My pronouns are she/her/hers, and I am AFAB.
And my name isn’t Shirley.
That explains the show where Robin Williams was also on. He kept up his ad-libs and Hope was clearly irritated.
Airplane II was funny and had most of the same cast, yet I’m glad Leslie Nielsen wasn’t in it.
Witness: But it was Striker who couldn’t handle it, and he went to pieces.
Prosecutor: Andy went to pieces?
I reckon that jail / numbered punchline joke has the most variants in the last line I can think of.
Andy was a rock!
Buddy went to pieces.
Which is why he shouldn’t call you “Bill”.
.nvm. someone beat me to it.
I’d like to see a comedy done like Airplane! where the source material is a legitimate thriller/melodrama (the way Zero Hour! was), and the producers tinker with it the way ZAZ subverted Arthur Hailey’s script.
It occurs to me that Left Behind: the Movie might make a good target.
In order to keep from being sued, ZAZ actually bought the rights to do a remake of Zero Hour, which cost them only about $2500 at that time. I would wonder if one could actually pull something like that off today with a spoof of a major film, without having to spend a fortune for those rights.
Could the studio that already owns those rights be the one that remakes it as a spoof?
If a studio owned the rights outright, I can’t imagine why not.
In a way, that’s fundamentally what happened with Airplane II. After the first film was a huge success, Paramount wanted the ZAZ trio to do a sequel. They weren’t interested, stating, “we’ve already done all the good disaster-movie jokes!” Paramount’s reply was, “we own the rights, and we’re making a sequel, with or without you.” To which, ZAZ replied, “without us.”
The sequel was made with essentially no involvement from them, while they instead went on to make Police Squad! and Top Secret!
This is what I came in to mention. Hope volunteered a lot of time and effort to putting on those shows for service members who were homesick and in a lot of danger. Hope brought pretty young women, singers, etc. to combat zones and put on a good show for the troops. He will always be forgiven any shortcomings by many thousands of veterans for that generosity.
It’s Pavlovian conditioning. If you laugh at a Bob Hope joke, Rachel Welch might walk into the room.
There’s that, for sure. I was never able to see one of his shows. A couple of guys from our unit got to go Freedom Hill to see him while the rest of us simmered in a stew of envy. I saw a couple of other USO efforts, though. I recall seeing Michelle Lee (singer/actress) at some point, but that was back in the States, and also Ray Charles (although that’s a bit of a fuzzy memory). I may have that confused with seeing him at Wolf Trap in Virginia.
Knots Landing Michele Lee?
EDIT: Corrected the spelling…she’s a one L Michel(l)e.
That’s the gal.
This is weird, because I’d always heard that as a young comedian, Hope was noted for his quick wit and ability to improvise. Maybe he lost some of that as he got older.
Here’s a site talking about Hope’s ability to improvise
or here:
You know, I searched for this on the Internet, and other than here and maybe on Quora there was no mention of this.
So, yeah, it is weird.
The story I heard was that in his late years, Hope had serious problems with both eyesight and hearing, so he’d work off an advance script. When Carson stopped talking, Hope would come back with a memorized remark.
Carson wasn’t a nice person off screen. I take his statement with a grain of salt.
The radio show ad lib contest between Groucho Marx and Bob Hope is famous to all Marx Brothers fans because it inspired John Guedel to create a radio show for Groucho, which became You Bet Your Life.
As the YouTube clip comments, the pair did not improvise the whole ten minutes; they used the script as the base. That would also be Guedel’s format, allowing Groucho to deliver comebacks between scripted lines that gave the guest knowledge of what they were going to talk about.
