Eddie Cantor, fresh from a holiday at St. Moritz, took the city by storm on his recent visit here. With crowds greeting him from the moment he stepped ashore, at Victoria Station, and wherever he went, Eddie, his wife and three of his daughters saw what they could of London through a protective screen of burly policemen shielding him from his admirers.
To representatives of the London press, the famed comedian expressed his views on a number of subjects. About Germany, he said:
“Why should I send my films to Germany and make people laugh who make my people cry?”
Of Mussolini, with whom he had an audience in Rome, he said: “He is the policeman of Europe.”
Asked why he can make so many people laugh—probably more than anybody else in history, one interview said—Cantor said:
“I guess its a superiority complex. You’ve got to make the fellow in the audience think you’re a fool and he’s smart. Seventy-five per cent of it lies in putting yourself in the place of somebody the man in the audience knows. When he turns to his wife and says ‘isn’t that like so-and-so!’ then you’ve got him.”
To the question why Jews make such good comedians, Eddie had this explanation to offer:
“The comedian who lacks pathos cannot last, and for centuries the Jews have suffered. They have been weak, oppressed, harassed. They have had to dissemble or die, to smile when they have felt rage, laugh when their hearts have been breaking.
“And for the same reason they are good musicians. They have found in music an outlet. In song or with the violin, they have been able to pour out personal grief, give expression to age-old racial sorrows.
“It is not the hand that guides the bow of our great violinists; it is the heart. That is why so many Jews are great.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
