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The 1968 film Funny Girl starred Barbara Streisand in the part of Fanny Brice, vaudeville comedienne, radio and film star. Not an imaginary character, Fanny was the longtime star of the Ziegfeld Follies and of the radio comedy Baby Snooks. She also made several films, including, in 1938, Everybody Sing in which she plays a Russian immigrant who pretends to have been a star in Moscow. She gets her chance to demonstrate her talents when working as a housekeeper for a theatrical family in need of a good show.

In this clip Fanny, auditioning for a part in the new show, does a musical number that must have been much like those that she did in the Follies. You will immediately recognize the young Judy Garland, who plays the part of the stage struck daughter of the theatrical parents. Born in New York in 1891, of Hungarian Jewish parents, Brice speaks and sings with a Yiddish accent, which she uses for humorous effect. Her dancing is studiedly awkward in this piece as she describes herself as a “tvinkle toes.”

Judy Garland sang The Trolly Song in the 1944 movie Meet Me In St. Louis and it became one of her standard performance pieces. Here Judy sings it as a duet with Mel Torme “the velvet fog” one of the great vocal improvisers of jazz.

If you were around in the 50s and 60s you probably remember Jimmy Durante on your black and white TV saying “Stop da music,” making jokes about his nose and closing with “Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”

Jimmy Durante started his show business career in New York as “Ragtime Jimmy” playing the piano. Sometime after their historic 1917 “first jazz recording” Durante joined The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the band responsible for making people think of traditional New Orleans jazz as music played by white guys in striped blazers and straw hats. By the mid 1920s Durante was appearing in vaudeville and on radio. In the 1930s Durante began to appear in movies. His film parts invariably were based on his self effacing humor and his deliberate butchering of the English Language. I particularly like his big death scene in “It’s A Mad Mad Mad World,” “It’s under the big dubya.”

Here is Durante singing his signature song “Inka Dinka Doo,” which had been his first hit record, in 1934. This is a clip from the 1944 film “Two Girls and a Sailor.” He is accompanied by Harry James and his orchestra.