Dennis Day

Today is the birthday of Dennis Day (Owen Patrick Eugene McNulty, 1916-1988).

Day came along too late for vaudeville; we celebrate him here today for his long, close professional association with Jack Benny. Day was a singer in a college glee club when he got hired for Benny’s radio show as a replacement for Kenny Baker in 1939. (Most radio shows sported a girl singer. Because Benny was happily married to Mary Livingstone he could get away with a boy singer.) Day’s role in the Benny family was to sing once or twice per show in that pleasant Irish tenor, and to take part in the comedy, doing a kind of sarcastic self-parody of a wide-eyed young lad. One can hear Benny say, “Oh, Dennis!”, in one’s head, just as plainly as “Oh, Don!”, “Oh, Mary!” and “Oh, Rochester!” It was still going on in my day! We had a great Christmas record when I was growing up…mostly Dennis doing carols, with Benny doing a cameo to help boost record sales I would imagine. Day was still appearing as the wisecracking kid on Benny’s tv show in its final season in 1965, even though he was nearly 50 years old.

Day also had shows of his own. On radio there was A Day in the Life of Dennis Day which ran from 1946 through 1951, followed by his tv program The Dennis Day show, which ran from 1952 through 1954. His career wound down in the late 1970s.

Here he is singing “Danny Boy” on Benny’s radio show, St. Patrick’s Day, 1946:

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Stars of Vaudeville #157: Fats Waller

Originally posted in 2010. 

Best known as an incomparable jazz piano and organ player, a hilarious showman, and songwriter of such hits as “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Your Feet’s Too Big”, 300 lb. Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller worked throughout the 1920s in the all-black vaudeville circuit run by the Theatre Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.), often accompanying singers like Sara Martin and Bessie Smith. By the 1930s he was contributing songs to Broadway shows and a star of radio and record albums. He died of pneumonia in 1943 at the age of 39. Predictably, he was on tour at the time. His resurrection a few decades later in shows like Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Black and Blue was just as inevitable.

Here’s “Your Feet’s Too Big”!

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Stars of Vaudeville # 698: Richard Bennett

Today is the birthday of Richard Bennett (1870-1944). I quoted him in No Applause without really explaining who he was: a major New York stage star (and later film star) who sometimes deigned to play vaudeville. His daughters Constance and Joan also became movie stars; his other daughter Barbara married the singer Morton Downey (and thus was the mother of loathsome talk show host Morton Downey, Jr., and an infernal delivery it must have been).

Already a major star of the New York stage by the 1890s, the elder Bennett became known for his diatribes against the audience, critics and authorities delivered as curtain speeches at the end of performances (this was the context in which I quoted him in No Applause). His silent movie career began in 1914 and continued until the last year of his life. Bennett’s best known role today is probably his performance as Major Amberson in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Isaac W. Sprague, The Original Living Skeleton

Today is the birthday of the original “human skeleton”, Isaac W. Sprague (1841-1887). His weight loss began at age twelve, although he wasn’t to join a sideshow until age 24 in 1865. P.T. Barnum hired him the following year for his American Museum and the traveling show he mounted with the former institution burned down. At the time of his death while performing at a Boston museum at age 46 he weighed only 43 pounds. The cause of his muscular atrophy was never identified.

To find out about  the history of show business, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Stars of Vaudeville #697: Imro Fox

Today is the birthday of Imro Fox (Isidore Fuchs, 1862-1910). Fox moved to the U.S. from his native Poland at age 17 and began his working life as a hotel chef. An amateur magician, he was drafted to become a professional within a few months when he was hired for an emergency substitution while working at a Washington D.C. hotel. Billed as a “comic conjurer” he would do a rapid succession of sleight-of-hand illusions, punctuated by one-line jokes, often about his baldness, although he was also often dressed in a wizard costume. Fox was to tour throughout the U.S. and the U.K. for the remainder of his career. In 1896 he joined a magic super-group formed by producer M.B. Leavitt with Servais Leroy and Frederick Powell called The Great Triple Alliance. That same year he made several short films depicting his stage act for Biograph. He died mysteriously at the age of 47 in a Utica, New York hotel while booked at the Keith-Proctor Theatre. The cause was given as “acute indigestion”.

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

On the Vaudeville of Cher

Today is the birthday of Cher (Cherilyn Sarkasian, b. 1946). I wish it had occurred to me to write more about her in No Applause – she is absolutely the modern equivalent of a Nora Bayes, Eva Tanguay, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Mae West, etc etc…a big, BIG female star, a singing comedienne who makes a huge impression wherever she goes, who seems to premiere a new, original designer outfit wherever she shows her face. And for a time she even had her own Jack Norworth in the person of Sonny Bono.  And can you imagine having your own comedy/ variety television series, AND recording and releasing hit records all at the same time? THAT, my friends, to me, would be the acme of all existence.

I slavishly watched hers (and Sonny’s) various tv shows in the early to mid 70s, and was inspired not only by them but by Cher’s trilogy of #1 singles.

“Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves” (1971) speaks for itself — the imagery it evokes, and its theme of being an outcast on the fringes of respectable society runs all through No Applause, and I do mention the song in the book a couple of times, so I guess Cher did wind up in it after all.

But as someone who is (like Cher) part Cherokee, my imagination was also fired up by her song “Half-Breed” (1973). This number is also straight-up vaudeville with its Hollywood  ”Indian” sounding string section and tom-toms, rivaled in the rock era only by Paul Revere & the Raiders’ 1971 “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)” for heap big hokum. This clip is just too good:

And the last piece of the puzzle, 1974′s “Dark Lady” in which she plays a murderous fortune teller. Sonny’s voice is pretty prominent among the background singers, which is kind of funny given the degree to which they were publicly breaking up by the point.

This is just the summit, man. Like all the great ones, she periodally re-invents herself (during the 80s she was a serious actress), but she always comes back to her Cherness. (It was the only palatable aspect of that terrible 2010 Burlesque movie, for example.) But if you want any indication of the health of her career, just Google her. Most of the photographs that pop up when you do so are from, like, NOW.

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

The World’s Only Bob Hope Impressionist

Today is the birthday of brilliant Canadian comedian Dave Thomas (b.1949). While he has a long list of impressive credits, he is most notable for having been head writer and key cast member of the late night comedy sketch show SCTV. It was while starring on this show that he became famous for accomplishing something that no one else has accomplished before or since: a Bob Hope impression. In his 1996 book SCTV: Behind the Scenes, he explains how he found the key, which was a certain mumbly quality that Hope had, especially in his mature years. But I also think Thomas was blessed with having a voice in Hope’s same register, one with a lot of nose resonance, having a quality roughly in the goose honk range.

At any rate, here is in one of the most classic of all SCTV sketches, with Thomas as Hope, and Rick Moranis as Woody Allen:

To find out about  the history of show business, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

For more on silent and slapstick comedy please check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc