Edgar Kennedy


Edgar Livingston Kennedy was an American comedic character actor who appeared in at least 500 films during the silent and sound eras. Professionally, he was known as "Slow Burn", owing to his ability to portray on screen characters whose anger slowly rises in frustrating situations. Kennedy in many of his roles used exasperated facial expressions, performed very deliberately, to convey his rising anger or "burn", often rubbing his hand over his bald head and across his face in an effort to control his temper. One memorable example of his slow-burn comedy technique can be seen in the 1933 Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup in which he plays a sidewalk lemonade vendor who is harassed and increasingly provoked by Harpo and Chico.

Early years

Kennedy was born on April 26, 1890, in Monterey County, California, to Canadians Neil Kennedy and Annie Quinn. He 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.

Film career

Making his debut in 1911,Kennedy performed with some of the biggest film comedians in the United States, including Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, 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, 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 everyman determined to accomplish a household project or get ahead professionally, despite the meddling of his featherbrained wife, her freeloading brother and his dubious mother-in-law. 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. In 1938, Kennedy worked as a straight man for British comedian Will Hay in Hey! Hey! USA.
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 ", yells Kennedy, "this is a " 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, 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. He also played comical detectives opposite two titans of acting: John Barrymore in Twentieth Century and Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours. In the latter film he tells Harrison's character, a symphony conductor, "Nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel."

Death

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

Selected filmography

As actor:
As director: