"You said a mouthful!".

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: Reel World - Joe E. Brown

DID A BOOK PROPOSAL on my favorite neglected comedian, Joe E. Brown (1892-1973). If the name does not ring a bell, think of writer/director Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" (1959). This is the picture where musicians Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and, for their own protection, join an all-girl band--as girls! Where does Brown come in? He is the oversexed millionaire, Osgood Fielding III, who falls for Jack Lemmon's in-drag Daphne. Besides stealing the movie from an all-star cast including Marilyn Monroe--Brown closes the film with its most melnorable line. That is, Osgood's response to his "fiancee's" admission that "she" is a man--"Well, nobody's perfect." Not only would this performance contribute to "Some Like It Hot" being a monster critical and commercial hit, the American Film Institute later would honor it as the greatest screen comedy ever made.

Of course, at the time of its release, Brown already had been entertaining people for 50 years. As he observed in his 1956 autobiography, "The only thing I ever could do was make people laugh.... Nature met me more than halfway when it threw a handful of features together and called it a face." Though film historian David Robinson described Brown's face as a "traditional clown mask," no one could match either the size of his large, wide signature mouth, or his slow building yell--"Haaaaaaaaaaaay!" Fittingly, Brown's famous catch phrase was "You said a mouthful!"

Like his comedy contemporaries W.C. Fields and Will Rogers, the Ohio-born Brown developed his stage shtick in vaudeville. Fields was a juggler; Rogers a rope-twirling cowboy; and Brown an acrobat. In each case, these performers found greater success when they started peppering their acts with comic comments. In later years, Brown enjoyed telling people he was the only youngster who ever ran away to join the circus ... with his parents' blessing. Actually, Brown's family needed whatever modest salary the 10-year-old could earn. While it is common knowledge that he was a screen star during the Great Depression, it often is forgotten that he was a child of another depression (the early 1890s).

Though Joe relished the life of a child acrobat in the circus, it was a tough, hand-to-mouth existence, with the boy often per forming while injured. Still, he never had known anything else, and the future comedian always put an upbeat take on adversity: "I began life as an undernourished baby who grew into...