Just did a little surfing and I found out that YouTube has a bunch of old Burns & Allen clips between 20 and 30 minutes, which would seem to translate to entire episodes of their TV show. Not sure if this is a case of their being in the public domain or if it's some kind of guerilla uploading that will eventually be taken down on order of someone's lawyers. The latter is something I've seen a few times with Dailymotion.
For now it's a good break. These shows are from before I was born, and my earliest memories of George Burns were as a wry widower who sometimes played God. But I have seen him and Gracie together, and they had a spark.
2 comments:
You mean like this one? Some of those shows are so old even I was too young to see them when they first appeared. Luckily there were afternoon reruns. The amazing thing about watching them is that the lines go by so fast it's next to impossible to remember the last funny one before another totally ridiculous misunderstanding takes place. It's a good thing there's a reference of best quotes of Burns and Allen:
Gracie Allen:
In school, I got very good marks in literature and I would've done much better if I wasn't distracted by that little Ernie Bergman.
George Burns:
What did he do to distract you?
Gracie Allen:
Well, how would you feel if the boy who sat in front of you kept dipping his pigtails into the inkwells?
George Burns:
The boy - and he had pigtails?
Gracie Allen:
He used to bring them to school; his father was a butcher.
Gracie Allen was a very remarkable woman. Just because the jokes are ludicrous now doesn't mean they weren't always and that's part of the fun of watching Burns and Allen
He was always a great and funny raconteur. I love the bit in one of his monologues where he talks about the man who was so careless he fell down the stairs on his way to look at a gas leak in the furnace. "It took him three months before he could go down again with a match and blow it up." A great dry comic, but of course when Gracie comes into the picture he generally takes a back seat.
It's interesting that there's so much doubt about her birthdate, with a range of eleven years between the earliest and latest speculated dates. Which means that she might have been a little older than he or substantially younger. Not that it matters. I'd also note that even quite famous people weren't in the media as much as they are now. Which means that while we can make an educated guess that she was quite different from her stage character, there's not a lot of evidence as to how she acted in "real life."
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