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Updated: May 3, 2025
Not so; I am writing not about comedians in general, but about Newgag. That he had come to so exceptional a concession marked the depth of his despair. I tried to cheer him. "Nonsense, my boy! They give you bad parts. Go out of comic opera. Try tragedy." I had spoken innocently and sincerely, but Newgag thought I was jesting.
Several months afterward, a manager, who is a friend of mine, was suddenly plunged in distress because of the serious illness of an actor who was to fill a part in a new American comedy that the manager was to produce on the next night. "What on earth shall I do?" he asked. "Play the part yourself, as Hoyt does in such an emergency or get Newgag." "Who's Newgag?"
"That's a happy thought, old man," said a comedian of the younger school, one night, when Newgag had uttered his wonted speech. "Why don't you quit?" Such a speech sufficed to rob Newgag of his self-possession and to reduce him to silence. He could not cope with easy, offhand, impromptu jesters.
Newgag, to be sure, should naturally have been, as he was, the last to discover it. Newgag thus went one step further than any comedian I have ever known. Having detected his inability to amuse audiences, he confessed it. People who know actors and read this will already have said that it is a fiction, and that Newgag's admission is false to life.
"This isn't exactly art," he said to me, the other night, with a tinge of self-rebuke. "But it's success." And the history of Newgag is the history of many. A Desperate Youth The second act of "William Tell" had ended at the Grand Opera House. The incandescent lights of ceiling and proscenium flashed up, showering radiance upon the vast surface of summer costumes and gay faces in the auditorium.
"He's a friend of mine, out of a position. I met him to-day very much frayed." "Bring him to me." Newgag was overwhelmed when I told him of the opportunity. "I never acted in straight comedy," he said. "I can't do it. I might as well try to play Juliet." "He wants you only to speak the lines, that's all. You're a quick study, you know. Come on!" I had almost to drag the man to the manager.
Brought up in the school which teaches that to make others laugh one must never smile one's self, he wore a grotesquely lugubrious and changeless countenance. Such was Newgag in his every impersonation. When he thought he was funniest, he appeared to be in most pain and was most depressing.
The papers agreed the next day that one of the hits of the performance was made by Newgag "in an odd part which he had conceived in a strikingly original way, and impersonated with wonderful finish and subtle drollery." "What does it mean?" he gasped. I enlightened him. "My boy, you simply played yourself.
"If only I'd had time to study it!" American plays had taken foothold, and this premier of a new one by an author of two previous successes drew a "typical first night audience." Newgag, having abandoned all idea of making a hit, or of acting the part any further than the mere delivery of the speeches went, was no longer inordinately nervous.
In truth, no one tried more than Newgag to excel in "horse-play," but his temperament or his training did not equip him for excelling in it; he defended the monotony, emptiness, and toilsomeness of his humour on the ground that it was "legitimate." One night Newgag drank two glasses of beer in rapid succession and looked at me with a touching countenance.
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