Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer certainly found a funny face in Richard Bernard 'Red Skelton born 1913 in Indiana, an erstwhile clown, medicine show carnie and pantomime performer who worked showboats and burlesque houses before his dummy run at movies when in 1939 he was to be featured in the respective shorts The Broadway Buckaroo and Seeing Red It would be at the behest of an impressed Mickey Rooney who happened to catch Skelton's routine at President F.D.R.'s birthday bash in 1940 and hoped to see the comic become a permanent fixture in Hollywood.
Skelton's first substantial starring role was as Wally 'The Fox' Benton, an OTR gumshoe in an updated version of the old comedy thriller Whistling in the Dark (1941). The film was so well received that there were to be two sequels to follow, Whistling in Dixie (1942) and Whistling in Brooklyn in 1943, both directed by S. Sylvan Simon.
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| Be a clown, be a clown! |
Skelton was now the pride of MGM and their equivalent to Paramount's Bob Hope. Red even advocated the Hope formula of building costume comedy around a variety of anachronisms, DuBarry Was A Lady (1943) was a prime example - Skelton would star vis a vis fellow charismatic carrot-top - Lucille Ball. He was also cited as being a cut-up, behind-the scenes, there was even an incident where his impish wit resulted in his female co-star suffering a sudden case of sprained ribs, simply from laughing so intensely after one of his infamous punchlines; Skelton was that naturally funny (and hopefully insured).
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| Skelton in the closet - did he fancy a bit of B & D? |
Skelton's next film, I Dood It (1943) was a paean to his well-known catchphrase 'If I dood it, I get a whippin'...I dood it.' The film would mark his first collaboration with silent great Buster Keaton, who as gag-writer would use his own comic masterpiece Spite Marriage (1929) as a creative template. Keaton continued to write gags for Skelton for the next six years; their last partnering would be on A Southern Yankee (1948) directed by Edward Sedgwick, a remake of Keaton's most popular film The General(1928) in which Keaton received no writing credit. Despite Skelton's being no shirker himself in the comedic genius department and starring in nearly thirty comedies - the comedian is best appreciated for a one-off sketch he performed - his Guzzler's Gin spot in Ziegfeld Follies (1946)
Skelton, a polymath - was also a short-story author, musician and painter that specialized in the subject of clowns and did so for twenty years before he would in the mid-1960's sell lithographs of his works. It has been said Red Skelton capitalized infinitely more on his artwork than all of his radio, television and film work combined. Skelton after years of struggling with poor health, passed away of an undisclosed illness on September 17,1997, he was 84.