Waiting backstage with Hope as the audience filed to their seats, we peered through a gap in the curtain as a dozen high-ranking Communist Party leaders were being seated in the front row.

They wore gray, baggy suits with the impeccable tailoring of pajamas from Wal-Mart. They looked to be in the neighborhood of 80 — and it must have been a rough neighborhood. Their lined faces reflected years of proletariat struggle, party in-fighting, industrial revolution and chain smoking.  

Watching this grim potpourri of Maoists, Hope frowned. “Look at them. Not a smile and they don’t even speak English. How am I supposed to get laughs?”  “Don’t worry, Bob,” Gig offered soothingly. “How many peasants could they have purged? A couple of million. Three on the outside.”  Hope said, “You’re right. What am I worried about? I survived vaudeville.”

At rehearsal that afternoon, we had to settle on the most efficient method of translating the material into Mandarin. First, we tried projecting the Chinese characters on a large screen beside the stage, but the Chinese, well-known as fast readers, would laugh before Hope could finish each joke.

We decided he’d need an interpreter on stage beside him.  We called for a volunteer and we got a good one — Ying Ruo Cheng, one of China’s leading actors, who a decade later, would play the disgraced Mayor of Peking in The Last Emperor.

Cheng’s sense of comic timing proved an equal of Hope’s and he got as many laughs from the Chinese as Hope was getting from the Westerners. I had seldom seen Hope more delighted — two laughs for the price of one.

His opening line that night was hardly designed to divert the minds of our hosts from the Cold War:

·         I can’t believe I’m really here, but this must be China. Last

night, I went to a movie called “The America Syndrome.”

Starring Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda, The China Syndrome was playing to big box office in the states and concerned a threatened nuclear meltdown, a somewhat touchy subject in the PRC. But we were there to get laughs, and remember, this was before the age of political correctness.

·         I’ve been seeing all the sights. Yesterday, I stopped by the Academy of Science and they offered me a job as an exhibit.

·         Then I visited the Hall of Longevity. I promised my insurance

man I would.

·         And I loved the Great Wall of China. Of course, I love anything

as old as I am.

·         Then we visited the Forbidden City. What opulence! It looks

like Caesar’s Palace without the slot machines.

At this juncture, Cheng turned to Hope and asked, “What’s a Caesar’s Palace?” The Chinese may have been in the dark, but as you would expect, the line got a huge laugh from the Westerners. Hope said, “It’s a little place that takes the money the IRS didn’t get.” That’s a pretty quick ad-lib, but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

·         Yesterday, I visited your Marble Boat at the Summer Palace. A boat made entirely of marble. At first they said it wouldn’t float — and then Billy Graham showed up.

Again, Cheng interrupted his translation and asked, “Who is Billy Graham?”  And in one of the quickest ad-libs I had ever heard, Hope replied “Billy Graham is an advisor at Caesar’s Palace.” The line proved yet again what a consummate ad-libber Hope was.

During rehearsal, we got word that the Ministry of Culture had cut this joke from the monologue:

·         They serve a drink over here called mao tai. One sip and your

head feels like it’s going through a Cultural Revolution. Two sips and it feels like a Gang-of-Four.

We gladly complied and excised the offending material. After all, we were batting five hundred. We lost this joke, but we managed to slip America Syndrome by them — most likely because they didn’t have a clue as to its meaning.

[Excerpted from THE LAUGH MAKERS: A Behind-the-Scenes-Tribute to Bob Hope's Incredible Gag Writers

Bear Manor Media - 2009.

Photos:

www.laughmakers.blogspot.com]