Will Rogers took the rope tricks he learned as a boy and honed on the range into the wild west shows and onto the vaudeville stage, where he added talks, jokes and gentle humor that soon made him famous.      Bashful at first, Will first offered jokes as apologies when his rope failed to spin. The audience roared and backstage pals encouraged the banter. Soon, his gags became more popular than his ropes.      In the early days of the twentieth century, as vaudeville boomed, Will crisscrossed America and invaded European theaters, serving up generous portions of frontier humor and sharing native insight with punctuation from his swinging lariat.      “Swinging a rope isn’t bad,” he would say, “as long as your neck isn’t in it.”      Will signed with showman Florenz Ziegfeld in 1915. By 1918, Will Rogers was a certified Broadway star, earning $1,000 a week in the famous Ziegfeld Follies.