THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 12, 1996 TAG: 9603120012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
``Comedian George Burns was the world's best known centenarian at his death last Saturday. Before becoming famous for beating the actuarial-table odds, he was known as the male straight man in the comedy duo of Burns and Allen, which delighted audiences for decades - in vaudeville and on radio, movie and television. To say Burns and Allen was to smile. To listen to Burns and Gracie Allen on the radio or to watch them in the movies or on stage or the tube was to laugh.
The announcer who introduced the weekly Burns and Allen radio program invited audiences to 30 minutes of ``healthy laughter.'' Healthy it was - laughter is good for body and soul - and Americans during the Great Depression and World War II welcomed all the laughter they could get.
Great comedians Fred Allen, Amos 'n' Andy, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fanny Brice, Jimmy Durante, Fibber McGee and Molly and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, among others, regularly lifted radio fans' spirits. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello convulsed moviegoers.
Each comedian or comedienne was distinctive, inimitable. Each helped hold at bay the darkness that ever threatens to engulf the human spirit. All is vanity, says Ecclesiastes, and no one gets out of this world alive, as we all learn. The human situation, as the British say, is hopeless - but not serious.
Thank God for laughter and for the likes of George Burns, who becomingly credited his show-business success to his wife, Gracie. It was a success that transformed the struggling vaudevillians into multimillionaires. ``I was nothing without Gracie,'' Burns insisted.
Gracie Allen died in 1964 and George Burns' star faded. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ``There are no second acts in American life.'' But George Burns had a super second act, winning a best-supporting-actor Academy Award at age 80 for his role as a retired vaudevillian in the Neil Simon movie ``The Sunshine Boys'' and later playing God in other films. He left us laughing, bless him. by CNB