The Happy Professor

Once upon a time, Bob Hope had a radio show. It was a good radio show. My favourite part of the Bob Hope Show isn’t Hope. It’s a wonderfully eccentric man named Jerry Colonna.

Colonna started out as a musician but somehow ended up spouting non sequiturs and using peculiar logic during dialogues with Old Ski Nose. He had several catchphrases, some of them you’ll hear if you watch old Warner Bros. cartoons with Colonna-like characters.

He lasted through the ‘40s with Hope. By then, Colonna wanted to do his own show and Hope wanted to freshen his with new people.

Let’s look at 20 years of Colonna’s career. First up is a 1941 column.

Hollywood Screen Life
BY ROBBIN COONS
HOLLYWOOD, Mar. 6—Even after sitting across a table from Jerry Colonna, you find it hard to believe in the reality of his most treasured possession, his moustache.
Even close-up, that gallant, larruping, upstanding decoration loons like something fabricated in a wild moment by a make-up artist. It's real, though, and Jerry hasn't been without it for 16 of his 36 years.
All those years, many of them before the moustache became an ingredient of his comic front, he has been receiving "double-takes" from incredulous passers-by.
Jerry (real name Gerard) credits the wonderful item to the inspiration of his late grandfather, who had a really prodigious pair of handle-bars that reached half-way down his chest and curled up at the ends. Jerry started early and to this day hasn't parted with one of the original hairs. He has become expert at resisting the blandishments of yearning barbers, and does his own trimming.
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Once Jerry joined an orchestra as a trombonist when he couldn't play the trombone, a deficiency he quickly remedied by hasty study For several years he made his living at music—in vaudeville (both on stage and in pit), in concert orchestras, on the air. The trombone further justified the moustache, he says. A moustache helps to cushion the lips for performers on any wind instrument, for which reason he still shaves his under-lip sparingly, even though for three or four years he has played the trombone infrequently.
Jerry came into picture via "52nd Street" after a guest aired with Fred Allen. He was under contract briefly at Warner's, where his bulging, rolling eyes and his fabulous moustachios appeared in a couple of bits—nobody, apparently knowing what to do with them.
He did better at Paramount, and with Bob Hope on the air. His latest film is "You're the One," his current job the "romantic lead opposite Judy Canova in "Sis Hopkins." (If Republic hasn't picked Judy's next story, they can have this tip free: Why not a burlesque musical of "Trilby," with hypnotic-eyed Colonna as Svengali—singing in his own distinctive "grand opera" style?)
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Jerry's comedy springs—aside from his eyes, singing volce (?), and moustache—from dialogue. He borrows a couple of Bob Hope's writers to go over the scripts, looking for ways to twist straight lines into Colonna gags without hurting the sense or the story.
He turned down a chance to play a role in "Marie Antoinette" because it would have required him to shave. For "You're the One," Producer Gene Markey wanted him to shave for one scene, but Colonna won the argument. He says has no wish to be an actor of other roles than Jerry Colonna—with, possibly, some alterations. In person he is quiet, almost shy.
He has been married foe 10 years. Mrs. Colonna, he says, has never objected to his moustache—in fact, never has seen him out it. Sometimes he himself wonders what he looks like underneath the shrubbery.

Now, to July 11, 1950. Colonna talked with NBC but ended up spending the rest of the year appearing at clubs.

Jerry Colonna Latest Of Top Radio Comics To Get Own TV Show
By BOB THOMAS
Associated Press Hollywood Writer
HOLLYWOOD—Jerry Colonna, the man with monstrous mustache and the steam-whistle voice, is the latest to get into the television picture.
The comic is shaping up his own show, which he hopes to have ready for the fall that should help enliven the coming season, which promises to be the most competitive in the young industry's history. Such stars as Fred Allen, Eddie Cantor, Martin and Lewis and Groucho Marx have been mentioned as definite or probable starters in the TV field.
Colonna severed his professional life with his old sidekick, Bob Hope, two years ago and has been doing mostly theatre dates since. The split was a friendly one and arose over Jerry's desire to have a show of his own. Hope's sponsor wouldn't go for it and so Jerry took a walk.
"I SPENT $9,000 whipping up an audition," Jerry recalled, "but I hit the market just when the bottom was dropping out of radio."
He declared he had no regrets over the secession from Hope, he gained a chance to try something different. But Jerry admitted the working conditions were ideal. He arrived two hours before the show and sometimes didn't go over the show until an hour before the broadcast. For reading about five gags he was paid $1,750 per week!

And finally Let’s stop in 1961. Colonna had pretty well given up on TV and settled in at casino resorts.

Jerry Colonna, Masterful Madcap of Radio and Movies, Has Night Club Act
By JANET FERRIS
STATELINE, May 7 (AP) — Almost two decades since the Road to Rio and the Road to Singapore, comedian Jerry Colonna, 56, now is hitting tho road to Reno, Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas.
His gay nineties mustache as black and bristling as ever, the whites of his great Barney Google eyes prominent against his dark-skinned face. Colonna now plays Nevada night clubs with his group of seven musicians.
Colonna arranges and writes all the music, including his satire on popular songs. His group puts on four 45-minute shows five nights a week, 46 weeks a year. After working almost until dawn, Jerry gets up early enough in the afternoon to take a sunbath to preserve his tan.
"We sometimes ad lib our way out of routines," he said in an interview, "Not out of boredom but from trying to see if we can top ourselves."
How can anyone be funny 46 weeks of the year?
"When the lights go on and the curtain goes up, the old firehorse in me comes out," he explained.
In World War II days, "The Professor" was called one of the leading experts on doubletalk. He still uses these famed patter routines.
"I like to do the pattern piece phonetically," he explained. "Mine is the iambic pentameter type. I like to watch the expressions on their faces. I like to do it so they're sitting up on their chairs trying to grasp it."
How does playing against the rattle of dice and clanking slot machines of the gambling casinos compare with playing in a quiet studio to radio end television audiences?
"This is a lot more confining and a lot harder than radio," he acknowledged.
"On radio, we had time to rehearse. We also had a preview of each show to check it out for the big laughs, so we knew what we were doing. On the other hand in TV, there was never enough time to rehearse.
"People who come to a radio or a TV show come to be entertained," he said. "These night club people aren't a captive audience. They may stay through three shows, in which case you have to keep putting in fresh material. Or they can walk out in the middle of an act."
Entertainment seems to run in Colonna's family. One of his brothers had a comedy quartet in vaudeville.
"I didn't lean toward that side of the stage then," he said. "I was more interested in trombone and jazz."
Colonna got on the Fred Allen show when he was playing trombone with the Columbia Symphony orchestra. At CBS he did Dixieland mornings, dance music afternoons and symphony in the evenings.
"Radio was mostly sustaining then. There were hardly any commercials so we really worked, 15 hours a day."
His big comedy break came when the woman playing Mrs. Nusbaum, the gossip of Allen's Alley, told her boss: "Did you see that man with the mustache. He's an opera singer."
Colonna's closest contact with opera had been studying trombone with the first trombonist of tho Metropolitan Opera company, but he was willing to try.
"I broke out with a long, searing note, Fred went down on the floor. He said: "We're going to use this on our show next week."
In the ensuing performance, Colonna tried to sell Fred Allen on doing a concert.
When the roads opened up—a long connection with Bob Hope, motion pictures, radio, television and Nevada.
The roads haven't all been strewn with daffodils, but Colonna obviously has enjoyed traveling them. Married for 30 years, his wife, Florence, has traveled with him and set up housekeeping "wherever we are."

The first time I saw Colonna was on McHale’s Navy in 1965. I thought he was a character invented for the episode; I hadn’t heard the old Hope shows yet. Colonna had a stroke in 1966, but had recovered to appear on a Christmas special with Hope. He made a few more TV appearances, either with Hope or saluting his old boss. He had a heart attack in 1979 and Hope was at his bedside the following year when he had heart troubles. Bing Crosby’s former Road partner delivered his eulogy when Colonna died in 1986 at the age of 82. Referring to their dozen-plus tours of military bases, Hope said “Jerry would pop out of the audience wearing a uniform and I’d ask him, ‘What were you before you joined the Army?’ And he’d answer, ‘Happy.’ Well, I have a feeling that St. Peter's question might be, ‘What were you in life?’ And Jerry would have the same answer—‘Happy.’

Find an old Bob Hope show from the early ‘40s and listen to the crazy antics of Professor Colonna. You’ll be happy, too.