The Mad Russian

Most of us today didn’t grow up with network radio, but some of us grew up with the remnants of it through old animated cartoons. Radio shows were rife with catchphrases and characters that were easily transferrable to cartoons. Those of us who were growing up after network radio died didn’t need to know their origin to laugh at them; they were silly and funny on their own.

One radio stooge who found his way, once removed, into cartoons was Bert Gordon. He created a character called “The Mad Russian.” Like a lot of radio comedians, he had come up from the ranks of vaudeville. And like a lot of radio comedians, he had catchphrases: “Do you mean it?” “How do you do?” “Silly boy!” Yeah, not funny stuff on paper. It was all in the delivery.

Gordon is still preserved in a few cartoons, notably in Hare Ribbin’ (1944), where a Mad Russian-esque dog (not voiced by Mel Blanc) is killed off at the end of the picture after failing to capture Bugs Bunny under water.

Let’s give you a bit of Gordon’s background. This is from PM newspaper, October 29, 1941.

HEARD AND OVERHEARD
By JERRY FRANKEN
Among the more antic madcaps on the nowadays is a vaudeville-trained dialectician called the Mad Russian. He is the chief stooge on the Eddie Cantor program (Wed., WEAF 9).
In person, the Mad Russian, who marks 10 years on the air this week, is a short, quiet-spoken actor named Bert Gordon, quite the antithesis of his loudly dialectic radio character.
On the air the Mad Russian's forte is unconscionable exaggeration. Whoever the weekly Cantor guest star may be the Russian is invariably a better man at the visitors own game.
By his own boast, he has been a tougher mugg than George Raft and a rougher slugger than either Lou Nova or Max Baer. Recently, when he was introduced on the air to Maurice Evans, the Russian sniffed disparaging.
"A Shakespearean actor?" he scoffed. "Did I ever tell you the time I played the classics in Moscow?'
“You mean, Russian,” asked Eddie Cantor, “that you played in Moscow?”
“Of course, of course—Loew's Moscow.”
Bert Gordon created his Russian in 1930 after meeting Gregory Ratoff. In those days Ratoff was just a Broadway producer and hired after Girl Crazy, the Willie Howard-Ginger Rogers musical, ended its Broadway run, Ratoff bought the vaudeville rights. condensed the show into a mad unit and Gordon to play the Willie Howard role. Bert spent most of his time on the road cribbing the incomparable Ratoff accent.
Gordon, born on the East Side, has spent 38 of his 44 years trouping. Before he met Ratoff he had been a boy alto and mugging song-comedian, sung in temple choirs and worked as a magician's assistant, and when he was 16 he owned his own vaudeville act, the Nine Crazy Kids, two of whom were Bert Lahr and Jack Pearl. Inevitably, as with his boss, Eddie Cantor, and almost all show-business East Siders, Gordon worked in a Gus Edwards act, one called the Newsboy Sextet. Two of the ragged newsboys were Bert Wheeler and Georgie Price. A third newsboy, aptly enough, was Walter Winchell.
By 1916, Gordon was a Keith headliner with his older brother, Harry. When Harry quit to go into insurance, Bert did a cowboy travesty, Desperate Sam, starred in Europe, came back for a George White's Scandals, did Girl Crazy and then met Jack Benny, who himself had recently gone on the air. A typical Benny-Gordon routine had Jack as a schoolteacher. Bert a pupil.
"I'm Moe." Bert would say.
"Eeny, meeny, miney. Moe.”
Next to tin Mad Russian. Bert’s favorite part is the one that started him off when he was 6. This was in an East Side play called The Mother's Sin. Bert was the sin.

Now, an Associated Press column from November 23, 1942.

Hollywood Sights and Sound:
By ROBBIN COONS
HOLLYWOOD—There are so many things and characters to investigate in this now sobering madhouse that I'm only now getting around to one of my favorite people—the chubby pixie with the Gable ears, the paunchy prince of theatrical peasants known as The Mad Russian.
Forty of Bert Gordon's 46 years have been spent in show business, which is more reason than most have for reminiscing in print. Bert is on the verge. He'll tell all in a tome called "Ring tip the Curtain," on which he has been laboring these lonely, unpixilated ever since he gave up cards and the polka-dotted ivories.
"Since I quit gambling," he said, "there's been nothing for me to do in Hollywood. I read and I write."
• • •
The Mad Russian, you see, is not authentically mad. He is, like so many comics, a little sad around the eyes when not working at being mad, and he doesn't work at it off duty. But he's genuinely Russian, at least in descent. His father was a reverend cantor from the old country who brought his numerous family to New York's East Side and there increased his progeny—including Bert among the later arrivals.
Bert got his early theatrical training on the sidewalks of New York, along with Georgie Price, Jessel and Winchell, and fell or jumped into the hands of the oldtime impresario of youth, Gus Edwards. For a while he was of the "school days" gang, emerged eventually into things like "Six Stage-Struck Kids," "Nine Krazy Kids" and other kiddishness. So it went on, through vaudeville and the revues and musical comedy, and marriage to a Ziegfeld beauty, and divorce, and now Hollywood, movies, the air, and litrachure. [sic]
"Seven years ago I was broke," he says, "from the cards and the dice. I quit, but I've got a memory. Once I took Arnold Rothstein for $12,000. I gave $3,000 to my wife for her Christmas shopping. I put $500 in my pocket. I locked the rent away in the hotel vault, and I was through with gambling. I walked the streets and didn't know what to do with myself. But the Rothstein boys waited for me. The game was right in the hotel. Pretty soon I was cleaned again."
• • •
Once Gregory Ratoff, casting a musical show, interviewed Bert, asked his salary. "A grand a week," said Bert. Ratoff snorted. "For $1,000 a week, I work for you!" That ended that—until later. Bert finally did "Girl Crazy.'
Eventually Gordon made a movie, a bad one. Strictly from hunger, he took up selling advertising to actors. He met Eddie Cantor. "If you can take a salesman named Einstein and make him a sensation as Parkyakarkus, what could you do with a comedian?" he asked. Cantor put him on, and soon—because Bert wanted a trademark—there evolved "The Mad Russian."

Eddie Cantor was not altogether a beloved entertainer, but one thing he can receive kudos for is his speaking out against Adolf Hitler and Nazism before World War Two. It resulted in a situation that Gordon may, or may not, have been part of. Here’s an Associated Press story from 1939.

NO JOKE TO THEM
Pair Attacked After Cantor Show
'Mad Russian' Faces Grilling; Hitler 'Slur' Resented
LOS ANGELES, March 28 (AP)—A beating which followed a couple's walk-out protest of a joke Eddie Cantor told about Adolf Hitler today resulted in Charles Gollob and his. wife, Elsie, demanding a battery complaint against the men they said attacked them.
A city attorney set April 8 for an official hearing of the Gollob's story, in which they accused Bert Gordon, Cantor's "Mad Russian," of being one of the men who struck them outside a broadcasting studio last night;—
Gollob said:
"I was leaving the studio, after the broadcast, and I told attendants I didn't care to hear any more propaganda. A woman shouted at me and I said I didn't want to hear any more of that kind of junk.
'CALLED ME NAZI.'

"They called me a Nazi. I'm not. I've been naturalized for 20 years. The woman followed me and my wife to the sidewalk. Then I was hit from behind. I nearly fell and my wife nearly fell. I didn't strike back."
Gollob's jaw was bandaged and a tooth was missing. His wife's cheek was swollen and bandaged. Cantor said:
"It was that part of the after show where the Rabbi tells Hitler that he cannot restore his youth, but he can fix it so Hitler won't grow any older, when there was a commotion in the back of the house.
'ASKED FOR TROUBLE.'
"A woman shouted at some man, and he said, 'Shut up, you Jew so-and-so.' The woman followed the man, and a couple of fellows who appeared to be in her party went with her. Of course, the beating was inexcusable, but that fellow certainly asked for the trouble.
"Gordon was in the studio all the time. I could see him back stage."
Vick Knight, producer of Cantor's show, said the "Mad Russian" was in the control room with him immediately after the broadcast.
Gollob, a bungalow court operator said he was an Austrian native, naturalized for 15 years.
Radio Police Officers J. H. Bohanon and J.T. Foster reported Gollob told them he and his wife had heard the Cantor broadcast and were leaving during an informal program which follows, but does not go on the air.
"As we neared the door," he said, "a woman asked us if we didn't like the program. We explained that we liked it but didn't want to hear any propaganda against Hitler.
"We walked on out. Four men followed us. When we got to the corner, two of them attacked us without warning. I was struck on the mouth, cutting my lower lip, and my wife also was struck on the mouth and side of the face."
Tom Hanlon, night manager of the studio, said there was "some kind of a disturbance" and "I believe there were some Bronx cheers."

The prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles declined to lay charges against Gordon. The Gollobs decided to go to court on their own; the AP reporting August 1st they had laid a civil suit for 751 thousand dollars against Gordon, Cantor and others. (I have not been able to find the end result).

Dialect comedians became passé after World War Two. America had changed from a land of people getting off the boat and swarming into the cities to a land of people without thick foreign accents swarming the suburbs. Gordon drifted in obscurity. His last hurrah may have been an appearance on the Dick Van Dyke Show, a far more sophisicated comedy than anything that appeared on radio. Gordon’s role was to play Bert Gordon—a relic comedian of the past. Outside of the trades, he got little press when he passed away from cancer on November 30, 1974, age 76.

Gordon had a kick at stardom. The low-budget PRC Pictures gave him the co-lead with Harry Von Zell in a 1944 comedy/mystery/musical named for one of his catchphrases: How Doooo You Do!!!. Don’t confuse it with a 1942 Columbia feature he co-starred in called Laugh Your Blues Away, which began as How Do You Do. At times, the PRC movie is as cartoony as anything at Warner Bros. (though the ending seems inspired by Columbia/Screen Gems’ Tangled Travels). You can see a bad VHS dub of it on-line.

A late P.S.: Devon Baxter has more about Gordon and cartoons in this post on Jerry Beck’s blog.