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Stan Freberg (born August 7, 1926 in Los Angeles)
is a voice actor, comedian, and advertising
creative.

He began as a voice actor in a number of old-time
radio shows and in animation as well. At the age
of eighteen, he was cast as the voice of Junyer
Bear in Chuck Jones' 1948 Looney Tunes cartoon
What's Brewin', Bruin?, featuring Jones' version
of The Three Bears (Looney Tunes)|The Three Bears.
He often found himself paired off with Mel Blanc
while at Warners, where the two men performed such
pairs as the Goofy Gophers, Hubie and Bertie, and
Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier. Freberg
also worked for Walt Disney Productions as a voice
actor for films such as Lady and the Tramp (1955),


During 1950-1955, he and frequent collaborator
Daws Butler provided voices on Time for Beany, an
early puppet version of characters created by Bob
Clampett who are better known in their later
animated incarnation, Beany and Cecil.

Throughout the 1950s he made a name for himself
writing and performing both original songs
("Television") and parody|parodies of popular
tunes ("The Yellow Rose of Texas", "Day-O",
"Heartbreak Hotel") and radio shows (John and
Marsha, St. George and the Dragon-Net, the latter
with Butler).

Freberg's popularity landed him his own program,
The Stan Freberg Show, on CBS Radio in 1957. The
show failed to attract a sponsor, however, at
least in part because Freberg did not want to be
associated with the tobacco companies who had
sponsored Jack Benny, whose time slot he
inherited. In lieu of actual advertisements,
Freberg mocked commercials in general by
"advertising" such products as "Puffed Grass"
("It's good for Bossie, it's good for me and
you!"), "Food" ("If you haven't any teeth you can
gum your food with your gum, gum, gummy-gum gum"),
and himself ("Freberg — the foaming
comedian! Bobba bobba bom bom bom" — a
parody of a well-known Ajax cleanser|Ajax laundry
detergent commercial). The lack of sponsorship
forced the cancellation of the show after a run of
only fifteen episodes.

The radio show is most famous for a bit in which,
through the magic of sound effects, Freberg
drained Lake Michigan and refilled it with hot
chocolate, whipped cream, and a cherry, saying,
"Let's see them do that on television!"

Another sketch from the CBS radio show, entitled
Elderly Man River, anticipated the Political
Correctness movement by decades. Daws Butler plays
"Mr. Tweedly," a representative of a fictional
citizens' radio review board, who constantly
interrupts Freberg with a loud buzzer as Freberg
attempts to sing "Old Man River," accompanied by
the orchestra of his longtime collaborator Billy
May. Tweedly objects first to the titular word
"Old", "which some of our more elderly citizens
find distasteful." As a result, the song's lyrics
are progressively and painfully distorted as
Freberg struggles to turn the classic song into a
form which Tweedly will find acceptable "to the
tiny tots" listening at home: "He don't, er,
doesn't plant 'taters, er, potatoes/he doesn't
pick cotten, er, cotting/and them-these-those that
plants them is soon forgotting," a lyric of which
Freberg is particularly proud. Even when the
censor finds Freberg's machinations acceptable,
the constant interruption ultimately brings the
song to a grinding halt, furnishing the moral and
the punch line of the sketch at once.

Freberg continued to skewer the advertising
industry, producing Green Christmas|Green
Chri$tma$ in 1959 (again with Butler), a scathing
indictment of the overcommercialization of the
holiday. Freberg, the son of a church minister and
very religious himself, made sure to point out on
that novelty record "Whose birthday we're
celebrating."

Green Chri$tma$ also foreshadowed 1961's Stan
Freberg Presents The United States of America,
Volume One in that both combined dialog and song
in almost musical-like style. (One can almost
imagine Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin
performing the big Broadway finish on "A Man Can't
Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days"). Then
there was this little exchange, as Freberg's
Christopher Columbus is "discovered on beach here"
by a Native American played by Marvin Miller
(actor)|Marvin Miller. Being skeptical of the
Natives' diet of corn and "other organically grown
vegetables", Columbus wants to open "America's
first Italian restaurant" and needs to cash a
check to get started.
*Native: "Can't cash check today. Banks closed."
*Columbus: "Oh? Why?"
*Native: "Columbus Day!"
*Columbus: "Oh, yeh." pregnant pause "Well, are we
going out on that joke?"
*Native: "No, we do reprise of song. That help,
but..."
*Columbus + Native: "...not much!"

While much of Freberg's writing was for radio, he
also wrote and produced numerous legitimate
television commercials for products such as:

* Contadina Foods|Contadina tomato paste: "Who put
eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?"

* Jeno's pizza rolls: A parody of a contemporary
commercial for Lark cigarettes that used the
William Tell (opera)|William Tell Overture, here
ending with a confrontation between a cigarette
smoker and Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger over
the use of the music.

* Sunsweet pitted prunes: Depicted as "the food of
the future" in a futuristic setting, until science
fiction icon Ray Bradbury (a friend of Freberg's)
butts in: "I never mentioned prunes in any of my
stories." Another commercial features Ronald Long
as a picky eater: "They're still rather badly
wrinkled, you know." ("Today the pits...tomorrow
the wrinkles!")

* H. J. Heinz Company|Heinz Great American Soups:
Ann Miller is a tap-dancing housewife whose
husband asks, "Why do you always have to make such
a big production out of everything?" At the time
(1970), this was the most expensive commercial
ever made — so expensive, in fact, that
there was little money left over to buy air time
for it.

* Encyclopædia Britannica: The boy in these
commercials is Freberg's son Donovan
Freberg|Donovan.  Freberg talks to him from
offscreen.

Today, these advertisements are considered
classics by many critics, and Freberg is usually
credited as being the first person to successfully
introduce humor into television advertising.
Freberg asserted that a truly funny commercial
that did not insult the intelligence of the
viewer, and that perhaps revealing a bit more
information about the product than the advertiser
had in mind, would draw the buying public in
droves. He was often proved right: famously, the
owner of Jeno's Pizza Rolls paid off a bet over
the success of a Freberg advertising campaign by
drawing Freberg through the streets of San
Francisco in a Rickshaw|rickshaw.

Freberg is still actively doing advertising and
other projects today. In 1996 he released Stan
Freberg Presents The United States Of America,
Volume Two. He is most visible these days as the
host of a syndication|syndicated anthology of
old-time radio shows, When Radio Was.

Freberg also played the J.B. Toppersmith character
in "Weird Al" Yankovic's The Weird Al Show.

Freberg recounts much of his life and career,
including his encounters with show-biz legends
such as Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra and Ed
Sullivan and the struggles he endured with radio
and TV networks to get his material on the air, in
his autobiography "It Only Hurts When I Laugh"
(Times Books, 1988).