Comedians: The First Time He Made Anyone Sad

“A comedian is not a man who says funny things,” Ed Wynn once said. “A comedian is one who says things fun ny. For instance, a comedian is not a man who opens a funny door — a co median is one who opens a door in a funny way.”

Ed Wynn, who died of throat cancer last week at 79, had been opening doors in a funny way ever since he was a kid in Philadelphia. Then he was Isaiah Ed win Leopold, who used to upset his mil liner father by putting on ladies’ hats and mincing around the showroom like a prospective customer. At 16, he split his middle name in two and became Ed Wynn, and soon he was “The Boy with the Funny Hats” — a turn in which he twisted a trick fedora into 28 shapes.

Over the years he became a polished comic who never had to resort to blue material to get a laugh. In fact, he was responsible for the biggest clean joke in theater history. As a speakeasy waiter in the 1927 musical Manhattan Mary, he hovered over a gangster who asked him what there was to eat. “Jelly roll,” suggested the comedian, “or perhaps the gentleman would like some nice ladyfingers.” “Ladyfingers!” roared the gunsel. “My God, I’m so hungry I could eat a horse!” Whereupon Wynn ran offstage and returned leading a full-grown sway-backed horse. It was almost a minute before the audience was quiet enough to hear Wynn’s topper: “Will you have mustard or catchup?”

Big Timer. Fred Allen once called Wynn the funniest visual comedian of the day — and so he was. He ate corn by attaching it to a typewriter carriage, knocking it back every time he wanted to start a new row; he invented a wind shield wiper to be served with grape fruit; and an eleven-foot pole for people he wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

Yet when radio came along, he abandoned his props, relied for laughs on his natural lisp and his unnatural giggle. By the early ’30s, he was a big-timer as the Texaco Fire Chief—one of the first com ics to kid the sponsor. “I’ll stick to my horse,” he once twitted. “He doesn’t have to be repainted every year.”

Television rediscovered him and made him a star for the third time—but the tube soon drained him dry. NBC dropped his option, and at 67 the boy with the funny hats was the old man with the funny scrapbooks. In 1956 his son Keenan advised him to try playing character parts. But the old man wasn’t buying. “He just didn’t want to get out of those funny clothes he’d been wearing for 50 years,” recalls Keenan. “He’d say, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that to my public.’ And I said, ‘What public?’ ” That did it. At 70, Wynn began a new career. He played a beat-up old fight trainer in TV’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, soon was getting calls for films. He was an aging broadcasting executive in The Great Man, the old dentist in Anne Frank, and Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins.

Perfect Fool. Wynn’s latest film for Disney, The Gnomobile, will be released next year. Though his most recent recognition came from his performances as a variety of has-beens and never wases, his essential self was the Perfect Fool, a role he created back in the 1921 show of the same name. The show died, but the name stayed alive. Recalling all the doors he had opened in a funny way, comedians hailed him last week as the finest crafts man of them all. Said Red Skelton, whom Ed Wynn discovered on a street corner in Indiana 35 years ago: “His death was the first time that Ed Wynn ever made anyone sad.” Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that there is almost no one left who knows how to open those doors.