charles butterworth

a portrait of the mad hatter of broadway, mr. charles butterworth, of "sweet adeline"

• He might have been drawn by Tenniel: this baffled, doleful, futile Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, blinking emptily as a bat at the bright and bewildering sunshine about him, staring with pale expressionless eyes at a gorgeous figure in ermine and merely remarking pessimistically: "She's in white." He is a melancholy, fugitive wraith among our more robust American comics; there is no one remotely like him, no one even remotely as funny. For he is a very master of understatement; his extraordinary features seem to ponder a fact interminably before he dismisses it with three words that are thus inevitably the three funniest words possible. Someone tries to imbue him with the Spirit of Spring. "Beautiful Spring!" they tell him. He is not impressed. "Spring," he scowls. "Spring air rots things. All rotten." Thus Charles Butterworth; there is no subtler or more unique artist of laughter in the American theatre today.