Humorous Quotes from George Burn's
All My Best Friends

on Sophie Tucker :

Nobody could belt out a song like Sophie; they used to say her voice was so strong she could audition for a part in Hartford without ever leaving New York.

on Fanny Brice :

Fanny never liked to talk about her private life. It was her private life, and if we were interested we could read about it in the newspapers.

on Blossom Seeley :

When Blossom started telling her story to Paramount's screenwriter an amazing thing happened - she became a virgin. That was known as the Immaculate Deception.

on Danny Kaye :

Danny Kaye was good at almost everything he did, but I don't think he was a great golfer. I will say this for him though, when he hit a bad shot, he threw his clubs further than anybody else.

On Maurice Chevalier :

Maybe the cheap . . . the most frugal . . . nah, cheap is right, the cheapest person I've ever known was Maurice Chevalier. He wouldn't even give you the time of the day. He wouldn't give you his best regards.

On Jack Pearl :

Every performer experiences failure. It's part of the business. It's just that some failures last longer than others. Jack Pearl's failure for example, lasted longer than his career.

on Frank Fay :

Fay was great in the courtroom. When he testified they put him under oath and asked him to state his profession. "I'm the greatest comedian in the world," he said. When his lawyer criticized him later for boasting, Frank shrugged and said, "What could I do? I was under oath."

When he died in 1961 he had a few bucks and a lot of enemies. And he got both of them the same way - he earned them.

on Eddie Cantor :

Maybe Eddie didn't sing so well, and he wasn't a great dancer, and most of his jokes really weren't that funny, but he did so much so fast that the audience didn't have time to notice. Slow-motion instant replay could have killed Cantor's career.

Eddie without an audience was like Jessel without a girlfriend.

Eddie had so much energy he made coffee beans jumpy.

Cantor, made fifteen pictures, and he couldn't act his way out of a bad dream. He acted like he was Eddie Cantor.

In 1944, when Cantor was singing his song, they shot him from the waist up - because from the waist down he was doing the hula. Excuse me, he was doing a suggestive hula. I'll tell you what it suggested - it suggested that Cantor couldn't do the hula.

on Ed Wynn :

Then there was Ed Wynn, who was billed as "The Perfect Fool." He wasn't, of course, nobody's perfect, but he was a great fool.

It was Ed Wynn who invented the eleven-foot pole that you used to touch people you wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Ed Wynn played the piano, but only in the key B-flat. If B-flat had been more popular Ed Wynn might have become a famous musician.

Ed Wynn almost became the first national radio star. He just missed it by about forty-six states.

Ed spoke with a lisp, and he always giggled before he told a joke. I guess the reason he giggled was that he knew the punchline before the audience did.

He played the King of Happy Island, a place that probably would have been a lot happier if its ratings had been better.

on Jimmy Durante

Calling Durante's nose large is like calling Jack Benny "thrifty," it just doesn't make the point. He did things to the English language that even Jessel wouldn't have done with Mae West.

Jimmy was also a substantial investor in the Las Vegas casinos, but he did it the hard way - one bet at a time.

Jimmy and Margie Little went out for sixteen years, and were engaged for ten of them, before they finally got married. I don't want to say Jimmy was nervous about it, but Eskimo surfers in December don't have such cold feet.

After the wedding just Jimmy and Margie, and thirteen friends went on their honeymoon.

Jimmy's malaprops were an important part of his act and his writers would always give him two or three in every script, but they'd also put in enough hard words to ensure that he'd mess up a few more.

It was sort of surprising that it was Jimmy's heart that went bad, because that was the biggest part of him.

on The Marx Brothers :

Panoochi was to card games what the Marx Brothers were to a script. A panoochi player could do anything, say anything, and play anything, so long as it made no sense.

Writing for Harpo was like trying to design clouds. Nobody could do it better than the creator, so they didn't even try.

He (Harpo) was so famous for not talking that a producer offered him $55,000 to say one word in A Night in Casablanca. Gees, $55,000 for one word - for that price Jack would have read the whole dictionary.

The only person at the table I didn't get along with so well was Groucho. Look, he got that name for a reason.

Harpo saw the humor in life. The great artist Salvador Dali once sent him a harp whose strings had been replaced by barbed wire. Harpo immediately sent Dali a picture showing him standing next to the harp with all his fingers wrapped in bandages.

There actually were some very personal things that Groucho enjoyed sharing with his friends; his insomnia, for instance.

on Fred Allen

Fred Allen broke into vaudeville doing a comic variation of Serge's act - he'd put a fork in his mouth and attempt to catch a turnip thrown from the audience. He was so bad he couldn't have caught a compliment.

The thing I always noticed about Fred was that he just wasn't happy unless he wasn't happy. Then he was happy.

A lot of people warned Fred that his dry wit wouldn't work on radio, and they kept warning him for the whole seventeen years his shows were on the air.

Fred claimed he didn't have to move to Los Angelos to be miserable, he was unhappy enough in New York.

Once Fred met a friend on the street and invited him up to his hotel for a drink - then served him a glass of water.

on Al Jolson :

Nobody ever dominated a theater like Jolson. And nobody was ever as quick to admit it as he was, either.

I mentioned Jolson twice, but that's because he always claimed to be twice as big a star as anyone else.

Jolie just never had the kind of success on radio that he had on stage; of course, that's like saying Columbus didn't do too much after discovering America.

The only person Jolie always got along well with was himself. Jolie even paid his brother Harry not to use the name Jolson professionally.

I think Jolson's biggest problem with women was that they came between him and himself.

Jolson's ego was so big he could have given the Lord himself an inferiority complex.

I'll tell you who was always faithful to the great love of his life: Jolson. Jolie never cheated on himself.

I think that failing was so tough for Jolson because he had the furthest to fall.

on Milton Berle :

What can I say about Milton Berle that he already hasn't said himself?

Milton's act was every bit as good as Jessel's or Cantor's. In fact, it wasn't only just as good, it was the same.

"The Thief of Badgags," as he was nicknamed, has made a career out of being accused of stealing other comedians' best material.

Once he was introduced as "The man who always steals the show - one joke at a time."

In all the years I've known Milton, and that's a long, long time, he's never stolen a single line from me. So atleast you know he has pretty good taste.

Berle was the smartest one of all. Not only did he steal jokes, he built his whole character around the fact that he stole material. So he got jokes out of stealing jokes.

Milton was probably the best at dealing with hecklers, but then he probably had the most practice.

Nobody was bigger than Berle (on early television). Milton would be the first person to tell you that. Also the second, and the third.

People said Berle was responsible for selling more television sets than anyone else in history - "I know that's true," Joe E. Lewis said, "I sold mine. My brother sold his."

Mahalia Jackson was a wonderful gospel singer, she sang about trouble and hardship and having faith in the Lord. But until she worked with Milton, she didn't know what trouble really was.

on George Jessel :

I think Jessel's philosophy about golf was something like: If all you're going to do is chase the ball, why hit it in the first place?

He was so good (an after dinner speaker) that one night he walked into the wrong reception and gave a long speech praising a man that nobody in that room had heard of, and still got a standing ovation.

People used to say that Jessel would appear at the opening of a TV dinner carton.

Legally Jessel was married 5 times. He married his first wife, Florence Courtney - one of Courtney Sisters, a good harmony act - three different times. Georgie was a man who couldn't take yes for an answer.

I think that after the third marriage Georgie tried to claim his divorce attorney as a dependant.

Nobody ever had to steal Georgie's affections - he gave them away at the drop of a skirt.

Georgie got engaged the way other people got haircuts; it was just something he did every few months whether he needed to or not.

Georgie was the kind of a man who always liked to drown his sorrows in a tall blonde.

I think Georgie felt that since he had been in show business long before television had been invented, television was going to have to adjust to him.

Georgie believed in democracy, and he felt that everybody had a right to an opinion. His.

on Jack Benny :

Jack was so cheap that instead of bringing his date flowers, he brought her seeds.

He was asked to throw out the first ball at a World Series game. But he broke up the whole ball park when he looked at the ball and, instead of throwing it, he put it in his pocket and sat down.

Of all the great qualities he had, and there were so many, there was one thing that set him apart from everybody else. He really thought I was funny.

He had a very middle-class childhood. He actually grew up in a happy home, not the best place for a comedian. Fortunately, he was able to overcome it.

Jack Benny's ability on the violin was legendary. Everybody knew he had none.

Jack Benny would end his act by playing a tune on his violin, so naturally he got a big cheer when he finished.

Let me tell you about Jack's singing voice - it made his violin playing sound good.

Radio consisted of sound and silence. That was it. And while the rest of us were trying to figure out ways of using sound, Jack was smart enough to figure out how to use the silence.

When we were all starting out every cheap joke was told about Scotsmen. By the late 1930s they were all told about Jack Benny. So in about eight years that character was so successful that he succeeded in wiping out the entire country of Scotland.

When he was held up by a robber who demanded, "Your money or your life?" Jack's silence while he thought it over was the funniest thing never said on radio.

Jack made his first movie, Hollywood Revue of 1929 in about 1929. As soon as the picture was released, the entire country went into a deep depression. Maybe it was a coincidence.

Maybe it's not nice to make jokes about the death of the man who was my best friend. I loved Jack, but there's no money to be made crying, and knowing him as well as I did, he'd want me to make the money.

He couldn't even make Jack Benny laugh, and Jack laughed at the menu.

On a golf course, Jack had the hands of a violinist. That was fair, because as a violinist, Jack had the hands of a golfer.

The biggest joke at the Round Table was not laughing at Jack when he was trying to be funny.

He was so cheap, for example, that when Mary asked for diamonds for her birthday he bought her two of them - the eight and the Queen.

He once gave Gracie a coupon for a year's subscription to a magazine as a gift - and all she had to do was fill it out and send it in with a check.

I remember that Jack and the IRS had a big fight over his profits. They both wanted them. I mean, that was really an unfair fight, the entire government of the United States of America against Jack - the government had no chance.

Seats for these concerts were priced from $5 to $100, but Jack claimed that the more expensive seats were those furthest away from the stage. "In fact," he said, "for two hundred and fifty dollars, you don't have to come at all.

Over a fifteen-year period Jack raised almost $6,000,000 for the benefit of classical music. Of course, a lot of people claimed that that was his way of paying for the damage he'd caused it.

Note: From the above selection of quotes it may seem that George Burns cribbed about his friends or painted them in poor light. However that's not the way the book is written. He does write about the good qualities too (like Jack Benny's generosity in real life) but I chose these quotes coz I felt these were the most humorous lines. ~ Gunjan

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