Lahr, Bert (1895-1967)

Vaudeville comedian Bert Lahr devoted most of his six decade career to portraying hapless, reckless, and uproariously funny characters who came to life through the contortions of his "India rubber face" and his exaggerated pantomime. The undisputed "King of Burlesque" transformed quizzical mimicry to an art form; he preferred the vaudeville stage to both the cinema and serious theater. It is therefore one of the great ironies of American entertainment that Lahr is best remembered for two roles outside his preferred medium. As The Cowardly Lion in the musical film The Wizard of Oz (1939), he has captivated generations with his humble search to become the courageous "King of the Forest." In Samuel Beckett's enigmatic drama Waiting for Godot (1956), Lahr, as the tatterdemalion Estragon—in the words of theater critic Brooks Atkinson—seemed "to stand for all the stumbling, bewildered people of the earth who go on living without knowing why." While these two roles helped make Lahr a household name, his greatest contributions were on the comic stage as a contemporary of Ed Wynn, Bobby Clark, Louis Mann, and the irascible W.C. Fields.

Lahr's origins were modest. He was born Irving Lahrheim on August 13, 1895, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. At the age of fourteen, he began to appear in bit roles in vaudeville. He debuted on Broadway in Delmar's Revels in 1927 and went on to star in dramatic productions of Flying High, Hot-Cha, Life Begins at 8:40, and Hold Everything. A hard worker with a fastidious eye for detail, Lahr capitalized on his bulbous nose and clown mouth to carve out a distinctive niche in a crowded comic market. His on-stage trademark was an overstated humility. "Laughter is never too far away from tears," he explained in an interview. "You will cry at a peddler much easier than you would cry at a woman dressed in ermine who had just lost her whole family."

Lahr gained widespread acclaim in Du Barry Was a Lady (1940) for his depiction of a washroom attendant who is drugged and while unconscious dreams he is King Louis XV of France. The New York Times hailed Lahr as "the most versatile comedian in the business" and argued that he was "not only likeable and funny, which are the primary essentials of a comic, but [also] skillful and accomplished, with extraordinary range." Brooks Atkinson compared him favorably to blockbuster stars Eddie Wynn, Victor Moore, and Jimmy Durante. Lahr drew similar praise for reinventing the role of M. Boniface in Georges Feydeau's Hotel Paradiso (1957) and as the title character in Ben Jonson's Volpone (1964). Critic Walter Kerr, writing in Life magazine in 1964, noted "something religious" in Lahr's humor and attributed his sympathetic humor to a face that had taken on "the contours of a Byzantine cathedral." This "sacred" element became increasingly apparent in Lahr's later roles in The Fantastiks (1966), Thomson's Ghost (1968), and The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968).

Yet The Wizard of Oz and Waiting for Godot proved to be Lahr's lasting legacy to American entertainment. In Oz, he played a double role: in the opening and closing segments of the film, he portrays a Kansas farmhand who urges Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) to have courage. During the main sequence of the movie, he plays The Cowardly Lion who accompanies Dorothy, the brainless Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), and the heartless Tin Man (Jack Hailey) on their eventful pilgrimage to the Emerald City of Oz. As the Lion, he dreams of becoming "King of the Forest" and earning the respect of rabbits and chipmunks. Eventually, the Wizard presents him with a testimonial—but not before Lahr delivers one of the most celebrated comic soliloquies in cinematic history:

Courage! What makes a King out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the Sphinx the Seventh Wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got? Courage.

Beckett's Godot offered Lahr another opportunity to test his range. The play itself was a mystery wrapped in an enigma, an absurdist blend of Joyce and Proust which Brooks Atkinson panned as "uneventful, maundering [and] loquacious." The one bright light, according to Atkinson, was Lahr's most glorious performance. Atkinson wrote that "Lahr is an actor in the pantomime tradition who has a thousand ways to move and a hundred ways to grimace in order to make the story interesting and theatrical, and touching, too." Lahr himself believed it was his greatest performance.

For the man who often said "there are very few good parts around," Lahr chose two of the greatest. When he died on December 4, 1967, he left behind a reputation for painstaking labor and unflagging determination. His efforts helped transform popular comedy from a mode of light entertainment into a widely respected art form. He reminded us all that "Comedy is serious business."

—Jacob M. Appel

Further Reading:

Funk, Lewis, and John E. Booth. Actors Talk About Acting. New York, Random House, 1961.

Gilman, Richard. Common and Uncommon Masks. New York, Random House, 1971.

Lahr, John. Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr. New York, Knopf, 1969.