“Danny Kaye’s Comedy Special”

Ottawa Citizen – Nov. 4, 1961

Danny Kaye plans to help us “see ourselves as others see us” on his hour-long comedy special, The Danny Kaye Show, to be shown Monday, Nov. 6, at 8:30 p.m. EST on the CBC-TV network.

Kaye will show how some singers who take themselves too seriously might look to their critics. He will follow this with a pantomime sketch on a man’s daily trials from the time he awakens to the time he goes to bed, demonstrating that a man is many things to many people. In another sketch, he will demonstrate the lengths to which a hostess might go to please an important guest at a cocktail party. But whatever opinion others may have of a person, Kaye stresses, the most important thing is what he thinks of himself. To prove it, he performs a number entitled I Am and Is.

An Entertainer

What does Kaye think of himself? “I’m neither comic nor funny-man alone,” he says, “I feel I should be summed up as an entertainer. I’d like to think I’m the kind of human being people think I am. For that matter, all of us like to think we’re greater than we really are. But, eventually, we realize we have all the human frailties and faults everyone else is heir to. There comes a point when you have to face yourself and stop pretending to yourself to be what you are not.”

Whenever he is asked how he became an entertainer, he always replies with the question: “How did you become what you are?

“I believe people become what they have to become, not what they want to become,” he has said many times.

The Danny Kaye Show is only the second show he has done for television, apart from a special which featured his activities in connection with the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Of all the people Kaye has entertained—including servicemen and royalty—he enjoys performing most for children of all nations.

His special brand of humor is able to hurdle all language barriers.

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