Red Skelton by Wes Gehring

Author:Wes Gehring
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-87195-355-1
Publisher: Indiana Historical Society
Published: 2013-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

An army courtship starring Skelton and Georgia Davis (circa 1944). (Vincennes University Foundation, Red Skelton Collection)

A circa 1944 photograph of young Hollywood starlet Davis, soon to be Skelton’s second wife. (Vincennes University, Red Skelton Collection)

That being said, Skelton was one busy private. By opting to serve as a regular soldier (with field artillery duty/training at California’s Camp Roberts), he inadvertently set himself up for double duty—a soldier constantly asked to entertain. Eventually the strain would be too much, and he entered special services as a performer. Still, his easy-going nature and desire to please resulted in too many one-man shows, with a nervous breakdown occurring shortly after being shipped to the Italian war zone in early 1945.

One can see danger signs, however, in Skelton’s press-clipping banter shortly before going overseas. For example, here is his comic take on always being tired since entering the service: “I think I know why the Army keeps you so darned busy all the time. If it didn’t, every guy in camp would be falling sound asleep. I’ve actually seen fellows so tired that they have gone asleep standing up. And that’s no gag.”56 In a military hospital article titled “Everyone’s a Kid is Basis for Skelton’s Philosophy,” the comedian also revealed a positive fatalism: “Everything that ever happened to me or anybody else has happened for a reason … though I may never know it. Good is going to come out of it because out of everything springs some good.”57

One need not equate this with some simplistic happy-face mindset. Skelton was quite capable of using his army experience to address some unpleasant truths. In a Hollywood Press Times piece “GIs Perplexed Red Skelton Reveals,” the comedian documented an embarrassing irony rarely hinted at in history books: “When the war is explained to a GI ‘as a war to defeat the forces that enslave Catholics, Jews and other people,’ the GI answers, ‘but we have those forces in our country, so why are we fighting?’ Among the wounded there is no race, creed or color; civilians re-stimulate prejudice when the boys return. If we could raise one generation in which mothers would say to their children, ‘all people are equal,’ America would be a long way towards democracy.”58

These were truly brave comments to make in 1945, reflecting, in part, the color-blind legacy Skelton learned from his Vincennes mentor Clarence Stout. I am aware of only one other World War II entertainer who expressed similar embarrassment over hypocrisy on the home front—the comedian Joe E. Brown. Best remembered now as the aging millionaire of Some Like It Hot (1959) who falls for Jack Lemmon in drag, during the war Brown repeatedly noted how servicemen were disappointed by the shameful placement of Japanese-Americans in interment camps.59 (Skelton’s advocacy tendencies towards GIs was also demonstrated by one of his army nicknames, “Chaplain,” because “he’s always fighting someone’s battles.”60 Given that the thirty-one-year-old Skelton was ten to thirteen years older than most recruits, they also affectionately called him “Pops.”)

GI

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