MUSIC REVIEW : Comedian Victor Borge Mixes Music With Musings : Performance: The 83-year-old kept audience at Knott’s laughing Wednesday.

He looks like a distinguished elder statesman and spoke with the charming accents of a middle European pumpernickel principality. But when Victor Borge came onto the Knott’s Good Time Theatre stage Wednesday night, he burped a large puff of smoke and commented, “Chinese food.”

The 83-year-old Borge has slowed down over the years. He fell off the piano bench cautiously and spent a lot of time wandering lost in thought.

But he also kept a capacity audience laughing for two hours until he sent them home with a medley of Danish folk melodies and a gentle “Clair de Lune.”

Music, however, did not intrude on comedy for the first 30 minutes. References to “Joe” Haydn and the bust of Mozart elicited subdued laughter, after which some discreet sexual innuendo, a viola joke (with the punch line, “because violas burn longer”), an anti-Japanese jab, and an acute observation about the shape of the piano had the gathering in high spirits.

Then the music began, with two salon waltzes attributed to Ignaz Friedman, and pop hits by Mendelssohn, Liszt and Dvorak. After a series of mishaps with a bumbling page turner (played by son Ronald), Borge played “Happy Birthday” in the styles of Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and Gershwin.

A polymetric treatment of the “Blue Danube” waltz (“That guy has no sense of rhythm,” Borge said) and a polytonal one of Dvorak’s “Humoresque,” followed by a Sprechgesang vocalization, also amused the crowd.

Before plunging into the closing musical set, Borge demonstrated his “inflationary language” (“I ate a tenderloin with my fork” becoming “I nine an elevenerloin with my fivek”) and plugged both his summer appearance at Universal and his video, the latter on sale at tables outside the stage door.

Borge’s next local appearance is May 24 at the South Bay Center for the Arts.