Bob Orben, 95; wrote gags for performers, president
Bob Orben, who after writing jokes for Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton, and others in the 1960s found a new avenue for his wit when he became a speechwriter for President Gerald Ford in 1974, died Feb. 2 in Alexandria, Va. He was 95.
His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his greatniece, Yvette Chevallier.
Mr. Orben was a one-man gag factory. He wrote joke books. He dispatched one-liners to entertainers, politicians, and disc jockeys through his subscription newsletter, Current Comedy. And he wrote a column, My Favorite Jokes, for Parade magazine.
“I don’t mean to blow my own horn,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “but between Johnny Carson’s monologues, the political cartoonists such as Herblock and Oliphant, and me, if we all decide what the hot subject in the country is, that’s what it is.”
In 1968, Ford, a Michigan Republican who was then the House minority leader, needed someone to spice up a speech he was going to give to the Gridiron Club, an organization of journalists whose annual dinner was an opportunity to lampoon political figures. George Murphy, the former actor and US senator, knew Skelton, for whom Mr. Orben was a writer, and recommended him.
Mr. Orben’s goal was to make Ford funny, or at least funnier than Vice President Hubert Humphrey, another speaker at the dinner. After listening to tapes of Ford’s delivery, Mr. Orben came up with a few zingers.
“Ford was the surprise hit,” Mr. Orben recalled in 2008 in an oral history interview with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. Among the Orben lines Ford delivered was the observation that he had no interest in the presidency, except that “on that long drive back to Alexandria, Virginia, where I live, as I go past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I do seem to hear a little voice within me saying, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’ ”
Mr. Orben continued to feed jokes to Ford during his vice presidency. When Ford became president in 1974, after President Richard Nixon resigned, he hired Mr. Orben.
A 1975 profile of Ford in The New York Times Magazine quoted him reading aloud from a speech written by Mr. Orben that he was going to give to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association. It included references to a prominent Democratic senator and an agriculture secretary known for his offcolor remarks.
“I have only one thing to say about a program that calls for me to follow Bob Hope,” he read. “Who arranged this? Scoop Jackson? It’s ridiculous. Bob Hope has enormous stage presence, superb comedy writing, and the finest writers in the business. I’m standing here in a rented tuxedo — with three jokes from Earl Butz!”
Mr. Orben cautioned the president not to pause when delivering a good one-liner.
“Watch Hope,” he told him. “You’ll see he really punches through a line.”
Mr. Orben became the director of the White House speechwriting staff in early 1976 and served through the end of the Ford administration.
John Mihalec, a speechwriter for Ford during the 1976 presidential campaign, said it was not surprising that a comedy writer should excel at writing speeches.
“Comedy writing is so precise — the setup and the punch line and everything has to be at exactly the right volume and in the right place,” Mihalec said in a phone interview. “It’s good training for the precision of presidential speechwriting.”
Robert Orben was born March 4, 1927, in the Bronx borough of New York City to Walter and Marie Orben. His father was in the hardware business. Bob was smitten by magic at an early age, and when he was 12 he and his brother, Walter, performed a mentalist act in the Catskill Mountains, “The Boy With the Radio Mind.” It flopped.
After graduating from high school in 1943, he attended Drake Business School. He also started his short-lived career in magic.
He was hired as a magic demonstrator in a shop in the Manhattan borough of New York City, but he found his métier not in performing magic but in writing about magicians; he was impressed by one magician’s onstage comedic patter, which led him to publish a pamphlet, “The Encyclopedia of Patter,” in 1946.
Over the next decade he would publish books like “Blue Ribbon Comedy,” “The Working Comedian’s Gag File,” “Tag-Lines,” “Bits, Boffs and Banter,” and “The Emcee’s Handbook.” He published dozens of joke collections in his career.
He began writing his comedy newsletter in 1958, and in the 1960s he wrote for “The Jack Paar Program” and then for “The Red Skelton Hour.”
After coming to the attention of the groundbreaking Black comedian Gregory, Mr. Orben said, he sent him a page of jokes every day. Another one of Mr. Orben’s clients was someone very different from Gregory: the conservative Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he wrote during his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964.
“One of the jokes that I wrote for Greg was talking about Goldwater,” Mr. Orben said in the Ford Presidential Foundation interview. “And as you know, the campaign slogan was, ‘In your heart, you know he’s right.’ And Greg used to say, ‘In your heart, you know he’s white.’ ”
Mr. Orben’s wife, Jean (Connelly) Orben, died last year. He leaves no immediate survivors.