![]() ![]() Eddie Cantor knew Gordon from their days on Broadway. It was in the mid-thirties that Gordon, after being a transient character in radio, finally found a home. ![]() Listen to The Mad Russian's catch phrase as exclaimed on an episode of Duffy's Tavern at this page. Could anybody have predicted that the phrase "How do you do?" would catch the country by storm? It was, like most verbal comedy performance, all in the delivery. Allusions to Gordon's familiar annotations appear in several old Warner Brothers cartoons, alienating children for over fifty years. "How do you do?" and "Do you really min it?" were mimicked for easy referential gags on other radio shows and comedy acts throughout the thirties and forties. His catch phrases are meaningless out of context. He didn't speak his words so much as pant them - an exasperated manner of speech. Instead The Mad Russian spoke in a weird, airy sounding voice. ![]() His character, despite its name, did not possess a credible Russian accent. Gordon broke into radio in the early thirties, initially appearing on primitive episodes of The Jack Benny Show. The show incorporated all the familiar elements of vaudeville in the twenties: lusty chorus girls, cornball jokes and plenty of the white man's scandal - blackface. Come the early twenties he was a regular performer in George White's Scandals, a successful annual revue of sketches and music that stole its format from the famous Ziegfeld stage shows. He appeared frequently as an actor in several different Yiddish theatre companies populating Broadway at the time. Barney Gorodetsky entered vaudeville in 1914, at the age of nineteen, working primarily as a dialect comedian. ![]()
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