Jerry Colonna

Biography

Jerry Colonna (b. Gerardo Luigi Colonna, September 17, 1904- November 21, 1986) was an Italian-American comedian, singer and songwriter, remembered best as the zaniest Bob Hope sidekick on Hope's popular radio shows and films of the 1940s and 1950s. Jerry ColonnaKnown for his pop-eyed facial expressions and walrus-sized handlebar mustache, Colonna was known for singing loudly, "in a comic caterwaul," according to Raised on Radio author Gerald Nachman, for dropping the tagline "Who's Yehudi?" after many an old joke, even if it had nothing to do with the joke (believed to be named for violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin, the search for Yehudi became a running gag on the Hope show), and for playing a range of nitwitted characters the best remembered of which was the moronic professor. "Colonna brought a whacked-out touch to Hope's show", Nachman wrote. "In a typical exchange, Hope asks, 'Professor, did you plant the bomb in the embassy like I told you?', to which Colonna replied, in that whooping five-alarm voice, 'Embassy? Great Scott, I thought you said NBC!" Colonna's career actually began musically: he had been a trombonist with the CBS house orchestra, the Columbia Symphony, in the 1930s---developing a reputation for prankishness (his off-stage antics were so infamous that CBS nearly fired him on more than one occasion) that inspired Fred Allen, then appearing on CBS, to give him periodic guest slots on his popular radio show., and joined the John Scott Trotter band working on Bing Crosby's Kraft Music Hall radio program a decade later. On one installment, Colonna was included in an opera parody, where he hollered an aria "in a deadpan screech that became his trademark on Bob Hope's show," Nachman noted. Colonna was actually one of three major comic discoveries Kraft Music Hall discovered in the 1940s, the others being pianist-comedian Victor Borge and the Trotter band's drummer, music "depreciationist" Spike Jones. According to radio historian Arthur Frank Wertheim, in his book Radio Comedy, Colonna was likely responsible for many of the Hope show's catch phrases---particularly, "Give me a drag on that before you throw it away", a crack the cast came to use to lance anyone's bragging. Colonna's usual greeting to Hope or other characters on the show was, "Greetings, Gate", and the show's listeners began using it broadly as well. Colonna was part of several of Hope's early USO tours during the 1940s. Jack Benny's singing sidekick Dennis Day, a talented impressionist as well as singer, was known to do a superb imitation of Colonna's manic style and expressions. He appeared in two of Hope's famous Road films (with Bing Crosby), The Road to Singapore (1940, as Achilles Bombassa) and The Road to Rio (1947, as a Cavalry captain), along with a memorable appearance in the 1945 Fred Allen vehicle It's in the Bag (film) as the psychiatrist Dr. Greenglass. Colonna left the Hope show as a regular in 1950, but he continued appearing with Hope on subsequent holiday television specials and live shows. He went on to provide the voice of the March Hare in the Walt Disney animated film version of Alice in Wonderland (1951) (another radio legend, Ed Wynn, voiced the Mad Hatter) and also lent his zany narration style to several Disney shorts, including Casey At The Bat (1946) and The Brave Engineer (1950). He also hosted his own television comedy, The Jerry Colonna Show. It lasted only one season, but Colonna went on to host the "Revenge with Music" episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1954. His television work also included serving as the second and last ringmaster/host/performer on Super Circus (1955-56), The Gale Storm Show (1959), a version of Babes in Toyland on Shirley Temple's Storybook in 1960, and a guest role as Dr. Mann in "Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth," an episode of the manic rock situation comedy The Monkees in 1966. Colonna joined ASCAP in 1956; his songwriting credits include "At Dusk", "I Came to Say Goodbye", "Sleighbells in the Sky" and "Take Your Time." He released an LP of Dixieland-style music entitled He Sings and Swings (Mercury-Wing MGW 12153) in the late fifties. Colonna married Florence Purcell, whom he was said to have met on a blind date, in 1930; the couple adopted a son, Robert, in 1941. The couple's marriage lasted 56 years. After his guest shot on The Monkees, Colonna suffered a stroke whose paralytic effect forced his retirement from show business; a 1979 heart attack forced him to spend the last seven years of his life in the Motion Picture and Television Hospital. Florence stayed by his side to the end, when he died of kidney failure in 1986. She followed him in death eight years later at the same hospital.