I can never ever get enough of George and Gracie, it's so good to go to go on vacation from our crazy lives these days and laugh like I'm a 5 year old. Thank you so very much for posting all of these videos!!!
Thank you so much for posting these shorts!! I can never get enough of this wonderful couple and seeing these shorts is a real thrill. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
The dialogue exchanges between George and Gracie are especially delightful and daffy in these early Educational short comedies...One could see how well they clicked as a team right from the beginning...
Well, given that the length of their career was over 40 years, I suppose it was relatively early, but it was hardly the very beginning. They had done vaudeville together since 1922.
It was only after George died, of course, that anyone was allowed to release the old TV episodes. A girl I'd known for years got hooked on those, but had no idea that they'd already been stars for about 30 years before they ever decided to do the TV show. Her delivery through these old routines is absolutely PRICELESS! 😂😂😂
I read that Burns & Allen were so popular and valuable, they got $5K per week on their radio show in 1931: That's $74K per week in 2012 money after inflation. George said he got so used to being a straight Man that he came across a man drowning and the man yells "Help! Help". So George repeated the line, "Help! Help?" and while he was waiting for the punchline, the man drowned.
That "straight man" joke was a personal favorite of George's- he also used it in his opening monologue on their very first TV show on October 12, 1950....and he often included it in his various books as well...
I saw these on tv as reruns when I was a little girl in the 50's. TV of those days shaped my life, but I never got the humor. I thought she made a lot of sense and the men were all crazy. I still think so....
EthelBramble, that's interesting because part of the construction of Gracie's character was the idea that she was not confused or stupid, but rather the world made complete sense to her in her own mind and it was other people who she found to be confused.
Brilliant lines and gags. I saw in the credits that George Burns wrote this script. He had an amazing mind, an absolute genius. The "far be it" gag even left me confused for a few moments - or is it the “be far it” gag?
Never liked GB but Gracie was great. Made the act. Never liked him even after she died and he had his own career. Without her, GB would just be another old Jew comic in an old age home for actors.
GB himself said he'd never have seen stardom if he hadn't been blessed with the breaks that ended up with him working with Gracie. My dad & maybe my mom apparently could see the same things Jack Benny could see in HIM, & history has it that Benny considered GB the funniest man alive! (Gracie died when I was 4, & I never SAW her until a few years after George died, but my folks never skipped a show GB was going to be in. Still, they told all of us kids how great they were before she died.) He wrote most of their material, but the way he.told the story, audiences only "laughed politely," even though Burns KNEW they were good jokes, so he started giving Gracie more & more of the lines he'd written for him, & NOW, audiences are laughing so hard they're CRYING, so Burns knew THAT was the direction in which any success lay. The rest, of course, is history.... They both had this deadpan delivery, but SHE was just so much BETTER at it that it's STILL almost unreal! Small wonder that America (& much of the WORLD not many years after these) loved Gracie before we ever started loving Lucy!
videognob When George published his 1988 biography on he and Gracie, he showed a picture of Gracie that was taken in 1927-28 where she is wearing a cloche hat. She really looked fetching in that photo. 😁 💜
