Biography
Born on 29 October 1894 in New York City, New York, USA, Jack Pearlman died in the same city on 25 December 1982. Throughout the 1920s he performed regularly on Broadway, where his quick wit established him as a prominent dialect comedian. His stage credits from that decade included the 1923 musical The Dancing Girl, whose score came from Sigmund Romberg and whose lyrics were supplied by Harold Atteridge, with additional numbers written by George Gershwin. Subsequent revues in which he appeared were Topics Of 1923, A Night In Paris (1926), Artists And Models (1927), Pleasure Bound (1929), The International Review (1930) and Ziegfeld Follies Of 1931. In 1933 he took part in the Gershwin brothers’ musical Pardon My English, performing the duets ‘So What?’, ‘What Sort Of Wedding Is This?’ and ‘Where You Go, I Go’ as well as the chorus number ‘The Dresden Northwest Mounted’. His final Broadway appearance came in 1943 with the play All For All.
Pearl formed a double act with Ben Bard that resulted in the short films Jack Pearl And Ben Bard (1926) and Two Flaming Youths (1927). Early in the 1930s he shifted his focus to radio, beginning with a 1932 stint on Ziegfeld Follies Of The Air. He and straight man Cliff Hall soon achieved widespread popularity on the Lucky Strike Hour, where Pearl portrayed Baron Munchausen to an appreciative national audience during 1933 and 1934. The same character reached the screen in Meet The Baron (1933) and again in Hollywood Party (1934), in which the baron attempts to furnish jungle-film star Jimmy Durante, billed as Schnarzan, with lions belonging to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who react with predictable irritation to a payment of 50,000 Tiddleywinks. Pearl returned to television in 1963 for the Stoney Burke episode To Catch The Kaiser.
Pearl formed a double act with Ben Bard that resulted in the short films Jack Pearl And Ben Bard (1926) and Two Flaming Youths (1927). Early in the 1930s he shifted his focus to radio, beginning with a 1932 stint on Ziegfeld Follies Of The Air. He and straight man Cliff Hall soon achieved widespread popularity on the Lucky Strike Hour, where Pearl portrayed Baron Munchausen to an appreciative national audience during 1933 and 1934. The same character reached the screen in Meet The Baron (1933) and again in Hollywood Party (1934), in which the baron attempts to furnish jungle-film star Jimmy Durante, billed as Schnarzan, with lions belonging to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who react with predictable irritation to a payment of 50,000 Tiddleywinks. Pearl returned to television in 1963 for the Stoney Burke episode To Catch The Kaiser.