Background
Bobby Clark was born on June 16, 1888 in Springfield, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Victor Brown Clark, a train conductor, and Alice Marilla Sneed.
Bobby Clark was born on June 16, 1888 in Springfield, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Victor Brown Clark, a train conductor, and Alice Marilla Sneed.
In the fourth grade he met Paul McCullough, four years his senior, who was to become his stage partner for many years.
Together they practiced bugle blowing and tumbling at the local YMCA and began their career as performers at an Elks circus in Delaware, Ohio. They made their first professional appearance in June 1905, as comedy acrobats and bugle players with the touring Culhane, Chace and Weston Minstrels. Their engagement proved more instructive than profitable, for after twelve weeks the owner absconded, leaving them stranded. Their next engagement, with Kalbfield's Greater California Minstrels, ended similarly. Undiscouraged, they joined the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus and gradually transformed themselves into clowns. Clark's makeup--spectacles painted with burnt cork--became his trademark. Chomping on a cigar, he treated audiences to such bizarre comic turns as his impression of a young Bulgarian weasel calling its mate. McCullough slipped easily into the role of straight man. After touring Mexico with the Sells-Floto Circus, they joined the Ringling Brothers Circus in 1906, and soon afterward made their first appearance in New York City at Madison Square Garden. After six years under the big top they turned to vaudeville, giving their first performance at the Brunswick, New Jersey, Opera House in December 1912. By then their stage personalities were well established. Clad in a short covert-cloth topcoat and porkpie hat, swinging his cane like a golf club, Clark would scuttle around the stage, leering, his voice a ribald gargle; while McCullough, in his checkered suit, bow tie, and ratty fur coat, beamed approval. Unlike most vaudeville comedians, they never resorted to dialect routines or blackface. Although they used many props, their routines were built around the simplest ideas--their comic inability, for example, to hoist a chair onto a table. In 1917, while appearing at the Orpheum Theater in Boston, they were spotted by Jean Bedini, a leading producer of burlesque, who engaged them to appear in Puss Puss at the Casino Theater in Philadelphia. They had not been headliners in vaudeville, but in burlesque, then in its heyday, they found the ideal medium for their freewheeling style. Under the management of C. B. Cochran they appeared in London in Chuckles of 1922, scoring particularly well in a skit in which they made elaborate preparations for a tumbling act but never turned so much as a somersault. Their London success led to their appearance in the 1922 and 1924 editions of Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue, sharing the honors with fellow comics Fanny Brice and Charlotte Greenwood. Following an engagement in their first book show, The Ramblers (1926), Clark and McCullough moved to Hollywood, where they appeared in a dozen shorts for Fox Studios and in sixty more for RKO. Moviemaking did not appeal to them, however. With their uninhibited style they chafed at the discipline imposed by directors and scriptwriters and returned to Broadway musicals, most notably Strike up the Band (1930), Here Goes the Bride (1931), Walk a Little Faster (1932), and Thumbs Up! (1934). McCullough's suicide in March 1936 ended their partnership. Clark was distraught but reestablished himself as a single performer in The Ziegfeld Follies (1936). He later enlivened a number of musicals such as The Streets of Paris (1939), Star and Garter (1942), and Mexican Hayride (1944), but his most notable appearances were in legitimate comedy. As Ben, the sailor, in a 1940 all-star revival of Congreve's Love for Love, he seemed on leave from Minsky's rather than the British Fleet, but he played the role with irresistible verve. He was no less irrepressible as Bob Acres in a 1942 production of Sheridan's The Rivals, prompting the director, Eva Le Gallienne, to observe, "I'll just try to keep the other actors out of your way. " As Monsieur Jourdain in Molière's Would-Be Gentleman (1946), not content with rewriting his role, Clark interpolated such characteristic bits of business as flinging a snuffbox across the stage into his valet's pocket. After appearing in As the Girls Go (1948), he virtually retired from the stage. He occasionally appeared on television and starred in a 1956 tour of Damn Yankees.
For the greater part of the time he lived quietly.
Like many comedians, offstage he was quiet, conservative in dress, and domestic in his habits.
On September 28, 1923 he married Angèle Gaignat, a chorus girl who had appeared with him in burlesque.