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 sophisticated delivery. Whether he has a one-man sounding board or a full studio audience, Skelton has a compulsion to entertain. Patter pours from him like the chatter of a ticker tape. He is a one-man humor computer, sensitive to any reaction, however uncritical, ready to dive into a morass of gags in the search for one which will disarm and break up his victim. Skelton has the permanent air of the newsboy who made it and is forever wagging his tail. This effectively conceals his vast ability and the impressive technique which enables him to cope with his weekly exposure on television without shriveling his stature. It is impossible to assess Skelton, of all people, during one brief meeting over a sketchbook. It suffices to say that he is a charmer by any standards. Corn merchant, master of the cliche, prat-faller, grotesque, whatever charges might be leveled at him—and he is magnificently culpable—it is enough that he is a great mime who gives pleasure to millions and one of the great clowns of our time. I, for one, am in his debt.