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The most talked about comedian in the U.S. today is a lithe, 33-year-old mophead named Danny Kaye. Unlike great clowns of the past, he does not wear funny clothes, fall on his prat, throw custard pies or even borrow ancient jokes from Joe Miller. His chief comic assets are a nimble brain and an even nimbler tongue.
In six years of breath-taking success, these have carried him through, two Broadway musicals (Lady in the Dark, Let's Face It), two movies (Up In Arms, Wonder Man), 39 weeks of a new kind of radio show and numberless vaudeville appearances. This year, such activity will bring him more than $500,000.
His popularity and nimble-wittedness were abundantly demonstrated in Manhattan's Paramount Theater, where he has done five shows a day for the past three weeks, at $20,000 a week. Freed for the first time in four years from the restrictions of movies and radio, he walked on stage his first day, stretched elegantly, and said: "Gee, I'm glad to be back on Broadway." Just then, blasters in an excavation near the Paramount let go with a charge of TNT, and the theater shivered. Cracked Danny: "Never mind the cannon, fellas; just tell 'em I'm glad to be back."
Rolling Eyes. After every show, Danny found his dressing room full of gifts from his admirers (a homemade cake, two pounds of butter, a diamond wedding ring, jars of canned fruit, popcorn, etc.). At his last show—scheduled for the usual 30 minutes—the audience held Danny for 91, while he went through his whole repertory of pantomime, mimicry and musical burlesques. He called up kids from the audience. Once, midway through a song, he doubled up with a great belly laugh. "You won't believe this," he howled, "but a little girl in the third row is looking at me through binoculars." At the end of this zany, record performance, the audience sang Auld Lang Syne.
It is the same at his radio show, whether he is broadcasting from New York or Hollywood. While Danny mimics and mugs through his half-hour program and a 40-minute post-broadcast show, girls pile presents on the stage. To show his appreciation, he reads mooncalf poems written to him by idolatrous bobby-soxers, mugs outrageously, or falls offstage with studied indifference.
Tall (6 ft.), skinny (152 Ibs.) and Cassius-cheeked, Danny is a handsome man—barring his Pinocchio nose. His face, rosy and puckish, is extraordinarily mobile. His mouth is big, his chin square, his eyes blue and easy-rolling. His hair has nervously changed from red to brown to blond at various stages of his life. Current color: carrot. His hands were once described by a critic as "the most expressive since Eleonora Duse."
Rattling Tongue. But his principal asset is his proficiency at something called scat—a form of singing in which the performer, instead of mouthing words, gushes forth an unintelligible gibberish most closely resembling a spluttering outboard motor. His radio signature is a scat phrase which, written down, looks something like this:
"Git gat gittle, giddle-di-ap, giddle-de-tommy, riddle de biddle de roop, da-reep, fa-san, skeedle de woo-da, fiddle de wada, reep!"
Since Kaye sings scat with the tonal inspiration of a New Orleans jazz band, he seldom uses the same polysyllabic sounds twice.