Joseph Morris Weber was born in the Bowery section of New York City. Joe Weber was one of the youngest of at least seventeen children of Abraham Weber, a kosher butcher, and Gertrude (Enoch) Weber; the family had emigrated in the 1860's from Poland to the impoverished Jewish enclave on the Lower East Side.
Weber and Fields became friends at the Allen Street School in the Bowery, from which, according to tradition, they were expelled at the age of eleven for practicing handstands in the corridors and performing Lancashire clogs in the classrooms.
The poverty of their families had forced them to work by the age of nine, Fields as a soda jerk and Weber in a cigarette factory, but lack of money did not keep them from attending the cheap variety shows and theatres of the Bowery, and both became fascinated by the stage. Their first performance as a team occurred in 1876. Billing themselves as a blackface acrobatic song-and-dance act, they were hired at the Elks Serenaders Social Club at Turn Hall on East Fourth Street, but were discharged after a single performance. Not easily daunted, the nine-year-olds secured a four-week engagement at the newly opened Chatham Square Museum and in the following year played at the Globe Museum, where for the first time they developed their "Dutch" act. Writing their own scripts and music, the youngsters would dress in oversized clothes, Weber padding himself heavily through the middle and Fields adding inches to his height with built-up shoes. After their entrance singing their theme, "Here we are, a jolly pair, " they would pummel each other in the best slapstick tradition, all the while conducting a comic dialogue in what was supposedly the stage German dialect of the time but which owed more than a little to the Yiddish spoken in their homes and to the faulty English of their Polish neighborhood. With this act, as well as Irish and blackface song-and-dance routines, they served a long apprenticeship in the nickel museums, amusement parks, and ten-cent theatres of New York and New Jersey. Gradually they acquired the experience and reputation to secure bookings at the better houses, like Keith and Batchelder's Museum in Boston, where in 1883 they received forty dollars a week. Over the years that followed, Weber and Fields traveled widely around the country, first with circuses and road shows and then, in 1890, with their own company. By 1891 they were earning $400 weekly apiece in skits in which the stubby and rotund Weber played the innocent, as the comic foil for the lanky and superior Fields. Fields would introduce Weber to the fundamentals of pool, bilk his gullible partner by a free interpretation of the rules of the game, and, when Weber sputtered his outraged protest, chase him around the table, beating him mercilessly with a pool cue. By the 1890's, however, the public appetite for dialect humor was diminishing, as ethnic groups became increasingly sensitive about their cultural backgrounds. Weber and Fields, sensing the trend, began to focus their comic ingenuity in another direction, that of the legitimate theatre. The start of their career in true burlesque, as Fields would later tell it, was an engagement at Hammerstein's Olympia Theatre during which they found themselves outclassed by the preceding performer, a quick-change artist who gave a one-act drama with all six parts played by himself. In desperation they counterattacked with a burlesque of the drama and of the quick-change art. They soon formed a company for this sort of burlesque and leased the Imperial Theatre on Broadway, renaming it Weber and Fields' Music Hall. Thus on September 5, 1896, Weber and Fields began the seven-year zenith of their career with a variety show featuring the famous pool-table skit and a burlesque, "The Art of Maryland, " a travesty on The Heart of Maryland in which Mrs. Leslie Carter was then starring for David Belasco. The second season opened September 2, 1897, with The Glad Hand, containing "Secret Servants, " their comic version of the play Secret Service by William Gillette. This was replaced in December by "Pousse Cafe, or the Worst Born, " burlesquing Anna Held in La Poupée and Belasco's The First Born - the earliest of many Weber and Fields burlesques written by Edgar Smith and put to music by John Stromberg. In their own stage roles, Weber at this period affected the loud checked suits which accentuated his artificial padding, and both men mimicked the city "sport" of the day with bushy chin whiskers and shallow derbies. So successful were Weber and Fields that they could attract top talent, and it was in the nature of an accolade for a Broadway production to be parodied by them. Richard Mansfield allowed them to watch a dress rehearsal of Cyrano de Bergerac, which they then presented at the Music Hall as "Cyranose de Bricabrac" (November 1898). Annie Russell and her company attended the opening night (January 19, 1899) of the burlesque of her play Catherine in which Fay Templeton assumed the title role, with David Warfield as the father. Miss Russell asserted "they never again were able to give a completely serious performance of the original for recollection of the counterfeit". Helter Skelter followed in April 1899, and then Whirl-i-gig (September 1899), the first of several productions in which Lillian Russell joined the group. DeWolf Hopper appeared in Fiddle-dee-dee (1900) and Hoity Toity (1901). The eighth and final season opened with Whoop-dee-doo on September 24, 1903, in which Louis Mann scored a hit. On December 30 of that year the disastrous Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago impelled New York to radical changes in its fire laws, changes which would have meant rebuilding or abandoning the Music Hall, and the theatre closed January 30, 1904. The "Weberfields, " as they were affectionately known, parted company with the final performance of Whoop-dee-doo at the New Amsterdam Theatre on May 29, 1904. According to Weber, they separated for "purely business reasons, " although their biographer, Felix Isman, contends that Weber's jealousy of Fields played a part. Weber bought out his partner and during the eight years of the Weber and Fields schism maintained control of the New Amsterdam Theatre. In the fall of 1904 he opened with Higgledy-Piggledy and a cast that included Marie Dressler and Anna Held. Fields, with two partners, launched his own theatre on Broadway with a light opera by Victor Herbert, It Happened in Nordland (December 1904). This was followed by a travesty of a current stage hit, The Music Master, and a succession of musical shows. Following a reconciliation which supposedly took place at the funeral of Fields's father, Weber and Fields joined forces once again in Hokey Pokey (February 1912). The following November they opened their New Music Hall on 44th Street with Roly Poly. Time, however, had wrought changes in the popular mood, and burlesque was not to regain its former glory. After a single season their theatre closed, and the partners diverted their talents to musical comedy, vaudeville, and later to motion pictures. Fields continued to act in musicals and in 1914 made a rare appearance in a straight dramatic play, The High Cost of Loving. Just before the opening of The Wild Rose in 1926, however, he was taken ill, and except for a small part in the motion picture The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), he gave up acting. He did produce musical and comic shows during his later years: Peggy Ann (1926), A Connecticut Yankee (1927), and, at the Lew Fields Mansfield Theatre, Present Arms (1928). Weber was also active as a producer. In 1918 he and Fields had collaborated in Back Again, and in 1925 they made a motion picture version of Friendly Enemies. Both men retired in 1930 and moved with their families to Beverly Hills, Calif. Even in retirement, Weber and Fields appeared in two motion pictures, Blossoms on Broadway (1937) and Lillian Russell (1940), and they made a short comeback in vaudeville at the Palace Theatre in New York in 1932. In September of that year their Golden Jubilee Dinner at the Astor Hotel was a sentimental gathering for a generation of show business folk. Weber died in Los Angeles ten months later, after six weeks of hospitalization for arteriosclerosis, and was cremated at the Hollywood Cemetery.
He, along with Lew Fields, formed the comedy double-act of Weber and Fields. In his heyday, an era of increasingly large theatres and audiences, the company had played to an intimate clientele, sophisticated enough to enjoy satire of the popular theatre but hungry for the broad comedy that was the Weber and Fields stock-in-trade.
Quotations: In "The Pool Room, " a refinement of their Dutch act, Weber would goggle upward and say, "I am delightfulness to meet you, " whereupon Fields would reply, "Der disgust is all mine. "
Joe Weber had married Lillian Friedman on January 3, 1897; they are not known to have had any children.
