Lecture Date: March 8, 2016
The Davenport & Company Lecture
With his topical jokes and his all-American, brash-but-cowardly screen character, Bob Hope was the only entertainer to achieve top-rated success in every major mass-entertainment medium of the 20th century: vaudeville, Broadway, radio, motion pictures, television and live stage performance. He virtually invented stand-up comedy, in the form we know it today. Above all, he helped redefine the very notion of what it means to be a star: a savvy businessman, an enterprising builder of his own brand, and a public-spirited entertainer whose Christmas military tours and unflagging work for charity set the standard for public service in Hollywood. In his illustrated lecture, Richard Zoglin, author of the widely acclaimed 2014 biography Hope: Entertainer of the Century (Simon & Schuster), will explore the life and career of this giant of American entertainment.
Speaker: Richard Zoglin
Richard Zoglin has spent more than 30 years as an editor and writer at TIME magazine. After joining as a staff writer in 1983, he served as the magazine's television critic for more than a decade — reviewing hundreds of TV shows, examining media coverage of such news events as the first Gulf War, and writing cover stories on David Letterman, Bill Cosby, Diane Sawyer, Arsenio Hall and Star Trek, among others. He later became a senior editor and assistant managing editor for both the magazine and its website, Time.com, and is currently TIME's theater critic. His first book, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (Bloomsbury, 2008), is considered the definitive history of that seminal era in stand-up comedy.
Zoglin is a native of Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley with a B. A. in English, and also earned a master of journalism degree at Berkeley. He began his journalism career in San Francisco as a copy editor for Saturday Review magazine, before moving to New York, where he worked as a magazine editor and freelance writer, contributing articles to the New York Times, Village Voice, New Republic and other publications. In 1978 he moved to Atlanta to become television critic for the Atlanta Constitution. He left in 1982 to help launch Time Inc.’s new television magazine, TV-Cable Week, before joining TIME.