Vaudeville, Films and Radio
Briggs was a popular lecturer, earning $100 for a single speech. He accepted a five-week contract for $500 a week to appear on the vaudeville circuit in 1914. In 1919, he produced four comedy film shorts for Paramount Pictures.
The Mr. and Mrs. radio series, based on Briggs' strip, starred Jack Smart and Jane Houston as Jo and Vi. The series was broadcast on CBS from 1929 to 1931.
National catchphrases caught on from the titles of some of his newspaper cartoon features: Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling?, Danny Dreamer, The Days of Real Sport, Movie of a Man, Mr. and Mrs, Real Folks at Home, Someone's Always Taking the Joy Out of Life, There's at Least One in Every Office and When a Feller Needs a Friend. Mr. and Mrs. ran during the last years of his life and continued in syndication after his death under his name. The names of Arthur Folwell and Ellison Hoover finally appeared on the strip in 1938.
His daughter, Clare Briggs, also was a comic strip artist and had an eponymous strip syndicated from 1939 through 1941. She used the name Miss Clare Briggs to distinguish her work from her father's.
In September 1929, neuritis of the optic nerve led Briggs to Baltimore for treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He died at the Neurological Institute of pneumonia on January 3, 1930. As he had requested, his ashes were scattered over New York Harbor.
Briggs' death in 1930 prompted Franklin P. Adams to write:
- I feel acutely the loss of a cartoonist whose work I have enjoyed hugely for 30 years. I enjoyed it so much that I got him to leave Chicago so that his work could appear in the New York Tribune with mine. It helped the paper so much that Clare stayed there for 15 years, seven years longer than I did. To my notion, he drew no dud cartoons. I never knew anyone who so enjoyed working. Often while drawing a cartoon I have seen him laugh uproariously at it. He was a sweet and merry boy, if a rotten poker player, and the public, poorer for his leaving it, is a big winner in having him at all.
Read more about this topic: Clare Briggs
Famous quotes containing the words films and/or radio:
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
—Andy Warhol (c. 1928–1987)
“Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)