Look! He’s now Paul Whiteman!
He turns again. Oooh! Now he’s Charlie Chaplin (as the little tramp).
Is everybody happy? It’s Ted Lewis.
Now, an extended gag. Lewis’ clarinet playing is so hot, the instrument has to fan itself, then uses the handle of the fan as a hose to drink water.
He turns again. I don’t know who this is supposed to be, if anyone.
Ben Harrison receives a story credit, with Manny Gould credited on animation. There are a few off-the-wall Fleischer-like gags here; unfortunately, Charlie Mintz’s cartoons weaned themselves away from that kind of thing.
That last one was supposed to be cross-eyed comic Ben Turpin. Or an unreasonable facsimile.
ReplyDeleteYep, I also thought about Ben Turpin when I saw the mixed up eyes. I remember my parents actually had a Ted Lewis album. I believe it was thrown in free with a number of other albums when they purchased the Ol RCA Orthophonic record player. And of course catching his act in Abbott and Costello's " Hold That Ghost ".
ReplyDeleteI was thinking maybe Bob Burns and his bazooka, but I'll go with Turpin.
ReplyDeleteCrazy eyes and playing a trombone? It's obviously Jerry Colonna. Sic transit gloria Mundi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Colonna_(entertainer)
ReplyDeleteIn 1930? I don't think anyone knew him then. He didn't really come to notice until he appeared with Fred Allen singing "On the Road to Mandalay."
DeleteColonna can be heard with Joe Herlihy's Orchestra on discs recorded for Edison Records in the late 1920s. During the 1930s, Colonna played with the CBS house orchestra and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra.
DeleteSo says Wikipedia. Contemporary news sources don't mention him until an Allen amateur night in 1937. There's no way he was known well enough outside the music industry to be caricatured in 1930. We start seeing a bunch of them in cartoons after he joined Bob Hope.
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