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His Majesty the Queen. This grey-haired, gopher-cheeked old lady is probably one of the most raffish monarchs ever to grace the stage. Her robes are immaculate. Her grey wig and crown retain a ladylike balance. But something about her demeanor suggests that she has been loafing in a saloon. She speaks in low Dutch comedy dialect, and when she pauses in her exit, carefully spreads her feet and then lowers her weight in a creaking curtsy, both her startled squint and her spavined posture make it obvious that she has suffered either a rupture of the royal corset or a Charley horse of massive proportions.
But at this point in the show Lahr is just getting his second wind. He reappears as Siegfried, garbed in long red underwear, and surrounded by Rhine maidens who look just like tassel dancers. He tears, howling and trouserless, through a burlesque bit graphically entitled Hubby, Wifey and Lovey. In a quiet, humorous little skit called "Schneider's Miracle," he portrays a fumbling old paper picker with such feeling and restraint that his lines have been studded with extra gags to keep the audience from choking up.
It is a wonderful demonstration of the art of a vanishing breed—that noisy band of U.S. comedians who were blooded in the dingy halls of burlesque, rose to astrakhan-collared eminence on the Keith-Orpheum circuits, and reached their fullest flower on Broadway in the days of Ziegfeld, prohibition and the Big Bull Market.
Vitamins & Buttons. The long era of radio has hatched a new species of comic —brash, highly paid, but script-bound comedians who can seldom rise above their gag men. But to Lahr—a master mechanic from the same shops which produced W. C. Fields, Bobby Clark, Ed Wynn, Paul McCullough, Sliding Billy Watson, and Victor Moore—the script is only a blueprint and a beginning. Like all his peers he lives by that ancient maxim of the trade: "You gotta be able to get a laugh without saying a word."
He repeats the phrase with scowling intentness. He cannot elaborate it. Like most comedians he sees nothing laughable about laughter, or the nerve-racking and exhausting process of extracting laughs from audiences. He speaks of laughter as a stock plunger might talk of his capital, or a prospector of some elusive vein of ore, and his capacity for vitamin-gulping, button-twisting worry about the problems of its production is a byword in the theater. Like all comedians he is engaged in a dogged, lifelong struggle against myopic critics, fickle audiences and, worst of all, the horrors of obscurity.
"School Acts." Lahr's war began in Manhattan's upper East Side, where he was born Irving Lahrheim in 1895. At 15, he left school and his father, a German-born interior decorator with old-country ideas, directed him to devote himself to honest toil. Lahr was not enthusiastic.
He got a job as an errand boy at Rogers Peet, clothiers, but managed to get fired in two weeks. He was immediately hired by one Wetzel, a tailor. He shook Wetzel and found himself in the stockroom of a firm which made imitation ebony hairbrush handles. Weakening but still stubborn, he loafed until he was fired again. Within a matter of days he was sweeping floors for R.L. & M. Friedler, manufacturers of jewelers' supplies.