by John Lahr
We’ll fool around, that’s what we’ll do …
And Lahr remembers himself playing with words. They must have called on strange recesses of his experience.
Teacher: Gladys, vot is de opposite of misery?
Gladys: Happiness.
Teacher: Dot’s right. Now, Abby, vot is de opposite of woe?
Abby: Giddyap.
His final job with this brand of entertainment was by far the most lucrative and the longest. Once again he signed to replace his friend Jack Pearl, who had graduated to burlesque in Joe Wood’s variety act, College Days. Lahr was to meet the troupe in Seattle and continue with it on the Western circuit. En route, the train stopped for half an hour in Portland, and Lahr got off. As he strolled down Portland’s main avenue he heard a familiar voice.
“Hey Dog-face!”
When he turned, he was standing face to face with Pearl, whom he was supposed to meet in Seattle. The show had closed in Washington and was now on its way to California. Lahr had confused the dates; he would have missed his first important booking.
The tour was successful. He earned eighteen dollars a week, playing to four audiences a day. He sent ten dollars home each week. He had forty week’s work on the tour. What pleased him was not the money, but the exposure. He was learning about audiences and struggling with them. “Comedy is sympathy,” he would say later. In this Western tour he was learning how to modulate his image and create this sympathy before audiences whose tastes were as varied as the countryside. He did not wear the outrageous comedy clothes that many other comedians did. When he won over his audience, it was with his body and his voice. He worked with a fierce energy on stage. The eyes that rolled as frantically as a hunted deer’s were real and their panic honest. He became aware that his face could win more laughs in its contorted movements than written lines or wild costumes.
By 1916 it was apparent to Lahr that he was already too old to continue with the kid acts. When he returned to New York, he teamed with a man and woman to form Hardy, Lahr, and Usher. They did not get much work, but even in this shabby act, Lahr’s rough talent attracted attention. After their final performance in Brooklyn, Lahr was sitting in his dressing room, pondering the trio’s tepid reception. A performer on the same bill came in and introduced himself.
“I remember Billy K. Wells was a very natty fellow, small, always well dressed. He was a monologist. He said to me ‘I’ve been watching you work. You’ve got talent.’”
Lahr and Wells chatted: finally Wells handed him his card. “I’m a writer for Blutch Cooper, ever heard of him?” Lahr knew the name. His friend Jack Pearl had signed onto the quality burlesque Columbia Wheel and Cooper had produced Pearl’s show.
Wells did not waste words. “He told me he’d be in touch. He said they could use young kids with talent. He said this was no gag. Then he left. I remember sitting there, amazed. More than five years in the business and now a shot at burlesque. I wondered if I was ready.”
Burlesque
I’ll never forget him. He was only nineteen or twenty and that’s infancy for a comedian, but he was completely at home on the stage. He already had that crazy stiff-arm gesture of his, and he was doing the gnong, gnong, gnong business. I signed him up for burlesque right away. He got thirty-five dollars a week the first season. Then, he was raised to fifty dollars, and the third year, I think, he got one hundred dollars. He was known as the boy wonder of the Columbia Circuit.
Billy K. Wells on Bert Lahr,
Theater Arts Magazine
BILLY K. WELLS died in 1956. Among the theatrical mementos that hung on his wall was an autographed picture of Bert Lahr. In it Lahr is lean and smooth. His hair is full. He can be no older than thirty. The dedication reads:
To My Pal Billy,
Who is responsible for what little success I have attained.
This is not hyperbole; Lahr was too careful and self-conscious with words to waste them. Nothing he ever again wrote would approach the frankness and gratitude of that inscription.
Lahr would probably have become a star without Billy K. Wells—even at nineteen he possessed energy and an individuality of style. But the road to comic expertise would have been longer and more confusing alone. Wells provided not only much imaginative material on which Lahr could embellish, but also an entree into the most important burlesque circuit—the Columbia Wheel. Because of Wells, Lahr was exposed to the best burlesque comedians and the most critical audiences. The competition and the pressure matured his comic sensibilities faster than they otherwise would have developed.
Wells had turned to writing as a sideline after his wife died, in an effort to support his children. He was a good performer; as a writer he created jokes and sketches for burlesque, and gradually expanded into vaudeville, theatrical, and, finally, movie writing. He wrote for many of America’s famous comedians—among them Jack Pearl (for whom he created Baron von Munschausen), Eugene and Willie Howard, Amos ’n Andy, Jack Benny, and Weber and Fields. He also contributed to George White’s Scandals and the Greenwich Village Follies.
Sitting at his cluttered mahogany desk, Wells draped a string from one side to the other, and, in a clothesline effect, pinned the various jokes and “bits of business” on the line, rearranging them as he built the scene. He kept a detailed account of the number of jokes he wrote; he tabulated the laughs per minute of every sketch. Even the malapropisms that salted his comic dialogue were uncovered in the same methodical manner. Wells would take a word and write it on one side of a file card and on the other side list similar sounding words, testing each for its comic possibility. With this businesslike procedure of comic creation, he brought to burlesque the instinct for social criticism that gave his comedy a depth approaching the English burlesque from another century. His fey imagination was able to ferret out fresh humor from old forms.
During the eighteenth century, the term “burlesque” had been synonymous with parody. (Henry Fielding and Richard Sheridan were among those who contributed to the tradition of English burlesque.) The twentieth century changed the meaning of the term and the nature of the entertainment. Burlesque became a much less cerebral, more robust low comedy that lacked the fundamental impulse for social parody. The American interpretation of the term began in 1865 when Michael Bennett Leavitt, a theatrical manager, decided to combine a variety of individual entertainments into one evening’s fare. American burlesque was conceived as “consisting of three parts—minstrel, vaudeville, and burlesque—the latter being the real feature.” The format would evolve into a miniature comedy that differed from vaudeville in its consistent form and story line. Because of the caliber and variety of entertainments in burlesque, the form demanded a long and versatile apprenticeship. Those who claimed to write for burlesque mainly wrote bits or monologues. Most of the classic American humor evolved from the comedians themselves, who knew their audiences and the format of this type of entertainment. Since burlesque made no pretensions at communicating ideas, the actors and those who wrote for it relied heavily on formula scenes passed down from season to season and on material revised from humor magazines. Wells was an exception. Still, Lahr was attracted to burlesque neither by Wells’ competence nor by the stars on the circuit, but by the thought of working steadily. It meant that he could pacify his parents by sending home a good percentage of his earnings. He did not realize that his father would never spend the money he sent, fearing that his son would need something with which to start a new life once his fling in show business had lost its luster.
Lahr was the last of America’s great comedians to graduate from burlesque, leaving it late in 1922, just as burlesque was beginning to lose the brio that sparked its growth during the previous two decades. The theatrical revue, along with the silent film, was absorbing the best of the burlesque “bits” and specialty numbers. The stunning Broadway chorus lines extended the legshow aspect of burlesque to a new titillating pinnacle. As early as 1923, while burlesque performers were still in tights, the Shuberts brought
nudity to Broadway revues. (Lahr never participated in the bastardized burlesque.) He knew burlesque when it was fresh and vital, exploring the truths of the working classes and the struggles of the minorities to make their way in America. What burlesque had to say, it said not with bitterness but with gay irreverence. The springboard for many creative entertainers and a multitude of “classic” sketches gave way to spectacle with nothing to offer but a peep show.
Wells made his offer to Lahr at the Olympia Theater in February of 1916, but Lahr could not make his debut on the Columbia Circuit until September of 1917. He would have accepted Wells’s proposal immediately, but he was already under contract to Charles Feldman to tour with a show called Garden Belles. He begged Feldman to release him, but to no avail. A letter from Blutch Cooper, one of the biggest burlesque producers of his day and the son-in-law of Sam Scribner, the founder of the Wheel, explains the situation and indicates the excitement Lahr’s talent generated in Wells and the portly, tight-lipped entrepreneur. It is an important document for Lahr, pasted on the first page of his makeshift scrapbook. The date is March 10, 1917. Cooper’s letter represented the first tangible indication that Lahr’s talent lived not only in his own mind, but in the imagination of others as well.
Dear Bert,
I just received your letter and I note where you say you humbly beg my pardon for the Feldman mix-up, you don’t have to beg my pardon. It was just a good opportunity that you have let slip through our fingers, and I don’t hold it against you, as I told you the other day when you came to see me. I wouldn’t have admired you jumping out of any show whether he is a big fish or a small fish. I gave Mr. Feldman ample time to get another man, and I hustled around and got him a man and was willing to give him $5 a week toward the new man, but he stalled me and lied until it was practically too late for me to send another man up.…
You don’t have to write me about your lack of business ability by not grabbing the opportunity that we offered you, but those things has to come to every man in life. It is an old and true saying, “Experience is the best teacher.” There isn’t a successful man in the world who doesn’t make mistakes. You are just a flower starting to bloom and your friend Mr. Feldman was there with a knife to nip the bud, but he is not good enough to kill the flower that has a wonderful chance to enjoy the sunshine that’s coming to him. My feelings toward you are not hurt to that extent to try and kill your future. I will endeavor to do my utmost next season to make you briter [sic] than any spotlight we have on the circuit. This is not any salve, but its right from the heart as you know from business dealings with me that I am not a mushy sort.
With best wishes for your future success, I remain yours sincerely
Blutch Cooper
Cooper was, indeed, not a “mushy sort.” He would never again be so overt in his praise of Lahr. He would nurture Lahr. In June of 1917 he made good his promise, signing Lahr onto the professional circuit as the third comedian in The Best Show in Town, featuring the Italian comic Frankie Hunter. A squib in the Burlesque News, heralding the transaction, spells Lahr’s name wrong in his first publicity clipping.
Wells Lands a “Find”
Billy K. Wells, producer of “Blutch” Cooper productions has, in his estimation, landed a “find” of a Dutch comedian for one of the Cooper shows on the Columbia Wheel for next season.
The new addition is Bert Lehr and was plucked from the “bushes” during one of Wells’ recent scouting tours. He has been signed to a three year contract under “Blutch.”
The show opened in Cleveland in September. After the first performance, Lahr was made second comedian. In assigning Lahr the heavy responsibility of the second comedy slot, it was clear that Cooper expected results; it was also apparent that he would get them.
“You can’t learn to be a comedian,” Lahr once told a reporter. “You’re either funny or you’re not. Let the audience tell you.” As early as 1917, the burlesque audience was communicating its approval of his broad “Dutch” comedy. But while his delivery was fresh and funny, his performance was far from polished.
Lahr made his entrance wearing a tight-fitting Palm Beach suit whose conservative checkered weave was marred by conspicuous spots. He wore no wig, but, instead, combed his thick black hair high on his head and matched it with a small brush mustache which curled up at the edge of his nostrils. His face was streaked with heavy pencil marks to indicate wrinkles. The pencil accentuated the pouches beneath his eyes, making them look like poached eggs, and outlined his mouth before time and continual smiling wore these contours deep into his face.
The final touch to his make-up was a large, bulbous putty nose, completing the German-Jewish stereotype. It transmitted, in its obvious falseness and inflexibility, a benevolent urgency and sympathy in his character to the audience. Whether intended or not, urgency was the primary emotional state that Lahr felt in this first circuit tour and in the remaining years of burlesque. In the glossy picture used for lobby displays, Lahr was pigeon-toed, his left hand drawn tight to make a fist. He was the self-conscious funny-man. If nothing else, these pictures show the approach he would take toward his audience. Young and inexperienced, Lahr would grapple with the people over the footlights. His tactic was as straightforward and unrelenting as his pose indicated. His job was simply to make them laugh and, if they laughed, if he could make them snicker or guffaw, then he was doing his work and insuring his survival with the Cooper shows. From his first success in Cleveland, burlesque meant steady employment and security.
Interviewer: What was the best teacher in burlesque—the other comedians, or the audience or what?
Lahr: Observance. Observance. A capacity to pick it up and a capacity to edit yourself. You could learn to be an acrobat if you were strong enough; You could learn to take falls. Or if you wanted to be a comedy acrobat, you’d put on funny clothes and have gags, pull wigs up and down, which the audience would laugh at.
Actors Talk About Acting
It is hard to imagine the laugh as an absolute value. However, it has been the one absolute in my father’s life, the focus of his imagination. Laughter is more than a serious business; it is an obsession. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to get a laugh, and the easiest thing to kill it,” he maintains. Burlesque was a good teacher not only because it offered Lahr a showcase in which to experiment with his audience and learn to build comic moments, but also because he learned to protect the laughs.
The Best Show in Town (1917) opened with the mellifluous chorus belting out a call to fun and festival.
…The plot is a lot of rot.
What’s the use I’d like to know
So long as there’s girls
And comedy whirls
Who cares about the plot of the show.
The finale, in which Lahr sang with the girls, may not have had the eloquence of a Shakespearean epilogue, but the functions of the players and the stage had not changed.
There’s been no rhyme or reason
In anything we did.
All we did was kid.
On stage, Lahr was the most frivolous of all, the loudest howler, the wildest acrobat, the merriest Merry Andrew. He worked hard on stage, trying out many different comedy gestures, eliminating the ones that did not get good laughs or which, in certain situations, killed a bigger one to come. He had already acquired, along with his distinctive delivery, a catch phrase. All the great comedians used some such phrase or action not only as a trademark but also as a psychological gimmick to elicit the audience’s response at the right moment. Will Rogers lowered his head and twirled his lariat after he told a joke. George M. Cohan glanced sideways toward the boxes and pretended he was cleaning his molars. Lahr did a double take toward the audience after the punch line and then growled his “gnong, gnong, gnong.” The audience was led to the joke, cued to laugh, and then, with an effective comic phrase, the basic joke was expanded far beyond its original proportions.
As Lahr learned to lure his audience and wrench from his m
aterial every possible laugh, he also became aware of how every technique could be employed against him on stage. With four comedians in a burlesque show, the competition was grueling. It was a struggle not only for the extra laughs, but also for the audience’s attention, for personal pride, and sometimes even for private dislikes. In those first months, Hunter would purposely kill some of Lahr’s laughs by making him seem the antagonist and flinching from him in mock fear. Lahr had to learn fast. “Never move on a joke. I can kill any joke by movement. It’s disastrous.” It is the one stage tactic that infuriates him to this day. The audience must focus on the person telling the joke; the slightest movement shifts this concentration and the action loses its impact with the switch of interest.
Hunter liked to toss his head just as Lahr was delivering a laugh. He was not the only culprit; Lahr himself could fight ruthlessly for an audience’s attention. If he had found a new faith in his comic delivery, he also had developed an occupational suspicion of other performers. “I’ve worked with very few men that I’ve ever had trouble with. I have a funny face, and whoever wants to make it a contest has two strikes against him.”
Women posed even more of a threat. Beatrice Lillie and Nancy Walker are the only two comediennes he admires. He claims that they “played theater.” “Play” has always been a key word for Lahr because, from the beginning, his comedy and success involved his ability to build scenes and situations rather than simply to tell jokes. Although no antifeminist, Lahr’s attitudes toward the majority of comediennes is adamant, and always skeptical. “Beware of the woman who gets the first laugh.” He says this wryly and with a smile, but experience has left him no other judgment. A woman on stage brought with her an immediate sympathy and appeal. Even if she behaved badly, the slightest sarcasm from Lahr dampened the audience’s sympathy toward him and shifted the delicate mechanism of the laughter.
He cites an example, a scene in Two on the Aisle that he knew was good material even though the audiences weren’t laughing. The sensation never changed. It was not so much a feeling of frustration as a sense of panic. Had the plotting and playing been wasted? Was the joke worthless? Was he himself worthless? Couldn’t he make them laugh?
