word "north." And all the truly despicable characters in this movie are damn Yankees. The movie totally sidesteps the issues of racial discrimination and slavery, which is perhaps for the best. There are no minority stereotypes here. But modern-day audiences might squirm at the reverential depictions of the Confederate flag and the many, many iterations of "Dixie," a song that plays roughly once every 5-10 minutes and is vital to the plot because it has roughly the same effect on Claghorn that spinach has on Popeye.
      

Mill Creek comedy classics #51: "Stan Laurel Festival" (1918-1923)

Stan Laurel stars in Mud and Sand, a parody of the bullfighting drama, Blood and Sand.

A young Stan Laurel

NOTE: This feature-length program consists of three short subjects Stan Laurel made before his days as half of the Laurel & Hardy comedy team. Born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Lancashire, England, in 1890, Stan was about 30 years old when he made these early silent films. The son of show people, he started acting on the English music hall circuit in 1910 and served as Charlie Chaplin's understudy. In fact, the two future legends of screen comedy came to the United States at the same time as part of impresario Fred Karno's theatrical troupe in the mid-1910s. 

Once established in America, Stan formed a romantic and professional partnership with actress Mae Dahlberg, who rechristened him "Stan Laurel" and herself "Mae Laurel." Together, they toured the country. In addition to his theatrical work, he began appearing in films in 1917 and was a full-time movie actor by 1924. He and Oliver Hardy, who had signed separate contracts with the Hal Roach Studio, started working as a team in 1927 and would stay that way for the rest of their careers. Stan Laurel Festival captures the comedian during his pre-fame years, already a showbiz veteran but not yet a movie star and still experimenting with his onscreen persona.

The flick: Mud and Sand (Metro Pictures, 1922) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.7

Director: Gilbert Pratt (in the silent era, directed short films for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett; in the sound era, wrote for Laurel & Hardy and the Three Stooges)

The star: Stan Laurel (most famous for his 25-year partnership with Oliver Hardy, which yielded Sons of the Desert, The Music Box, Way Out West, and much more)

Other actors of note: Mae Dahlberg aka "Mae Laurel" (Stan's common-law wife at the time, appeared in his movies for about seven years), Julie Leonard (a regular in Eddie Boland and Stan Laurel films of the early '20s; married for 18 years to Norman Taurog, who directed many Elvis Presley films), Leona Anderson (House on Haunted Hill; recorded an LP, Music to Suffer By), Sam Kaufman (Suspense, Kismet); Wheeler Dryden (half-brother of Charles Chaplin; appeared in Chaplin's Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux)

Poster for the film.

The gist of it: In a small Spanish village, a young man named Rhubarb Vaselino (Stan Laurel) has his family worried because he's taken up the dangerous art of bullfighting, alongside his best friend Sapo. On their first day as matadors, Sapo is killed instantly, but Rhubarb proves to be a natural at fighting bulls and earns an invitation to battle the fearsome toros of Madrid. Before his departure, he marries his sweetheart Caramel (Leonard). In Madrid, Rhubarb is even more successful, becoming a major celebrity and letting the fame go to his head. He goes to a restaurant where he dances with the famous Pavaloosky aka La Paloma (Mae Laurel), but she is enraged when he accidentally spritzes her with seltzer water.

That same day, he falls under the spell of the seductive Filet de Sole (Anderson) and goes to her apartment that night. Caramel discovers Rhubarb and Filet together and leaves him. Heartbroken, Rhubarb prepares for the last bullfight of the season. He accidentally wins, thanks to a cape that has been soaked in ether by Pavaloosky. While the crowd throws their hats into the ring to honor Rhubarb, Pavaloosky throws a brick at his head and knocks him out cold. As he is immediately buried right there in the bullring, a caption tells us: "If you want to live long and be happy, cut out the bull!"

Mud and Sand parodies Valentino.

My take: Like The Villain Still Pursued Her, Mud and Sand is a parody of a specific work -- in this case, a Rudolph Valentino flick called Blood and Sand, which had come out only three months earlier and was one of the biggest box office hits of that year. "Rhubarb Vaselino" is an obvious pun on Rudolph Valentino's name, while "Caramel" and "Filet de Sole" are cognates of characters named Carmen and Doña Sol, respectively.

Not being too terribly familiar with the Valentino film, itself based on a 1909 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, I can't tell you how accurate this parody is. Audiences at the time would have known, however, which is why this story is told in such a broad, sketchy outline. It plays like the summary of a longer, more complete narrative. In one scene, for instance, Filet drops her purse on the floor and forces Rhubarb to pick it up right in front of Caramel. "My purse, slave!" says the intertitle. What's the significance of this? Well, apparently in Blood and Sand, there is a sadomasochistic element to Valentino's affair with Doña Sol.

But apart from the satirical element of the film, Mud and Sand is still a string of jokes built around the story of a bullfighter, not too different from one of the Three Stooges' bullfighting films, except with one comedian instead of three. The bulls defeated by Rhubarb go sailing over the entranceway to the arena, like the catapulted cow from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Rhubarb climbs a trellis to Caramel's balcony, only to have it tip over. Rhubarb's grandmother is a salty old dame who wants to make her grandson a bootlegger. (Prohibition was still on.) And there are many, many jokes that play on the double meaning of "bull." Typical silly comedy stuff.

So how's Stan Laurel? Well, he hadn't developed his trademark "good-hearted, naive simpleton" routine yet. But this film does take good advantage of Laurel's scrawny physique and elongated, rubbery face. He obviously knew how to take a pratfall and does so several times in Mud and Sand. I'm not quite sure if I would have sensed a legend in the making from this film, but it's passable entertainment.

I should add that Mill Creek's particular print of this film adds its own soundtrack with some very catchy 1920s-style "hot" jazz. The music is not timed in any way to the action, but I enjoyed it so much I didn't really care.

Is it funny: Like I said, it's no comedic masterpiece, but I got a few laughs out of Mud and Sand. There's a pretty funny sequence with amateur bullfighters waiting outside the arena for their chance to fight. Nobody wants to go first, so they keep trading places in line. Then Rhubarb enters, and bulls start flying out of the building. He tallies them up on a chalkboard outside, then goes back in -- only to find himself flying out of the arena! But he goes back in again, and the scene ends with medics somberly taking a bull out on a stretcher.

The whole "wooing" scene is cute, too: before he climbs up to Caramel, Rhubarb sings to her from ground level, and a nearby dog starts to howl. And I liked the moment when the great bullfighter is primping before his big showdown, which includes licking a giant lollipop while servants dress him. When some men gather around to shake his hand, Rhubarb accidentally offers one of the fellows his lolly, only to quickly retrieve it and daintily dust it off with a whisk broom.

My grade: B

P.S. - While there are no African-American stereotypes on display here for obvious reasons, one could argue that the entire film consists of Spanish stereotypes. The few foreign names and phrases in the film are a weird mixture of French and Spanish. ("Mon dios!" rather than "Dios mio!") Another intertitle tells us that a certain club is frequented by matadors, toreadors, humidors, and cuspidors (which is to say, spittoons). At one point, Rhubarb gives his mother some of his winnings and tells her that this will keep her in tomatoes and garlic for two years. In another scene, Rhubarb lacquers his hair down with a shiny, greasy tar-like substance. I don't see any real racial malice here, but the film does make fun of Spain's culture and people in a way some modern viewers may find offensive.

~~~

Stan Laurel plays a suspiciously Chaplin-esque "nervy young man" in Just Rambling Along.

The second flick: Just Rambling Along (Pathé release of a Robin Films production, 1918) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.7

Director: Hal Roach (legendary producer/director profiled in my review of Niagara Falls)

Bud Jamison

Other actors of note: Clarine Seymour (True Heart Susie, Scarlet Days; discovered by D.W. Griffith and seemingly destined for stardom but died suddenly during an emergency operation), Noah Young (Safety Last!, Bonnie Scotland), James Parrott aka Paul Parrott aka Jimmie Parrott (younger brother of comedian Charley Chase, extremely busy comedic actor, writer and director from the 1910s to the 1930s; worked behind the scenes on many Laurel & Hardy films including The Music Box and Way Out West but died at age 41 of a heart attack brought on by alcohol and drug addiction), Bud Jamison (Holiday Inn; Chaplin's A Dog's Life; portly character actor familiar to all fans of the Three Stooges for his many, many appearances as a comedic foil in their Columbia short subjects; a diabetic, his firm belief in Christian Science and rejection of traditional medicine shortened his life considerably), Max Hamburger (Harold Lloyd's Lonesome Luke series)

The gist of it: The print of the film I saw starts with a rather long series of educational captions explaining the movie's history and that of its star Stan Laurel. At last, the film proper begins. As the easygoing title implies, there is not much in the way of "plot" here. It's just a few minutes of gags. Laurel is a Chaplin-type freeloader who is first glimpsed fighting over a wallet with a small child... whose burly father (Young) happens to be a police officer. Stan manages to steal a little money from the kid, then joins a line of lustful men who are following a pretty young lady (Seymour) into a cafeteria-style restaurant. After scoring some free samples of food from the chef (Jamison) and buying only a ten-cent cup of coffee, the freeloader sits down with the young lady to eat, unaware that she has casually switched bills with him. He gets a nasty surprise when he reaches the checkout counter... and some nastier ones still when he tries to sneak out without paying.

AWOL Toto the Clown

My take: This brief comedy, Stan's second, is the oldest-surviving example of the comedian's film work. Considering it was made from a negative that was just about to turn to dust, it looks pretty good. At some point in its long life -- and it's now nearly a century old -- it must have wound up in the custody of a company called Blackhawk Films. They're the ones who have added the film's rather long-winded opening text, a series of title cards that tell us how Stan Laurel got his big break in movies when another comedian, Hippodrome star Toto the Clown, decided he didn't want to do any more movies and left the Pathé company desperately searching for a replacement. Enter Stan Laurel, who apparently inherited this film and its leading lady from the departed clown.

I don't know if any of that is true, but Stan does as well as any comedian could have with this slight material. It's obvious how strongly he was influenced by his former castmate, Charlie Chaplin, who had already taken the country by storm by then. Laurel very closely imitates Chaplins's facial expressions and mannerisms. If anything, the film is too brief. It seems like it ends before the story really even gets started. But as historical curios go, it's a fascinating memento.

Is it funny: It gets the job done. Let's say that. The film's best comedic set piece is the showdown between Laurel's sneaky character and Jamison's French chef, who wears the type of heavy black greasepaint mustache and eyebrows we now associate with Groucho Marx. Stan hides food in his clothes when the chef isn't looking and has the nerve to sample nearly everything on the menu -- items he won't and can't purchase. After all this, he gives the exasperated chef his order: one cup of coffee. This pairing of skinny Stan Laurel with a hefty, mustachioed foil is perhaps a harbinger of his partnership with Oliver Hardy. The opening credits make a big deal of leading lady Clarine Seymour, but she doesn't really do that much here except sit, smile, and look pretty. Whether she's funny or not, I couldn't tell you.

My grade: B

P.S. - No stereotypes that I could find.

~~~

Decades before the XTC album, Stan Laurel starred in the citrus-themed comedy Oranges and Lemons.

The third flick: Oranges and Lemons (Pathé release of a Hal Roach production, 1923) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.7

Director: George Jeske (directed other 1920s Stan Laurel shorts, including Smithy and Short Kilts; in the 1910s, an actor who was an original Keystone Cop and appeared in a few Chaplin shorts such as Tango Tangles; in the 1930s, a screenwriter whose credits include The Life of the Party)

Other actors of note: Katherine Grant (Miss Los Angeles 1922; appeared in almost 50 films between 1922 and 1926); Eddie Baker (Chaplin's City Lights, the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, Laurel & Hardy's Sons of the Desert, W.C. Fields' It's a Gift), George Rowe (Buster Keaton's Day Dreams, Harold Lloyd's Grandma's Boy), James Finlayson (All Over Town, The Perils of Pauline) , "Tonnage" Martin Wolfkeil (appeared in Stan Laurel and Charley Chase comedies of the mid-1920s)

An ad for Sunkist oranges.

The gist of it: Clumsy, knuckleheaded Sunkist (Laurel) works in various capacities for a company that raises, picks, and then packages citrus fruits. His girlfriend, pretty Little Valencia (Grant), works on an assembly line there, too. Sunkist's ornery boss, Orange Blossom (Baker), keeps assigning him to various tasks, both indoors and outdoors, but our hero manages to cause havoc wherever he goes. Soon, Orange Blossom and some other angry men are chasing Sunkist around the place, and a full-scale war breaks out at the plant with citrus fruits often being employed as projectiles.

My take: This is another film to which Blackhawk Films has added a lengthy text preamble, this time to rhapsodize about what a great gagman Stan Laurel was, the best of the silent era and surpassing even Larry Semon. While Semon used stock gags and built scenes around them, the text tells us, Stan would start with the scenes first and then incorporate gags into them. That may be true, but neither the scenes nor the gags are terribly inspired here. I'd estimate that 40% of this film is people running on treadmills or throwing citrus fruits at each other. A person can only take so much of that.

Is it funny: Not terribly so, but I think I might have chuckled at a few of the physical gags. Again, as with Just Rambling Along, Oranges and Lemons' best scene is one that pairs Stan Laurel with a heavyset man who becomes enraged at Laurel's incompetence. In this case, it's a brawny orange-picker ("Tonnage" Wolfkeil) who foolishly asks Sunkist for help. And I liked one of the intertitles that states that Orange Blossom wouldn't hurt a mosquito "unless its back was turned." Zing!

My grade: C+

P.S. - Stereotype-free again!

OVERALL GRADE FOR STAN LAUREL FESTIVAL: B