by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last Charles and I watched an episode of
the Kraft Music Hall from 1958, hosted
by Milton Berle (who seems to have been host of a dizzying array of series
under different titles, many of them named after his sponsors — the most famous
show he did was the Texaco Star Theatre) and featuring Andy Griffith. Though the archive.org download from which
I got this one didn’t give a date, it was easy enough to figure out because
Berle’s opening monologue announced that it was just after election day and
contained a joke about “Harriman lost New York, but he bought New Jersey” — a
reference to the 1958 New York gubernatorial election, in which super-rich
Averell Harriman was beaten in a landslide by super-duper-rich Nelson Rockefeller.
Griffith was there to pitch
his movies and his TV work — this was two years before his fabled sitcom The Andy Griffith Show debuted (in which he played seriously the country-boy schtick he’d bitterly satirized in the remarkable film A
Face in the Crowd) — and his best moment
was when Berle introduced him as a folksinger and Griffith launched into a
long, convoluted explanation of the song he was about to sing, then sang one
line of it and quit. When Berle questioned him, Griffith replied, “I’m not a
song-singer, I’m a song-explainer” — a gag that will ring true with anyone who’s been
to a folk concert and noted how the performers spend as much time talking about
the songs they’re about to sing as they do actually singing them. (With the
late Utah Phillips — who was good enough at this sort of thing he could
actually have had a career as a stand-up comedian — his pre-song explanations were so long that Ani DiFranco
did a remix album of him that used only his stage raps, not his actual singing voice.) As with the Lucky
Strike-sponsored program we’d watched earlier, this download left in the
original commercials — and Charles and I were both astounded to hear Kraft’s
Velveeta actually being sold as a health food!
