“Why Danny Kaye Is Laughing...”
Times Daily – Nov. 27, 1961
By: Dick Kleiner (Newspaper Enterprise Assn.)
NEW YORK – (NEA) – Comedian Danny Kaye generally is a serious-
Kaye paused a moment.
“Of course,” he began. “I’m worried about the state of the world like anybody else. But let me explain it this way.
“I remember a convention I had with Bosley Crowther, the film critic, after my picture, ‘Me and the Colonel,’ came out. That picture was a fiasco. I don’t even think they made enough to pay for the parking lot. But Crowther had given it a nice review, except that he wrote he didn’t think the plight of the Jews under Nazi Germany was a source of humor.
“So I met him at some luncheon or other and we discussed it for an hour. I told him he couldn’t understand why it was a source of humor, because he wasn’t a Jew. I told him that through all the centuries, whenever things were at their most depraved, there was humor. The Jews laughed in the concentration camps—when they weren’t crying. If they hadn’t laughed, none of them could have survived.
“Today, the same thing holds true. If you took the state of the world seriously—completely, absolutely seriously—you would just stand still. The only thing we can do is go about our business as best we can. And my business is comedy.”
So Danny continues to make people laugh, as he did on his recent TV special. He calls TV “the box” and enjoys it, as a viewer as well as a performer. He feels doing specials, as he does, is harder than doing a series, because a series gives a performer a chance to establish a formula he can fall back on.
“This way,” he says, “I’m on only a year and they expect me to walk on water.”
[the rest of the article was omitted as it did not pertain to Danny]