There is hardly anyone under the age of 60 aware of how phenomenally successful Bob Hope once was. His heyday may have been long-lasting—he hosted a top-rated weekly radio series from 1937 to 1953, appeared frequently on TV from 1950 to 1996, and acted in more than 70 films, many of which were hits—but the latter-day consensus is that he was never all that funny. When he died in 2003 at the age of 100, Christopher Hitchens brutally dismissed him as a purveyor of “comedy for people who have no sense of humor.”
Enter Richard Zoglin, theater critic of Time and author of Hope: Entertainer of the Century 1 a new primary-source biography whose categorical subtitle is not wholly in accord with its content. On the one hand, Zoglin argues that Hope was “the most important entertainer of the century” and that his brand of humor was “an affirmation of the American spirit: feisty, independent, indomitable.” On the other hand, he also acknowledges that Hope’s comedy was noteworthy only for “the sheer force of his style and stage presence,” not for anything he had to say about the current events that were his customary subject matter:
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