Børge Rosenbaum, known professionally as Victor Borge, was a Danish-American comedian, conductor, and pianist who achieved great popularity in radio and television in the US and Europe. His blend of music and comedy earned him the nicknames “The Clown Prince of Denmark”, “The Unmelancholy Dane”, and “The Great Dane”. Borge played his first major concert in 1926 at the Danish Odd Fellow Palæet (The Odd Fellow’s Lodge building) concert hall. After a few years as a classical concert pianist, he started his now famous “stand-up” act, with the signature blend of piano music and jokes. He married the American Elsie Chilton in 1933; the same year he debuted with his revue acts. Borge started touring extensively in Europe, where he began telling anti-Nazi jokes.
When the German armed forces occupied Denmark on 9 April 1940, during World War II, Borge was playing a concert in Sweden and managed to escape to Finland. He travelled to America on the United States Army transport American Legion, the last neutral ship to make it out of Petsamo, Finland, Even though Borge did not speak a word of English upon arrival, he quickly managed to adapt his jokes to the American audience, learning English by watching movies. He took the name of Victor Borge, and in 1941, he started on Rudy Vallee’s radio show. He was hired soon after by Bing Crosby for his Kraft Music Hall programme.
Borge quickly rose to fame, winning Best New Radio Performer of the Year in 1942. Soon after the award, he was offered film roles with stars such as Frank Sinatra. While hosting The Victor Borge Show on NBC beginning in 1946, he developed many of his trademarks, including repeatedly announcing his intent to play a piece but getting “distracted” by something or other, making comments about the audience, or discussing the usefulness of Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” as an egg timer. He would also start out with some well-known classical piece like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and suddenly move into a harmonically similar pop or jazz tune, such as Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”.
One of Borge’s other famous routines was “Phonetic Punctuation,” in which he read a passage from a book and added exaggerated sound effects to stand for all of the punctuation marks, such as periods, commas, and exclamation marks.
Another is his “Inflationary Language,” in which he added one to every number or homophone of a number in the words he spoke. For example: “once upon a time” becomes “twice upon a time”, “wonderful” becomes “twoderful”, “forehead” becomes “fivehead”, “anyone for tennis” becomes “anytwo five elevennis”, “I ate a tenderloin with my fork and so on and so forth” becomes “I nined an elevenderloin with my fivek and so on and so fifth”.
Borge used physical and visual elements in his live and televised performances. He would play a strange-sounding piano tune from sheet music, looking increasingly confused; turning the sheet upside down or sideways, he would then play the actual tune, flashing a joyful smile of accomplishment to the audience (he had, at first, been literally playing the tune upside down or sideways). When his energetic playing of another song would cause him to fall off the piano bench, he would open the seat lid, take out the two ends of an automotive seat belt, and buckle himself onto the bench, “for safety.” Conducting an orchestra, he might stop and order a violinist who had played a sour note to get off the stage, then resume the performance and have the other members of the section move up to fill the empty seat while they were still playing. From off stage would come the sound of a gunshot.
Making fun of modern theater, he would sometimes begin a performance by asking if there were any children in the audience. There always were, of course. He would sternly order them out, then say, “We do have some children in here; that means I can’t do the second half in the nude. I’ll wear the tie (pause). The long one (pause). The very long one, yes.” In his stage shows in later years, he would include a segment with opera singer Marylyn Mulvey. She would try to sing an aria, and he would react and interrupt, with such antics as falling off the bench in “surprise” when she hit a high note. He would also remind her repeatedly not to rest her hand on the piano, telling her that if she got used to it, “and one day a piano was not there – Fffftttt! ” After the routine, the spotlight would rest on Mulvey, and she would sing a serious number with Borge accompanying in the background.
Continuing his success with tours and shows, Borge played with and conducted orchestras including the Chicago Symphony and the London Philharmonic. Always modest, he felt honoured when he was invited to conduct the Royal Danish Orchestra in Copenhagen in 1992. Victor Borge continued to tour until his last days, performing up to 60 times per year when he was 90 years old
