Jerry Colonna
Jerry Colonna is an actor, born 1904.
A trombone got Jerry Colonna into comedy. Born Gerardo Luigi Colonna in Boston in 1904, he was a working musician first, and the instrument handed him the two things his act ran on: timing and an enormous sound.
Paired with Bob Hope on radio and in films through the 1940s and 1950s, he became the loudest and least sensible of Hope's sidekicks, a pop-eyed man with a handlebar moustache who sang in a deliberate caterwaul and punctuated other people's jokes with a catchphrase, Who's Yehudi?, that had nothing to do with anything. Radio comedy of that era survives badly, because so much of it was pace and personality rather than material, and Colonna is a good illustration of what has been lost: the bit is closer to performance art than to a joke.
Film kept him mostly as a voice and a cameo. He narrates the Casey at the Bat segment of Disney's Make Mine Music, turns up uncredited in the Hope and Crosby Road pictures, and, best of all, plays the March Hare in Disney's Alice in Wonderland, where the tea party gives his brand of aggressive nonsense a permanent address. He died in 1986.
Movies (5)
Where to start with Jerry Colonna
Alice in Wonderland is where to start, and for most people it is where the acquaintance already began without their knowing it. The March Hare at the tea party is Colonna distilled: volume, cheerful derangement, no interest whatsoever in the plot.
Then Make Mine Music for the Casey at the Bat segment, which is him narrating a comic poem and the closest a film ever came to bottling the radio act.
The Hope pictures are the completist tier. He appears uncredited in Road to Utopia and The Road to Hong Kong, so watch those as Hope and Crosby vehicles and treat him as a bonus. Joys catches him late, playing himself. The radio shows where he made his name are not among the credits listed here, and they are worth chasing down elsewhere.