What I watched: An episode of the DuMont variety show The School House, hosted by Kenny Delmar and co-starring Arnold Stang, Wally Cox, Tommy Dix and Kenny Bowers among others. This episode was broadcast on Tuesday, March 22, 1949 at 9:00 PM.
What happened: The episode opens abruptly with a scene of two women tap-dancing as a class of adult “students” look on. Quite what educational role this dancing provides is not addressed. It comes off as a bit of a fetish thing, if I’m being honest. Kenny Delmar, playing a teacher, takes control of things and quickly establishes the conceit of the show: that he, as host, is the teacher of his class, and his marvelously talented students will continually interrupt to put on a performance.
But before we can get to these performances, Arnold Stang (not using a character name) comes in late, and Delmar has to upbraid him. Stang, playing the cowardly kid disturbingly well, slinks to the back of the class while a woman sings a rather generic Irish song. The singing is all right, but she seems to have no idea what to do with her body while doing it. This leads into an on-set commercial, in which Stang gives a “report” on the superiority of DuMont television sets. Presumably anyone who was watching this on another brand’s set would have thrown it away and gone out to buy a DuMont. Stang loses track of his lines at some point, and once again seems to inhabit the spastic nerd a bit too well.
Delmar gives a lecture about acting kind even when upset, which naturally enough leads to a student played by Kenny Bowers heckling him and the teacher retaliating. The heckler gets up to do a musical number where he argues with his girlfriend through song. Yes, he admits, he’s been cheating on her with Clara — his jazz clarinet. He goes on to demonstrate to the class what bebop is. I would give his assignment a C+.
Stang comes up again to give a rendition of “The Ancient Mariner”, but flubs all the lines (intentionally, this time). Delmar responds by saying he’ll “see you on the roof”, which does not sound like something the school board would approve of. The teacher then notices that someone is playing with sticks at the back of the class, and invites him to come up and do it for everyone. He puts on an impressive juggling display, and Delmar tells him “you go ahead and play with sticks any time”. Uhhh…..
As the episode winds down, we get into a lengthy parody of Das Rheingold of all things, with Delmar doing an impression of his German music teacher and Stang becoming effeminate the instance he puts on a Brunhilde wig. Tommy Dix, another “student” has to kiss him, to his (humorous?) disgust. Tommy then concludes the show by performing “Buckle Down Winsoki”, a nonsensical song that was apparently a 1940s crowd pleaser. [1] I don’t know, folks.
What I thought: This has to be the strangest show I’ve seen yet, and one of the most amateurish. The School House was undoubtedly an attempt to experiment with the nascent variety genre, but it’s pretty easy to tell right away that this format doesn’t work. Seeing a bunch of talented, full-grown men play-acting schoolchildren is less charming than it is disturbing, particularly when Delmar’s teacher tries to discipline them. (Once again, there’s a weird homoeroticism in the predominantly male world of early television). I can imagine a version of The School House where the classroom is just set-dressing and the opportunity for a few jokes, but this episode seems determined to maintain the fiction all the way through.
The show’s cultural references are all over the place. Is the audience that appreciates Stang’s slapstick humour and the zany musical numbers really going to also enjoy a parody of Wagner? The point of a variety show is to have different acts appeal to different audiences, but I imagine that these sketches would serve the opposite purpose of making sure any potential viewer is repelled. The school setting also seems misjudged. This was long before a time when adults would try to re-live their adolescence through media; most adults in the 1940s remembered their youth as a period of deprivation or violence. It’s hard to go from the almost fully-formed Texaco Star Theatre to something as scattershot and amateurish as this.
Is there any value in The School House? Well, Stang is reasonably funny as a spastic loser, although from what I can tell he was playing the role better on Berle’s show. There’s some talent among the other “students”, but nothing really out of the ordinary. Really, the funniest part of the show is when Stang flubs his lines. A contemporary viewer can also get a glimpse of how DuMont was already beginning to lag behind its rivals. Remember, this aired on the same night as the Milton Berle episode I described in the last post, and any viewer switching over would notice the obvious contrast in quality. While NBC, ABC and CBS all had experience in radio broadcasting and could put on a reasonably professional presentation, DuMont was really just tossing people on stage in an attempt to fill air and sell televisions. The result was messes like this.
What else is on?: CBS aired something called We the People, while NBC had a program called I’d Like to See, and ABC featured the premiere of The Billy Bean Show, also featuring Arnold Stang. Either my dates are wrong on some of these, or that guy really got around. CBS had the prize of the evening, though: the NCAA basketball finals, airing at 9:30 after the conclusion of all these second-string variety shows.
Coming up next: We’re back to the Admiral Broadway Review grind, with an episode welcoming us to spring.
[1] According to an Internet Archive comment, Dix had gotten notoriety for performing this song in the 1943 film Best Foot Forward alongside Lucille Ball.
The Eternal Couch Potato 