Bob Orben, one-man gag factory and speechwriter, dies
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, Virginia. He was 95.
His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his great-niece, Yvette Chevallier.
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 U.S. senator, knew Skelton, for whom Orben was a writer, and recommended him.
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, Orben came up with a few zingers.
“Ford was the surprise hit,” 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.’ “
Orben continued to feed jokes to Ford during his vice presidency. When Ford became president in 1974, after President Richard Nixon resigned, he hired Orben.
A 1975 profile of Ford in The New York Times Magazine quoted him reading aloud from a speech written by 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 off-color 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!”
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.”
Orben fed Ford self-deprecating lines that suited his personality. One of those lines, also delivered in 1975, played off something Lyndon B. Johnson had famously said about him.
“It’s a great pleasure — and great honor — to be at Yale Law’s Sesquicentennial Convocation,” he said. “And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.”
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. Orben’s wife, Jean (Connelly) Orben, died last year. He leaves no immediate survivors.