For Victor Borge, War Led to Stardom

The early months of 1940 were a jittery time in Denmark. Germany had invaded Poland, Europe was officially at war, and the Danes waited to see if their country, which had clashed with Germany in the previous century, would be next.

“Winston Churchill and I were the only ones who said it could happen here,” says Victor Borge, the 90-year-old pianist recently saluted at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington. (The event will be broadcast on CBS Wednesday.)

Back then, Borge was named Borge Rosenbaum, a Danish entertainer who was also Jewish. And it did happen in Denmark, in 1940, despite a 10-year nonaggression pact signed with Germany a year earlier.

“What’s the difference between a Nazi and a dog? A Nazi lifts his arm.” At home in his seaside mansion, Borge doesn’t think it’s a funny joke, at least not anymore. He hated the Nazis and they hated him, and well before they arrived, he worked that kind of material into his shows. During his last year in Denmark, he says, he barely left the house for fear of attacks by German sympathizers.

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Borge fled to Sweden, arriving a day before the invasion to give a string of performances he had arranged in anticipation of the German takeover. His wife, who held both Danish and American citizenship and was ostensibly immune from Nazi harassment, stayed behind.

On the day of his first performance as an exile in Sweden, he learned his mother was near death from cancer. Despite the danger, Borge, a well-known figure in his homeland, returned to occupied Denmark.

“I came back on my first free night and I told her the biggest lie of my life,” he says in a voice inflected briefly into a minor mode. “I told her, ‘When you get over this, we’ll all go to America. I have a tremendous contract.’ ”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” his mother responded.

Borge never saw her again. His lie, however, was unexpectedly close to the truth. Despite not speaking English, despite leaving the earnings from his Danish career behind, despite having to compete with a great influx of musicians and entertainers from Europe, he soon did have a tremendous contract in America--with Bing Crosby’s radio show, on which he was heard by an audience of 30 million every week for more than a year. By 1941, the refugee, living in Los Angeles with his wife, was on his way to becoming the “Great Dane,” whose piano-comedy act has entertained generations.

Although he maintains an impressive concert schedule for a 90-year-old with a bad shoulder and bum knees, Borge’s widest audience may stem from his videotapes

Borge comes from an age when comics thought in terms of material and timing, and, as with most great comics, his humor suggests a hidden matrix of screwy but recognizable distortions of logic and grammar. Never mind his slapstick, pulling on the page-turner’s tie or playing the “Blue Danube Waltz” upside down--the real heart of Borge’s humor lies in its misapplied precision.

“I was an only son. Later I had an older brother.”

“My grandfather gave me this watch a few minutes before he died--for 20 bucks.”

Distortions of Logic and Grammar

In Borge’s hands, it gives one the sense that his comic logic is like a musical phrase: What comes next can always alter or subvert what came first.

One of Borge’s enduring routines, “Phonetic Punctuation,” is a spoken aria of nonsense noises, amplified by the microphone. Borge’s gag is to speak all the punctuation marks in a typical sentence: Periods go Phhhht!, commas come out Theeeewtk!, and exclamation points Szzzybkkkt!

A sentence sounds like a topsy-turvy percussion fantasy. Periods and commas, like musical expressive marks, are not meant to be heard literally yet are essential to meaning. By articulating them, Borge uses literal precision to make a kind of spoken music.

“I once heard a lecture in Russian, but it was like a new form for music that I didn’t understand,” says Borge. “But it sounded good. And that is what music is supposed to be.”

The one question you should never ask Borge is whether he’s really a pianist or a comedian. On radio and television, they wanted Borge to talk more. In live performances, impresarios let him do more playing. Eventually he was able to define himself as indefinable, a very good pianist who was also very funny.

“I was a good pianist, but I wouldn’t go to Carnegie Hall and try to fool anybody,” he says. “But what did they want, a pianist who was not Horowitz when they already had Horowitz? So I used my ability to influence people to laugh and enjoy the way I combined music and words.”

His first appearances in this country were memorized translations of his Danish material. His huge success with Crosby came without his knowing what the individual words he was speaking meant. Just before that breakthrough, says Borge (who pronounces his name “BOR-ga”), he applied for a job as a gas station attendant--but his English was so bad they wouldn’t take him.

“I didn’t know what I was saying. I just did the phonetic punctuation, and people were taken to the hospital, they ran into trees and hit lampposts and died laughing. On radio and television, then, they always wanted me not to play, just jokes, jokes, jokes. It was an uphill battle to get to play more.”

He still plays a few popular classics, but as interludes between monologues in which he pretends to be unable to get to the point.

Onstage, Borge occasionally walks over to the piano and places his hand on it. Sometimes his fingers trace a gentle circle. It’s reminiscent of something Horowitz did in 1986 when he returned to his native Russia to perform for the first time in 61 years. As he walked onstage, he lightly brushed a hand against his beloved instrument. When pianists do this, it’s more than casual body language. It’s about a love and reliance deeper than the music we hear or--in Borge’s case--don’t hear.