The "Road" pictures really were funny. My 14-yr-old has watched them time and time again, and he loves them. I think Hope lost something somewhere in his second half-century, and he became cynical. Comedy became a business for him, an task of reading cue cards to make money.
I saw him live in the 1970's. We paid $25 a head to watch him tape a "Bob Hope on Campus" show at UCLA. All his jokes were on huge cue cards we could read. If a skit didn't go right, he'd get angry and make the cast do it all over again. I can understand his need to do things right for the television show, but he didn't seem to have any respect for us as a paying audience - nor did he seem to have any respect for the people who were working with him.
-Joe Offer-