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Columbia comedians were forbidden, on pain of $10 fines, to use profanity. Lahr was also instructed in other taboos: it was considered offensive to refer either to rats or false teeth. The shows were, in effect, well-staged revues, and were often reviewed by critics. In this heady atmosphere Lahr felt a new need. Funnymen, like birds of passage, are best identified by their distinctive cries. He developed one which sounded as though he were being strangled to death: "Gung-gung-gung-gung-gung." And though he remained a loud, low comedian, he labored for the sympathy of the audience and concentrated more & more on perfecting an air of bewilderment and insane incompetence, the eternal fall guy with one foot in his mouth and the other poised over a banana peel.
"Lahr & Mercedes." In the years after World War I—in which he served as a Navy enlisted man—all this paid off. He invented a noisy, red-nosed cop ("Go ahead and call the captain—he's drunker than I am") and hit big-time vaudeville in one jump. His first wife, a beautiful ex-burlesque soubrette named Mercedes Delpino, was his straight woman. LAHR AND MERCEDES, read big newspaper ads, A RIOT OF MIRTH AND IRRESISTIBLE COMEDY. He bought a Packard car and tailored suits, and dreamed of Broadway. "Bert," said the Broadway wise guys, "you're too burlesquey." But in 1927 he got his break. An ex-vaudevillian named Harry Delmar put a revue on Broadway, and asked Lahr to bring his cop act in. Delmar's Revels ran only 16 weeks—and part of the time it existed only because Lahr, thirsting to be noticed, was pumping hard-earned money into the enterprise to keep it going. But before it folded, Broadway Producers Alex Aarons and Vinton Freedley handed him a contract.
They were putting together a new musical, Hold Everything, based on the million-dollar fight racket which Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney had so magically inspired. They had some nice tunes by De Sylva, Brown and Henderson: You're the Cream in My Coffee, Don't Hold Everything. They had Betty Compton. They had Victor Moore. They had a part for Lahr — a punch-drunk fighter named Gink Schiner. What did he say?
Big Man on Broadway. "It scared me," Lahr remembers. "All those years I'd been hiding behind the putty nose and the baggy pants. Now they wanted me to play without them. I didn't think I could do it. But I had to try. Opening night I peeked out through the curtain, and it looked like the Diamond Horseshoe. Jimmy Walker was there. Everybody in New York was there. Jewels. Big names. After the curtain went up I heard the laughs, but when it was over I went out and wandered around in the dark, and I didn't know whether I was good or bad."
But next day gritty, garish, gold-lined Broadway was Bert Lahr's street. Lahr was a smash. Lahr was a sensation. NEW COMEDY KING CROWNED, read a Journal headline. Hold Everything ran for 413 performances. Suddenly the headwaiters, the cabbies, the reporters, the speakeasy bartenders all knew Bert Lahr. He played the Palace three times in six months with his old cop act at $4,500 a week. One hit followed another: Flying High, Hot-Cha!, Life Begins at 8:40, George White's Scandals, The Show Is On.