Red Skelton
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Jackie Gleason (center) and Honeymooners regulars Art Carney and Audrey Meadows. (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
So why was a more realistic approach preferable on the small screen? In entertainer and author Steve Allen’s watershed book on television comedians of the 1950s, The Funny Men (1956), he noted, “It is an axiom of the TV-comedy business that the less realistic you are the bigger your jokes have to be. If you’re not being at least a little true to life, your script has to blast a laugh out of the audience every few seconds because their emotions are not much involved. But, if the audience is intensely interested in what happens to your characters, they will laugh amiably at almost any little joke you sprinkle the story line with.”19 As with the San Francisco Examiner critic Newton, Allen also uses the Skelton-Gleason comparison when discussing realistic small-screen figures.
One should hasten to add that no one was saying Skelton’s characters were not as funny—simply that they were more high maintenance. Thus, this was one explanation as to why Skelton’s ratings had dropped off, eclipsed, for a time, by Gleason. Ironically, Skelton had established himself in vaudeville with several brilliant slice-of-life sketches, starting with the donut-dunking routine, all scripted by Stillwell. These were largely “how to?” pantomimes based in observational (realistic) humor.
Appropriately, when CBS brought in Sherwood Schwartz to turn around Skelton’s ratings, the new head writer said the comedian’s old shows were 80 percent verbal and 20 percent pantomime—numbers he thought should be reversed.20 Skelton doing pantomime was more realistic. Of equal importance, Schwartz had Skelton appearing as just one of his characters each week. Previously, the comedian had been flirting with over exposure by parading several figures through every installment of the show. Coupling this more focused programming with a single theme also had the advantage of further encouraging viewer identification, even if Skelton’s characters were more exaggerated than those of Gleason’s.
These changes made all the difference. Skelton’s first season (1955–56) with Sherwood, later kiddingly referred to as “Robin Hood’s rabbi,” put the comedian back among television’s top-rated programs. Skelton continued to generate impressive numbers through the 1969–70 television season, logging in as high as number two (behind the Western Bonanza) in 1966–67.21 Schwartz stayed with Red for eight seasons before creating such hit television programs as Gilligan’s Island (1964–67) and The Brady Bunch (1969–74). Though both of these shows were miles away from delineating anything lofty and poetic, they perfectly demonstrate what Schwartz brought to Skelton’s program—an uncanny ability to “read” public tastes. The modest Schwartz, who never worked directly with Skelton (a mutual preference by both men), simply saw himself as a Skelton facilitator: “We didn’t make him any funnier—we just created a format to maximize his possibilities.”22
As a postscript to the relative realism of Skelton’s comedy characters, I suggest they represent more of a middle ground in believability. If Gleason’s Ralph Kramden equals the realistic gold standard of 1950s television comedy, the opposite end of the spectrum would be owned by the iconoclastic Ernie Kovacs, undoubtedly the most original comic mind of his day. His theater of the absurd characters included the cockeyed poet Percy Dovetonsils and the Nairobi Trio—three men in ape masks, trench coats, and bowler hats miming the strange musical number “Solfeggio.” Two apes pretended to play instruments (piano and drums), while the nominal leader conducted. Given that leadership counts for little in the absurd modern world, the “crowning” achievement was that in a moment of distraction, the drummer pounded on the conductor’s head. After several subterfuge-driven repetitions of this darkly comic drumstick violence, the ape conductor wraps the routine with a vase to the head of his musical nemesis. Compared to such Kovacs characters, Skelton’s comedy troupe is just this side of Italian neorealism.
Skelton saw a great of realism in his characters, claiming: “They’re based on different people I’ve met—I see something funny, yet tragic.”23 Certainly this is true of his oldest and arguably most important early figure, Clem Kadiddlehopper. As noted earlier, Skelton appeared to have based Clem on childhood friend, Carl Hopper, whose severe hearing loss as a youngster made it difficult for him to communicate, sometimes suggesting he had a learning disability. Yet, by redefining this figure as what American humor would call a “wise fool,” Kadiddlehopper is often allowed to succeed. This wise fool moniker also applies to Skelton’s punch-drunk fighter, Cauliflower McPugg. During the 1950s, Skelton wrote, “But for all his inane antics, Cauliflower is basically an honest and sympathetic character. Like Clem, he dearly loves people, but he too does the wrong thing at the right time [the hallmark of the wise fool].”24
Significantly, Skelton believed a certain degree of comic distortion/distraction was necessary to facilitate laughter. He believed comedy was triggered by an innate “emotional outburst. People see themselves in the same situation or know someone like that. By exaggeration it becomes funny, yet it’s tragic.”25 One might build a tragic foundation to Freddie the Freeloader, since Skelton sometimes called the character a tribute to his grocer father, who Skelton desperately wanted to believe was a world-famous clown. Yet, as examined earlier, Freddie’s classic material is more apt to be borrowed from Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. When Skelton “appropriated” material, he often attributed it to his father. For example, New York Herald Tribune critic John Crosby took Skelton to task in 1952, noting: “Last Sunday … he did a pantomime of a girl dressing in the morning—a bit, he assured us, his [circus] father did … fifty years earlier. This was illuminating information since the ensuing pantomime was, almost to a gesture, an exact replica of Sid Caesar’s famous burlesque on the same subject. I suppose this lays Caesar open to the charge of stealing Skelton’s father’s material fifty years ago which seems hardly likely. Caesar wasn’t around that long ago.”26
I am not overly bothered by borrowed material. After all, just a few months after the Crosby column, Lucille Ball did her celebrated “Vitameatavegamin” sketch (I Love Lucy, May 5, 1952), which is clearly lifted from Skelton’s “Guzzler Gin” routine. The routine was written by Stillwell, who had taken the idea from a Fred Allen radio program. Obviously, there is very little that is original, however, giving material fake origins, based upon a sketchy father figure, only seems to compound the falseness. Skelton would have been on much more solid ground if, in prefacing the sketch examined by critic Crosby, “a pantomime of a girl dressing in the morning,” Skelton had simply said, “I first did a variation of this routine back in the 1930s, when I was a vaudeville headliner. Originally conceived by Edna Stillwell, I hope you enjoy my new rendition of this material.”
As a biographer, however, one constantly needs to reframe a problematic action by one’s subject. Biographer Marc Pachter offers the challenge, “how much can be learned about an individual from the facts he invents about himself?”27 Let us briefly examine the smokescreen created by Skelton when he credited the morning ritual routine to his father. First, since he never knew his father, it adds to the common legacy he has already established for them—being clowns. Second, Skelton wore his heart on his sleeve, and he would have intuitively recognized the added poignancy the routine would generate with a sentimental backstory. Third, Skelton had a comic gift, but he was insecure about his lack of an education. His press releases and concert programs were miniresumes about the sheer volume of the comedian’s creativity, tabulated on a daily basis. Consequently, if Skelton had knowingly lifted elements of the sketch from Caesar, as suggested by the period critic, Skelton quite possibly would have worried that he needed a personal footnote to safeguard his credibility as a creative, educated person. These are just some hypothetical suggestions as to what might have motivated his actions. Of course, the simplest explanation might be that, as the consummate storyteller, the raconteur par excellence, Skelton was merely trying to tell a better story.
Before leaving the subject of Skelton’s competing com
edians, I would like to backtrack briefly to the subject of Kovacs’s entertainingly disturbing Nairobi Trio. While their surrealistic silliness was from a different comedy planet than that occupied by Skelton, one wonders if the comedian ever picked up a basic metaphorical life lesson from the Trio. That is, years later the darkly comic humorist Jim Knipfel wrote the memoir, Quitting the Nairobi Trio (2000). Like Skelton, he went through some troubling psychological times before he came up with an unorthodox but effective mindset to fight depression. As the title of his book suggests, Knipfel came to equate the ultimately destructive repetitive nature of life with being stuck in a nightmare version of a favorite television comedy routine. The secret to survival was to: “Recognize the skit I was in before I got too far into it. Figure out who—or what—was holding the drumsticks over my head early enough so I could dodge them, before they caved in the back of my skull.”28
Skelton also managed to put his personal demons at bay, for a time, by the mid-1950s. I am reminded of a pertinent comment later made by Wade Boggs upon his 2005 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame: “Our lives are not determined by what happens to us, but how we react to what happens.”29 Skelton had soldiered through a difficult time. By the end of the 1950s, another memoir spoke directly to the comedian’s greatness. No less a laughter legend than Groucho Marx wrote, “I think the logical successor to Chaplin is Skelton. Red, to my mind, is the most unacclaimed clown in show business.” Marx was especially impressed that the redhead did not need funny clothes and/or special make-up: “The last time I watched Skelton perform in a theatre, he came onstage in an outfit that could conceivably have been worn by … [anybody]. With one prop, a soft battered hat, he successfully converted himself into an idiot boy, a peevish old lady, a teetering-tottering drunk, an overstuffed clubwoman, a tramp, and any other character that seemed to suit his fancy.”30
Marx’s hat perspective is well taken. Despite Skelton’s minimalist needs as a performer, he was lost without headgear. Indeed, Red once claimed, “I couldn’t get into character without the right hat.”31 When his one-person stock company is examined, each character is defined by his lid apparel. Freddie the Freeloader’s suggestion of a fall from grace (or is that a dream of better things?), comes by way of wearing a battered top hat. Oddball Clem tries for normalcy by wearing a fedora, but the headgear’s rakish angle and folded-up brim suggest “he hasn’t a clue.” The boastful San Fernando Red and Sheriff Deadeye both wear broad-brimmed Stetsons, as if to embellish their attempts at being larger than life. A later addition to Skelton’s comedy troupe, the henpecked husband Mr. Appleby, tries for a modicum of dignity by wearing a derby (à la the often henpecked antiheroes Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy). The “mean widdle kid” Junior wore a ribboned porkpie hat, and boxer Cauliflower McPugg, Skelton’s closest character to a street person, accents that fact by wearing a newsboy’s cap. Otherwise, when Skelton was running through more generic figures, the fedora became his all-purpose prop. For example, when he performed the “Guzzler’s Gin” sketch, his inebriated television pitchman’s fedora gets increasingly smashed down on his head, as he becomes progressively more “smashed” with each subsequent commercial. But between times Skelton also played a poet reciting his work. As this sober literary type, Skelton wore the same fedora upside down, making it resemble an academic mortar board cap. No wonder Marx was impressed.
When Skelton was not making news as television’s favorite comeback comedian of the 1950s, his private and professional life still generated headlines. What follows are a subjective list of ten memorable Skelton-related news stories from that decade. Arranged chronologically, save the last one, some stories begin with Skelton, while others simply draw him into a bigger picture. But taken as a whole, they represent a Skelton mosaic of the 1950s. The first, involving Johnny Carson, was completely involuntary. At that time, Carson was an up-and-coming young comic who had had some local success with a Los Angeles-based Sunday afternoon television program called Carson’s Cellar. With no budget to speak of, Carson got by with wit and moxie, such as an episode on which he “announced that Red Skelton was the show’s ‘special guest star.’ A lone figure then raced across the stage. That, Carson said, was Red Skelton.”32 As luck would have it, Skelton just happened to catch his fleeting “appearance” and was charmed. The comedian ended up “really” appearing on the program with Carson several times. When Carson’s Cellar was canceled in the early 1950s, Skelton hired the young comedian as a monologue writer and a sketch participant.
Flash forward to August 18, 1954. The two-hundred-pound Skelton, once described as “show business’ answer to [bruising football pioneer] Bronco Nagurski,” was rehearsing a routine shortly before airtime that involved crashing through a breakaway door that did not break away. Briefly knocked out, Skelton was unable to go on that night. As if borrowing a plot twist from 42nd Street (1933), where an unknown subs for the disabled lead and becomes a star overnight, Carson replaced Skelton on the show.
The former Nebraska disc jockey, calling himself “the poor man’s Red Skelton,” garnered across the board rave reviews, such as, “[Carson] ad-libbed the entire Skelton show, doing what network executives enthusiastically claimed was a great job.”33 (Though Carson’s gift for impromptu humor undoubtedly played a part in maximizing this break, a goodly portion of his “ad-libbing” that night was a recycling of his comedy act, such as Carson’s Robert Benchley-like “lecture” on the economics of television.) Regardless, a number of big-name comedians, besides Skelton, weighed in with praise, such as Jack Benny’s kudos, “The kid is great, just great.”34 Shortly after the broadcast, Carson confessed, “I could tell the studio audience was disappointed when they saw me instead of Red [before the show]. But I just told them: ‘Look, I’m in a spot—and we’re all in this together.’”35 Carson also added that the suddenness had been a blessing, “If they [had] told me a week ahead of time I’d have to replace Red Skelton, I’d have gotten the shakes for sure. But there wasn’t time to think or get nervous. I was in a daze.”36 He was also pleased that Skelton was so happy with the turn of events, prompting him to kid that he had sent Skelton a “stay sick card.” In less than two weeks, with an assist from Benny, Carson was signed to an exclusive contract with the network.37 The following season (1955–56) Carson even had a short-lived prime time comedy variety show.
Robert Benchley’s “lecture” approach to comedy influenced both Skelton and Johnny Carson. In this publicity shot, Benchley examines The Romance of Digestion (1937). (Wes D. Gehring Stills Collection)
Though Carson’s style was more in the tradition of Benny, the young comedian “did adapt Red’s ‘anything for entertainment’ fearlessness in stunts. Over the years Johnny has placed his life in more jeopardy than any comic, Skelton included [‘breakaway’ doors notwithstanding].”38 Carson’s troupe of comedy characters was also often reminiscent of Skelton’s, particularly the parallels between their two hucksters, San Fernando Red and Art Fern, the Tea Time Matinee Movie host. Plus, with both Skelton and Carson coming from the Midwest, there was generally an amicable tone to their humor. Thus, the following description of Carson during his early years on The Tonight Show would not be out of place in a Skelton biography: “a gentle, almost shy host who seems to want everyone to have a good time, and no feelings hurt.”39
Skelton’s second memorable 1950s news event involved a television phenomenon in the midst of all its proverbial glory. During the 1954–55 season Walt Disney first came to the small screen with an anthology program initially titled Disneyland, an ongoing commercial for his soon-to-open amusement park of the same name. Disneyland the program was an immediate hit for ABC, the third place network’s first major success. But the episodes that really launched Disneyland were from the anthology’s “Frontierland” segment (more tie-ins to the park), featuring the adventures of real-life frontier hero Davy Crockett (Fess Parker). The Davy Crockett segment was an overnight sensation that spawned a merchandising bonanza in the mid-1950s—c
oonskin caps, comic books, fringed leather jackets, shirts, shorts, pajamas, soap, dolls, lunch boxes, tents, bedspreads, draperies, and so on. Reporters in Washington, D.C., even gave President Dwight D. Eisenhower a Davy Crockett necktie for his 1955 birthday.40 The New York Times projected that Crockett merchandise totaled a staggering $300 million in sales by the end of 1955.41 For many baby boomers, including this author, the Davy Crockett craze was a defining part of early childhood.
Like the rest of the country, Skelton and his baby-boomer children (eight-year-old Valentina and seven-year-old Richard) were huge Crockett fans. Because of the power of celebrity, Davis was able to organize a joint birthday bash for the children with Crockett (Parker) and his sidekick George Russel (Buddy Ebsen) as special guests. Davis, however, had a hidden agenda: “It was the only way I could get Red to stay [with several dozen youngsters]—tell him Davy Crockett was coming.”42 While one article covering the party was titled, “Kids Can’t Get at Davy; Skelton Monopolizes Him,” the comedian amusingly spread the blame, noting, “it was like the [new] electric train at Christmas—the kids couldn’t get to Crockett because of the parents.”43
For those who might call this tale “cute but inconsequential” and question its inclusion, there is a pertinent back story. As so often happens with anything popular, there eventually was a modest backlash against Crockett. Some revisionist historians debunked the real Crockett, suggesting he was little more than an alcoholic braggart who doubled as his own press agent. This really angered Skelton, and he responded to these critics through the syndicated column of his friend James Bacon. After the then current controversies associated with the Korean War and the Communist witch hunts tied to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Skelton stated, “Davy Crockett has made it popular to be an American again. What’s wrong with that?”44 Long a missionary-like advocate for the power of comedy, Skelton celebrated the crackerbarrel humor inherent to the Crockett stories, while naively implying such programming was a blow against a problem new to the 1950s—juvenile delinquency: “To see our children laugh—to see ourselves laugh with our children because of Davy Crockett is one of the greatest forces for good this country has had in years.… [But] the greatest good to come out of the Crockett craze, is that it has taken kids off the streets and put them in the backyard under Davy Crockett tents.”45