"Benny toured with her for two years, traveling through Illinois and Wisconsin under the billing "Salisbury and Kubelsky: From Grand Opera to Ragtime." When Salisbury retired, Benny continued the act with pianist Lyman Woods. For six years he played his violin and never spoke or told a joke. He enlisted in the Navy for the First World War and found himself in a maritime revue at the Great Lakes Naval Station. Here he told his first jokes, and by the end of the war he had begun to think of himself as a monologuist."