Jimmy Durante Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
James Francis Durante was born on February 10, 1893, in New York City, in the dense, polyglot world of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He grew up amid Italian-American working-class families, street commerce, and the rough-and-ready entertainments of saloons and nickelodeons. The neighborhood bred two traits that never left him: a hustler's instinct for the next job and a sentimental loyalty to the people who helped you get it. His famously outsized nose and gravelly warmth became not just physical markers but symbols of a whole city persona - brash, quick, and oddly tender.

Before he became "Schnozzola", he was a kid watching show business up close, learning how attention could be earned and lost in a single room. New York in the 1900s and 1910s rewarded performers who could shift between music, patter, and improvisation - the same flexibility demanded by immigrant households where survival meant adapting fast. Durante's later stage identity, half clown and half sage, came from that early collision of hardship, camaraderie, and the need to be memorable.

Education and Formative Influences
Durante left school early, trained his hands as much as his voice, and taught himself the piano well enough to work professionally - a classic Tin Pan Alley-era route where talent mattered more than credentials. Ragtime and early jazz shaped his timing, while vaudeville taught him to read a room with surgical speed. He absorbed the influence of New York's theater district, the comic monologists of the day, and the emerging star system that turned personality into product, yet he kept the sensibility of a neighborhood musician: play the tune, land the joke, win the crowd, and move on to the next gig.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
By the 1920s Durante was established as a bandleader and comic pianist, co-founding the Original New Orleans Jazz Band (not to be confused with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band) and then breaking out in vaudeville and Broadway, where his persona crystallized - the big-nosed wise guy who could flip from slapstick to pathos without warning. The early 1930s brought national exposure through radio, and the decade anchored him in film and stage appearances, including the jumbo-scale Broadway musical "Jumbo" (1935), which reinforced his gift for mixing spectacle with intimacy. In the 1940s he became a dependable Hollywood character and guest star, and in the 1950s and 1960s television made him a living room fixture, notably through frequent appearances on "The Hollywood Palace". A major late-life turning point was his partnership with the Fraternal Order of Eagles' charity drives; his emotional sign-off, "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are", became a cultural riddle and a signature of his public softness beneath the clown paint.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Durante's comedy worked because it was built on exposure rather than concealment: he made himself the joke, then used that vulnerability to grant the audience permission to laugh at their own bruises. His style blended vaudeville mugging, jazzman's swing, and a sentimental croon that could turn corny into sincere. The "Schnozzola" persona - self-mythologized, physically distinctive, forever hustling - was an argument that imperfection could be profitable if you owned it completely. Yet underneath the noise was an old New York moral code about dignity and reciprocity, as if every laugh carried an obligation.

That code shows in the way he framed success as temporary and social rather than solitary. "Be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down". The line is funny because it is blunt, but psychologically it reads like a survivor's note to himself - a man who had watched fortunes change from one booking to the next, and who never forgot that show business runs on memory as much as talent. His irritation with intrusion also surfaced as a kind of anti-authoritarian plea for ordinary peace: "Why can't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone". In Durante, that impatience was less ideology than exhaustion with pretense; he trusted the direct joke, the direct feeling, the direct handshake. And his late-life quip about aging - "If I'd known how old I was going to be I'd have taken better care of myself". - is pure Durante: self-mockery as a way to admit regret without surrendering to it, a comic's method for turning mortality into a shared room-temperature truth.

Legacy and Influence
Durante died on January 29, 1980, after a career that had spanned vaudeville, radio, film, and television - essentially the whole arc of 20th-century American popular entertainment. His influence endures less through a single canonical masterpiece than through a template: the performer as unmistakable persona, mixing brassy comedy with real tenderness, and using catchphrases not as gimmicks but as emotional bridges. Later comics and hosts borrowed his willingness to look ridiculous while speaking sincerely, and his charity work helped define the mid-century idea that an entertainer could be both clown and civic figure. In an industry that constantly replaces its faces, Durante's stayed memorable because it carried a city, an era, and a recognizable human need: to laugh, then to be comforted.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Jimmy, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Dark Humor - Kindness.

Other people realated to Jimmy: Tallulah Bankhead (Actress), Margaret O'Brien (Actress), Carmen Miranda (Musician)

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