‘Danny Kaye’ a Tribute to an American Master Clown

There are comedians, there are comic actors and, in a class by themselves, there are the great clowns. Chaplin and Keaton come to mind at once, and a strong case can be made that Danny Kaye was the last of the great clowns in our time. (Kaye died in 1987 at the age of 74.)

“Danny Kaye: A Legacy of Laughter,” an “American Masters” biography airing Sunday at 7:30 p.m. on KCET, makes wonderfully clear why he was indeed a great clown. He could make us laugh uproariously, but he could also take us to sadness and beyond. Pianist Artur Rubinstein, one of Kaye’s fans, said his work was not so much amusing as moving. As with Chaplin and Keaton, the wistfulness was never far from the jokes.

He had all the gifts. He had a dancer’s balletic and expressive grace, which made even the slapstick he did so well graceful, too. He had amazing vocal agility, dazzlingly revealed in “Tchaikovsky,” his show-stopping hit from “Lady in the Dark,” in which he sang the names of 50 Russian composers in 39 seconds. He did rapid-fire double-talk in what sounded like any one of several languages. Yet he also sang ballads with a quietly engaging ease that, heard again, recalls both Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby.

Kaye had come up a hard but instructive road, singing on Brooklyn streets as a young teenager, and not long after discovered that pratfalls begat laughs. As a “toomler,” a kind of free-floating emcee, at a Catskill resort hotel, he mastered the fine art of skits, helping turn out a revue a week and working with a talented team that included songwriter Sylvia Fine, who become his wife and wrote his best material then and later.

From it all, he developed a comic persona: a kind of exalted nebbish, girl-shy and accident-prone but quick-witted and always beautifully agile, and always lovable. He became a man for all media: stage, screen, television, concerts. Later in life, he was impressive as a straight dramatic actor. Not least, he was a pilot licensed to fly jets, and an expert chef with Chinese cooking his specialty.

The large pleasure of this portrait, inevitably, lies in the clips from the showcase movies, among them “Wonder Man,” “The Kid From Brooklyn,” “On the Riviera” and “Hans Christian Andersen.” There is disappointingly little from “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” in which he was particularly splendid, but there is rare footage of a triumphant engagement at the Palladium in London.

Glimpses of his early ‘60s weekly variety shows, cavorting with Lucille Ball, Louie Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, are curiously poignant reminders of the variety shows that were once the medium’s glory and now, alas, are gone.

For 35 years, Kaye was a UNICEF ambassador to the world’s children, and there are very affecting sequences of Kaye delighting various children and making the language barrier between them vanish.

Directed by Bob Marty, written by JoAnn Young and narrated by Hugh Downs, a longtime friend, the show fits comfortably in the pattern of television show-business profiles, breaking no new ground but exploring the surface with competent affection. To get the measure of the man, Carl Reiner discusses Kaye the comedian; Rosemary Clooney, Kaye the singer; Itzhak Perlman, Kaye the symphony conductor; Harry Belafonte, Kaye the entertainer; and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Kaye the dancer. Daughter Dena talks about Kaye as father. (“I fall somewhere between daughter and audience,” she has said.)

Executive producer Susan Lacy created the “American Masters” series, now in its 11th admirable season.

* “Danny Kaye: A Legacy of Laughter” airs Sunday at 7:30 p.m. on KCET.