by Anthony Slide

It is curious that youngsters today thrive on the Marx Brothers, imitating Groucho Marx's walk, leer, and voice at the drop of a hat, yet they have never heard of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough, who were equally funny (especially Bobby Clark, who was more outrageous and perhaps worthier of imitation than Groucho Marx). Clark was the funny man, with black glasses painted on his face, a cigar in one hand, and a leer and walk that were unique. On his head was a pork pie hat; he wore a short topcoat and he carried a cane which, sooner or later, would be used to smack a retreating chorus girl. Like Groucho, Bobby Clark was both witty and intelligent, announcing, for example, that the team's motto was "Omnia Cafeteria Rex" (We Eat All We Can Carry). McCullough was the straight man, although he could crack a joke when required. As a team, they delighted vaudeville, burlesque, and revue audiences from 1912 through the thirties, when they made occasional excursions into films, transferring some of their better sketches from the transience of the stage to the permanence of motion picture film.

No matter what production he appeared in, Bobby Clark would completely take over the show. While playing the comedy lead in a 1947 revival of Victor Herbert's Sweethearts, Clark provided his own gags and at one point confided to the audience, "Never was a thin plot so complicated." When appearing the the 1946 production of Moliere's The Would-Be Gentleman, he was told that the alphabet was divided into vowels and consonants, to which he responded, "That's only fair." In a 1942 production of The Rivals, directed by Eve Le Gallienne, he refused to stand still on the stage for a moment; while the other actors were delivering their lines, Bobby Clark was climbing over the furniture, deploring the pictures, leering and winking at the rest of the company, and carrying on imaginary conversations. Eventually Miss Le Gallienne said to him, "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." Bobby Clark's favorite dramatist was William Shakespeare, "because the clowns never get killed."

Both Clark and McCullough were born in Springfield, Ohio, Clark in 1888 and McCullough in 1883. Bobby Clark made his stage debut in May of 1902 at the Grand Opera House in Springfield as an attendant in Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks. The two met in grammar school in Springfield; they attended tumbling classes at the Springfield YMCA and practiced in each other's back yards. One day in 1900, Paul McCullough said. "I'll tell you what. Let's become partners. Maybe we can go into show business or something." They did. After placing an advertisement for their act in The Billboard and the New York Clipper, the two were invited to join first the Culhane, Chace, and Weston Minstrel Show, and later, Kalbfield's Greater California Minstrels. Eventually the pair joined Ringling Brothers' Circus. The story is told that Al Ringling complained about the amount of luggage that Clark carried with him and constantly added to, to which the comedian responded that he was only traveling with so much luggage because he had noticed the circus was advertised as "Bigger and Better". For six years, between 1906 and 1912, Clark and McCullough worked in various circuses as clowns and musical performers, billed as the Jazzbo Brothers, The Prosit Trio, or Sunshine and Roses.

Clark and McCullough (unlike most comedy duos, the funny man's name was first in the billing) entered vaudeville on December 2, 1912 at the Opera House in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with an act which consisted chiefly of trying to set a chair on top of a table. In those early years the act was chiefly pantomime with little or no dialogue. Later the pair developed a sketch in which Clark volunteered to act as a lion tamer in a circus if McCullough would wear a lion skin and substitute for an escaped lion. In the meantime, unknown to Clark, the lion returned, and he played out the sketch with such comments as "Great boy, great! You're doing a grand job;" "Put some life into it! We're getting fifty cents for this job" and "This is one of the classic performances of history. You even smell like a lion!"

Clark and McCullough toured in vaudeville for five years, until the 1917 White Rats strike against the vaudeville management, which the two supported. This ended with management's barring any vaudeville act which participated in the strike from their theatres. To continue working, Clark and McCullough entered burlesque, and there, rather than in vaudeville, achieved their greatest success. Clark once reminisced about burlesque comedy and noted, "We had a lot of good people then. It would be hard to pick out the best. Maybe Joe Welch with his Jewish comedy, or his brother Ben Welch, or Dave Marion, or maybe Frank Tinney. I used to catch them all whenever I could. They were good... better than anybody today, I think. Real funny fellows. Make you laugh like you meant it." A classic Clark and McCullough burlesque sketch was titled "The Courtroom," which had Clark as the judge at the trial of a strip-tease performer. Every time an attorney spoke, Clark would hit him with a bladder and shout, "You're trying to inject hokum into this case!" Eventually a fight broke out involving everyone in the courtroom, which was stopped only by the suggestion that the stripper demonstrate her act for the judge in his chambers. Clark returned soon after to announce, "Case settled out of court!"

Critic Howard Lindsay recalled, "The core of their vaudeville act was pantomime, but they learned the use of dialogue, the value of the feed line and the timing of the comedy line. They learned another lesson vaudeville could teach better than any branch of the entertainment field: economy. In the eighteen or twenty minutes a vaudeville act was allowed, there could not be a wasted word or an insignificant movement."

As burlesque stars, Clark and McCullough were featured in Puss, Puss, which opened at the Columbia Theatre in New York on December 9, 1918. Clark played Count Rolling No Moss, while McCullough was Baron Few Clothes, and the two sang "They Go Wild over Us" and "Spanish Onions," described as "a strong specialty." In addition, the pair made their London debut in Chuckles of 1922, which opened at the New Oxford Theatre on June 19th. From Chuckles of 1922, the team went into the 1922 edition of The Music Box Revue, which made them Broadway stars. In 1926, Clark and McCullough were starred in The Ramblers, set in a motion picture studio on the Mexican border.

Despite their fame on Broadway, Clark and McCullough were still not major headliners in vaudeville. They played the Capitol... which featured both vaudeville and films... in January of 1928, and Variety (January 11, 1928) commented that few in the audience knew who they were. However, it was not long before the audience was roaring with laughter, because, as Variety noted, "They cash in heavily on ability rather than on laurels gained through past successes." Audiences everywhere soon knew who Clark and McCullough were after their many film appearances between 1929 and 1935.

In the spring of 1936, the partners were resting; Clark in New York, and McCullough in a sanitarium in Massachusetts. They had just finished touring in a version of the revue Thumbs Up!, in which they had started on Broadway the previous year. On March 23, 1936, Paul McCullough walked into a barber's shop in Medford, Massachusetts, and ordered a shave. After the shave was finished, he picked up the razor and slashed his throat and wrists. He died two days later in a Boston hospital. "I think it was just something Paul couldn't help. Something that had been with him all the time and he didn't even know it," said Bobby Clark. Variety (April 1, 1936) noted that McCullough might have been only a straight man but "the fact that he was a vital part of the noted team was never doubted, least of all by Bobby Clark."

Clark remained in seclusion for several months, but he reappeared to play solo for the first time in the 1936 version of The Ziegfeld Follies. He sang "I Can't Get Started" with Gyspy Rose Lee and proved that even without McCullough he was as funny as ever. Bobby Clark worked continuously through the years, appearing in Streets of Paris (1939), Star and Garter (1942), Mexican Hayride (1944), As the Girls Go (1948), and Jollyanna (1952), among others. In 1956 he toured as Mephisto in Damn Yankees, playing it straight, except for the cigar... "It seems to me that the devil would smoke cigars," he explained.

For the last few years of his life, Bobby Clark lived in retirement in New York with his wife, Angele Gaignat, whom he had married in 1923. He died at his home on February 12, 1960. The leer that "lit up the whole theatre" was no more.

Copyright 1981 by Anthony Slide

originally published in The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers. Arlington House, 1981