George Burns Names The 6 Comedians He Utterly Hated

 

 

 

Unquestionably, the boldest, sweetest pussycat I have ever known in my life, and I love you.  George Burns was the ultimate Hollywood nice  guy. With his trademark cigar and dry wit, he spent nearly a century making us laugh. Famously refusing to step on anyone’s toes or burn a bridge in show biz, but behind that kindly old-timer grin lay a few decades of unspoken friction.

While he usually kept his grievances private, there were a select few performers whose backstage antics pushed him to his absolute limit. So, who were the six comedians George Burns utterly hated? Join us as we pull back the curtain on old Hollywood and count down the legendary funny men he secretly  couldn’t stand.

Milton Berle. To the public, Milton Berle was Mr. Television, the legendary entertainer who single-handedly made the brand new medium of TV popular across the United States. He first stepped onto a theater stage at just 10 years old and quickly spent his youth working hard through show business, even acting in more than 50 silent films.

By the late 1940s, his legendary  Texaco Star Theatre variety show became a national obsession, famously credited with causing a massive jump in television set purchases. Audiences absolutely  fell in love with his unpredictable live performances, his trademark cigar, and his hilarious skits where he dressed in women’s clothing.

Uncle Miltie was a beloved star who went on to act in massive hit movies like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, wrote several books, and became one of the very first people put into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1984. But behind the glitz and glamour of his historic television empire, Berle carried a bad backstage reputation that drove a traditional gentleman like George Burns absolutely crazy.

You see, Burley was famous for one massive flaw. He had a habit of taking jokes and entire comic routines from other comedians. He didn’t just borrow them, he practically built his entire career on them. The industry knew it, too. Famous writer Walter Winchell openly called him the thief of bad gags, a title Burley eventually accepted just to get a laugh.

Legendary comedian Jack Benny once joked to his face, “Milty, taking a joke from you isn’t joke stealing, it’s repossession.” It got so bad during the Great Depression that writer Irving Brecher actually paid for a famous ad in Variety magazine that read, “Burley proof jokes for sale.

 So bad, even Milton Berle won’t steal them.” After 1939, Burley spent a decade stuck playing in nightclubs while trying to get an audience on the radio as none of his radio shows could last more than a single year without failing. While the rest of Hollywood laughed off Burley’s joke stealing as a running gag, George Burns secretly couldn’t stand it.

George was an old-school stage performer who took immense pride in original work. He spent decades writing, polishing, and perfecting original material alongside his wife,  Gracie Allen. To George, a comedian’s jokes were sacred, representing  true pride and grueling hard work. Watching Berle achieve national stardom by simply using physical comedy, funny faces, and shouting stolen material to fit a visual medium like TV was a bitter pill for George to swallow.

George believed in quiet timing, a straight-faced  delivery, and respecting the craft. Backstage insiders whispered that while George smiled and played  nice for the cameras at celebrity roasts, he was quietly furious. He simply couldn’t respect a man who rode other people’s hard work straight  to the top.

 To George Burns, Milton Berle wasn’t a comedic genius. He was the ultimate Hollywood shortcut.  Lucille Ball To the public, Lucille Ball was the undisputed queen of television comedy. As the scatterbrained red-headed housewife in I Love Lucy, she captivated millions with her unmatched physical slapstick, crying  fits, and brilliant comedic timing.

Her journey to the top was the absolute  definition of Hollywood grit. Determined at an early age to become an actress, she courageously left high school at age 15 to enroll in a New York City drama school. Her initial attempts to find a place in the theater all met with cruel rejections,    forcing her to take a job as a fashion model under the name Diane Belmont.

She was only moderately successful, but a promotional poster brought her to the attention of Hollywood studios, winning her early spots in Roman Scandals, Blood Money, and Kid Millions. Ball remained in Hollywood for years, slowly appearing in increasingly larger roles across a succession of movies like Carnival, Stage Door, Room Service, and Five Came Back.

In 1940, she starred in Too Many Girls,  which featured the popular Cuban bandleader, Desi Arnaz, whom she married that same year. For the next 10 years, they conducted completely separate careers, he traveling as a bandleader and she working as a movie actress, usually relegated to B-grade comedies.

  She did win major roles in The Big Street, alongside Henry Fonda, Du Barry Was a Lady, Ziegfeld Follies, and two films with Bob Hope, Sorrowful Jones and Fancy Pants.  While all her comedies were box office successes, Hollywood failed to make the most of her wide-ranging talents. Everything changed in 1950, when Ball and her husband formed Desilu Productions.

After experimenting with a radio program, they launched I Love Lucy in October  1951. Starring the two of them in a comedy version of their real lives, the show became  an instant historic hit. For 6 years, it remained safely at the very top of the television ratings. The show was an outstanding vehicle for Ball’s talents, showcasing her expertise for timing, physical comedy, and deep characterization.

It also introduced major technical innovations to broadcasting, notably the groundbreaking use of three cameras to film the show before a live audience, setting a permanent  standard for situation comedies that thrived in worldwide reruns for decades. During this peak era, Desilu acquired RKO Pictures, began producing other major shows for television, and became one of  the biggest giants in a highly competitive field.

When Ball and Arnaz divorced in 1960, she bought him out. Two years later, she succeeded him as president of Desilu, officially becoming the only woman at that time to lead a major Hollywood production company. After selling Desilu in 1967, she formed Lucille Ball Productions to produce Here’s Lucy. Even in her later years, she continued to challenge herself, famously playing a Manhattan bag lady in the television film Stone Pillow before her final television series, Life with Lucy, aired briefly in 1986. 

Ball passed away 3 years later, leaving a legacy that influenced generations of comedians well into the 21st century, even inspiring the Oscar-nominated film Being the Ricardos. But behind that inspiring, legendary story of a self-made studio mogul lay a high-stress workplace environment that George Burns reportedly absolutely despised.

While George was famously relaxed, casual, and incredibly easygoing about show business, Lucille Ball ran her television empire with an uncompromising iron fist. Multiple memoirs and co-stars have pulled back the curtain on what it was really like behind the scenes at Desilu Studios. Child actor Keith Thibodeaux, who played Little Ricky, along with various veteran show directors, noted that the real-life Lucy was nothing like her goofy, lovable television character.

Off-camera, she was an incredibly intense, intimidating, and fierce perfectionist. On a Lucille Ball set, there was absolutely zero tolerance for mistakes. Because she carried the financial weight of an entire studio on her shoulders, she expected grueling, repetitive rehearsal hours that left writers and actors completely exhausted.

Most importantly, Lucy strictly forbade her actors to improvise. Every single movement, gasp, trip, and funny face was strictly scripted, meticulously calculated, and rehearsed dozens of times before the cameras rolled. If an actor dared to change a line or miss a precise cue, they faced the full, terrifying wrath of Hollywood’s most demanding boss.

To a laid-back, organic operator like George Burns, this rigid, high-stress management style was completely toxic. George believed that comedy should feel effortless, natural, and joyful. He spent his career relying on casual charm and loose timing, often letting a joke breathe with a simple, quiet puff of his cigar.

Backstage insiders whispered  that George simply couldn’t tolerate Lucy’s strict, control-freak nature. He viewed her extreme perfectionism  not as dedication, but as an unbearable, micromanaged nightmare that sucked all the fun out of the craft. While he always respected her massive box office success    and historic cultural impact from afar, friends knew that George avoided collaborating with the queen of comedy at all costs.

To George Burns, working with Lucille Ball simply wasn’t worth the immense backstage anxiety. Bob Hope. To the average American, Bob Hope was the ultimate definition of a show business hero. Born in England before his family immigrated to the United States  when he was 4 years old, Hope grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.

He manifested the first signs of his true vocation  at just age 10 when he won a local Charlie Chaplin imitation contest. After working a series of odd jobs, including a brief stint as an amateur boxer, Hope embarked on an entertainment career during his late teens, performing with a succession of temporary partners in vaudeville.

He first appeared on Broadway in Sidewalks of New York, and after additional work in vaudeville and a failed Hollywood screen test, he finally landed his first stage role in the Jerome Kern musical Roberta. During the mid-1930s, he starred in a series of comedy shorts and found increasing success in radio, a fast-paced medium perfectly suited to his fast-talking  style.

Hope made his historic feature film debut in The Big Broadcast of 1938, in which he first sang his  iconic signature tune, Thanks for the Memory, and he launched the long-running The Bob Hope Show on radio in that very same year. By the end of the decade, Hope was comfortably cemented as one of America’s most popular comics.

Just as silent films had popularized physical slapstick, the rise of sound motion pictures and radio during the 1930s paved the way for Hope’s unique style of loud, fast-talking comedy. Although a wide-eyed look of surprise remained a familiar trademark, most of his comedy relied on fast jokes and one-liners delivered at crazy speed.

On screen, his character was a fake tough guy who always had a quick comeback, but would instantly run away at the first sign of danger. He purposely  didn’t try to make the audience feel sorry for him. Instead of winning the girl at the end of the movie, he usually ended up looking foolish in a mess of his own making.

Because of this, Hope became one of the few comedians to build a massive career playing a character people didn’t really root for. The first movies to show off this side of him were The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers, two horror comedy spoofs starring Paulette Goddard. In 1940, Hope made Road to Singapore, the first of seven wildly popular Road movies with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour.

These films were full of silly visual jokes, playful teasing, and lots of inside jokes, which perfectly showed off the bold style of comedy everyone loved in the 1940s. The best ones were Road to Morocco and Road to Utopia, and they helped make Hope one of America’s  biggest movie stars from 1941 to 1953.

His other massive hits during this successful time included  My Favorite Blonde and The Paleface. A few of his movies also showed that he was a great singer and dancer, helping introduce famous songs like Silver Bells. During World War II, Hope traveled constantly to perform for soldiers at home and overseas,    even hosting his radio shows right from military bases.

He kept doing these military tours for decades through the Korea, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars. Because of this, he became just as famous for entertaining the troops    as he was for his movies and TV shows. In 1997, the US Congress named him the first honorary veteran in US history, which Hope called the greatest honor of his life.

He picked up countless awards over the years, including an honorary British knighthood, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and five special Oscars for his charity work. But behind the hard-working patriot was a highly competitive business machine that George Burns secretly disliked. Biographies like Richard Zoglin’s Hope, Entertainer of the Century, show how Hope turned comedy into a literal factory.

He was the first  comedian to hire a huge army of writers, keeping them on a rotating schedule to pump out jokes for his military tours, radio shows, and TV specials. He was incredibly competitive and obsessed  with staying the number one star in Hollywood. By the 1960s,    his movies started to feel old and predictable.

 And his pro-war political views left him out of touch with how Americans felt about the Vietnam War. Young people made fun of him, seeing him as a symbol of the  old rigid system. To George Burns, who believed in pure comedy, this factory style of writing was an insult to the art.    George had become successful based entirely on a simple, natural act with his wife, Gracie Allen.

George didn’t need an army of writers. His success  came from natural chemistry and perfect timing. While George stayed polite and smiled next  to Hope at big Hollywood events, he secretly thought Hope’s fake joke machine and non-stop need for attention was exhausting, unnatural, and completely missing a real comedic soul.

W.C. Fields To film historians and classic movie lovers, W.C. Fields is right up there at the top of American comedy alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. While Chaplin was praised as a brilliant movie director who did it all, critics often said that Fields was simply America’s funniest man. His perfect timing  and funny, grumpy attitude completely changed the game.

Born in Philadelphia, he left home at 18 to become a professional juggler. By age 21, he was a massive star in vaudeville, performing at the world’s most famous theaters, including the legendary Folies Bergère in Paris. Fields completely changed his act when he joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1915, adding spoken jokes to his world-class juggling routines.

 By 1928, he was Broadway’s highest-paid performer, making an unbelievable salary of $5,000 per week starring in Earl Carroll’s  Vanities. When movies with sound came along in the 1930s, his unique voice and jokes finally won over Hollywood. Writing most of his own scripts, he played two main types of characters: the smooth-talking con man and the henpecked, pushed-around husband.

Audiences fell in love with his fancy words,    silly character names like Larson E. Whipsnade, and his brilliant, quiet grumbling under his breath. He made timeless hit movies like It’s a Gift, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. He even gave a legendary serious performance as Mr.

 Micawber in MGM’s David Copperfield. Yet, behind his brilliant movie career was a real-life personality that was exactly like his dark, unfriendly screen characters. Fields’ real-life hatred for people was legendary, and it created an angry, toxic environment backstage that a gentle, upbeat  professional like George Burns absolutely hated.

You see, George Burns was Hollywood’s biggest optimist. George genuinely loved people, loved the friendship of show business, and kept  a sunny, active outlook on life. It kept him performing until he was 100 years old. W.C. Fields was the exact opposite. He had a deeply bitter, negative view of humanity  that leaked into his daily life and ruined the mood of any theater or movie set he walked onto.

Fields made the public angry by openly showing how much he hated children and dogs. He was a severe, unpredictable, and highly dangerous alcoholic who, at his worst, reportedly drank more than two quarts of gin every single day. His heavy drinking eventually led to terrible shakes and serious illnesses that got him fired by Paramount Pictures in 1938 before he made a short comeback at Universal Studios.

George Burns and W.C. Fields crossed paths constantly during their years together in the tight-knit vaudeville and Broadway circuits. While the public thought all comedians were  great friends behind the scenes, backstage insiders whispered that George absolutely hated Fields’ miserable attitude. George took great pride in good backstage manners, mutual respect among actors, and bringing joy to audiences.

To George, Fields wasn’t just playing a part. He was a genuinely mean, toxic person who brought a dark cloud wherever he went. Fields was famous for treating stagehands, co-stars, and fans with bitter anger. His deep  negativity even showed in his personal beliefs. He did not believe in God at all, and he spent his final days on his deathbed reading the Bible, joke-telling that he was only looking for loopholes.

Ironically, the famous grump died on Christmas Day in 1946. For George Burns, who believed that comedy was a beautiful uplifting gift to be shared with a smile, Fields’ alcohol-fueled nastiness and open hatred for mankind rubbed him entirely the wrong  way. George rarely said bad things about other performers, but his close friends knew the truth.

He thought W.C. Fields was a deeply miserable man whose great talent was ruined by a toxic personality. To George, comedy was about loving life, and W.C. Fields spent his whole life hating it. Jerry Lewis To the people  growing up after the war, Jerry Lewis was the king of wild high-energy comedy. Born into a hardworking showbiz family, he put together a unique act where he mimed along to music when he was only 12 years old.

He soon dropped out of high school to work through New York’s tough nightclub and burlesque theaters.  His life changed forever in 1944 when he met singer Dean Martin. By 1946, they officially formed the most explosive comedy team in American history. The setup was simple but brilliant. Martin would try to sing, Lewis would wildly clown around him, and the two  would come together for a loud, messy musical ending that crowds loved.

After packing the famous Copacabana nightclub, Paramount Pictures signed them to a huge deal. Their first movie, My Friend Irma, 1949, made them instant superstars. Over eight busy years, they starred in 16 hit films, including The Stooge, 1951, and Artists and Models, 1955. They were also massively popular hosts on NBC’s The Colgate Comedy Hour.

Following a bitter, highly public fight and breakup in 1956, Lewis proved he could succeed on his own. He signed a historic contract with Paramount that gave him 60% of the movie  profits and complete freedom to write and direct his own films. He made beautiful, joke-filled hits like The Bellboy, 1960, and The Ladies Man, 1961, leading up to his best movie,    The Nutty Professor, 1963.

He became a global star, deeply loved in France as a true film artist, a massive charity helper who raised billions hosting the annual MDA Labor Day Telethon for decades, and the winner of the prestigious Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Yet, behind the brilliant physical jokes and the heartwarming charity shows was a deeply splitting genius attitude that made things rough behind the scenes.

 To a quiet, polite professional like George Burns, Jerry Lewis’s behavior was an absolute nightmare. You see, George Burns was the king of quiet timing. George didn’t need to yell, wave his arms, or break furniture to get a laugh. He could control a whole theater audience simply by raising an eyebrow or letting a joke sit while taking a slow, calm puff of his cigar.

His style was built on pure control and old-school theater manners. Jerry Lewis, on the other hand, was completely wild. On stage and on screen, his comedy was loud, crazy, unpredictable, and highly physical. The real trouble, though, was behind the scenes. While George was famously easy-going, patient, and deeply respectful of camera crews and stagehands, Lewis was notoriously difficult to work with.

He had a massive, fragile ego and strictly demanded to be treated like a high-class artist. Biographies and industry insiders often detailed his famous short fuse, unpredictable backstage  screaming matches, and harsh treatment of studio crews who didn’t do exactly what he  wanted.

 His obsession with being perfect eventually led to massive, self-indulgent failures. A prime example was the legendary, unreleased 1972 disaster, The Day the Clown Cried. A movie so heavily criticized by Lewis himself that he locked it away in a vault forever. Even Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, 1983, famously featured Lewis playing a cold,  demanding show business boss.

 A role critics noted wasn’t much of a stretch for him. For George Burns, this mix  of a loud, crazy acting style and a toxic, ego-driven backstage attitude was completely exhausting. George spent nearly a century avoiding Hollywood drama, believing that show business should be a pleasant, team effort job.

 He reportedly found Lewis’s constant screaming, funny faces, and demanding genius tantrums completely unbearable. To George, comedy was a subtle art that worked best when it was kept simple. Lewis’s aggressive need to rule every room he walked into felt incredibly irritating and fake. While the two occasionally shared the screen later in life, like Lewis’s 1983 movie, Smorgasbord, which featured quick appearances from both Lewis and Milton Berle, backstage insiders knew that George kept his  distance.

 He simply could not respect an actor who traded quiet, professional skill for loud  tricks and backstage bullying. To George Burns, Jerry Lewis wasn’t a genius master of the craft. He was a high-maintenance, exhausting whirlwind who took the joy out of making people laugh. Don Rickles To modern comedy fans, Don Rickles is looked up to as a true pioneer of crowd work and stand-up comedy.

Born in Queens, New  York, he joined the Navy at age 18 and proudly served in the Philippines during World War II. After leaving the military, he graduated from an acting school in New York City in 1948. Unable to get normal acting jobs, Rickles spent years hustling through bingo games, church gatherings, and synagogues while working random sales jobs  just to survive.

 His life completely shifted in 1953 when he moved to Los Angeles. While performing stand-up in smoky nightclubs, Rickles made a shocking discovery. His angry, fast comebacks to hecklers got far bigger laughs than any of his written jokes. He quickly dropped traditional joke setups to develop a brand new, cheerfully aggressive style of humor.

His act consisted almost entirely of loudly making fun of audience members, focusing his sharp jokes on how people looked and broad cultural stereotypes. Instead of getting angry, audiences were completely hooked by his quick delivery and actually found a strange joy in being picked on by the man who came to be known as the merchant of venom.

By the late 1950s, Rickles became a favorite of Hollywood’s top stars. He famously became a show business legend during a 1957 nightclub show by making fun of the incredibly powerful Frank Sinatra straight to his face. Instead of destroying Rickles’ career, Sinatra loved it, helping him land a permanent main spot in Las Vegas by 1959.

He branched out into movies with parts in the submarine drama Run Silent, Run Deep and The Rat  Race. However, it was his famous 1965 first appearance on The Tonight Show where he greeted host Johnny Carson by instantly snapping, “Hello, dummy.” that turned him into a household name. He became a regular on the Dean Martin Show and built a huge television career guest  starring on comedies before starring in his own shows like CPO Sharky.

 Younger generations fell in love with him all over again when he acted in Martin Scorsese’s  Casino and voiced the famous short-tempered Mr. Potato Head in the beloved Toy Story movies. His legendary 1968 comedy album Hello, Dummy was even put into the Library of Congress  National Recording Registry as a historically important masterpiece.

 Yet, behind the roaring laughter of those celebrity roasts was a style of comedy that a traditional old-school gentleman like George Burns privately  found deeply insulting. You see, George Burns was a product of the classic vaudeville days. A time when show business was run by a strict unspoken rule of politeness and mutual respect.

To George, comedy was a classy, dignified job meant to lift an audience up. Rickles’ entire career, on the other hand, was built on tearing people down. While the rest of Hollywood eventually got used to Rickles’ mean, Mr. Warmth character and understood it was just an act, older stars initially took his brutal biting comments very personally.

 Backstage circles whispered that George privately felt Rickles’ mean-spirited insult act crossed a major line. George believed that a truly skilled comedian shouldn’t have to resort to calling people dummies or attacking their backgrounds just to get an easy laugh. To George, Rickles’ wild aggressive style felt cheap, disrespectful, and completely against the polite traditions of the stage.

 Even though Rickles toured successfully into his 80s, George quietly kept his distance. He refused to let the merchant of venom turn his life or his friends into a mean punchline. While George always acted like a polite professional when their paths crossed in Las Vegas, those closest to him knew the truth. George Burns believed that comedy should always wear a tuxedo, and Don Rickles had brought a sledgehammer to the party.

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