Gary Owens, with -- one assumes --  cupped-hand to ear, extols the virtues of Bob Mills's THE LAUGH MAKERS: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute to Bob Hope's Incredible Gag Writers, many of whom Gary knew personally and worked with in variety television.  Gary laments what he terms our loss of "the Golden Age" of variety TV with it's sketches, monologues, pratfalls and seemingly never-ending parade of laughs with legends like Hope, Berle, Skelton, and Burns center stage -- a long-ago era that is now but a memory and lovingly recalled in the pages of THE LAUGH MAKERS.  

Excerpted from THE LAUGH MAKERS: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute to Bob Hope's Incredible Gag Writers (c) 2009 by Robert L. Mills and published by Bear Manor Media.