Although first judged a suicide, his father, a devoutly religious man who hoped his son would be a minister, was eventually charged with murder, but found not guilty at trial.

Heading to Des Moines he found employment as a hotel bellhop, but then moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where his interest in theatre led to a career in comedic acting.

In St. Louis, Missouri, he saw a performance by the vaudeville team of Joe Weber and Lew Fields, which prompted Conklin to develop a character based on his boss at the time, a man with a thick accent and a bushy walrus moustache.

In between, he had a significant role as ZaSu Pitts' father in director Erich von Stroheim's acclaimed 1924 MGM production, Greed, although the part was cut from the film and the footage is now lost,[3] and in 1928 in the Christie Film Company version of Tillie's Punctured Romance with W.C. Fields, which had nothing to do with the 1914 Chaplin version (in which Conklin had also appeared) aside from the title.

[3][4] Conklin made the transition to talkies and, although he would continue to act for another thirty years, age and the shift in moviegoing tastes to more sophisticated comedy saw his roles limited to secondary or smaller parts in shorts, including the Three Stooges shorts Flat Foot Stooges (as a fire chief), Dutiful But Dumb (as a bartender), Three Little Twirps (as a Circus butcher), Phony Express (as a bartender), and Micro-Phonies (as a drunken pianist who answers a song request with "Know it?

[4] In Soundies musicals, he appeared with other silent-comedy alumni as The Keystone Kops, as well as on the televised This Is Your Life tribute to Mack Sennett.

[4] In the 1960s, Conklin was living at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital when he fell in love with another patient there, June Gunther.

The two got married in Las Vegas in 1965, the fourth marriage for both,[6] they set up housekeeping in Van Nuys, California; the groom was seventy-nine and the bride sixty-five.