studio · Public domain

An entertainer who turned a comic persona — vain, cheap, permanently 39, and a genuinely terrible violinist — into one of the most durable acts in American broadcasting, with a radio and television program that ran essentially unbroken from 1932 to 1965. His mastery was less the joke than the pause before it; a single flat stare or a drawn-out "Well!" could hold a laugh longer than most comedians' punchlines, and the show is still studied as a high-water mark of the genre.