Its great for a comedian to be honored in Washington, Bob Hope said when he was celebrated at the Kennedy Center in 1985. If there was ever a city that knew how to get laughs ... .
There are so many congressmen and senators here, he added. I don't know whether to tell a joke or pass a bill. Pause. As if there was a difference.
Or on another occasion: The farmers hate to see it end, he said, after the 1984 presidential election. All those campaign speeches were good for the crops.
By now, an entire generation has come to maturity without having any memory of Bob Hopes ski-slope nose or of his sense of timing, so acute that he could slowly scan an audience with his knowing eyes, as laughter continued to build. And many generations have passed since he and Bing Crosby went on the road to anywhere, wisecracking and winking their way through adolescent capers like the vaudeville veterans they were.
Certainly, too, Hopes quips about politics as a variety of show business and political speeches as a form of fertilizer have almost lost the gentle edge they once had. Even his friendships with 11 American presidents (from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton) are fast shrinking into minor anecdote.
But Hope, who died in 2003 at 100, left his papers and his famous 85,000-page file of jokes to the Library of Congress; the Hope family also established an endowment to support the Library's Bob Hope Gallery of American Entertainment, which opened in 2000. And that guarantees a form of posthumous attention, preserving memories, inspiring comparisons. On Friday a new exhibition at the Library of Congress, Hope for America: Performers, Politics and Pop Culture, took the place of a 10-year-long exhibition, Bob Hope and American Variety, which had focused on Hope and vaudeville.
For better or worse, the exhibition begins, politicians and entertainers have dominated public life in America for much of the 20th century. This exhibition traces that connection, with Hope at its center. Its artifacts range from a note Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1899 to the Chicago newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne, who had lampooned him, to a video made for the exhibition, narrated by Stephen Colbert, who transforms the conspiratorial insider wink once used by Hope into something so coy that you are never quite sure if his celebration of Hope for America is meant to be ironic or not.
There is a quick survey of 20th-century political humor mentioning Will Rogers, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce most using far more caustic material than Hope was known for. Hope is quoted here recalling an encounter with Lenny Bruce: He asked me seriously if I had a spot on my TV show for him. Now I admired the man, but with that kind of material? I thought fast and said, Lenny, I think you'd do better on educational television.
We see the beginnings of mainstream political satire in the 1960s with George Carlin and Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the Smothers Brothers and Rowan & Martins Laugh-In. Hope appears here too, with some examples of unexpected controversy: he violated British taboos when performing for Queen Elizabeth in 1962, by satirizing the Kennedy's, and he outraged his fans by appearing on a Smothers Brothers special, thus seeming to endorse their anti-Vietnam-war, countercultural sympathies. By the end of the 1960s, Hope was enduring other attacks for his support for Richard M. Nixon and for organizing the Honor America Day rally in 1970.
