Stan Freberg died a year ago last April. If he hadn't, he would have been 90 years old today.
Please forgive me if instead of writing wholly about him, I write a little about myself in this piece. I am a fortunate man in that I was inspired by a lot of talented folks when I was younger and then went on to know and even to have close relationships with many of them. My mother always told me that when she was pregnant with me, she was a steady watcher of Time for Beany, a pioneering television show with miserable production values but brilliant writing, acting and concepts. I got to know well the three main talents behind that show — Stan, Daws Butler and Bob Clampett.
They were all very gifted, influential men. They were all very nice to me. They all treated me as an equal even though I clearly was not. (As far as I could tell, all three treated everyone as an equal, including people who were amazingly even less their equal than I was.)
I remember vividly playing Stan Freberg records over and over and over again in my parents' bedroom when I was a child. That was where the one record player in the house was and almost any time one of them wasn't sleeping, I could go in there, shut the door and listen to Freberg over and over and over. I did not "get" all the cultural references. Often, he was parodying something about which I knew nothing other than that his parody, whatever it was making fun of, was quite wonderful.
I'm not the only person who felt this way. A Freberg-Butler record that aped and spoofed Jack Webb's TV show Dragnet was a smash hit in Australia several years before Dragnet was ever seen or heard in Australia. People just thought it was a funny record.
Stan made funny records. Stan made funny commercials. Stan made funny voices in cartoons. And it wasn't just that they were funny. They were also memorable. They stayed with you because they not only got to your sense of humor but to other portions of your brain. He made you laugh but he also made you think.
"Made you laugh but he also made you think." That's a cliché used to promote a lot of comedians who were lucky if they could make you do either but it was really true in Stan's case. I always felt a little more creative and smarter when I listened to Freberg or got to be around Freberg. I'm not saying that I actually was either of those things…but I felt like I was. Maybe that's almost the same thing. One thing I did observe that even into his eighties, that mind of his was always working. It was a tad slower but it was always working.
One time, I was sitting in his living room talking with him while his wonderful wife Hunter was out running an errand. They were nearly inseparable and she took such good care of him but just for a half-hour, they were apart. Stan was telling me an anecdote and as he was nearing the punchline, the doorbell rang and I went to accept a parcel from a U.P.S. driver. By the time it had been signed-for and the guy was gone, Stan had forgotten where he was in his story. I started to prompt him but he said, "No, no…let me come up with it myself." It was kind of a personal challenge at his age.
All on his own, he remembered where he was and he started to resume the story. That's when the phone rang. The person who'd sent the package was calling to see if it had arrived yet.
Stan said, "Yes, it just got here. Yeah, I know it was supposed to be here two days ago but you should have specified Next Day Delivery." Then he added, "And while you were at it, you should have taken out Punch Line Insurance on it. That's where you pay a few bucks extra and they guarantee the delivery man won't interrupt a joke you're in the middle of telling."
I don't know if the person on the other end of the line laughed but I sure did. If Stan had still been in the advertising business, I think U.P.S. could have had a whole new campaign.