THE CLOWING OF DANNY KAYE
Dworkin, Martin S.
The Clowning of DANNY KAYE By MARTIN S. DWORKIN DANNY KAYE has worked a long time at being funny, and surely has sufficient laughter to show for his labors. No comedian in films disposes so many...
...Kaye liked to make people laugh starting his reputation as an enter tainer at parties...
...People just sitting around begin to get things on their minds—like going back home to the city, where they' can sit around indoors just as well, without fee...
...Unlike those who entertain by assassination and ridicule, his comedy is never that of cruelty, which soils its objects and ourselves—with our own excreted corruption...
...In England, especially, he has become nothing less than an institution, saluted and serenaded by nobles and crowds...
...In fact, he succeeds so well that it is only by measuring him against greatness that we can understand the subtle disappointment that accompanies our happiest enjoyment of his comedy...
...and he has a half-dozen triumphant times...
...One audience of Scotsmen followed him to his hotel, singing under his window, "Will ye no come back again...
...Hotel and vacation-camp managers learn to sniff boredom before it begins, and are ready to call their toomullers at the first fall of silence...
...For Kaye's implication of our spirits is limited, at last, by the boundaries of entertainment—and entertainment, essentially, involves receptive diversion...
...IV There is no question of Kaye's mastery—nor of his impact...
...The basis of Kaye's appeal is spectacular, rather than emphatic...
...The great clown humbles our pride, yet makes us the greater for our laughter at ourselves...
...but this is only the beginning of his meaning...
...The Straw Hat Revue of 1939, starring Imogene Coca, which Liebman and Miss Fine put together from the summer camp routines, presented Kaye in ten sketches which gave him his first Broadway success...
...The true, transcendant role of the clown or fool is to incarnate the fool in all of us...
...Laughter has the last word, and all that pride can say and do cannot prevail against it...
...too—-from Raye's own neighborhood, to fact—and she seemed to grasp the necessities and potentialities of his personality...
...But it was his experience as a too-muller that is most important in his development, setting the basis for his style, his approach to the audience, his goals, achievement—and his limitations...
...After years of touring the United States and the Orient as a minor entertainer—and after a first engagement at London's famous Dorchester Hotel—Kaye apparently had matured a style, and had been given material to match it...
...The measure of Kaye is that he is always the performer, executing the "numbers" of an extensive and extraordinary repertoire...
...And entertainment, in Kaye's style, is something riotous yet warm, hilarious yet fraternal, ridiculous without ridicul-izing...
...But only rarely do we laugh with him at ourselves...
...The name derives from the Yiddish toomul—translating, roughly, "tumult"—and originated in the famous "Borscht Circuit" of summer resorts in the Catskill Mountains northwest of New York City...
...As if being the best of what he is is not enough, Kaye has always seemed to be approaching greatness...
...For such a fool, entertainment is but a prerequisite occasion...
...Growing up in Brooklyn, where he was born David Daniel Kominski, son of an immigrant tailor from Russia, 43 years ago...
...To be a great fool is to comprise comedy and tragedy as inseparably mutual opposites, personifying the human condition—as in the achievement of Chaplin, the greatest clown of this century and the leading personality produced by the motion picture (however great his foolishness off the screen...
...Miss Fine, with Sammy Cahn, again has tailored songs precisely to fit Kaye's personality...
...The entertainer finds us waiting to be amused, and performs for us...
...He made a for tentative ventures into show business, including a youthful flyer as a singer in Florida, teamed with a friend who played the guitar...
...We may watch with pleasure, and even join in the games...
...The great clown has to be born, and must flourish, to be sure...
...By 1941, he was established as a night-club entertainer, and was the star of Let's Face It, with songs by Cole Porter— and many written especially for him by Miss Fine, including another prototypical number, "Melody in F," with its "git-gat-gittle" rataplan of nonsense syllables...
...We laugh at him, and occasionally along with him...
...Kaye is a good clown— "sweet," not "bitter," in the words of Lear's Fool—and a superb one...
...His Knock On Wood had in common with the multiple-role films that it was assembled to afford him a wide range of comic occasions, from satire—of ventriloquism, psychoanalysis, cloak-and-dagger spy melodramas, and classical ballet—to sheer slapstick—in wild chases, changes of dress, a hilarious masquerade as a salesman for an incredibly be-gadgeted sports car, and a mad toomul backstage in a theatre...
...Just this unity, however, with Kaye's singing, dancing, mimicry, gymnastics, and general toomul all in place, points up the paradox of his powers and their bounds...
...He is always contagiously warm, projecting a fellowship that surely represents the art of the toomuller at its best, drawing people to him to forget themselves together...
...A toomuller is a peculiar, American-Jewish phenomenon, yet one that is easily recognizable as a manifestation of the ancient, and universal, zany or buffoon...
...His comic attack consists of a large number of display pieces, in which he can demonstrate dazzling brilliances, unified in an uproarious toomul that itself has definite form: the operatic whole within which his virtuoso arias may be performed...
...On theater stages throughout the world, he has shown a power to please that is litde short of phenomenal, reaching audiences that have included numerous royalties...
...Hans Christian Andersen, a farfetched glorification of the Danish story-teller, seemed too elaborated and contrived, although it did allow Kaye to demonstrate his unmistakably affectionate appeal for young children—which came across even better in a short film, Assignment Children, recording his trip around the world on behalf of the United Nations Children's Fund...
...The Court Jester, to illustrate, may be the best of his films, not only for opportunities provided for expression of variegated qualities, but for their organization into a unitary comic context...
...But it is not that we laugh together in the theaters, or that we make a great noise, that makes a clown great...
...Although there are a few worthy aspirants—notably Jacques Tati—since Chaplin, there is no great clown to lift all of us out of the crowd by our own laughter at ourselves, edged by the sadness signifying our inescapable sorrows...
...Once, later, as part of a touring dancing act, he got some inadvertent—though significant —laughs when he took a ludicrous header off a stage into the footlights...
...This laughter is the bitterest and best there is, and the greatness of a clown lies in his power to evoke it—the complementary aspect of our own size, our sanity or sense of proportion, in expressing it...
...The film is wholly delightful, and the reservative reflections expressed here are prompted, perhaps, by no more than that Kaye appears in the traditional clown's motley, suggesting the role transcending entertainment that is the profoundest significance of the fool...
...Lear's Fool—that very genius of the laughter of self-humiliation and self-discovery—defines his profession in constant contrast to the foolishness of men, and instructs the old king—and the audience—in the responsibilities of sanity...
...Kaye is on screen almost continuously, in a variety of masquerades...
...Writers-producers-directors Norman Panama and Melvin Frank have arranged a plot as dizzily complicated as it is hilariously fantastic...
...No variety or music hall comedian has greater skill in winning the affections of audiences quickly, so that the business of entertainment can go forward...
...His is the comedy of public entertainment, marvelously articulated, and directed at crowds...
...As Kaye sings in "The Maladjusted Jester" number of The Court Jester, he "was not a born fool," but worked long and hard at it: "With firm application and determination, I made a fool of myself...
...This armament of funny business has been created and refined over many years, yet has traceable origins in his background...
...The problem of Kaye—as well as his triumph—is his versatility: a sweeping compass not merely of facilities, but of first-rate talents...
...These young men—likely employed also as waiters, busboys, athletic counsellors, or musicians— are prepared to leap into action to make a toomul to disrupt the creeping ennui: improvising mock mayhem, chasing each other in gymnastic abandon, toppling into swimming pools, punctuating their frenetic excursions with prat-falls and assorted slapstick...
...Kaye, the quintessential public entertainer, is, perhaps, symbolic of the times, with their unremitting emphasis upon collectivities and masses...
...But somewhere in our great admiration we must reserve a regret for what might have been...
...Much of the latter was created especially for him by his wife, Sylvia Fine, whom he first met at Max Lieb-man's Camp Tamiment in Pennsyl vania...
...Now firmly in the Big Time, he went on to Lady In The Dark, starring Gertrude Lawrence—and including that prototype of his patter songs, Ira Gershwin's Tschaikowsky, with its machine-gun burst of the names of 50 Russian composers in 38 seconds...
...No comedian in films disposes so many talents...
...Toomullers must learn to make people laugh, and many of the brightest stars of show business—and Kaye most of all—consistently reveal characteristics of such apprenticeship...
...He is, in fact, a personified archetype of the entertainer: comic, mimic, singer, dancer—in all, a master of japeries and the crowd's own tomfool...
...In our tradition, the fool has an ancient place at the side of kings, pricking the presumptions of power...
...We may not laugh at him for long, before we must be laughing with him at ourselves...
...But, perhaps above all, he must be deserved, as we rise to see ourselves for what we are...
...But our experience, however pleasant, is no deeper than our immersion in the passage of time, which has gone by unnoticed...
...II In Kaye's style, we may see toomul as an organizing principle for terial...
...Miss Fine was from Brooklyn...
...He is better at slapstick farce, as in The Kid From Brooklyn, a remake of an old Harold Lloyd comedy about a milkman turned prizefighter, than at poignant romance...
...A Song Is Born, in 1948, was not his style at all, and was the most unsuccessful of his films...
...In public appearances, he is one of the most remarkably successful entertainers of our time...
...Here is Kaye the entertainer at his best, in a happy lampoon of the spate of epics of chivalry which has been pouring from the wide screens, floating a motley debris of mutilated history on floods of costumed improbability...
...There, as in resorts everywhere, a rainy day can portend calamity...
...III Kaye's films, beginning with Up In Arms in 1944, almost always have seemed to restrict his qualities, although they often have been designed to allow him to play multiple roles, with dialects to suit—as in Wonder Man, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Inspector General, and On The Riviera...
...The great clown always entertains, to be sure...
Vol. 20 • March 1956 • No. 3
