Jimmy Durante was loved because he came across as a sincere guy, who rose from poverty through hard work to become someone. People love that kind of story. Durante loved his audiences, so his audiences pulled for him.
A while ago, we posted the first of a three-part series from United Press International on Durante. Here’s the second part which goes into his early years. It appeared in papers in November and December 1959. Part three will be posted later.
The Remarkable Schnozzola
Clayton Joins Durante's Stage Team and a Great Star is Born
By Vernon Scott
HOLLYWOOD (UPI)—What would you do if you became the parent of a baby that looked like Jimmy Durante?
That's what happened to Barthelmeo Durante, a barber, and his Italian-born wife, Rosea Milliao Durante, back in February 1893. Even to these kindly people Jimmy's appearance came as something of a shock. His gargantuan nose was as proportionately striking then as it is today.
But the outsized proboscis came in handy when Jimmy was an odd-looking little urchin selling papers in New York. People became customers for laughs, unwittingly shaping the boy's future as a comedian.
“I'm peddling papers along the streets, passing the jernts and peeping under the swinging doors," Jimmy recalled. "I'm thinkin’ the swellest job in the world is the guy banging da piano in a saloon. I wants to be him."
Pianist at 16
After a couple of years of lessons the Schnozz' dream came true. At 16 he was punishing the 88 in a third-rate Coney Island gin mill glitteringly emblazoned "Diamond Tony's."
Jimmy moved on to another joint, a cut above Diamond Tony's in New York's Chinatown. This one was called the Chatham Club. It was during this stage of his life that he fell in love with a girl he identifies only as Gladie. The nose had been tweaked by cupid and was all for marching to the altar. Gladie, however, jilted the funny-looking little piano player for a guy with a reasonable nose. Durante was heartbroken.
He remained a bachelor, hobnobbing with the Manhattan hoods of the era, and becoming increasingly popular as a ragtime pianist.
Then in 1918 he met Maud Jeanne Olson, a Midwestern girl who wandered into the club Alamo in Harlem where Jimmy was working with a five-piece combo. They were married in June, 1921.
Joins Jackson
By this time the Schnozz had joined forces with Eddie Jackson. They became a successful team in the smoke-shrouded saloons. It wasn't until 1924 that Lou Clayton, the man who exerted the most influence on Jimmy, joined the act to make it one of the most famous of the roaring '20's.
The partners opened the Club Durante, and shrewd businessman Clayton ran the team. Jimmy was devoted to Clayton, and still is.
"I loved that man," Jimmy said. "He was the finest, most honest guy I ever knew. He made me a star—that's what he did."
Vaudeville paged the trio during the late '20's and early '30's and all three partners prospered, blowing their earnings on high living and gambling. In 1932 Jimmy bucketed off to Hollywood to star in the movies with Clayton acting as business manager and Jackson stringing along for laughs. But the pattern was broken. Jimmy stood alone as the star.
The Great Day
"Yeah, them were the great days," Durante recalled. "There was something doing every minute."
But the carefree prosperity palled. Jimmy's pictures began to slow down at the box office, and by the early '40's work wasn't easy to find. The partners split up.
Jeanne died in 1943, and Jimmy still visits her grave. Clayton, after a long, painful illness, passed away in 1950. Until his death, Clayton's doctor and hospital bills were picked up by little Mr. Malaprop. Whenever his old friends died Jimmy paid for the funerals.
When the movie rug was pulled out from under him, Jimmy went to work on radio and returned to night clubs, making ends meet and conquering new fields.
"But I never changed my act, and Eddie Jackson came back with me," he said. "Audiences would be disappointed in me if I didn't sing all the old tunes, like 'Inka Dinka Do.'
Same Songs
"I been doin' some of them songs 20-25 years. It's all a part of the Durante tempo—‘I know I Can Do Without Broadway, But Can Broadway Do Without Me?’ and 'Have You Ever Had the Feeling that You Wanted to Go. And Still Had the Feeling That You Wanted to Stay?'
"They is ageless on accounta the tempo. They ain't got lyrics in 'em like ‘Wait 'Till the Sun Shines Nelly.’"
Jimmy's butchered lingo is not strictly an act. He never went beyond the seventh grade. But in typical Durante secrecy, he refuses to say how much of his mangled syntax is purposeful. When asked, he merely gets a twinkle in his eye.
"It's mortifyin’ sometimes to have people laugh at the way I talk," he grinned. But it's also satisfying. However them are the conditions that prevail."
Another Durante secret is his famed signoff line, "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, Wherever You are!”
Jimmy won't tell anyone the meaning of his mysterious, but deadly serious adieu. The two best guesses are that Mrs. Calabash was an affectionate nickname either for his wife or for Clayton. But no amount of wheedling will extract a straight answer.
"I ain't talkin’ about it,” Jimmy says flatly. "It's a very special thing to me, with a very special meanin’. Maybe some people have guessed the meaning of it. But they'll never hear it from my lips." (Next: A day with the Schnozz).
Wednesday, 8 September 2021
Tuesday, 7 September 2021
Throwing the Bull in the Silent Film Days
Terrible Tom from Toronto takes advantage of a beat-up old steer in a bullfight with a $10,000 prize—but the sorry-looking animal unexpectedly gets vicious when the cat tosses him into a cactus.

A tail take.
Swirls substitute for fight action. When the swirls end, Tom is vanquished. The bull bows to the crowd.




This is from Alice the Toreador, a 1925 Disney silent short. Alice does a bull-by-the-tail twirl like Popeye in Throwing the Bull, some Terrytoons character in 1935 in The Bull Fight and Droopy in Señor Droopy. Judo Jack did the same circular mid-air spin with Mr. Jinks in a 1958 Pixie and Dixie cartoon. In this case, the crowd yells “FAKE” when it’s revealed the bull she defeated was really Julius the cat wearing a cow-skin. A nice twist ending. Cheaters never prosper, Alice!


A tail take.

Swirls substitute for fight action. When the swirls end, Tom is vanquished. The bull bows to the crowd.





This is from Alice the Toreador, a 1925 Disney silent short. Alice does a bull-by-the-tail twirl like Popeye in Throwing the Bull, some Terrytoons character in 1935 in The Bull Fight and Droopy in Señor Droopy. Judo Jack did the same circular mid-air spin with Mr. Jinks in a 1958 Pixie and Dixie cartoon. In this case, the crowd yells “FAKE” when it’s revealed the bull she defeated was really Julius the cat wearing a cow-skin. A nice twist ending. Cheaters never prosper, Alice!
Labels:
Walt Disney
Monday, 6 September 2021
Pull on a Bull
Daffy discovers he’s pulling on a bull, not a sickly calf, in Porky’s Last Stand, an early 1940 release from the Bob Clampett unit. Some examples of expressions he’s given.


These are consecutive frames.


Izzy Ellis received the animation credit in this short, with Warren Foster coming up with a weak ending. Backgrounds by Dick Thomas.
As you can see from this Hollywood Reporter story on the right, Warners was releasing pairs of shorts every week. Three cartoons in two months was a pretty big workload for the Clampett unit, and may be one of the reasons his black-and-white cartoons seemed watered down in 1940-41.



These are consecutive frames.




As you can see from this Hollywood Reporter story on the right, Warners was releasing pairs of shorts every week. Three cartoons in two months was a pretty big workload for the Clampett unit, and may be one of the reasons his black-and-white cartoons seemed watered down in 1940-41.
Labels:
Bob Clampett,
Warner Bros.
Sunday, 5 September 2021
The Perspiring Palm
To radio listeners in 1932, Jack Benny was a rising comedian who made fun of his sponsor on the air. Behind the scenes, things were a little more tumultuous.
Canada Dry wasn’t happy with Benny’s show, which debuted May 2nd. It pulled the programme off NBC and moved it onto CBS at the end of October. Benny lost his bandleader and singers as well as his announcer as they were bound by contract to remain at 711 Fifth Avenue. More significantly, Canada Dry saddled Phil Baker’s former stooge, Sid Silvers, on the show as a writer.
Silvers started coming up with a storyline that included more and more of him. That would mean less of Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone. Benny wasn’t happy, Livingstone wasn’t happy and original writer Harry Conn wasn’t happy. The three of them forced a showdown. Silvers was out before year-end. Canada Dry soon decided the Benny show was a huge headache and pulled it off the air entirely. The last Canada Dry show was January 26, 1933.
(Evidently there were no hard feelings. Silvers stooged for Benny in the MGM feature Broadway Melody of 1936, co-written by Conn).
Jack had become popular enough on the old Stromberg-Carlson that Radio Guide profiled him in its October 1, 1932 issue. The show hadn’t moved to CBS yet; that came at the end of the month.
I believe the “manager” being quoted is Harry Baldwin, who appeared on Benny’s show until his induction in World War Two.
Meet the Artist
Jack Benny
BY LEE RONELL
WE sat and talked and watched many busy people scurrying around that thirteenth floor of the National Broadcasting Studios.
Or rather I sat and talked and watched Jack Benny did nothing but say "Hello, Pal" . . . "Howre yah, Westerner?" Well, well, well, if it isn't Ned, you old so and so." Because everybody on that thirteenth floor knows
Jack Benny. The Canada Dry Orchestra members all have admiring smiles for Mr. Benny. The receptionist has a great big grin for him. And everybody else has many hellos." In fact, every time he really got going on what promised to be an interesting statement about something or a revealing fact about himself . . . another person had shouted “hello” . . . and ankled over to see what Mr. Benny was doing at the moment.
Considering that the Canada Dry rehearsal had to start rehearsing in just a very few minutes. I thought it a bit inconsiderate of Mr. Benny to have so many friends, and inconsiderate of him to greet them so effusively. But that's Jack Benny, folks. Just a great big "hello" man. Cordial, beaming, unexcitable, very nonchalant. Wouldn't dream of snubbing anybody. Not the least bit high hat.
You'd hardly know Jack Benny off the air. I begged him to say something funny. He groaned. And his manager . . . only one of the various "stooges" that was hanging around, intercepted with, "He can't say anything funny. Never does." And Mr. Benny said, "If even my manager says I'm not funny, I guess I'm not."
Most of his ideas for his continuity come to him on the golf course, he confided to me. Just as he gets his stance all perfect and his eye on the ball ... he gets a thought. That's why his golf is so bad. But he loves it. He loves golf and his wife. They've been married for six years ... I mean Benny and his wife. And still just as delirious. No scandal mongers have anything to do with the Benny's. They realize it's just unnecessary eye-strain . . . peeping through the Benny keyhole on Central Park West.
Mrs. Benny is known professionally by any one of a dozen names on the stage and air . . . and has recently put in some work for Jack's program. "She only appears to help me out," says Jack. "In fact she never had any connection with the stage before she met me. She married me and part of the marriage vows said something about being a ‘help-mate’ so she got included in my work. That's what you call utilizing a wife."
Jack Benny started trouping years ago.
Started off from his home town, Chicago, Illinois, and traveled around the various vaudeville circuits in these United States. Several seasons with the Shuberts and Earl Carroll on Broadway. Several more seasons making Hollywood pictures for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ... the biggest of which was "The Hollywood Revue." Some more time spent making "shorts" for Paramount and then back to New York to be master of ceremonies at the Capitol and other large playhouses on Broadway.
Canada Dry was Jack's first try before the mike ... and it got him pretty panicky at first.
“The second time I was on the air I dropped one page from my continuity script without realizing it. When I came to that page, I stopped . . . dumb. I couldn't talk. I couldn't look around. I thought nine hours had passed and the end of the world had come. Ethel Shutta, standing next to me, discovered my plight and thrust the missing page into my perspiring palm. Nothing like that catastrophe could happen on the stage. You could bluff it out. But not over the air."
Jack's got no ambition. I mean he doesn't care about being president or anything pretentious like that. He wants to keep going on pretty much as he is. Wants to stay on the air as long as he doesn't go stale, he started off being terribly funny and he says very seriously that it's up to him to keep the pace. "You never compete against others on the air," says Jack. "You compete against yourself. It makes no difference if you're better than somebody else. You've got to be as good as you are at your best. If you start off with a bang . . . you've got to keep it up or you flop. Listening to others on the air doesn't mean a thing. What they're doing doesn't affect me directly. It's what I'm doing that makes the difference."
"Canada Dry" a page sang out.
“That’s me," said Mr. Benny. "Say, I forgot to tell you what I dislike. I dislike interviews. Not good at them at all. You should talk to the wife. She can tell you things about me that she never thought of before. Why don't you get in touch with her?"
For his fans, Jack never got stale. He stayed on the air, albeit reduced to occasional specials, until his death in 1974. Despite any “dislike,” he kept doing interviews until then, too.
Canada Dry wasn’t happy with Benny’s show, which debuted May 2nd. It pulled the programme off NBC and moved it onto CBS at the end of October. Benny lost his bandleader and singers as well as his announcer as they were bound by contract to remain at 711 Fifth Avenue. More significantly, Canada Dry saddled Phil Baker’s former stooge, Sid Silvers, on the show as a writer.
Silvers started coming up with a storyline that included more and more of him. That would mean less of Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone. Benny wasn’t happy, Livingstone wasn’t happy and original writer Harry Conn wasn’t happy. The three of them forced a showdown. Silvers was out before year-end. Canada Dry soon decided the Benny show was a huge headache and pulled it off the air entirely. The last Canada Dry show was January 26, 1933.
(Evidently there were no hard feelings. Silvers stooged for Benny in the MGM feature Broadway Melody of 1936, co-written by Conn).
Jack had become popular enough on the old Stromberg-Carlson that Radio Guide profiled him in its October 1, 1932 issue. The show hadn’t moved to CBS yet; that came at the end of the month.
I believe the “manager” being quoted is Harry Baldwin, who appeared on Benny’s show until his induction in World War Two.
Meet the Artist
Jack Benny
BY LEE RONELL
WE sat and talked and watched many busy people scurrying around that thirteenth floor of the National Broadcasting Studios.
Or rather I sat and talked and watched Jack Benny did nothing but say "Hello, Pal" . . . "Howre yah, Westerner?" Well, well, well, if it isn't Ned, you old so and so." Because everybody on that thirteenth floor knows
Jack Benny. The Canada Dry Orchestra members all have admiring smiles for Mr. Benny. The receptionist has a great big grin for him. And everybody else has many hellos." In fact, every time he really got going on what promised to be an interesting statement about something or a revealing fact about himself . . . another person had shouted “hello” . . . and ankled over to see what Mr. Benny was doing at the moment.
Considering that the Canada Dry rehearsal had to start rehearsing in just a very few minutes. I thought it a bit inconsiderate of Mr. Benny to have so many friends, and inconsiderate of him to greet them so effusively. But that's Jack Benny, folks. Just a great big "hello" man. Cordial, beaming, unexcitable, very nonchalant. Wouldn't dream of snubbing anybody. Not the least bit high hat.
You'd hardly know Jack Benny off the air. I begged him to say something funny. He groaned. And his manager . . . only one of the various "stooges" that was hanging around, intercepted with, "He can't say anything funny. Never does." And Mr. Benny said, "If even my manager says I'm not funny, I guess I'm not."
Most of his ideas for his continuity come to him on the golf course, he confided to me. Just as he gets his stance all perfect and his eye on the ball ... he gets a thought. That's why his golf is so bad. But he loves it. He loves golf and his wife. They've been married for six years ... I mean Benny and his wife. And still just as delirious. No scandal mongers have anything to do with the Benny's. They realize it's just unnecessary eye-strain . . . peeping through the Benny keyhole on Central Park West.
Mrs. Benny is known professionally by any one of a dozen names on the stage and air . . . and has recently put in some work for Jack's program. "She only appears to help me out," says Jack. "In fact she never had any connection with the stage before she met me. She married me and part of the marriage vows said something about being a ‘help-mate’ so she got included in my work. That's what you call utilizing a wife."
Jack Benny started trouping years ago.
Started off from his home town, Chicago, Illinois, and traveled around the various vaudeville circuits in these United States. Several seasons with the Shuberts and Earl Carroll on Broadway. Several more seasons making Hollywood pictures for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ... the biggest of which was "The Hollywood Revue." Some more time spent making "shorts" for Paramount and then back to New York to be master of ceremonies at the Capitol and other large playhouses on Broadway.
Canada Dry was Jack's first try before the mike ... and it got him pretty panicky at first.
“The second time I was on the air I dropped one page from my continuity script without realizing it. When I came to that page, I stopped . . . dumb. I couldn't talk. I couldn't look around. I thought nine hours had passed and the end of the world had come. Ethel Shutta, standing next to me, discovered my plight and thrust the missing page into my perspiring palm. Nothing like that catastrophe could happen on the stage. You could bluff it out. But not over the air."
Jack's got no ambition. I mean he doesn't care about being president or anything pretentious like that. He wants to keep going on pretty much as he is. Wants to stay on the air as long as he doesn't go stale, he started off being terribly funny and he says very seriously that it's up to him to keep the pace. "You never compete against others on the air," says Jack. "You compete against yourself. It makes no difference if you're better than somebody else. You've got to be as good as you are at your best. If you start off with a bang . . . you've got to keep it up or you flop. Listening to others on the air doesn't mean a thing. What they're doing doesn't affect me directly. It's what I'm doing that makes the difference."
"Canada Dry" a page sang out.
“That’s me," said Mr. Benny. "Say, I forgot to tell you what I dislike. I dislike interviews. Not good at them at all. You should talk to the wife. She can tell you things about me that she never thought of before. Why don't you get in touch with her?"
For his fans, Jack never got stale. He stayed on the air, albeit reduced to occasional specials, until his death in 1974. Despite any “dislike,” he kept doing interviews until then, too.
Labels:
Jack Benny
Saturday, 4 September 2021
Afraid Not, Woody
Cartoon woodpeckers don’t usually milk cows, and there’s a reason.
The censor says they can’t.
Walter Lantz ran into problems with censors in the ‘40s when he was told his “Miss X” (who appeared in two cartoons directed by Shamus Culhane) was too sexy, so he removed her from the screen. But he also had to deal with restrictions on his biggest star, Woody Woodpecker.
Night and Day magazine of November 1948 published a two-page spread with some very attractive drawings of Woody indulging in some theatrical no-nos. It’s all ultra-tame stuff today, and probably was then, too. They were accompanied by the text below.
THOU SHALT NOT MR. WOODPECKER
ANIMATED CHARACTERS HAVE RIGID CODE, GET EDUCATORS ELUSIVE OKAY.
BACK in November 1940, Walter Lantz created an aggressive bird-like character who was to match popularity strides with Disney’s fabulous Donald. In 1948 the “Woody Woodpecker Song” broke all kinds of records as did parents who wouldn’t care if they heard the ditty again. However, Woody himself and Mr. Lantz were grateful; and the same parents, who were shy by a few bars of becoming raving things, are all behind the Woodpecker who has brought back to movie cartoons the originality and imagination once so prevalent, recently so scarce.
“Every breed to its own code,” advised an insalubrious, simple censor. The movie industry (Hollywood division), is composed of many breeds. It just happens that the humans are in the majority; so their language is spoken, and they rule the roost. Not a self-trusting breed, they devised a code to limit their own promiscuous nature. The inanimates, if they were only capable of thinking and speaking for themselves, would surely have done everything they could to preserve their dignity by protesting to the last that censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, was a ridiculous, distasteful thing. In our opinion, Woody and other animated characters are capable of producing, day in and day out, decent, realistic, or fantastic comedies and tragedies without having to submit their products for an okay to anyone.
We hope that someday soon young children will not be prevented by censorship from learning that milk does not grow in bottles.
The censor says they can’t.
Walter Lantz ran into problems with censors in the ‘40s when he was told his “Miss X” (who appeared in two cartoons directed by Shamus Culhane) was too sexy, so he removed her from the screen. But he also had to deal with restrictions on his biggest star, Woody Woodpecker.
Night and Day magazine of November 1948 published a two-page spread with some very attractive drawings of Woody indulging in some theatrical no-nos. It’s all ultra-tame stuff today, and probably was then, too. They were accompanied by the text below.
THOU SHALT NOT MR. WOODPECKER
ANIMATED CHARACTERS HAVE RIGID CODE, GET EDUCATORS ELUSIVE OKAY.
BACK in November 1940, Walter Lantz created an aggressive bird-like character who was to match popularity strides with Disney’s fabulous Donald. In 1948 the “Woody Woodpecker Song” broke all kinds of records as did parents who wouldn’t care if they heard the ditty again. However, Woody himself and Mr. Lantz were grateful; and the same parents, who were shy by a few bars of becoming raving things, are all behind the Woodpecker who has brought back to movie cartoons the originality and imagination once so prevalent, recently so scarce.
“Every breed to its own code,” advised an insalubrious, simple censor. The movie industry (Hollywood division), is composed of many breeds. It just happens that the humans are in the majority; so their language is spoken, and they rule the roost. Not a self-trusting breed, they devised a code to limit their own promiscuous nature. The inanimates, if they were only capable of thinking and speaking for themselves, would surely have done everything they could to preserve their dignity by protesting to the last that censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, was a ridiculous, distasteful thing. In our opinion, Woody and other animated characters are capable of producing, day in and day out, decent, realistic, or fantastic comedies and tragedies without having to submit their products for an okay to anyone.
We hope that someday soon young children will not be prevented by censorship from learning that milk does not grow in bottles.
Labels:
Walter Lantz
Friday, 3 September 2021
The Sound of Distant Laughter
One gag flows into another in Tex Avery’s Rock-a-Bye Bear.
You know how this works. A character tries to force a second character to make noise to bother a third character. The second character runs off somewhere to make the noise so the third character doesn’t hear it. Little Dog, Spike, Bear are the three characters here.
No sooner has the little dog captured Spike in an extension table and burned his tongue with a firecracker, he tickles Spike.



These are consecutive frames.

Back to the house and the next gag.

Rich Hogan and Heck Allen assisted with gags; Hogan left animation during production. Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Mike Lah are the animators. This was the last cartoon Avery did until he returned to the studio after a year in July 1951. MGM was so far ahead in production, this short was released in July 1952.
You know how this works. A character tries to force a second character to make noise to bother a third character. The second character runs off somewhere to make the noise so the third character doesn’t hear it. Little Dog, Spike, Bear are the three characters here.
No sooner has the little dog captured Spike in an extension table and burned his tongue with a firecracker, he tickles Spike.




These are consecutive frames.


Back to the house and the next gag.


Rich Hogan and Heck Allen assisted with gags; Hogan left animation during production. Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and Mike Lah are the animators. This was the last cartoon Avery did until he returned to the studio after a year in July 1951. MGM was so far ahead in production, this short was released in July 1952.
Thursday, 2 September 2021
Miss Cud to the Rescue
Friz Freleng mined a bit of personality out of Miss Cud (played by Elvia Allman) in I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935).
Little Kitty (played by Berneice Hansell) is in front of the class doing a recitation, forgetting the words to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She gets stuck on “lamb” and looks off-stage.

Miss Cud is in a panic (Friz loved those sweat drops; his unit was still animating them in the 1950s). She mouths the word “lamb,” then quickly pulls out a drawing of one she conveniently happens to have.


That triggers it. Little Kitty is happy now. Oh, but she gets stuck on the second line, “Its fleece was white as.....”

After a quick “I wanna strangle her” expression, Miss Cud pulls out a box of cereal and gently tosses some golden flakes of corn in the air.

Miss Kitty responds with what she sees: “Corn flakes!” Then realises she screwed up.

She finally gets so nervous, twisting her dress and pacing back and forth, she runs out of the school, never to be seen again (well, until the next cartoon).

I still like the “corn flakes” gag, no matter how hokey it is. It is perfectly logical. Kitty saw a lamb and describes it. She sees corn flakes and describes them. Friz may have been prescient, though. Cereal companies and cartoons became very connected when television animation took off more than 20 years later.
Ham Hamilton and Jack King, normally a director, are the credited animators.
Little Kitty (played by Berneice Hansell) is in front of the class doing a recitation, forgetting the words to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She gets stuck on “lamb” and looks off-stage.


Miss Cud is in a panic (Friz loved those sweat drops; his unit was still animating them in the 1950s). She mouths the word “lamb,” then quickly pulls out a drawing of one she conveniently happens to have.



That triggers it. Little Kitty is happy now. Oh, but she gets stuck on the second line, “Its fleece was white as.....”


After a quick “I wanna strangle her” expression, Miss Cud pulls out a box of cereal and gently tosses some golden flakes of corn in the air.


Miss Kitty responds with what she sees: “Corn flakes!” Then realises she screwed up.


She finally gets so nervous, twisting her dress and pacing back and forth, she runs out of the school, never to be seen again (well, until the next cartoon).


I still like the “corn flakes” gag, no matter how hokey it is. It is perfectly logical. Kitty saw a lamb and describes it. She sees corn flakes and describes them. Friz may have been prescient, though. Cereal companies and cartoons became very connected when television animation took off more than 20 years later.
Ham Hamilton and Jack King, normally a director, are the credited animators.
Labels:
Friz Freleng,
Warner Bros.
Wednesday, 1 September 2021
The Happy Professor

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.
• • •
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?)
• • •
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.

"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."

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