Red Skelton
By Bruce Shawkey Red Skelton's dressing room sits like a small Noah's ark in a Sargasso Sea of props and spots behind a stage at the CBS studio where the weekly Skelton show is bruised and battered into being. Before I could tap on the door, it opened and a very small Japanese gentleman emerged, wearing a beret and bearing two abstract paintings. I made my obeisance. But I had evidently been mesmerized by Skelton's powers of transformation. It was a Japanese gentleman and above him towered an unmistakable, un-oriental and undisguised Red Skelton. However, within two minutes of my entry into his dressing room, he had populated it with a crowd of fantastics, his imagination ejecting a stream of characters and his memory a flow of patter—a mixture of gems and purest corn that would have caused the original ark to founder. Skelton's air of simple innocence and incompetence allows him to emerge unscathed from material that would normally sink without a trace under a more so...
