Jimmy Durante

If any performer can truly be said to have carved out his own comedic turf, made a huge success out of it lasting over several decades, while completely owning that piece of turf lock, stock and barrel, then that performer would have to be Jimmy Durante. There never has been -- nor is there likely ever to be -- a stylistic school of Durante; the man and his character are of one piece and ingrained in the national consciousness to the extreme. Anyone foolish enough to start appropriating any part of his act would be immediately branded as a slavish imitator -- someone just merely 'doing Durante' -- while always being doomed to comparison with the one and only real deal "Schnozzola" and again, falling well short of the mark. On the surface, Durante's mega-success defied all commonly understood show-business laws. No one with such a gravelly voice should have been able to put over a song as well as he did. No one as ugly as him should have made as much profitable hay as he did about being that ugly, and parlaying those looks into a movie career at that. No one wore rumpled suits and a beat-up fedora (covering what little hair he had left), smoked a cheap cigar, and mangled the English language with more charm and hilarity than he. No one won the hearts of his audience by simply being himself -- a comic Everyman from the poor side of town -- than did one Jimmy Durante. He didn't sing good, he didn't look good while having the audacity to keep bringing it up, he dressed like a bum and couldn't say a complete sentence without screwing up some (or all) of the words. Not much of a show-business resume on the surface of it, but Durante's uncloneable charm gathered its main strength from being just that; an average guy who -- as one critic put it -- "acted like a heckler from an...