Well! Sculpture of Jack Benny Unveiled : Tribute: Comedian’s likeness joins those of Johnny Carson and Lucille Ball at the Academy of TV Arts & Sciences.

Three fingers touch his cheek musingly--the silent pose that could evoke more laughter than a decade’s worth of slapstick. The violin is tucked under the left arm, as if ready for yet another rendering of “Love in Bloom.”

The approximately life-sized bronze statue of Jack Benny, by California sculptor Ernest Shelton, was unveiled by Benny’s daughter Joan Hill and his longtime friend, manager and partner Irving Fein at an informal rain-spattered ceremony Wednesday night.

The Benny figure joins full-sized representations of Johnny Carson and Lucille Ball on the plaza in front of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences building on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. Nearby is a cluster of bronze busts: Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ed Sullivan, Carol Burnett, writers Rod Serling and Paddy Chayevsky, Sylvester (Pat) Weaver--who invented the “Today” and “Tonight” shows--Mary Tyler Moore, Norman Lear and Joyce Hall of Hallmark Cards.

In niches along the building’s front, stand the pale stone figures of Steve Allen, Walter Cronkite, George Burns and Gracie Allen. It is a partial and erratic array of the medium’s shapers and shakers (Ed Wynn, Arthur Godfrey, Ernie Kovacs, where are you?), and the site doesn’t yet have the tourist-pulling power of those pawprints in cement at Mann’s Chinese. But even in the display’s early stage, the characters in view evoke floods of bright memories, and none more than Jack Benny.

As Irving Fein noted at the dedication, the Benny radio shows are still playing in many places (locally on KNX Saturday nights at 9) and so are the television shows. No wonder. Jack Benny’s brand of comedy was uniquely timeless, as funny in 1932 as in 1972, and free of the topicality that still provides Bob Hope, for example, with some of his best lines, perishable as they may be.

Those at the dedication also watched a new hourlong documentary, “Jack Benny: Comedy in Bloom,” produced by Ellen Klass for Time Warner, which will air on HBO on Oct. 28, the 60th anniversary of Benny’s first radio show.

What those in the audience (including Gisele McKenzie, a frequent Benny guest) needed no reminding was that Benny was a magical employer of pauses and silences. He had a whole glossary of stares, slow turns and wonderfully considered double-takes. He raised dawning awareness--that rising realization that all is not as it should be--to a special form of art. He did not so much milk laughs as give them time to form and ripen and burst.

The apparent simplicity of his style--he seemed to be doing so little--was in fact the mark of a professional who learned humor in the drafty and demanding halls of vaudeville. His timing, as everyone has rightly noted, was impeccable. He understood better, probably, than any comedian of his time (or any other) that less is more, and that pushing a joke too hard cheapens it, and weakens it.

His comic characterization was as a kind of flawed Everyman. He was, as he once remarked, parts of people everybody knew: a tightwad uncle, a vain and boastful brother-in-law, an ever-rejected but ever-hopeful Lothario. The public Benny soon became a brilliant shorthand, funny almost before he had done anything, said anything or stared balefully at the audience.

One night in Las Vegas Benny was at ringside when George Burns was performing. As Burns remembered it later, he interrupted his act to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, there are supposed to be actors who can read a telephone book and make you cry. I haven’t got a phone book but I have a friend here who can make you laugh. Jack, I wonder if you’d stand up and drink a glass of water.”

Benny stood up and, gazing around the crowd with that wide-eyed, oddly expressionless and patented stare of his, very slowly began to sip a glass of water. Well before he had finished it, the audience, Burns said, was laughing well on toward hysteria.

Benny’s ability to provoke laughter was in its way astonishing. He didn’t tell jokes, couldn’t tell jokes. Someone years ago famously said that Jack Benny couldn’t ad lib a belch at a Russian banquet, which may or may not have been literally true, although his appearances on talk shows left no doubt that he really didn’t require a script to be funny.

Once, Burns told me a few year ago, Jack and Mary Livingstone gave a big party at their house and Benny fretted all evening that people weren’t having a good time. Burns, mildly impatient with all the worrying, finally suggested that Benny go upstairs, strip to his underwear, put his hat on upside down and come down the stairs playing “Love in Bloom.” That should liven things up, Burns told him.

Benny, dubious at first, saw the logic of it and went upstairs to change. Burns quickly told everyone what Jack was going to do, and urged them to ignore him completely.

When Benny reappeared, fiddling away, the guests went on drinking and chatting as if he were invisible. Jack realized what Burns had done, went back upstairs and dressed again. When he came down, he confided to George, “It worked. They’re all having a good time.”

He was, Joan Hill said, “the most generous man I ever knew, and the nicest.” He died in 1974, at 80.