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Mel Blanc kept joke note cards in his wallet
A barrel full of laughs and a wallet full of jokes.
A smart person is always prepared for anything, but a smart comedian is always prepared for any funny situation. Mel Blanc, one of the best voice actors of our time, was nothing if not a smart comedian.
According to the Copley News Service, Blanc revealed that he actually kept a list of jokes on his person at all times. The jokes, written on note cards, were kept in the safety of Blanc's wallet. Well known as the man with a thousand voices, Blanc actually once estimated that he had roughly "several hundred" jokes on these cards.
While Blanc was plenty funny on his own, the jokes written on his note cards were the result of a collaborative process between the voice actor and any person he met. If someone told him a joke that was relatively funny, Blanc explained that he would add the joke to his list of cards.
Blanc said, "People tell me jokes and I jot down the punch line." So while it's possible that one of these jokes made it into a Looney Tunes short, it's not likely, as Blanc confirmed that many of them weren't too safe for general audiences. He said, "It's a shame so many of them are unprintable, but those are the jokes that people tell me." He joked, "But listen, if I'm ever at a stag dinner, I'm prepared."
One might think the jokes might come in handy on the plentiful amount of college campuses that Blanc frequented. In addition to his incredible work as a voice actor, Blanc was also well-known as a lecturer at colleges. The actor spoke on his creative process, and how many of his famed voices came to be.
Blanc commented, "I show slides of the characters, do the voices, and tell the kids how they were created. College kids love cartoons."
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