If you enjoyed yesterday's clip with Mel Blanc and Johnny Carson, you'll probably like this one of Mel Blanc with his longtime employer, Jack Benny. You'll even get to hear the English Horse impression again.
This runs ten minutes and it's from Benny's last TV show of 1956. The first half is Mel playing an impersonator of animal sounds. Note that he and Mr. Benny have a bit of trouble getting through it without breaking up.
If you want to stay tuned for the second half, you'll see some (not all) of a bit Benny did with "The Landrews Sisters." There's an interesting bit of history to this piece. It was originally written for Benny by a writer named Harry Conn, who authored all the early Jack Benny radio programs. Jack did some version of it throughout most of the live performances he did from about the mid-thirties until the last times he played Las Vegas in the seventies. The name of the act kept changing to keep up with the times. Near the end, they were called The Smothers Sisters.
The three ladies in the video are, left to right, June Earle, Iris Adrian and Muriel Landers. I don't know anything about Ms. Earle but Iris Adrian had a long career playing wisecracking waitresses and chorus girls. (She was the waitress that Walter Matthau flirts with in the delicatessen in The Odd Couple.) Muriel Landers had a long career playing fat girls and was even a regular briefly on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. She was so often cast when they needed a fat girl that casting agents used to refer to those as "Muriel Landers roles," which was a nicer way of saying, "Get me a fat girl."
