[2] Practicing in the back of Hayman's Plumbing Shop one night, he picked up a length of gas pipe and blew into it, creating an unusual sound.

With modifications, this became a musical instrument he named a "bazooka" (after "bazoo", meaning a windy fellow, from the Dutch bazuin for "trumpet").

His stage persona was a self-effacing, rustic bumpkin with amusing stories about "the kinfolks" back home in Van Buren.

Burns was a regular, playing the bazooka and telling tall tales about his fictional hillbilly relatives, Uncle Fud and Aunt Doody.

[2] Bob Burns was the host of the 10th Academy Awards held on March 10, 1938, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

[citation needed] In 1930, Burns appeared briefly in the film Up the River playing the bazooka in blackface for a prison vaudeville show.

[7] He also appeared on the December 4, 1939 Lux Radio Theatre one-hour adaptation of A Man to Remember, taking Edward Ellis's film role as a humane small-town doctor battling the townspeople's greed.

[8] In 1941, Burns broke with Paramount, rather than appear in a proposed film which he thought was excessively demeaning to "the people of his native hills".

[7] In 1944, Burns appeared in the Technicolor musical Western film Belle of the Yukon (1944), set in the Canadian Gold Rush.

[7] For his contributions to the film industry, Burns was inducted posthumously into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 with a motion pictures star located at 1601 Vine Street.

[citation needed] A wealthy man from his land investments, Burns spent his final years on his 200-acre (0.81 km2) model farm on Sherman Way in Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California.