The Funny Man with the Pardon: Billy Gilbert in His Girl Friday

Gilbert was born in 1894. The son of show business professionals, he entered vaudeville at twelve and over the next two decades began to make a name for himself on Broadway as well. The man who brought him to Hollywood and changed his life forever was probably the greatest comedy film producer of all time, Hal Roach.

By the midthirties, Gilbert had become a welcome presence in features as well as shorts, and in 1937 he sneezed his way into cinema immortality by voicing Sneezy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Gilbert’s character in His Girl Friday derives from the play, where he goes by the name “Pincus.” The world Pincus will enter is the pressroom of the Criminal Court building, as reporters, policemen, and politicians await the hanging of accused cop killer Earl Williams. The corrupt mayor and sheriff need the execution to happen for their own political purposes. When a messenger named Pincus arrives with a reprieve from the governor, they endeavor to get rid of him until Williams is dead. He agrees to leave and the mayor suggests he visit a place he knows where “you can get anything you want,” which in 1931 meant a speakeasy, a brothel, or both. Pincus returns toward the end, the worse for drink. Insisting that he can’t be bribed, he drives the play and film to its conclusion.

In the first film version, made in 1931, the part is played by Slim Summerville, himself a skilled comedian known for slow-talking country bumpkin types. And that’s how he plays Pincus. His very presence, rustic and dim, is a comic contrast to the hyperactive Chicago characters, and we know immediately he is out of his league. But when Billy Gilbert, now called Pettibone (a funnier name—just trust me on this one), enters His Girl Friday, we see the brilliance of Hawks’s casting. Because Pettibone is not the hayseed played by Summerville. Nor is he the traditional outsized Gilbert character. Instead he’s a timid soul—a little man in a big body. The contrast is funny from the moment he opens his mouth. In the original, Pincus only speaks when spoken to. But nobody can keep their mouth shut for that long in a Howard Hawks comedy, so the director, along with screenwriter Charles Lederer, ensured that Pettibone has something to say, usually wrong or irrelevant, between or during lines by the mayor and the sheriff (it’s entirely possible that some of this was ad-libbed by Gilbert, improvisation being something Hawks generally encouraged).

But while the expansion of the dialogue helps turn a one-note role into a fuller and more immediately amusing one, I would suggest that much of what makes Gilbert so effective in this film could be traced to his physical expressiveness, which he mastered in his years with Roach. One signature that runs across the Roach comedies is the value of the reaction shot. Roach, his players, and his directors realized that laughter driven by a big sight gag could be extended by cutting to the reaction of the comedian directly affected by it. Think of the multivalent camera looks of Oliver Hardy or the fogged visage of Stan Laurel, whose rising and falling eyebrows signaled the slow grinding of rusty gears behind them. Other Roach comics found reactions that suited their own personas.

There’s a crucial difference, however, in the editing style of Roach and Hawks comedies. The deliberate pacing of Roach and his directors called for a gag in one shot to be followed by the reaction in another. Hawks’s fleet comedy style doesn’t work that way. With all his actors in a master shot jumping on or through each other’s lines, Gilbert reacts continuously to what he hears or thinks he hears, shifting from befuddlement to astonishment to anger within one shot. And because his comprehension usually runs a beat behind his reaction, those shifts are often hilariously wrong.

Hawks’s choice to have the other characters in the film play their parts “legitimately” pays dividends here. In a traditional comedy team, you have a straight man and a comic. The questions and comments of the straight man triggerthe jokes of the comic. In Gilbert’s first scene, what Hawks effectively gives us are two straight men doing their best to ignore the comic. Gilbert is fitting the “jokes” into their barely existent pauses. The traditional straight man has to deal with the comic throughout the scene or sketch. By contrast, the sheriff and the mayor in His Girl Friday are desperately trying to get rid of the comic and are frustrated by Pettibone’s incessant reactions, both in word and action, to everything they say.