Air schtick

David Renzi

Tuesday, Dec. 17, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and especially to all my fellow Italians."

This is a dependable opener for him. Always gets a laugh.

"You may have seen me in the movies. I always sit in the front row."

A solid segue. Induces titters and chuckles.

"They told me to do five minutes. I told them, 'There's only one thing I can do in five minutes. That's why my wife left me.'"

This incites the first cackles and stokes the promise of actual guffaws, maybe.

"My wife once asked me, 'Darling, will I lose my looks when I get old?' I said, 'If you're lucky.'"

Guffaws.

The man causing them is Jay Bernard. The man showing this videocassette of Bernard's stand-up act is James Bernard Knighten. The two are one and the same.

"Jay Bernard is my stage name," Knighten says.

We are in the family room of their spacious ranch house in southwest Las Vegas, midway through the second hour of a fact-finding mission.

The initial 60 minutes gleaned Knighten's recollections on making history, the latter his thoughts on getting laughs.

Prior to the discussion, Barbara Knighten floated a word of caution about her husband -- "You'll be lucky to get a straight answer out of him" -- timed to his entrance into the room.

Knighten looked around in mock disgust, first at the living room, then the dining room. He is tall and trim, nattily attired in a blue pinstripe jacket, brown vest, red tie and black dress slacks.

"I apologize," he says. "My wife is the world's worst housekeeper."

The Knightens are like that. Always busting on each other.

Barbara smiled.

"That's probably the only truth you'll hear out of him all day."

Which wasn't far from the truth. Not that Knighten is a liar. It's just that he has this roundabout way of getting to an answer. Asked, for instance, what he thinks about his charter membership in the first all-black fighter squadron, he substitutes the usual "it was an honor and a privilege" drivel with this:

"Bunch of idiots flying through the air and flak everywhere."

Knighten is one of 19 surviving members of the 99th Fighter Squadron, the forerunner to the Tuskegee Airmen. He flew 81 combat missions during World War II.

"If the Germans could shoot straight," he says, "I wouldn't be here."

That is Knighten's pat line. Said the same thing to a guy from the Mobile (Ala.) Press Register in November, when Knighten and 11 other 99th Fighter Squadron alumni were honored with Mobile's Patriot of the Year award on Veteran's Day.

As to the reason for joining, this is his unusually direct reply:

"They opened up the cadet corps to Negro pilots, and I signed up for it."

At the time (1941), Knighten was working as a waiter on the Santa Fe Railroad between Chicago and Los Angeles. When he returned to Chicago and his room at the YMCA one day, three letters awaited. The first offered a scholarship to Howard University Law School. The second offered an opportunity to study for the ministry at the Gammon Theological Seminary in Chicago. The third was an offer to become an Army Air Corps cadet.

"I had a decision to make."

Knighten opted to join the service because he didn't want to be drafted, which he could have been had he opted for school or the seminary.

"At that time, all the Negroes drafted in Chicago were sent down to Texas to work detail in the infantry."

Texas. Infantry. The words set with Knighten about as well as dining-car chow.

"I would have been walking around in the mud."

Still, it took a candy-coated advertisement and a buddy's drunken prodding to entice Knighten to join the air corps.

"We were at a bar and they announced it on the radio. He said, 'Let's sign up.'"

He laughs at the memory. "He flunked the physical and I passed it. I went to Alabama, he stayed in Chicago and had all the fun."

The training consisted of three three-month stages: primary, secondary and advanced. Knighten says he had neither flown an airplane nor been near one when he arrived at Tuskegee Army Airfield, in east-central Alabama.

"To me there was nothing to it. You can teach a monkey to fly an airplane. All you have to do is handle a stick and rudder, stay out of the clouds and don't go under too many bridges."

Which, with Knighten, apparently is a case of "do what I say, not what I do."

"We did everything wrong. How we lived I don't know. They didn't build a bridge we couldn't go under."

Which may explain this next remark: "We didn't have no sense in those days."

After graduation, the squadron members practiced what they had learned until the Army found a place for them overseas. It did in April 1943, sending them to North Africa. Knighten also flew missions over Sicily and Italy.

"The flights were short," he says. "You'd go out and come in. If you got back."

There were times he doubted he would get back.

"The Germans would shoot every fifth bullet with a tracer. You're seeing a wall of tracers in front of you and you wonder how you'll get through, and you do. You keep your fingers crossed. You've got to go down, so you go ahead."

It was only after landing that he'd notice the bullet holes in his plane.

"You get hit and never know it."

Which is what happened on the occasion of his only crash landing, in Italy. Knighten's P-40 had taken a hit to the electrical system, and he couldn't lower the landing gear.

"I skidded across the field and into an apple orchard. The ambulance went by (the plane) looking for the body."

The incident only added to his legend as "the Eel."

"Playing poker, I was always down to my last dollar and I'd find a way to come back. An eel's slippery, that's the idea."

Knighten was sent back to the United States in 1944 and was training to be a bomber pilot when the war ended.

Flying comedian

For nearly half the time he was in the service (he stayed in the Air Force until 1968 and retired a lieutenant colonel), Knighten was dabbling in stand-up comedy. When he was stationed at McGuire Field in Trenton, N.J., he would work weekends in New York City, the Catskills and the Poconos.

He puts the year at 1955 the first time he performed in public, at a club in Manhattan.

"I knew in the back room of a cabaret they had a stage. My wife at that time was in show business. She got me up there."

He and Luana were married for 12 years. Knighten says she died of a heart attack in 1956, two days before she was to appear in the Broadway play "Take a Giant Step."

"She had never been sick a day in her life."

In 1968, Knighten began a 20-year career as an operations inspector with the Federal Aviation Administration. He worked the majority of that time in New York City, but was later transferred to Los Angeles. When he retired, he and Barbara moved to Las Vegas in 1989, and he's been building a stand-up act and working as a movie extra ever since.

His best job to date was a 2 1/2-year run as part of the Jazz and Jokes players at the Debbie Reynolds Hotel. One of his most ardent fans is longtime Las Vegas comedian-impressionist Jimmy Caesar, who acted as emcee for the weekly showcases at the hotel.

At a recent Toys for Tots benefit at which both performed, Caesar introduced Knighten this way: "When he was at Jazz and Jokes, I would be sitting ringside and laughing hysterically, because he's one of the funniest guys."

He later offered the expanded version.

"The best description of Jay Bernard I can have is this: You know the incredible enthusiasm and energy and constant research and rehearsing that young comedians that you run into in the comedy clubs have in their act? At Jay's age, he has and does exactly that. Jay genuinely is dedicated. You would swear he's a teenager, the way he goes about it.

"Veteran guys, we that have been performing all our lives and have never been out of the business, we get lazy. Sometimes someone will come up and say, 'Hey, I've got a good routine for you.' The veteran comic, what I call the journeyman comic, will say, 'Oh, really?' He's frightened of anything new. He's going to stick with his hooks."

Not Knighten, Caesar says.

"I would introduce him and I would sit there, right in front every weekend, and he always had some new things. He didn't open the same. It was always a surprise."

Rx for laughs

Knighten has four files of jokes (each file contains more than 50 one-liners and pithy observations -- "Tulsa spelled backwards is 'a slut'") stored in his home computer and two more files of nothing but openers and closers. He has enough material, he estimates, to fill an hour.

His act can be bawdy and contain the occasional double entendre, but is never profane.

"You ever hear the Pee Wee Herman thing?"

The follow-up to his front-row-at-the-movies joke.

"I used to sit in the back row, but Peewee Herman kept borrowing my handkerchief."

"Oh, Bernard!" Barbara socks him in the arm.

"She calls that crude." Knighten shrugs. "A lot of jokes I use have been cleaned up Redd Foxx jokes."

In fact, Knighten's mumbling cadence and rapid-fire delivery owe a lot to Foxx, as does his Rx for laughs.

"You kinda write your material so that every fourth line is a surprise. Have 'em going east and you're really going west."

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