"You said a mouthful!"

DID A BOOK PROPOSAL on my favorite neglected comedian, Joe E. Brown (1892-1973). If the name does not ring a bell, think of writer/director Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" (1959). This is the picture where musicians Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and, for their own protection, join an all-girl band--as girls! Where does Brown come in? He is the oversexed millionaire, Osgood Fielding III, who falls for Jack Lemmon's in-drag Daphne. Besides stealing the movie from an all-star cast including Marilyn Monroe--Brown closes the film with its most melnorable line. That is, Osgood's response to his "fiancee's" admission that "she" is a man--"Well, nobody's perfect." Not only would this performance contribute to "Some Like It Hot" being a monster critical and commercial hit, the American Film Institute later would honor it as the greatest screen comedy ever made.

Of course, at the time of its release, Brown already had been entertaining people for 50 years. As he observed in his 1956 autobiography, "The only thing I ever could do was make people laugh.... Nature met me more than halfway when it threw a handful of features together and called it a face." Though film historian David Robinson described Brown's face as a "traditional clown mask," no one could match either the size of his large, wide signature mouth, or his slow building yell--"Haaaaaaaaaaaay!" Fittingly, Brown's famous catch phrase was "You said a mouthful!"

Like his comedy contemporaries W.C. Fields and Will Rogers, the Ohio-born Brown developed his stage shtick in vaudeville. Fields was a juggler; Rogers a rope-twirling cowboy; and Brown an acrobat. In each case, these performers found greater success when they started peppering their acts with comic comments. In later years, Brown enjoyed telling people he was the only youngster who ever ran away to join the circus ... with his parents' blessing. Actually, Brown's family needed whatever modest salary the 10-year-old could earn. While it is common knowledge that he was a screen star during the Great Depression, it often is forgotten that he was a child of another depression (the early 1890s).

Though Joe relished the life of a child acrobat in the circus, it was a tough, hand-to-mouth existence, with the boy often per forming while injured. Still, he never had known anything else, and the future comedian always put an upbeat take on adversity: "I began life as an undernourished baby who grew into a gaunt, too--thin little boy; it was a fact that disturbed me not [in] the slightest. Most of the other kids in nay family and neighborhood were equally thin. And if it was a hardship, it was good conditioning for the life I later knew."

Appropriately, as film critic Leonard Maltin observes, the screen persona Brown projected was that of "likability, innocence, and American stick-to-itiveness." Indeed, his film success belied the frequent explanation for the Depression era film failure of the period's ultimate funnyman go-getter--Harold Lloyd. How did Brown best Lloyd at his own game in the 1930s? One explanation might be that he coupled his tireless work ethic with American sports, at a time when the public had a heightened interest in athletics as entertainment. For example, in "Local Boy Makes Good" (1931), Joe's accomplishments are tied to track-and-field stardom. "You Said a Mouthful" (1932) involved his being a champion swimmer. In "Son of a Sailor" (1933), he boxed. And so it went in a number of pictures.

Sports represented not only a catalyst for slapstick comedy, it also embraced both a passion and a real talent of Brown's. When not finding early employment as an acrobal, he played semipro baseball. In fact, the New York Yankees once had recruited him as a player. Though he opted for performing, he maintained ties with the organization, later acting as a Yankee television commentator in 1953. Through close friendships with legends such as Lou Gehrig, Brown amassed an extensive collection of diamond memorabilia. Fittingly, Joe's best work from the 1930s occurs in the base ball trilogy--"Fireman, Save My Child" (1932), "Elmer the Great" (1933), and "Alibi Ike" (1935).

An impressive top 10 box office star for Warner Bros., in 1936 alone he ranked ahead of such popular performers as Dick Powell, Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Jeanette MacDonald, and Gary Cooper. In 1935's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Brown (as Flute) even manages to steal the movie from another all-star cast which included Powell, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and Olivia de Havilland.

For all his movie successes, Brown was most proud of the extensive time he spent entertaining troops during World War II. Fiercely patriotic by nature, his comedy outreach was further fueled by the loss of one son in uniform. This special GI "Joe" was so active early in the conflict that he was the first entertainer to establish the precedent of near-combat-zone performing. Moreover, he is the sole show biz "trouper" during World War II It be credited officially by the army with taking a prisoner. This occurred in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese, where he flew on Allied combat missions. For these efforts, Brown later would be awarded the Asiatic Pacific Service Ribbon.