TV—Radio Today
It’s Zumm Fun When Danny Kaye Sets Out To Tickle Audience
Toledo Blade – Apr. 20, 1963
By: Alan Gill

           The other night I realized an ambition I’ve harbored since 1940 or thereabouts. I became a zumm.

           On that afternoon 23 years ago when I played hookey from high school and bent my steps toward the New York Paramount Theater to see a new comedian named Danny Kaye, I was a schtuck-schtuck. A few years later, as Mr. Kaye entertained a multitude of service men on a mountainside in Okinawa, I was a ha-ha-ha.

           If you’ve been a member of a Danny Kaye audience yourself, then you recall how the fellow splits his audience into three sections—the zumms at the right, the schtuck-schtucks in the center, the ha-ha-ha’s at the left—and how he takes a particular pride in the ha-ha-ha’s and looks with disdain upon the zumms because they’re always coming in too early or too late with their zum-m-m. “What’s the matter with you, you zumms you!”

           Well, the other night at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, I learned that being a zumm was a good deal more fun than being either of the others. But then, I suppose, it’s fun sitting anywhere in a Kaye audience.

           He can start out with some routines you saw him do last November on television (“The Glory Hallelujah Twist” or a lengthy cigarette commercial delivered in a French accent), then do some numbers from his movies (e.g., his impression of a night club singer who just misses the note he’s looking for), and end up with the songs his father wrote for him “when he was nine weeks old” (Anatole of Paris,” “Dinah,” “Minnie the Moocher”) and somehow convince you that it is all spanking new and freshly funny.

           And it is. Kaye is having so convincingly blissful a time up there on the stage that every word and gesture seems hot out of the oven. Toward the end of the evening, he confides to us that nobody—no, nobody in the world—enjoys Danny Kaye in the throes of entertaining an audience more than Danny Kaye does, and the confidence brings with it a surge of hope that maybe—just maybe—he’ll stay on all night long.

           His best moments come, though, when he “plays” the audience the way Harpo plays the harp—when he gets us singing hi-hi-dee-hi-dee-ho back at him or crooning a whole chorus of “Ballin’ the Jack” or giving him the zumms, schtuck-schtucks and ha-ha-ha’s., In that Okinawan show I mentioned, he “played” on those scores of thousands of GI’s marines and navy men for a good three hours and never let the delirium slip for a moment.

           When Danny Kaye slips, it’s into a puddle of sentimentality; and the man should keep his eyes to the road and avoid all sudden immersions. (He steered clear of such potholes the other night at the Ziegfeld—which I took as a good omen for his television series next season).

           But Kaye has never moved with such swift, eccentric grace, or looked younger, or led an audience into higher pitches of excitement. He can take a small piece of business he invented 20 years ago (a small boy trying at great length to pronounce the word “rhinoceros”) and make it funnier than it’s ever been. For at least one of his ever faithful zumms, he is the greatest entertainer of them all.

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