Howard Brothers
[citation needed] After performing in amateur night competitions, the brothers began separate professional theatre careers.
The brothers were hired by the Shubert family in 1912 to perform in a series of successful revues on Broadway over the next decade called The Passing Show.
[10][11] Eugene and Willie, in 1902, along with a friend, Thomas Potter Dunne, formed an act called "The Messenger Boys Trio".
One sketch that they wrote was called "The Messenger Boy and the Thespian"; even after Dunne left the act, Willie and Eugene continued to perform this routine.
[4] After a few years together, the brothers were earning high fees on the Orpheum circuit, and young Willie became the acknowledged leader of the act.
[4][9][10] The brothers generally played wisecracking caricatures, using Jewish dialect humor, opera parodies (with Eugene as the tenor and Willie as the baritone), and rapid-fire comedy crosstalk.
Diminutive, wild-haired, slumping Willie often portrayed a troublesome servant, such as a waiter or a bellhop, while well-fed, well-dressed Eugene, the straight man, played a self-satisfied authority figure, such as a manager, businessman or a customer.
Willie assayed foreign accents, such as Spanish, Scottish, French, Russian, and Chinese, but always laced with his Yiddish dialect, and also did impressions of popular vocalists, such as George Jessel, Al Jolson, Gallagher and Shean, and Eddie Cantor.
Their most famous comic routines "included 'French Taught in a Hurry' in which [they] did rapid doubletalk; 'Quartets from Rigoletto' [a parody], which [they] would perform with large, buxom ladies ([with Willie] stealing glances at their breasts the whole time); and 'Comes the Revolution', in which [Willie] would play a radical agitator"[3] on a soapbox and Eugene would play a heckler.
An early review in Variety magazine commented: "The Howards never fail to become a riot at the Garden", and George Jessel later said that Willie was "The best of all the revue comics, bar none.
[3][9] Willie's last Broadway shows were: The Howard Brothers also made several short films together, including Between the Acts at the Opera (1926, one of the earliest Vitaphone talking pictures), The Music Makers (1929), and I'm Telling You (1931).
[citation needed] The New York-based Willie Howard was signed, and he made several short comedies in which he appeared as the hapless Frenchman Pierre Ginsbairge, complete with beret, mustache, and goatee.
He told Lawrence Grobel in his 1979 Playboy interview that, as a young actor in New York, he used to go see Willie and laugh so loudly, Howard began to play to him.
[3] Eugene, who had been living in Jackson Heights, Queens, died in 1965 at Park West Hospital, in New York City, aged 84.
