Red Skelton’s extraordinary talent is evident in every scene on “The Red Skelton Show: The Lost Episodes,” a collection of shows from the 1950s and ‘60s previously unavailable on DVD. With his goofy bearing and daft grin, Skelton’s stand-up routines were loose as in a good nightclub act. He was the half-grown child whose disarming demeanor gave license for innuendo on the strict network television of those years.
His shows were built around comical scenarios in which he played such recurring characters as Freddie the Freeloader and Clem Kadiddlehopper. Reared in deprivation and poverty, Skelton gravitated toward playing sympathetic, marginal characters—bums, 90lb. weaklings, clerks put upon by bosses, husbands under the thumb of wives. With his vaudeville slapstick roots on display, Skelton sometimes addressed the camera on the silliness of it all (“meta” is not a postmodern invention).
Skelton often looked like he was having the time of his life. Some of the humor was topical but enough of it can still stir laughter decades on.
