Danny Kaye | Nov. 28, 1956

“Radio and Television”

Children Are The Same The World Over

The Portsmouth Times – Nov. 28, 1956

By: Danny Kaye

(EDITOR’S NOTE—While John Crosby is on vacation his column is being written by guests. Today’s writer is comedian Danny Kaye.)

“Ouch” and “ha-ha-ha” are the only words that are the same in every language. I discovered this while traveling 100,000 miles, visiting 32 countries and trying to get kids to laugh in 17 languages—none of which I speak.

Maybe I’d better explain myself a little more. For the last three years I have been operating as a sort of roving ambassador for an organization called the United Nations Children’s Fund—UNICEF, for short. This is a highly non-political branch of the U.N. with one very simple aim—that of eradicating sickness and hunger from all the children of the world.

I have made five trips abroad for UNICEF in the last three years on this sort of assignment. On my last trip, through Britain, France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Israel, Morocco and Nigeria, I was accompanied by a CBS camera crew filming a special 190-minute “See It Now” broadcast for Edward R. Murrow and producer Fred W. Friendly (to be seen Sunday).

This presented special problems. Not only must I communicate with children who didn’t speak my language but I must be equally understandable to millions of TV viewers.

I don’t know what kind of an ambassador I make. I know little about diplomacy and even less about protocol. But I do get along pretty well with kids. That’s because I follow one cardinal rule. If you want to communicate with a child, put yourself on a child’s level. Become a child with him. Sing his songs, dance his dances, play his games.

Frequently I find it helps to allow the child to teach something to you. In Italy, I communicated with a group of young polio convalescents through the medium of a Neapolitan folk song, “Ciu, Ciu Bella”, which they taught me. They roared with laughter over my attempts to master the Italian phrases, such as “cantara la cansome,” which I insisted on prouncing, “Cansome la Cantara.” To a child, this was excruciatingly funny.

In Spain, I got my message across by impersonating a Flamenco dancer whose knee buckles under him the first time he stamps his foot on the stage; in Turkey I taught a group of school children to sing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” which they learned phonetically.

Sometimes, in getting children to laugh, you get quite a few laughs yourself. One little girl in the chorus sang “My Bonnie” so excruciatingly flat it reminded me of scratching my fingernails over a blackboard.

In my stage show I do an impersonation of a night club singer singing “Begin the Beguine” off-key, and this little girl sounded like she was doing an impersonation of me. I “broke up” and the audience roared, but, thankfully, I was able to make it appear the audience was laughing at me.

In Yugoslavia, I sang jazz “riffs” to an orchestra and led them through a hopped-up version of “I Never Knew.” In Israel I did a pantomime of an American cowboy movie. In Nigeria I hopped into the midst of a native dance and added a little of the Lindy Hop to their tribal rituals.

One particular incident stands out in my memory. A member of the president’s staff in Turkey was sent to inform me of an appointment. He found me in the schoolyard of an orphanage, covered with dust from the yard, wearing one of the children’s caps sidewise on my head and leading a “follow the leader” snake-dance through the antics of an oran-utang who has taken on too much cocoanut juice.

The emissary stared at my grime-streaked face for a moment, then cleared his throat decorously and announced:

“Your excellency’s appointment with the president is for 5:30 this afternoon.”

In addition to the president of Turkey. I also visited and spoke with Prime Minister Eden of Great Britain, the president of France, President Gronchi of Italy, the King and Queen of Greece, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Prime Minister Ben Gurion of Israel and the Sultan of Morocco.

It would be hard to imagine more diversified political beliefs than are reflected by this group. Yet, each man said almost exactly the same thing about children—that children represent the future of the world and unless the adults of the world assume the responsibility for providing these children with the opportunity to grow into useful maturity, there would be no world in years to come.

It’s logical, however, that prime ministers, presidents, kings, and queens should react the same to children, since all children are basically alike. They even look alike.

We shot films of kids in every country and then we looked at this film in a CBS projection room after we got back. Scene followed scene and I found myself asking producer Fred Friendly:

“What country was this in? I don’t remember it.”

“Gosh, I don’t know. You can’t tell by looking,” he would answer.

If you turned off the sound the kids we photographed in Turkey could have been from Yugoslavia or Greece or France or Britain, or South Bend, Indiana, for that matter.

Only once on my trips did I think my rules for communicating with children had failed me. A little girl in a polio bath in Greece didn’t seem to dig my language at all. She stared at me stone-faced while I stood on my head, sang three choruses of “Minnie the Moocher” and did a spine-snapping rhumba.

Determined not to get this little blonde-haired, blue-eyed Greek goddess get away without a smile, I reached deep into my bag of entertainer’s tricks and put on a show that would have cost her $5.50 on Broadway. She never cracked a smile.

Months later, back in America, I learned the little lady’s game. Looking at the film we had taken I saw that when I turned my back to her and resigned myself to defeat, she looked into the TV camera and gave out the biggest grin in the world!

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