When I was a kid, I loved Danny Kaye. My parents once took me to see him do "An Evening With…" at the Hollywood Bowl and he was just enchanting. He sang all his famous numbers…and he had a lot of famous numbers. This was before the Bowl had the big jumbotron video screens so if you were sitting in the cheap seats, as we were, you couldn't see the face of a performer on the stage…but with him, it almost didn't matter. Even from row ZZZ in the eleventh mezzanine or wherever we were, you could sense the sheer joy in his performance.
I still love Danny Kaye, I guess, but it got harder as a couple of books came out that said, in effect, that he was not a very nice human being. And it became even harder to love him when I started meeting performers who'd worked with the man and did not have good things to say. This kind of thing shouldn't make a difference with your enjoyment of a performer but I'm afraid that with me, it does.
Still, I can enjoy what he does…like this clip from his 1963-1967 variety show on CBS. Harvey Korman is the interviewer in the sketch. Mr. Korman was a regular on the series and when it was cancelled, he was hired by Carol Burnett for her new variety show, which taped in the same studio. So Harvey didn't even have to change parking spaces…
