I always think about that quote (need to dig it out) because it’s hard to come up with something fresh over and over again. Hemingway did it with his books. Babe Didrikson did it as an athlete. There are serial entrepreneurs who do it, starting one company after another – and some who create one company, and are creative within it for decades.

So is it one fresh idea that is recreated/redefined through the years or a series of fresh ideas? And how do you tap into fresh and know you have it? I don’t have answer.

End of day, though, one thing I know for certain is that all the ideas in the world don’t matter if they aren’t implemented.

The goal for the post was to show another individual who, end of day, offers the same advice for advancing within his career: Do the work. Whether you are a writer, a painter, an athlete, an entrepreneur or a comedian, the common theme is: Do the work.

As to whether Hope is an artist, it’s all about personal preference.

When I was a kid, if someone mentioned the word artist, I assumed it referred to a painter. As I grew, it expanded to musicians and writers. Now, I look at scientists, mathematicians, and teachers as artists, too. For me, it defines people who stand out for their unique, consistent, approaches and non-stop perseverance. I understand that others have different definitions. This is mine.

Hope did fall back on the traditional. But if you gave someone else his material, they might not receive the same laugh. So there’s an art to the presentation, too. Best ever? Not necessarily. An artist? Yes.

Do I hold him as high as I do Hemingway and Picasso? No. Do I recognize the art in his work? Yes.

My art gets slammed too. But getting slammed is not a sufficient condition for making art.

Bob Hope is not above criticism. The man was not funny. And buried in my response is an unanswered rebuttal to Steven Pressfield and his acolytes: what, qualitatively, is art? Plenty of people turn a dime on less worthy pursuits than that huckster. Are they artists?

Steven Pressfield assumes his writing applies beyond the rareified and clubby world of screenplays. But does it?

“The sexlessness of Hope’s routines, however, was just another clue to their essential conformism and cowardice. Eye-rolling and wolf-whistling are among the weakest forms of crowd pleasing that we possess. And Hope never stretched or challenged an audience in his life. For him, the safe and antique moves were the best, if not the only. The smirk was principally one of risk-free self-congratulation.” (from “Hopeless”)

Lauding somebody as an essential artist, favored by the hallowed and elusive Muse, a champion of beating the Resistance, or whatever other mystical attainments one may strive for in doing the work — recognizing all that ought to be informed by basic good taste. Bob Hope was a commercial success; he was not an artist.

I actually wonder sometimes where you draw the line: are highly successful pornographers artists? Propagandists running Faux political news organizations? Activists for overblown, false causes?

And likewise, is a man who, in Hitchens’s words, “was to the comedy of the [Vietnam] war what Nixon was to its negotiation and what Billy Graham was to its husky religiosity?”