Bert Wheeler (born April 7, 1895 in Paterson, New Jersey - January 18, 1968) Americancomedian and one half of the comedy team of Wheeler & Woolsey. April 7 is the 97th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (98th in leap years). ... 1895 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... The skyline of Paterson, New Jersey, showing the canyon of the Passaic River in the foreground. ... January 18 is the 18th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1968 was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ... A comedian (also comedienne, female) is a person who attempts to make people laugh through a variety of methods, normally through joke telling, or a stream of funny banter. ... Wheeler & Woolsey famous American film comedy team of the thirties who are almost totally unknown today though their movies have survived. ...
Wheeler and Woolsey were hugely popular in the early thirties, for their vaudeville honed wisecracking, cockeyed musical numbers and risque repartee.
BertWheeler (the one with the curly hair) and Robert Woolsey (the one with the glasses and cigar) both came up in vaudeville, but separately.
Wheeler and his wife (as Bert and Betty Wheeler) played all over the country with their act, eventually ending in the top of the heap; the 1923 Ziegfield Follies, headlining Fannie Brice.
Wheeler and Woolsey carried the sexual double entendre, a staple of vaudeville and burlesque in the 1920s, with them into the early sound film, and, fortuitously, Code enforcement was sufficiently slack to enable some great verbal gags to make their way into their work.
Wheeler, on the other hand, and while there is no doubt that he will always get the female ingenue at the end of each film, is always less aware of his own, and other men's, attraction to men and male effeminacy.
Wheeler and Woolsey's best comedies adopt this provocative attitude of "anything goes," and Depression audiences ate them up (Watz details how profitable most of their films were, except for the short period when David O. Selznick ran RKO into the ground financially).
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