On the comedy beat from Broadway to vaudeville to movies, thinking of two terrific icons of silver screen humor, both of whom crack us up, only every time. One is star of stage, screen, Ziegfeld Follies, etc. Leon Errol, born in Sydney, Australia on July 3, 1881. Here's Leon with Lou Costello in The Noose Hangs High (1948).
The other is Mel Brooks, because the gang here somehow missed the comedy maestro's 100th birthday last Sunday!
While Leon Errol is arguably best known for his later work - his appearance in W.C. Fields' hilarious 1941 opus Never Give A Sucker An Even Break, the Joe Palooka series and the eight Mexican Spitfire feature films co-starring comedienne, singer and dancer Lupe Vélez, he had a lengthy and illustrious show business career as comedian-singer-director-writer before 1930 and even appeared in several silent films (in the following co-starring with stalwart comedienne Dorothy Gish).
Mentioning how expertly the thorough Forgotten Australian Actors website chronicles Errol's five decade show business career, we note that the rubber-legged comedian began performing on stage, acting, singing and directing theatrical troupes as he worked in burlesque and vaudeville, starting at the turn of the 20th century.
He toured Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain and Ireland, worked extensively as a director and writer with Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. and co-starred in sketches with the legendary Bert Williams in the Ziegfeld Follies.
Mr. Errol is also among a slew of comedians in the enjoyably eccentric and unrelentingly grotesque version of Alice In Wonderland directed by Norman Z. McLeod and produced by Paramount Pictures in 1933.
We are quite fond of the 2-reelers Leon starred in during the first year of Jules White's Columbia Shorts Department, consider the uninhibited group to be slapstick masterpieces.
ONE TOO MANY is quite the curio, directed by Our Gang series creator Robert McGowan (on a break from the Hal Roach Studio) and written by the insanely prolific Harry McCoy.
Also love the two Technicolor Vitaphone musical shorts from 1934, both directed by Roy Mack, later a producer of very enjoyable Soundies.
The wonderfully cheesy time-traveling Vitaphone musical GOOD MORNING EVE (1934), one of the last gasps of pre-Code naughtiness, in glorious 3-strip Technicolor, is a personal favorite Leon Errol flick.
Greg Hilbrich of the The Columbia Shorts Department wrote, "upon completing HONEYMOON BRIDGE for Columbia, and after an argument with studio executives who cited "creative differences", Errol left for Radio Pictures."
So, in 1934, Leon began starring for RKO in a series directed and written by legendary gagmeister Al Boasberg.
There are LOTS of RKO Leon Errol short subjects on YouTube. In one produced in 1936, none other than Lucille Ball (who has a cameo as Leon's secretary in the 1934 Columbia 2-reeler PERFECTLY MISMATED) plays a housekeeper. No doubt Lucy was taking notes when working at the Columbia Shorts Department in 3 Stooges and Leon Errol 2-reelers.
Errol's co-star in ONE TOO MANY, ONE LIVE GHOST and many other films is the always formidable former Ziegfeld Girl and Hal Roach Studios stock company player Vivien Oakland, who, along with the equally formidable Dorothy Granger, would be a frequent collaborator.
Our favorite of all the Leon Errol RKO short subjects is THE JITTERS (1938), an astounding version of his rubber-leg routine.
Leon starred in 2-reel comedies for RKO through the 1940's, long after Mack Sennett and Educational Pictures closed and Hal Roach Studios ceased making short subjects. He often played a lecherous philanderer who unsuccessfully attempts to conceal booze, broads and gambling from his wife. Would expect no less from a comedian who starred in the 1933 Paramount short subject Three Little Swigs!
As of July 2026, clips from this series are practically nonexistent online. Fortunately for comedy geeks, all eight Mexican Spitfire features are available as a 4-DVD box set.
Too bad Lupe wasn't around 30 years later to bring her wacky and unabashedly over-the-top sensibility to western deconstruction Blazing Saddles - which brings us to Mel Brooks.
We're thrilled and delighted that comedian-writer-director-producer Mel Brooks made it to his 100th birthday last Sunday!
Here, Mel celebrates his 100th with TV producer-writer (Everyone Loves Raymond), documentary host (Somebody Feed Phil), actor and enthusiastic gastronome Phil Rosenthal.
Noting our June 28, 2021 post celebrating Mr. Brooks' 95th birthday and Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog's February 21, 2026 tribute to the mighty and ridiculously talented comedy writers and performers who created Admiral Broadway Revue, Your Show Of Shows and Caesar's Hour, in closing, here's one of our favorite Mel contributions to a movie, approved enthusiastically by the Psychotronix Film Festival!
Thanks for the laughs, Leon and Mel! Now it's time to re-watch the four Columbia 2-reelers, then watch those Video Yesteryear compilations of Leon Errol comedies, starting with volume 1. Then on to The Flustered Comedy Of Leon Errol volumes 2, 3 and 4.
Obscure or lesser known movie comedians, anyone? Here's one of our favorites: Harry Sweet (1901-1933).
Harry Sweet was an uber-goofball slapstick artiste and writer-director-star in the 1920s and early 1930's.
Harry Sweet, gifted physical comedian and acrobat, starred in zany short subjects for Mack Sennett, Joe Rock, Century Comedies and most memorably RKO Radio Pictures.
Here he is with comedy queen (and prototype for cartoondom's Olive Oyl) Gale Henry in WHAT, NO SPINACH?
Why are we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog wild about Harry? Because his starring vehicles, especially the early 1930's talkies, are wacky beyond belief! His uninhibited style is akin to comics from many decades later, from Jerry Lewis to the Pythons to Rik Mayall to Chris Farley to Melissa McCarthy.
Readers will note quite a few familiar faces from Hal Roach Studios and the Columbia Shorts Department in the supporting cast of the following opus from Sweet's starring series for RKO.
Am taken aback by how few Harry Sweet starring vehicles, both silents and talkies, have been posted on YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo, Internet Archive, even given that he passed over 90 years ago.
While he didn't, as Harold Lloyd did, headline a gazillion films, those Harry Sweet starring vehicles the gang here have seen (most via prolific YouTube poster Joseph Blough and San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker and vintage comedy expert Lory-Michael Ringuette) are riotously funny.
Sweet was most adept in the pratfalling art of physical comedy.
Invariably, Ed Kennedy 2-reelers written and directed by Harry Sweet are a hoot!
Shortly after writing and directing the hilarious Next Door Neighbors, Harry launched the "Mr. Average Man" series starring slow-burnin' Edgar Kennedy in 1931.
For more info, read the following Harry Sweet bio from the long gone but insanely informative Hollywood Oblivion website.
Meanwhile, we hope more long lost films Harry Sweet directed and/or starred in will miraculously turn up, as a Fox short subject starring wiseguys Bobby Clark & Paul McCullough did.
Trying to cheer up, mostly unsuccessfully, the pissed-off and snowstorm-addled reprobates at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are watching Toby The Pup cartoons.
Seven of the 12 Toby cartoons remain in the lost film Twilight Zone. The Tobys are less gritty in design and sensibility than the Scrappy series, and in some sequences resemble Ben Harrison and Manny Gould's contemporaneous Krazy Kat, also produced by Charles Mintz.
Alas, the Toby The Pup cartoons were so unloved that several in the 12-entry series remain lost almost 100 years later.
One urban legend goes that producer Charles Mintz was so incensed by the failure of the Toby cartoons to score a boffo Mickey Mouse style mega-hit for RKO Radio Pictures in 1930-1931 that he had all the original 35mm negatives and prints buried! That's a great story, but seems unlikely. . .
Produced by the Charles Mintz Studio for RKO Radio Pictures release, the Tobys were made by the same crew that subsequently produced Columbia's Scrappy series.
That crew would be led by the highly imaginative Dick Huemer, supported by his fellow ex-Fleischer animators Sid Marcus and Art Davis. The jaunty musical scores were by Joe De Nat, who re-used the Toby The Pup opening a few years later as main title theme for Columbia's Color Rhapsodies.
Huemer, who ultimately spent three decades working for Walt Disney Productions as part of a prolfic story writing team with Joe Grant, regarded his Mintz Studio cartoons as dreadful at best, an embarrassment. No surprise there: he subsequently worked on Pinocchio and Fantasia.
In this writer's cartoon-crazed opinion, the Tobys equal or surpass the wacky Fleischer Studio hijinx from the same period and also rival the contemporaneous Disney cartoons for animation technique, early 1930's "rubber hose" style.
Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films has found heretofore lost Toby cartoons with French titles. Hence, it is possible to compare two versions of Toby in The Museum.
The Toby cartoons never got distributed to U.S. television and were largely unseen for several decades. They were mentioned in Radio Pictures' print ads, presumably with some expectation that the cartoons would give Mickey Mouse at least a bit of competition for the Depression-era moviegoing audience.
Before the great and prolific Mark Sandrich (October 26, 1900 - March 4, 1945) became the premier director of classic 1930's movie musicals, including several boffo Astaire & Rogers flicks (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Follow The Fleet, Shall We Dance, Carefree), he was responsible for making fast and very funny 2-reel comedies for RKO. Several short subjects Sandrich directed starred the aggressively zany, randy and exceedingly pre-Code comedy team of Bobby Clark & Paul McCullough.
Clark & McCullough emphatically give the bird to the world as they pose as various professions, always under false pretenses, in these RKO comedies. Jitters The Butler co-stars the always dignified Robert Grieg (a memorable co-star in the Marx Brothers' 1930 film of ANIMAL CRACKERS) as the funniest - and the most enthusiastically masochistic - of professional manservants.
The Iceman's Ball features a rather amazing cast of 2-reel comedy royalty, including Billy Franey, Laurel & Hardy nemesis Jimmie Finlayson, 3 Stooges arch-nemesis Vernon Dent and perennial cop Fred Kelsey. All the players make sure that the essential premise - the always brazen Clark & McCullough masquerade as cops to pick up girls and crash all the local parties - is also a riot.
Prior to his smashing success as RKO musicals king, Mark Sandrich successfully delivered both key elements of Clark & McCullough's humor, the ultra-zany and that sense of the dark and disturbing, to the silver screen.
C & McC possess a dark sensibility well beyond even that of the early 1930's Marx Brothers, who also gave the world the bird. . . at least until they ended up at MGM.
There is always an palpable uneasiness intertwined with C&McC's distinctive comic anarchy, and not just due to the troubled Paul McCullough's suicide in March 1936.
After directing Bobby & Paul's go-for-broke wacky antics and musical short subjects featuring bandleader Phil Harris (pre-Jack Benny) but before helming Fred & Ginger musicals, Mr. Sandrich made very funny films with a goofier (and substantially less dark) comedy team, Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey.
These include two of our all-time favorite classic comedies, Cockeyed Cavaliers and Hips Hips Hooray.
Love the talented Mark Sandrich's W&W features for the same reasons I love the aforementioned Clark & McCullough comedies and the Marx Brothers at Paramount: that unique 1930-1934 blend of the unabashedly and unrepentantly wacky, the silly, the goofy, the outrageous and the risqué, all served simultaneously.
Frankly, we're just a tad skeptical about the RKO Short Subjects Department's claims here. While comedy geeks love Benny Rubin, for cryin' out loud, he's the top of the bill and W.C. Fields is the bottom! Well, both were headlining RKO Radio Pictures 2-reelers at the time.
Even more amazing is the bit about kids "clamoring for" Larry Darmour Productions' cheesy, low-budget Mickey McGuire comedies - yes, even in a hurting, battered, Great Depression and entertainment-starved America. We do, however, at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, admit to liking Billy Barty's performance in the following film as the conductor TONS.
By all accounts Billy Barty was a very good musician (started his career touring vaudeville in his family's band) who offscreen would rock the drum kit like his heroes from the Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman big bands. Billy soon left these comedies to contribute some amazing bits to Busby Berkeley's already hallucinogenic production numbers in WB musicals.
Meanwhile, the Mickey McGuire series moved from RKO to Columbia distribution for its last season in 1933-1934. Comedy shorts starring Clark & McCullough, Edgar Kennedy, Harry Sweet and Grady Sutton continued being produced by RKO.
Notably, at the bottom of this ad, most certainly bringing up the rear, is a reference to RKO's Toby The Pup cartoons, produced by Dick Huemer, Sid Marcus and Art Davis at the Charles Mintz Studio.
That means we simply must close this post with two, not three, no make that FOUR animated adventures starring the (not exactly) beloved Toby. The cartoons never got distributed to U.S. television and were largely unseen for several decades.
For the longest time, only one entry from the Toby The Pup series, The Museum, was available for viewing.
Since then, animation historians (Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films and prolific chronicler of comic art David Gerstein in particular) have found several more Toby cartoons. In this writer's cartoon-crazed opinion, they equal or surpass the wacky Fleischer Studio hijinx from the same period and also rival the contemporaneous Disney cartoons for animation technique, early 1930's "rubber hose" style.
