Just a Quick Drink

There are scenes with very quick movement in The Mouse Comes to Dinner, released by MGM in May 1945.

In this one, Tom gulps down a glass of champagne. Director Bill Hanna times the drawings so the whole bit takes just over half a second (11 frames).

The second and third drawings are the same, but the camera (by Jack Stevens?) trucks in just slightly in the third frame.

Swinging the arm up takes up two frames, as does the next drawing. The remaining drawings take up only one frame apiece.



You’ll notice when Tom first raises the glass, there’s nothing in it. Nobody would catch that watching the cartoon and it saves some painting.

I suspect a few years earlier, Hanna would have had Tom daintily sip the champagne, with Tom in various poses like in a Rudy Ising cartoon. The quicker way is the funnier way.

Ray Patterson, Ken Muse, Irv Spence and Pete Burness are the credited animators. Harvey Eisenberg (uncredited) would have drawn the layouts.

What'll You Do, Robert Q.?

The world got way too much of Robert Q. Lewis.

At least, Lewis thought people thought so.

Lewis seemed to be everywhere in the 1950s. He had a couple of shows, he filled in for Arthur Godfrey, he made appearances on panels of game shows. Then it all dried up.

1960 saw Robert Q. touring the U.S. in “The Gazebo.” And complaining to J. Don Schlaerth of the Buffalo Evening News. This is part of a column published Aug. 24, 1960.

COMEDIAN Robert Q. Lewis admitted today that he is a victim of a television malady known as “overexposure.”
The star of the summer stock production, "The Gazebo,”' a comedy-mystery playing at the Garden Center Theater in Vineland, Ont., visited Bill and Mildred Miller on their WHEN-TV telecast this afternoon and stopped long enough to discuss his case.
"There are dozens of people in show business who are suffering from too much exposure," explained the candid entertainer, "and I'm one of those finding it tough going. Arthur Godfrey has suffered from it and so has Jack Paar. I think Steve Allen will have some difficulty this season."
Lewis stated that his TV outlook is "chilly" at the moment "because show producers and advertising agencies seem to feel that the public is tired of me."
• • •
LEWIS RECALLED that he was on both network radio and television steadily from 1946 to 1959. "At one time I had shows five days a week and once in the evening. It got to the point," he said, "where the average housewife saw more of me than she did of her husband."
Stating that he was far from starving, Lewis said the current period in his career gives him tme to concentrate on his art collection and enjoy summer stock.
"I plan to guest on a number or TV panel shows this season when the regular panel members vacation," he went on, "but I have to wait to be called."
• • •
IN THE MEANTIME, he said, there are plans for a TV series based on the Harold Lloyd movies. “We’re working on a shooting script and may be able to film the pilot in November. I’ll be working for a mythical Federal Bureau of Space."
The performer also said he would like to do a Broadway play soon. “It’s important when you're in the position that I'm in right now to watch your emotions. Some actors become very upset. You've got to plan and wait for your time to come around again. It usually does and then you’re better off than before."

Robert Q. was still complaining about “overexposure” more than 12 years later during a time he hadn’t been getting a lot of national exposure. He never seemed to accept the fact that everyone’s career goes up and down. Newcomers arrive and get attention. Old stars get shoved out along the way by the public. That’s how the entertainment business works.

In various interviews in 1960, he talked about buying a radio station on Long Island. Maybe he was going to move to Miami. The show about a Harold Lloyd-type character (with writer Howard Tichman) went nowhere. Instead, Lewis ended up on the West Coast at a radio station, starting Aug. 7, 1961. This wire service feature story was published on Aug. 19.

Robert Q. Moves West
By RICK DU BROW
HOLLYWOOD (UPI) — Robert Q. Lewis, accompanied by his white poodle and bolstered in morale by occasional glances at his Rolls-Royce, has come West to settle dawn as a Hollywood disc jockey.
"This is where the action is," said the bespectacled, nasal-voiced funnyman who once shared network radio and television eminence with Arthur Godfrey, Dave Garroway, Garry Moore and Jack Paar.
"This is Mr. Lewis' first Hollywood interview," said his press agent.
"And you couldn't have picked a bigger star," said Robert Q.
Looking "Hollywood" to the core—with a deep tan, sun-glasses and a wide-striped dark sports shirt open at the neck Lewis sat on the terrace of an outdoor cafe and explained why he left New York:
• • •
"I NEEDED A job. Arthur Goldberg and I decided there was too much unemployment. No. Seriously, this station out here (KHJ) wanted to be No. 1—not that they aren't now. My gosh, how do you say this? Well, anyway, I'm here. It's a good deal. I wanted to be a disc jockey again. I like doing a job five days a week.
"I haven't had my own show for two years, and I don't have the actor's temperament of being able to relax. My kind of show—the informal, anything goes daytime thing—is in disrepute since filmed syndication took over, and it's affected all of us—Godfrey, Moore.
"All of us are radio babies. We gripe, but we're never happier than when we're on the air every day projecting our own self-idolized images. Paar says he's going to quit, and he may well do it—but be in pain missing the outlet every day.
“Moore got his night-time show but begged CBS to put him on radio 10 minutes a day. Godfrey went through cancer but kept his radio show.
"I was on the air since 1945, and my problem is overexposure. The average American housewife saw more of me than her husband."
• • •
ROBERT Q. confessed that some people considered his move from network to a local show something of a comedown.
"I suppose people along this Sunset Strip or on Madison Ave. might consider it so," he said, "but I don't. I'm looking forward to it. I think there'll be a rebirth of my kind of show. The TV set once was an altar in the living room. Now it's become a pennance box. Hmmm —that's not a bad line."
What has he done for the past two years?
"Primarily griped," he said. "I did summer stock, winter stock, spring stock. Believe me, I know now why they call it stock. I've been in just about every contemporary American comedy."
Lewis, whom bigwigs believe will wind up network from here, said,
“Sure, I’ll miss New York. I’m a native and lived within a radius of 20 blocks all my life. But I always wanted to live here. I'm a sun-worshipper. I bought a house within two days, got a housekeeper the third and wallpaper the fourth.
"Wait'll I give out freeway instructions on the air: ‘This is Robert Q. Lewis and as for you on the freeway—I don't know where the heck you are.’ Did you ever hear those cheerful disc jockeys in the morning? Not me. Who's cheerful in the morning?
• • •
"FRANKLY, I haven't the slightest idea what I'm going to do on the show. But you'll hear such names as Jimmy Stewart, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Of course, Bette Davis may turn out to be a stenographer, and Stewart a worker from Lockheed. But some days, it might be the real thing.
“Awhile back, I had an idea for a wonderful show. It would be called ‘Breakfast with a Bachelor,’ and it would start out with me saying, ‘Today our special guest is—what's your name, honey?’ For heaven's sake, don't print that!" Lewis got up from the table and headed for the parking lot.
"I really wanted a compact limousine, but no American manufacturer was making one," he said. "By the way, do you know anybody who wants to buy a $65,000 duplex in New York?"
An elderly couple recognized him and said, "Hello, Mr. Lewis." He returned the greeting and said: "I hired them from Central Casting."

The love affair with morning radio and the West Coast didn’t last too long. On Nov. 19, 1962, he was back at NBC New York, with Johnny Olson introducing him as the host of Play Your Hunch. He replaced Merv Griffin, who had accepted an offer from the network to host an afternoon talk/variety show. When that didn’t pan out, Merv was back on a game show again on Sept. 30, 1963 hosting Word For Word, which replaced Robert Q.’s show.

The two men crossed paths a number of times, starting when Merv was hired to sing on Lewis’ daytime TV show in the mid-1950s. Griffin ended up marrying Q.’s secretary. Though Robert Q. came across to viewers as somewhat sophisticated and glib, Merv bluntly stated (after Lewis’ death) he was crazy. Behind the scenes, Lewis would throw furniture and fits.

Mark Goodson continued to put Lewis into a fill-in host or guest panellist slot until the host’s job at Get the Message came open on Sept. 28, 1964. There was no overexposure on that show. It was cancelled on Christmas Day.

There was more stage work, then another West Coast radio gig (at KFI) in the ‘70s. By the 1980s his name in print was associated with others who had worked with him in the Golden Age of Television. Robert Q. passed away December 11, 1991 at 71.

Telescope Eyes

They were re-issued as “A Columbia Favorite.” Whose favourite, I’m not quite sure.

Dog, Cat and Canary must have been someone’s favourite, as it was nominated for an Oscar, losing in 1945 to the Tom and Jerry short Mouse Trouble.

There’s some good animation. In this scene, the cat’s eyes become telescopic, checking out the canary and the sleeping guard dog.



Then the rest of the cat’s head comes up to meet the eye pupils. These drawings are animated on twos.



The characters? Eh. Just another cat and bird and dog. They don’t really stand out, not like the Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry who were pretty expressive characters in the mid-‘40s. Despite that, the canary was turned into Flippy (at least according to Boxoffice Barometer of Nov. 17, 1945) and appeared in some forgettable cartoons. The Exhibitor of January 24, 1945 rated the cartoon “fair.”

Howard Swift directed this short, with animation credited to Volus Jones and Jim Armstrong, and the story to Grant Simmons.

The following year, Rippling Romance was Columbia’s Oscar nominee, losing again to Tom and Jerry. It was the final Screen Gems short up for an Academy Award. The studio gave the bird to the animation world and shut down.

Who's the Real Monster?

Tex Avery tried a split screen gag in 1939 in Thugs With Dirty Mugs, and did it again the following year in Cross Country Detours.

Narrator Lou Marcelle intones over a tympani roll the next scene is quite gruesome, so the screen will be split with one side for grown-ups and one side for children.



Grown-ups get a “hideous gila monster” snarling and growling. Children get a recitation.

Avery loves violating split screen gags, and he doesn’t disappoint us here.



Avery uses a split-screen again in A Bear’s Tale (1940), Tortoise Beats Hare and Aviation Vacation (both 1941). The “Mary Had a Little Lamb” recitation routine goes back to Harman-Ising’s Bosko in Person and Bosko's Mechanical Man (both 1933). Avery used it in Hamateur Night (1939) and again as late as 1954, when MGM released The Flea Circus.

Rich Hogan is the credited story man on this short, with Paul J. Smith getting the rotating animation credit and Johnny Johnsen getting no credit for backgrounds.

As Old as Aristophanes

Publicity departments churned out all kinds of material in the days of yore.

In radio, networks or agencies or producers would bash out copy and send them with photos to newspapers hoping to get some free ink.

I suspect that’s what happened in 1952 when the Ogden Standard-Examiner printed a life story of Jack Benny in a special TV edition on Nov. 12, 1952. The article was unbylined, so it likely didn’t come from a newspaper staff writer, and specifically mentions CBS TV stations, so it likely came from the network P.R. department. At the time, Benny's TV show aired on KSL-TV on Sundays at 5:30 p.m. Mountain.

As a biography, there are a few things you could quibble about when it comes to accuracy, but it’s a good summary. I find it remarkable that among Jack’s movie accomplishments there is no mention of To Be or Not to Be, arguably his finest picture, and one he was proud of. It should be noted “The Bee” programme of Fred Allen’s in December 1936 was not a take-off. Allen actually conducted an amateur show on the second half hour of his weekly broadcasts for several seasons. I half-expected a joke about Jack's age next to the mention of Aristophanes but we all know Aristophanes is ridiculous.

There was a nice caricature of Jack, his violin and Rochester that was printed with this article but I can’t fix the lousy scan to make it look decent.

He Started at Full Speed
Believe It or Not, Jack Benny Was a Child Prodigy on the Violin
Jack Benny, who for 18 years on radio had created solely through his voice one of the greatest of comedy characters, entered America's living rooms "in the flesh" when he made his debut on the CBS Television Network Oct. 28, 1950.
And the millions of delighted fans who saw him on television for the first time found he fitted exactly the penny-pinching, frustrated, lovable laughmaker they had so vividly imagined him to be.
Jack Benny made four broadcasts from New York during the 1950-51 season. He launched his second season Nov. 4, 1951, in a transcontinental broadcast originating from the CBS-TV outlet, KNXT, in Hollywood.
Benny was one of the first of the major comedians to make the changeover from vaudeville to radio, in 1932. Vaudeville was going out, bigtime radio coming in. Benny bumped into columnist Ed Sullivan one night in a Broadway restaurant. Sullivan asked him, that night in 1932, to guest on his radio program the following evening. "But I don't know anything about radio," Jack protested. "Nobody does," Sullivan replied.
Gave It A Whirl
Benny offered to give it a whirl, gratis, and on this first broadcast of his life introduced, himself with an immortal line: "This is Jack Benny talking. Now there will be a brief pause for everyone to say, 'Who cares?' " Millions did care, as Benny soon found out. The same year, 1932, he had a sponsor and a network program. He was a sensation from the start.
Benny on television, as on radio, is the central figure in what historians of comedy call the classic insult method, which goes back to Aristophanes.
His knack of building unknown personalities into stars in their own right is well known. Dennis Day, Eddie Anderson, who plays Rochester, and Phil Harris are notable examples.
Benny's sense of timing and spontaneity of delivery have been underscored by critics and fellow comics alike, qualities which contrast strangely with the dither he works himself into in preparing his scripts. He sweats out the lines which appear to flow effortlessly and merrily over the air. Although a battery of top gagsters whip together the raw material, Benny does the final editing, unifying and polishing.
To keep the lines fresh, he cuts rehearsals to the minimum. And during the broadcast he rarely ad libs, but stops the show and howls with unrestrained laughter when others put over an unscheduled nifty.
From Waukegan
Waukegan, Benny's home town, is a suburb of Chicago. His father, a haberdasher, insisted that his son take violin lessons at an early age, and he was considered a child prodigy on the fiddle in Waukegan. One of Jack's early triumphs was playing "The Bee," a short violin piece that has been the butt of Benny jokes on the air for a decade. "The Bee" sparked his famous radio feud with Fred Allen. A moppet in an Allen skit which was a take-off on amateur programs played the song and Fred commented afterward that it was Benny's old vaudeville specialty.
"Only eight and you already can play 'the Bee'," Allen joked. "Why Jack Benny ought to be ashamed of himself."
The next week Benny on his own show, indignantly declared he could produce four persons who would attest that he had played "The Bee" at the age of six. And the feud was on. "The Bee," by the way is not "Flight of the Bumble Bee," but a piece composed by a Franz Schubert —but not the Franz Schubert. Seems confusion is the word for Benny.
At 13, Jack was a fiddler in Waukegan's leading dance orchestra and also a regular of the Barrison Theater orchestra, a lone knickerbockered figure surrounded by grownups. Since his teachers recall him more vividly for his wisecracks, it wasn't surprising that Jack quit school before he was 17 to team up with a vaudeville pianist named Cora Salisbury.
Jack billed himself as Benny K. Benny and at $15 a week he toured Midwest theaters with his partner. He didn't tell jokes, but he managed to draw laughs by sawing away on his violin, with the little finger of the bow hand affectedly extended while his eyes followed its movement in mock curiosity.
Benny Joins Navy
Afterward, Jack joined another pianist named Lyman Woods, and their tours took them, at the outbreak of World War I, to London's famous Palladium. They broke up and Jack joined the Navy. In a Navy revue, he played the fiddle without much success, until one night he paused to make a few wisecracks.
The crowd roared, Jack Benny the comic was born and "The Bee"-playing violinist was no more. Thereafter, Jack was pencilled into the show as "Issy There, the Admiral's Disorderly," and for the duration he convulsed both the Navy and the public with his ingratiating patter.
Upon his discharge, Benny returned to vaudeville. To avoid confusion with another fiddling comic, Ben Bernie, he adopted the "Jack Benny" tag. As a topflight funnyman. Benny worked with the greats in the heyday of the two-a-day, and went on to further success in Earl Carroll and Shubert shows on Broadway.
His movie debut was as auspicious as his radio bow. A talent scout spotted him in a Los Angeles theater in 1929. Benny got the lead in “The Hollywood Revue,” clicked big, and has been starred in a number of pictures since, including "Charley's Aunt," "The Horn Blows at Midnight" and "George Washington Slept Here."
Benny and his wife, Mary Livingstone, have been stage and broadcasting partners for 20 years. She was Sadye Marks, a salesgirl in a Los Angeles department store when they were married in 1927. She recalls that he practically had to drag her on stage to make an actress out of her. But it was not long before she became an invaluable ingredient is the Benny fun formula.
The Bennys have a beautiful home in Beverly Hills, Calif., and their home life has been a happy one. Their daughter, Joan Naomi, adopted at the age of four months and now 17 years old, is the joy of their lives. As practically every Benny fan knows, Jack is the exact opposite in private life to the penurious, protesting character he plays on the air. He is notorious for his over-tipping. His genial manner and friendliness have made him one of the most popular figures in Hollywood.
Benny gets little time off to play, what with television schedule, weekly radio show and business interests, but when he has an hour or so to loaf he's usually out on the golf links.
Sponsor of the "Jack Benny Program" is American Tobacco Co.

First, a Cartoon From Our Sponsor

Animated commercials in the 1950s are loads of fun. They have great designs, good writing and excellent voice acting. And they provided jobs to animators who had worked on theatrical cartoons.

How many of the actual commercials still exist is anyone’s guess. But thanks to publications like Television Age, we can view frame grabs of a whole pile of them. The trade magazine came out twice monthly and for several years featured articles about animated spots on TV.

Below are some of the ones found in the May 2, 1960 edition.



We’ve talked about some of these companies before. Animation, Inc. was run by Earl Klein, ex-layout man for Chuck Jones. Playhouse Pictures was, more or less, Bill Melendez` baby at one time. Pantomime Pictures later made the Roger Ramjet cartoons. Ray Patin was a former Warners and Disney animator. In New York, Pelican Films’ big creative guy was Jack Zander, Elektra Films was operated by Abe Liss, an ex-UPA artist, while HFH was owned by Howard Henkin, Ronald Fritz and Dan Hunn. And the Albuquerque company was, in 1960, creatively run by Dan Bessie, an ex-assistant animator at MGM.

Television Age included news blurbs about commercial or animation production, usually mentioning executives. The May 2nd issue has line of note: “Stephen Muffatti, formerly with Transfilm, Inc., has been appointed director of commercials for Terrytoons, Inc.” Mufatti went back much further, employed at the Fleischer studio and directing Cubby Bear cartoons for Van Beuren.

Even more interesting are the following two items: “Format Films has added several new staffers to work on the Popeye series being animated for King Features. Hanna-Barbera Productions is in negotiation with CBS-TV for a 90-minute animated Huckleberry Hound spectacular.” How far Hanna-Barbera got on the Huck special is anyone's guess, but you have to wonder where the studio found the staff to work on it. The Flintstones was in production, and that would have taken up much of the studio's efforts. The Format staff members added are not mentioned, but the April 12, 1960 edition of the Hollywood Reporter said Harris Steinbrook, Doris Collins and Ruben Apodaca (assistant animators), Evelyn Sherwood and Jane Phillipi (checkers) and Boris Gorelick (background) had been hired to work under Jack Kinney.

It also mentioned awards by the Art Directors’ Club of New York, with a gold medal going to an animated spot for Instant Butter-Nut coffee produced by Stan Freberg and awards of distinctive merit to Alex Anderson and Fred Crippen for a cartoon commercial for Rival Dog Food Co., produced by Pantomime, and an Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp. spot by Saul Bass produced by Playhouse.

Here’s another strip of frames.



Since we’re passing along cartoon news from May 2, 1960, allow me to give you items from the pages of The Hollywood Reporter of that date:

Format Doing Nine Spots
Hebert Klynn, president of Format Films, has signed contracts to do a series of nine animated cartoon TV spots for the Reddi-Starch Co. Leo Salkin will direct the spots, and June Foray, Shepard Menkin and Paul Frees have been signed to record them.

Jay Ward Expands
Jay Ward Productions moves tomorrow to larger quarters at 8218 Sunset Blvd. Move is being made to accommodate a staff of 125 artists, who are preparing three new animated TV series.

Cartoon Strip For TV
New York.—Affiliated Television Productions has acquired rights to the cartoon strip “There Oughta Be a Law” from the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, syndicated in newspapers in over 180 markets. It will be made into a half-hour animated series for national sponsorship.

Among the Ward projects was Super Chicken, which finally became part of the George of the Jungle series toward the end of the decade. Format was still a year away from getting The Alvin Show on TV while the Oughta project was one of a number which was either never made or never sold.

Hare Splitter Smears

Smear in-betweens show up in three scenes of the Bugs Bunny cartoon Hare Splitter, directed by Friz Freleng.

In the first scene, Bugs and Casbah both rise up from their holes (on platforms) with flowers they each intend to give to Daisy Lou. Bugs notices Casbah’s bunch is bigger than his.



The rest of the scene contains fine expressions as the two rabbits go back into their holes to emerge with larger gifts, ending with the annoyed Bugs bringing up an anvil to drop on Casbah's head.

Bugs then spends a good deal of the cartoon pretending to be Daisy Lou to give the woiks to the dopey Casbah.

Bugs is on Daisy Lou's porch. He sees something.



There's a cut to Daisy Lou coming up the sidewalk. Bugs looks around then runs out of the scene.



Of course, Casbah thinks Daisy Lou is Bugs and she takes care of things (off-camera).

Virgil Ross, Gerry Chiniquy, Ken Champin and Manny Perez animated the cartoon, released in September 1948. This is the first Freleng cartoon with a solo story credit to Tedd Pierce after Mike Maltese moved to the Chuck Jones unit.

The music under the opening credits is Don’t Take Your Love From Me by Henry Nemo in a tempo a lot quicker than what you’d normally hear it sung in.

Magoo's Payoff

Pink and Blue Blues starts off with Mr. Magoo mistaking a fish bowl for a television and a fish for Esther Williams, and spends the remainder of the cartoon mistaking just about everything for something else.

Bill Scott weaves a robber, a child being baby-sat, a dog and a tube of toothpaste into the plot, so at the end, police show up to arrest a robber and praise Magoo for being “right on the job.”

Through it all, we get non-stop chatter from Jim Backus. It would impossible to make a silent Magoo cartoon.

In one gag, Magoo mistakes his cuckoo clock for a pay phone.



This sets up the final gag of the cartoon. Magoo has already mistaken a burglar for a police officer. At the end he mistakes a police box for the same officer.



The camera trucks in to show the cuckoo bird reacting to Magoo with a familiar sound. Then Scott adds a nice touch by having the 78 nickels Magoo has slipped into the clock pour out like a jackpot from a one-armed bandit.



To be honest, I was going to talk about another Magoo cartoon, but it had more of the same “almost-blind old guy mistakes stuff” and endless dialogue from Backus, all surrounded by flat backgrounds.

It must be me. Magoo was an incredible popular character, employed to sell light bulbs and beer. The commercials I generally like, and some of the Magoo theatricals I enjoy, but I just can’t get excited about others. And don’t get me started on the TV “Magloo” series after Hank Saperstein took over the studio.

This short was released in 1952. It was directed by Pete Burness, who maintains a good pace throughout, with designs by Ted Parmelee and credited animation by Rudy Larriva, Phil Monroe and Tom McDonald.

Laugh-In's Englishman

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In burst forth onto the scene at the start of 1968 and made stars of the regular cast members.

Well, almost all of them.

As a Toronto newspaper asked in 1983, whatever happened to Roddy Maude-Roxby?

Unlike other players on the show, it doesn’t appear he was interviewed in print at the time it rocketed in the ratings, and he was the only regular besides Larry “Hogan’s Heroes” Hovis who didn’t return for a second season (Eileen Brennan was supposedly a regular in the first season, but didn’t appear every week).

In 1969, Maude-Roxby was back on television in England. He was a performer in the six-episode London Weekend Television series The Complete and Utter History of Britain, written by Terry Jones and Michael Palin, soon to be of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Jones was quoted in “The Pythons” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003) he was very frustrated that Maude-Roxby would constantly ad-lib and never learn lines.

As well, Maude-Roxby was signed in May 1969 (according to Hollywood Citizen-News) to voice the villainous English butler in the Disney feature The Aristocats. It would appear much of the rest of his career was on the stage, which is where he came from (in New York, he appeared in a comedy directed by Mike Nichols) before joining the Laugh-In gang.

Maude-Roxby wasn’t only a comedian. One of Australia’s newspapers, The Age, of October 10, 1968 revealed:

Roddy has a connection with Melbourne and indeed with this newspaper dating back to 1947 when he came to Australia with his brother, Chris, who worked as a cadet journalist on “The Age.”
For a short period during the three years the brothers stayed in this country, Roddy drew a weekly cartoon strip—Bulgy the Frog—for “Junior Age” know in those days as “The Age” Junior Section.
He also appeared in a local children’s radio series. When the brothers returned to England, Roddy enrolled at the Royal College of Art.
Apart from his work in the theatre, in cabaret and on television, he has exhibited his paintings (described as abstract-cum-figurative) in London.

The closest thing to a biography about him I’ve found is in the Ottawa Journal of April 9, 1977. He was part of a four-man improv comedy group that was brought to Canada from England at the behest of the Ottawa Board of Education drama consultant. We’ve snipped out extraneous copy to focus on Maude-Roxby’s past.

Theatre Machine
Wheeling and dealing in free-form comedy
By Jean Southworth
Journal Arts Writer
When Roddy Maude-Roxby was studying at the Royal College of Art in London, England, in the late 1950s he found that his main interest lay in theatre. His imaginative work with the student drama group at the college led to a professional engagement in a West End revue, One to Another, and he has been involved in theatre ever since.
He now is active in a group called Theatre Machine which has developed a unique type of improvisational theatre. He and two other members of the group, Ben Benison and Richardson Morgan, arrived in Ottawa this week for a series of high school and university appearances. They will conclude their visit with a public performance in the University of Ottawa's Academic Hall next Saturday at 8.30 p.m. John Muirhead, the fourth member, was unable to make the trip because of commitments, in London. ...
Roddy Maude-Roxby was born in London but grew up in Somerset and attended Brambletye School in Devon. When he was in his early teens he produced two books containing stories and drawings for children. On leaving school he went to Australia with his two brothers. He got some acting experience there through working for a children's newspaper which sponsored a radio program. When he returned to England he did a period of national service and took up art studies.
He explained in an interview that there was a connection between the Royal College of Art and London's Royal Court Theatre, which had become primarily a "writers' theatre". When he staged Beckett's Endgame at the college, for instance, he was able to borrow the dustbins which had been used in the original Royal Court production of the play.
During the 1960s he took part in various plays at the theatre in Sloane Square. These included the original productions of N.F. Simpson's One-Way Pendulum and Joe Orton's Erpingham Camp, and a production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters in which Glenda Jackson, Marianne Faithful and Avril Elgar played the title roles. He said the Simpson play received unfavorable reviews when it opened in Brighton but it was a success at the Royal Court. ...
Some years ago Maude-Roxby performed in New York with The Establishment, a company based in the Soho section of London. He went on to Hollywood to appear in the Laugh-In TV series. He also spoke the part of the butler in the Walt Disney animated feature film The Aristocats.
During 1973-74 he played in Habeas Corpus, with Alec Guinness, at the Lyric Theatre in London's West End. He appeared in Relatively Speaking at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 1975 and returned there last fall to play Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady.

The Establishment appeared once on TV. A one-hour special, written by Peter Cook, aired on March 30, 1964, taped in New York and broadcast on WNEW-TV and at least two other stations in syndication. Maude-Roxby, Peter Bellwood, Francis Bethencourt, Carole Simpson and non-Brit Alexandra Berlin appeared in satirical sketches that targeted heterosexuality, which seems pretty daring for 1964. Kay Gardella of the Daily News said Maude-Roxby “was at his best portraying a confused cabinet minister called upon to explain why he was seen dressed in nothing but a Masonic apron waving a speckled trout over the heads of two kneeling persons. His description of an art film, ‘Adam and Eve,’ was for [far] more suited to the bistro environment than TV.” The New York Times reported an hour and 45 minutes was taped, and four-letter words were the first thing taken out to bring the revue to time.

Maude-Roxby had one more crack at a regular TV series in the U.S. Jay Sandrich directed him in a pilot for a proposed show based on the 1967 movie To Sir With Love (Hari Rhodes played the Sidney Poitier part from the movie, Maude-Roxby had the role of a French teacher). It was not picked up, but CBS aired the half-hour on April 19, 1974.

Laugh-In liked to have a Brit component every once in a while. Monte Landis appeared in the pilot but when it became a series, Maude-Roxby was brought in. Writer Jeremy Lloyd was part of the cast for a year, and Richard Dawson also appeared on the show. Then there was Judy Carne, the former co-star of Love on a Rooftop, who tired of the show and left after periodic appearances in the third season. Maude-Roxby moved on to other endeavours before that.