Hackett, Buddy

(b. 31 August 1924 in Brooklyn, New York; d. 30 June 2003 in Malibu, California), stand-up comedian and comic actor known for sometimes bawdy and ethnically charged material who rose to national prominence in the 1950s and enjoyed a long career in nightclubs, films, television, and on the stage.

Born Leonard Hacker, Hackett was raised in Borough Park, a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. His father, Philip Hacker, was a furniture upholsterer; his mother, Anna (Geller) Hacker, worked in the garment trades. One of two children in the family, Hackett attended public schools including New Utrecht High School, where he played on the offensive line for the varsity football team and was a member of the drama club, activities he preferred to academic study. With the United States at war, soon after his 1942 high school graduation Hackett enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving three years at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

Hackett’s real education, which prepared him for show business, took place in the Jewish resort hotels of the Catskill Mountains in the area known as the “Borscht Belt.” The comedian began working in hotel dining rooms as a young teenager, eventually graduating from waiter to entertainer. Following the path of the comedians Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, and other stars who had come up through the ranks, he became a hotel social director or tummler (a Yiddish word translated as “tumult maker”). As such, he was expected to entertain guests not only on stage but also poolside, at the dinner table, on the dance floor, or wherever the opportunity arose.

Hackett was very much a part of this culture, intuitively knowing the interests and content limits of his audiences, whose enthusiasm or toleration for blue material was generally greater than that of mainstream audiences. Moreover, he had use of a dependable (if inexplicable) convention of Jewish-American comedy: no joke told in English was considered out-of-bounds if its key words and punch line were delivered in Yiddish. Unsure if he could perform effectively under mainstream conditions, Hackett continued to work the Catskill resort hotels in the summer (and at non–show business jobs during the off-season) into his mid-twenties.

In 1948 Frank Faske, a Brooklyn automobile dealer with hopes of becoming a talent agent, approached Hackett with a plan to advance both of their careers. If Hackett would take him on as manager, Faske would hire comedy writers to create a mainstream nightclub act. The comedian agreed and Faske booked him a string of New York City–area engagements. The results were uniformly disastrous. The two parted company and Hackett moved to Los Angeles to start over.

Desperate to save his failing career, Hackett resolved to free himself of inhibitions. He quickly emerged on the West Coast as a fearless stand-up, ready to take on any topic for a laugh. Nightclub audiences loved the bizarre juxtaposition between the comedian’s short stature (he stood five feet, six inches tall) and infantile high-pitched voice and the crude, often lewd language and imagery of his monologues. By the mid-1950s he was selling out prestige rooms all over the country and earning more than $3,000 a week. In an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1959, Hackett told host Jack Paar that he thought people found him funny because he came across as a cartoon rather than as a person.

Toilet humor and frank sexual storytelling were Hackett trademarks, but they were not the only controversial aspects of his work. The comedian’s most popular stand-up bit was probably his extended first-person monologue as a Chinese waiter. The laughs came principally from dialect humor (“You get one from co-rum A and one from co-rum B, mis-tah. No subsatooshun”). Hackett’s recording of the routine on a 1957 comedy album, How You Do?, helped make it a Billboard top-100 comedy album.

Successful by any measure as a nightclub performer and able to fill venues in Las Vegas, Nevada, and other show business hotspots for most of his career, Hackett attempted to cross over into more lucrative performance media but experienced a series of false starts. The playwright Sidney Kingsley, who had seen Hackett perform at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, personally solicited him for a new Broadway farce, Lunatics and Lovers, offering him with no audition the role of Dan Cupid. The show began a two-year run at the Broadhurst Theater on 13 October 1954, with the New York Times singling out Hackett for the “exuberance” of his performance. A flurry of offers came his way, but Hackett declined, claiming that a persistent fear of forgetting his lines made theater a torturous experience for him. He appeared in only two more Broadway plays during his career. Viva Madison Avenue (1960) closed after one night. His only starring role, as a Coney Island fortune-teller in I Had a Ball (1964), took in more than $1 million in advance sales based on the comedian’s stand-up reputation. It opened at the Martin Beck Theater on 16 December 1964, but after several performances audience disappointment was palpable. Hackett rescued the production from an early closing by coming onstage after the final act each evening to give the audience what it had paid to see: a stand-up set. The show ran through June.

The same pattern marked Hackett’s television career. Good breaks came his way early. In 1952 he was selected by Jackie Gleason as a second banana for Gleason’s top-rated Columbia Broadcasting System variety show, and in 1956 he was cast in the title role of Stanley, a National Broadcasting Company sitcom set in a hotel newsstand. Hackett had difficulty sticking to the script, throwing in off-the-cuff one-liners at will and refusing to pay attention to the problems he created for costar Carol Burnett or the show’s production personnel, who had a schedule of commercials to follow during the live broadcast. The series was canceled before the end of the season. Hackett appeared on dozens of television programs during his career, playing guest roles on sitcoms and dramas and appearing often on game shows, including What’s My Line? and Password, whose producer, Mark Goodson, called him the best celebrity contestant ever to play the game. But Hackett was not able to find a welcoming format on television until the era of cable television, when looser content standards opened the door to several stand-up comedy specials on Home Box Office, including the celebrated Buddy Hackett—Live and Uncensored (1983).

It went much the same for Hackett in the movies. He gave a well-regarded performance as a crude southern rustic in God’s Little Acre (1958), an adaptation of the American writer Erskine Caldwell’s novel. His performance in the screen version of The Music Man (1962) as Marcellus Washburn, a con man from Brooklyn following the straight and narrow in Iowa, is among the film’s highlights. But after a cameo role in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Hackett’s movie career fizzled. He appeared in perhaps a dozen more features, including Muscle Beach Party (1964) and Hey Babe! (1980). Ironically for a “dirty word” comedian, Hackett’s most successful work in Hollywood was in children’s films, including The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) and The Love Bug (1968). His distinctive vocal presence was a natural for animated films, and Hackett’s voiceover efforts included Jack Frost (made for television, 1979) and both The Little Mermaid and its sequel (1989, 2000).

During the mid-1980s the comedian suffered what he described as a long-term lapse into stage fright, and he curtailed his work schedule. He seemed to snap out of it in the late 1990s, making appearances on several television series, including a regular role on Action (1999), a Fox Broadcasting Company sitcom set in the front office of a Hollywood film studio, and a regular Tuesday appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn (2001–2002).

Hackett married Sherry Cohen, a Brooklyn dance teacher (professionally known as Sherry Dubois) whom he had met in the Catskills, on 12 June 1955. The couple had three children and lived in Malibu, California. A crack shot, Hackett enjoyed shooting on a pistol range as well as golfing and skiing. He was involved in a variety of charitable activities, including fund-raising for the National Tay-Sachs and Related Diseases Foundation and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. During the last years of his life, Hackett and his wife developed a strong interest in animal welfare and funded a facility in Los Angeles for the humane treatment of stray cats. Hackett died at home of complications from diabetes. His remains were cremated.

Hackett published a book of his poetry, The Naked Mind of Buddy Hackett (1974), and he collaborated with the cartoonist Gahan Wilson, supplying captions and other text for The Truth about Golf and Other Lies (1968). Obituaries are in the New York Times (2 July 2003) and Variety (14 July 2003).

David Marc