Stan Freberg

Stanley Victor Freberg (born August 7, 1926 in Los Angeles) is a voice actor, comedian, and advertising creative.

The son of a Baptist minister, Freberg grew up in Pasadena, California. His traditional upbringing is reflected both in the gentle sensitivity which underpins his work (despite his liberal use of biting satire and parody), and in his refusal to accept alcohol and tobacco manufacturers as sponsors (which was to be an impediment to his radio career when he took over for Jack Benny on CBS radio in the early 1960s as Benny moved to television.)

The early days

Stan Freberg began as a voice actor in a number of old-time radio shows and in animation as well. He won his first part by taking the advice of his uncle, a stage magician, who advised him to take a bus into Los Angeles and have the driver let him off "in central Los Angeles," whereupon Freberg was to walk into the first building he saw and ask for an audition. At the age twenty-one, he was cast as the voice of Junyer Bear in Chuck Jones' 1948 Looney Tunes cartoon What's Brewin', Bruin?, featuring Jones' version of The Three Bears. He often found himself paired off with Mel Blanc while at Warner Bros., where the two men performed such pairs as the Goofy Gophers, Hubie and Bertie, and Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier. Freberg also worked for Walt Disney Productions as a voice actor for films such as Lady and the Tramp (1955).

During 1950-1955, he and frequent collaborator Daws Butler provided voices on Time for Beany, an early puppet version of characters created by Bob Clampett who are better known in their later animated incarnation, Beany and Cecil.

Throughout the 1950s he made a name for himself writing and performing both original songs ("Tele-Vee-Shun") and parodies of popular tunes ("The Yellow Rose of Texas", "Day-O", "Heartbreak Hotel"). He also parodied the melodrama of radio soap operas with the breathy John and Marsha and (with Butler and June Foray) produced a medieval parody of Dragnet called St. George and the Dragon-Net. The latter recording was a #1 hit for four weeks in late 1953.

Radio

Freberg's popularity landed him his own program, the situation comedy That's Rich (1954), followed by The Stan Freberg Show, on CBS Radio in 1957. The satirical show failed to attract a sponsor, however, at least in part because Freberg did not want to be associated with the tobacco companies who had sponsored Jack Benny, whose time slot he inherited. In lieu of actual advertisements, Freberg mocked commercials in general by "advertising" such products as "Puffed Grass" ("It's good for Bossie, it's good for me and you!"), "Food" ("If you haven't any teeth you can gum your food with your gum, gum, gummy-gum gum"), and himself ("Freberg — the foaming comedian! Bobba bobba bom bom bom" — a parody of a well-known Ajax laundry detergent commercial). The lack of sponsorship forced the cancellation of the show after a run of only fifteen episodes.

After the radio show, he created an album, which was supposed to be similar to his radio show. This album is most famous for a bit in which, through the magic of sound effects, Freberg drained Lake Michigan and refilled it with hot chocolate, whipped cream, and a cherry, saying, "Let's see them do that on television!" That became a commercial for advertising on radio.

Another sketch from the CBS radio show, entitled "Elderly Man River", anticipated the Political Correctness movement by decades. Daws Butler plays "Mr. Tweedly," a representative of a fictional citizens' radio review board, who constantly interrupts Freberg with a loud buzzer as Freberg attempts to sing "Ol' Man River," accompanied by the orchestra of his longtime collaborator Billy May. Tweedly objects first to the titular word "Old", "which some of our more elderly citizens find distasteful." As a result, the song's lyrics are progressively and painfully distorted as Freberg struggles to turn the classic song into a form which Tweedly will find acceptable "to the tiny tots" listening at home: "He don't, er, doesn't plant 'taters, er, potatoes...he doesn't pick cotten, er, cotting...and them-these-those that plants them is soon forgotting," a lyric of which Freberg is particularly proud. Even when the censor finds Freberg's machinations acceptable, the constant interruption ultimately brings the song to a grinding halt (just before Freberg would have had to edit the line "You get a little drunk and you land in jail"), furnishing the moral and the punch line of the sketch at once.

Recordings

Freberg's brilliant, authentic-sounding musical parodies were a byproduct of his collaborations with Billy May and his Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson. His first hit was "John and Marsha," a soap-opera parody that consisted of the title characters (both played by Freberg) repeating each other's names. He used pedal steel guitarist Speedy West to parody the 1953 Ferlin Husky country hit "A Dear John Letter" as "A Dear John and Marsha Letter." His brilliant 1957 spoof of TV "champagne music" master Lawrence Welk, "Wunnerful! Wunnerful!" was a true collaboration with May, a veteran big band musician and jazz arranger (known for his work with Frank Sinatra among others) who loathed Welk's corny style. To replicate that sound, May and some of Hollywood's finest studio musicians and vocalists worked to virtually clone Welk's sound. Billy Liebert, a first-rate accordionist copied Welk's own accordion playing. The humor was lost on Welk; Freberg later recalled the bandleader denying he ever used the term "Wunnerful! Wunnerful!" (later the title of Welk's autobiography). Another hit song to get the Freberg treatment was Johnnie Ray's weepy "Cry," which Freberg rendered as "Try" ("You too can be unhappy...if you try!") Ray was furious, until he realized the success of Freberg's parody was helping sales and airplay of his own record; Ray and Freberg actually became close friends.

Freberg also tackled political issues of the day. For instance, one extended sketch paralleled the Cold War gamesmanship between the USA and the Soviet Union by portraying an ever-escalating public relations battle between the El Sodom and the Rancho Gomorrah, two casinos in the city of Los Voraces (Spanish for "The Greedy Ones" -- a thinly-disguised Las Vegas). The sketch ends with the ultimate tourist attraction, the Hydrogen Bomb, which turns Los Voraces into a barren wasteland. (Network pressure forced Freberg to remove the reference to the hydrogen bomb and destroy the two cities with an earthquake instead. The version of "Incident at Los Voraces" released later on Capitol Records contains the original ending.)

On two occasions, however, Capitol balked at releasing Freberg spoofs. One, "That's Right, Arthur," was a barbed parody of controversial 1950s radio-TV personality Arthur Godfrey, who expected his stable of performers known as "Little Godfreys" to toady to him. With a dialogue that included Freberg's "Godfrey" monologue, punctuated by an announcer repeatedly interjecting "That's Right, Arthur," Capitol feared Godfrey might take legal action. They also rejected the equally acerbic "Most of the Town," a spoof on Ed Sullivan. Both eventually surfaced on a box-set Freberg retrospective issued by Rhino Records.

Freberg continued to skewer the advertising industry after the demise of his show, producing Christmas|Green Chri$tma$" target="_blank" >^* in 1958 (again with Butler), a scathing indictment of the overcommercialization of the holiday. Freberg, the son of a church minister and very religious himself, made sure to point out on that novelty record "Whose birthday we're celebrating." (Despite his Jewish-sounding last name, Freberg is actually a Baptist of Swedish heritage.)

Green Chri$tma$ also foreshadowed 1961's Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, Volume One in that both combined dialog and song in a musical-like style. (One can almost imagine Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin performing the big Broadway finish on "A Man Can't Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days"). Then there was this little exchange, as Freberg's Christopher Columbus is "discovered on beach here" by a Native American played by Marvin Miller. Being skeptical of the Natives' diet of corn and "other organically grown vegetables", Columbus wants to open "America's first Italian restaurant" and needs to cash a check to get started.

Native: "You out of luck today. Banks closed."
Columbus: "Oh? Why?"
Native: "Columbus Day!"
Columbus: "Oh, yeah." pause "We going out on that joke?"
Native: "No, we do reprise of song. That help, but..."
Columbus and Native together: "...not much!"

A sequel "Volume Two," was planned for America's Bicentennial in 1976, but did not emerge until 1996.

Television Commercial Legend

While much of Freberg's writing was for radio, he also wrote and produced numerous legitimate television commercials for products such as:

Contadina tomato paste: "Who put eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?"
Jeno's pizza rolls: A parody of a contemporary commercial for Lark cigarettes that used the William Tell Overture, here ending with a confrontation between a cigarette smoker and Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger over the use of the music.
Sunsweet pitted prunes: Depicted as "the food of the future" in a futuristic setting, until science fiction icon Ray Bradbury (a friend of Freberg's), shown on a wall-to-wall television screen redolescent of Fahrenheit 451 butts in: "I never mentioned prunes in any of my stories." "You didn't?" "No, never. I'm sorry to be so candid." "No, they're not candied" (rim shot). Bradbury reportedly refused to consider doing a commercial until Freberg told him, "I'm calling it 'Brave New Prune'" prompting Bradbury to ask, "When do we start?" Another Sunsweet commercial features Ronald Long as a picky eater: "They're still rather badly wrinkled, you know." ("Today the pits...tomorrow the wrinkles...Sunsweet marches on!")
Heinz Great American Soups: Ann Miller is a tap-dancing housewife whose husband asks, "Why do you always have to make such a big production out of everything?" At the time (1970), this was the most expensive commercial ever made — so expensive, in fact, that there was little money left over to buy air time for it.
Lawnmower Ad: Sheep slowly munch on a front lawn. On camera reporter/announcer: "Jacobson mowers. Faster... than sheep!"
Encyclopædia Britannica: The boy in these commercials is Freberg's son Donavan. Freberg talks to him from offscreen.

Today, these advertisements are considered classics by many critics, and Freberg is usually credited as being the first person to successfully introduce humor into television advertising. Freberg asserted that a truly funny commercial that did not insult the intelligence of the viewer, and which perhaps revealed a bit more information about the product than the advertiser had in mind, would draw the buying public in droves. He was often proved right: famously, the owner of Jeno's Pizza Rolls paid off a bet over the success of a Freberg advertising campaign by drawing Freberg through the streets of San Francisco in a rickshaw. In all, Freberg has won 21 Clio awards for his commercials; many of these spots can be found on a videotape included in the Freberg 4 CD box set, Tip Of The Freberg.

Later Work

Freberg is still actively doing advertising and other projects today. He is most visible these days as the host of a syndicated anthology of old-time radio shows, When Radio Was. (Freberg was inducted into the radio Hall of Fame in 1995.)

Freberg also played the J.B. Toppersmith character in "Weird Al" Yankovic's The Weird Al Show; Yankovic has many times acknowleged Freberg as his greatest influence.

Freberg recounts much of his life and career, including his encounters with show-biz legends such as Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra and Ed Sullivan and the struggles he endured with radio and TV networks to get his material on the air, in his autobiography It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Times Books, 1988).