"Take" Artist

To TV's creaky stable of professional monkeyshiners last week came a fresh new talent: a rumpled, dumpling-shaped (5 ft. 6 in., 220 lbs.) buffoon named Buddy Hackett. The show: a half-hour comedy series called Stanley (Mon. 8:30 p.m., NBC), the only live situation comedy of the new season. For the next 30 weeks, Comedian Hackett, with his butterball face, will play a newsstand proprietor in a Manhattan hotel lobby and be manhandled like pully-candy by some expert Runyonesque musclemen. With better help from his comedy writers, he should help make the new season more fun.

Born Funny. More than any other TV comic, Hackett plays himself; he rarely gimmicks up an act or trades insults with his audience. In his first show, he seemed neither as bumptious as Jackie Gleason nor as carbolic as Steve Allen. His formula for success, if any, seems to be the unconscious ability to run into the ground the trivia of ordinary life.

Thirty-two-year-old Jester Hackett claims he was born funny: "I was fat and I was from Brooklyn. That made me funny from the start." He is a veteran of the $5-a-night honky-tonks, the Catskills and the nightspots of Chicago. Miami and Las Vegas. He wanted to be a clown because of an early " 'feriority complexion," which he has since worked off in simple ways: settling down in New Jersey to a quiet family life (a wife and three-month-old son), playing golf, driving hot-rods at breakneck speeds. But a practical joke is still his special maggot: he once dived into a Miami millionaire's pool wearing a $200 suit just to prove he "could afford it."

Stanley's Producer-Director Max (Show of Shows) Liebman spotted Hackett on Broadway two seasons ago as the tippling racketeer in Sidney Kingsley's Lunatics and Lovers and signed him for two one-shot shows. After a season of high-flying spectaculars--some right out of left field --Liebman decided to return, with Hackett, to more fertile, familiar soil (other Liebman proteges: Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca). Liebman regards Hackett as the best "take" artist since Caesar, i.e., he reacts strongly to people and things. "With Buddy," says Liebman, "it's usually the 'take' that gets the laugh rather than the joke."

Outside World. Onstage or off, Hackett has the wide-eyed responses of a small boy. When he picks up a phone, pudgy fingers aflutter, he stretches an inquiring eye, screws up his brow, puckers the right corner of his rubbery mouth and startles the operator with Broadwayese: "Connect me to de outside woirld!" Or again, he leaps from a chair and plunges into a routine as ad-libbed as most of his acts. "They used to say whenever someone turned on a light, I started performing."

The life of TV comedians is hazardous --and usually brief. But in his rueful, often incoherent way, Buddy is not worried about going stale. For the moment, Liebman's Stanley is just a shiny new toy. Says Buddy, a sad, mad glint lighting up his beady brown eyes: "I don't expect nuttin' from nobody."

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