Edgar Livingston Kennedy was an American comedic character actor who appeared in at least 500 films during the silent and sound eras. Professionally, he was known as "Slow Burn", owing to his ability to portray characters whose anger slowly rose in frustrating situations.
In many of his roles, he used exasperated facial expressions and performed very deliberately to convey his rising anger or "burn", often rubbing his hand over his bald head and across his face in an effort to control his temper. One memorable example of his comedy technique can be seen in the 1933 Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup, where he plays a sidewalk lemonade vendor who is harassed and increasingly provoked by Harpo and Chico.
Kennedy was born April 26, 1890, in Monterey County, California, to Canadians Neil Kennedy and Annie Quinn. He attended San Rafael High School before taking up boxing. He was a light-heavyweight and once went 14 rounds with Jack Dempsey. After boxing, he worked as a singer in vaudeville, musical comedy and light opera.
After making his debut in 1911, Kennedy performed with some of Hollywood's biggest comedians, including Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Charley Chase and Our Gang. He was also one of the original Keystone Kops.
Kennedy's burly frame originally suited him for villainous or threatening roles in silent pictures. By the 1920s, he was working for producer Hal Roach, who kept him busy playing supporting roles in short comedies. He starred in one short, A Pair of Tights (1928), where he plays a tightwad determined to spend as little as possible on a date. His antics with comedian Stuart Erwin are reminiscent of Roach's Laurel and Hardy comedies, produced concurrently. Kennedy also directed half a dozen of Roach's two-reel comedies.
In 1930, RKO-Pathe featured Kennedy in a pair of short-subject comedies, Next Door Neighbors and Help Wanted, Female. His characterization of a short-tempered householder was so effective, RKO built a series around him. The "Average Man" comedies starred Kennedy as a blustery, stubborn everyman determined to accomplish a household project or get ahead professionally, despite the meddling of his featherbrained wife (usually Florence Lake), her freeloading brother (originally William Eugene, then Jack Rice) and his dubious mother-in-law (Dot Farley). Kennedy pioneered the kind of domestic situation comedy that later became familiar on television. Each installment ended with Kennedy embarrassed, humbled or defeated, looking at the camera and doing his patent slow burn. The Edgar Kennedy Series, with its theme song "Chopsticks", became a standard part of the moviegoing experience. He made six "Average Man" shorts a year for 17 years. In 1938, he worked as a straight man for British comedian Will Hay in Hey! Hey! USA.
Kennedy became so identified with frustration that practically every studio hired him to play hotheads. He often played dumb cops, detectives, and even a prison warden; sometimes he was a grouchy moving man, truck driver, or blue-collar workman. His character usually lost his temper at least once. In Diplomaniacs, he presides over an international tribunal where Wheeler & Woolsey want to do something about world peace. "Well, ya can't do anything about it here," yells Kennedy, "This is a peace conference!" Kennedy, established as the poster boy for frustration, even starred in an instructional film titled The Other Fellow, where he played a loudmouthed roadhog venting his anger on other drivers (each played by Kennedy as well), little realizing that, to them, he is "the other fellow."
Perhaps his most unusual roles were as a puppeteer in the detective mystery The Falcon Strikes Back, and as a philosophical bartender inspired to create exotic cocktails in Harold Lloyd's last film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947). He also played comical detectives opposite two titans of acting: John Barrymore, in Twentieth Century (1934); and Rex Harrison, in Unfaithfully Yours (1948). In the latter, he tells Harrison's character, a symphony conductor, "Nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel."
Kennedy died of throat cancer at the Motion Picture Hospital, San Fernando Valley on November 9, 1948.
