January 27
PERFECT FOOL DAY
Zany costumes, a comic lisp and slapstick humor earned comedian Ed Wynn the title of The Perfect Fool.
Born Isaiah Edwin Leopold, Wynn was one of television and radio’s earliest stars. He came to radio from vaudeville and Broadway, starring as the Texaco fire chief on the Texaco Star Theater. (The show’s title was better known as The Fire Chief, Texaco’s trademark and Ed Wynn’s role.) The variety show was an innovative stage for Wynn. He wore costumes and makeup to make the radio studio audiences laugh louder; and incorporated comic sounds with kazoos and cymbals. When Texaco gave up the sponsorship, the show was retitled, The Ed Wynn Show.
A year after being named by his peers as “the greatest visual comedian of our day,” Ed Wynn took the perfect fool to the new entertainment stage of television. It was 1949 and The Ed Wynn Show was the first regular show to be carried live on the West Coast, then kinescoped for rebroadcast from New York to the rest of the CBS network. This was unusual at the time because live TV shows generally originated from New York with the kinescopes being fed from Hollywood.
On this night in 1950, Ed Wynn took home the Emmy for Most Outstanding Live Personality and his show, The Ed Wynn Show, received the award for Best Live Show. Coincidentally, this same night, Wynn’s comedian friend, Milton Berle was awarded the Emmys for Most Outstanding Kinescope Personality for his performance on The Best Kinescope Show, The Texaco Star Theater on NBC TV.
Ed Wynn went on to become a dramatic actor for such highly esteemed television programs as Studio One, Playhouse 90 and Kraft Theater. In the 1950s and 1960s, some forty plus years after he had first stepped on a stage, Wynn became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after character actors, appearing in a number of films, including The Greatest Story Ever Told, Mary Poppins, The Absent-Minded Professor, Cinderfella, The Diary of Anne Frank, Marjorie Morningstar, Requiem for a Heavyweight and Alice in Wonderland (voice of the Mad Hatter).
The perfect fool was nobody’s fool!
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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