Ambrose Bierce, that perceptive (if dark) critic of his fellow creatures and (especially) fellow Americans, wrote a pair of definitions in his DEVIL'S DICTIONARY. Academe (the ancient Greek term) was a place where wisdom and ethics were taught. Academy (the modern version) was a place where knowledge and football were taught. That image, of college as a four year football game with the student body as a big cheer leading squad, was probably ingrained into Americans in the 19th Century by dime novel hero "Frank Merriwell" of Yale who Burton Standish made a paragon of sport and sportsmanship, and who always scored the winning touchdown at the last moment of the game (isn't that the way it always happens?).
The image persisted throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Films as diverse as the Marx Brothers HORSE FEATHERS (which actually probed the idiocy of this view to it's extreme - Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff's tenure as new President is shaky unless he gets Huxley a football victory) to GOOD NEWS (where June Alyson's expertise as a French Major is dragooned to assist the football hero with failing grades - Peter Lawford!) kept up this image.
COLLEGE HUMOR is no different from these. To a small mid-western college comes Jack Oakie, the son of a wealthy creamery owner. Oakie does not have to get a degree - he'd inherit the business. But his father sends him, and he was a high school football hero. So he intends to join the college football team. We watch as he is bullied by senior classmates Richard Arlen and Joe Sawyer in a process leading to his acceptance into the college fraternity, and his acceptance by his fraternity brothers. Their bullying does not prevent them cadging cigarettes and money from Oakie.
The college's teaching staff includes Bing Crosby, who naturally sings many of his lessons, but actually is teaching drama and singing. We see Jimmy Conlon and James Burke as two other faculty members, but the film does not explain what they teach.
Oakie is introduced to the sorority on the campus by Arlen, and meets his future girlfriend Mary Kornman (who is a feather head, but pretty), and Arlen is dating Lona Andre. We see that Sawyer, Arlen, and Oakie make up a great football team backbone, and then Sawyer leaves three weeks before he was supposed to graduate. More about this point later. The new school year begins, and Arlen meets Oakie's sister, Mary Carlisle. She is very sweet to him, but she falls for Crosby (who falls for her). This leads to Arlen's growing jealousy, and his increased alcoholism. He is arrested for drunk and disorderly behavior, and Crosby gets him out in time for the big game - which he wins. But college President Lumsley Hare expels him for unbecoming behavior. In anger Crosby quits the faculty (and tells off Hare as a pompous fathead). At that point I will leave off the remainder of the plot.
The music in this film is pleasantly sung, in particularly THE OLD OX ROAD, which is a more earthy version of such later melodies in other films as FLIRTATION WALK and THE KISSING ROCK. THE OLD OX ROAD is "talk-sung" (like Rex Harrison's style of singing in MY FAIR LADY), but I wonder if this method was used because of the current musical film work of Rodgers and Hart at Paramount (where COLLEGE HUMOR was produced). Crosby concludes it with suitably melodic singing. There is also a wonderful song and dance by Burns and Allen during a college party they are catering, centered on Gracie's Irish ancestry.
But though the film is pleasant enough it is actually fairly disjointed. The scene where Arlen meets Carlisle is described by Arlen, but we never see it. Was it shot but cut? Why were Crosby's three cronies on the faculty shown in the opening scene and rarely shown afterward. Arlen's incarceration and release was told to Hare by his sources - my suspicions here is that a bookish fellow who had also gotten drunk and was in a nearby cell (but escapes when Crosby got Arlen released) probably told the President of the College. Again this is a guess.
Then there is the interesting problem of Joe Sawyer. He tells Oakie that he has to leave school to earn a living three weeks before his graduation. What's the rush? When we next see him, about a year later, he has a wife and two children with him at the football game. In modern parlance, it looks like he knocked up a girl and felt obliged to marry her. This was still possible to show in 1933 before the tightening of the movie moral codes, but it opens up some problem. When did Sawyer, who was a terrifically good quarterback, find the time and energy to date and impregnate the girl?
But the film's biggest problem is the failure to show (really show) the interest in the college to teach it's student body. This is not too hard to understand. College, in 1933, was a rich person's prerogative - meant for the wealthy to prepare the next generation for it's role in ruling the world. Only gifted exceptions (scholarship winners or football/sports phenomenon) could get admission. An escape-seeking Depression audience seeing this film would not have cared to see the Lumsdale Hare version of college (the realistic classrooms). They could tolerate Crosby teaching his students to croon to win at love, or Groucho and his recalcitrant students Harpo and Chico turning a classroom into a vaudeville turn. This film is a fascinating brief antique - it has very little reality in it, except in showing what the 1933 audience expected regarding it's setting.
