Customer Reviews

All My Best Friends

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George Burns is a funny man! This book deserves to be in print. It chronicles his and many other famous comedian's lives, like Al Jolson and Jack Benny. Al in all a great read.

This is one of the funniest books I have ever read as well as an informative and authoritative history of American show business and the men who invented it from burlesque to vaudeville, radio, movies and tv.

Can never get enough of George.......loved the Burns and Allen show........enjoyed reading about the man and his life. He worked with the best entertainers of all time. What a life!

You probably need to be in the over-60 crowd to really appreciate this extensive set of anecdotes, a memoir of a show biz legend, all of 93 years old when this was published in '89. It's not about his famous partner, wife Gracie - that relationship had been previously chronicled. Rather, this is Burns' longtime recollections of famous friends in the biz - especially Groucho and Harpo Marx, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, George Jessell, Eddie Cantor, and probably his best friend, Jack Benny. Along the way, he illustrated the evolvement of stage shows from vaudeville to radio to television, each successive medium practically annihilating its predecessor. It was also interesting to see which stars successfully made each transition, or not!

We're not necessarily fond of biographical reading, but recalling many of these personalities and characters from our childhood made the narrative a little more fun than it might otherwise have been. Burns also uses the pages as an excuse to drop many a punch line, most of which were pretty corny, but hey - what does one expect of a nonagenarian !! So -- a reasonably pleasant several hours of reading, plus extensive sets of black and white photos of all the characters under discussion awaits...

This book contains a treasure trove of hilarious anecdotes.

Here's an example. George Jessel had a lot of girlfriends. Once in Florida one was running away with another man when George took out a pistol, shot at the other man, missed him completely and winged a Japanese gardener two blocks away. He was charged, of course. When the judge sourly asked him, "Mr. Jessel, how does a man take aim at someone and hit someone else two blocks away?"

George replied, "I'm a comedian, not Buffalo Bill."

If you liked that one you should get this book. It probably has sixty stories that good.

by now.