Victor Borge made classical music funny and accessible

We’re letting one of the most original comedy musical performers ever quietly fade away

Interview requests

You may be familiar with Proverbs 17:22 in the Bible (King James Version), which goes like this, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

That’s why many people believe laughter is the best medicine. Lord knows we need plenty of laughs, chuckles, giggles, snorts and guffaws in today’s society.

One way we can find humour is in music. There have been many comedians and comedic figures associated with just about every musical style imaginable. Country stars like David “Stringbean” Akeman, Roy Clark, Homer and Jethro, Louis “Grandpa” Jones, Lonzo and Oscar and Minnie Pearl. Jack Benny and Henry Youngman on the violin. Steve Allen, Jimmy Durante and Oscar Levant on the piano. There’s also Spike Jones, Seth MacFarlane, the Marx Brothers, Spike Milligan, Eddie Murphy, “Weird” Al Yankovic and Peter Schickele’s alter ego, P. D. Q. Bach.

One name arguably stands above the others. That would be Victor Borge, the magnificent classical pianist nicknamed “The Clown Prince of Denmark.”

Borge’s musical talent was undeniable. His parents, Frederikke and Bernhard Rosenbaum, were both Danish, Jewish and musicians. The young Borge started taking piano lessons in 1909 in Copenhagen at age two. He was identified as a prodigy and gave his first piano recital when he was eight years old. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and briefly became a classical concert pianist. He shifted to his stand-up act in 1926, which enabled him to travel across Europe, North America and the world.

When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, Borge was playing a concert in Sweden. He wisely headed to Finland and made his way to America with only $20 in his pocket. (He visited his dying mother in Denmark during the Second World War by disguising himself as a sailor.) He would marry twice and have five children. He performed with the New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Royal Danish Orchestra and more. He became a household name by appearing on Ed Sullivan’s Talk of the Town, What’s My Line? and PBS specials, as well as children’s shows like Sesame Street, The Electric Company and The Muppet Show.

He was an excellent composer, including his famous “Phonetic Punctuation” routine, and a surprisingly good all-around writer.

Let’s consider his amusing March 1985 piece for Popular Mechanics about moving a baby grand piano. It’s a funny, thoughtful and intelligent tale of how he supposedly got a “4½-foot-wide baby grand through two 3½-foot-wide single door frames and across two thresholds without a sound.” The task involved a stack of books, rolling pin and a sleep-deprived 15-year-old Borge to get it done in one night.

His mother apparently didn’t immediately notice the piano had been moved since she was “so accustomed to seeing the old upright where it belonged for years.” Alas, his success in moving the baby grand piano was seemingly for naught. “From then on, my mother slept even lighter,” Borge wrote in his concluding sentence, “from fear that perhaps one morning she wouldn’t be able to locate the kitchen.”

The first time I ever saw Borge perform was on a PBS special either in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Watching this concert with my father, who had seen him perform live in Toronto at Massey Hall a time or two, I was instantly mesmerized. I already enjoyed classical music (and still do), but the infusion of comedic lines, quips, jokes and asides was a revelation of sorts. I own two of Borge’s legendary performances on CD, Comedy in Music (1954) and Caught in the Act (1955), along with one DVD set, The Best of Victor Borge: Act One and Two (1990). There’s an official YouTube channel of his work, as well as his testimony as a Holocaust survivor to the USC Shoah Foundation.

It was Borge’s ability to tell jokes and captivate an audience that truly set him apart.

His sense of humour was on the light-hearted side, although the early stages of his stand-up career included plenty of anti-Nazi jokes. Borge would tell people to “excuse his front” and “excuse his back” before playing the piano. Some witty remarks often popped up at his performances, such as “I only know two pieces; one is ‘Clair de Lune’ and the other one isn’t” and “Beethoven wrote in three flats a lot. That’s because he moved twice.” There were other great quips, including “the difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer,” and this appropriate analysis, “laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”

Borge’s music and comedy soothed the savage beast until he passed away on Dec. 23, 2000. He’s greatly missed by those who remember him fondly, but that group of people is shrinking with each passing year. My hope is that this unfortunate trend can be reversed if we start to recognize, cherish and become reacquainted with his genius once more.

“I normally don’t do requests,” Borge once said, “unless, of course, I have been asked to do so.” Fair enough. Ask the Danish clown prince, and ye shall receive.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.