1 A Ziegfeld Follies headliner who starred in two iconic Broadway musicals of the Jazz Age, a pioneering radio and television funnyman, a recording artist who introduced a plethora of popular hits, and one of the most bankable Hollywood stars of the Great Depression, Eddie Cantor was a singing comedian who spent over four decades prancing across media borders to the delight of millions.1 The full implications of why Cantor has, in the words of his biographer, “become the most forgotten star of the twentieth century” are beyond the range of a single article.2 In regard to his screen output, however, the medium-specific preoccupations of traditional film criticism surely contribute to his relocation to the sidelines of both the musical and comedy genres. This is surprising given that Cantor’s six musicals for Samuel Goldwyn (1930-1936) were among the most lavish, expensive, and successful productions to date. The All-Technicolor Whoopee! (Thornton Freeland, Samuel Goldwyn, 1930)^[CLIP 1] was hailed as a cure to the public’s lassitude toward the song-and-dance surplus of the early sound era, and credited, two years later, as being “largely responsible for the return of musical pictures.”3 In reviewing the film, Variety pointed to that crucial ingredient of comedy as the savior of the supposedly “washed up” genre.4 Traditional canons of film comedy nonetheless hold Cantor in the same disregard as his fellow singing comedians of the 1930s like Wheeler & Woolsey, Winnie Lightner, or Jimmy Durante.5 It would seem that this “Apostle of Pep,” one of the rare performers who excelled in providing both essential components of the musical comedy, is too much of a singer to be embraced as an emblematic screen comedian, and too much of a comedian to be seen as a fully representative star of the film musical.

2Throughout his career, Eddie Cantor espoused an ideology of spectacle that exceeded more than individual film genres: “Show business is the tree, the trunk is the entertainer; and how you entertain – in musical comedy, on the concert stage, in radio, movies, television – these are all the branches.”6 Tuned in to the specificities of each medium, and of its coordinates within a larger field of performance, Cantor was continually sending out and relaying jokes in a comedy crosstalk. From interpolating the parody song “Ever Since The Movies Learned to Talk” into the Broadway production of Whoopee! while he was shooting musical shorts for Paramount to clowning alongside his radio stooge Parkyakarkus in his final Goldwyn feature Strike Me Pink (Norman Taurog, Samuel Goldwyn, 1936), Cantor’s intermediality was a self-reflexive source of both humor and revenue.7 He sardonically cross-promoted his media wares all while exploiting the resulting distanciation effect to renegotiate audience complicity, often at the expense of his fictional persona. Much of Cantor’s appeal as a performer grew out of his unique way of addressing his public, of “putting over” his act. Whether belting out a novelty song or scrupulously timing a monologue, Eddie Cantor’s relationship to his audience was orchestrated through an array of fictional and celebrity personae that extended across stage, screen, print, record, and radio.

Celebrity address

3Cantor’s mass media ubiquity transmitted varied, and at times seemingly incompatible, representations of race and ethnicity that were deeply intertwined with his celebrity. As was the case with many vaudevillians of immigrant background, Jewish or otherwise, blackface was a perennial part of Cantor’s performance repertoire. This practice, inherited from the 19^th century minstrel show, testifies to a larger system of ethnic and character types on the variety stage that functioned as an easily recognizable, and frequently parodied, comic shorthand. Cantor rarely adopted the so-called “darky” dialect characteristic of what he deemed the “old-fashioned” minstrel show.8 Indeed, his bespectacled “Jewish negro” character of the 1920s deliberately went against such conventions.9 In contrast to the Dixie imaginary so central to many of Al Jolson’s blackface routines, Cantor’s minstrelsy tended to shun imitation, at least of African-Americans. A delight in artificiality, in contradictory layers of characterization, generally outstripped any pretense of authenticity. In or out of his burnt cork makeup, Yiddish outbursts or intonations were common both on stage and screen before the de-Semitization of Cantor’s film character between Whoopee! and Palmy Days (A. Edward Sutherland, Samuel Goldwyn, 1931).10 While ethnicity would be all but erased from his characters on screen, performances in other media allowed Cantor the celebrity to remain one of the country’s most prominent Jewish personalities. Whether serenading radio auditors with a nonsensical ode to potato pancakes (latkes) or slipping into Yiddish with George Jessel on the vaudeville stage, there was little risk that he pass for a gentile.11 These examples demonstrate the importance of scrutinizing Eddie Cantor’s career through an intermedial lens: The layering of the singing comedian’s celebrity persona with his screen characters instated a dialogue across media that was acted out again and again in his films, for which spectators were presumed to have a familiarity with his ostensibly extra-fictional star image.

Fig. 1. Celebrity in the era of mass media. Radio Mirror, February 1934.

Fig. 2. Cantor and his entertainer double; Whoopee! (Samuel Goldwyn, 1930) advertisement (detail). Variety, October 1, 1930.

4If one can, somewhat schematically, divide Cantor into his Jazz Age and Depression Era avatars, his four one-reel musical shorts (1929-1930) shot at Paramount’s Long Island studios offer a rare glimpse into his 1920s performance style. While Cantor appears in blackface throughout the second release, A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic (Joseph Santley, Paramount, 1929), which presents itself as a “canned” version of his nightclub act, the referent is anything but a stereotypical stock character. In a strategy that will return in the musicals of the 1930s, burnt cork does not cue imitation; it cues Eddie Cantor, professional comedian and entertainer. Blackface does nonetheless have an effect on his means of expression. When made up, as the singer later commented, his legendary Banjo Eyes “fairly popped out” of his head.12 These ocular antics are put to full advantage in Midnight Frolic, notably to give a frankly libidinous intent to “Eddie Cantor’s Automobile Horn Song” (routinely interpolated into Whoopee!) [clip 2] that is significantly less pronounced in the phonograph recording made for Victor the same year^[CLIP 3].13 In or out of blackface, this gestural trope was so central to his mode of song delivery that, soon after Midnight Frolic’s release, Cantor prematurely declared himself unfit for the broadcast medium he was soon to conquer. ( “Without the hands and the eyes I’m sunk in the abstract on the ether.”)14 Sound media were indeed blind to the endlessly varied insinuations sketched out by each new trajectory of Eddie’s interlocked Banjo Eyes, which were liberally employed to illustrate his lyrics’ sexual implications. In his feature films, Cantor frequently took advantage of his musical numbers to forego the virginal affectations of his boyish protagonists, who were constantly fleeing from the advances of assertive women, to delight in evocations of youthful love affairs or to proffer a mocking lesson on “the birds and the bees” to the spectator^[CLIP 4]. While Eddie Cantor was equally capable of sentimental ballads, often in serio-comic mode, or of the wholesome Depression era cheer-up tunes that became one of his specialties^[CLIP 5], the double entendre-laden novelty song would long remain his most identifiable act.

5In a carnivalesque spirit of erotic and bodily license, did Cantor’s use of blackface during such numbers call for a more extravagant style of performance? As suggestive lyrics go back to the origins of the minstrel show, one can also wonder if sexual content was a criteria in determining whether Cantor performed a song in or out of burnt cork, and whether this had an impact on a number’s staging.15 While the singing comedian rarely forayed into elaborate choreographies – his limited dance training became a source of humor in a memorable routine with The Nicholas Brothers from Kid Millions (Roy Del Ruth, Samuel Goldwyn, 1934) –16 Cantor’s uninhibited nervous energy nonetheless kept him in perpetual motion. While singing, he bobbed up and down, jumped, and shuffled his feet. A 1921 Variety write-up aptly describes “his system of song delivery” as “movement, rushing, swinging arms and action, while the arms keep working when he stands quiet to talk.”17 The occasional song during which the frenetic Cantor kept his feet on the ground was almost always performed without burnt cork and tended to be more serious in tone^[CLIP 6]. Often, the singing comedian’s movements were more subdued in whiteface, although the lyrics’ content could remain just as risqué. An overview of the numbers in his Samuel Goldwyn musicals does reveal a link between burnt cork and Cantor’s handful of elementary but highly individual dance steps^[CLIP 7]. When in blackface, the performer’s body often acquired a supplementary elasticity, with his movements becoming more sinuous; in other cases, it had the reverse effect of accentuating his angular jerks of the arms and repetitive gestural tics. While these tropes were generally more ostentatious in burnt cork, they nonetheless remained fluid across Eddie Cantor’s filmography and resisted a systemization of the differences between blackface and whiteface registers of performance. Even a single song, such as “My Baby Just Cares for Me” from Whoopee !^[CLIP 8], could be seamlessly reprised across this racial barrier that the variety stage had long granted white performers, be they immigrant or native-born, the ability to transgress^[CLIP 9].

Between character and celebrity

6While Cantor’s film persona was recast in the transition from the Jazz Age to the Great Depression, the equation between burnt cork and star performance remains a constant in the narrative features of the 1930s. With the exception of Strike Me Pink, they each contain a blackface specialty number that gives Cantor the opportunity to shift from his character back into the celebrity singing clown of A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic – albeit now without the in-jokes about his ethnicity. These films suggest a displacement of the comedian’s ethnic humor onto baroque, fanciful locales that exemplify Rick Altman’s category of the Fairy Tale Musical – from the Arabia of Ali Baba Goes to Town (David Butler, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1937) and the Egypt of Kid Millions to the antiquity of Roman Scandals (Frank Tuttle, Samuel Goldwyn, 1933) – which allow for more universally recognizable forms of travesty.18 Set in Mexico, The Kid from Spain (Leo McCarey, Samuel Goldwyn, 1932) is full of ethnic masquerade characteristic of the exoticism of Cantor’s 1930s musicals. In the role of Eddie Williams, he adopts a mock accent throughout much of the film – and in one of the songs, “Look What You’ve Done” – in which he is forced to pass for a famous Spanish matador. True to the post-Whoopee! formula, explicit references to Cantor’s Judaism are absent from the film itself, although the fan magazines demonstrate that the subject was anything but taboo. ( “Eddie doesn’t mind this bull-fighting business, but insists on killing only kosher bulls.”)19 His comic partner and love interest Rosalie is played with a similarly absurd lack of verisimilitude by the Polish-born Lyda Roberti, whose Slavic intonations remain audible under her faux Mexican dialect. The fact that an entire Photoplay article, “Eddie Goes Spanish”_{[FIG. 3]}, was spent milking these ethnic inconsistencies for laughs proves just how central they were to the film’s appeal.20 The taste for masquerade is naturally extended to The Kid from Spain’s blackface number. As was common in the Goldwyn films, the sequence of “blacking up” works at once to further the narrative and to cue performance – to justify the transition from character to celebrity.

7“What a Perfect Combination,” placed just before the film’s climactic bullfight, offers a characteristic example of an attempt to integrate Cantor’s blackface into the narrative. Pursued through a nightclub by two stereotypical Mexican bandits (both played by Midwestern-born character actors), Eddie finds refuge under the table where they begin to argue. In a key plot point, he overhears the details of their scheme, but remains trapped until a stray champagne cork literally strikes him with an idea. Using a butter knife as a mirror, he burns the cork and applies it as stage makeup^[CLIP 10]. Eddie escapes from under the table, but is caught by the two suspicious bandits who are briefly fooled by the racial masquerade (aided by a brief use of dialect, justified by the narrative and just as soon abandoned in song). Using a music cue as pretext to slip away, the singing comedian joins the act of two black dancers who have taken the floor^[CLIP 11].21 Forced to stay on, Eddie nervously bursts into song, his delivery punctuated by one of the trademark gestures of Cantor the performer – his compulsive clapping of the palms. The cut to the next shot consummates the transition from character to celebrity: The stage fright of Eddie Williams gives way to the assurance of Eddie Cantor, who performs to the spectator via lateral tracking shots that perpetuate this privileged, frontal address^[CLIP 12]. The number then continues as the Goldwyn Girls enter the floor in a hot jazz choreography staged by Busby Berkeley (employed on all of the comedian’s films from Whoopee! to Roman Scandals). The extended sequence concludes with a top shot in which the dancers enclose Cantor in an enormous bull’s head. In a recognition of the links between these two forms of spectacle, the musical set piece leads directly into the slapstick comedy climax with Cantor masquerading as matador^[CLIP 13].

Fig. 3. Parody article with caricatures of Cantor’s wife and daughters. Photoplay, December 1932.

8While Eddie Cantor’s blackface rendition of “What a Perfect Combination” in The Kid from Spain is prompted by superimposing the modes of address of stage and screen, an additional representational duo would subsequently be grafted onto this intermedial performance – radio and the phonograph. On his Chase and Sanborn Hour radio show, Cantor tirelessly promoted his newest feature. Just before the film’s premiere, he sang “What a Perfect Combination” prefaced by comic anecdotes about hobnobbing with Hollywood royalty^[CLIP 14]. In the month of its release, Columbia issued a phonograph record of what is labeled as the film’s “theme song.” It opens with the “We Want Cantor!” chant used to promote the film_[FIG.4] and popularized by Eddie’s spoof presidential campaign carried out on his radio show and through books like Your Next President!22 The arrival of the singing comedian is then cued by his “quack-quack” introduced in Palmy Days, followed by a type of verbal direct address more characteristic of radio than phonographic practices of the era^[CLIP 15]: “Here I am. And now my dear public I’m going to sing one of the songs from my last picture, The Kid from Spain. Here goes!”. As this example demonstrates, while the shift from spectator to auditor entails an amputation of the visual field, it also grants the listener with a privileged relationship to the performer.

9In the movie theater, Eddie Cantor’s celebrity is staged as an audiovisual spectacle to be consumed collectively. The phonographic iteration of “What a Perfect Combination” follows in the path of Cantor’s more down-to-earth radio persona, in which Eddie travels the air waves every Sunday into your home for a private performance. With one major difference: The phonograph allows him to perform more than just once a week. Cantor’s reified presence can entertain fans at their whim, a situation that he is quick to exploit for humor. “Turn me over, I’m all done on this side,” he requests, just before the needle reaches the lead-out groove. All while punning on the codes of radio, Cantor modulates his address to the specificity of the phonograph – with its conflation of user and operator – to invite the listener to wind him up for an encore. On side B, he sings another hit from The Kid from Spain, “Look What You’ve Done,” in a solo version that does away with both Lyda Roberti and the comic accent from the film. On record, Eddie Cantor mocks his commodification by convoking an intermedial network of address. Yet as his inoffensive wisecracks aimed at radio sponsors would prove, such strategies constitute, at best, an ambivalent critique of mass media. To borrow Jane Feuer’s expression, these in-jokes could be characterized as “conservative reflexivity,” for they most often serve as the building blocks of Cantor’s celebrity image.23

Fig. 4. Cantor’s radio jingle used to promote The Kid from Spain (Samuel Goldwyn, 1932). The Film Daily, December 30, 1932.

10The diversity of strategies in framing Cantor’s film, phonograph, and radio performances of “What a Perfect Combination” demonstrate that a character-celebrity binary which looks exclusively to blackface is not operative across media. Even within a single film, a whiteface number like “In the Moonlight” in The Kid from Spain, with its multiple shifts in address, points to a porosity that rules out clear-cut divisions between character and celebrity performance^[CLIP 16]. It is nonetheless true that a media outlet like the radio leaned more toward alimenting the myth of Cantor’s star persona; inversely, his two Paramount silent features left almost no room for his Jazz Age image as a high-class Broadway entertainer. The musical comedies of the Great Depression, on the other hand, offer evidence of a back and forth movement between character and celebrity – a broader characteristic of the genre’s attempts to reconcile the spectacle of star performance with the demands of narrative. Like many of the featured performers in 1930s musicals, whether tap dancers or singing comedians, Eddie Cantor’s stardom began on stage. His films, however, should not only be read as the result of a linear trajectory from his “pre-filmic cultural representation” and “show business origins,” but as one media channel among many in a continuous feedback loop.24

Radio cantor on screen

11Eddie Cantor incarnated both a “populist underdog” and Jazz Age millionaire, mass media family man and exclusive Broadwayite, de-semetized nebbish and “Jewish negro” – each an overlapping Eddie with a specific inflection of address across media.25 While Cantor was bound to film producers and radio sponsors by his shrewdly negotiated contracts that allowed him to collaborate with gagmen and scriptwriters, he retained creative control over the relationship between his various mass media identities. Samuel Goldwyn, for example, had little power over his valuable star’s radio career, which the film mogul looked upon with suspicion, despite its immense aid in promoting his products.26 In multiplying his personae, the singing comedian flirted at times with incoherencies in his star image. Yet he would periodically take a few steps back into the role of intermedial puppet master to laugh at these contrivances with the complicity of his public. Such meta-discourse generates a double movement that calls attention to the conventions of representation all while drawing the spectator/auditor back into the pull of Cantor’s star image. This promise of resolution could nonetheless be held at a distance. In his films, Cantor’s media personalities were indeed prone to split in two.

12In the wartime musical revue Thank Your Lucky Stars (David Butler, Warner Bros., 1943), Eddie Cantor plays a double role – himself and Joe Simpson, a dramatic actor whose career has been destroyed by a resemblance to the man he calls “that pop-eyed baboon.” The ruthless self-parody in this film confirms that Cantor’s celebrity persona is but an additional character in his repertoire. His likeable double, Joe Simpson, presents an older, more resigned variation on the comedian’s boyish underdogs of his Depression era films. To save the Allied Charities’ Cavalcade of Stars benefit show from the self-important Cantor (in a satire of his reputation as a humanitarian), Joe is coaxed into impersonating the man he loathes. “Gosh, I’m beginning to hate myself already,” he quips while being made up to pass for his show business doppelgänger. Such comic self-hatred was already on evidence in the final scene of Ali Baba Goes to Town: At a movie premiere, Cantor’s forgotten man character distastefully glares at his celebrity dead ringer who delights the crowd with manufactured cheer. “What’s he got that I haven’t got?” the comedian asks before twirling his eyes in complicity with the spectator^[CLIP 17]. This gag functions like Cantor’s self-depreciating radio wisecracks about his comically exaggerated ego – a performance affectation that is subsequently disavowed by the punchline. Rather than following the sequential logic of verbal humor, the joke’s structure in Thank Your Lucky Stars bifurcates into two distinct figures within the film’s diegesis. In a sense, Joe Simpson is the punchline. When Eddie Cantor is on screen, the comic resolution is displaced onto this character lingering out of frame.

13This simultaneity of celebrity and character mirrors the intermedial layering of the comedian’s movie and radio personae. It is not surprising that Eddie Cantor’s first appearance in Thank Your Lucky Stars takes place during a broadcast of his radio show. This prompts his mediated voice to travel to a receiver on a Hollywood sidewalk. Outside a newsstand, Cantor’s singing goes on to compete with the sales pitch of an exasperated Joe Simpson, who has been reduced to conducting a bus tour of movie stars’ homes^[CLIP 18]. Throughout the course of the film, the failed movie actor is continually pitted against his radio double. All the ingredients of Cantor’s on-air personality are rehashed in Thank Your Lucky Stars, from jokes about his stale one-liners to running gags about his wife Ida and their five daughters. Yet now that his sympathetic traits have been transplanted onto Joe Simpson, the broadcast celebrity is reduced to a vaudevillian masquerade. Divided between two outlets responsible for his mass media stardom, the role of Eddie Cantor is identified as a product of the radio, whereas his fictional character is linked to the cinema.

Fig. 5. Thank Your Lucky Stars (Warner Bros., 1943).

14The final minutes of Thank Your Lucky Stars attempt a synthesis of character and celebrity by staging their confrontation. After the egotistical star hijacks the benefit, Joe Simpson’s friends convince him to imitate Cantor and restore order to the world of show business. The evening goes on as planned until Eddie Cantor is called for his star number. The Eddie Cantor present is of course Joe Simpson, a dramatic actor and not a singing comedian. The other Cantor, who has been kidnapped and subjected to a slapstick punishment, suddenly bursts into the theater. After a trick photography face-off_[FIG.5], the “phony” Cantor wins out and his adversary is led away to an insane asylum. Joe Simpson’s not-so-willing usurpation of Eddie Cantor’s identity is complete. At a loss nonetheless at how to deal with his stage entrance, Joe is incited by his co-conspirators to “give ‘em the best imitation of Cantor they’ve ever seen.” He prances onto the stage for an encore of “We’re Staying Home Tonight,”^[CLIP 19] a song initially sung by Joe’s celebrity double in a broad travesty of his performance style^[CLIP 20]. In this perplexing conclusion, imitation proves to be more authentic than the genuine article. Radio entertainer and film character are reunited, but the locus of Eddie Cantor the celebrity seems to have been left astray.

15Instead of seeking out a singular expression of Cantor’s persona, which entails delimiting a dominant medium and a period of canonical works, Thank Your Lucky Stars suggests that we engage with the heterogeneity of his intermedial identities.27 One could read Cantor’s career through the model of silent comedy to his two pre-talkie Paramount features (1926-1927), which earned him glowing comparisons to Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.28 Yet Eddie’s incarnation as a slapstick clown, an underdog role that he never ceased to play, already presents a figure wiped clean of the ethnicity which seems so central to his persona. From that point of view, one might privilege his four Paramount musical shorts and the film version of Whoopee! In addition to the Phonofilm routine shot by optical sound pioneer Lee de Forest, A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor, Star of “Kid Boots” (de Forest Phonofilm Corporation, 1923), and the film version of his famous sketch as a pushy Jewish tailor in Glorifying the American Girl (Millard Webb, Paramount, 1929), this corpus furnishes the most complete audiovisual document we have of Cantor’s brassy 1920s performance style. The aesthetic and institutional interests of these films, however, diverge significantly from the subsequent norms of the classical musical. The next five Samuel Goldwyn features of the Great Depression – alongside Ali Baba Goes to Town for Fox – went on to establish a durable formula of comedy and musical spectacle centered around Cantor, all while leaving room for talent as diverse as The Nicholas Brothers, Ethel Merman, Ruth Etting, or Charlotte Greenwood. Eddie Cantor’s stage, film, phonograph, radio, and television output can be divided into many such potential periodizations. Yet the fact that his work has long since been pushed out of the canon provides us with an opening. Neither his career nor the characters he inhabited were static. Our methodologies should follow suit by tuning in to the interactions that went on between Eddie Cantor’s performances across media. Like the singing comedians who were his contemporaries, he has much to reveal about the intermediality of American variety entertainment and its long-standing dialogue with the Hollywood musical.