While working on my mom's eulogy in 2000, I found a poem about people's lives being represented by the dash on their grave markers. The birth and death dates are not nearly as important as the dash. The dash represents how they lived and how much they were loved.
In Danny Kaye's case, the dash began on January 18, 1913 and ended March 3, 1987. Danny's dash can be represented by two words. . . "Renaissance Man."
An all-around entertainer (comic, actor, singer, dancer) may be what's remembered most about him but one cannot forget that he was a gourmet chef, symphony conductor, a baseball team owner, an airplane pilot, radio station owner,and a deeply committed humanitarian.

David Daniel Kaminski (the family name has been spelled Kominsky and Kuminsky, but the Singer and Freedland biographies confirm Kaminsky) was born to an immigrant Ukranian garment center tailor and actually at an early age decided to become a doctor. Danny made his professional debut as a watermelon seed in a play at Brooklyn's P.S. 149 (Later Renamed The Danny Kaye Elementary School). His New York City public school antics as "class clown" proved to him how comedy could make him popular so he dropped out of school at age 13 and ran off to Florida where he became a busker, singing on the streets to earn money. By 1933, he had changed his name to Danny Kaye and traveled to the Catskills where he worked for a radio station and performed at summer hotels and camps before joining the dance team of Dave Harvey and Kathleen Young.
On opening night of the show, he lost his balance, fell onto the stage and was shocked when the audience broke into a roar of laughter . . . his physical comedy scored big. Throughout the late 1930s Kaye, when performing on his own, relied on the material of a brilliant comedic and music writer, his soon-to-be wife, Sylvia Fine.
Success did not come quickly or easily for the young Kaye. He took jobs working behind a soda fountain and as an insurance agent to pay the bills. The latter job was terminated after he made a mistake which is said to have cost the company some $40,000.
For a while, Danny worked the Catskills as a comedic duo with straight-man Nick Long, testing new material, and experimenting on the audience as he joked, sang, and danced. The next year he traveled to the Orient, where he polished his professional performance after joining "The Three Terpsichoreans." During this period, Danny began to fine-tune his double-talk, babbling, and dialect routines. Since had no formal training as a actor, dancer, comedian, or singer, he could only enhanced his natural abilities as an entertainer.
Unable to speak the languages of his audience while on tour, Danny communicated by using mime and facial expressions. He also developed such a talent for dialects and improvising gibberish during his songs, which were funny in any language. Danny worked it into his repertoire, cajoling his audience into repeating every line he sang. The payoff would be when he would deliver an extra-long string of nonsense syllables that would prove impossible to copy.
During this early period, Kaye also added the jazz standard "Dinah" to his act, beginning the song with a spoken introduction in a Russian dialect. Danny would pronounce the title "Dee-nah," which in effect changed every other rhyming word in the song (China became "chee-nah;" Carolina became "Caro-lee-na," etc). Audiences in Asia did not understand Danny's mis-pronounciation, so the song was dropped from the act. The song later became so popular in his American stage shows that Danny recorded Dinah, mispronunciations and all, at his first recording session for Columbia in May 1941 (he would later name his daughter Dena after the song).
Eventually, Kaye became so proficient at high speed double-talking, that it threatened to type-cast him. Almost in self-defense, he strengthened his other attributes as an entertainer, becomming an excellent singer, actor, and dancer.
During the late 1930's, he appeared in several two-reel film shorts such as Dime a Dance, Getting An Eyeful, Cupid Takes A Holiday, and Money On Your Life. He was even shown on the newest medium, Television, in Autumn Laughter. But he still relied on the live stage for his bread and butter.

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