July 29, 2003

OLHEM PARA BOB HOPE!
O artigo chama-se «The C.E.O. of Comedy» e é um perfil do actor escrito em Dezembro de 1998 por John Lahr para a «New Yorker». Pode ser lido aqui. Excerto para aguçar o apetite: Like any shrewd C.E.O., Hope believed in careful product planning. He employed as many as five press agents at a time, and he brought his particular combination of gall and good-enough looks onstage with a distinctive swagger: chest out, body pitched forward on the balls of his feet, hands cupped behind his swinging arms—as Jack Benny quipped, like a headwaiter trying to get a tip. “He came on as if he were carrying a great weight of almost civic dignity in front of him,” Sir Laurence Olivier once told the BBC. “It’s very amusing.” Hope also established a kind of joke factory, which has remained intact from the late thirties until today. (Even now, he keeps a skeleton crew of two writers on retainer.) “I believe I was the first of the comedians to admit openly that I employed writers,” Hope told William Faith in 1981, in “Bob Hope: A Life in Comedy,” which is perhaps the best book about him. “In the early years of radio, comedians fostered the illusion that all of those funny sayings came right out of their own skulls.”