Mirthful Dane

Comedy in Music. Funnyman Victor Borge knows how not to deliver a line. He swallows it, and then utters small digestive burps.

His face is a pliant mask of dismay and disdain. One never knows whether he regards his props--the microphone, the piano, the piano bench--as allies or enemies. Flailing away at Rachmaninoff, he skids clean off the piano bench, pulls out a neon-blue seat belt, fastens it with frosty dignity, and resumes his musical flight. He also keeps up a running gag with a treacherous watch that tells the day, month, year and altitude ("Today it is the 39th of February, 1216 B.C., and we are flying at an altitude of four feet below sea level").

Instead of doing a one-man show as he did nine years ago on Broadway, Borge this time does a kind of one-and-a-half-man show with Leonid Hambro as co-pianist and straight man. Borge sort of excludes him in, and satirizes the egomania of stars by scraping the mike head along the floor like a vacuum cleaner during Hambro's only solo number. Later, in a howling display of virtuosity, the duo intertwine legs, arms and hands and march their fingers up the keyboard in a centipede's version of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody. With the election over, Borge has also decided that the White House is in humor's public domain again: "I had the great honor [muttered aside] and vice versa to meet the President of the United States--Gentleman Bird. He approached me at 70 miles per hour, lifted me up by my ears, and pronounced me a Great Dane." And so he is.

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