Benny Rubin

Jack Benny’s autobiography includes a very telling story about how The Past Was Different. Rubin was a regular player on Benny’s radio show, and they used his talent with dialect to just hire him instead of hiring a range of actors for a range of characters. One episode involved a Pullman porter, and initially, Benny just planned to have Rubin do the character. According to Benny, the producer felt that Rubin looked “too Jewish,” leading to the hiring of Eddie Anderson and the eventual creation of the character of Rochester. And the more you learn about the relationship between Anderson and the cast and crew of The Jack Benny Program, the happier you become, but it’s a weird launching place.

Rubin was indeed Jewish. And that’s practically all the information I can give you about him as a person. He was born in Boston in 1899. He died in Los Angeles in 1986. He’s buried in Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City. He was apparently married twice, apparently had a daughter. In between birth and death, he spent more than fifty years in show business, covering everything from vaudeville to Citizen Kane. And that’s about what we’re able to find about Rubin as a person without considerably more reference access than I have.

We’ve encountered a lot of careers like that. You know him if you see him, probably if you hear him. He had a vaudeville act doing dialects, so he played people from everywhere over the course of that half-century. Including such poorly-aged characters as “Second Indian Chief” on an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies and “Chinaman” in the Abbott and Costello vehicle The Noose Hangs High. And if Dick Tracy’s “Joe Jitsu” is a great name, well, maybe it would’ve been even better with an Asian actor in the role. I’m just spitballing, here.

I have actually seen things with Rubin in them, and not just because of the aforementioned Citizen Kane. He gets a really sweet character on an episode of Emergency! It’s one of those bonkers episodes wherein the episode starts with a person having a heart attack in a stuck elevator which then falls a couple of stories, breaking Rubin’s character’s leg. In part because he’s obviously in love with the woman who had the heart attack and is trying to protect her in the falling elevator. And that sort of thing is why we watch Emergency!

Wikipedia says we’ll know him from The Jack Benny Program and six ‘50s Three Stooges comedies, which these days pretty much means people don’t know him. Tiffany Pictures, one of the Poverty Row studios of the ‘30s, tried putting him into two starring vehicles, but he didn’t ever hit it big. That said, he did do a ton of minor things you might know. The Dexter Riley Now You See Him, Now You Don’t. A Perry Mason. A whole lot of those TV shows Rat Pack types had for a while. All of which brings us to the least surprising thing on his resume, a bit part (uncredited) in Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood.