Will Rogers ‘Schooled’
Comic Eddie Cantor

The great comedian Eddie Cantor appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies and the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic on Broadway with Will Rogers in the 1910s and 1920s.      They first met in 1912, playing the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.      Cantor idolized Will Rogers.      “Rogers was my grammar school, high school and college,” Cantor said. “He taught me that the world doesn’t end at the stage door and that politics are every man’s business, actors not excluded. He kept on giving me an education as long as he lived.”      A newspaper reporter once asked Cantor the secret of Will Rogers’ humor and his delivery.      “Will would buy the morning newspapers, read the interesting and important items of the day, and build his political and social comedy out of the news materials,” Cantor said.      “Each morning, he had his new act completely framed for the following night. He was a tireless worker and taught me that a timely joke, even if it is not so funny, is better than a joke bearing no relation to the times.”      Will Rogers often acknowledged his dependence upon newspapers for material.      Everyone knows his famous line that opened many of his daily and weekly newspaper columns: “All I know is what I read in the papers.”      At one point, Will delved deeper into the subject of material and newspapers.      “Of late I am asked is: ‘Who writes your stuff and where do you get it?’ ” he wrote.      “And the surprising answer is: The newspapers write it! All I do is to get all the papers I can carry and then read all that is going on and try to figure out the main things that the audience has just read, and talk on that.      “I have found out two things. One is that the more up-to-date a subject is, the more credit you are given for talking on it, even if you really haven’t anything very funny. But if it is an old subject, your gags must be funny to get over,” he said.      Cantor learned plenty from observing Will Rogers.      “Another pet slogan of Will’s was that an actor is as good as his material,” Cantor said. “He followed these thumb rules himself, always built his gags out of the daily stuff of life, and was most careful to select the finest material. With the limited audience of the Frolics, very few actors lasted more than two or three weeks, for most of them had a set specialty or fixed routine, and when the novelty passed off they passed on.      “But Will Rogers always had something new to offer and I took the cue from him,” Cantor said.