August 31 - Buddy Hackett

Image courtesy playbill.com

On this day, in 1924, Leonard Hacker was born in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up the son of a garment district worker and a furniture upholsterer, Leonard would have fit right in to the story of High School Musical: he played football and was active in the drama club. He also suffered from Bell’s Palsey, which didn’t permanently affect his appearance but did give him his signature slurred speech. While still in school, Leonard began warming up audiences in various Catskill night clubs as what was known as a tummler, the Yiddish word for tumult maker. He eventually graduated to doing actual stand-up routines in those same clubs, although his debut probably left him questioning his life choices. He later recalled that he didn’t get a single laugh his first time behind the microphone. Luckily, his act quickly improved.

Once Leonard had graduated from New Utrecht High School in 1942, he immediately enlisted in the United States Army. He spent the entirety of World War II as part of an anti-aircraft battery. When the war ended and he returned to the States, Leonard changed his name to Buddy Hackett and jumped back into stand-up. After rewetting his feet at the Pink Elephant club in Brooklyn, he began to make appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas while also returning to the Catskill clubs of his youth (although his name was a little higher on the billing this time around). In 1950, Buddy made his big screen debut in a sports related short titled King of Pins. A how-to piece on the proper bowling techniques, he was featured as the sportsman you didn’t want to emulate. Three years later, Buddy was part of the original cast of Lunatics and Lovers, a play that ran for 336 performances on Broadway (Zero Mostel was his replacement when he went on vacation).

Image courtest jesswaid.com

Lunatics and Lovers gave Buddy enough exposure to land him a couple of television specials and expand his nightclub act. He didn’t return to the movies, though, until a bit from his stand-up act caught the attention of Universal Pictures. Unfortunately, it’s a bit that highlights changing social norms. Presently it would have gotten Buddy fired instead of hired, but the Fifties were clearly a different time. He took a rubber band, put it around his head in such a way that it gave a decided slant to his eyes, affected a thick accent and impersonated a frustrated waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Audiences ate it up. He made a recording of it and Universal put him in 1953’s Walking My Baby Back Home specifically so he could do the bit on film. He even got billing right under the picture’s main stars, Donald O’Connor and Janet Leigh.

I’d like to be able to say that his material got better after Walking, but Buddy became a darling of the talk show circuit pretty much because of his off-color jokes and ribald stories. He made frequent appearances with Jack Paar (including one on Jack’s final night as host of The Tonight Show), Arthur Godfrey, Perry Como and holds the record for the most guest shots on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In 1958, he appeared on the Patrice Munsel Show with his then roommate Lenny Bruce. The significance of that performance is that the duo referred to themselves as the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” predating Saturday Night Live’s usage of the phrase by seventeen years (although why anyone thought putting those two on television together was a good idea is a question for another day).

Image courtesy globegazette.com

In spite of a somewhat profane stand-up persona, Buddy began building a more family friendly career starting in the mid Fifties. He had his own television show for a season, Stanley, which co-starred a young Carol Burnett as his girlfriend and featured a voice only character done by Paul Lynde. With that kind of a cast, you might think Stanley would be a big hit, but it struggled against more established shows in its time slot and failed to connect with audiences. In 1962, he played Marcellus Washburn to Robert Preston’s Harold Hill in the classic musical The Music Man. He teamed up with Mickey Rooney twice: 1961’s Everything’s Ducky and 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And he appeared with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in the second of their beach movies, Muscle Beach Party, in 1964.

Image copyright Disney

Buddy first joined the Disney family in 1968. As the lovable artist and racer Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug, he was introduced to a whole new generation of fans. Twenty-one years later, Buddy gave voice to the well-intentioned but totally off base seagull, Scuttle, in The Little Mermaid. He would reprise the role in 2000 for The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea and for various theme park attractions and shows. For his participation in multiple iconic films for the company, Buddy would be declared an official Disney Legend in 2003, shortly after his death.

Image copyright Disney

After the release of the The Love Bug, Buddy continued to make frequent appearances just about everywhere. He was a semi-regular on the Sixties version of Hollywood Squares. He made late night audiences laugh on every talk show you can think of. He narrated the classic Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost in 1979 (he was the groundhog in that as well). He spent three years as the spokesman for Lay’s Potato Chips. He booked hundreds of stand-up gigs and eventually had his son, Sandy, as his opener on them. And he took on a handful of big screen roles including himself as Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooged and a pawn shop owner in Paulie.

In the early Nineties, Buddy got bad news from his doctor in the form of a severe heart disease diagnosis. Not only did he refuse to even consider bypass surgery, he also developed diabetes during the same decade. Neither disease seemed to slow him down much for almost a decade. Then, in mid-June 2003, Buddy suffered a stroke that proved to be too much for his ailing body. A week later, on June 30, 2003, the brash comedian who recovered from a laughless debut to enjoy a six-decade long career passed away in his beach home in Malibu, California. He was 78.