Bob Hope had a million jokes, but he was one of a kind

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: He had a million of 'em, Bob Hope did, written down on file cards and napkins and script sheets, filed by subject and year at his home in California, filed away in case he needed them again. Golf jokes ("If you watch a game it's fun. If you play a game it's recreation. If you work at it, it's golf") and political jokes ("I bumped into President Ford the other day and said 'Pardon me.' He said, 'I don't do that any more'.") and age jokes ("You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake").
He rattled them off, one-liners, by the thousands for most of the 20th century. ("Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.") He rattled them off from vaudeville to cyberspace. ("A bank is a place where they lend you money if you can prove you don't need it.")
Bob Hope died ("headed for that big divot") on Sunday of pneumonia at age 100, having long ago made peace with his maker ("I do benefits for all religions. I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.") and leaving behind his own epitaph: "I have seen what a laugh can do. It can transform almost unbearable tears into something bearable, even hopeful."
Hope springs eternal
New York Daily News: It was just a couple of months ago that the world wished Bob Hope the happiest of 100th birthdays and thanked him for the memory. Now we wish him a safe journey as he leaves us to rejoin his pals -- Crosby and Lamour, Burns and Berle, Skelton and Merman, so many others from a day long past, come and now gone.
Trite, but nonetheless true: They were giants then, the likes of whom will not walk our way again. Bob Hope went back practically to the dawn of recorded time (sound and image, that is). Back to the days when young song-and-dance men lived out of suitcases and got second billing behind jugglers in Cleveland.
Bob Hope, Englishman by birth, was America -- through the Depression, through war, through peace and prosperity, through war again, through good times and bad, through dark days and bright. No, there will never be another Bob Hope.