Edgar Kennedy

Edgar Kennedy
Born	Edgar Livingston Kennedy April 26, 1890(1890-04-26) Monterey County, California, U.S.
Died	November 9, 1948(1948-11-09) (aged 58) Woodland Hills, California, U.S.
Years active	1911–1947
Spouse	Patricia Violet Allwyn (1924–1948) (his death) 2 children

Edgar Livingston Kennedy (April 26, 1890 – November 9, 1948) was an American comedic film actor, known as "Slow Burn". A slow burn is an exasperated facial expression, performed very deliberately; Kennedy embellished this by rubbing his hand over his bald head and across his face, in an attempt to hold his temper. Kennedy is possibly best known today for a small but memorable role as a lemonade vendor in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup.

Career

Kennedy was born on 26 April 1890 in Monterey County, California and attended San Rafael High School before taking up boxing. He was a light-heavyweight and once went 14 rounds with Jack Dempsey. After boxing, he worked as a singer in vaudeville, musical comedy and light opera.^{[citation needed]}

Making his debut in 1911, Kennedy appeared in about 500 films, working with some of the biggest film comedians in the United States, including Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Charley Chase, and the Our Gang series. He was also one of the original Keystone Kops.

Kennedy's burly frame originally suited him for villainous or threatening roles in silent pictures. By the 1920s Kennedy was working for producer Hal Roach, who kept the actor busy playing supporting roles in short comedies. Kennedy starred in one short, A Pair of Tights (1928), in which he plays a tightwad determined to spend as little as possible on a date. His antics with comedian Stuart Erwin are reminiscent of Roach's Laurel and Hardy comedies, produced concurrently. Roach also used Kennedy as a director on half a dozen two-reeler comedies.

In 1930, Edgar Kennedy was featured by RKO-Pathe in a pair of short-subject comedies, Next Door Neighbors and Help Wanted, Female. Kennedy's characterization of a short-tempered householder was so effective that RKO built a series around it. The "Average Man" comedies starred Kennedy as a blustery, stubborn guy determined to accomplish a household project or get ahead professionally, despite the meddling of his featherbrained wife (usually Florence Lake), her freeloading brother (originally William Eugene, then Jack Rice) and his dubious mother-in-law (Dot Farley). Kennedy pioneered the kind of domestic situation comedy that later became familiar on television. Each installment would end with Edgar embarrassed, humbled or defeated, looking at the camera and doing his patented slow burn. The Edgar Kennedy Series, with its theme song "Chopsticks", became a standard part of the movie-going experience: Kennedy made six "Average Man" shorts a year for 17 years.

Kennedy became so identified with frustration that practically every studio hired him to play hotheads. He often played dumb cops, detectives, and even a prison warden; sometimes he was a grouchy moving man, truck driver, or blue-collar workman. His character usually lost his temper at least once. In Diplomaniacs, Kennedy presides over an international tribunal, where Wheeler & Woolsey want to do something about world peace. "Well, ya can't do anything about it here", yells Kennedy, "this is a peace conference!" Kennedy, established as the poster boy for frustration, even starred in an instructional film titled The Other Fellow, in which loudmouthed roadhog Edgar always vents his anger on other drivers, little realizing that, to them, he is "the other fellow."

Perhaps his most unusual roles were as a puppeteer in the detective mystery The Falcon Strikes Back and as a philosophical bartender inspired to create exotic cocktails in Harold Lloyd's last film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.

Death

Kennedy died of throat cancer at the Motion Picture Hospital, San Fernando Valley on 9 November 1948. He was interred at the Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, Los Angeles County, California.

Selected filmography

As actor:

• Brown of Harvard (1911)
• The Knockout (1914)
• Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)
• Two Tars (1928)
• Perfect Day (1929)
• Trent's Last Case (1929)
• They Had to See Paris (1929)
• Night Owls (1930)
• Duck Soup (1933)
• Twentieth Century (1934)
• Murder on the Blackboard (1934)
• We're Rich Again (1934)
• 1,000 Dollars a Minute (1935)
• Little Big Shot (1935)
• Living on Velvet (1935)
• The Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936)
• San Francisco (1936)
• A Star Is Born (1937)
• When's Your Birthday? (1937)
• Hey! Hey! USA! (1938)
• Dr. Christian Meets the Women (1940)
• Air Raid Wardens (1943)
• Hitler's Madman (1943)
• The Falcon Strikes Back (1943)
• The Girl from Monterrey (1943)
• Crazy House (1943)
• It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
• Anchors Aweigh (1945)
• The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) (a.k.a. Mad Wednesday)
• Unfaithfully Yours (1948)
• My Dream Is Yours (1949)

As director:

• From Soup to Nuts (1928) — Laurel and Hardy two-reeler (silent)
• You're Darn Tootin' (1928) — Laurel and Hardy two-reeler (silent)
• All Teed Up (1930) — Charley Chase two-reeler (talkie)
• Fifty Million Husbands (1930) — Charley Chase two-reeler (talkie)
• Bigger and Better (1930) — The Boy Friends two-reeler (talkie)

Further reading

• Cassara, Bill (2005). Edgar Kennedy: Master of the Slow Burn. Albany: BearManor Media ISBN 1-59393-018-6

External links

• Edgar Kennedy at the Internet Movie Database
• Edgar Kennedy at Find a Grave
• Edgar Kennedy Homepage, by biographer Bill Cassara edgarkennedy.org
• Edgar Kennedy at The Way Out West Tent, The Sons of the Desert