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He was ready for anything when a boyhood pal reported that a bush-league theatrical producer was forming a child vaudeville troupe in the neighborhood. In those days, before World War I, innumerable child "School Acts" flourished in cheap vaudeville. They were virtually alike, and their kiddy casts played standard parts.in almost all: a sissy boy, a silly boy, a boy with a Jewish accent, a sassy girl, a dumb girl and a teacher (usually portrayed by a Dutch dialect comedian). Lahr reported for rehearsal in a dusty, vacant store, sang a song entitled A Garland of Old-Fashioned Roses and was immediately hired as a "sissy comedian."
A Yellow Diamond. In the next three years he drifted from coast to coast, one of a small army of kid actors who roamed the land, imitating their elders, scheming for better parts, and yearning for those twin badges of success, a yellow diamond and a room with bath. He was stranded in Chicago with an act known as Joe E. Marks & Co., and in Pittsfield, Mass. with Harry Sixes Greater New England Show. He was fired by tough managers, and interrupted by tough audiences. But he learned.
During his frequent bouts of unemployment he rubbed a ring of grease paint around his collar to convey the spurious impression that he had just stepped from a dressing room. He wore the flashiest of $7 suits, affected checkered caps and learned to assume instantly that false air of hearty confidence which is every actor's shield and buckler in time of ad versity. He became an expert at snatching free lunches in saloons, buttonholing cheap booking agents, and in the art of living in $2.50-a-week boarding houses.
He also toiled. He was essentially a shy and uncertain boy. But the sound of laughter rolling in across the footlights gave him a sense of power and ambition.
He studied older comics with endless, beady concentration. He moved from act to act — "Nine Crazy Kids," "May Party," "Boys and Girls of Avenue B," "Col ege Days." At 18, already a cagey and seasoned trouper, he was overwhelmed by a veritable Niagara of good fortune —the head of the Columbia Burlesque Circuit gave him a $3$-a-week job as a Dutch comedian.
"Irish Justice." Then, as now, burlesque comedy hinged on raucous and ancient ritual—acts and scenes which have been played for half a century in smoke-filled backstreet theaters and will probably go on being played until the last shouts of the last intermission butcher die away. Their titles have a ripe and moldy ring: "Flugel Street," "The Union Hat," "Water-in-the-Pants," "Irish Justice," "The Dirty Boot Finish." Nose reddened, hair greyed with talcum, baggy pants flapping, Lahr played them all.
He perfected the art of taking bumpers (falls), breaking the spill with one hand and slapping the stage with the other. (Today his left wrist is permanently enlarged from the endless dives of his burlesque days.) The leer, the grimace, the wild cry became his stock in trade. But for all this, in the world of the putty nose and the kick-in-the-pants, going to the Columbia "wheel" was like a scholarship to Yale.