A snowball-dodging school kid slips into the skin of the screen's screaming scaredy cats
Cowardice.
That's what it was, that magic quality that made them different from you and me, that gave them their childlike energy, their poetic, high-speed physicality, their capacity for witticism. That and a love of women - though even that, more often than not, was just another manifestation of the yellow-bellied joie de vivre that made them so enjoyable to watch.
To a man - and I use that term loosely - they exhibited it: Danny Kaye, darting about a boxing ring on misshapen legs...Bob Hope, donning disguises and desperately dodging premature demise...Lou Costello, able to face the real world only at the belligerent bullying of Bud Abbott.
We traded their escapades in the schoolyard, just the way we traded sports cards or gossip about girls. Did you see the part where...? I liked it when...No way! The best part was...
And if you were fortunate enough to catch them not in prime time but on a school day afternoon, when you were home sick, you were the envy of your peers - for you, and only you, had had an audience with the Pope.
Early one weekday morning, as the snowballs began to fly - the English, on their way to English school, against we French, waiting at the bus stop - I decided to slip into the jaundiced skin that was the team jacket of filmdom's funnymen.
All the while, the battle intensified, projectiles peppering the air. The French fought valiantly but in the end, lost, for they were short one man. He was hiding around the corner, giddy in anticipation of the laugh he would get when his humble, cowardly presence, Bob Hope-style, would emerge with a Lou Costello bounce to utter the Danny Kaye-worthy line, "Have they left yet?"
So great would the ensuing roar be, he was certain, that, in true comic movie fashion, the snow piled up on the roof above his friends would shake, and as the last, unseen English enemy, snowball in hand, attempted to sneak up on one of them from behind, down would come the hundred pounds of snow - the coward, as always, accidentally saving the day.
There was no such victory of course, for there was no such laugh. Instead, stunned silence - then, derisive cries that included, "Chicken!," "Baby!," and "Loser!"
Danny, Bob and Lou had forever separated me from my peers.
From that moment until the end of childhood, there was only one social caste with which I could feel comfortable: the coward class - Danny, Bob and Lou - from whom I could learn, I hoped, how to win acceptance through inadequacy.
