Leonard Still 'Putdown' King

By JOHN HUDDY
Herald Entertainment Editor
February 22, 1973

We don't usually think of comedians in "classical" or "history making" terms, yet in many respects that is the Jack E. Leonard story. “The Mouth That Roared”, now early into a two week engagement at the lively Tom Jones cabaret in the Round on Biscayne Blvd., is a veteran comic who wrote the book on insult humor by first combining traditional gags, one liners, slapstick and anecdotes with spontaneous humor played off visiting celebrities and ordinary customers out of the crowd.

LONG BEFORE Don Rickles made this style of humor lucrative and famous, and long, long before improvised comedy became the fashionable thing for younger comedians to do, Leonard had fully developed this idiom of nightclub humor and made it his trademark.

So, after too many years away from Miami, we finally get to see the rotund (but fast shrinking) Chicagoan who also claims to have done more television guest appearances than any other comic in the business.

This is a boast that could well be true since Leonard can remember playing Miami back in 1948 when George Bourke was a cub entertainer editor. In other words, Leonard has been around a long time.

Wearing a funny, small-brimmed straw hat that sits atop his mostly bald head, and especially wearing that famous scowl, one that hangs down to his naval and that registers an attitude of utter disgust, Leonard lopes onto the Tom Jones stage.

ON A RECENT opening night early in the week, the kind of night when only the Liza Minnellis are supposed to attract crowds, the Jones Pub is packed.

Leonard sits on a revolving stool and looks at the audience with distaste.

"What an audience. I'll bet you all go home in a Rambler. And I'll probably go home with you."

Leonard appears tired and somewhat strained (he is only now recovering after suffering more than a month with the London flu), but his act moves well anyway and the laughs are there.

LEONARD seems to have an unlimited bag of gags and even if he didn't, it is his look of dismay, and the put down aimed at anybody who dares to speak up that draws the biggest applause. In this respect, Leonard is truly an actor.

"You better not start with me, buddy, this is my racket you know," Leonard says to a heckling ringsider. The customer throws out a line anyway, is thoroughly but not brutally taken apart and, afterwards, when Jack table hops around the club, the victim is one of his proudest fans.

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