Stan Freberg

1926 -

Of all the great comics of the mid-20^th century, Stan Freberg is a curiosity.  Most rose to fame doing stand-up in nightclubs, on TV shows, or in the movies.  Stan Freberg  is known for what he did with his voice: in cartoons, behind puppets, on parody records, on radio, and in advertising.

Stan Freberg was raised in Pasadena, California and spent his youth mimicking the great comics of radio during the 30’s and 40’s.   In 1944, at the age of 18, he took a bus from Pasadena to Hollywood and immediately landed an audition with Warner Brothers Cartoons.  The WB folks were so impressed with the wide array of voices that came out of this young man’s mouth that they offered him a job.  Cartoon director Friz Frelang asked “Why haven’t we heard of you before, Stan?” adding quickly “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.  I’m sure you didn’t just get off the bus.”  Freberg voiced dozens of cartoon characters for Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, Paramount, and MGM.  He often worked opposite the great Mel Blanc, filling all the other voices not voiced by Mel. 

Stan Freberg (center) with Dishonest John and Cecil

In 1949 at the dawn of television, Freberg and his buddy Daws Butler wrote and performed a children’s puppet show called Time for Beany.   For five years, they pulled on hand puppets of Beany, Captain Huffenpuff, Dishonest John and a sea serpent named Cecil to do a live half-hour puppet show they had written the night before - five times a week, 52 weeks a year.  The show was an immediate success.  Whole families would gather in front of their TV sets to watch.  Time for Beany won three Emmys and a Peabody.  In his book, Freberg writes that Dr. Albert Einstein once interrupted a meeting at Caltech saying “You vill haf to excuse me, gentlemen.  It’s time for Beany.”

In 1950, Freberg recorded a stand-up routine he had developed years earlier touring with Red Fox.  “John and Marsha” is a parody of soap operas where two characters go through an emotional conversation only saying each other’s names.  After test audiences went bananas for it, “John and Marsha” raced up the charts, launching Freberg’s recording career.   During the 50’s, he made several parody records for Capitol Records, most of them huge hits.  “Try” is a parody of weepy singer Johnny Ray’s “Cry.”  ”Wunnerful, Wunnerful” is a hysterical parody of the Lawrence Welk show with Welk pleading for someone to “turn off the bubble machine” as the Aragon Ballroom floats into the Pacific.  “St. George and the Dragonet” is a stunningly accurate parody of Jack Webb’s Dragnet.  Freberg even used Webb’s orchestra to play the iconic theme.  “Banana Boat” is a takeoff on Harry Belfonte’s “Day-O” where the soloist has to run outside the studio to sing “Day-O” because the bongo drummer complains that “it’s too piercing, man!” As his reputation grew, Freberg got bolder; he took on the McCarthy hearings in “Point of Order” and the commercialization of Christmas in “Green Chri$tma$.”

When fans asked Freberg to sign this
album cover, he'd sign the little cast.

In the spring of 1957, CBS Radio needed a comedy show to replace exiting Jack Benny.  They hired Freberg.  The Stan Freberg Show showcased a great collection of comic talent: Freberg, Daws Butler, June Foray, Peter Leeds, singer Peggy Taylor and the Billy May orchestra.  Episode 1 opens with a parade of Freberg voices right off the Capitol recordings.  After a visit from some tuned sheep, Freberg presents a Freberg Fable entitled “Incident at Los Voraces.” This brilliant satire tells the story of two rival Las Vegas-style nightclubs, the El Sodom and the Rancho Gomorrah.  Each club tries to top the other with bigger and bigger shows, for example, the largest swimming pool in the world.  The rivalry escalates until the Rancho Gomorrah books the hydrogen bomb and destroys the entire city.  Even as a little kid, I got that “Los Voraces” was a satire of cold war nuclear proliferation.  CBS executives apparently didn’t because they made Freberg change the ending to an earthquake, thus wrecking the political satire.  Fortunately, the hydrogen bomb ending was restored on later LP’s and CD’s for future Freberg fans to enjoy.  Other episodes included  “Bang Gunleigh, U.S. Marshall Field”, a parody of 50’s television westerns and inane commercials; “Face the Funnies”, a parody of punditry that still resonates today; and “Elderly Man River”, Freberg’s skewering of CBS censors. The Stan Freberg Show ran for only 15 episodes before being cancelled for lack of advertising support.  Network radio would soon give way to television, making Freberg the last network radio comedian in America.

Fortunately, Stan Freberg had found yet another career: advertising.  Freberg always thought that hard-sell commercials were poorly written, pretentious, and boring.  When Contadina Tomato Sauce hired him to write some commercials, he broke the advertising mold with a little jingle that asked “Who Puts Eight Great Tomatoes in That Little Bitty Can?” When Butter-Nut coffee of Omaha wanted to expand into the West Coast, Freberg wrote a six and a half-minute musical called “Omaha!” that didn’t mention the coffee until the finale of the musical, uh, commercial.  “Omaha!” was advertised in the theatre section of the L.A. Times and played after the Dodger game on a single L.A. radio station.  A year later, after similar Freberg shenanigans, Butter-Nut had quadrupled its L.A. market sales.   He wrote an ad for Chun King chow mein that got on the truth in advertising bandwagon by singing “Ninety-five percent of people are NOT buying Chun King chow mein.” In a spot for the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Freberg calls it “funnier than Cleopatra.”  A second voice says “we can’t say that.”  So Freberg corrects the slogan to “almost as funny as Cleopatra.” These commercials, and the many that followed during the sixties and seventies, re-wrote the advertising playbook.  Today, comic commercials are routine largely due to the innovation and invention of Stan Freberg.

Both Stan Freberg, 35 years apart

As his advertising career took off, Freberg still found time for other projects.  In 1959, he wrote a 21-minute musical entitled “Oregon! Oregon!  A Centennial Fable in Three Acts” to help celebrate the state’s centennial.  In 1961, “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America: Volume One: The Early Years” was released.  This LP comically revisits scenes from U.S. history including the First Thanksgiving (where the chef accidently cooks the centerpiece, a turkey),  the Boston Tea Party (where the tea is accidently dropped in the harbor by a clumsy dockworker), and  Betsy Ross sewing the flag (and George Washington questioning Betsy’s design sensibilities.)  He originally planned to record “Volume 2: The Middle Years” soon after, but Broadway Producer David Merrick convinced Freberg to turn “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America (Volume 1 and 2)” into a Broadway musical.  After being jerked around for a year, Freberg abandoned the project and “Volume 2: The Middle Years” didn’t get recorded until 1996. In 1964, while Freberg was doing the ads for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, director Stanley Kramer asked him if he wanted to be in the movie.  Freberg can be seen in sitting at a radio set while Andy Devine talks to Spencer Tracy on the phone.  Ironically, he doesn’t have any lines!  In 1966, Freberg released an LP called “Freberg Underground Show #1 introducing a ZOWIE! new medium: Pay Radio.”  That ZOWIE! comes from the Batman craze of the day.   In fact, the LP includes a Batman parody of the California Governor’s race between Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan.  “I see brown!  Dark, dingy brown!  It’s Pat Brown and he’s winning the election!”

Freberg today, still going strong!

I shook Stan Freberg’s hand at the 2009 Comic-Con and told him the profound influence that “Incident at Los Voraces” had on me as a young kid.  I’m sure he hears that kind of thing all the time - but I don’t care. I got to tell him that, if only once.

Question of the Day: In 1990, Freberg started a series of commentaries entitled "Stan Freberg Here."  Who was the audience?

Freberg, Stan, It Only Hurts When I Laugh, Times Books, 1988.