This series of invaluable articles from The New Yorker has been generously contributed by Craig Gustafson

BOBBY CLARK, a squat, graying man with a painfully worried expression, is among the last of the great clowns. His kind of comedy --- broad, impolite, irreverent, frequently bawdy --- is vanishing from the theatre, and it is not likely to reappear soon. Clark prepared for Broadway in various schools now permanently closed. Starting as a tumbler and bugle blower with a minstrel show, he left it for the circus, transferred to vaudeville, and moved on to burlesque. Of these, minstrel shows and vaudeville have expired and burlesque has developed a familiar rattle, thus drying up three prime sources of comic genius. Any comedians of the future will spring, if not from the circus or the stage itself, from radio, movies, or night clubs, a prospect that some people would rather not contemplate. Present-day comedy, in the opinion of many critics, is suffering from a dangerously low blood count; like Russian wolfhounds and European royalty, it has been over-refined Clark is violently hostile to this trend, and has been ever since he graduated, a little reluctantly, to musicals and straight comedies. After forty-five years as an entertainer, he still has an affectionate regard for the bladder, the slapstick, and the pratfall, and he enjoys smacking a retreating chorus girl with his cane, a property with which his celebrated antic rushes are closely identified.

Clark's worried expression arises from his constant state of indecision over what makes people laugh. By now, he has learned a whole catalogue of rules, but the job, he has concluded, will never be finished. In a way, the study is comparable to Mark Twain's grapple with the Mississippi; the river keeps shifting slightly and requires different kinds of treatment under changing conditions. When Clark gets a laugh in the wrong place, he quizzes the cast between acts. "What was it?" he will cry. "What made them laugh? The answer may have some dim connection with current affairs or with the weather. If, for example, rain is falling when the audience arrives, he expects fairly normal reactions all evening. If a shower develops during the show; however, the house acquires a kind of croupy tension, subject to odd quiets and hideous, unexpected cackles. The women may be trying to remember if they closed the windows, and the men may be wondering where they left the lawnmower.

Clark favors removing all obstacles to unrestrained laughter. At the dress rehearsal of his present show, the rather elderly Victor Herbert musical "Sweethearts," he put the book --- and by extension, every musical-comedy book --- in its place by stepping to the footlights and remarking confidentially, "Never was a thin plot so complicated." The company, relieved of a mounting concern over clarity, relaxed. The line was retained, and the subsequent audiences have realized, along with the star, that the play is by no means the thing. It is probably fortunate that Herbert did not live to see the revival of "Sweethearts." Clark's treatment of this mushy old tunebag is one of the most rewarding cases on record of dramatic le'se-majeste'. At the start, Clark generally plans to play any role just about as the author conceived it, but his mind keeps wandering outside the script. He has a lightning-quick eye for improvements, not only in plays he is doing himself but in those that he sees or reads. Not long ago, reading Shakespeare, he fell to musing about the sprightly effect of having Lady Macbeth walk over a Coney island skirt blower, and he couldn't help wondering if the witches should be equipped with trombones.

In "Sweethearts," as in all of Clark's shows, he displays enough of his traditional stage business to satisfy the Bobby Clark cultists and then branches out, paying occasional attention to the story. He wears his painted-on glasses, which have been his chief identifying symbol for thirty-five years, in all the scenes, and for his initial appearance, early in the first act, he wears his most familiar ensemble --- an absurdly short covert-cloth topcoat, a porkpie hat, a lighted cigar, and the cane. Clark's first entrances are always pretty much alike. In "Sweethearts," he sprints on from backstage, brandishing his cane and crouching low, and easily routs a rather formidable group of swordsmen, then he rushes to the footlights and spits his cigar in the general direction of the audience. He catches it, replaces it in his mouth, and spits it out several more times. As a rule, he misses it once, then, with his cane, takes several vicious cuts at the nearby members of the cast, usually women, who, at least in his mind, may be trying to steal it. Clark is not entirely joking when he warns these people away from his cigar. He has a distinguished economical streak, and he plans to finish the cigar after the show. When the scene is over, he gives it to the dresser he has employed for eighteen years, a colored man named Tom Brown, who carefully puts it out, scrapes off the vaseline Clark has rubbed on to make it spit smoothly, and wraps it in Kleenex. The cigars the comedian smokes cost him a dime apiece, and he remembers the lean years of his itinerant youth, when a dime meant a meal or a night's lodging.

Clark's addiction to the cane is a carry-over from his circus days, during which he practiced juggling on the side. Canes are usually the hallmark of former jugglers. W. C. Fields once said he felt uncomfortable on-stage without a cane; he liked to carry one behind him, in an upthrust position and, in a. scene of leave-taking, erroneously place his hat on it. The ensuing confused search, often involving getting down on the floor and feeling under tables and beds, was his favorite bit of business. Fundamentally, Fields' cane, frock coat, elongated hat, daintily turned-back gloves, and exhausted carnation were a burlesque on upper-class pomp, whereas Clark uses the cane as a combination weapon, golf club, and drum major's baton. To round off a funny line, he will twirl the cane, then let it slip through his fingers and catch it by the tip, and the next second he may rush gallantly across the stage to lift a dropped handkerchief into the wings with a neat mashie shot. He is periodically threatening to smack some female member of the cast with his cane, holding the curved handle uppermost. For a reason that he thinks will always remain indefinable, a menacing attitude with the pointed end is not funny, while brandishing the curved handle aloft will invariably provoke laughter. Clark's sudden defensive furies, with their implication of violence, always dissolve into a beaming, victorious smile, since he is never attacked, and the audience somehow feels that it was all in fun and that the girl could really lick him if she tried. The persecution complex is an affectation of many comedians. Jimmy Durante's funniest songs are recitals of vague bullying, injury, and assorted indignities. His hearers are led to believe that an indeterminate number of knaves have been making things extremely tough for him lately. Wearing a look of terrible outrage, he explains matters, becoming increasingly livid as the garbled tale unfolds, his mouth screwed up, his brows drawn together; and his eyes reduced to angry little black beads. Then, like Clark, he gains a sudden ascendancy over his enemies and brings, the song to a triumphant and carefree close.

Clark's comedy is unique because his manner always suggests that despite mankind's faults and presumptions it is easy to have a wonderful time. He plainly finds life a continuous frolic. In "Sweethearts," he is on the stage better than sixty per cent of the time, occupied with such typically Victor Herbert adventures as heaving laundry onto a rooftop clothesline, doing headstands on a Zilanian love seat, kicking his inamorata's train, gargling lasciviously at the soubrettes, and producing frightening noises with a bugle. He reduces a scene of elegant court life to absurdity by mincing around with a lace handkerchief dangling over his nose, and he puts on a monk's costume that is crowned by a wig so tangled, greasy, and generally revolting that it might have been designed for Pap Finn. Clark expends a prodigious amount of labor to achieve his frolicsome stage manner. He will toil for days over a trivial bit of business. After two or three rehearsals, his scripts are covered with odd autobiographical notations, scrawled in the margins, on the back, at the top and bottom, and between the lines. "At this point, I take my snuffbox," he wrote in his script for "The Would-Be Gentleman," in which he appeared just before "Sweethearts," "and throw it in the pocket of the lackey on the other side of the stage. This can be done. I have been practicing." The comedian had been arriving at the theatre early and pelting the forbearing Brown with snuffboxes in an effort to perfect his aim and settle on a handy throwing size. Several years ago, as Bob Acres in "The Rivals," he had a characteristic whim to use a whip as a prop in one scene. Another member of the cast, while delivering a line one evening, accidentally dropped a book, which bounced in a peculiar way. The audience laughed, and Clark promptly unfurled his whip and belabored the book soundly, increasing the laughter. During the remaining five months of the play, he spent much of his time trying to make the book bounce again. The straight man obligingly continued to drop it, while Clark stood ready with the whip. For reasons of its own, the book decided to lie low. Clark tried other books, searching for literature with more elasticity, but nothing much happened. He even had a rubber book made, but it bounced too high. "Why don't you give it up, Bobby?" someone in the cast would ask him. "Go ahead and whip the book anyhow." "We'll whip it when it bounces," Clark would reply savagely, and try a copy of "Robinson Crusoe" from a new angle.

EVA LE GALLIENNE, who directed "The Rivals," very early gave up trying to direct Clark. The comedian arrived for his first rehearsal on a dead run, several days late, having been detained in another show. He was carrying his new part, which he had recopied, in triple-space, and annotated with a few tentative suggestions about handsprings, headstands, whips, and odd clothing. To get into the spirit of things, he began to dash back and forth across the stage, crying his lines en route and surveying the establishment for comic business opportunities. Looking worried, he jotted down his findings on the triple-spaced script. During the opening scene, one of the actors read from a book an uncommonly long passage on love. For the first few minutes, Clark listened patiently, with a minimum of hitching at his trousers and kicking at imaginary objects on the floor; then his face took on an expression of stupefied incredulity. This persisted to the end of the speech, when he inquired of Miss Le Gallienne, "What am I supposed to do while that goes on?" "It's customary to stand still," she replied respectfully; "but it's up to you." Several times during the first rehearsal he asked Miss Le Gallienne's opinion on lines and business. At, length she said, "I've never worked with anybody like you, Mr. Clark. I think you'd do a better job by yourself. I'll just try to keep the other actors out of your way." Thus unbound, the comedian began to lay out his part like a one-man medicine show. He took particular pains with the passage on love. "By the time the show opened," says Haila Stoddard, who played Lydia Languish in this production of "The Rivals," "it had developed into a Clark masterpiece." While the other actor read the speech, with commendable feeling, Clark clambered over furniture, inspected and deplored pictures, conducted fictitious conversations, accompanied by leers, winks, and threatening looks, with other actors, and had an all-around, relaxing good time.

Clark's best scene in "The Rivals" was built up out of a situation intrinsically barren. The business of the play provided that Clark sit down, in a rage, and write a letter, at O'Trigger's instigation. He sat at a desk with numerous drawers, on a high-backed Restoration chair. Starting with one quill in the inkstand, he kept adding others during rehearsals. On opening night, he was more than bountifully equipped. As Clark began to write the letter, his rage mounted. His first quill seemingly didn't work, and he sent it flying across the stage. Successive quills didn't work either, and he sent them flying, too. "At one point," Miss Stoddard recalled recently, "the air was literally clogged with flying quills." Clark finally took the stand that the imperfect quills could be laid to O'Trigger, and began to growl at him. Throwing back his head, he ran through half a dozen growls indigenous to the barnyard and then through several indigenous to himself. "I counted eleven prolonged growls," Miss Stoddard says, "all of them different." Clark then buckled down to his work. He wrote a word, threw sand on it, banged three or four drawers, and climbed up the back of his chair. Leaning over it, he tried another word, hastily covered it with sand, and kicked the drawers he had previously overlooked. He finished the letter while forming a kind of bridge, his feet hooked over the chair, his body in midair, and his elbows and chin on the desk. The cast had seen only a skeleton of the act before the opening, and enjoyed it as much as the audience. Each performance the entire company of "The Rivals" assembled in the wings to watch Clark do his letter-writing scene. "All of us realized," one of the principals said afterward, "that it was the kind of theatre you see once or twice in a lifetime."

Clark plays to the cast, for the most part. Naturally, because of the footlights, he is unable to see the people out in front and can only listen for their laughter; hence he uses his colleagues as his major audience. Directors have been known to deplore this practice. There is never any surefire method of telling what he will do next, and even during performances, actors are sometimes tripped up by comic surprises. Quite often, in a Clark show, the cast begins to identify itself with the audience, and things get out of hand. A singer in "Mexican Hayride," a musical in which Clark appeared a couple of years ago, once said, "I feel kind of guilty, as though I had sneaked in under the tent or something." A lively, appreciative cast stimulates Clark to a state of near lunacy. After ad-libbing a line or unexpectedly kicking over a table, he will pause while his associates knock off to laugh. If the reception is satisfactory, he will beam, nod slightly, then sprint around the stage, happily improvising, wrecking the set, further demoralizing the players, and aging the producer. In "The Rivals," during the duel scene, in which O'Trigger coaches Clark, it was not uncommon for O'Trigger, after stepping off his five paces, to wheel and find that Clark had left the stage entirely. About all the stranded duellist could do was mentally flip a coin, go to one wing, and call, "Mr. Acres! Oh, Mr. Acres!" As a rule, after a few repetitions of this agonized bray, Clark would poke his head out from the opposite wing, looking at once surprised and annoyed, as though he had been interrupted while taking a bath.

CLARK'S comedy is predominantly visual. He has the reputation among show people of being able to extract the utmost comic effect from a line, but he is essentially a pantomimist. One good prop, he feels, is worth a thousand words. In his opinion, dialogue should consist in the main of whatever comments he may choose to make on what he has just done physically. His devotion to props amounts to an obsession. Offstage, he picks up practically every grotesque portable object he can get away with and not be arrested. His progress down a street is eccentric in the extreme. He steps along briskly, like a man who knows where he is going, but he is given to sudden dartings back and forth. He will leap to the gutter like a frightened mare, peer down briefly, perhaps bend over and pocket a discarded faucet, look around furtively, then move on a few yards, where he may climb onto a scaffold after a handful of shavings.

These lateral expeditions are sometimes due to Clark's long-standing curiosity about secondhand cigars. A powerful smoker, he has known periods when a cigar only slightly charred on one end was a welcome sight. He acquired the habit of inspecting any stray cigars that came within view. Today, if he spots one in exceptionally good shape, he may give it a speculative nudge with his cane, but he never picks it up. The fact is, Clark has not shot a snipe, as the phrase goes, since the early nineteen-hundreds.

When, in his youth, Clark was with Ringling Brothers, he accumulated sixteen pieces of luggage, full of things like stovepipe joints, false teeth, buggy whips, ladders, corsets, embalming fluid, mustard plasters, and fire tongs. Word finally reached Al Ringling that getting Clark's stuff on and off the trains was almost as much trouble as loading the elephants. He looked the boy up and said, "Son, if you don't throw some of this junk away, we'll have to cut our itinerary." Clark replied that he had kept adding luggage because he had noticed that the show was being billed as "Bigger and Better." For some reason, Mr. Ringling was unconvinced by this logic, and Clark promised to scale down. Before the next jump, he abandoned a small carpetbag containing a worn-out French horn and a fox-hunting coat with one lapel missing.

Clark collects props indiscriminately, but he is fiercely particular about how each of them is used. To his way of thinking, treating props casually is as contemptible as beating a horse. At one point in "The Would-be Gentleman," the script required him to toss a gold coin across the stage. Michael Todd, the producer of the show, who has the routine regard for money, noticed that the stage floor was somewhat chinky, and he provided a fifty-cent piece. Clark stopped a rehearsal to insist upon authenticity. "Bring out a ten-dollar gold piece," he said. "A child would spot the deception in this hollow ring." "As a matter of fact," Todd says, "a committee of experts from the Mint couldn't have distinguished between the two sounds, and, as far as that goes, neither could Bobby. He just wanted things perfect." Clark is a great believer in dust. Dust, he feels, often adds the soupcon of absurdity that transforms the amusing into the hilarious. Whacking a dowager with a board is funny, he thinks, but it is much funnier if a whiff of dust is raised at the point of contact. The comedian once labored for three weeks, growing increasingly worried, to achieve the exact pitch of dustiness he wanted in his jacket. He first tried small, specially made cloth sacks filled with flour and pinned under his lapels and in his pockets, but this method was unreliable. When he slapped himself, a sack was likely to spring a leak and emit a milky plume, like skywriting. Next, he spent a week or so emptying the tea out of tea bags and putting flout in them. These didn't work out very well, either. They were too porous, and emitted a cloud of such proportions that it was difficult to locate Clark and the other actors in his vicinity for a considerable period. Eventually, he found some light rubber bulbs in a magic shop, and these proved satisfactory.

One of his friends feels that the final proof of Clark's reverence for props may be found in his preparation for a scene in "Mexican Hayride. " In this scene he was to enact the part of a Mexican woman selling tortillas. Reflecting on all title possibilities of the colorful peasant garb, the comedian quickly foresaw that his costume would need a set of outsized teeth. His first impulse was to acquire this equipment cheaply in a novelty shop, but after a struggle his perfectionism triumphed. He went to a dentist, had a fitting, picked the fangs up a few days later, and paid a bill of considerable magnitude out of his own pocket. "I have grave doubts," said the friend, "whether Bobby would have made any such outlay for a real dental emergency.

Clark is strongly disposed to measure things. Reporting onstage for rehearsals of a new play, he usually arrives with several valises full of assorted traps and refuse, unpacks, then fishes a tape measure out of his pocket and begins to take soundings. Sometimes on all fours, sometimes lying on his back, and occasionally high up in the stage rigging, he ascertains the distance between windows, the length of sofas, the height of stairs, and the exact position of a cuspidor, and once in a while he will add in the dimensions of the members of the company, to be on the safe side. There is a definite purpose to these investigations; Clark may be finding out if he has enough room to crack a whip or swing a cat. He does each measuring job thoroughly, his face a rare study in pessimism --- puckered lines between his brows, a concerned look in his eyes, and his mouth fixed in a soundless, worried whistle.

The comedian's demand for flawless mechanics extends to his own dressing room. Early in the course of rehearsals, he dismantles the room's lighting system and installs a substitute arrangement, principally involving tomato cans. He saws the cans in two, places light bulbs in the halves, and sticks them around the room in places that suit him. "I've looked them over," one of his directors has said, "and I don't think they're as good as the original lights. But they make Bobby happy, and that's the main thing." Clark will give his best professional attention to props for even an informal, nonprofessional occasion. As "The Rivals" settled down to its run, Miss. Stoddard made a practice of serving afternoon tea on matinee days. Clark unfailingly turned up, to everyone's surprise, since he had seemed preoccupied and aloof offstage, and later the stagehands began to attend. After a few weeks, the stagehands shyly asked Miss Stoddard if they could serve tea on one matinee day, and she consented. The table was beautifully arranged with a lace cover, a splendid tea set, and bowls of fruit and cakes. Clark was among the first arrivals,. His expression was one of thoughtful interest as the guests bit into wax apples, Crockery pears, and rubber cookies. Although Clark never officially accepted credit, he was generally considered to have been the host. Critics agree that his fine discrimination with funny properties is largely instinctive. He will instantly choose from a group of hats --- the only one that will look funny in a particular scene. Another cane twirler, Charlie Chaplin, also displayed, in his pre-evangelical period, this priceless theatrical gift. Clark has always admired Chaplin's selection of a wood-burning range as an object to drop out of a second-story window onto a persecutor's head. The preposterousness of a range falling on a man's head and inconveniencing him only briefly stimulates the most humorless imagination. Another Chaplin prop that Clark respects was the boiled boot off which the movie comedian and a companion dined in a snowbound Alaskan shack. The, fastidious attention with which Chaplin turned and tested the boot in the pot; and the delicacy with which he later removed the nails, as though they were the bones of a fish, have been mentioned by many comedians as the work of a virtuoso with properties.

CLARK attributes his own dexterity with props, and much of his speed, to various activities of his childhood. His beginnings were not aggressively humble, nor were they conducive to developing a comic spirit. He was born, Robert Edwin Clark, in 1888, in the rectory of the First Episcopal Church in Springfield, Ohio. His paternal grandfather, Ezra Clark, with whom the family was living, was the sexton. His father, who died when the boy was six, was a Pullman conductor and, as far as Clark can remember, never cracked a smile. Two or three early influences shaped the youngster's destiny. For one thing, his grandfather was preoccupied almost entirely with the winning of Masonic degrees. After an exhausting career, he had arrived, in the afternoon of his life, at a Masonic eminence believed to be unparalleled in Ohio. Draped in his robes and sprinkled with miscellaneous fraternal insignia, he was acknowledged to be quite a sight. Clark's admiration for the full-blown Ezra was limitless; he resolved that someday, God willing, he would find a costume to top his grandfather's. Thus far, he has been unsuccessful, but he keeps trying. Like other Springfield youths, he went to grammar school, and after school he delivered papers, worked in a machine shop, and sang in a boys' choir. Clark, who had a good voice, sat in the front row of the choir; frequently he got a beaming nod of approval from the choirmaster, who doubtless had no premonition that the child would one day be piping, for the Broadway congregations, "I'm Robert the Roue', from Reading, P.A."

Clark bought a bugle with his first savings and won an appointment to the Sons of Veterans' Drum & Bugle Corps. His father was a veteran only of occasional skirmishes with coach passengers who had sneaked into the Pullman, but the boy had extraordinary lung power and was made a sort of honorary son of a veteran. He used to practice the bugle along his paper route, generally giving a couple of rusty toots after he had flung a paper up on a porch. Clark was small for his age; he had to sprint along his route to finish in time for supper. He developed the habit of running in those years, and he is still at it; in addition to moving at furious speed on the stage, he often runs on the street, and he gives the impression that he is about to break out of starting blocks even while seated at a table. To save further time and avoid dog bites on the way, he became a finished performer at the long-distance throwing of folded papers. His hands were filled with papers, bugles, machine tools, and choir books as he dashed through his high-velocity youth; later on, it was easy for him to substitute the canes, cigars, whips, and snuffboxes. Clark changed grammar schools in the fourth grade and at the new one met a boy, four years older, named Paul McCullough, who owned a bugle but was really dedicated to tumbling. They became friends. Through McCullough, Clark started to attend tumbling classes at the local Y.M.C.A. They tumbled there in the afternoon and in McCullough's back yard at night and on Saturdays and Sundays. It was soon evident that they were going to be pretty good. Clark recalls that McCullough said, late one Sunday, "I'll tell you what. Let's become partners. Maybe we can go into show business or something." Clark agreed, and they decided to crowd in another hour's practice. A distinguished vaudeville team had just been formed, and one of the world's great comedians was on his way.

-ROBERT LEWIS TAYLOR

Copyright 1947 by The New Yorker Magazine

part II