Joe E. Brown: The Wide-Mouthed Comedy Star

Joe E. Brown (1891-1973) was Warner Bros.'s top comedy star throughout the 1930s. His distinctive screen persona — enormous mouth that opened impossibly wide for shouting/laughing/crying, perpetually optimistic disposition, working-class everyman positioning — built one of Hollywood's most-watched comedy careers. At his peak in 1936, Brown was earning $300,000 per picture (over $7 million in 2024 dollars), making him one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. He's largely forgotten today.

The vaudeville foundation

Brown began his career as a vaudeville circus performer at age 9. He toured as part of the "Five Marvelous Ashtons" acrobatic act through his teenage years, then transitioned into vaudeville comedy in his twenties. By the late 1920s he was one of Broadway's most-watched comedic performers — his Broadway production Twinkle Twinkle (1926) made him a national stage star. Warner Bros. signed him in 1929.

The screen persona

Brown's enormous-mouth feature was authentic — he had been born with unusually wide jaw musculature. He learned to exploit it for screen comedy: opening his mouth wider than seemed physically possible for shocked reactions, comic singing, anguished crying, or simply astonished silence. The visual was unique enough that audiences immediately recognized him.

His screen persona was the optimistic working-class everyman. He played factory workers, baseball players, traveling salesmen, soldiers — never aristocrats, never sophisticated city people. The class positioning matched his vaudeville roots and connected him to Depression-era audiences who appreciated screen characters who reflected their economic circumstances.

The baseball comedies

Brown was a legitimate baseball player — he had played professional minor-league baseball in the 1910s, and his own son Joe L. Brown later became general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He directed his baseball expertise into three films: Fireman, Save My Child (1932), Elmer the Great (1933), and Alibi Ike (1935). The three baseball comedies are considered his finest single body of work — combining his real expertise in the sport with his comedic timing.

Earthworm Tractors (1936)

The picture in our library. Earthworm Tractors (1936) is Brown's strangest and most-cited Warner Bros. vehicle. He plays Alexander Botts, a struggling tractor salesman who tries to convince a skeptical Southern landowner to buy Earthworm-brand bulldozers. The picture is based on William Hazlett Upson's Saturday Evening Post stories about the Botts character — a series of stories that ran in the magazine for over 50 years.

The film's premise is unusual for a 1930s comedy: a salesman trying to sell heavy equipment becomes the basis for an entire feature. The picture works because Brown plays Botts with genuine commitment to the sales-pitch absurdity. The Caterpillar Tractor Company (the actual manufacturer that Earthworm satirizes) reportedly considered suing for trademark infringement but eventually decided the publicity was beneficial.

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Brown's most-watched single screen performance came late in his career: Some Like It Hot (1959), Billy Wilder's masterpiece. Brown plays Osgood Fielding III, the wealthy millionaire who romantically pursues Jack Lemmon's drag character. The picture's famous final line — "Nobody's perfect" — is Brown's, delivered with deadpan acceptance that has become one of the most-quoted moments in screen comedy.

The Some Like It Hot role was a late-career renaissance for Brown. He had been semi-retired from Hollywood since the late 1940s; Wilder personally recruited him for what became his most-cited performance.

Why he's forgotten

Brown's comic register doesn't fit modern critical categories. He wasn't a slapstick clown like Chaplin or Keaton. He wasn't a screwball romantic-comedy lead like Cary Grant. He wasn't a wisecracker like the Marx Brothers. His optimistic working-class everyman persona belonged to a specific 1930s Depression-era American moment, and that moment hasn't been actively rediscovered.

The public-domain catalog

Brown's Warner Bros. productions are mostly still under copyright through Warner-AT&T-successor entities. Earthworm Tractors (1936) lapsed into the public domain through complicated post-1964 rights handling — Warner Bros. failed to renew the picture, likely because it had become commercially irrelevant by the mid-1960s.

The personal life

Brown was deeply patriotic — he visited troops continuously throughout WWII, making over 200 personal-appearance tours to American military installations across the Pacific theater. His son Don Brown was killed in WWII during pilot training, and Brown's grief over his son's death significantly shaped his later humanitarian work. He continued performing for troops and veterans for the rest of his life.

Where to start

Start with Earthworm Tractors (1936) — the strangest and most distinctive Joe E. Brown vehicle in the public domain. The premise (a tractor salesman as comedy protagonist) is unique enough to anchor the picture's strangeness, and Brown's commitment to the role demonstrates why he was Warner Bros.'s top comedy star throughout the decade.