Notes on a Cowardly Lion (10 page)
Read Notes on a Cowardly Lion Online
Authors: John Lahr
| Interviewer : | What was the best teacher in burlesqueâthe other comedians, or the audience or what? |
| Lahr : | Observance. Observance. A capacity to pick it up and a capacity to edit yourself. You could learn to be an acrobat if you were strong enough; You could learn to take falls. Or if you wanted to be a comedy acrobat, you'd put on funny clothes and have gags, pull wigs up and down, which the audience would laugh at. |
Actors Talk About Acting
It is hard to imagine
the laugh
as an absolute value. However, it has been the one absolute in my father's life, the focus of his imagination. Laughter is more than a serious business; it is an obsession. “It's the hardest thing in the world to get a laugh, and the easiest thing to kill it,” he maintains. Burlesque was a good teacher not only because it offered Lahr a showcase in which to experiment with his audience and learn to build comic moments, but also because he learned to protect the laughs.
The Best Show in Town
(1917) opened with the mellifluous chorus belting out a call to fun and festival.
â¦The plot is a lot of rot.
What's the use I'd like to know
So long as there's girls
And comedy whirls
Who cares about the plot of the show.
The finale, in which Lahr sang with the girls, may not have had the eloquence of a Shakespearean epilogue, but the functions of the players and the stage had not changed.
There's been no rhyme or reason
In anything we did.
All we did was kid.
On stage, Lahr was the most frivolous of all, the loudest howler, the wildest acrobat, the merriest Merry Andrew. He worked hard on stage, trying out many different comedy gestures, eliminating the ones that did not get good laughs or which, in certain situations, killed a bigger one to come. He had already acquired, along with his distinctive delivery, a catch phrase. All the great comedians used some such phrase or action not only as a trademark but also as a psychological gimmick to elicit the audience's response at the right moment. Will Rogers lowered his head and twirled his lariat after he told a joke. George M. Cohan glanced sideways toward the boxes and pretended he was cleaning his molars. Lahr did a double take toward the audience after the punch line and then growled his “gnong, gnong, gnong.” The audience was led to the joke, cued to laugh, and then, with an effective comic phrase, the basic joke was expanded far beyond its original proportions.
As Lahr learned to lure his audience and wrench from his material every possible laugh, he also became aware of how every technique could be employed against him on stage. With four comedians in a
burlesque show, the competition was grueling. It was a struggle not only for the extra laughs, but also for the audience's attention, for personal pride, and sometimes even for private dislikes. In those first months, Hunter would purposely kill some of Lahr's laughs by making him seem the antagonist and flinching from him in mock fear. Lahr had to learn fast. “Never move on a joke. I can kill any joke by movement. It's disastrous.” It is the one stage tactic that infuriates him to this day. The audience must focus on the person telling the joke; the slightest movement shifts this concentration and the action loses its impact with the switch of interest.
Hunter liked to toss his head just as Lahr was delivering a laugh. He was not the only culprit; Lahr himself could fight ruthlessly for an audience's attention. If he had found a new faith in his comic delivery, he also had developed an occupational suspicion of other performers. “I've worked with very few men that I've ever had trouble with. I have a funny face, and whoever wants to make it a contest has two strikes against him.”
Women posed even more of a threat. Beatrice Lillie and Nancy Walker are the only two comediennes he admires. He claims that they “played theater.” “Play” has always been a key word for Lahr because, from the beginning, his comedy and success involved his ability to build scenes and situations rather than simply to tell jokes. Although no antifeminist, Lahr's attitudes toward the majority of comediennes is adamant, and always skeptical. “Beware of the woman who gets the first laugh.” He says this wryly and with a smile, but experience has left him no other judgment. A woman on stage brought with her an immediate sympathy and appeal. Even if she behaved badly, the slightest sarcasm from Lahr dampened the audience's sympathy toward him and shifted the delicate mechanism of the laughter.
He cites an example, a scene in
Two on the Aisle
that he knew was good material even though the audiences weren't laughing. The sensation never changed. It was not so much a feeling of frustration as a sense of panic. Had the plotting and playing been wasted? Was the joke worthless? Was he himself worthless? Couldn't he
make
them laugh?
During one performance he turned by chance to the woman playing the scene with him. She was tinkling a champagne glass just as he was about to deliver the punch line. He was livid; at the same time he knew he couldn't let the audience see his fury. He spat out his line, changing its rhythm, surprising the actress, who understood that she had been caught.
She blushed, and then, in her embarrassment, forgot her lines. “What do I do now, Bert; what do I do?” she whispered.
“You got yourself into this, babyânow get yourself out.”
He waited on stage without moving or saying a word until finally someone from the wings gave her the lines.
Sympathy was also the emotion he longed for off the stage. Lahr knew many of the tricks to create it on stage; but it has taken him fifty years to learn how to express his knowledge in words.
| Interviewer : | Is it harder to make people laugh than to make them cry? |
| Lahr : | Well, you're equipped for both. Let's put it this way, if you're equipped for both, they're both easy. But you will find that a comedianâa good comedianâhas to be a good actor. And the reason for a comedian being a good comedian, he creates sympathy. He immediately creates a warmth in his audience, so once you do that, and the audience roots for you, it's a very simple matter to make them cry. I think you laugh at a great comedian because you want to cry. Laughter is never too far from tears. |
| Interviewer : | What is your secret of getting sympathy from an audience? |
| Lahr : | I think it's a physical and chemical thing, the same as if you go to a party and somebody comes in a room and immediately attracts you. So a person comes out with a manner on stage that makes you say “Aah, he's a sweet guy”âdo you see? Which I don't think you can acquire, and I don't think you can acquire good tasteâI think you've got to be born with that. I know what not to say, what not to do. I think it's his manner, his general attitude, a humbleness. |
| Interviewer : | You must have done something to cultivate this. Let's start with the fact that you have the basic equipment. |
| Lahr : | It isn't a question of cultivating. You cannot cultivate humbleness, it becomes phoney. He's either a humble fella or a brash fella ⦠|
Actors Talk About Acting
Lahr learned quickly that the audience responded to individuality and that the imitator's staying power in burlesque was short. Critical reaction reinforced his theatrical eccentricity. He was noticed immediately by reviewers.
[Lahr performs] in a most pleasing and different way than is usually seen ⦠He is a newcomer to burlesque and a welcome one.
New York Clipper
on
The Best Show in Town
As a low “Dutch” comic, much of his spoken humor came from malapropisms. He had grown up with this aspect of dialect humor; few had a keener ear for the funny sound or the ludicrous innuendoes of words. Lahr and Wells would discuss various elaborate word plays, with Lahr improvising on Wells's script. Wells, perhaps more than any other writer besides S. J. Perelman and Damon Runyon, was a master of the mangled phrase.
Lahr's singing was another source of comedy. His voice could never be trained to stay on key. He had never tested the real possibility of the comedy song in the school-act days.
The Best Show in Town
brought the comedy song into his act. Sometimes it would be a rendition of a popular ballad complete with malapropisms and thick Dutch dialect such as he had used on Wilkins Avenue. Later in his career he found that he could create more laughter with his voice when he tried to sing seriously than when he launched into a wildly athletic and raucous spoof (as he did in
The Best Show in Town)
. There is no better example of the burlesque malaprop song than the one he did in
The Best Show in Town
, a number introduced a few years earlier by Sam Bernard. Frederick Morton wrote, on hearing Lahr's version years later, that the sound “was indescribable. Perhaps a Wagnerian tenor could achieve it, if in the midst of wooing Kriemhild, he were given a hotfoot.”
Lahr's delivery was fast, his hands froze at the peak of their excitement to emphasize the delight of each statement in the song.
Ououououououoouchâhow dot voman could cook!
His eyes rolled in dumbfounded ferocity. His voice strained in its passion so that the veins around his temples swelled perceptibly.
Her zoop had a flavor likeâlike bitches and cream
Her pancakesâah!âVhat a bootiful dreaeaeaeammm!
His hands suddenly shot out in front of him as if he was feeling his way along an imaginary wall. They trembled. He closed his eyes as he spoke; his nostrils dilated until they became the fulcrum of his face, teetering between delight and disgust.
And her oyshters and fishes
Were simply ⦠(he pauses in sensuous reverie)⦠malicious.
Ach, Gott
, How
Dot Voman Could Cook, Jawohl
.
This was a subtle version of the word-murdering potential of his comedy. A year earlier, before he had signed on to the Cooper shows, Lahr did a stint with Joe Woods's
College Days
, once again replacing his friend Jack Pearl.
The program of the performance, featuring such characters as Heinrich Hasenfeffer, manufacturer of excited oats, Charlie Horsely, and Ivy Green, gives an indication of the playful simplicity of the humor. The song Lahr performed in this two-act farce was less sophisticated than his later misuse of the language.
Ve're two ignorant Germans just arrived from College,
And our geographical language is just supreme.
Ve have learnt to speaking English in a bar room
And that is vhy ve don't know whose the reason â¦
He is embarrassed now at the nonsensical, hokey quality of the humor; but in 1916 it was a big success.
After
College Days
, Lahr had worked himself up to burlesque and
The Best Show in Town
, which became one of the season's choicest burlesque offerings. It played to rave reviews and packed houses for its full forty-week tour. After the fourth month, the program for the show ran an advertisement announcing that “Bert Lahr, eccentric Dutch [was signed] three years more with Blutch Cooper.”
The gaiety of this time is reflected in a picture of Lahr in his tattered first scrapbook. It shows him and Frank Hunter mugging with the soubrette of the show. They are dressed in children's clothes complete with pillows for paunch and little skullcaps. They are being embraced by a
zoftig
beauty wearing a rhinestone star in the middle of her forehead. It is the only picture he has kept that depicts him clowning off stage.
During the run of
The Best Show in Town
there was little leisure time. Performers worked two shows a day, seven days a week in the towns west of Chicago. When they were in the East, Sunday was a day of rest, but any free time was spent sleeping or planning new material. At every circuit theater, rehearsals would be held at 9:30 each morning and the chorus and routines overhauled.
Lahr thrived on the work. He did not waste time at rehearsals. His
earnestness made him the brunt of much good-natured joking. During the first tour he incorporated new kinds of comic movements into his performance, adopting many of the antics of the acrobats, who fascinated him. He developed a neck fall and a backward flip that he worked into the memorable Flugel Street Union scene (see Appendix 2) he did with Hunter.
Wells's burlesque was high-level entertainment. The audiences appreciated his skill. In cities like Detroit and Cincinnati, the local theater buffs announced that it was the best burlesque to come their way in a long time. Cincinnati offices reported that
The Best Show in Town
was “the most successful season of burlesque in the city.” And Dayton, where burlesque houses had been languishing because of a dearth of talent and suitable material, saw Wells's show as heralding a new type of burlesque. One critic was outspoken on the subject:
By this time, Dayton has learned that burlesque is not so black as it is painted. It has been pretty well cleaned up. Rot and coarseness, the solid foundations upon which the old burlesque was built, have been amputated and what remains is no worse than that which is found in almost any musical comedy. To be sure it is no show for babes in arms ⦠But then the average man or woman can see it without being any the worse for the experience. It is spectacular and diverting and musical and its principal exponents comprise some of the cleverest people on the stage.
Lahr's reviews continued to be outstanding. He was “a coming Teuton” in almost every critical appraisal. He pasted each clipping in his book.
Now the scraps of paper are brown with age. Many of them disintegrate at the touch. They tell little of the enthusiasm of those performances, but they include a few random entries that are not about him. These are mysterious and touching inclusions in a book that represents so much of his early dream and the beginning of his future. One clipping from a Charleston paper is about a show called
Katinka
(1916). A paragraph in that review is marked with a thin red line of lipstick: